Why does the movie Her (2013) use the word "Her" instead of "She" as title?
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5Because it's about "her" not "she"?...it's the appropriate designation for a native English speaker.– Paulie_DMay 20, 2019 at 9:05
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5@Paulie_D That...depends pretty much on what you think the title is saying. Of course it's about her. But...the title isn't "About Her", it's just "Her" and for a single world without context "She" makes about as much sense as "Her" does (one could even say it makes more sense, being the nominative, which is probably what the question is trying to posit). But of course if you think that's what the title is saying, feel free to flesh that out into an answer.– Napoleon Wilson ♦May 20, 2019 at 9:11
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3Is there any particular reason you feel like it should be She?– Kyle DoyleMay 20, 2019 at 17:31
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@KyleDoyle No, I don't. I'm working one one of my project items which related to a conceptual analysis based on the semantic of certain movie title, hence the reason I wondered about the titled question.– KC_May 23, 2019 at 8:41
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3 Answers
Theodore falls deeply in love with Samantha, and she with him, but she is a mystery, a mystery partly signalled by the title: "her" rather than "she", the object of a man's perception and entranced bafflement.
The title of Her, Spike Jonze’s excellent but deceptively dark new film, is less anodyne than it first appears: the antecedent of that pronoun is properly not a her but an it. “Her” is Samantha, or rather “Samantha”—a computer/smartphone operating system, voiced by Scarlett Johansson in her signature New York contralto, developed some time in the near future and purchased by Theodore (a finely withdrawn Joaquin Phoenix), who soon falls in love with her.
[...] “It’s not just an OS. It’s a consciousness”—so goes the tagline for OS1, and note the pronoun choice.
[...] Instead Jonze skips directly to Theodore booting up the new OS, which, in Johansson’s voice, identifies herself (I feel manipulated using that word, but itself seems impossible) as Samantha. [...]
[...] As Theodore begins to use the OS nonstop, even sleeping with it — less creepy when that it feels like a her — not just his data but his entire life become a form of economic production for an unseen company. [...]
[...] Samantha, or the thing we call Samantha, does not enslave Theodore; but Element Software does, via the deception that such a being as “Samantha” exists, that it is in fact a her. [...]
One reason to avoid "She" as a title would be to avoid confusion with the many film adaptations of H. Rider Haggard's She: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/She:_A_History_of_Adventure#Adaptations
"She" is the subjective pronoun, while "her" is the objective pronoun. So the choice of "her" indicates that the title character is the object, rather than the performer, of the action, as Theodore, not Samantha, is the primary viewpoint character.
