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“Artificial Intelligence”
Steven Spielberg’s 2001 sci-fi film, Artificial Intelligence, is a flawed and somewhat incoherent movie, done in the slow, portentous style and conveying the well-worn alienated mood of the late director Stanley Kubrick, who had originated the project but had not yet started filming at the time of his death. Despite the movie’s defects, however, it offers some thought-provoking material for conservatives. The story takes place in an unspecified future time in which a highly advanced robot is developed that resembles an 11-year-old boy, and who is adopted (or rather purchased) by a couple whose own son has died. The robot boy’s only function is to love. But there’s a catch: he doesn’t just love but wants to be loved himself. Furthermore, his demand for love is not human, but an unnatural fixation on just one person—his adoptive mother—and totally demanding of her total attention. The problem is that since the boy is not a real human being but a robot, he can never receive the love he wants. And this is where the movie gets interesting in ways that may not have been intended by its makers (which is also true of the robot boy himself). The robot boy demonstrates the consequences of man’s becoming his own god and creating his own human being, a self-maintaining (as well as ageless and immortal) human system. One result is cosmic alienation. Late in the movie, the whole human race has died and thousands of years have passed and the robot boy, who had been in a state of suspended animation in a submarine at the bottom of the ocean, is rescued by beings from another planet who want to study him to find out about the race that once lived on this planet. The pathos of the situation is that the boy is now the single existing carrier of whatever remains of the human—yet he is only a synthetic artifact of one aspect that makes a human being, the desire for love. Because he was not born into a natural and social world in which be belongs, because he is totally self-sufficient in physical terms (needing neither to eat nor sleep), he’s not a part of anything. Yet at the same time he still has these human longings which cannot be met, which also has the effect of rendering him utterly out of place in the universe.
Artificial Intelligence dramatizes the existential emptiness, alienation, and horror that result from modern man’s attempt to create his own world, his own self-sufficient political and technological systems, even his own self-sufficient man, rather than living as part of a larger world that precedes and structures his own existence. Email entry |