Anatomy of a sex scene: her (2013)
There’s a scene in Spike Jonze’s her (2013) where Theodore Twombley (Joaquin Phoenix) has sex with the AI Operating System Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson) over the phone, where Samantha who’s always weighed by the fact she doesn’t have a body discovers the feeling of having one while talking to Theodore. The scene is simple – Joaquin Phoenix is lying on his bed and talking into his earpiece as we hear the raspy voice of Samantha and the scene escalates, the camera zooms into the Theodore’s face as the scene heats up and fades to black as the voices heighten to a sexual climax.
For a minute or so we're immersed in the darkness of their orgasm, a scene of cinematic brilliance as it is successful in making us believe that a tender sexual moment can be possible between a human and an AI agent and it does away with the physical aspect of sex and wanders into the psychological aspect of lovemaking – as all great sex happens deep in the mind than the body. The way Spike Jonze achieves this in a rare flash of undoing of the cinematic and weighing on the voice performances of his characters alone, which by the time the scene comes up are established by a dramatic perfection.
The weight of the scene plays in the darkness of the cinema, with the breathlessness the characters experience become your own. It's by no means an easy scene to conceive as the movie hinges on the momentum produced by it to sustain the dramatic meat of the movie and the radical simplification without the voyeuristic gaze of the camera is a touch of genius. In a world where the visual representation of sex is abundant, to be able to perceive intimacy as silence and darkness gives the scene a sensitivity that other sex scenes rarely capture.
This scene also answers an important question: Can you have sex with an AI agent, considering the physical limitations it has? The answer is a resounding yes, as all you need is a mind or the perception of one as bodies are immaterial to intimacy.