FC: Another review of AI movie, by Bruce Webster, with spoilers

From: Declan McCullagh (declanat_private)
Date: Sat Jun 30 2001 - 11:06:01 PDT

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    Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 09:22:44 -0400
    To: declanat_private
    From: "Bruce F. Webster" <bwebsterat_private>
    Subject: Re: FC: AI movie review: More artificial than intelligent
    In-Reply-To: <20010630012553.A9388at_private>
    
    Declan:
    
    My own take on AI. Feel free to post or not, but please note SPOILERS 
    INVOLVED.  ..bruce..
    
    ================================================================================
    AI: A Horrific Fairy Tale for Adults
    
    [SPOILERS BELOW]
    
    I have been fascinated by some of the sharp divisions of opinion 
    surrounding AI as reviews (official and un-) have come out in the past few 
    weeks. Today, my wife Sandra, our 18-year-old daughter Crystal, and I all 
    went to see the 12:00 noon showing at the Uptown here in DC (enormous 
    screen, great theatre). I believe that Crys was entertained but not 
    particularly moved. Sandra and I--who between us have 9 kids from our 
    separate prior marriages--both felt as though we had had a dentist with 
    sharp, tiny, hand-held instruments working on our hearts for 2 1/2 hours, 
    with pauses to let us recover, only to dig in again. Why the difference? 
    Because we're parents and she's not. And therein, I think, lies much of the 
    great divide.
    
    AI is not hard SF. It is a cautionary horror story cum fairy tale cum myth, 
    probably one of the best examples since Mary Shelley penned _Frankenstein, 
    or The Modern Prometheus_. It takes a simple premise--what if we could 
    teach a machine to love as a child loves, to think as a child thinks, and 
    to want to be loved as a child is loved?--and carries it through to some 
    excruciating, non-obvious and unflinching consequences that, I suspect, 
    resonate primarily with parents who have had children of that age.
    As with Frankenstein, the core of AI involved hubris, temptation, 
    rejection, and consequences. Hubris was the unthinking arrogance of Dr. 
    Hobby and associates in tampering with the ecology of family and love 
    without due regard for the unintended consequences--set, ironically, 
    against a backdrop of melted icecaps (frankly, my first clue this wasn't 
    hard SF) and other unintended consequences of meddling with the physical 
    ecology at large.
    
    Temptation was Monica, watching her flesh-and-blood son Martin in cryonics 
    for five years, not knowing whether a cure would ever be found for him 
    (another fairy tale/myth motif), now being confronted with a machine, 
    called David, that looks like a little boy, that--if and when she says the 
    magic words--will fall eternally in love with her. Monica has a void inside 
    which remains gaping and unhealed because of Martin's suspension between 
    life and death, which is what makes her temptation so real. In far too many 
    movies and novels, the key temptation is so stupid and the consequences so 
    obvious that I lose most or all sympathy for the character (e.g., King's 
    _Pet Sematary_). What made this movie so painful for me was how realistic I 
    felt the temptation was. If I had one child, frozen, near death, with no 
    clear prospect of ever having him/her back and no prospect of ever having 
    another--yes, I might be tempted, and I think my wife even more so, to have 
    something like David to fill that void, and we would stumble into the trap 
    without realizing what we've done.
    
    Rejection comes with the realization of the artificial, unnatural aspect of 
    the relationship. Children grow; they mature (usually); there is always a 
    bittersweet aspect to losing the simple, passionate love of a child, 
    especially once they become brain-dead adolescents ;-), but one wishes 
    children to grow and go out on their own. Kubrick/Spielberg first carefully 
    lay out the slowly-unfolding hell of having a child-like automaton with 
    real feelings stuck at that particular emotional age, then accelerate and 
    compound that hell by bringing back the real child, warts and all. Can one 
    love a machine when one's own flesh and blood is at hand? What are our 
    loyalties, our instincts? Martin's and David's reactions to each other are 
    very believable (speaking particularly as someone who has had experience 
    merging two sets of kids together into one family), as are frankly the 
    different reactions to the situation between and her husband Henry (with 
    whom, remember, David has _not_ bonded; a classic parent/step-parent 
    divide, one with strong Oedipal/Freudian overtones). Martin is less 
    pleasant, less pure in his love, less physically perfect, less lovable--but 
    his is Monica and Henry's flesh, their progeny; having nearly lost him 
    once, can they reject him in favor of something that runs off electric 
    current, something manufactured? What would that say about them as humans, 
    as parents? Yet David really loves Monica, and she has to choose between 
    him and the rest of her very-human family.
    
    Whatever the twists and turns of the future projected, the emotional 
    consequences for all involved, but particularly for David, are as 
    inexorable as they are logical. For me, one of the most haunting lines of 
    the film is when Monica abandons David in the forest (another classic fairy 
    tale touch), shouting cautions even as she does so, then pauses and 
    says--as her final words to him--"I'm sorry I never told you about the 
    world." There's a deep, wrenching stab at any parent's heart, capturing the 
    twin heartbreaks of forcing a child out into the world, away from the 
    safety comfort of a parent's arms (with a loss of security) and into all 
    the pain and cruelty and tragedy that the child is likely unprepared for.
    
    David then embarks on a classic, almost Campbellian fairy tale quest, 
    complete with faithful sidekick (Teddy) and rogue knight (Joe). He's off to 
    see the wizard (Dr. Know), to win the Sphinx-like riddling challenge and 
    find out what he needs to know to become a real boy so that Monica will 
    love him. But unlike the comforting, Disneyized fairy tales we've come to 
    accept, this one holds to the hard truth--there is no blue fairy, David 
    will never become a real boy, and Monica will never love him the way he 
    loves her, the way he so desperately wants to be loved, as someone unique 
    and irreplaceable--and this is where it is most wrenching. David's hopes 
    are raised to their highest peak by the mysterious message in the Dr. Know 
    booth and its literal unfolding as he and Joe travel to the 'ends of the 
    earth'--and then they are utterly smashed as he finds what lies at the end 
    of his quest. His homicidal (robocidal?) rage at finding another, duplicate 
    David is chilling and utterly consistent, calling to mind Henry's 
    seemingly-overblown worry much earlier in the film that "If he [David] is 
    capable of love, then he is also capable of hate." And then all his hopes 
    are utterly crushed as he discovers that he himself is merely a simulacrum 
    of Hobby's own dead son David, and that he is being mass produced for human 
    consumption. It leads to two attempts at suicide, one out of despair, and 
    one based on obsession with his goal leading to indifference to everything 
    else, trapped in a dark prison of his own making.
    
    Some have objected to the third part of the movie, yet I think it was very 
    much keeping in spirit with the old-style fairy tales and myths. It has the 
    irony of robot survival and human extinction (brought on, with further 
    irony, by a profound ice age). It has the resurrection motif, with 
    acceptance into the company of gods or near-gods, not as an equal, but as 
    an honored icon (much as Greek gods elevating heroic mortals to Olympus or 
    into the constellations). And, as gods, they grant not what David wants but 
    what they can--a single day with Monica (Clarke's third law should be 
    enough to deal with any quibble about DNA), with no competition from Dad or 
    Martin or from the world at all. Again the Oedipal/Freudian overtones may 
    seem a bit blatant, but it's still utterly true to life, for a child of 
    that emotional age, as to what heaven would be. And David's choice--that he 
    would rather have that one day, with the increased sense of irrevocable 
    loss afterwards, than not to have it at all--goes to the heart of vast 
    numbers of myths and tales about what is so essentially human. Indeed, 
    David for all intents and purposes now _is_ the human race. And as the day 
    ends and Monica passes away, David--for the first time in his 2000-year 
    existence--sleeps and dreams.
    
    But does he wake?
    
    =============================================================
    Bruce F. Webster (bwebsterat_private)
    Washington, DC
    http://bfwa.com
    =============================================================
    
    
    
    
    
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