A.I. Artificial Intelligence

The entirety of this film's impression hangs on a single conceit: "Is having a child worth it if you can't love them the way they will implicitly love you?" I have struggled in my life with my decision to never have children. I had a rough childhood, that much is certain. I saw my mother and her failures both physical and spiritual, and her weaknesses, both emotional and sexual, and I knew from around the time I was thirteen years old that I could never, ever bring a child into this world. How would my own child feel if I made those same mistakes? Would they be more or less forgiving than I was to my own parents? I would wager they would be even more unforgiving than I was, for the fact that with every new generation, we know better than the ones that came before. I should know better. And in not knowing the difference, I would became the same kind of different, the same kind of abuser, the same malcontent begging for forgiveness. And in the absence of God, the absence of morality, I would find myself begging on my knees for something I never knew. It's hard to describe the feelings, even now, with the galaxy-sized distance between my mother and I, but I remember the pain of all the things I was told. "You'll never be my daughter", "You'll never be pretty", "You're killing my child", et cetera. All the little things she said, all the bigger things, they represented for me the truth in a fallacy I was all too eager to believe in: Love is conditional. It was my position that only a child can espouse the notion of "unconditional love" because after a certain point, conditions always arise. Whether they be internal or external factors, whatever string takes us through this life, things happen that cause us to become more aware, more intelligent, more keen to myriad human frailty. What if your mother/child was a murderer? What if they committed grievous, unforgivable sins? Could those conditions matter not in the face of a spiritual armada? I became the proof of this paradigm as more than a fallacy, because even now, I do not love my mother. I don't know if I ever could after all she did in the name of God, motherhood and power. I must make known here that the main sadness of my life has been the loss of my mother's love. And like David, our robot boy who dreams of being real, I was a woman who dreamt of being real, because then I too could receive that affection. I tried so hard, did everything I could to be seen as my mother's daughter and not as my mother's son. But like A.I.'s protagonist, who watches his mother choose her "real" boy over her "artificial" one, I felt that pain. I felt that heartbreak. I felt that loss. I haven't seen too many critiques on this website or indeed elsewhere debating the matter, but for me, the unintentional transgender dots are all too easy for me to connect and grasp on to. The notion of the outside world's perception conflicting with how you truly feel and see yourself is familiar, due and devastating. Not to mention the subtext involving the Mechas that look distinctly nonhuman versus David's "real" look (read: passing privilege). Obviously, these are not intended by the film's creators, but like I said, they are impossible for me to unsee or unfeel. What strikes me most about A.I., Spielberg and Kubrick's mammoth journey into their shared consciousness, is that in their film, love is a construct not human, but artificial. Love is just that—a thought, a created variable, a cosine to be accounted for in the grand scale of the universe. Love is a particle that builds a bigger world, that transcends time, or even the frozen death of the human race itself. It will always exist even when there is nothing. And it does so for the simple reason that math will always exist in a vacuum. And because love is part of the universe's formula, Spielberg asserts that it cannot be destroyed or removed. It's elementary, really: Humans are the most powerful species the universe has known, and even when we are dead, we will leave our love behind. Anyone else getting teary-eyed? Of course, the film's most powerful moments are its penultimate ones. The back end of this movie takes great, challenging risks in its narrative, ones that seem to have eluded many charitable readings upon its release in a soon-to-be tragedy-stricken 2001 America. These narrative decisions, as bold and earnest as they appear to be on the surface, manage to confirm my initial thoughts surrounding A.I. as a movie. My main thesis of contention is that this film has an emotional breadth to it that is frankly astonishing. And sure, it is easy to point out the film's interest in fairy tales, in the Pinocchio yarn, in the distinctly Japanese style of merging the dream with the heart, but all of these factors bring with them a truth and logic to the ideas of what is real and tangible in such a mysterious and ever-changing world. But the idea of a boy doing anything to receive love as opposed to give it, well, if that doesn't tug on your heartstrings, you are without a soul. And in a movie where robots seem to have souls, that's a pretty low fucking bar. To conclude my thoughts most poignantly, A.I. speaks to the world we live in, and as well the world of the future. It speaks to the most common ideas, the most prevalent fears in our society. It wails an aria of yearning, of longing, for the most basic of human feelings, and its heights and beautiful peaks crushed me in my soul, for it dared to put me as a viewer in the position of a child, something that I'll never be again. It asked me how far I would go, how distant I would travel to love my parent, something I'll never do again. And as I sat there after this movie ended, I was left with the the final truth that there is nothing I wouldn't do, there's nothing I wouldn't give, nothing I'd ache for more than to bring myself the moments in life I was deprived of. I would pray to a Blue Fairy for two thousand years the same as David did, I would freeze myself if it meant that my mother would love me they way I should have been. To see him receive that catharsis at the hands of the artificial beings of the future, was all it took to cry harder than I ever have at a film in my life. For that reason, there can be nothing left to do or say than to give this film a perfect rating.