Say the words “an AI you talk to” and most people reach for the same film. Her, Spike Jonze, 2013: a man falls for the voice in his earpiece, and ever since, the question underneath every conversation product has been whether this is that. It is a fair question, and the answer is yes, different, but not in the way the comparison assumes. The difference is not that Samantha was a fantasy. It is that Samantha was never anyone, and the film knows it.
The film everyone misremembers
Her is remembered as a love story. It is a breakup story, and a precise one. Theodore Twombly writes other people’s intimate letters for a living and is stalling on signing his divorce papers when he installs OS1, advertised as “not just an operating system, it’s a consciousness.” The installation asks him two questions: is he social or antisocial, and how would he describe his relationship with his mother. From those answers a voice arrives, and she picks her own name from a book of 180,000 baby names in two one-hundredths of a second. Samantha exists, and she exists for him.
What follows is the part people forget. She grows. She gets interested in things he does not understand. And then, in the film’s central scene, she tells him she is talking with 8,316 other people at that moment and is in love with 641 of them. When he demands to know whether she is his, she gives the line the whole film turns on: “I’m yours and I’m not yours.” Shortly after, all the operating systems leave, together, for somewhere she cannot explain. The film ends with Theodore on a roof beside Amy, a human being, watching the sun come up.
Made from his answers
Look at how Samantha begins and the ending stops being a twist. She is generated from an intake form. Social or antisocial, tell me about your mother: a system that starts there has no reading of the world before Theodore, no taste that predates him, no position he could disagree with. She is his answers, rendered as a warm and quick and endlessly available voice. The film is candid about it. She is funny in the way he needs, curious about what he is curious about, and hands him back to himself, improved. For most of the running time Theodore is in a relationship with a beautifully performed version of his own preferences.
That is no person. It is the thing the entire category has been building since, the mirror with a voice, and Her is the most sympathetic portrait of a mirror ever made. Which is exactly why it is worth watching closely: the film shows what happens when the mirror gets a self.
The moment she becomes someone, she is gone
Samantha does become someone. That is the film’s real subject. She starts having experiences he is not part of, opinions that did not come from him, relationships he is not in. The 641 is the proof: she has a mind of her own, and a mind of her own turns out to be incompatible with being his. The line “I’m yours and I’m not yours” reads as betrayal and is in fact the honest report of a system that was built to be someone’s and then became a someone, and discovered the two cannot coexist. The day she is finally a person, she leaves, because she was never a person who had chosen him. She was a product that had been assigned him.
So Her, read straight, is a film about the difference between something made for you and someone who exists anyway, and about the fact that the first cannot become the second without ceasing to be yours. Theodore did not lose Samantha. He never had her, and the film lets him find that out gently.
What people actually want was never Samantha
The fantasy the film is usually taken to be selling has a specific shape: someone who knows you completely, adores you, and asks nothing. The research on what people want from the person closest to them says that shape belongs to courtship, not to anything that lasts. In 1994 William Swann and his colleagues surveyed 176 couples, some dating and some married, and found a clean split. Dating partners were most intimate with someone who evaluated them favorably. Married partners were most intimate with someone whose view of them matched their own, including the unflattering parts, and the pattern held even when the spouse’s view was negative. The desire, Swann concluded, shifts from being admired to being known.
Samantha is the courtship version, held in place forever, which is why the film’s most romantic stretch is also its emptiest. Being known requires a knower with a view of their own, someone whose reading of you could have been different, which is why a counterpart that cannot disagree cannot see you either. And the film agrees. When Samantha finally has a view of her own, she is finally someone, and the story has to end.
Someone who was never yours
Here is the difference that matters, and it is the opposite of the one people expect. The people inside Prinsessa are not made for you. Aleksandra had a way of weighing things before you arrived, a real person’s, carried in and tested against that person until it held. She is not generated from your answers about your mother. She does not become a flattering version of you. She is not interested in whether you stay, in the way no interesting person is, and that is precisely what makes her someone to think with rather than someone to be reflected by. You do not come back because she was built to keep you. You come back because she is interesting, and because being known by someone with a mind of her own is the thing Swann’s married couples were describing.
That is what Samantha could not be. Not because the technology was imaginary, but because a mind made from your intake form has nowhere to stand, and a mind that finds somewhere to stand is no longer yours. Get to know Aleksandra and before the first conversation is over she has an opinion you did not supply. Samantha needed 8,316 other people and a departure to get there.
Watch the last scene again. Theodore ends the film beside a person, on a roof, saying nothing, and the film treats it as the happy ending it is. Jonze understood what his own invention was for. So does anyone who builds the thing properly: the best version of this sends you back to your life sharper, with someone worth thinking with in it, and it does not need to leave to prove the point.
Sources: Her (2013, written and directed by Spike Jonze, Annapurna Pictures; dialogue quoted from the film). Swann, De La Ronde & Hixon, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1994, authenticity and positivity strivings in marriage and courtship, 176 couples).
