Hollywood Romantic Comedy, 2018-9

Week 10: 21st Century Romantic Comedy

Her (Spike Jonze, 2013)

Romantic comedy

‘Human beings are the only animals who are capable of formulating social projects independent,
and often in defiance, of their instinctual drives. It is scarcely astonishing, in the light of this fact
[…] that these same human beings are possessed of an insatiable impulse to construct symbolic
dramas in which such projects are conceived, impeded, thwarted and accomplished, and in which
feelings about the nature, conditions, limits and consequences of human action are worked through.’
(Britton 2009: 435)

‘Aspiring monogamists are going against some of the deepest-seated evolutionary inclinations with
which biology has endowed most creatures, Homo sapiens included.’ (Barash/Lipton 2001: 1)

Her

Is the film…

(1) …asking us to consider whether human/AI relationships are as valid as human relationships?

(1a) Are we critically/ironically/comically distanced from Theodore/Samantha’s relationship?

(1b) Is their relationship/love treated entirely sincerely?

Human / A.I relationships

‘Theodore finds “real” love in a simulation. Although the context is highly superficial […], the
affect itself is intended and sincere.’ (Boom, 2017: 8)

There is another layer to the spectator’s experience of tone, because Theodore’s normalised state of
simulated-as-real emotion makes us wonder whether the film itself is entirely sincere in its empathy
for the protagonist or whether this sincerity itself is a form of irony exposing how inherent the
simulated affections are.’ (Thornton-Rice, 2017: 35)

This [is a] male fantasy of an Other who totally accommodates one’s own demands, while at the
same time maintaining an aura of untapped distance and fullness — so that we have the satisfaction
of actually connecting, outside our own narcissism with an “Other”, without any of the discomforts
that contact with any sort of otherness actually brings. (Shaviro, 2014: 1)

(2) …presenting the human/AI relationship as metaphorical for aspects of human relationships?

(2a) Is it reflecting on ‘inauthentic’ nature of contemporary human relationships…?

(2b) Is it reflecting on the ‘authentic’/‘inauthentic’ nature of all romance…?

(2c) About some other aspect of human relationships…?

‘Theo is disturbed not only because he suspects her of faking on this occasion, but because it leads
him to wonder if she is never not faking.’ (Jollimore, 2015: 133)

Bibliography
- Barash, David P., Judith Eve Lipton (2001) The Myth of Monogamy: Fidelity and Infidelity in Animals and People, New
York: Henry Holt & Co.
- Boom, Jeroen (2017) ‘A Case Study in “Quirky Cinema” and “The New Depthiness”, unpublished BA dissertation,
University of Nijmegen.
- Britton, Andrew (2009) Britton on Film: The Complete Film Criticism of Andrew Britton. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. London:
Wayne State University Press.
- Jollimore, Troy. (2015) ‘This Endless Space between the Words: The Limits of Love in Spike Jonze's Her’, Midwest Studies
In Philosophy, 39, 120–143.
- Shaviro, Steven (2014) ‘Spike Joze’s Her’, The Pinocchio Theory, online: http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=1186
- Thornton-Rice, Arnold (2017) ‘Her, Metamodernism and Romantic Comedy’, unpublished BA dissertation, University of
Warwick.