 | | | Spielberg Symposium
CONNECTIVE TISSUE
By Michael Koresky Outright public rejection marked Steven Spielberg’s 2001 career benchmark. The most financially successful American filmmaker had taken on A.I. Artificial Intelligence, one of the many pet projects of the late Stanley Kubrick, and given that the science fiction opus was actually a spiritual reimagining of Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, the transition from Kubrick to Spielberg seemed bold, yet natural; some couldn’t wait to see how the two directors’ sensibilities would be juxtaposed to create a tantalizing one-of-a-kind spectacle, perhaps retaining Kubrick’s calculated, circular irony (deemed pessimistic), as well as Spielberg’s childlike longing (regarded as immaturity). Directly due to those generalizations, the film found its undoing, not just because of public expectation, but of preconceived notions about the directors’ “worldviews,” as if Kubrick and Spielberg’s bodies of work had not each shaped diverse cinematic roadmaps to shared human understanding. Both directors have countlessly tread upon the light and the dark. Surely, Kubrick’s characters are defined and trapped by their environments (Dr. Bill Harford, Barry Lyndon, Jack Torrance) while Spielberg’s find a way to break from strict societal parameters and emerge as individuals (Celie, Elliott, Oskar Schindler). Yet to create such a black-and-white separation between the two filmmakers is an effrontery to not just their craft, but their profound awareness of human interaction, its perils and consolations. To suggest that Kubrick’s schematic mise-en-scène is not as “manipulated” as Spielberg’s more situational sentimentality, is erroneous. A.I. Artificial Intelligence was commonly dismissed as a “Frankenstein’s Monster,” a misshapen piece sewn together from chunks of a Kubrick and Spielberg greatest hits package. The existent disparities between the two rather represent a reconciliation of popular American filmmaking.
The media and public, so desperate to define A.I.’s rich, thought-provoking text, treated the film as a Kubrick epitaph rather than what it actually was: a mid-career summation of a decidedly Spielbergian history, a vivid coalescing of the hopes, desires, dreams, and nightmares which have formed his oeuvre. Often accused of simplistic emotional manipulation by detractors, Spielberg unveiled A.I. as a vision true to Kubrick’s unorthodox plot trajectory, yet more importantly, as an uncompromised Spielberg allegory. In no way distilling Kubrick’s view of a dubious, doomed humanity, Spielberg used his own recurring childhood-centered imagery to shed an essential spiritual light on the deceased director’s devastating forward-looking ruminations, which had admittedly been in the pop consciousness since the Sixties. Spielberg uses the Kubrick nexus to his full advantage, creating his purest cinematic realization of the powers and limitations of the childhood imagination. It is therefore essential for us to now set Kubrick aside, and to recognize A.I. as Spielberg’s own: a refinement of his themes, and as a bridge to the heretofore existent gap in his unpredictable, expansive career.
A science-fiction parable about the extinction of the human race, Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence ultimately does nothing less than allegorically connect the two distinctions of the director’s career: the socially conscious realism and the fairy-tale hopefulness. As so many of his earlier fantasy films showed an conclusive utopian balance between the dimensions, A.I. presents a shockingly dystopian future America in which there is no harmonious finale, no reconciliation between the otherworldly beings and the wide-eyed earthlings desperate for love, such an overpowering resolution in both Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. the Extra Terrestrial. In A.I., it is the alien who is in desperate need of love, yet cannot find any emotional catharsis from a corrupt society. With the character of David (Haley Joel Osment, tender yet terrified, his plasticine features a transparent reflection of the human condition) the android created by the same humans that eventually fear and loathe him, Spielberg has happened upon the vessel which unites the disparate elements of his films, conjoining Schindler’s List’s horrific realization of our world’s evil, with E.T.’s unclouded, child’s eye-view of racial optimism.
Within the first half-hour of A.I., Spielberg stages what might be the defining sequence of his entire career. After initially unable to accept David as a replacement for their comatose son Martin, the deceptively maternal Monica (Frances O’Connor) warms to the astonishingly lifelike robot as one would a family pet. Monica quickly flips past the warning sign on the Cybertronics booklet which states that once the child is activated, the imprint is permanent and irrevocable (in fact, the camera barely registers all the text…on the small screen, it’s helpful to pause the image), and rather impulsively begins to program David. Her hand on the back of his neck in an automated yet tender gesture, the room flooded with shafts of “Spielbergian” light reminiscent of both the benign and terrifying otherworldly invaders from Close Encounters and Poltergeist, Monica utters a succession of nonsense words (tulip...dolphin...hurricane...) ending with her own name. The imprinting is complete. David’s face falls in quiet exhilaration of this initial, pitifully brief sampling of human love. He calls Monica “mommy” for the first time and collapses in her appreciative arms. A hopeful beginning to a tragic tale, it is the moment of all rash conception, the immediacy of emotion without consideration of consequence. To Monica, David may still be the family pet, but to David, Monica has given birth. As the mechanical boy’s papers warned, the imprinting is irreversible. What’s most jarring about the scene, and the film as a whole, is its juxtaposition of David’s aching purity with his cold, ambiguous environment. Never before has Spielberg created a portrait of a love so devoted and so single-minded that it is finally trapped by its surroundings. This dichotomy is further reflected within the film’s structure, a drastic split in halves which posits E.T.’s poignant, domestic transcendence within Schindler’s List’s methodical, fascist terror.
The android’s love is never returned to him—David is hardwired into a human race that has lost the ability to connect. The first hour of the film is set almost entirely within the confines of the Swinton household, a frigid, domestic space marked by opaque glass dividers and antiseptic wooden surfaces. Yet to David, this is heaven. Even as his revived adopted stepbrother, Martin, full of childhood’s jealousy and selfishness, attempts to make it impossible for David to remain in Monica’s favor, David (and the audience) remains hopeful that he can win her back. In the early scenes of dinner table interaction, the family attempts for a rapport as natural and fluid as those between Elliott and Michael and Gertie in E.T., yet the process is here strained. Though E.T.’s family dynamic is still injured from the heartache of divorce, trying to carry on with this newfound separation, the Swintons of A.I. cannot function with this newfound addition. Believing that David may be dangerous, particularly towards the manipulative Martin, Monica does cast David out of his paradise, abandoning him in the middle of the woods rather than returning him to Cybertronics for dismantling. Within this sequence, the film’s most harrowing, Spielberg surpasses E.T.’s tearjerker death scene in its implications of the impossibility of the parent/child relationship, and manages to avoid viscous sentimentality. As the first half of the film fades out to blackness, so does the spectator’s perception of lingering domestic comfort. Along with David, we are abandoned, and as we have been shown nothing beyond the Swintons’ ivory walls, we must finally discover what lurks in the environs of this unknown external world. David’s final pleading cries to his “mother” are that if he can find the Blue Fairy and become a real boy, then perhaps she will love him and allow him to come home. Monica tearfully, hatefully responds, “I’m sorry I never told you about the world.” Thus, the Spielbergian bridge is gapped—between familial utopia and grim, environmental nightmare; between fairy-tale optimism and cold, 21st-century skepticism.
After such a drastic, accomplished mood shift (fade out on Osment’s horrified innocence, fade in on Jude Law’s synthetic beauty, Gigolo Joe), Spielberg creates a dystopic future world not dissimilar from those found in previous science fiction films from A Clockwork Orange to Blade Runner, this time the apocalypse being heralded by the melting of the polar ice caps, leaving the Manhattan skyline drowned in its own metropolitan glory (a shivery, prescient image, the impact of which is deepened, not diminished by September 11th). Moving past the cold political agendas of those other science fiction extravaganzas into a bold, emotional sense of loss, a deeper dread emerges, as Spielberg stages the Flesh Fair sequence, a hideous, grandiose homage to the debasement of humanity. David and Gigolo Joe are captured, along with many other disfigured robots, older models, and forced to participate in the terrifying violence of the Flesh Fair, a massive road show in which American families can watch as robots (“mechas”) are torn limb from limb, chainsawed in half, or melted by buckets of steaming acid.
How did we get here? We feel torn from the womb and instantly dropped into the middle of the jungle. The confused terror writ on Osment’s face mirrors the audience’s disorientation; we wish for a moment to become mecha, if only that “someone could switch off our pain receivers” (as an antiquated model pleads as he’s being carried away for mutilation). Its harrowing imagery reminiscent of Schindler’s List’s liquidation of the Krakow ghetto sequence, the Flesh Fair is Spielberg’s supreme encapsulation of the human racist urge, a gruesome spectacle recycling imagery from Inquisitional torture to African-American lynching (Spielberg boldly chooses the first android death to be the burning and decapitation of a ghastly lawn-jockey-ish black robot, with a toothy grin from ear to ear). “Purge yourselves of artificiality!” the monstrous, Stromboli-esque emcee (Brendan Gleeson) screeches to the crowd of bloodthirsty American spectators, urging them to get in touch with their basest instincts. Though the setting couldn’t be more different, Spielberg had set the stage for this sequence much earlier in the film, when David was still immersed in what is now the faint memory of familial bliss. At Martin’s birthday party, David had been surrounded by his stepbrother’s little friends, each one poking and prodding at his skin. As one points definitively back and forth between them, saying “I’m Orga(nical), you’re Mecha(nical). Orga; Mecha. Orga; Mecha...” and so on, it becomes racism’s primal scene, the moment in the schoolyard when one’s racial indentiy and therefore, other-ness, is defined. And the fact that David is not allowed in the water while the other children are happily frolicking reminds one of the prevalent segregated swimming pools that once represented distorted American ideologies.
David’s walking racial metaphor situates the idealism of E.T.’s ethnographic other-ness within the newsreel horror of the Schindler holocaust, with the Flesh Fair itself encompassing the historical demarcation that separates the civilized and the bestial. Although David’s terrified pleading for his life appeals to the crowd, he and Joe only narrowly escape this unforgettable whirlwind of suffering. In Schindler’s List, the fact that the protagonist is a benevolent savior does not diminish the impact of the Holocaust imagery, and the same is true of A.I. As David and Joe emerge unharmed, the camera pans up to catch the irony of the entrance sign, “Flesh Fair: A Celebration of Life”. This permeates the remainder of the film, this first true introduction to the outside world and its inhabitants. The mechas are the pursued, outcast minorities—no place will be safe.
Spielberg’s clarity of vision reaches far beyond any simplistic interpretation. David’s search for his mother cannot be singularly identified within any Freudian definition or Christian allegory, though both are readily available. Spielberg recognizes David’s eternal reverence as religious parable, his “lifelong” search for the Blue Fairy visually connected to the Virgin Mary when he mistakes the two while searching the corrupt, Vegas-like environs of Rouge City. In A.I., Virgin Mary is Blue Fairy is Monica, the three coalescing in David’s mind, as well as on-screen.
The fairy-tale backbone is not as much a construct as it is deconstructed, a representation of the breakdown of genre norms, in order to find the solemn truth behind them. Within this world of despair (as disorienting as the first half hour of Saving Private Ryan, as perplexing as the crowded Shanghai streets in Empire of the Sun), Spielberg realizes that the fairy tale only exists in the child’s psyche, only his belief in its truth can impregnate the mythology itself. David’s singular faith in the Pinocchio story, in the Blue Fairy’s existence, becomes not only his quest, but Spielberg’s pilgrimage towards the essence of childhood.
And he gets there. In the film’s final half-hour, Spielberg unleashes something so transcendent, so spiritually shattering, that of course, it was deemed unacceptable by most viewers. After being buried underneath layers of oceanic ice, face-to-face with his deity, a Coney Island Blue Fairy replica, for 2,000 years, the eternally youthful David is excavated by Earth’s surviving race, pearly white syntheses of the mechanic and the organic that resemble Close Encounters’s extra terrestrials. By reading his mind, the advanced androids extract all of the warm memories which David had stored away, and can thus attempt to recreate his world for him. We are then placed back within the warm domestic confines of the film’s first half, yet Spielberg blankets a grainy haze over everything, creating a disorienting, creepy familiarity. “This is my house, but it looks different,” David wonders to the faceless life forms. It is different; it is all in his mind.
Finally, David is then allowed to see his mother recreated from a lock of her hair, yet she can only live for one day. No mere plot manipulation or ploy to wring tears from the audience, this final dramatic statement pushes A.I. into a level of subconscious awareness so profound as to be unprecedented within Spielberg’s entire body of work. Delving even further past Memento’s recognition of the impermanence of memory, these final moments between David and Monica, not her reincarnation as much as David’s sensual, altered ideal vision of maternal love, attain a heavenly composure. As the image of Monica finally states “I love you, David. I have always loved you,” David sheds a tear and does indeed become a real boy, the Pinocchio, fairy tale trajectory has come full circle. David’s emergence into fleshly existence is not done through miraculous wish fulfillment, but from a profound, human confessional; and the realization of mortality encroaches. As this is merely a memory of his mother, a passing, fleeting image, David must watch as she fades from him, dying in her bed. David, left on this precipice between life and death, between the pain of reality and the catharsis of remembrance, for the first time in his life, sleeps.
E.T. and Schindler’s List were box office behemoths, as both tapped into an urgent emotional reservoir for the American public. A.I. deepens those themes, yet people didn’t want to work at uncovering them. Schindler’s List’s essential historical agenda forced a populist audience to consider the magnitude and importance of memory and remembrance. A.I. capitulates and metaphorically uncovers the essence of that film’s argument: remembering is the key to our survival as a species. E.T. regards companionship and human interaction as life’s prime motivation. A.I. pushes this notion to its tragic, complex conclusion, agreeing yet recognizing its inherent impossibilities, recording David’s humanist need for such an emotional bond, yet positioning its idealized outcome as possibly all in his mind. David’s journey is never hindered by hesitation or subconscious doubt—David is all subconscious, single-minded and shockingly pure. Whether A.I. heralds a striking new shift in Spielberg’s career towards a dubious world view remains to be seen; the complex dualities of Minority Report and Catch Me If You Can certainly don’t clarify matters. Or perhaps after the two opposing sides of his career have been brought to a fitting atonement, he can look even further ahead. ++ |
