Movie of the Moment: A.I. Artificial Intelligence - Primal Screen

Film Comment, July-August, 2001 by Paul Arthur

To oversimplify a bit, Kubrick's films suggest that emotions are never pure; they are unalterably messy, governed by unconscious drives, rife with contradictions -- in some sense, all humans embody the twin prerogatives of Private Joker's peace symbol and "Born to Kill" motto in Full Metal Jacket. Moreover, emotions are "produced," constructed rather than inherent, and thus can be faked or dissembled. The issue is partly one of personal autonomy, how free we are to act and thus transcend our limitations, in a universe teeming with unseen forces either benign or malign. As a modernist, Kubrick knew it was fruitless to deny the shaping pressures of the mechanical and the artificial, and he consistently staked out territory where all systems, even that of representation, begin to break down. Spielberg's romanticism struggles to take cinema beyond cinema, to naturalize spectacle and achieve a state where artifice disappears in a flood of raw sensation. Asked about his technique in Schindler's List, the director responded: "I tried to pull the events closer to the audience by reducing the artifice"; or as the mathematician in Jurassic Park put it, "Life has a way of breaking out of all artificially imposed boundaries."

Despite the humanist Spielberg's unfamiliar dilemma of making a machine more heartwarming than any mortal character, telling themes and motifs from a host of his previous films are sewn into the fabric of A.I. There is the mystical light show as harbinger of the Beyond (Raiders of the Lost Ark, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Always), the magical resurrection or second coming that smacks of New Testament theology (start with Jaws and go from there), watery immersions or baptisms that restore a character's will to live (Always), surrogate fathers (you name it), injunctions to "Go home" (E. T., Hook, et al.). Perhaps most crucially, A.I. revisits as it crowns the child's fantasy of a primal scene, the site of its own conception, an idea dangerously flirted with in the Spielberg-produced Back to the Future but lurking in the shadows of Hook and other films.

Two scenes register initially as profoundly un-Spielbergian, perhaps even self-critical. In the midst of the Flesh Fairs postmodern demolition derby, a brutal entrepreneur voices a pro-life credo that in previous films would have framed the director's philosophical stance: "Purge yourselves of artificiality ... Robots are an insult to human dignity." Couched as a condemnation of spectacle, or at least spectacle devoid of empathy, the scene provides a negative template that celebrates the humanity of David's programmed consciousness; as the film's advertising tagline proclaims, "His love is real, but he is not." Spielberg's opposition of technology and storytelling, craft and imagination, manufactured violence and manufactured love, is palpably spurious. Contrary to the self-serving allegory proposed in Schindler's List, Amon Goeths' factory of death and Oskar Schindler's factory of life ("They say no one dies here") are equally integral to Hollywood's Dream Factory ethos.