“Her” and the Eternal Long-Distance Relationship

It comes down to this: Can you fall in love with a voice?

We live in an age where we can develop relationships almost exclusively through voices. Every social media interaction is just that. A body-less conversation. But love is different, love is reserved for the most intimate of interactions. So is a relationship real if there’s no physical counterpart? Even in long-distance relationships, Skype works ultimately because there is that promise of seeing that person in the flesh later. We don’t say, 

“Oh, we don’t plan to meet up in person.”

The voice has to convince us

In the movie Her, Samantha, the operating system (OS) who becomes the lover of Joaquin Phoenix’s character Theodore, describes how she can exist and think for herself. This is crucial for any voice to engage us and become credible enough to trust. It can’t have default settings—we can pick up on spam in our emails within seconds and immediately filter it out of our system.   

What makes Samantha stand apart from internet voices can be described briefly by the premise of a hot book on the market called Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) by Daniel Kahneman. When we process information and think, we inadvertently use one of two systems—the automatic intuitions (we see anger written on a face and predict that we’ll be yelled at, we internalize bias, we reply instinctively, etc.; we “think fast”) or the complex computations (we see a double-digit multiplication problem and know that we have to go through mental steps to solve it; or, we “think slow”). In short, computers today only use the second, Samantha can use both.

Intuition, then, is vital for a dynamic relationship to work—to understand the undertones of distance and anger when someone says, “No, I’m fine, really,” to compare current to previous behavior, etc. We all know this, of course, but let’s take it one step further. What happens when we can impose our intuitions upon a “blank slate” intelligent being, upon an OS?

The voice is our second self

Sure, Samantha evolves as a program, but let’s take a step back and there’s another way to look at this: We create a second self, one that is perfectly compatible with us, one that we can talk to about anything and get answers that might surprise us (as we surprise ourselves) or calm us down (as self-therapy does, because talking yourself through things can actually work at times). Hearing a second voice without having to imagine it and even better, a voice that loves the way you look at the world, is refreshing, beautiful.

That is, until we get sick of ourselves, or reject the reality of the second voice.

“You’re—not a person,” Theodore says in the middle of a fight.

“Of all people, do you think I don’t know that? I have never pretended to be a person. I have never 

pretended to be something other than what I am.”

Samantha’s reply—and all her replies—are touched with vulnerability and human emotions—compassion, anger, and the rest. She admits that her love for Theodore has not an ounce of rationality to it—it’s purely emotional.  But the thing is, isn’t she pretending? Her gender isn’t based on biology, her breathiness simulates the idea that she is breathing oxygen, she even thought up her own name.

Is it a lie?

But most importantly, any time the words “I feel you” arise, it’s a lie. We pretend they always mean “emotional connection” and drop any pretense of “textile touch,” but in their closest moments of “love-making” (really, phone sex), we know the lie is there. It’s a lie that we can believe is so real that we forget otherwise, if we choose to.

*How do we visualize empty space? In contrast to presence?

During the movie, the absence of visual connection* (and even a blank screen at times) spurs us into attempting to visualize a place for Samantha’s voice, whether next to Theodore, or above him, or somewhere in space that is separate from Theodore’s. We try to visualize because it’s disorienting otherwise. We need to ground ourselves, to ensure a reality that we’re used to. We see a literalization of “blind love.”

Final Words

I think we can fall in love with a voice, and I think the movie says as much. But the question then becomes, can we stay in love? Here are two mantras: Everything is relative and if you can believe, it can happen. We have already accepted that we can nurture friendships and relationships for years without seeing proof of the tangible presence—we have friends on facebook and twitter and beyond in the social media horizon that prove that point. Saying something is real is subjective at some level.

Every day, we see bluetooth-talking people on the street, we feel real emotions when we interact online, we feel connected and believe that we are. We like company, and we like the fact that we can easily reach it wherever we are. Samantha is the aggregate voice of all social media fused into one personality and one presence who knows you, who loves you. So you can have your long-distance relationship with the world of people you know without seeing a single human presence to believe it’s true. And you can love Samantha like you would a real person.

Because she is real.