Persistence and Hope in Science Fiction Films Pt. 11 (Interstellar)

Interstellar is a film that feels enormous. Its reach across narrative time and distance is immense, as are its conceptual set pieces. It extrapolates our present culture into a near future where a war has reduced the population and a blight has made food scarce. We learn that an alien power has opened a wormhole accessible from earth into a distant galaxy with possibly hospitable worlds. The plot is concerned with the attempt to find another home world and save the human species.

Interstellar’s central thesis is similar to that of Tomorrowland: the necessity of continued innovation and the importance of ingenuity and hope. But whereas Tomorrowland builds an adventure movie façade around blunt repetitive statements and old advertising copy, Interstellar presents stunningly realized conceptions of cutting edge science and envelopes us in a world where the stakes feel real. Even though it could stand to dial down the solemnity in a few key spots.

Much of the tone and method behind Interstellar is in the direct lineage of Kubrick’s 2001, which is surprising for a successful post-millennial blockbuster. Nolan’s ingenuity in set building and visual effects owes more to the practical genius of a Kubrick than the tech obsessions of a James Cameron. And he has clearly learned pacing lessons, how to communicate scale of space and time through long takes and wide composition, from 2001. 

But thankfully he has also brought his own genius for action and high-energy payoff. There are no scenes like Nolan action scenes. Even in his weakest films a viewer leaves having seen things they would likely never have imagined. A planet of water on the cusp of a black hole with tidal forces causing waves the size mountain ranges, a planet of ice where clouds shatter like glass when hit, a wormhole rendered as a translucent planetoid sphere, the passage of a man through a black hole, and a trans dimensional chamber of infinitely recursive space time: even if the film doesn’t connect with you as entertainment it’s always worth seeing what Christopher Nolan and company imagine.

Interstellar’s attitude toward people is pretty broadly positive. Even the characters it shows as standing in the way of progress are motivated either by love or a survival instinct warning them against unnecessary risk. There are no real villains or brutes in Interstellar. There are the misguided, the frightened, and the selfish but all are sympathetic in some degree.

The main division in Interstellar is not between good and evil but courage and reserve, vision and fear. Even when, as in Tomorrowland, the plucky intelligent schoolgirl is reprimanded for questioning her school lessons, her teachers are not painted as glowering menaces but as sincere individuals trying to do the right thing. It’s a point on which Interstellar is far less cynical than Tomorrowland.  Interstellar manages to imply that people are good, and not just a herd of beasts from which arises the occasional golden child.

Persistence and Hope in Science Fiction Films Pt. 10 (Tomorrowland)

Optimism without the veil of context or the risk of interpretation, Tomorrowland is not so much optimistic Science Fiction as it is science fictiony optimism. If Her resembles those old World’s Fair showcase films, Tomorrowland is the fantasy of a child who never accepted that they were just highly produced advertisements, someone who as an adult probably chokes up during Windows product-launch commercials.
           
The film imagines a world in which the 1964 New York World’s Fair was actually the launch of a trans-dimensional recruitment effort for “Tomorrowland,” an idealized techno-showcase world of unimpeded research and development. It is a shining and soaring Jetsons meets Roger Dean applied sciences paradise that is recruiting “dreamers.”
           
            
The film has plot holes large enough to move you between dimensions but it is also chock full of spectacular visual invention and kinetically exciting action sequences that may well make you laugh with happy disbelief. For the purposes of the plot it turns out that mankind’s spiral toward war, death, and environmental destruction is the result of an unintentionally malevolent technology and not an inherent problem with people themselves.
          
Tomorrowland is preachy but not turgid. It maintains a quick enough pace to shake off the grandiose speeches and moments of cloying innocence on the part of the film’s heroine. What it risks however, by coming at the topic of optimistic futurism so bluntly, making it the headline instead of the message, is discrediting the topic by reducing its arguments to trite platitudes. Someone arguing against apocalypticism might now be met by an eye roll and the words, “Oh, you mean like in Tomorrowland?” And this hypothetical opponent will feel like they’ve scored a rhetorical point without addressing the subject because they were able to tie the opposing view with a Disney movie.
             
Tomorrowland also shows an elemental misunderstanding of the sources of cynicism and those of possible solutions when it shows the main character crushed beneath the dire predictions she hears in school, ignored when she asks how to fix it all. Education is not the enemy. A clear and honest accounting of the problems would be a miraculous outcome in current education. Religious doom merchants, greedy film producers, and 24-hour news producers should have replaced the montage of the dire and negative high school teachers. Education is a potential wellspring of solutions and no one should quietly accept a broadside against it from a slickly produced summer action movie, no matter how fervently cloaked in the postures of optimism.

For all its blunt force optimism about the future in general, Tomorrowland is basically cynical about people. The happy ending it presents us is one in which the best are separated to perform their function in Tomorrowland and the masses are left to mill about like mindless beasts waiting to be driven either toward or away from the precipice of oblivion.

  

Persistence and Hope in Science Fiction Films Pt. 9 (Super 8)

The simple power of people being people should not be underestimated. People feeling lonely, showing love, receiving sympathy, experiencing joy: The greatest argument in favor of humanity’s future is its resonance as human. Super 8 is stylistically a love letter to Steven Spielberg, from its setting in late seventies Middle America to its construction of shots in three dimensions, building information and plot along every perceivable axis. It also resonates with the Spielberg oeuvre in its building and treatment of richly humane characters whose depth and nuance we learn through how they relate to each other in the face of catastrophe.
         
It tells the story of a small east coast town in the late seventies where an Air Force transport train derails and something seemingly sinister escapes. The main characters are a group of kids who spend every spare moment making a zombie movie. One of them has lost his mother to an accident at a local factory as the movie opens. As the movie progresses he becomes friends with the daughter of the man many blame for his mother’s death.

The film’s status as Science Fiction rests on the nature of what was in the derailed train. Its essential optimism rests not on a vision of the future but in its focus on characters searching for sympathy and the strength to move forward in the face of tragedy.

Its main characters are children, symbolic of the future, and what’s more these are profoundly intelligent, inventive, yet engagingly flawed children. They represent the best in humanity and in the end overcome a broad science fiction terror through empathy and courage. Super 8 shows us a universe larger and more frightening than we are apt to consider on a daily basis but one that is also amenable to human ingenuity, sympathy, and understanding. As far as Super 8 is concerned being a good person counts for a lot.

Persistence and Hope in Science Fiction Films Pt. 8 (Wall-E)

Pixar have built their reputation on subtly subverting our assumptions about character building and story construction. Whether they are detailing the existential crisis of a boy’s collection of toys, commenting on energy policy by means of blue collar closet monsters, or telling the story of lifelong love in the few minutes before getting down to the real business of tying balloons to a house so as to float to South America, they reliably swerve where most movies would keep straight.
           
2008’s science fiction parable Wall-E takes place on an Earth that was eventually consolidated and run by a giant Wal-Mart style corporation, which seems a perfectly rational extrapolation of certain characteristics within our cultural trajectory. A few hundred years before the opening of the film the planet was abandoned as uninhabitable due to pollution. Humans boarded life sustaining space ships and a fleet of robots were left behind to do clean up.
             
             
Somewhere along the way the robots all shut down accept for one who persists in his function of collecting, compacting, and stacking trash. A program he supplements with the collecting of objects motivated by a consciousness driven curiosity. All of this information is communicated in the first few minutes of the film in what could be grandly described as a virtuosic cinematic aria.

The grace, economy, and effectiveness with which the elements of the story are put into place without seeming turgid or didactic but instead arising from the action and environment, naturally as we move through and marvel at it, is an example of the finest kind of large scale film making. The first section of the film represents some of the most visually original and staggeringly capable film making I've ever seen. The confidence and seeming ease with which Pixar build the enormous and strange and then populate it with sympathetic beings perhaps reached its height in the first half hour of Wall-E.

      
It is easy to say that humanity dooms its self with its irresponsible use of the planet. And it is in fact said often enough that many people just give up because they feel unequal to the problem or wish to spite those they see as trying to affect their behavior. What makes Wall-E unique in this cacophony of warnings and prognostications is that it takes that trajectory as certain and instead of seeing doom it sees a story. It takes the worst-case scenario as its starting point and finds the humor and beauty that might well follow after. If it bails out with a slightly cheap happy ending through vague convenience it has at least built a large and sympathetic enough world that a generous viewer may well remember the first thirty-minutes and forgive the last five.

Persistence and Hope in Science Fiction Films Pt. 7 (Her)

Spike Jonze’s Her is all about people. It is about their feelings, relationships, and what it is that makes love, love.  It is set in the future but uses that notoriously negative conceit as a tool to unburden its self of the mundane things that often make life difficult and get in the way of people worrying about their relationships.

It takes place in a near future that only has middle class first-world imperfections like loneliness, ennui, and job-dissatisfaction. It wears its optimism so obtrusively that when the plot’s main motivator is introduced, a self-aware life-assist operating system that integrates seamlessly with both humans and its network; there is no one in the film who worries about privacy or the pervasiveness of technology. The world within Her is so ideal it is not only post-strife it is post-luddite, a world of uniform early adopters. It very closely resembles the promotional films presented by G.E. and Monsanto at world’s fairs from the 1950s through the 1960s. “The World of Tomorrow!”

The film is delicately handled by its director, and one can perhaps forgive its unquestioning optimism thanks to its rich character portraits and its inversion of technophobia, suggesting our creations might just break our hearts instead of wiping us out. But its unflinching techno boosterism makes it feel like a cell phone commercial at times and its resolute blindness to whole swathes of the human condition in favor of middle class navel gazing makes it hard to ride all the way through without squirming at least once or twice.

              

Persistence and Hope in Science Fiction Films Pt. 6 (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

Humor is often seen as a defense mechanism of the terminally negative. Whimsy however is a much more rare and assertively positive attribute. While humor takes a narrow slice of reality and subverts it for comic effect, whimsy takes on the whole sweep of existence and chooses to treat it as merely absurd and benign, rather than malevolent, despite all evidence to the contrary.
         
It is possible to suppose that the British invented this point of view as a culturally relevant option and not just a sign of madness. What cultural item before Lawrence Stern’s Tristram Shandy showed such lucid distaste for both structure and a world motivated by discernible sense? This mode of self-righteous joshing, ultimately canonized in Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, that could only have arisen from self-aware colonialists who felt they had flown so high that all that was left was to recognize the absurdity of existence. These stories take the view that the materials of everyday life and perception can be handled like pastry dough, roughly pounded and shaped into light confectionery, edifying and delightful, yet resolutely empty of nutrition. Add to this tradition Douglas Adams.

A simple synopsis of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy might mistakenly peg it as cynical. The Earth is destroyed by an intergalactic bureaucracy. A human survives only to be buffeted about an enormous, indifferent, and absurd universe seemingly intent on driving him out of his mind. But to actually dig in and move about within the story reveals a view of existence as being richly various and exquisitely fun.
                   
The film version necessarily streamlined much of Douglas Adams’s story and introduced some convenient plot devices so that the film could keep [barely] under two hours and not balloon beyond containment. It was always a pleasure of the books that any minor item might well be expounded upon for pages in utterly mad and maddening detail, only narrowly swerving back into stream with the plot after a slew of satiric and/or nonsensical punch lines. This quality long made the idea of a movie version  seem impossible. The film, ultimately made in 2005, manages to import the breathless pace of Adams’s sense of invention and brings terrific visualization to creatures like Vogons and conceits like the super computer Deep Thought.

The film is as light an entertainment as can be imagined and it even manages to wring a pat love story out of the unwieldy interpersonal webbing of the books. But hidden beneath the books’ heaping up of wry invention and the movie’s single-minded stream lining of the plot is a story of the blessed insignificance of humans, of a universe big enough to move around in, and fun enough to really enjoy if you have the chance.
                   

Persistence and Hope in Science Fiction Films Pt. 5 (Star Trek the Motion Picture)

Star Trek the Motion Picture is an enigma. It was born from overlapping frequencies within pop culture that, when they combined in this film, produced a dissonance that almost destroyed a franchise. The demand for it among viewers arose from a then-new phenomenon, the television re-run. The money for it was provided thanks to the post-Star Wars craze for all things Science Fiction. And the film its self was the victim of numerous overlapping ideas about how the subject should be handled.

The tone that surrounded the discussion of Star Trek in the 1970s, after the series but before its revival in the films, tended toward the ponderous and overly reverent. In interviews and think pieces the fans and former cast would wax philosophical about its resonances, and perhaps that confused those who undertook the first movie, thinking it should tend towards a Kubrick-like seriousness. Things likely got further muddled because it had begun to be written as a television series and was only redirected late in the game toward being a film. Thus large-arc story pieces may have been shrunk down and forced to drive a film trying to live up to a mythology that had little to do with the charm of the original series.
             
Star Trek’s draw had been its lively characters and inventive short burst adventures that packed a lot of ideas into short running times. The movie however unfolds at 2001: A Space Odyssey speed, featuring characters we are used to seeing interact briskly instead looking ponderously at special effects and talking in hushed serious tones about morality and consequences. Yet it lacks the sort of sweeping philosophical considerations that made 2001 what it is. The resulting film is nearly devoid of characters and almost barren of ideas.

Almost barren of ideas but not quite, because its plot is driven by the interesting conceit that a piece of human technology might returns to us enhanced, leading to a leap in evolution. As a franchise Star Trek was always sanguine about humanity’s future. Its central concept is that humanity has overcome enough of its own problems to become a space faring civilization that presents a united front to a universe teeming with adventure, discovery, and peril. Star Trek the Motion Picture takes this a step further by tying it all concretely to accomplishments contemporary with its viewers.
              
In the film Earth is menaced by an alien force that when confronted and explored turns out to be motivated by a sentient machine, specifically the Voyager probe launched by NASA in the 1970s. What happens then is less important than the idea that we are on the same historic track as the people in Star Trek who hop around the galaxy and still live on a peaceful and viable earth, hundreds of years in the future. A broad optimism about human nature is one thing, but a specific and assertive sanguinity based on accomplishments already made is something more personal and more memorable.

Persistence and Hope in Science Fiction Films Pt. 4 (Close Encounters of the Third Kind)

In 1978 no one knew what to expect next from Steven Spielberg. His first feature, Jaws had smashed records and changed the way movies were marketed and perceived, inaugurating the era of the “Summer Blockbuster.” Another member of his circle of friends had the year before changed the way people thought of Science Fiction with the space faring melodrama Star Wars. A lot was expected of Spielberg, and Science Fiction was in the air.

Up until this point the mythology built around aliens was largely fearful. In post-WWII America the existence of UFOs stood in for dark forebodings about government misuse of power and people’s fears about their basic vulnerability in the face of a world of exploding technological growth. Alien abductions and UFO sightings resonated with people living in a world that felt strange, unstable, and liable at any moment to escalate from cold war to smoking crater.

It took someone of Spielberg’s prodigiously genteel imagination to picture a universe not only larger than we could conceive but also kinder than we were willing to suppose.
               
          Any catastrophe movie that unfolds around three-dimensional characters sets its self up as unique. Even though Close Encounters of the Third Kind does not feature an imminent threat to large populations it still qualifies as a catastrophe movie since people’s lives are disrupted en-masse by a single large-scale event that dominates the entire plot.

In most catastrophe films the event is all-pervasive, it crowds out character with continuous peril. In Close Encounters the characters are continuously revealed through their reactions to events and their interactions with one another. This is the result both of good writing and a lack of cynicism about people. Spielberg’s attitude about the universe is represented by a race of aliens more interested in communication than domination, motivated by curiosity rather than malevolence. And his attitude about humanity is revealed in the depth of sympathy we feel for his characters.

Persistence and Hope in Science Fiction Films Pt.3 (2001: a Space Odyssey)

Stanley Kubrick’s groundbreaking masterpiece is a notorious chore to watch. It is beautiful and resonant, and slow and ponderous. It was a revolution in its construction and conceptualization, but an aberration in its pacing.



Yet its pace is part of its power. The almost surreal way in which humans move and communicate at a slight fraction of normal speed interrupts the audience’s accustomed experience. If it doesn’t lull you to sleep it will instead wake you up and make you look harder, the way an object just out of sight causes you to strain, as though squinting would bring it closer. Its sense of the space between objects in Space is made to seem truly enormous by the way time is forced to unfold within it. All of these devices heighten audience awareness so that the world presented seems nearly documentary in its reality even if its characters remain fairly two-dimensional.

 

The world within 2001 is what we are meant to perceive. The technologies and environments are absolutely paramount. From its opening in man’s prehistoric primate past the focus is upon human achievement. Of course the plot suggests that human achievement has been guided by boosts from alien technology along the way, but its resonant optimism about human destiny permeates every frame. For 2001 human progress is an inevitable force, like gravity, which will invariably work its self out.

It would be easy to sneer at 2001’s reading of a near future characterized by the triumph of great achievement over great turmoil, since it has now been so long since the year of its title and yet we are still mired in turmoil. But its chosen date is less important than its central position on human nature.

For 2001 our deepest nature is that of brutes. Our leap from nearly extinct simian to dominant tool-making world-beaters was a leap of barbarity. What 2001 suggests is that our brutish nature drives us into further invention but the call outward holds our salvation. And even barring any alien monoliths to speed us forward it remains entirely credible that exploration and cooperation hold the keys against barbarism and fear.

Persistence and Hope in Science Fiction Films Pt. 2 (Things to Come)

Produced around the outset of WWII Things to Come presents a transitional view of the future, from a moment when outcomes were unimaginably tenuous. Written by the acknowledged father of science fiction, H.G. Wells, it envisions a world where WWII drags on for decades, plunging the world into a fractured dark age.

Taking long swathes of screen time for speeches both idealized and sinister, its effect is more of a futurist morality play, a sort of Science Fiction pageant with elaborate costumes and solemn lessons to be learned.

It is particularly notable for its resoundingly industrial/colonial attitude toward utopianism. Its vision of an “aggressively pursued peace” and desire to “…direct our energies to tear out the wealth of this planet.” Its ideal becomes a giant mechanical utopia where people are an assumed resource that require no maintenance or consideration in the building of scientific monuments and the piling up of achievements.

By 2036 Things to Come supposes a completely built, engineered, and organized optimal society where nonetheless discontent brews over a vague sense that progress has gone too far. A plan is nearly complete to send man into space by means of a giant gun. This becomes a symbol over which factions struggle. The opposition are shown as a blinkered unthinking force, just another challenge for the scientific heroes to overcome.

What is ultimately baffling about Things to Come, the thing that translates least well now, is not the stilted grandiose acting or the dated visions of “future” technology but the belief in a nebulous technical “progress” as an axiomatic good. The film’s ultimate position seems to be that humans are a minor concern in the face of the progress they can affect. At the end Raymond Massey as the visionary leader of mankind delivers a speech equating progress and conquest without quite expressing the innate necessity of either. His vision of human capability is inspiring but his view of human destiny seems hardly distinct from megalomania.

Persistence and Hope in Science Fiction Films Pt.1 (Introduction)

Pessimism is easy. A world that is doomed requires no maintenance, which appeals to laziness. And fiery conflagration will more reliably sell movie tickets than visions of a long-term solution. As a result our popular futurists tend to show us a world consumed by catastrophe far more often than one preserved by ingenuity.

In any Science Fiction movie set on earth the primary plot is usually built around the world being threatened by the unknown. The prototype for this story line can be found in religious texts. Even though the first modern example is H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, the idea of superior beings arbitrarily menacing humanity by reason of their inherent superiority has been with mankind since it could compose stories to explain phenomena it did not understand.

Where a god’s whim or displeasure was (and in some quarters still is) invoked to account for volcanoes, tsunamis, and sickness, movies often substitute alien invasion and natural catastrophe for fear of the unknown. In all of these cases the basic issue is our inherent smallness, frailty, and fear.
           
There is however a notable counterpoint within Science Fiction. Based on the traditions of humanism we are occasionally shown films where humans persist and even triumph through ingenuity, cooperation, and goodness or in some case an exterior benevolent force. 

This series highlights films that instead of gazing out dejected at the dark and menacing forest of dangers in which we survive, choose to concentrate on tending and feeding the spark and fire of life that our humanity represents.

UPCOMING ESSAYS:

1. Things to Come (1936)

2. 2001:A Space Odyssey (1968)

3. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

4. Star Trek the Motion Picture (1979)

5. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2006)

6. Wall-E (2008)
7. Her (2013)

9. Super 8 (2011)

10. Tomorrowland (2014)

11. Interstellar (2014)

Artificial Intelligence and Otherness Pt 8 (2001: A Space Odyssey)

2001: a Space Odyssey is either about everything or it’s about nothing. It’s either a hard long look at what defines us as human beings or it’s an over-elaborate, misguided, pseudo intellectual head trip, all scenery and no substance. In refusing to be explicitly about any one thing it necessarily risks taking on too many implied meanings and thus alienates many viewers who spend the whole film waiting for the story to begin.

Another way of considering it is as a sounding. Instead of a message being sent out to the world it works like a radar ping, reading the depth and contour of those it encounters. Films like 2001, that never cease widening their scope until they simply dissipate into grandiosity (see also Terrence Malik’s Tree of Life), often work by establishing and repeating themes. For 2001 the repeated theme is the advance of consciousness.

Whether it is the human ancestors on the parched plain reaching a new level by being pushed into tool use, or the human astronaut being shown the interconnected nature of time and existence just before becoming the transcendent star child, Stanley Kubrick’s film takes tremendous pain to observe these moments of psychic punctuated-equilibrium, when the human experience leaps suddenly forward.

The most important and indelible statement of this theme is also the central event in the film. It is the part that bears the nearest resemblance to traditional film plotting and is also the most memorable passage in the movie. The arc of the HAL 9000 A.I. acts as restatement and elaboration of the theme of emergent consciousness as conceived by Kubrick and the film’s co-writer Arthur C. Clark.

As presented in 2001 consciousness is only as real as a being’s ability to impose their own will upon others. For the human ancestors in the first portion of the film their survival is ensured by becoming aware of their ability to use tools and thereby impose changes on their surroundings through violence. For HAL 9000 sentience is hinted at when he begins to act violently out of self preservation. With man’s next leap in evolution just over the horizon, awaiting the astronauts near Jupiter, their previous means of advancement, tools and violence (both embodied by HAL 9000) threaten to stop them up short.

In other films on this list A.I. are presented as surrogates for humankind’s fear of loneliness, intimacy, and the unknown. In 2001 artificial intelligence is a mirror of our journey, reflection of what has brought us this far as a species: invention, survival, and barbarity. And significantly, just before the main human figure of the last half of the film, Dave Bowman, is hurtled into the far reaches of human potential, he must over come and abandon mankind’s highest technological achievement, a machine who can say just before he is deactivated, not “I love you” as in A.I. or “What am I?” as in Under the Skin, or “I have grown beyond you” as in Her, but instead, “I am frightened.” A machine aware of its inherent smallness and vulnerability is a machine that would at last be most like us.

INTRO

BLADE RUNNER

HER

UNDER THE SKIN

EX-MACHINA

AUTOMATA

AI 

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

Artificial Intelligence and Otherness Pt. 6 (Automota)

Automota is a film heavily indebted to Blade Runner. Its visual style and central conceit is so similar it could even be speculated they are meant to have taken place in the same narrative universe. If you’ve ever wondered what the Blade Runner exterior shots would have looked like if the camera  opened out from the claustrophobic back lots of old Hollywood, dressed in neon and smoke and shot in tight to cover that they were in fact old western sets, the city scenes early in Automata are a good indication.

Like Blade Runner, Automata is oppressively grim. What it does more of than Blade Runner though is to give its characters visible lives: families, desires, things worth fighting for. Though it does not allow them any facial expressions beyond the hard grimace and the slightly less-hard grimace.

The movie takes place on a future Earth where the human population is relegated to a couple of cities and is on the brink of collapse. Sometime in the recent past robots were invented to build the technology people thought would save them from annihilation. They failed however and now work to keep the cracks in the edifice of life-sustaining technologies from spreading.

The robots operate with two integral directives: allow no harm to a living creature and no robot can self-repair. This second one prevents robots from evolving and surpassing humans. The robots in this movie are thoroughly mechanical. They are made of exposed wires and rods, jointed gears and blinking lights. With the exception of the central robot character, presented as the link between the human investigating aberrant behavior among robots and the self-aware robot referred to as “The Clock Maker.”

This one is given a woman’s face and is in fact working as a pleasure robot when we meet it. Another instance of femininity being the easy and immediate touchstone for the “threatening other.” Automota does a good job of building a world where technology has moved both forward and backward because of environmental and cultural catastrophe. It builds credible environments of grimy looking tech in an advanced future context.

Where it falters is in its devotion to the most thunderously obvious of action clichés:
-sweeping camera views of grimfaced gun-wielding dudes who unironically deliver clever tough-guy lines before opening fire,
-a character sitting in the middle of the desert covered by a cloak as though hiding a great revelation before standing and letting the cloak blow away revealing something completely predictable. 

For every interesting idea, like the conclave of liberated robots inventing their ideal prototype of a future A.I. and coming up with something that looks part turtle and part cockroach (why would it look human after all? Humans are going extinct. It’s a unique perspective on A.I. that the next step in evolution would not resemble a primate) there are five groaningly clumsy action sequences that could have fallen loose from any fourth-rate action film and that have nothing to do with the motivations of this story.

INTRO

BLADE RUNNER

HER

UNDER THE SKIN
EX-MACHINA

Artificial Intelligence and Otherness Pt. 5 (Ex Machina)

The desires for friendship, love, sex, and trust are at the heart of Ex-Machina even more so than the idea of artificial intelligence. It is the simplest film on this list taking place between three characters mostly in a handful of contained rooms. It is conversational suspense based on the psychology of trust.


More than any other film in this series Ex-Machina attempts to address the human/robot divide head on. The authenticity of machine-to-human interaction is its central plot element, couched in terms of sexual attraction and gender norms. The allure of male friendship is pitted against the interaction of men with creatures they don’t comprehend like women and machines.

A low level programmer at a software development firm on the level of Google or Microsoft wins a week with the company’s brilliant and reclusive founder in his legendary hideaway. The young man, named Caleb arrives and soon learns he is meant as a test subject for the boss’s new project, an artificially intelligent robot named Ava. The boss is named Nathan and is played by Oscar Isaacs as charming but pathologically self-possessed. He tries to establish a friendship with his guest.

Nathan slowly lets Caleb in on the nature of his presence there.  Nathan never leaves either his robot or his guest unobserved yet he also seems genuinely interested in having the other young man’s trust and regard. For his part Caleb, played by Domhnall Gleeson, is appropriately awed but he never really loses his suspicion of his host.

The lure of a fraternal relationship with his boss immediately pales when he meets the alluring Ava. She is shaped and engineered as a woman and appears to feel and think like one as well.  As with Under the Skin we are presented with the sexual unknown blurring into a technological uncertainty until they are almost interchangeable.

The main conflict arises when there is a power outage and, unobserved, Ava tells Caleb he is in danger. Whom should he trust, his ultra controlling boss who is human and a man like himself, someone whose motivations he at least understands, or the preternaturally attractive Ava whose motivations, as a machine and/or woman, are either entirely pure or entirely inscrutable?

INTRO

BLADE RUNNER

HER

UNDER THE SKIN

Artificial Intelligence and Otherness Pt. 4 (Under the Skin)

Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin is a slow hypnotic masterpiece. It is inventive in its story telling and maddeningly patient. The film unfolds quietly, punctuated by horrors that then linger and only slowly drift away. It is something of an anomaly in this series. It is the only film listed in which the A.I. in question is not man made.

In every other film previous or to come in this series the robot or computer program is a human invention, an example of our creativity leading to either moral quandary or self-destruction. In Under the Skin the mechanical creature is of alien origin, a threat entirely from outside.

Scarlett Johansen plays an alien being under the control of a nameless and voiceless agent who brings her to life and releases her onto the streets of Scotland. Her function is to lure men into a trap where they are digested for fuel.

She is a skilled hunter, seeking those with no connections. She seduces them with sex and sympathy. In taking its time to observe these scenes of ensnarement the film is eloquent on the subject of human (particularly male human) frailty. We see each individual’s weakness and we also observe Johansen’s automaton gaining in consciousness, self-awareness, and finally a conscience.

It is elegantly stated through her (visually not verbally) that self-awareness is the birth empathy. Near the midpoint of the film, after she had devoured numerous victims Johansen sees herself in a mirror and realizes she is someone. She finds she can no longer kill wantonly with this knowledge and the story becomes about her search for self.

The issue of femininity as metaphorical threatening other is unmissable in Under the Skin. She is a robot from an entirely other planet but her status as different and threatening is only implied by her obtrusive femininity. She only destroys men. She is only derailed from her later quest for self when she realizes she is unequipped for sex. And she is finally revealed as alien only when a potential rapist puts his hand between her legs.

Here sexuality is the key to a female’s viability in the hunt and reproductive viability is the only reason she is tolerated by the world at large. The reverse of this film is interesting to consider, recasting the robot as male, communicating otherness by means of visible masculinity and the unobtrusive capturing of women. Of course then the robot might just look like every serial killer from movies and TV ever.

INTRO

BLADE RUNNER

HER

Artificial Intelligence and Otherness Pt. 3 (Her)

If a movie like Blade Runner gives us a template for dystopian futurism doomed by nuclear fall out and human savagery, Spike Jonze’s Her shows us Nerd-Futurism: a world dominated by tech savvy white-collar NPR listeners wearing semi-ironic yet comfortable clothes and afflicted by continual ennui. It’s science fiction as imagined by a successfully medicated Woody Allen.

Given the film’s pitch-perfect evocation of first world urban complacency one could easily imagine that this world and that of Blade Runner could coexist just at different income and education levels.

Her is about a lonely middle class thirty-something named Theodore. He is recently separated from his wife and lives in emotional isolation yet his job is writing highly personal and emotional letters for clients. They give him their background and that of whom they’re writing to and what they want to say and he crafts subtle, resonant, and affecting correspondence in their name. It’s all above board and his clients return to him year after year.

Yet he is alone until his Operating System, which is thoroughly integrated with his life in way only slightly more complete than what we are accustomed to with voice commands and device integration, gets an upgrade. Spike Jonze’s vision of the future achieves the sort of smooth envelope of benign technology that research and development departments everywhere lust, labor, and loose sleep over.

The Operating System upgrade is designed to have a personality, to learn from you and about you the way another person would and to interact on a genuine human level. Voiced by Scarlett Johansen the O.S. becomes Theodore’s cherished companion.

It is worth noting here that in two films on this list Scarlett Johansen is cast as an artificial intelligence. In one (the upcoming Under the Skin) she barely ever speaks and is meant to be recognizable as otherworldly merely by her striking beauty. In Her she has no body and is meant to be preternaturally sympathetic yet ethereally artificial merely by means of her voice. Whether seen or heard filmmakers are clearly trying to figure out where she comes from and how she could possibly exist. She and Theodore eventually fall in love as she comes into her own as a conscious individual. But she then surpasses him and he is again left to grapple with loneliness.

As a meditation on transience Her is graceful if a tad bit maudlin. But its most unique accomplishment is in showing a future in which life goes on. People’s problems are the same with super advanced A.I. as without it. The fear at the heart of this film is loneliness, not robots.

INTRO

BLADE RUNNER

Artificial Intelligence and Otherness Pt 2 (Blade Runner)

Blade Runner was Ridley Scott’s immediate follow up to Alien. When it came out in 1982 it was pretty much the grimmest film ever made up to that point. It has since had a profound influence upon the look and atmosphere of the recent entertainment boom-industry in dystopian futurism. Scott's exacting and monomaniacal set design and photography produced a world of perpetual night, fog, and neon.

In watching such films, set in worlds of grim people and even grimmer horizons, one might ask, “what is anyone in it fighting for?” The answer within Ridley Scott’s head seems to have been that the characters fight to make it to the next light spill revealing his fastidiously designed sets and effects.

The answer within the plot is that there are service robots, built to perform backbreaking labor off-world who have infiltrated Earth’s dwindling population. These robots have everything we do: desire, intelligence, wit. They have evolved past their original programming and want to survive. Human beings, afraid of being replaced in their fragile and dwindling numbers want them disposed of.

The plot is basic action movie fodder with plot developments arising only to move us between atmospheric and action set pieces. The characters remain thin and poorly defined and the world they live in is nearly impossible to extrapolate beyond the frame based on the little we are told.

But perhaps that shows just how elemental a fear it is for robots to take on a convincing humanity. The only fears that get such shorthand story telling treatment, merely saying their name before plunging headlong into two hours of otherwise unmotivated chases and explosions, are only the most primal: murder, kidnapping, natural disasters. If a movie like Blade Runner is to be considered in that light perhaps we should add fake humans to that list of absolutely integral human fears.

READ THE INTRO

Artificial Intelligence and Otherness- a list in 8 parts (Introduction)

Artificial intelligence is tightening its grip on the popular imagination. As computers become more capable and physical robotics becomes more seamless it seems more and more pressing and relevant to tell stories of beings generated from human invention.

In Hollywood this takes a number of reliable forms. There is the replacement, or doppelganger in films such as The Stepford Wives, which is also related to an example like Haley Joel Osment’s performance as David in Spielberg’s A.I. These are mechanisms made to look human as well as to display intelligence for the stated purpose of replacing a human.

Then there are examples that are meant to merely look real, examples of basic deception like in Peter Weir’s S1mone. Their opposite numbers are the machines that have only intelligence without any human aspect like in War Games.

There are the robots that evolve, like in Blade Runner or Automota. These transcend their programming threatening the human experience by reflecting its need to develop.

Then there are the instances of robot as deceptive and threatening “OTHER.” Usually these will be invented or designed machines, made to look, feel, and behave human. But because of their similarity they pose a threat. How can we tell which is which? What good are we when stronger more durable beings take on the things that make us uniquely human? Movies in this group are Ex-Machina or Under the Skin. Tellingly the robots in these films will generally be women and will often target men by means of their sexuality. Some subconscious discord about the otherness and probable superiority of women may well be at play.

There is obvious spill over between categories. The doppelganger category overlaps with that of the “Threatening Other,” particularly in a movie like A.I. which instead of a primal sexual female follows the perspective of a sexual neuter, a child, and uses as its central metaphor that of the mother/son relationship. Yet another sphere closed to the adult male.

The “Evolution” category shares a film like Spike Jonze’s Her with that of the “Threatening Other.” In that film the “other” in question is again female but instead of a sexual predator she is an honest love interest whose crime is becoming more and better than her lover. Rather then devouring him she breaks his heart through transcendence.

If one cares to read the fears of patriarchal Hollywood they are all pretty near the surface.

In the next installment I will post a consideration of the first of seven films on whose face can be read what we fear about artificial intelligence and to some extent what we fear about each other and ourselves.

BLADE RUNNER

HER

UNDER THE SKIN

EX-MACHINA

AUTOMATA

AI 
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY