I saw Spike Jonze’s new movie Her the other day at the cinema and I was quite profoundly moved by it. It’s a movie that works on many levels and while it is being sold as a love story, I seem to have watched it as a sci-fi movie that used the romantic narrative to get a point across.

Her places us in a situation where we constantly question our assumptions and judgments about relationships with technology. It does this beautifully by blurring the thin line between what we perceive as the distant future and what we already do in our own lives today. Trapped in the dance of thought we’re still kept so close to the characters in the movie that the intimate relationship with them bonds us with their situation.

There are moments of dystopian awkward human-computer interaction that makes us shiver at the thought of that kind of future, but even the worst kind are gracefully dismissed as the delicate narrative makes us realize that humans will always fall in love with other humans. Technology is merely a new conduit. Either way—they always do it through their own perception of the world and it seems that it doesn’t matter if there’s a real human on the other side.

Falling in love most of the time means people discovering themselves through another person.

If there’s a computer with enough of a personality on the other side, sure why not, as long as there’s communication.

Her seems to be just a bit ahead of us (I’d say 2022?). And this effect is felt through the whole movie: You dismiss the ideas the movie acts upon because they seem too far out, but you keep realizing just how close they are to our life in the present. It’s unsettling and yet somehow warm and safe due to the intimate setting of the movie.

It could be that the effect of the picture on me was so grand because I’ve been going through something like what the story is proposing, but with a real human being. However, a big portion of our communication is through various technologies and it can get weird. I tend to think about its effects a lot. All the time actually. All the messaging systems in the world put our friends and lovers in the cloud accessible always and everywhere. If you’ve ever been in love, you probably understand how important phatic communication is. And there’s a way to mitigate that too. Awkwardly enough, Snapchat makes phatic communication very pleasureful. It lets through just enough information to know the other person is there—which is exactly what phatic communication is.