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A.I.: Artificial Intelligence
16-20 minutes

Contemporary popular cinema has many blockbusters, but few true events. For a film
to be an event, it needs more than simply excitement, cleverness or star power;
more than the pre-fab mythology of a Star Wars cycle or the elaborate spectacle of
a Gladiator (2000).

Event-films, paradoxically, do not need to be perfect or seamless. It is in fact

better if they are somewhat excessive and unresolved, open to conflicting
interpretations. Primarily, they must touch some raw nerve in the mass imagination,
igniting a train of thought and feeling that mixes anxiety with delight, fear with
desire.

A.I. Artificial Intelligence – written and directed by Steven Spielberg from a

mountain of material developed by the late Stanley Kubrick – is variously weird,
confronting, magical, maddening and inspiring. As a blockbuster, it is wayward and
fascinating – fascinating precisely because not everything in it makes comfortable
sense, or fits together well. But it is incontestably a cultural event of the
highest order.

But first, another context. One of the most poignant, tearing moments in cinema
happens an hour into Henry Hathaway’s Peter Ibbetson (1935). This today little-
known Hollywood gem is a mystical romance about two people (played by Gary Cooper
and Ann Harding) who, cruelly separated for most of their lives, manage to meet up
and frolic, forever young, in their shared dreams.

It takes Coop, however, a little while to get this nocturnal transcendence trip
down pat. In his first dream vision while serving a life sentence in prison, his
lover materialises and moves, phantom-like, through the cell bars. He remains
stuck, cursing the illusion that is taunting him: “All this is a lie I’m dreaming!”
His ghostly companion coolly replies: “Don’t ask why. Just believe!”

Hope, blind faith, belief in dreams, the power of the human will to alter mundane
reality – these have become great subjects for cinema. Spielberg has in fact
devoted his entire career to taking such possibilism (as Denis Wood has called it)
(1) to delirious heights.

The three acts of A.I.’s futuristic story are carved from surreal displacements and
vast leaps in space and time. Act One is an intimate, family story concerning
Monica (Frances O’Connor), Henry (Sam Robards) and the robot child they adopt,
David (Joel Haley Osment, superbly cast) – a special prototype experimentally
implanted with the ability to develop emotions of love and belonging.

David’s evolution is rudely halted when the couple’s human son, Martin (Jake
Thomas), suddenly emerges from hospitalisation. Hurled into wild woods, David
enters Act Two of his journey, undoubtedly the film’s least successful section: a
Mad Max-style panorama of angry humans (orgas, meaning organic) hunting down and
brutally destroying discarded robots (mechas, for mechanical).

Act Three, which is reminiscent in some respects of the finale of 2001 (1968),
takes David through several remarkable voyages – including into the distant future
and under water, where New York sleeps after a new Ice Age has overtaken the Earth.

Where Ring (1998) is about a child’s almighty fury, A.I. is about unstoppable
longing. Time and again, David explains, whispers, prays or shouts his dilemma: if
he can become a real boy, then Mommy will finally love him.
But the clammy sentimentality of this premise is contradicted at every turn by odd,
startling or subversive complications. As a result, one watches the film in a
uniquely disturbed state: while our emotions are being mercilessly preyed upon, our
minds race to figure out what artistic process gave rise to such a tortuous
fantasy.

A.I. enacts the meeting of two artistic sensibilities that are, in virtually every
respect, antithetical. On certain levels of subject matter and style, a satisfying
blend of these sensibilities is achieved. But the most exciting parts of A.I.
register the split between them.

Kubrick has often been described as a cold, clinical, misanthropic filmmaker. In

fact, Jacques Rivette once went so far as to say: “Kubrick is a machine, a mutant,
a Martian. He has no human feeling whatsoever”. Rivette added, though: “But it’s
great when the machine films other machines, as in 2001”. (2)

There is no doubt that Kubrick and Spielberg worked toward a meeting of minds on
the project. Kubrick rightly saw that his Pinocchio-like parable was perfect
material for the director of E.T. (1982) and Hook (1991) – David is given the trait
of obsession for the tale of Pinocchio, which has thus passed, historically, from
Carlo Collodi to Walt Disney and hence, logically, to one of the contemporary
filmmakers most steeped in Disney’s ethos, lore and ideology. (3)

Many aspects of the tale surely resonate for Spielberg. He has often focused on
outsiders – children or aliens cut off from family and community. There is longing
for the old, patriarchal, family structures in his cinema, but also intense,
sometimes furious ambivalence (as in his Jurassic Park series): children who want
to disown and kill their parents, parents who want to exclude or murder their kids.
So, in his hands, A.I. becomes a monument to the striving to overcome the most
extravagant obstacles that a scary, troubling world can put in a child-outsider’s
path.

Spielberg, for his part, has scrupulously respected aesthetic procedures

fundamental to the maker of A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Dr Strangelove (1963) –
such as his tendency to break stories into long sections or plateaux that leisurely
explore a particular premise.

Earnest speculation has raged as to which elements of the film originated with
Kubrick and which have been added by Spielberg. One theory, for instance, runs that
Gigolo Joe (Jude Law), David’s handy, robot companion in Act Two, was envisioned by
Kubrick as a darker, dirtier creature. Spielberg insists that Kubrick’s notes in
this regard were sketchy and that he needed to elaborate the character himself.

In the wash-up, Joe starts out as a devilish imp and quickly metamorphoses into a
lovable sidekick, complete with Fred Astaire dance moves – the kind of reassuring,
cartoonish figure beloved of Spielberg.

But if Joe can stand for the Spielbergian side of the film, the singularly
unnerving presence of Professor Hobby (William Hurt) at the heart of the story is
pure Kubrick. The more we find out about Hobby, the less we like him.

He is a demiurge like many scientists, creators and military officials in Kubrick’s

oeuvre – a man who would be God, recklessly and heartlessly assuming power over
life and death in the name of some grand, world-altering plan. The eventual
revelation of David’s true significance to Hobby serves only to render his plan
more chilling.

A.I. is a monumentally perverse film. Indeed, its wildest moments are enough to
make one imagine that Kubrick’s ghost has possessed Spielberg and made him twist
his usual, cloying sentimentality into something altogether stranger and more
disturbing. It is a spectacle reminiscent of Gilles Deleuze’s immortal fantasy-
vision of how philosophy (including his own) comes to be:

[I] conceive of the history of philosophy as a sort of buggery or, which amounts to
the same thing, a sort of immaculate conception. I imagined myself as arriving in
the back of an author and giving him a child, which would be his and which
nevertheless would be monstruous. That it really be his is very important, because
the author had to really say everything that I made him say. But it was also
necessary that the child be monstruous, because it was necessary to go through all
sorts of decentrings, slippages, breakages, secret emissions that gave me a lot of
pleasure. (4)

There are many niggly questions haunting David’s story, and they only become more
obvious and prominent as his cosmic chronicle presses on. Firstly, there is the
synthetic, wholly static nature of David’s so-called love for Monica – an imprinted
emotion which, as Hobby rightly predicts in the opening scene, creates a being
“caught in a freeze frame”.

Then there is David’s evident mother-fixation. A.I. may well be the most starkly
Oedipal tale in cinema history. At the high point of David’s dream of being the
sole repository of Monica’s love, he even muses pleasantly: “No more Henry, no more
Martin …” And the final scene, in this light, is nothing short of mindboggling.

Then there is the question of humanness itself, which I suspect was Kubrick’s
guiding theme as he developed the project. His interest in this topic goes deeper
than the usual Star Trek-style orientation towards aliens, androids, and the
evolution of the human species – although that is a level on which the makers of
2001 and Jurassic Park (1993) do indeed meet.

A.I. becomes more intriguing once we recall that human beings were always rather
strange and precarious entities in Kubrick’s cinema. For starters, the
psychological individual of today is only a historical blip for Kubrick, positioned
somewhere between swirling amoeba and the formless Star Child at the end of 2001,
living beyond the strict co-ordinates of time and space.

Even within the seemingly naturalistic boundaries of psychological drama, Kubrick

was always at pains to present humans in defiantly anti-humanist ways: as animals,
machines, or crazy interfaces of material bodies and irrational drives. (5)

As has often been noted, Kubrick’s clinical view of humanity led him to a
paradoxical level of tenderness and compassion. Only he could present entirely
manufactured creatures – like the computer HAL in 2001 or the walking, talking
Teddy in A.I. – as a story’s most intriguing and even delightful characters; only
he would envision base, obsessive, paranoid jealousy (in Eyes Wide Shut, 1999) as
the most essential and universal human trait.

A.I. takes this Kubrickian investigation of humanity to its most extreme and
deliberately confusing point. The story presents its nominal humans as primarily
driven by ego – expressed in a boundless desire to be loved and worshipped (Hobby:
“In the beginning, didn’t God create Adam to love him?”). As to the emotions of
which mechas are ultimately capable, the film remains resolutely ambiguous to the
very end.

Taken from the Kubrick angle, A.I. is the ultimate exercise in “a machine filming
other machines”. Almost no one in this story is real, in the old-fashioned, flesh-
and-blood sense. Phantoms, simulations, clones, spirits, mere images take the place
of people. Spielberg has reached this path, less intellectually, through another
route: through high-end special and digital effects processes. Putting these
orientations together, A.I. takes the simplest gestures and interactions – like
sharing a laugh at the family dinner table – and makes them look utterly strange
and unfamiliar.

What is David’s journey, finally? Does he truly become human by the end? Two
further, fundamental doubts eat away like termites at the heart of this familiar,
Spielbergian, Peter Pan tale.

The first involves the supposed uniqueness of humans. Spielberg pointedly inserts
some wise, benevolent aliens to sing the praises of this uniqueness, but Kubrick’s
scenario constantly and brutally undermines the notion – especially when Hobby
coldly tells David: “Are you one of a kind? No, but you’re the first of a kind”.

The second doubt signals Kubrick’s most inspired perversion of the Spielbergian
creed. The latter’s films, as I have already indicated, always preach the need to
believe in impossible dreams – and they use every cinematic resource available to
involve the audience in that necessary leap of faith. This is what has long divided
those who acclaim Spielberg’s films as inspiring and moving from those who decry
them as sentimental and manipulative – and it is a debate which is almost
impossible to ever adjudicate, given our intractable subjectivities as cinema
viewers.

A.I. overflows with situations, words and events that keep rubbing our noses in the
illusory, artificial nature of such dreamy beliefs – from Joe’s ability to
literally merge the categories of fact and fairy tale, to the unforgettable
apparition of a magical Blue Fairy that is in fact a tacky, Coney Island statue.
The hand of the faithless, always sceptical Kubrick is surely at work in the moment
when a devastated David watches this tacky icon slowly crumble into a thousand
pieces.

As a net result, it is impossible to simply watch this film; rather, one gets
caught in its trap, alternately moved by the extreme pathos of David’s story and
then chastened by the evidence of its underlying trickery. Although it’s some kind
of fairy tale, it’s certainly not made for children, or at least not the kind of
innocent, child audience Spielberg sometimes aims for – because it’s (to borow the
title of a splendid cartoon segment) a fractured fairy tale.

For every lush image of transcendence which is so vividly offered by A.I., there is
a complementary image of loss, abandonment, dissillusionment or death. This is the
ambiguous spin in which the film leaves us, no doubt mirroring the war within
Spielberg’s own sensibility as he tries to remain true to Kubrick’s legacy.

At the heart of the film, you can sense this constant war between Kubrick the icy,
sardonic misanthrope, and Spielberg, the incurable optimist, the dreamer with an
idiot grin. Spielberg’s only recourse is to take his little hero even deeper into
the realm of wish-fulfilment fantasy. As David frolics with a phantom of his mother
in a heavenly home more fantastic than anything Peter Ibbetson ever had a chance to
visit, the typical Spielbergian dream-come-true is simultaneously affirmed and
completely folded in on itself.

This may not be the drama which A.I. intended to convey, but it is the one that
makes it a rich, unmissable movie.

MORE Spielberg: Catch Me If You Can, The Color Purple, The Lost World, Saving
Private Ryan, Schindler's List, The Terminal, Munich

1. See Denis Wood, “No Place for a Kid: Critical Commentary on The Last
Starfighter”, Journal of Popular Film and Television, Vol. 14 No. 2 (1986), pp. 52-
63. back

2. Frédéric Bonnaud (trans. Kent Jones), “The Captive Lover – An Interview with
Jacques Rivette”, Senses of Cinema, no. 15 (September 2001). back

3. For a brilliant discussion of what Disney did to Pinocchio, see William Paul,
“Art, Music, Nature and Walt Disney”, Movie, no. 24 (Summer 1977), pp. 44-52. back

4. Gilles Deleuze, “Letter to a Severe Critic”, cited and translated by Terence

Blake, Agent Swarm, 12 July 2016. back

5. I am indebted, on this point, to Dana Polan, “Jack and Gilles: Reflections on

Deleuze’s Cinema of Ideas”, Art & Text, no. 34 (Spring 1989), pp. 23-30. back

© Adrian Martin September 2001

filmcritic.com.au
Dark City
5-6 minutes

Although he is sometimes disparaged as an MTV era director, I am drawn to the films

of Australian-born Alex Proyas. His impeccable sense of how to fashion a film as a
design object – an integrated arrangement of sets, costumes, special effects and
figures in a landscape – meshes with his taste for the modern narrative forms found
in today's graphic novels (i.e. comic books for adults).

Proyas' previous film The Crow (1994) is the acid test for any filmgoer. Its
sweeping vision of a neo-medieval cityscape is contained within the barest and
least appetizing of plots – basically, a series of ingenious, gory murders
committed by an obsessed, undead anti-hero. In content, The Crow is only one degree
away from the trashiest stalker-slasher movie – and yet it works, in part because
of this disconcerting, stripped-down storyline.

The troubling mixture of highbrow and lowbrow elements again takes hold in Dark
City, an extravagant fantasy/sci fi conceit. Each night, as a spooky clan of
Strangers engage in a collective dream called the Tuning, the dark city of the
title is literally re-fashioned: new architectural structures arise to displace and
reshape the existing ones.

The citizens of this city are subject to massive mind-control – they are only ever
dimly aware that the world around them is changing. Of course, in the tradition of
THX 1138 (1971) or Gattaca (1997), it only takes one brave, rebellious individual –
in this case, John (Rufus Sewell) – to start unravelling the entire, malevolent
conspiracy.

Dark City's three writers (Proyas, Lem Dobbs and David Goyer) appear to have each
contributed a different layer of references and plot structures. The film is indeed
an odd patchwork: memories of '40s film noir, Metropolis (1927), Blade Runner
(1982) and Tim Burton's Batman movies collide with an unmistakably erudite reading
of Freud's famous Rat Man case-study – not a bad model for paranoid plots.

Characters who are little more than types or would-be icons fill this gloomy, urban
landscape: Frank (William Hurt), the tersely spoken detective with his generic,
stylish hat; Emma (Jennifer Connelly), chanteuse with a heart of gold; Walenski
(Colin Friels), a man driven mad by his brush with the terrible truth underlying
daily reality.

It is not hard to see, with figures like these, why Proyas is often accused of
being incapable of spinning old-fashioned tales with characters you can care about.
But Proyas belongs to a different and more challenging tradition: like the French
team of Jeunet and Caro (The City of Lost Children, 1995) or Walerian Borowczyk
(Goto, Isle of Love, 1968), he invites us less into a story than a world, offered
up in such a way that we can wander its streets and explore its contours for an
entire movie.

Proyas is not exactly an avant-garde artist like Orson Welles, using the machinery
of big-budget production for his own, experimental ends. Parts of Dark City show
him straining towards the same pat resolutions and emotional highpoints achieved by
run-of-the-mill movies. In particular, Proyas runs away from the most chilling
premise of his story: that the memories, desires and very personalities of the
characters are, to some extent, preprogrammed by the mind-warping Strangers. Total
Recall (1990) foundered on a similar premise.

Dark City vacillates constantly between art movie aspirations and cruder, action-
film clichés. To some viewers, this indecision will register as a fatal flaw. To
me, it results in a weird, fascinating and highly enjoyable hybrid.

In fact, the film is very much like a graphic novel in this respect; it mixes a
sometimes adolescent sensibility with flashes of conceptual brilliance. One thing
is for certain: Proyas is among those helping to build a bridge towards cinema's
future.

MORE Proyas: Garage Days, I, Robot

© Adrian Martin August 1998