It’s taken me an embarrassingly long time to come around to Spielberg. I’ve always liked the idea of Hollywood blockbusters that use their scale to tell stories to “ordinary people”. After all, film is about telling stories, and something that has been majorly lost in cinema is the notion that blockbusters can have emotional depth and be entertaining. This summer I watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind in theaters, as well as Minority Report and A.I Artificial Intelligence, and was surprised at each film’s beauty.
A.I. Artificial Intelligence is probably my favorite of the three Spielbergs I’ve seen this summer. It’s a one-of-a-kind movie, and its mastery lies in its ability to find lightness in its dark story. As someone who’s done basic machine learning programming and got out of it quickly when I realized how soulless and dehumanizing it was, I was sure there was no way I could ever buy into the conceit of a robot as a “real boy”. Yet David is obviously a real boy, and this central question of the film made me wonder why exactly that was, beyond movie magic.
To understand why David is a real boy, we must first look to the “real people” in this movie. They are weak and selfish people, turned bad by the deep wounds of grief. David’s creator is a monster who thinks highly intelligent androids can be given the capacity to love someone yet also have the right to be destroyed by that same person. This supposition - that we allow ourselves to destroy others - is the heart of the movie.
I read that many people think the Rouge City arc is unnecessary, but spending so much of this film in a red light district is actually essential. Gigolo Joe says the robots are meant for human use, and can be discarded at any moment they don’t suit someone’s needs. This doesn’t imply that the robots are inhuman, it means we treat humans like robots. There is nothing separating the plight of the disposable robot prostitute, available in all kinds of ready-made fetish gear, from the human prostitute, and many a child has been born to a parent that treats them as someone brought into the world to serve their needs. It’s very easy to view something as inhuman the second they don’t meet your needs anymore. What does the Flesh Fair, where robots are ripped to pieces in front of jeering human crowds evoke? Gladiator matches. We did this to ourselves, we have always done this to ourselves.
David is human because he descends into hell for someone who doesn’t love him — the fact that his mother doesn’t love him isn’t even up for debate. What makes David human is that he loves his mother in spite of the fact that she does not love him. What makes David human is that he unquestioningly believes that you must earn the love of the people who brought you into this world.
A.I. is a horror movie not because of David, but because of the people in the world he lives in. Keyword “lives” - David lives, he was a real boy from the second he learned to love. To love is to believe, and David didn’t have a choice but to love. And neither do we. If you identify with David’s story, you are a believer, whether you can admit it to yourself or not.