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.
[Wed 22:09] Matthew (email) Here’s where A.I. almost works (and I promise this is going to have nothing to do with the decline of the nation state): an examination of Kubrick’s rather gloomy examination of what it is to be human.
Within the first half an hour, a female researcher asks what responsibility humans have to robots displaying human-type behavior. We get back to this theme when David returns to the lab. The engineer (forgotten name) gets excited because David has put his life in danger chasing dreams–in this case a mother’s love–not concrete facts. That, in the engineer’s mind, is what it is to be human.
In Kubrick’s mind, that’s what sucks about the human race: like David, we’re hard-wired to want things we can’t have and that makes us miserable. A similar theme ran through “Eyes Wide Shut,” which, crudely put, said we all want illicit and pornographic sex until we actually get illicit and pornographic sex and then we can’t handle it. Again, a sign that humans are pre-disposed to be unhappy.
So far, so good. But the researcher’s initial question–what is our responsibility to an-almost-but-not-quite-human is never fully tackled, and certainly not answered. I struggled to tease this out of the film because it was so cluttered. Was it a Bildungsroman, a youthful journey of discovery? Was it a treatise on humanity? Was it supposed to have something to do with the ozone layer? Who knows, because there wasn’t enough of each to satisfactorily explore any of these ideas.
Perhaps there were too many ideas. There were certainly too many stupid questions left exposed by the narrative. How did David and Joe fit in the car that took them to Rouge City that was already filled with boys? Why Rouge City? There was seemingly no reason they had to go to Pornoland. What was that bizarre explanation of the space-time continuum we apparently all inhabit? And why can we come back for 24 hours? Why not 24 minutes? Why at all? Why did the aliens in the final tryptich look like Giacometti sculptures? Why did the Blue Angel look like the Virgin Mary?
Silly questions, certainly, but note that 2001, for example, is far more internally consistent and sophisticated, and that’s makes it a far more compelling bedrock on which to ask and perhaps even answer the bigger questions Stefan thinks he sees in A.I. (but I think he’s making it up).
David encapsulates many of these problems. Is his behavior learned or programmed, or both? At certain times, when he hid behind the brother at the pool party to escape the boy with the knife, he seemed to be acting on programming. The spinach episode, by contrast, looked like a technologically unscripted human trait–competitiveness. An interesting conflict, but like everything else, not fully developed. Does he finally move from rote behavior to human behavior? Who knows. His final wish, to have his mother love him, was, after all, what he was programmed to look for.
This is the unsatisfactory kind of confusion, not artistic ambiguity.
[Thu 13:08] uppington (email) Was it a load of wanky poncy crap? Maybe, maybe not; I haven’t seen the film. I have read both of your comments, however, and they qualify for the above description.
[Fri 05:43] uppington (email) oh look, it did work! my comment thingy is up there!
[Fri 09:32] Stefan (email) For an example of self-referential triteness, please read Uppington’s two comments above.
[Mon 10:25] marc well it hasn’t opened in europe yet, so all i want to know is do the raptors escape the island and invade the mainland?
[Wed 06:57] uppington (email) hey marc. where’s your email address?
oh and by the way i saw “shrek” the other day. It’s a subversive movie. Here’s where it almost works; Shrek is a 8 ft tall green ogre, unconvincingly voiced by Scottish artist Mike Myers, who’s Weltanschauung has been affected by id-angst; we follow him through the narrative as he makes a slow, but startling rediscovery of his inner ogre. It’s an examination of Katzenberg’s rather gloomy examination of what it is to be ogre. However, if 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, and the movie doesn’t fail on this count.
But the researcher’s initial question–what is our responsibility to an-almost-but-not-quite-ogre, is never fully tackled, and certainly not answered. I struggled to tease this out of the film because it was so cluttered. Was it a Bildungsroman, a youthful journey of discovery? Was it a treatise on ogreiety? Was it supposed to have something to do with the ozone layer? Why am i telling you this at all? Am i a total wanker pretending not to be? I must be.
In this recognition lies Shrek’s subversive message. It’s also a solidly functionalist stance in the philosophical debate about what constitutes genuine ogre mental states. Shrek’s striking up of a friendship with the talking donkey voiced by minority actor Eddie Murphy is the equivalent to passing a Turing Test for emotions. Of course, Murphy is human, but it is only through the artifice of Shrek (the movie) that we become convinced of the reality of the artifice in Shrek (the talking donkey).
Eventually the dualism of the Princess, voiced by Cameron Diaz, the actress, resolves itself. Human during the day, an unknowing ogress at night, this dialectic culminates in a synthesis that makes the somewhat trite point that her “true nature” was always ogre. But by positing that our prejudices are arbitrary, Shrek 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 (sic) the negative-sum outcome of this kind of behavior.
[Tue 08:59] Matthew (email) prick
[Fri 01:02] Kartika (email) hi-I stumbled across Stefan’s web site when surfing the net for info on AI- Unfortunately AI has not started to show in Australia- but it has already caused some controversy- there is the obligatory “Where is the human race headed?” type of discussion- but interestingly enough, the comment that struck me- was the one an eminent film critic here made- that the plot of AI is identical to that of Pinocchio- ie the age old tale of a non- human being earning its “humaness” through various trials etc.
I must say- that I am rather peeved you have not answered my e-mail Stefan, all the more so – when I have just realised that we have met briefly at Sydney Uni- and it is most reassuring to see your friends being assiduous in their task of keeping your ego in check.
Kartika