4 July 2001

CIVILIAN VOICES ON A.I.

I asked for your thoughts and you came through in large numbers.  I’m sorry that the following 5000 words don’t include all of your mail.  But hey, if this inspires you, write in again or for the first time and there could be another C.V. on the subject before you know it…

The Delaware Kid writes:  “Moral of the fairy tale: If you approach the work of two great movie makers as a script doctor, your diagnosis better be correct before you begin surgery.

I didn't see A.I. until Monday, so with a dozen contradictory reviews swirling in my head, I felt acceptably inoculated from walking into the theater with any undue prejudicial allegiances.  I'm surprised by your initial and second viewing comments -I don't consider anything you've written to be an actual review - and I'd like to address what you've presented to your readers, and how my experience in the theater in Lewes Delaware differed so much from what you saw and thought and felt.

The made-for-TV-movie Act One, Act Two stuff that you trade in doesn't play when you start dealing with the big guys.  Just like Shakespeare a couple of hundred years ago, I think that the structural norms have been reshaped by creative movie makers.  I look forward to the day when you - and producers - start talking about Act Two, Scene Two.

For you to approach the domestic - Mom, Dad, Real Son-issues of the living characters as if you were on a spirit episode of Oprah is achingly misbegotten.  All of the principals in A.I. spin off of the fairy tale rule.   Cruel abandonment and lack of fulfillment.  Before you condemn Spielberg for selling out to his romantic side, think hard about the path that ends David's eternal condition as the ultimate Sleeping Beauty.

David is informed by those who discover him two thousand years after he is submerged and frozen, as the memory of everything he has ever seen.  David is, of course, a movie.  His creators - Kubrick and Spielberg - long dead, are consigned to having their art become fossils for a future race.

This is legitimate science fiction and fable.  All of the logic you insist the movie must possess to be acceptable are irrelevant when the premise and objective is to tell a story that combines questions of our present life with future resolutions that may explode the very nature of who we think we are.

Past all of the Sci-fi mesh is the cinematic fabric. I don't know why you haven't addressed all of the obvious - and not so obvious - movie references that fill A.I.  From Night Of The Living Dead - when the mechas seek replacement parts - to The Graduate - when David is Dustin Hoffman in a swimming pool - the movie is an endless, moment by moment reliving of film history.  Why?  Because David represents the Director's obsession.  A million memories of the world that could bring more laughter and tears to women than could their living sons or husbands. This is a purely Kubrick concept that Spielberg brings unremittingly to the screen.  What is art?  Is film art? Is film more powerful and real than life, than a husband or son? Thousands of years in the future when a new race excavates our world, and they find David instead of a dinosaur fossil, will he-and we- be reconstructed and studied?  This is science fiction, not Kramer Vs. Kramer, though of course, Meryl Streep is on hand as the voice of the potential fallen mother.

All I can say, is that frame for frame, there is much to savor in A.I.,  and I'm surprised that none of it reached you.  As for Spielberg, how many directors would bring back a ferris wheel from their least successful joke movie, and use it as the apocalyptic symbol in a dead serious movie about the nature of art, humanity and the future?

PS.  Get the Original Cast Recording of Sunday in the Park With George.  All the same issues, a lot of the same conclusions, just as exciting.”

DAVID NOTE:  I saw the show on Broadway… much more powerful… much smarter.  And for that matter, Into The Woods is far better as well.  As far as my willingness to deal with directors who play with structure… no one out there is more willing than me to do that.   But you are quite wrong to suggest that there are many American directors who have EVER broken the three act structure.  And Spielberg DID NOT do that in A.I.  Not close.  This is as sharply defined a set of three acts as you will EVER see.  And I did a pretty thorough look at the all the references to other movies in The Matrix… a movie that earned that much analysis because of the clean, simple beauty of the mesh.  Michael Bay stole as many visual references in Pearl Harbor… which also failed to inspire extensive analysis. 

Not MA sent this in:  “In ET, the title character goes through all that torment to call home, and as soon as he does, he's dying.  Why?  The older kids who bully Elliot get to ride their bikes in the sky just like our hero.  Why?  Spielberg's films are full of illogical plot points, not to mention continuity errors.  I'm sure I would like Stevie if he lived next door, but as a director, he's not even close to being an artist.”

But ME felt:  “I think you may have missed a couple of points in your second A.I. review (I also think you were right on on some points).

Not having the father imprint with the mother does set up a very Oedipal imbalance.  This, I think, is deliberate.  If David had loved both parents equally many problems would have been avoided…and we would have the same kind of movie.

1. There are people I personally know, who have driven out into the country to abandon pets the same way David was abandoned.  Watching that happen onscreen I found my hands clenched in rage.  Good filmmaking or just pushing buttons?  Both?
2. Unequal treatment, you bet!  But although I saw the beginning of affection toward David, I didn’t see love there.  David was a thing, at best a pet, never a son to her.  Again, this is deliberate decision to show us that she DOESN’T love David the way he wants to be loved.
3. Gigolo Joe, I think you missed his character.  He isn’t as advanced as David, he does develop as a character, in the beginning but he only operates within the limits of his programming.  The woman’s pain, vulnerability, these things just wash over him.  He is just a machine designed to seduce women.  He plays the music selections he was loaded with.  He doesn’t even recognize the blood on his fingers at first when he encounters the murdered woman.  His encounter with David gives him depth he doesn’t start with it.
4. We don’t see more of the robot underground (which I also found fascinating) because David doesn’t go with them.  They are peripheral to his quest for the Blue Fairy. 
5. David doesn’t have an ID because he is “beta” product in “pre-release”, still undergoing testing inside the company.
6. Hip Young Dad does think David is too special to chop up, I’ll grant you that working at the Flesh Fair, this seems an odd attitude toward a Mecha. 
7. What kind of Jackass brings his daughter to the Flesh fair?  The same Jackasses who bring their kids to work and to R-rated films.  Frustrating but not uncommon.
8. David does kill his other self (who wants to be friends) and that felt like the hand of Kubrick.  He IS obsessive and irrational…and violent apparently.  I don’t know if that justifies the abandonment and fears of his human family.  It does cast a pall of ambiguity over David’s character.  I think it was a good choice, but they I prefer my characters with plenty of shades of grey.
9. I’m glad for your sake that you’ve never felt so forsaken by the lack of love that death seemed attractive.  However, David’s despair and plunge into the sea reinforces his burgeoning sentience.  Consider Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, perhaps we should be glad his despair did not turn to rage.  Just food for thought.”

Not Heather’s Dad writes:  “Your hypothetical musing about an alternative plot for AI points out a curious aspect of the movie which hasn't been mentioned in anything I've read. This was a movie that had intense, real conflicts boiling away under the surface, but it avoided them all for safer, false conflicts.

The obvious example was the whole false conflict between David, the robot, and that fairly poisonous child he'd replaced. In Spielberg's universe, this is a false conflict--the mother will always choose her real son over the robot. There is no drama, because it's a pre-destined decision.

But what if the movie had left the real son out of it, and followed the implications of the earlier scene where David makes his adoptive parents late for a party; where the mother was getting attached to the robot as to a real child, and the father was starting to regret bringing it home? That's a situation that cannot be resolved--which do you choose, your husband or your child?

And whatever happens between the couple, how does the mother deal with a son that never grows any older? And then, how does the robot deal with the mother's eventual mortality?

All of these real conflicts, if they'd been addressed, would have made for better drama. Consider that alternative, with the mother choosing her robot over her husband, clinging the harder to the robot for the rest of her life because it's what she has left, and with, eventually, David *still* ending up bereft and abandoned.

As it is, I think a lot of those images will stick with me, but I am already forgetting the story, and I just saw it Saturday night. Its images are real, but it is not.”

Downtime wrote:  “One of my biggest problems is this:  "His love is real, but he is not."

I thought it was a stupid tagline before I saw the movie, now it just seems downright wrong. David's love was never real. He loved the person he was imprinted to love. That's it. That's not real love. To me, the movie could have been vastly improved if he had learned to transcend the program and love something or someone or anything else. That would have been the realization of his quest to become a "real boy." I never wanted him to reunite with his mother. I wanted him to get over her. She was unworthy of his love (program) and, in addition to her husband, was a highly unlikable character. I couldn't connect with David's journey, therefore I never connected with A.I. “

Sealed With A Kick challenged my take on the film:  “My only remark about your A.I. comments is how strange it is to see you summarily write off a movie that you admit is less than straightforward using the same tone that you chided the critical establishment for adopting when it was dismissing Eyes Wide Shut. You say: 'If Spielberg was paying homage to Kubrick, he should have gotten the most basic thing... Kubrick almost never told the audience what hypothesis he was about to bring to life.'

But what if, to toss out one theory, the hypothesis is a feint? What if the ironic comment here is that Hurt is less emotional, less capable of love, less real than David? You also say: 'David is not designed with real integration in mind... neither the glory of it or the danger of it. Instead, we get a boy who is designed to bond with only one of two parents. We get a boy who doesn’t seem to have been programmed to understand the most basic pre-teen attitudes and activities. We get a boy who learns lessons, but who doesn’t ever use them. We get a boy who not only doesn’t need to eat, but for whom the act of eating is dangerous.  Why?  If they can make Mechas who can service Orgas sexually in a way that seems absolutely real, why not a boy who plays video games?'

Up until the last sentence, you're asking the right questions, digging in the dirt to unearth possible subtext. But the best answer you offer is a plot quibble, as if the absence of a digestive tract makes the science just too unbelievable. With Eyes Wide Shut, you recognized the need to step back and look at things in a less conventional light: Maybe this movie is after something other than strict realism. Why not extend A.I. the same benefit of the doubt? I wouldn't instinctively expect an artistic statement of that calibre or complexity from Spielberg, either, but the fact that it doesn't "click" in all of the famous Spielberg ways seems like indication enough that it should warrant a little extra thought.”

DAVID RESPONDS: Plenty of thought on this end… I just think that most of the explanations for all the things that don’t make sense about A.I. are rationalizations by people bringing their personal perspectives to the film.  I guess the same could be said about my take on Eyes Wide Shut… except that Kubrick’s floor plan for what the film really was connected with me, in some small way, on the first viewing.  And in every viewing since, the subtext has become not only clearer, but the incredible simplicity of it has become startling.  For the most part, I was more irritated by the biggest brush strokes in A.I. the second time around.  I have a strong sense of what Spielberg was trying to say… but the movie simply fails, over and over, to invest in the comments it seems to want to make.  And the reason why you don’t have a robot who can’t eat is not because it irritates me… it’s because if you sincerely want to integrate a boy into a family, you create as much reality as possible.  Hell, we have a whole riff in the first scene about the robot reapplying her make-up, later reflecting Monica putting on her make-up.  David’s skin seems real… but his behavior does not.

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