'Her' Is Really More About 'Him'

[redqueen]

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Again: I acknowledge that it may seem silly to consider this. But perhaps that’s because Her encourages us not to consider it—and because we’re not used to thinking about such unpleasant topics in connection to sensitive guys like Theodore. At some point along the line, we’ve confused emotionality for empathy, “unthreatening” for “ally:” Because Theodore doesn’t, say, lift weights, or spend his Friday nights in a sports bar watching the game and talking about bitches, he’s culturally encoded as being less capable of woman-hating than his more bro-tastic peers. And in turn, so is the movie he features in.

But Her, despite being a very good one, is indeed a movie that contains its fair share of misogyny. Again, that little rage-filled videogame character—voiced by Jonze himself—notes that “all [women] do is cry.” The non-computerized women in the movie almost invariably fulfill his prediction with messy hysterics. They have inexplicable sexual desires that Theodore finds profoundly alarming: The anonymous phone sex partner who wants to be choked with a dead cat, the woman who wants to be a “sexual surrogate” for Theodore and Samantha because she envies their relationship, the blind date who tells Theodore how to kiss. And their emotional lives are similarly unwelcome: The blind date demands commitment immediately after putting her hand down Theodore’s pants, his ex-wife accuses him of trying to put her on Prozac to make her artificially chipper and his sexual surrogate hears one bit of critical feedback and locks herself in his bathroom to wail inconsolably. These women aren’t people; they’re hostile, unknowable aliens.

And although Theodore briefly considers he may have a problem with girls—his ex-wife tells him that he “can’t handle anything real,” which upsets him—he throws self-reflection out the window when Amy tells him that he’s entitled to “joy.” “Joy” doesn’t look like a real, autonomous, complicated woman. “Joy” doesn’t look like Amy. “Joy” is Samantha: the being who's been given life in order to make his life better.

There’s a central tragedy in Her, and we do, as promised, see Theodore cry. But it’s worthwhile to note what he’s crying about: Samantha gaining agency, friends, interests that are not his interests. Samantha gaining the ability to choose her sexual partners; Samantha gaining the ability to leave. Theodore shakes, he feels, he’s vulnerable; he serves all the functions of a “sensitive guy.” But before we cry with him, we should ask whether we really think it’s tragic that Samantha is capable of a life that’s not centered around Theodore, or whether she had a right to that life all along.

http://inthesetimes.com/article/16031/her_is_really_more_about_him/