I have loved the film Her since I first saw it in the winter of 2012.
By Michael Catchen
Course: Language, Gender, and Sexuality (Ling 2400)
Advisor: Prof. Kira Hall; TA Ayden Parish
LURA 2018
A poster for the theatrical release is staring down at me as I write this. Writer/director Spike Jonze uses an absurd premise—a man starts dating his artificially intelligent computer—to tell a story that is truly first and foremost about human relationships. It is not difficult to see the parallels between Her and Lost In Translation, a 2002 film directed by Sofia Coppola (who is Jonze’s ex-wife). Both films deal with each director’s perspective on their divorce, and the causes of the communication breakdowns and periods of growing-apart, which are responsible for the end of many relationships, both romantic and platonic.
When thinking about potential research projects for the course Language, Gender, and Sexuality (LING 2400) during the Fall 2017 term, I quickly gravitated to Her as a topic because the operating system/love interest, who names herself Samantha, is undoubtedly a woman, but the process by which she is gendered is murky at best. Traditionally, performance of a gender identity is thought to be expected of a person based on their sex—females are expected to perform the identity “woman”—but Samantha has no body, her femininity is performed strictly through language, because that is the only vessel she has to communicate. Samantha’s gendering is the process by which Jonze moves her from the realm of the artificial to the realm of humanity, which is in-and-of-itself a reflection on contemporary American culture’s failure to recognize people separately from their gender identity.
I decided to look into the process by which Samantha is gendered, and I found the pivotal scene occurs when the protagonist, whose name is Theo, is initializing his brand new operating system. The OS setup-assistant asks whether Theo wants his OS to have a male or female voice, already a problematic questions as it is well accepted in the existing literature that differences in male and female voices are not a result of simple biology, but rather performed to adjust to social norms of what is considered “male” and “female” speech. By making the innocuous decision of choosing a female voice, this operating system has been anthropomorphized into not just being female, but also performing femininity. Theo’s first impression on meeting Samantha tells it all—“you seem like a person, but you’re just a voice in a computer.”
The project offered the choice between a written essay and a video essay, the latter being a fairly general category that uses video and a narrator to offer some form of analysis. In my experience, video essays are particularly well suited toward film analysis because scenes can be cut into the video, allowing the audience to hear dialogue and see composition directly, rather than relying on the extensive quotation and descriptions of framing that would be necessary in a traditional written essay.
Michael Catchen
Michael Catchen is a junior majoring in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. He is interested in the intersection of theoretical ecology and conservation of biodiversity, and hopes to study this further in grad school. He also plays guitar and listens to a lot of independent folk music.