THE SYMBOLIC TRIANGLE ("Her" isn't who you think she is.)

Rating: 8/10 (30 August 2015)

All I'd heard about HER was that it was about a man who gets romantically involved with a digital girlfriend. But that isn't what the story is really about.
That isn't why Spike Jonze deservedly won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
Let me warm to my theme.
HER not only entertains through its pleasing visual design--from the understated film architecture of futuristic cool-toned LA to the vivid palette of protagonist Theo Twombley's warm-toned spring-season threads.
More important: HER educates through its equally pleasing story design. Which illustrates what I call THE SYMBOLIC TRIANGLE: the thematic correlation of a story's TITLE, ONE-WORD THEME*, and HERO'S NAME.
For example, what's The Symbolic Triangle of James Joyce's famous novel "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" (1916)?
1. TITLE: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
2. ONE-WORD THEME: Freedom
("To discover the mode of life or of art whereby my spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom," sings Joyce through his alter-ego hero.)
3. HERO'S NAME: Stephen Daedalus
(Greek: Stephen means "crowned one." Daedalus = the mythic Greek artisan-hero, inventor of the labyrinth and wings).
Here's The Symbolic Triangle of HER--and how the meaning of the story's title, the story's one-word theme, and the story's hero's name (i.e., the main character's name) all fit together in a work of symbolic and artistic unity that pulses with subtle emotional truth.
1. TITLE: HER
HER refers only superficially to Samantha (Scarlett Johansson), the digital girlfriend--the virtual woman. Samantha is only a decoy: story-wise for us and emotionally-wise for Theo (Joaquin Phoenix). HER refers more deeply to the physical woman, Theo's soon-to-be ex-wife, about whom Theo is heartbroken: Catherine Klausen.
At its emotional core, HER isn't mainly about a fantasy love story in which futuristic software conjures up through artificial intelligence a beguiling Google Assistant. HER evokes the pain and futility of an all-too-common everyday love story in which age-old real-ware cannot conjure up sufficient relational intelligence between men and women to ward off divorce.
2. ONE-WORD THEME: Divorce
Screenwriter Spike Jonze tells a classic three-stage Rites-Of-Passage Separation story: Life Problem, Wrong Way, Acceptance (Blake Snyder's "Save the Cat!" classifications). The theme of divorce plays out primarily with Theo and Catherine (Rooney Mara), secondarily--analogically--with Theo and Samantha, and lower down the ladder of priority, with Amy and Charles (Amy Adams and Matt Letscher), a third couple that goes through a divorce.
Amy herself takes up after her divorce from Charles with a female OS--another Her--then gets dumped. Can we see, Jonze implies, that HER refers to all women in the story? To all women?
Jonze distracts us with the futuristic look and feel of artificial intelligence to blind us--momentarily--to the deeper and timeless mystery of genuine human-relationship intelligence that we'll always require if we hope to share with a significant other the joys of happiness, intimacy, and trust. The filmmaker blinds us to this core human-relationship challenge to better show how the story's hero, the emotionally withdrawn and confused Theo (the story's EveryMan), is blind to what love requires. A professional letter-writer who knows what love requires in the lives of others, Theo is clueless when it comes to what love requires in his own life, what women require of love.
Technology can help men (and women) with lots of stuff. But not this. Not marriage.
Jonze distracts Theo (and us) from the core theme and Life Problem, divorce, by the "attractive-distractor" experiment of Theo's relationship with a non-human: Theo's Wrong Way of dealing with his Life Problem. Caught up with the false "Her"--Samantha, a machine--Theo temporarily dulls the pain he feels from his dead marriage with the real "Her"--a human being, Catherine.
Samantha is the wizard of HER. And just as Dorothy's misplaced hope in the wizard of Oz has little to do with her eventual triumph over her ordeal, her growth and development, her return home, so too Theo's same-old-pattern emotionally-remote escapist relationship with Samantha will not bring him to a place of maturity and relationship intelligence he needs to become a member of the 20% club of successful marriages.
But unlike Dorothy who grows and changes, Theo doesn't.
Experience along the yellow-brick road teaches him little about women or marriage and male-female relationships, little to spare him the same ordeal if he chooses to take another crack at marriage. A man without a flight manual. Winging it. Consult a book? "The 5 Love Languages"? "Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay"? "The Way of the Superior Man"? Not Theo. And by the end of the story, he accepts life as it is. Ready to move on. Still clueless about EveryHer.
Here's how Jonze visually bookends Theo's journey to Acceptance:
Opening Shot: Theo inside, office cubicle, looking at his computer--a nearsighted contracted view of life, alone--writing a letter for someone else about their life while he himself (Theo) faces a huge Life Problem: divorce.
Closing Shot: Theo outside, rooftop of a skyscraper, looking out over the city, a farsighted expanded view of life still alone inside himself (interior-wise) but not alone exterior-wise because he's with Amy, another casualty of divorce, Theo having finally written a letter for himself about his own life to the woman he loved--a man finally resigned to his failure and fate: divorce.
And Jonze hints that Theo (and Catherine) might have to accept much more. Did the couple lose their baby? Did a tragedy contribute to their doom? Does that explain their unspeakable pain?
3. HERO'S NAME: Theo Twombley
(A Man For Whom Women Are "Deities Unknown")
Given his painterly celebration of color, expressed through his wardrobe, and his fuzzy contemplation of life and its emotional tension between what's fanciful and true, could Theo Twombley refer to artist Cy Twombly, whose signature scribbles of mythically inspired canvases and drawings represent the confused scribbles of Theo's inner life as he braves through his ordeal?
Add that the meaning of the surname Twombley is unknown and that the meaning of Theo relates to God or deities, as in "theology." And we see how Theo Twombley's name reflects his incapacity to successfully traverse the labyrinth of marriage. Theo Twombley: A Man For Whom Women Are "Deities Unknown."
Because marriage is a mysterious religious experience, requiring the relational intelligence of deities for Him to get it right with Her.
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*Credit Christopher Vogler for the concept "one-word theme" ("Memo from the Story Department," by Vogler & McKenna).
© Copyright 2015 by JEF7REY HILDNER