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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At the end of Robert Graves’s historical novel Claudius the God, emperor Claudius visits Vitellius, a dying courtier. Claudius ask the man why someone so virtuous as he had not supported the Republican cause during Claudius’s reign. Vitellius’s last words are “Phaemon’s dog was right.”

Claudius explains:

“It appears that Phaemon the philosopher had a little dog whom he had trained to go to the butcher every day and bring back a lump of meat in a basket. This virtuous creature, who would never dare to touch a scrap until Phaemon gave it permission, was one day set upon by a pack of mongrels who snatched the basket from its mouth and began to tear the meat to pieces and bolt it greedily down. Phaemon, watching from an upper window, saw the dog deliberate for a moment just what to do. It was clearly no use trying to rescue the meat from the other dogs: they would kill it for its pains. So it rushed in among them and itself ate as much of the meat as it could get hold of. In fact it ate more than any of the other dogs, because it was both braver and cleverer.”

Phaemon’s dog certainly seems right; and if this is the case we have ourselves a brilliant apologia for collaboration in unjust regimes. Or is the dog’s option of scoring a moral victory by not participating in the eating of the spoils downplayed? Or is it his duty to be killed defending a just cause (his master’s meat) even if there is no chance of succeeding?

But who is Phaemon? I cannot find a reference to him anywhere, which is unusual for Graves, whose novels are usually colored by real historical figures.

King Herod Agrippa I was a brilliant diplomat and ruler who secured the best possible deal for the Jews (and himself) under the reign of Roman emperor Claudius. But while scholars cast an approving eye on his realpolitiking, Agrippa I gets a bum deal in the Bible.

Agrippa felt he had to appease the more conservative elements in his constituency to ensure their support for his autonomous Jewish vassal state–and this meant persecuting a couple of early Christians. Conveniently, these Christians were also vocal anti-Roman separatists–hence the execution of James, one of the 12 apostles, which proved both popular and prudent.

He died suddenly in 44AD in Ceasarea, during games dedicated to Claudius. The city is now an archeological site, and the hippodrome where the games were held was being excavated in January, when I visited with Benny Mandler.

My favorite site on the internet at the moment: Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, photographer for Czar Nicholas II, made color (!) pictures years before World War I using an ingenious system of colored lenses and multiple exposures. They’ve been rediscovered and are on exhibit at the Library of Congress and its web site.

To me, anything before World War II has a definite black and white feel to it. To see color pictures of an era before color is simply bizarre—it forces a contemporary sheen back onto long-dead people and situations. Interestingly, it seems easier not to judge historical actions of black and white people; but take a color picture of them, and the morality of their actions, such as those of the Emir of Bukhara (above), become suddenly relevant.

Imagine a color photograph of Alexander the Great in an unposed moment, or a video clip of Vercingetorix. Would we think of them differently? We have such things of Hitler—does the banality of Hitler relaxing in a color documentary bring the magnitude of his crimes into even greater focus?

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New York is being treated to a gem of a movie right now: Our Song. Set in deepest Brooklyn during the summer of 1999, it follows three teenaged girls—friends and fellow school band members—as they each grapple with the challenges of becoming adults.

But you can read the plot on IMDB; what I want to focus on is what is genuinely original about this film: It uses a documentary style of filmmaking, strongly reminiscent of Dogme 95 and its precursors (such as Varda’s Cléo de 5 á 7), but with an aim that is wholly different. Whereas Dogme films use the documentary style to heighten the emotional intensity of the story being told, I felt that Our Story is in fact a documentary that uses actors and a screenplay in an attempt to be even more realistic than a conventional documentary can be.

Filming a documentary can be like observing electrons: the very act of observing alters the reality being observed. Our Song circumvents this trap by meticulously reconstructing a reality, and it is done so convincingly and with so much humanity that I left the cinema convinced I have an understanding of what it is like to grow up in Crown Heights that no “real” documentary could give me. This makes it one of the best movies about New York I have seen to date.