Thematic Analysis of Audience Commentary on The Movie Her

Abstract

This article aims to conduct a thematic analysis through audience comments on the 2013 movie Her (written and directed by Spike Jonze). The movie is about the romantic relationship between Theodore, who makes a living by writing handwritten letters for others and Samantha-an operating system. In the study, the data set was created from the audience comments, and the platform called "Ekşi Sözlük" was used to reach the audience comments. An offline backup of the title "Her" in Ekşi Sözlük was created on August 17, 2022, with 773 entries. It was observed that some of the entries were not related to the movie. Those entries were excluded from the analysis. After the exclusion process, the remaining 370 entries were analyzed using the thematic analysis method. It has been determined that three main themes appear in the examined audience comments: "Problems of the postmodern humanity," "Bodilessness," and "Change-Transformation," and it has been observed that these themes also contain various sub-themes. The theme "problems of postmodern humanity" consists of the sub-themes "deficiencies," "escapes," and "fears about the future." Within the sub-themes of the disembodiment theme, bodiliness is interpreted as "a positive condition," "a deficiency," or "a neutral or unimportant condition." Finally, in the theme of "change-transformation," two sub-themes were defined as "people do not change" and "people do change." The data obtained were discussed within the framework of the current literature.