Even for a science-fictional character, Theodore Twombly is having a bad day. At about the midpoint in Spike Jonze’s 2013 Oscar winning movie ‘Her’, Twombly is – quietly, agonisingly – drawing out the decidedly non-utopian experience of putting the final signatures on his divorce papers. Joaquin Phoenix’s Twombly sits across from Rooney Mara’s Catherine in an open-air cafe and makes a half-joke about being “a really slow signer” and how it had taken him “three months just to write the letter ‘T’”. Catherine swallows a laugh. As she takes the papers from him, he pleads, defeated, that she doesn’t “have to do it right now”, but Catherine gently insists. Whatever has happened to the pair, there is now a gulf between them: a void into which one or both of them might fall reaching for the other, unless she remains resolute. She scratches out their future with a ballpoint.
Twombly isn’t the strong, romantic male archetype (“Everything makes you cry,” she says...