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A.I.: Artificial Intelligence
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Contemporary
popular cinema has many blockbusters, but few true events. For a film to be an event, it needs more than simply
excitement, cleverness or star power; more than the pre-fab mythology of a Star Wars cycle or the elaborate
spectacle of a Gladiator (2000).
Event-films,
paradoxically, do not need to be perfect or seamless. It is in fact better if
they are somewhat excessive and unresolved, open to conflicting
interpretations. Primarily, they must touch some raw nerve in the mass
imagination, igniting a train of thought and feeling that mixes anxiety with
delight, fear with desire.
A.I. Artificial
Intelligence – written and directed by Steven Spielberg from a
mountain of material developed by the late Stanley Kubrick – is variously
weird, confronting, magical, maddening and inspiring. As a blockbuster, it is
wayward and fascinating – fascinating precisely because not everything in it
makes comfortable sense, or fits together well. But it is incontestably a cultural event of
the highest order.
But
first, another context. One of the most poignant, tearing moments in cinema
happens an hour into Henry Hathaway’s Peter
Ibbetson (1935). This today little-known Hollywood gem is a mystical
romance about two people (played by Gary Cooper and Ann Harding) who, cruelly
separated for most of their lives, manage to meet up and frolic, forever young,
in their shared dreams.
It
takes Coop, however, a little while to get this nocturnal transcendence trip down
pat. In his first dream vision while serving a life sentence in prison, his
lover materialises and moves, phantom-like, through the cell bars. He remains
stuck, cursing the illusion that is taunting him: “All this is a lie I’m
dreaming!” His ghostly companion coolly replies: “Don’t ask why. Just believe!”
Hope,
blind faith, belief in dreams, the power of the human will to alter mundane
reality – these have become great subjects for cinema. Spielberg has in fact
devoted his entire career to taking such possibilism (as Denis Wood has called it) (1) to delirious heights.
The
three acts of A.I.’s futuristic story
are carved from surreal displacements and vast leaps in space and time. Act One
is an intimate, family story concerning Monica (Frances O’Connor), Henry (Sam
Robards) and the robot child they adopt, David (Joel Haley Osment, superbly
cast) – a special prototype experimentally implanted with the ability to
develop emotions of love and belonging.
David’s
evolution is rudely halted when the couple’s human son, Martin (Jake Thomas),
suddenly emerges from hospitalisation. Hurled into wild woods, David enters Act
Two of his journey, undoubtedly the film’s least successful section: a Mad Max-style panorama of angry humans
(orgas, meaning organic) hunting down and brutally destroying discarded robots
(mechas, for mechanical).
Act
Three, which is reminiscent in some respects of the finale of 2001 (1968), takes David through several remarkable voyages – including into the
distant future and under water, where New York sleeps after a new Ice Age has
overtaken the Earth.
Where Ring (1998) is about a child’s almighty fury, A.I. is about unstoppable longing. Time and again, David explains, whispers, prays
or shouts his dilemma: if he can become a real boy, then Mommy will finally
love him.
But
the clammy sentimentality of this premise is contradicted at every turn by odd,
startling or subversive complications. As a result, one watches the film in a
uniquely disturbed state: while our emotions are being mercilessly preyed upon,
our minds race to figure out what artistic process gave rise to such a tortuous
fantasy.
A.I. enacts
the meeting of two artistic sensibilities that are, in virtually every respect,
antithetical. On certain levels of subject matter and style, a satisfying blend
of these sensibilities is achieved. But the most exciting parts of A.I. register the split between them.
Kubrick
has often been described as a cold, clinical, misanthropic filmmaker. In fact, Jacques
Rivette once went so far as to say: “Kubrick is a machine, a mutant, a Martian.
He has no human feeling whatsoever”. Rivette added, though: “But it’s great
when the machine films other machines, as in 2001”. (2)
There
is no doubt that Kubrick and Spielberg worked toward a meeting of minds on the
project. Kubrick rightly saw that his Pinocchio-like parable was perfect
material for the director of E.T. (1982) and Hook (1991) – David is given the trait of obsession for the tale of Pinocchio, which
has thus passed, historically, from Carlo Collodi to Walt Disney and hence,
logically, to one of the contemporary filmmakers most steeped in Disney’s
ethos, lore and ideology. (3)
Many
aspects of the tale surely resonate for Spielberg. He has often focused on outsiders
– children or aliens cut off from family and community. There is longing for
the old, patriarchal, family structures in his cinema, but also intense,
sometimes furious ambivalence (as in his Jurassic Park series): children who want to
disown and kill their parents, parents who want to exclude or murder their
kids. So, in his hands, A.I. becomes
a monument to the striving to overcome the most extravagant obstacles that a
scary, troubling world can put in a child-outsider’s path.
Spielberg,
for his part, has scrupulously respected aesthetic procedures fundamental to
the maker of A
Clockwork Orange (1971) and Dr
Strangelove (1963) – such as his tendency to break stories into long
sections or plateaux that leisurely explore a particular premise.
Earnest
speculation has raged as to which elements of the film originated with Kubrick
and which have been added by Spielberg. One theory, for instance, runs that
Gigolo Joe (Jude Law), David’s handy, robot companion in Act Two, was
envisioned by Kubrick as a darker, dirtier creature. Spielberg insists that
Kubrick’s notes in this regard were sketchy and that he needed to elaborate the
character himself.
In
the wash-up, Joe starts out as a devilish imp and quickly metamorphoses into a
lovable sidekick, complete with Fred Astaire dance moves – the kind of
reassuring, cartoonish figure beloved of Spielberg.
But
if Joe can stand for the Spielbergian side of the film, the singularly
unnerving presence of Professor Hobby (William Hurt) at the heart of the story
is pure Kubrick. The more we find out about Hobby, the less we like him.
He
is a demiurge like many scientists, creators and military officials in
Kubrick’s oeuvre – a man who would be God, recklessly and heartlessly assuming
power over life and death in the name of some grand, world-altering plan. The
eventual revelation of David’s true significance to Hobby serves only to render
his plan more chilling.
A.I. is a
monumentally perverse film. Indeed, its wildest moments are enough to make one
imagine that Kubrick’s ghost has possessed Spielberg and made him twist his
usual, cloying sentimentality into something altogether stranger and more
disturbing. It is a spectacle reminiscent of Gilles Deleuze’s immortal fantasy-vision
of how philosophy (including his own) comes to be:
[I] conceive of the history of philosophy as a sort of
buggery or, which amounts to the same thing, a sort of immaculate conception. I
imagined myself as arriving in the back of an author and giving him a child,
which would be his and which nevertheless would be monstruous. That it really
be his is very important, because the author had to really say everything that
I made him say. But it was also necessary that the child be monstruous, because
it was necessary to go through all sorts of decentrings, slippages, breakages,
secret emissions that gave me a lot of pleasure. (4)
There
are many niggly questions haunting David’s story, and they only become more
obvious and prominent as his cosmic chronicle presses on. Firstly, there is the
synthetic, wholly static nature of David’s so-called love for Monica – an
imprinted emotion which, as Hobby rightly predicts in the opening scene,
creates a being “caught in a freeze frame”.
Then
there is David’s evident mother-fixation. A.I. may well be the most starkly Oedipal tale in cinema history. At the high point
of David’s dream of being the sole repository of Monica’s love, he even muses
pleasantly: “No more Henry, no more Martin …” And the final scene, in this light,
is nothing short of mindboggling.
Then
there is the question of humanness itself, which I suspect was Kubrick’s
guiding theme as he developed the project. His interest in this topic goes
deeper than the usual Star Trek-style
orientation towards aliens, androids, and the evolution of the human species –
although that is a level on which the makers of 2001 and Jurassic Park (1993) do indeed meet.
A.I. becomes
more intriguing once we recall that human beings were always rather strange and
precarious entities in Kubrick’s cinema. For starters, the psychological
individual of today is only a historical blip for Kubrick, positioned somewhere
between swirling amoeba and the formless Star Child at the end of 2001, living beyond the strict
co-ordinates of time and space.
Even
within the seemingly naturalistic boundaries of psychological drama, Kubrick
was always at pains to present humans in defiantly anti-humanist ways: as
animals, machines, or crazy interfaces of material bodies and irrational
drives. (5)
As
has often been noted, Kubrick’s clinical view of humanity led him to a paradoxical
level of tenderness and compassion. Only he could present entirely manufactured
creatures – like the computer HAL in 2001 or the walking, talking Teddy in A.I. – as a story’s most intriguing and even delightful characters; only he would
envision base, obsessive, paranoid jealousy (in Eyes Wide Shut, 1999) as the most
essential and universal human trait.
A.I. takes
this Kubrickian investigation of humanity to its most extreme and deliberately
confusing point. The story presents its nominal humans as primarily driven by
ego – expressed in a boundless desire to be loved and worshipped (Hobby: “In
the beginning, didn’t God create Adam to love him?”). As to the emotions of
which mechas are ultimately capable, the film remains resolutely ambiguous to the
very end.
Taken
from the Kubrick angle, A.I. is the
ultimate exercise in “a machine filming other machines”. Almost no one in this
story is real, in the old-fashioned, flesh-and-blood sense. Phantoms,
simulations, clones, spirits, mere images take the place of people. Spielberg
has reached this path, less intellectually, through another route: through high-end special and digital effects
processes. Putting these orientations together, A.I. takes the simplest gestures and interactions – like sharing a
laugh at the family dinner table – and makes them look utterly strange and
unfamiliar.
What
is David’s journey, finally? Does he truly become human by the end? Two
further, fundamental doubts eat away like termites at the heart of this
familiar, Spielbergian, Peter Pan tale.
The
first involves the supposed uniqueness of humans. Spielberg pointedly inserts some wise, benevolent aliens to sing the
praises of this uniqueness, but Kubrick’s scenario constantly and brutally
undermines the notion – especially when Hobby coldly tells David: “Are you one
of a kind? No, but you’re the first of a kind”.
The
second doubt signals Kubrick’s most inspired perversion of the Spielbergian
creed. The latter’s films, as I have already indicated, always preach the need to
believe in impossible dreams – and they use every cinematic resource available
to involve the audience in that necessary leap of faith. This is what has long
divided those who acclaim Spielberg’s films as inspiring and moving from those
who decry them as sentimental and manipulative – and it is a debate which is
almost impossible to ever adjudicate, given our intractable subjectivities as
cinema viewers.
A.I. overflows with situations, words and events that keep rubbing our noses in the
illusory, artificial nature of such dreamy beliefs – from Joe’s ability to
literally merge the categories of fact and fairy tale, to the unforgettable
apparition of a magical Blue Fairy that is in fact a tacky, Coney Island
statue. The hand of the faithless, always sceptical Kubrick is surely at work
in the moment when a devastated David watches this tacky icon slowly crumble
into a thousand pieces.
As
a net result, it is impossible to simply watch this film; rather, one gets caught in its trap, alternately moved by the
extreme pathos of David’s story and then chastened by the evidence of its
underlying trickery. Although it’s some kind of fairy tale, it’s certainly not
made for children, or at least not the kind of innocent, child audience
Spielberg sometimes aims for – because it’s (to borow the title of a splendid
cartoon segment) a fractured fairy tale.
For
every lush image of transcendence which is so vividly offered by A.I., there is a complementary image of
loss, abandonment, dissillusionment or death. This is the ambiguous spin in
which the film leaves us, no doubt mirroring the war within Spielberg’s own
sensibility as he tries to remain true to Kubrick’s legacy.
At
the heart of the film, you can sense this constant war between Kubrick the icy,
sardonic misanthrope, and Spielberg, the incurable optimist, the dreamer with
an idiot grin. Spielberg’s only recourse is to take his little hero even deeper
into the realm of wish-fulfilment fantasy. As David frolics with a phantom of
his mother in a heavenly home more fantastic than anything Peter Ibbetson ever
had a chance to visit, the typical Spielbergian dream-come-true is
simultaneously affirmed and completely folded in on itself.
This
may not be the drama which A.I. intended to convey, but it is the one that makes it a rich, unmissable movie.
MORE Spielberg: Catch Me If You Can, The Color Purple, The Lost World, Saving Private Ryan, Schindler's List, The Terminal, Munich, The Fabelmans
1.
See Denis Wood, “No Place for a Kid: Critical Commentary on The Last Starfighter”, Journal of Popular Film and Television,
Vol. 14 No. 2 (1986), pp. 52-63.
2. Frédéric Bonnaud (trans. Kent Jones), “The Captive Lover – An Interview with Jacques Rivette”, Senses of Cinema, no. 15 (September 2001). back
3.
For a brilliant discussion of what Disney did to Pinocchio, see William Paul, “Art, Music, Nature and Walt Disney”, Movie, no. 24
4. Gilles Deleuze, “Letter to a Severe Critic”, cited and translated by Terence Blake, Agent Swarm, 12 July 2016. back
5.
I am indebted, on this point, to Dana Polan, “Jack and Gilles: Reflections on
Deleuze’s Cinema of Ideas”, Art &
Text, no. 34 (Spring 1989), pp. 23-30. back © Adrian Martin September 2001 |
