One summer day back in the mid-1970s, a woman I know was hitchhiking on Cape Cod with two friends. The three, all college students, got picked up by a geeky guy in his late twenties who told them he was on a crew making a movie about a shark attack. Actually, he said, he was the director. They asked him how he was doing the shark attack in the movie.
"We have a machine," he said. "We have a mechanical shark."
They laughed. It sounded so rinky-dink.
From the start, Steven Spielberg has blurred the boundary between machines and animate beings, and the results, as the whole world knows, have been anything but rinky-dink. His first movie, Duel (made at age twenty-four!), a terse road thriller about a motorist terrorized by a truck driver across the highways of the West, turned the eighteen-wheel rig into a shark of the interstate, a terrestrial proto-Jaws. The eerily cute mannequin of E.T. pushed the Spielbergian theme of benign extraterrestrials bearing enlightenment. And Jurassic Park, ostensibly a harrowing cautionary tale of technology run amok, turned into family fun, the medium overwhelming the message, Spielberg’s own technological wizardry pushing filmmaking entertainment to new levels of dazzle, suggesting an irrepressible optimism about the power of technology to fulfill human imagination.
A.I.: Artificial Intelligence represents the director’s collaboration with the late Stanley Kubrick, whose vision-and property-A.I. was (he’d been chewing on it for nearly twenty years). Spielberg took over the project, using Kubrick’s storyboards while rewriting the script, posing an intriguing hybrid of sensibilities: an upbeat and essentially humanistic moviemaker grafted onto a brooding, cerebral, much darker one. What monster of a movie would result?
A.I. takes place in a future American dystopia partly sunken beneath melted polar ice caps, where scutwork is done by androids, and an ambitious and visionary corporate scientist, Dr. Allen Hobby (William Hurt), undertakes to construct "a robot that can love...with a subconscious, an inner world of metaphor, of dreams." The company, Cybertronics, selects a grieving couple, Henry and Monica, whose child has died and been placed in cryogenic storage-precisely the clients real-life gen-tech companies are currently aiming at. But A.I. doesn’t touch our cloning dilemma directly, because the child, David, played by Haley Joel Osment, isn’t human-he’s a robot, a mechanical toy. Instead, the movie focuses on Monica’s confused response to David’s programmed displays of affection. She knows he’s not real, a mere machine, yet she can’t help melting a little when he looks her in the eyes and says, "You’re my Mommy." A.I. makes clear that we are machines, built to respond to emotional stimuli, even if we don’t want to. Soon Monica is giving David her late son’s teddy bear, pulling back in confusion even as she does.
In a similar way, the film keeps confusing and undercutting our responses. We see a little boy and a talking teddy bear wend their way over a hilltop under the moonlight, and it looks like another of Spielberg’s cozy portrayals of family life and a child’s fervent imagination. David is not a child, however, but a human simulacrum, and that walk in the woods leads not to some encounter with friendly aliens, but to a so-called Flesh Fair, a gladiatorial festival where robots are dismembered before a howling human audience. A.I. keeps us nicely off balance, our hearts continually pitted against our heads, Spielbergian images pumped full of Kubrickian ironies.
Both directors started their careers from realism and pushed toward fantasy or allegory, and the second half of A.I. turns explicitly on a fable. David has read Pinocchio, and decides that, like Pinocchio, he no longer wants to be a puppet, but a real boy. After Monica tearfully abandons him in the woods (she had been taking him back to Cybertronics for demolition, but can’t go through with it), we follow his quest to find the Blue Fairy who will turn him into a real boy, so that his mother can finally love him. The journey leads ultimately back to David’s creator at Cybertronics headquarters, in a half-submerged Manhattan office tower, where David, surrounded by a room full of replicas of himself, experiences rage and grief at the revelation of his origins, as Dr. Hobby waxes triumphant, ecstatic that David has evinced "the ability to chase our dreams-something no machine has ever done."
At times, it’s hard to know what Spielberg is after in this welter of fantastic scenarios. We live in a country where women sell their eggs online, priced by donor beauty and IQ, and a futurist group called the Räelians is actively pursuing human cloning, yet A.I. feels surprisingly untopical; it doesn’t (for instance) touch the profound narcissism, or the Darwinian eugenic darkness, underlying our headlong rush into genetic engineering. As satire, the movie is tantalizing but frustratingly obscure. What does it mean that we are made to sympathize with the robots vis-à-vis their hardhearted human creators, and that the sadistic and villainous emcee at the Flesh Fair sounds a warning against technological hubris ("Do not be fooled by the artistry of this creation!")? The last third of the movie rather bewilderingly piles up surreal events and suggestive ironies. David ends up in an amphibian helicopter, trapped beneath a fallen Ferris wheel among the relics of long-submerged Coney Island, staring raptly at the Blue Fairy statue of a Pinocchio amusement ride...only to be discovered there, frozen, two thousand years later-big time leap-by kindly robotic superbeings in a glacial post-human world. "These robots are originals," the beings muse as they study David. "They knew living people." And so, again ironically, David gets his wish: he is unique after all, the nearest thing to human; the most real. And his other wish, too. With a lock of Monica’s hair, the beings manage to clone David’s "mother" back for one day, but one day only, after which she must disappear forever.
Despite such notions as a DNA Sleeping Beauty, A.I. isn’t finally interested in cloning or global warming or the nature of consciousness or technology and ethics. Like Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the movie takes on nothing less than what the theologians call teleology. And while grandiose, A.I.’s own end proves strangely moving, its absurdities and ironies yielding to a haunted and lonely beauty in its dreamlike closing sequences. There’s enough Kubrick in the genetic code of A.I.’s material to prevent the kind of sentimental ending that marred Spielberg’s Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan. Spielberg’s redemptive impulse is there, but muted and restrained, while Kubrick’s own lurking misanthropy gets brightened, or lightened, into somberness. What results is the best of both temperaments-dark, but not heartless. A.I. delivers Spielberg’s twist on Kubrick’s gloomy Faustian fable-yes, we died by technology, but lived by it as well, and even expressed through it our deepest need. It’s astonishing to see that staple of pop psychology, the inner child, turned into a dream voyager on behalf of all humanity, but somehow A.I. pulls it off in the figure of the robot boy calling out through eternity for its mother-both vestige and symbol of our own helpless, hard-wired quest for love.
