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Abstract: This article posits a connection between questions of materiality, embodiment, and gender at the center of the love affair between a man and his computer operating system in Her (Spike Jonze, 2013) and the relationship between the technologies of traditional filmmaking and those of digital film production. As the film's lovers attempt to strategically deny and forestall the collapse of the traditional gendered subjecthood on which their relationship rests, so too does the film engage with the possibility of a future wherein digital fi lm departs from the ontologies of its celluloid predecessor toward the creation of new, uncertain forms.
His face framed in an extreme close-up, Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) begins the movie Her (Spike Jonze, 2013) with a seemingly intimate personal confession that disintegrates and reforms before our eyes:
To my Chris, I have been thinking about how I could possibly tell you how much you mean to me. I remember when I first started to fall in love with you like it was last night. Lying naked beside you in that tiny apartment, it suddenly hit me that I was part of this whole larger thing, just like our parents, and our parents' parents. Before that I was just living my life like I knew everything, and suddenly this bright light hit me and woke me up. That light was you. I can't believe it's already been fifty years since you married me. And still to this day, every day, you make me feel like the girl I was when you first turned on the lights and woke me up and we started this adventure together.
The gender switch, unmarked by any fluctuation in Theodore's largely flat delivery, occurs just before the end of the monologue, immediately recasting the categorical ambivalence of the name invoked at the start of the address and providing a clue to the private performance that is taking place diegetically within the film-not so much a disclosure of private feelings but a kind of deadpan drag act delivered to no one in particular. Theodore, or "Letter Writer 612" by his professional title, is an employee at Beautifulhandwrittenletters.com, a ghostwriter of imagined intimacies who offers himself as a kind of emotional prosthesis for busy couples whose own...