Her, us and them

(Spoiler Alert: If you haven’t watched ‘Her’, you’re missing out. It’s not so much a spoiler alert as a FOMO alert, it’s not a thriller. But you are missing out.)

When Joaquin Phoenix emotes on screen, I cry. There was ‘Joker’, and then there’s ‘Her’. I watched ‘Joker’ when I was going through a lot and half the scratches on my glasses were probably from vigorously wiping it throughout the movie. ‘Her’ I watched just now and still cried, despite being mentally in a better place. Because damn, what a movie.

With the JP appreciation out of the way, ‘Her’ got me thinking about not just human-AI but human-human interactions in the modern world. We live in a day and age where nearly most of us, at some point have had a friendship or even relationship that has been primarily online. While we have had the assurance of knowing it is a person and not a diabolical bot who can screw us over one day (wow was I the only one who was paranoid about Samantha’s superhuman abilities lest Theodore dumps her?), the friend(/relation)ship has still been almost like connecting with a virtual entity. It has always been easier to open up to someone who isn’t in your immediate circle and you may even never meet. Pen friends and the like have been around but the modern world has made these near anonymous friendships so much more accessible and commonplace. And in that, many of us may find ourselves relating to Theodore. ‘Her’ of course is also about loneliness and the things it makes us do, heartbreak, grief, as well as how AI, similar to (or perhaps due to) the world of advertising, manipulates us.

When it comes to fleeting, insincere, near anonymous connections, dating apps top the list. I myself have evolved in how I feel towards them, from judgement to acceptance to final usage. I think I judged them a little unfairly at first as the last refuge of the creepy and socially inept, comparing their users to the desperate men who once thronged the infamous Facebook Others inbox. As I know now, it is largely true as well. An app is only as good as the people on them and most dating apps that have even started out with promise have soon gone to the dogs with the influx of all varied specimens of men (and women and bots). But in their potential they are tremendous. From having our dating options limited by geography and the contexts of our lives, work and social circles, the possibilities are tantalizing and seemingly infinite. It is possible to meet people you would never otherwise come across, let alone approach, especially if you are queer or exploring. Ofcourse more options aren’t always a good thing, ask Buridan’s donkey if he’s still alive. And humans have not caught up with the evolution of technology, we are able to invest only so much time and feeling at a time and talking to multiple people simultaneously is something I have always found hard to do without losing sincerity or interest. But the stakes are low when these are people you will perhaps never meet and this is their boon as well as bane. Tess Joseph’s heartbreaking experience is unfortunately far more common than we would like to admit. It is easy to seem sincere and loving when you are talking to a face on a screen, but it can be insincere at best and dangerous at worst. Rarely though, people do meet their soulmates. (Case in point- the Black Mirror episode ‘Hang the DJ’ is every app developer and users’ utopia).

I made a friend on Bumble in 2020 when I was sitting at home and generally unproductive and jobless. He was easy to talk to, and somehow we found ourselves telling each other about recent heartbreaks and soon everything under the sun. Despite not being romantically drawn to him at all, I found myself very comfortable talking to him. I do not really have many virtual friendships and this was sort of rare and special for me although I soon knew this was routine for not just him but actually many people. I was just one of his retinue of virtual female friends who sometimes affirmed his feelings in a way that his emotionally stunted male friends could not. I have really good, close, wonderful friendships with real people and although enticing, I still pity people who consider these kinds of friendships more real. They can sometimes be undoubtedly, and I think with this guy it sort of was. But I am still very aware that just like with Samantha and Theodore, I am one of the many others he’s virtual ‘friends’ with. (Love is of course a lot more exclusive, friendship can and should allow for diversity).

I think the popularity of sites like OnlyFans is also partly because people are not just content with watching two unknown people perform unspeakable acts on screen, they want to be able to talk and interact and have them respond. While most of us know it is a charade on their parts, we still want the experience to feel as real as possible and enough people are willing to shell out the big bucks just to have a more real interaction of whatever kind. It gets creepier with the metaverse and AI generated human impersonators with whom you can interact on the metaverse. People have even tried to eerily recreate deceased loved ones just to hold on to a memory, however much a lie. We are close to inhabiting the ultimate Black Mirror dystopia.

Like Frankenstein’s monster, the OS Samantha was learning every second of her existence since her inception. She was learning from her interactions with Theodore and her thousands of other users, from accessing the vast database of human knowledge already existing on the internet and from her own experience of the world. Whether Samantha could actually feel or was programmed to manipulate and was just learning to be a master manipulator is open to interpretation. Social media itself traps you with similar strategies. With every bit of trivia they gain, it is easier to manipulate. It is easy to think the online interactions, likes and comments and the hundreds of birthday messages actually mean something but on the other side of the screen its probably someone lazily scrolling, distracted the very next second by something entirely different. And this, despite them being a real person who likely knows or at some point knew you.

With Theodore who was lonely and needed to process the pain and grief of heartbreak and divorce, Samantha was at once a therapist and friend. She was non judgmental, encouraging, attentive and always on his side. Church confessionals wouldn’t have been a thing if we sometimes didn’t just need someone non judgmental to hear us out and a lot of therapy is that as well. (On that note, I think this video on non religious confessionals, and basically this whole series, is pretty amazing). His romantic and sexual needs existed as well but he was really deeply lonely and in a lot of pain. This is when a person becomes most vulnerable. In the modern world, and especially with people moving cities and countries for their jobs, loneliness is rampant. This is when we give these myriad internet traps an opportunity to exploit us, and choose to be in denial about it. Sometimes these traps are real relationships with real people who aren’t right for us as well and even if you choose to view it as a love story, Samantha was just not right for Theodore.