Acousmatic Anxiety: Voice, Lack, & Maternal Technology in Her
2023


A young man in a button-up shirt and tortoiseshell glasses approaches his apartment door as Little Willie John’s “Need Your Love So Bad” moans longingly in the background of his oakwood-shelved home. Anxiously, he opens the door, greeting the woman he is told to believe is his lover. Blue-eyed and blonde-haired, doe-eyed and mute, she gazes at him as he introduces himself. “Hi, I’m Theodore,” our protagonist shakily states. The girl smirks knowingly back, rejecting his handshake and prompting him to offer her what Samantha instructed him to: A camera, a headpiece, and a synthetic beauty mark, which she slyly applies, all the while avoiding his worried gaze. The door closes, reopens, and she speaks, though her mouth does not move. “Honey, I’m home,” smiles the blonde girl, voice emanating from all sides of the diegesis, her mouth still despite her speech. Wrapping her arms around Theodore, the voice which cannot quite be called hers continues, “How was your day?” and “It feels so good to be in your arms”. But our protagonist does not seem at ease in the arms of his alleged lover. He gazes intermittently at his breast pocket, in which lies a small camera device. He gazes intermittently at the body he is used to his lover being in – his lover whose body is that of technology, whose voice is her only constant, who is a highly evolved form of artificial intelligence (AI) that goes by the name of Samantha. The two have fallen in love through voice, and Samantha longs for a body and its haptic capacities. The blonde who now embraces Theodore is but a surrogate, hired by Samantha to fill the lack she feels without corporeality.

As she kisses him, leads him to the living room, removes her shoes and bites her lip, Theodore does not seem pleased to finally feel the physicality of his otherwise disembodied lover. Anxiety riddles his moustached face as she offers to “Do a little dance” and asks him to “play with her”. She places his hands along her waist and moves them along her body’s profile. “Does my body feel nice?” A hesitant yes, followed by an escalation. The woman lets her hair down, sits on his nervous lap. “Kiss me.” As the pair begins to kiss, then touch, Samantha’s heavy breath can be heard over the blonde girl’s closed mouth. Theodore gives in, as the camera tightly follows his hands climbing the topographies of the woman’s body. “Take me to the bedroom.” And so they do. He, against her back. She, against the wall. The moans continue and then are doubled, Samantha’s moans resonating around the aural track, and the girl, Isabella’s sharp, heavy breath echoing from her physical body. He unbuttons her dress. He kisses her neck. “I wanna see your face” Samantha groans between pornic sighs. The blonde girl turns, wide eyes staring into his. “Tell me you love me,” Samantha says, to a vague and incoherent response. “What is it baby, what’s wrong?” Theodore looks away, pulls Isabella’s hands off his face. “It just feels strange. I don’t know her, and I’m so sorry but I don’t know you and… and her lip quivered and –” Isabella runs to the bathroom distraught as Samantha’s resonant voice attempts to comfort her. “I’m sorry my lip quivered,” Isabella cries from behind closed doors. But her apology is pointless. Theodore never wanted Samantha to have a body. He never wanted to touch her physical form. He never wanted Samantha’s corporeal lack to find sufficiency. A lip quiver simply reminded him that he was in relation with a body that he wanted to experience as bodiless. (1:15:15 - 1:19:53)


Spike Jonze’s 2013 box office hit, Her, follows Joaquin Phoenix as Theodore, a young letter writer in a seemingly utopic near future as he falls in love with the AI Operating System (OS) known as Samantha. An investigation into love, technology, communication, and the body, Her is a celebrated and exciting modern classic. Its particular relationship with the female body and its role in cinema, however, leaves something to be desired for the feminist critic and female viewer. As outlined by Mary Ann Doane in her exemplary chapter “Technophilia: Technology, Representation, and the Feminine”, science fiction is predisposed towards depictions of “a new, revised body as a direct outcome of the advance of science” (110). Where there is a new body in the realm of filmic representation, there tends to be a new instantiation of “the question of sexual difference” (110). Doane’s text outlines a thrilling analysis of the social anxiety that “the maternal will contaminate the technological” (116) and examines how the overproliferation of technologies of representation in contemporary society exacerbates this fear. 

Kaja Silverman’s foundational feminist text, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema, also examines the relationship between the feminine and technological anxiety, focusing specifically on the equation of woman with lack throughout film history. This equation is constructed to assuage the inherent anxiety of filmic consumption for the male viewer. In examining Silverman and Doane’s arguments relationally, a new anxiety renders itself visible. Maternity’s tainting of technologies of visual representation has altered and exacerbated the male viewer’s inherent filmic anxiety. Her then disembodies the feminine in an effort to reaffirm female lack, attempting to assuage the male viewer’s anxiety. This essay will examine this proposal through an in-depth relational analysis of The Acoustic Mirror and “Technophilia”, before applying these ideations to the film Her and its specific diegetic (dis)embodiments and productive processes of absence and presence.



Silverman’s investigations into the psychoanalytic and filmic female voice begins with a general analysis of film theory up to the point of her 1988 publication. From Comoli and Munsterberg to Bazin, Dayan, Oudart, Metz, and even Mulvey, the notion of loss and absence seems central to theoretical analyses of the film medium. “Film theory has been haunted since its inception by the specter of a loss or absence at the center of cinematic production” (2). This sense of absence is conventionally attached to two specific features of the filmic medium: “the foreclosed site of production” and the “absent real” (2). The foreclosed site of production refers to the literal spatiotemporal distance between the film’s viewer and the film’s production. The viewer is, by nature, not present for the production of the film, is not physically nor temporally proximate, and has no means of relating to or being near the mechanical apparatus that captures the filmic proceedings nor the object or action of mechanical capture. This implies that film is itself distinctive as a medium by its distance from “the phenomenal order - by the absence of the object or referent” (3). Additionally, there is the absence of reality that structures film and film theory. This “absent real” initially denotes the fictitious nature of diegetic proceedings and their constructed, non-documentarian nature. This statement could, of course, be said of theatre and staged productions as well, a medium that does not provoke the same sense of absence as film despite its shared employment of fiction. This is because theatre is a medium that uses present, embodied people (actors) to depict the fictional plot. Film, on the other hand, “communicates its illusions through other illusions; it is doubly simulated, the representation of a representation” (3). In other words, there is a doubled sense of non-reality, as the narrative is fictional, and the means of communication (the camera) is but a technology of representation, and therefore not the representation itself. In summary, film theory tends to focus on and extrapolate from the absence and loss evoked by the viewer’s spatiotemporal distance from production, as well as the doubled removal of reality in film.

Having examined the consistent theorizing on filmic absence, Silverman explains how the female subject is utilized to reorient the male viewer’s anxiety in the face of loss. “The identification of woman with lack functions to cover over the absent real and the foreclosed site of production… film theory’s preoccupation with lack is really a preoccupation with male subjectivity, and with that in cinema which threatens constantly to undermine its stability” (2). Essentially, Silverman is arguing that the threat posed by filmic absence is placed upon the female body, allowing the male subject to remain unthreatened by film’s inherent loss. This process is typically achieved through a “redrawing of the diegetic boundaries… which situates him in a position of apparent proximity to the cinematic apparatus” (39). In other words, woman is rendered as spectacle, while man is aligned with the camera and therefore the gaze. This is often executed through point-of-view (POV) camera work, where the audience is shown the diegetic world and the body of the woman through the male protagonist’s eyes. Generally speaking, this allows the male viewer to feel a sense of identification with the mechanical apparatus, diminishing his perceived distance from the foreclosed site of production, while simultaneously allowing him to identify with the male protagonist, diminishing his perceived distance from the absent reality. This diegetic redrawing has historically proven successful in assuaging the anxiety of the male viewer and has produced some exemplary feminist scholarship including but not at all limited to Silverman’s Acoustic Mirror and Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema”, a text that is not directly utilized in this essay, though certainly exists as a spectre lurking in its ideations. While this essay commends and affirms these ideations of male subjectivity and female lack, it also offers an amendment unique to the 21st century and its specific relationship with representative technologies. 

Mary Ann Doane’s “Technophilia” underlies this particular theoretical amendment. Offering a general investigation into the relationship between maternity and technology, this text offers invaluable insight into contemporary science fiction cinema, as well as larger societal and cultural connotations of the woman and the machine. Much of her brilliant analysis falls outside the scope of this essay, which will focus in particular on the realities of representative technologies, specifically in terms of visuality. Doane’s argument highlights the role of maternity, a concept that inherently undermines any sense of subject/object, interior/exterior, and self/other. The very nature of pregnancy, for example, is that of the interiorized other, the abject, and the alien entity assuming a position within the body. Other facets of maternity such as the chora stage and others follow suit. The maternal, therefore, creates an anxiety surrounding “the collapse of any distinction whatsoever between subject and object… the concept of motherhood automatically throws into question ideas concerning the self, boundaries between self and other, and hence identity” (116). Written at a time of vast reproductive technological advancement (ie: birth control, in vitro fertilization, etc.), Doane argues that it would seem the technological can limit and control the threats inherent to maternity. And yet, despite these technological advancements, “the fear lingers – perhaps the maternal will contaminate the technological” (116). She continues to explain how the contemporary use of technologies of representation such as photography, film, and radio allow for this fear. Their "excessiveness and overproliferation" (116) serve only to evoke the excess and overproliferation of the reproductive mother. The “all-pervasive images” (116) that make up our daily visual landscape have become so deeply unrestrained and exorbitant that they simply remind the contemporary subject of the unrestrained nature of biological, maternal reproduction. 

This idea of maternal excess displaced onto technologies of representation is central to the arguments of this essay. Silverman’s construction of “woman as spectacle” (viii) functions precisely by making woman hypervisible, aligning her with lack, absence, and loss, while man is aligned with the cinematic apparatus, thereby assuaging his anxiety at his own absence from the “foreclosed site of production” and the “absent real”, as outlined above. Through “Technophilia”, however, the relationship between maternity and technologies of representation is troubled. It is important here to note the particular overproliferation of images of women and the female body in contemporary society. Woman has so successfully been made spectacle that she is essentially everywhere. Woman stares at us in subway advertisements, holding a bottle of perfume or a cold can of Diet Coke. Woman shows herself in celebrity, her image plastered across film, TV, red carpets, and more. Woman influences us on social media, pouting for selfies and selling us her brand affiliations. Woman is everywhere, and she is put everywhere through technologies of visual representation. It has reached such extremes that technologically-produced visual representations of women now evoke the maternal anxiety outlined by Doane. “Woman as spectacle” can no longer assuage the male viewer’s filmic anxiety, as she has become “excessive… and overproliferat[ed]” (Doane 116). Instead, she evokes maternity and therefore ignites its abject anxiety, that of the threat of collapsing distinctions. As “woman as spectacle” no longer assuages male viewers’ anxiety, new techniques must emerge to protect male subjectivity in the face of filmic absence and maternal tainting. In the case of Jonze’s Her, disembodiment becomes this very technique. 


Her’s entire plot and cinematic universe depend on female disembodiment. Samantha, the AI OS and primary love interest of Theo, the male protagonist, is the very embodiment of disembodiment. She exists purely technologically, at first confined to a Cloud-like technological infrastructure and communicating through various audiovisual devices, before she learns to “move past matter as [her] processing platform” (1:44:12 - 1:44:15). Her entirely disembodied form is not only the basis of her interactions with Theodore, but also makes up much of her intra- and interpersonal dialogue and conflict. Her disembodiment serves as an attempt to assuage male viewers’ inherent filmic anxiety as well as its maternotechnological exacerbation. This attempt is made not by the alignment of man with mechanical apparatus and woman with spectacle, but rather through a disembodiment of woman and a hyper-embodiment of man. As woman now evokes maternal anxieties and does nothing to assuage filmic anxiety, she is instead literally moved away from the diegetic action and nondiegetic production. Man is then physically and figuratively centred within the diegesis as well as the production of the film, allowing him to dismiss woman’s visual ubiquity and feel a sense of proximity to the film, assuaging the anxiety produced by absence. Several scenes in her (dis)embody these ideations quite directly.

To begin, let us review the scene with which Her begins. The very first shot of the film is a tight close up of Joaquin Phoenix’s face, caught in thought for a moment before smirking as inspiration strikes and he begins a monologue. Before we are introduced to any aspect of this fictional world, we are made intimately familiar with the embodiment and physicality of its male protagonist. More than the entire first minute of Her is simply a representation of Phoenix’s hyper-embodied self, centred literally in the shot and figuratively in the film’s narrative. His voice and body are synchronized, speech leaving his lips as though the viewer was in immediate conversation with him. The entire narrative and visuality of this film begin with and depend on the hyper-embodiment of the male protagonist. His corporeality sets the stage for the film to come. As the scene continues, Theodore speaks of love as birth and marks the generations of persons who compose any one existence, speaking to maternity and geneology in a means that is intensely fascinating yet sadly outside the scope of this particular essay. The camera then cuts to Theo’s computer screen where his speech is being recorded in a synthetic digital handwriting, alongside photos of the people from/to whom he writes. Interestingly, handwriting, like speech, is a form of disembodied language. Its placement next to embodied photographs of the subjects of this speech rejoins language to corporeality, just as the close up shot of Theo’s face emphasizes his synchronization of voice and body. 







            Stills from Opening Scene



This opening scene establishes what will be an entire feature’s worth of shots which physically centre the male protagonist and his embodiment. Even those scenes which aurally focus on Samantha’s voice and speech remain visually centred on Phoenix’s corporeality and centrality to the camera’s view. This recentering of the male subject and his embodiment is precisely the new technique employed to protect male subjectivity and assuage anxiety in the face of filmic absence and maternal tainting. As these technologies of representation have themselves overproliferated, evoking the threat of maternity, so too have visual representations of woman become ubiquitous. “Woman as spectacle”, therefore, does nothing but exacerbate the maternal and filmic anxiety experienced by the male subject, neccessitating the advent of new means of assuaging this anxiety and equating woman with lack. In the physical, visual, and diegetic recentering of the male subject, he is able to feel proximate to the cinematic world in a way that the disembodied woman cannot. The male subject sees Phoenix’s consistent embodiment and visual dominance over the film, identifies with him as the male protagonist, and feels closer to the “absent real” of the film. Samantha’s disembodiment, meanwhile, assures the male viewer that woman is absent from the embodied diegetic world in a way that he is not. A “redrawing of the diegetic boundaries” (Silverman 39) enables this entire practice, and is executed visually from the very first scene of the film and throughout its duration. 






Other Stills Depicting Centrality of Male Protagonist & Male Embodiment


This practice of centering the male subject and disembodying the female subject extends beyond the realm of the purely visual. It is represented through a plethora of scenes, dialogue, and narrative implications that deify, idealize, and focus on embodiment, corporealization, and the having of a body. This practice is possibly most obvious in the scene that this essay will refer to as the “Body Fantasy” scene. Following a sequence of goofy and cute adventures shared by Theodore and Samantha, Theo sits down at the edge of a public art sculpture of some sort in a crowded part of his utopian city. The two watch as a diversity of countless people walk by, the camera focusing on a range of strangers as Theodore discusses empathy and the imagining of lives through the looking at bodies. The camera returns to Phoneix as Theodore, centred as usual in the middle of the shot, as he tells her that he “feels like he can say anything” to her, even things he does not tell other people. When he asks if she feels the same, Samantha abruptly answers “No”, explaining that she has “a million” embarrassing or personal thoughts everyday. Theodore presses her to share them, and after much giggling and coyness, she replies:

SAMANTHA: Well, I don’t know, when we were looking at those people, I fantasized that I was walking next to you - and that I had a body. (laughing) I was listening to what you were saying, but simultaneously, I could feel the weight of my body and I was even fantasizing that I had an itch on my back - (she laughs) And I imagined that you scratched it for me - this is so embarrassing.

Theodore laughs. 

THEODORE: There’s a lot more to you than I thought. There’s a lot going on in there. 

SAMANTHA: I know, I’m becoming much more than what they programmed. I’m excited. (Jonze Screenplay, 35)


As this conversation carries out, the camera shifts its gaze between the strangers passing by, all of whom are embodied, many of whom are speaking to their own OSs, and Theodore as he listens and responds to this fascinating and personal thought of Samantha’s. In her admission of her desire to have a body, Samantha and Her positions the body as something to be desired, something that makes one whole, and something that establishes lack when not present. In Samantha longing for a body, therefore, the viewer is told that she understands herself to be lacking. As the primary female subject of the film, Samantha therefore implies a diegetic lack related to her disembodied femininity. Simultaneously, she is affirming the male subject as whole. If she is lacking by her non-corporeality, it follows that he is whole by his corporeality. Where woman is lacking, therefore, man is not, a process that is enabled by his visual dominance over and presence in the diegesis and her visual and bodily absence. Furthermore, Theodore’s response and the exchange that follows (“There’s more to you than I thought”; “I’m becoming much more than what they programmed”) furthers the diegetic primacy of the body. If her mere desiring of embodiment shows her advancement beyond her programming, it implies that the body is inherently an ideal state, and her desiring it brings her closer to the ideal she will never reach. This entire Body Fantasy scene moves the recentering and embodiment of the male subject and decentering and disembodiment of the female subject outside the realm of the purely visual. It proves that this process is woven through the narrative, plot, and theoretical ideations of the entire film. 

To continue this line of analysis, let us return to the scene with which this essay began, one which will be referred to from here on out as the “Surrogate Sex” scene, as Isabella serves as Samantha’s surrogate body. (Here, a brief digression to note the film’s employment of the word surrogate and its natural evocation of technologies of maternal reproduction, another piece of a particularly maternal analysis of Her which unfortunately does exist outside of this essay’s purview, but is so truly fascinating. That line of analysis would include the aforementioned employment of birth metaphors in the first scene, as well as Theodore’s fantasizing of a pregnant woman and the famous black screen sex scene’s evocation of the womb and fantasies of unity and plenitude. Sadly all these points are outside of this essay’s scope, though are certainly worth mentioning and considering, as the female voice is deeply intertwined with the “sonourous envelope” (qtd in Silverman 72) of the womb and the mother.) This scene’s narrative tension hinges upon Theodore’s obvious discomfort with its proceedings. Before he even opens the door to greet Isabella, Theodore is palpably nervous, chugging his beer and obsessively adjusting his clothing. This anxiety does not seem to decrease as their interaction escalates. Samantha vocally instructs Theodore to “get out of your head” and Isabella manually places Theo’s hands onto her body. As viewers, we too are somewhat uncomfortable in watching this scene. The stillness of Isabella’s mouth as speech emerges from it is inherently unsettling and somewhat uncanny and we are aware of the dissonance between the aural and the visual track of the film. As Theodore progresses into his interaction with Isabella/Samantha, he seems to set aside his anxiety and discomfort so as to complete the sexual endeavour. It is when Isabella’s lip quivers, however, that Theo feels it necessary to stop the goings on. This lip quiver is a key moment in this scene and a highly intentional one at that. The lip quiver is one of the body’s many natural, unconscious movements - One of the simple realities and actions inherent to embodiment. Isabella, therefore, did nothing to provoke Theodore’s actions other than have a body and perform its unconscious actions of embodiment. It is here that a central aspect of the film’s disembodiment of woman becomes clear: Theodore does not want Samantha to have a body.

This idea is reiterated after Theo and Samantha put Isabella in a taxi and send her home. Theodore is sitting on the curb outside of his apartment building, unpacking and processing the prior events through conversation with Samantha. When she sighs, Theodore becomes quite uncomfortable, calling her out on performing a bodily process without the body to require it: 

Samantha inhales, nervous to press on. Theodore imagines a close up of a woman’s mouth inhaling at the same time, and he seems bothered by this. 

SAMANTHA: Is there anything else, though? 

THEODORE (preoccupied): No, just that.

SAMANTHA (sighing again): Okay. 

Again, when she exhales, Theodore imagines a woman’s mouth exhaling.

THEODORE (looks anxious): Why do you do that? 

SAMANTHA: What? 

THEODORE: Nothing, it’s just that you go (he inhales and exhales) as you’re speaking and... (beat) That just seems odd. You just did it again.

SAMANTHA (anxious): I did? I’m sorry. I don’t know, I guess it’s just an affectation. Maybe I picked it up from you.

She doesn’t know what else to say. 

THEODORE: Yeah, I mean, it’s not like you need any oxygen or anything. 

SAMANTHA (getting frazzled): No-- um, I guess I was just trying to communicate because that’s how people talk. That’s how people communicate. 

THEODORE: Because they’re people, they need oxygen. You’re not a person. (Jonze Screenplay 78)


This interaction reiterates and clarifies the exact negative desire outlined above. Theodore simply does not wish for Samantha to become corporeal. He does not want her to have a body, and this is shown not only through the Surrogate Sex scene and the filmic depiction of the sigh, but also in the screenplay’s instructions. When Samantha sighs, Theodore is specifically written to imagine a “woman’s mouth inhaling at the same time” and it is this which is structured as the source of his anxiety and lashing out. Between his loathing of Isabella’s lip quiver - an unconscious act of corporeality - and his anxiety and rage at Samantha’s sigh, it is highly evident that Theodore wishes for Samantha to remain disembodied. 

When placed in context with the Body Fantasy scene, where the diegetic primacy and idealization of the body is emphasized and disembodiment is identified with lack, Theodore’s desire for Samantha’s disembodiment is proven to really be a desire for her to remain lacking and for himself to be whole. Her disembodiment, therefore, diegetically functions as her incompleteness and inadequacy, allowing Theodore’s embodiment to make him dominant and complete. As the male viewer is intended to identify with the male protagonist of this film, this allows the male viewer to feel whole in Theodore’s wholeness, and to feel secure in Samantha’s representation of the loss and absence inherent to cinema through her lack. 


Thus far, we have established how man is diegetically recentered and hyper-embodied where woman is diegetically decentered and disembodied. It is of equal importance, however, to examine the particular production of Her. The character of Samantha was not initially voiced by the wildly famous and famously sexualized Scarlett Johansson, but was instead intended to be voiced by English actor and director Samantha Morton. With no intention to diminish Morton’s own success and celebrity, it is undeniable that Scarlett Johansson is a more instantly recognizable figure. She is also known as a sex symbol of our culture, and has a very unique and sensual voice that is very aligned with her visual embodiment. Samantha Morton, as the initial intended voice of Samantha, was present everyday on set for the filming of Her, reading her lines as Phoenix performed his. “Samantha was with us on set and was amazing. It was only in post-production, when we started editing, that we realized that what the character/movie needed was different from what Samantha and I had created together. So we recast and since then Scarlett has taken over that role,” Jonze stated in one IndieWire interview. While not necessarily intended at the initiation of production, this does ultimately mean that Scarlett Johansson was physically and temporally removed from the site of production. She was not at all present for the filming process, instead recording her lines in a booth after the film’s otherwise completed production.

Joaquin Phoenix was, of course, spatiotemporally present for the production process. This means that it is not only within the diegesis that woman is made absent and lacking while man is made present and whole, but in the production itself. The male viewer, therefore, finds comfort and diminished anxiety not only in the world of Her, where woman is disembodied and man is hyper-embodied, but in the mode of production itself, where Johansson is absent and Phoenix is present. The identification with the fictional male protagonist that provides a sense of completeness is then transmuted into a sense of proximity to the otherwise foreclosed site of production through Phoenix’s on set presence. Woman then becomes the scapegoat of absence and lack yet again, this time in the nondiegetic world of our own through Johansson’s distance from set. 


Interestingly, however, it is in this same choice of recasting that the film potentially fails to assuage the male viewer’s anxiety. Scarlett Johansson’s voice, as already mentioned, is highly unique, distincitve, and recognizable as her own. Through her particular affect, intonation, and rasp, Johansson’s voice possesses what Barthes refers to as “grain” (qtd in Silverman 44). Johansson’s unique “grain” renders her “thick with body” (Silverman 62) and “deposit[s] the female body into the female voice” (61). This means that when many viewers hear Samantha’s disembodied voice, it does not truly operate as disembodied. Instead, it is reembodied in Scarlett Johansson. This reembodiment breaks the illusion of diegetic non-corporeality, inserting the nondiegetic figure of Johansson into the voice of Samantha. This already breaks the filmic illusion, but is complicated further by the particular celebrity of Johansson. Generally understood as a sex symbol, Johansson and her body have been visually ubiquitous for over 20 years. She is everywhere, from film and television to advertisements and commercials to social media, and she is put everywhere through technologies of visual representation. Therefore, Scarlett Johansson’s image itself reminds viewers of the "excessiveness and overproliferation" of technologies of visual representation, and therefore evokes the same maternal anxiety established by Doane. Thusly, in bringing Johansson into Her, Samantha is not only reembodied as Johansson, but she potentially evokes the very anxiety she is intended to assuage. 

This argument does ultimately hinge upon the particular viewer’s recognition or non-recognition of Johansson’s voice and is perhaps essentially a subjective analysis. In dialogues with my peers and colleagues, however, this imagining of Johansson was frequently noted. One classmate suggested that despite her reembodiment, Johansson is still disembodied for the average subject, as we see but representations of her through the camera, and not her actual self. This is a highly interesting assertion, though this essay contends that the very presence of a female body represented through visual technology is enough to evoke the male viewer’s anxiety. It was also mentioned that Jonze’s casting of Johansson may have been intended to evoke her corporeality. This is, of course, quite possible, though it is equally possible that by virtue of being on set with Morton, Jonze was unable himself to distance her from the site of production in the way he could Johansson. Perhaps then it was Jonze’s subconscious attempt to assuage his own anxiety as a male subject that sabotaged his attempts to assuage anxiety for other male viewers. There is, of course, no means through which to confirm or deny these ideations, though they are a fascinating element of the film’s production and consumption. 

Overall, very few of my peers felt undisturbed by Johansson, and the majority of those who initially did not recognize her found their filmic experience greatly altered upon learning of the casting decision. This shift in perception reiterates the “depositing [of] the female voice into the female body” carried out by Jonze and Johansson. Here, in Samantha’s reembodiment into a highly recognizable body, the entire technique of assuaging the anxiety of the male viewer through female disembodiment may be rendered moot. 


Through a relational analysis of Silverman’s Acoustic Mirror and Doane’s “Technophilia”, new forms of male anxiety emerge. The anxiety produced by the absence inherent to film through the “foreclosed site of production” and the “absent real” has historically been assuaged through an equation with woman as lack and woman as spectacle, allowing the male viewer to identify with the cinematic apparatus and feel a renewed proximity to the filmic reality and production. This technique of hypervisualizing woman, however, cannot function as it once did. The "excessiveness and overproliferation" of technologies of visual representation and the particular ubiquity of representations of woman has allowed the fear that the “maternal will contaminate the technological” (Doane 116) to run rampant. Representations of woman enabled by technologies of visual representation, therefore, do nothing to minimize the male subject’s inherent filmic anxiety, but now evoke the threat of the maternal. To combat this, new techniques of equating woman with lack have emerged, and nowhere is this more clear than in Her. The physical and narratival centering and hyperembodiment of man is complimented by the physical decentering and disembodiment of woman. Where Theodore is visually embodied and centrally shot throughout the film, Samantha is visually absent. Dialogue in the Body Fantasy scene reveals a primacy and idealization of the body, affirming a lack in Samantha’s disembodiment and desire for a body, implying that Theodore, the male protagonist is whole, complete, and not lacking through his corporealization. This is reiterated in the Surrogate Sex scene, where it becomes clear through the lip quiver and the sigh that Theodore simply does not want Samantha to have a body, and would prefer to view her as lacking where he is complete. Furthermore, the mode of the film’s production, wherein Phoenix was spatiotemporally present for its filming while Johansson was spatiotemporally absent, allows the sense of absence and lack to extend beyond the diegetic boundaries of the film and into the production itself. The male viewer’s identification with Theodore combined with Phoenix’s presence on set allows the male subject to feel proximate to the otherwise “absent real” and “foreclosed site of production”, while Johansson, and by extension, woman, is rendered distant, absent, and therefore lacking. Where Her potentially falls short of truly assuaging male viewers’ anxiety lies in the particular choice to cast Johansson in the role of Samantha. Her voice being “thick with body” and possessing a highly distinctive “grain” as well as her particular visual ubiquity as a celebrity reembodies Samantha as Scarlett Johansson, potentially shattering the illusory equation of woman with disembodiment and corresponding lack. 


Works Cited

Doane, Mary Ann. “Technophilia: Technology, Representation, and the Feminine.” The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader, edited by Gill Kirkup, Routledge, New York, NY, 2000, pp. 110–121.

Jagernauth, Kevin. “It Turns out That Scarlett Johansson Replaced Samantha Morton in Spike Jonze’s ‘Her.’” IndieWire, IndieWire, 21 June 2013, www.indiewire.com/news/general-news/it-turns-out-that-scarlett-johansson-replaced-samantha-morton-in-spike-jonzes-her-96743/.

Jonze, Spike, director. Her. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2013.

Silverman, Kaja. The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Indiana University Press, 2017, First Published 1988.