When Spike Jonze’s romance Her was released in 2013, it sounded both like a joke – a man falls in love with his computer – and a fantasy. The iPhone was about six years old. Siri, the mildly reliable virtual assistant for that phone, came along a few years later.
You could converse in a limited way with Siri, whose default female-coded voice had the timbre and tone of a self-assured middle-aged hotel concierge. She did not laugh; she did not giggle; she did not tell spontaneous jokes, only Easter egg-style gags written into her code by cheeky engineers. Siri was not your friend.
She certainly wasn’t your girlfriend. So Samantha, the artificial intelligence assistant with whom the sad-sack divorcé Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) fell in love in Her , felt like a futuristic revelation. Voiced by Scarlett Johansson, Samantha was similar to Siri, if Siri liked you and wanted you to like her back.
She was programmed to mould herself around the individual user’s preferences, interests and ideas. She was witty and sweet and quite literally tireless. In theory, everyone in Her was using their own version of Samantha, presumably with different names and voices.
But the movie – which I love – was less the tale of a near-future society and more the coming-of-age story of one man. Theodore found the strength to return to life in a brief, beautiful relationship with a woman who fit his needs perfectly and healed his wounds. It was thus a tad jarring to hear the voice of.
