A.I.: Artificial Intelligence
A World More Full of Weeping
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
– Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
No one — at least, no one who has seen Tomb Raider recently — would ever make the statement that movie directors are “unacknowledged legislators” of anything. For one thing, movie directors are not the sort of people who go unacknowledged; Hollywood recently came close to shutting down over the question of how to best acknowledge directors as opposed to script writers. And despite their occasional forays into the public policy arena, directors have little influence on the direction of laws. (One expects that they would like to, of course; A.I. itself actually begins with the ritual invocation of the Hollywood political muses by paying obeisance to the fashionable liberal dogma on global warming.)
However, there is substantial backing for the idea that Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick are two of the unacknowledged ethicists of the 21st century. You can go all the way back to Dr. Strangelove for a lesson in the ethics of Mutual Assured Destruction if you like. 2001: A Space Odyssey explored the dangers inherent in a computerized mind without ethics. Both E.T. and Close Encounters dealt with the ethics of dealing with alien civilizations, and Jurassic Park is a powerful warning about biotechnology and cloning. And given that A.I. began as a collaboration between Spielberg and Kubrick, it is reasonable — and perhaps inevitable — to assume that A.I. has something to say about ethical behavior towards artificial life forms.
A.I. is the story of David (Haley Joel Osment), who is a “mecha”, a robot child designed to express love and affection towards its lonely human parents. When first we see David, he is entering the apartment of Henry and Monica, uber-yuppies of the future living lives of quiet desperation in a New Jersey home that looks for all the world like an abandoned Pottery Barn outlet. Henry and Monica have a young son named Martin who has experienced a nameless accident and has been flash-frozen in a cryogenics laboratory; strict population controls mean that they cannot have another child. (If I were Spielberg, I would spend less time explaining about global warning and more time explaining how the Chinese Communist Party took over New Jersey.)
As David tries to integrate himself into the lives of Henry and Monica, we get a sense of how unspeakably grotesque the whole thing is. David is capable of mimicking the reactions of a small boy, pretending to lie down and sleep, miming Henry and Monica as they eat, but the whole thing is off-center, tilted, distorted like the seemingly endless reflections of glass blocks and strips of mirror in the Swedish Modern paradise where the family lives. In its own quiet, domestic way, A.I. is every bit as twisted and disturbing as George C. Scott in Dr. Strangelove, or the trial of Kirk Douglas’s soldiers in Paths of Glory, or the way that HAL sings in 2001, or what the marching soldiers chant at the end of Full Metal Jacket. A situation this grotesque cannot go on forever, and inevitably results in stresses and strains and fractures within the family unit, leading up to a scene of — and there is no other way to say this — dreadful cruelty and appalling heartlessness, made all the worse by just how inevitable the whole thing is.
(This is something I almost never do, but I cannot warn parents strongly enough that A.I. is emphatically not a film for children. If you take your eight-year-old to see this movie, you are guaranteed nightmares for a month. I could not be more serious about this. Parents sometimes take children to see even R-rated movies thinking that they won’t understand what they see and hear, and that may be true, but there is no way that any child will misunderstand the abuse that goes on, or fail to identify with what Osment’s character is feeling when it happens. It is a wrenching, moving scene that would, I believe, horrify even the most well-adjusted child. Please — please — go see Shrek again instead.)
This has the effect of tearing David away from his IKEA heaven and landing him straight into the maw of the real world, where the ethical issues that robots pose to humans are being resolved at knifepoint. (If A.I. does nothing else, it guarantees that you will never watch an episode of “Battlebots” in quite the same way again.) David is thrust into one bizarre setting after another in a 21st century Pilgrim’s Progress through a Vanity Fair and various other hellholes. His guide is Gigolo Joe (Jude Law, who was in Gattaca, another cautionary tale of futuristic ethics) who protects him and imparts what passes for robotic wisdom.
This is the area of the movie that is the most technically well-done, as Spielberg takes us through a mutant heavy metal carnival, a gloriously twisted neon city (that bears an unfortunate resemblance in spots to the Joel Schumacher version of Gotham City), and the majestically flooded city of New York. The acting is also first-rate, Law as an artificially stylish hustler, William Hurt as a gentle genius, Robin Williams (at least I think so) in an uncredited voice-over cameo.
None of this, however, is too important.
What makes A.I. an important, although badly flawed, movie is that it despite appearances, it has nothing to do and little to say about the relationships between robots and humans. It has everything to do (up to a point) with faith, and what we believe in, and why. It is important to remember — especially when evaluating Osment’s role — that what we see on screen is a little boy playing the part of a robot who is playing the part of a little boy. The movie’s interest in mechanism is a smokescreen. A.I. is best understood as an allegory, a commentary on faith and the relationship of human intelligence to its Creator. Its real issues have to do with God, and why we have been abandoned, and why the world is more full of weeping than we can understand.
Of course, as with any allegory, not everyone is going to have the same interpretation. And if you are part of the audience who believes, with Mrs. Malaprop, that allegories should be left on the banks of the Nile, you will be disappointed by just how confusing and depressing A.I. can be. If you are part of the audience who thinks that the movie ought to be about how we relate to robots (this apparently includes my main man R. Ebert), you will be disappointed that the movie is not more than it is. And if you are part of the audience who buys into the allegorical significance of the movie, you will be disappointed that the movie does not end where it should, and that Spielberg feels the need to extend the ending and resort to a phony deus ex machina. (And if you are part of the audience who brings in cell phones and feels the need to discuss various plot points in loud stage whispers, stay the hell home.)
A.I. is so constructed and so designed that it will please nobody completely. The Kubrickian part of the movie is literate, intelligent and thought-provoking while retaining the essential contradictions and grotesque character of his best work. The Spielbergian part of the movie is superbly cast and acted, and the visuals are put together by the greatest technical director of our time. There are moments when these halves fit together perfectly, where A.I. lives up to all of its considerable promise. But there are moments when the two halves clash together with a sickening wrench, where Kubrick’s intellectual passion crosses swords with Spielberg’s commercialized vision, where the whole thing collapses into an unsightly heap of sentiment. It is emphatically worth seeing, but like any piece of legislation (acknowledged or otherwise), it is so rife with confusion and compromise that it cannot fully meet anyone’s expectations.