I didn’t really think about if for a long time, but then eventually I thought about the idea of a man having a relationship with an entity like that, a really fully formed consciousness. A good decade ago, he became fascinated with a kind of instant messenger service, where you could have “conversations” with a computer program, though it quickly “devolved to where you could tell it was just parroting things it had heard before, and it wasn’t intelligent. Her is set in a Los Angeles that’s about five minutes into the future, its computer technology just a hair more advanced than our own, and when its trailer hit last summer, the shorthand for its plot in most quarters ( including this one) was something along the lines of “guy falls in love with Siri.” But in talking to press after Saturday’s media screening, Jonze (who both writes and directs) said the spark came much earlier than that. Early on, as he pours his soul out to her, he utters one of the movie’s key lines: “I can’t believe I’m having this conversation with my computer.” But he does, and he falls in love with her as well. And sure enough, Samantha, the voice (provided by Scarlett Johansson) that purrs from his desktop and smartphone, is bright, and funny, and wonderful - everything he can no longer imagine in a partner. He is, in short, the perfect audience for OS1, the world’s first artificially intelligent operating system “It’s not just an operating system, it’s a consciousness,” boast the ads. His wife is divorcing him, his job is depressing, and he lives a life of crushing solitude. When we meet Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix), the hero of Spike Jonze’s exquisite new film Her (which closed the New York Film Festival last weekend), he is a reservoir of melancholy.
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