Artificial Intelligence and Otherness pt.7 (A.I.)

Steven Spielberg's A.I. is not easy to watch. It is beautiful, strange and inventive. But it’s also creepy in a way that shows Spielberg really capturing the ambiguity that separates us from our creations. Particularly in the first section of the film, as the main character David, a robot made to look and behave like a ten-year-old boy, bonds with his human “mother.”

We are confronted with a vivid depiction of human/machine integration and it makes for uncomfortable viewing. David is sympathetic but also sincere unto psychosis. As a robot programmed to love, that is all he does, to the exclusion of even acquiring common sense.

It is a genuine tribute to Haley Joel Osment’s performance, but all the credit in the world cannot quell the feeling that any moment David might, with the purest of intentions, kill or maim out of love.

It is this fear within the story that leads David’s “mother” to abandon him. He must fend for himself through the middle of the film which delivers the most memorable scenes and characters such as Gigolo Joe, a male pleasure robot. The cities Joe lives and works in display the hand of Stanley Kubrick in the film’s early planning and design.

A.I. was originally planned as a collaboration between Kubrick and Spielberg and one can see the hard division between Spielberg’s and Kubrick’s pet themes in the switch from the first and second passages in the films.

Spielberg’s lionizing of innocence and youth and Kubrick’s desire to gaze long and hard at both human potential and human frailty. The second of which is most vivid in the Flesh Fair sequence. David is taken by proprietors of a carnival that publicly destroys robots amid loud music, shouted invective, fireworks, summary executions, and copious junk food (sort of how I imagine the State of the Union address as delivered by a President Trump…but I digress). The ringmaster wants to destroy David but the crowd is turned because David looks and behaves too realistically. He and Gigolo Joe escape and go off briefly adventuring.

Joe is interesting in the context of this series because he is the only adult male A.I. in any of the films considered. He is similar to Scarlett Johansen in Under the Skin and Alicia Vikander in Ex-Machina in that he is identified primarily by his sexuality. But whereas the female is presented as an inscrutable and remote threat, as obvious “others,” Gigolo Joe is a passive pleasure robot, a sympathetic non-threat whose motivations are made clear in an eloquent and well delivered speech as he and David walk through the woods. This is not an “other,” Joe is our way in, a point of sympathy.

With the exception of Gigolo Joe, A.I. might be the truest film about artificial intelligence (Joe is ultimately less of a representation of A.I. and more a film archetype of the lovable rogue). In most other AI films robots are either played as completely mechanical or entirely human. From the walking appliances in Automata to Rutger Hauer quoting poetry in Blade Runner and Alicia Viklander playing the mechanical ingénue in Ex-Machina, robots in movies either stay mechanical or never achieve the authentically disconcerting effect of human behavior fed through machine logic. That is what makes A.I.’s David unique and uniquely unwatchable. He is a machine playing human but by machine rules.

INTRO

BLADE RUNNER

HER

UNDER THE SKIN

EX-MACHINA

AUTOMATA