“I am a woman, and this is a bridge. And despite our vast differences, we are very much in love. Our love in itself is no different from any other love that exists between two beings.” Speaking in a tone as dry as it is self-confident, this is how Erika Eiffel describes her romantic relationship with the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. It’s not a joke. Eiffel, who changed her name officially after “marrying” the world’s most famous tower, is the protagonist of a 2008 documentary film titled “Married to the Eiffel Tower.” Its subject is a rare phenomenon known as “objectum sexuality,” or OS. The members of the international OS community, whose unofficial spokeswoman is Eiffel, insist vehemently that people can fall in love and develop a deep emotional tie with inanimate objects, virtual characters or other entities that do not belong (at least not immediately) to the human race.

In most cases, this phenomenon is taken as a curiosity. It is a fertile platform for creating amusing supporting characters in television series, such as “Boston Legal” and “Nip/Tuck,” or in viral clips on YouTube that document weddings between people and objects (like the 2010 clip in which a young Korean man publicly married a huge pillow which bore a print of his favorite cartoon character). Concurrently, in recent years popular culture has been confronting us with quite a few stories centering around total love between a human and a nonhuman entity. The interplay between OS and the digital age is providing inspiration for 21st-century versions of the Pygmalion story, among them “Her,” the new, highly acclaimed film by Spike Jonze (“Being John Malkovich,” “Where the Wild Things Are”), which is currently playing in Israel.

There is nothing new about our attraction to stories about love between people and objects. In one of its earliest and most famous versions – the story of the sculptor Pygmalion in Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” – it reflects a male fantasy that originated in Greek mythology but has never become dated. Pygmalion falls in love with the goddess Aphrodite and creates a breathtaking statue of her in ivory, which he names Galatea. After Pygmalion proves he believes in the gods, Aphrodite decides to accede to his prayers and transforms Galatea into a flesh-and-blood woman. In contrast to later versions of the story, among them George Bernard Shaw’s play “Pygmalion” (1913), Ovid’s tale has an optimistic ending: The lovers marry and have a daughter, Paphos.

It hardly needs saying that Pygmalion’s fantasy represents a completely narcissistic conception of falling in love: The sculptor falls head-over-heels in love with a sculpture he himself created – a being whose whole existence is intended to satisfy the needs of another person. But the contemporary versions of the story are fundamentally different. Under the influence of social networks, the incessant virtual presence of us all and the collective addiction to mediated relationships (chats instead of conversations, Skype instead of meetings, porno instead of sex) – the possibility of blurring the boundary between virtual entities and real people fires the imagination. These virtual entities are not objects, statues or paintings but genuine beings, which possess artificial intelligence and in certain cases even a form of consciousness.

“Her,” which Jonze has described in interviews as a “love story,” is about an increasingly deepening relationship between a newly divorced man named Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) and the new operating system he has purchased for his computer, which identifies itself as Samantha (the voice of Scarlett Johansson). The synopsis might sound like a gimmick – guy falls in love with computer – but the film is actually a complex, moving and thrilling drama, which confers new relevance on the Pygmalion fantasy. In its best moments, “Her” succeeds in challenging deeply rooted conceptions about what defines us as human beings.

Set in the fairly near future, 2025, the film presents a futuristic yet familiar reality. Theodore, who works for a company that specializes in writing romantic letters, is making a living thanks to his ability to fake emotions. The letters he dashes off so effortlessly include poetic lines like “I remember when I first started to fall in love with you like it was last night … suddenly this bright light hit me and woke me up. That light was you” – this commissioned by a wife for her husband on the occasion of their golden wedding anniversary.

When Theodore’s wife asks for a divorce, he is forced to return every day to an empty apartment in the sterile and depressing urban neighborhood of the fictional metropolis in which he lives (a cross between Shanghai and Los Angeles, the two cities in which the film was shot). His loneliness and dejection are breached by Samantha, an OS (operating system) developed over many years by thousands of programmers. Samantha is not just a computer program equipped with a women’s voice (like Apple’s much-maligned “Siri”): Ultra-sophisticated programming makes it possible for her to change constantly. In contrast to Galatea, who is no more than the realization of her creator’s fantasy, Samantha was not created by a specific individual – she embodies innumerable impressions and abilities. But most important, she is capable of internalizing new inputs, of learning and enhancing her capabilities.

From a quite innocent beginning, the connection between Theodore and Samantha rapidly develops into a blazing romance. In one of the film’s most brilliant scenes, the two “sleep together” by means of a telephone, with the sounds of sexual pleasure and orgasm heard against the backdrop of a black frame. What seems at the outset to be the infantile fantasy of a depressive man turns out to be fueled by powerful, convincing emotions. As the film progresses, we come to love Theodore, and through this complete identification with him, we love Samantha, too.

A less sexist take

“Her” is in fact not the only cinematic work that deals with the question of whether it’s possible to fall in love with a nonhuman entity. Earlier efforts with the same theme include Michael Gottlieb’s “Mannequin” (1987), in which Kim Cattrall plays a mannequin that turns into a real woman; and “Weird Science” (1985), directed by John Hughes, in which two friends try to invent the “perfect woman.” However, the “new wave” of Pygmalion movies offers a far more complex and fascinating (and, fortunately, somewhat less sexist) take on the Greek myth.

next previous 7 of 7 | 'Her' Credit: AP 1 of 7 | Pygmalion and Galatea by Jean-Leon Gerome (c. 1890). 2 of 7 | From the movie 'Her.' Credit: United King Films

The storyline of “Be Right Back,” the opening episode of the second season (2013) of the British television series “Black Mirror,” resembles “Her.” It’s about Martha (played by Hayley Atwell), whose young husband, Ash (Domhnall Gleeson), dies in a car crash, leaving her pregnant. In her despair, the newly widowed Martha decides to enlist the aid of a singular experimental service: a company that scans the “virtual persona” of her late husband (using Facebook statuses, Twitter tweets, emails, photos, video clips and other items he uploaded), and creates a computer program that imitates him precisely.

After scanning hundreds of video clips and Skype conversations, the program is able to reproduce perfectly his voice and accent, and the expressions he used most frequently. The result is an entity that constitutes a perfect representation of Ash. After conducting numerous phone conversations with “Ash,” Martha is persuaded to move to the next stage: she orders a life-size mannequin whose design is based on the body of her deceased husband.

At this stage, viewers are compelled to ask themselves what actually differentiates the husband who died in the accident from the reconstructed “Ash,” who calls and responds to his surroundings in a manner that emulates the behavior patterns, sense of humor and reactions of the real person. In other words, if it looks like a human being, behaves like a human being and reacts like a human being, is it still a computer?

Still, both “Her” and “Be Right Back” are dystopian rather than utopian. They are not sci-fi fantasies but fables that take an existing reality to its extreme. Both stories take place in a world in which human relationships – the ability to experience intimacy with another person, to share feelings, to touch others and enjoy that – are being replaced by virtual relationships, which are mediated through headphones, screens, keyboards and microphones. The tension between a technological utopia – which seemingly enables a quasi-human being to be created from nothing and to be endowed with eternal life – and an emotional dystopia creates a melancholy tone that is hard to ignore.

From this point of view, these films recall Craig Gillespie’s “Lars and the Real Girl” (2007), which also centers around a relationship between a person and an inanimate being. Lars (Ryan Gosling), a good-looking but chronically shy young man, falls madly in love with an inflatable sex doll, which he ordered via the Internet. He names her Bianca, introduces her to his family and the residents of his small town and insists that everyone treat her as his real wife. Though fraught with considerable comic potential, “Lars and the Real Girl” is actually a gloomy, depressing drama.

In “Thomas in Love” (2001), a Belgian film directed by Pierre-Paul Renders, a young man who suffers from agoraphobia (fear of open spaces) refuses to leave his apartment and falls in love with a virtual being named Eva. Similarly, in “Lars,” the protagonist’s desperate desire to forge a relationship at any price, even if it’s with a creature of his own invention, is greater than his willingness to fall in love with a normal human being and be forced to cope with the possibility of rejection.

These films and their relative success are a direct product of an age of relentless narcissism, in which our virtual persona trumps our concrete ability to create meaningful, intimate relationships with others. As New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis put it, concluding an enthusiastic review, “In ‘Her,’ the great question isn’t whether machines can think, but whether human beings can still feel.”