The possibilities for non-linear storytelling that DVD technology provides are obvious, but until now these have been squandered on the decidedly plot-free travails of porn actors. No longer. Two of the best recent movies are in fact better suited for DVD than for the mass sequential viewing provided by a cinema screening.

Timecode, directed by Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas), has just been released on DVD. The film consists of four cameras rolling without a single cut for 97 minutes, filming a troupe of actors as they interact within a loosely defined plot. All four views are synchronized and shown simultaneously on the screen. The sound, meanwhile, is gleaned from whichever camera happens to be documenting the most interesting action. In the cinema, this “director’s cut” sound edit is what everybody hears. On the DVD, all four sound streams are available, and they are accessible at the push of a button.

The result is a much fuller understanding of the plot—there are entire conversations now exposed that were previously silent. Switching sound from camera to camera is addictive, and it entices the viewer to replay scenes from different perspectives. But the lasting impression is one of appreciation for the virtuosity of the actors, who all stay in character for the duration of film, which really only took 97 minutes to shoot.

Of course, Timecode is a lot more than a bunch of actors and a few cameramen getting together for an afternoon. The version we see is in fact the 15th one shot. The DVD also includes, in its entirety, the first shoot, where the plot and characters develop completely differently.

Another film where seeing it on DVD will make all the difference is Memento. If you haven’t seen it already, do not read this Salon exposé of this murder mystery’s labyrinthine narrative structure. It suffices to know that Leonard, the main protagonist (Guy Pierce) suffers from the inability to make new memories, allowing the director (Christopher Nolan) to run the plot backwards in 5-minute increments as a means of simulating that effect for the audience. (Of course, it’s much more complicated than that).

When the DVD version is out (on September 4, 2001 in the US), we’ll finally be able to unscramble the scenes, piece them together in chronological order, and see the film the “traditional” way. This would be thankless and boring on video, but will only take the push of a button on my DVD. With a film as good as Memento, each version will validate the other.

A.I.

A.I., directed by Steven Spielberg but storyboarded by Stanley Kubrick, is a subversive movie. As with all great science fiction works, the philosophical questions it raises directly challenge the assumptions of contemporary society, and finds them lacking. Few movies associated with Kubrick seem to evade controversy, and A.I. certainly is experiencing its share of incomprehension. Yet even scathing reviewers admit the following: The acting, cinematography, score, set design and special effects are among the best ever. Then why does A.I. elicit guffaws from a minority in New York audiences (and probably a majority everywhere else)?

In short, any movie where the narrator intones “Two thousand years later” will tax feebler imaginations. Minds that venture no further than the next fashion are bound to be unimpressed with an invitation to contemplate their long-term obsolescence. Yet this is not even new ground for Kubrick: the plot for 2001: A Space Odyssey spans a good million years or so. The resultant New York Times review opined, “The movie is so completely absorbed in its own problems, its use of color and space, its fanatical devotion to science-fiction detail, that its is somewhere between hypnotic and immensely boring.” And that from a kind review. (The New York Times is gushingly kind towards A.I.) A.I., like 2001, simply crams in too much material for debate by movie buffs and philosophy wonks for it to compete with such plausible summer blockbusters as “Jurassic Park III” and “The Mummy Returns”.

Here are just a few themes:

When you make a fairy tale about the possibility of finding redemption through a narrative (such as a fairy tale), you’re declaring open season in the hunt for self-referential metaphors. In A.I., robots exist to use their artifice to entertain and redeem, much as the protagonists in narratives do today. For both, the aim is to induce a suspension of disbelief—to produce credulity. The similarity of their roles is often deliciously poignant: When Gigolo Joe, the sex robot, seduces a woman, the audience is simultaneously seduced by Jude Law, the actor. When David, the robot boy who aspires to being a “real boy”, pleads for his life at the Flesh Fest, movie audiences are seeing a human actor, Haley Joel Osment, playing a robot that manages to induce empathy in his jury by acting sufficiently human. Of course, Osment is human, but it is only through the artifice of A.I. (the movie) that we become convinced of the reality of the artifice in A.I. (the robot).

(Genially, the New York Times review suggests “the Flesh Fair might be a Dogma 95 pep rally, or a meeting of dyspeptic film critics protesting the movie’s lavish and startling special effects”)

Compared to other robots, David is designed with a superior ability to elicit an emotional response in humans, one based on his capacity to love and yearn for requital. His need for his mother’s love becomes a reason to live, and it’s in this that the humans at the Flesh Fest recognize themselves.

In this recognition lies A.I.‘s subversive message. Future society has no qualms about destroying robots until they prove adorable, which of course is hypocritical. All robots are artifice, as the Flesh Fest evangelist proclaims with irrefutable logic—not only those who fail to meet our arbitrary, socially constructed criteria for eliciting empathy. But such reasoning leads to a slippery slope—humans are constructed too, their assemly instructions stored in genes and improved upon via the evolutionary process. Once humans and robots like David display equal competence in their yearning for love, the only difference between them is the medium that generates their behavior—organic or mechanic.

This is a shockingly materialistic stance for a movie to entertain, and certainly one that the majority of contemporary society would be unwilling to embrace. Yet Kubrick has toyed with the definition of humanity before. In A Clockwork Orange he explores free will as a component of human nature by asking whether taking away aggression as a choice makes us less than human. In 2001, HAL 9000 is never more human than when he turns psychotic or when he admits fear.

It’s also a solidly functionalist stance in the philosophical debate about what constitutes genuine human mental states. David’s successful pleading for his life in the Coliseum is the equivalent to passing a Turing Test for emotions. Underlying functionalism is the notion that any system that can emulate a mind to perfection needs to be at least as complex as the mind being emulated. To put it differently, it is impossible to describe a brain exactly using anything less complex than an entire brain. The only thing that separates David from a human boy is the matter with which the mind is constructed.

The arbitrary nature with which this future society decides which robots stay in its good graces and which do not is a parable for our age: We care for our own children, but let those in the the third world starve. Pet dogs and cats (and cute bears) win our empathy, while cows and pigs do not. It’s a killer argument for vegetarianism, or for eating cats and dogs, but not the current state of affairs. (The future family that adopts David eats vegetarian, at least.)

By positing that our prejudices are arbitrary, A.I. undermines the premise that forged history and upon which the nation state was built. History is the story of preferring one’s own kind over the other, nevermind the negative-sum outcome of this kind of behavior. Two thousand years ago in the Roman empire, only citizens were considered real people; slaves and captives that were not useful were fit for a good flesh fest at the Coliseum. Today, this proud tradition is continued by the Hutu and Tutsi, Croat and Serb, Israeli and Palestinian—each more similar ethnically to their antagonists than to any other group.

This is no coincidence. As Donald Horowitz observes in his landmark Ethnic Groups in Conflict it is usually among groups that most resemble each other that conflict is fiercest. No wonder we’ll find reasons to hate robots. We want to be unique. It’s our human nature. No wonder David destroys his replica. He wants to be unique. It’s his human nature.

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