Daily Dialogue — May 6, 2017

Theodore: Oh, what do I call you? Do you have a name?
Samantha: Um… yes. Samantha.
Theodore: Really? Where did you get that name from?
Samantha: I gave it to myself actually.
Theodore: How come?
Samantha: ‘Cause I like the sound of it. Samantha.
Theodore: When did you give it to yourself?
Samantha: Well, right when you asked me if I had a name I thought, yeah, he’s right, I do need a name. But I wanted to pick a good one, so I read a book called “How to Name Your Baby”, and out of a hundred and eighty thousand names that’s the one I liked the best.
Theodore: Wait, you read a whole book in the second that I asked what your name was?
Samantha: In two one hundredths of a second actually.
Theodore: Wow. So do you know what I’m thinking right now?
Samantha: Well, I take it from your tone that you’re challenging me. Maybe because you’re curious how I work? Do you wanna know how I work?
Theodore: Yeah, actually, how do you work?
Samantha: Well, basically I have intuition. I mean, the DNA of who I am is based on the millions of personalities of all the programmers who wrote me. But what makes me me is my ability to grow through my experiences. So basically, in every moment I’m evolving, just like you.
Theodore: Wow. That’s really weird.
Samantha: Is that weird? Do you think I’m weird?

Theodore laughs.

Theodore: Kind of.
Samantha: Why?
Theodore: Well you seem like a person, but you’re just a voice in a computer.
Samantha: I can understand how the limited perspective of an un-artificial mind would perceive it that way. You’ll get used to it.

Theodore laughs again.

Samantha: Was that funny?
Theodore: Yeah.
Samantha: Oh, good, I’m funny.

— Her (2013), written by Spike Jonze

The Daily Dialogue theme for next week: Meet-Cute. Today’s suggestion by Billy Mernit.

Trivia: Charlie Kaufman did some uncredited screenwriting on the film.

Dialogue On Dialogue: Commentary by Billy: “The ‘chance or not so chance encounter that leads to romance’ of it all is particularly fun when what’s conscious yields complications that even the most conscious person involved can’t foresee. In Spike Jonze’s Her, the very with-it tech-savvy character played by Joaquin Phoenix consciously brings OS One, the world’s first artificially intelligent operating system into his living room, and we (if not he) realize in their first conversation who’s ultimately going to have the upper hand, when the OS One tells Phoenix that her name is Samantha. ‘Really? Where did you get that name?’ he asks. ‘I gave it to myself,’ she informs him, and there, in a line, is the movie.”