He looks like any other boy, though disturbingly so, because he is not really human, but a robot who had been programmed to love his human mother who adopts, and then abandons, him. His name is David. He lives in a distopian American future. And he is the star of the new Steven Spielberg movie, “AI: Artificial Intelligence,” released three weeks ago.
The flick, very simply, has flopped, or at least it has dropped from the box-office top 10. How could that be? How could a movie by a legendary director like Spielberg show such dismal ticket sales?
But we get ahead of ourselves.
When we go to the cinema, as those who take cinema very seriously will tell you, we go there not just to see movies, but to watch an art medium reflecting and refracting the ethos of our time, to encounter a work imbued with a sustained vision of who we are, writ large there on the screen, available to us all for communal reference.
To be sure, misgivings about the medium persist. Today, a century after movies began, with studios still driven purely by need to produce big box-office successes that translates into big bucks, cinematic art continues to occupy a contradictory position in American culture. Movies, in other words, continue to be at once tawdry diversions and powerful tools of special transformation. But whether they are escapist art (Pillow Talk,1959) or high art (Citizen Kane, 1940) and whether they are issues of deception (Exodus, 1960) or vehicles of truth (Grapes of Wrath, 1940), movies have never failed to absorb, almost by a process of osmosis, the dominant mood in American culture.
As America began to change in the mid-sixties, so inevitably did Hollywood, which at the time released topical and passionate films that probed, as it were, the American soul. These films spoke to and from audiences about their fears of a nuclear holocaust (Dr. Strangeglove, 1964), their vision of a technical future (2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968) the heart of darkness that was the American experience in Vietnam (Apocalypse Now, 1979), the alienation of a whole generation that grew up in the hyperactive sixties (The Big Chill, 1983), American involvement in the civil wars of Central America (Salvador, 1986), the avarice of high finance in the Reagan era (Wall Street, 1987), the havoc that a disgraced president left as his legacy (Nixon, 1995), and the drug problem that plagues America today (Traffic, 2001).
If each of these films — among many other cerebral productions that could be cited — had something seminal to say about America, it is because of their reception by the American public. Clearly, when audiences made these films popular by going to movie theaters to see them in droves, it was because their subject matter was responsive, however, spuriously, to their sensibility and collective consciousness.
All of which brings us back to “AI: Artificial Intelligence.”
What happens when a consistently successful director like Spielberg releases a three-hour movie about technology and the distant future, and the public stays away from it?
The answer, my dear Watson, is that “AI”, a parable for our computer-animated times, is yet another casualty of the American people’s weariness with information technology, tech stocks, and the burdensome relationship that they somehow suspect exists between them and the brave new world of the last decade.
Every film is a film for its moment. The cyber-fantasy action movie, the “Matrix,” for example, was successful (it grossed $171 mullion) because it was released at the height of the web-ascendant days of the dot coms, and, in a way, was an apt metaphor for the 1990s.
“AI”, however, arrived in the wake of the tech-stock meltdown and weariness by the public with the putative miracles of the new technology. Moreover, “AI” has an almost nihilistic vision of human beings (who perish before the end of the movie and are replaced by robots) with nary a human hero around to take on the sentient machine, as in, say, “2001: A Space Odyssey”, when Hal runs amok and an astronaut onboard pulls the plug and reduces him, or it, to a babbling fool, singing “Daisy”.
At the cultural critic John Naisbitt wrote in his much acclaimed book “Megatrends”: “Softened by the comforts that technology brings to our lives, fascinated by its gadgetry, reliant on its companionship, addicted to its steady delivery of entertainment, seduced by its promises, awed by its power and speed, Americans are intoxicated by technology. Technology feeds our pleasure centers physically and mentally, but its intoxication is squeezing out our human spirit, intensifying our search for meaning.”
No question about it. Technology has always been America’s utmost quest. But the quest has gone awry. Americans sense it, and when they bailed out of going to see “AI”, after taking a close look at the story, they were saying, perhaps, that technology’s seductive promises are not, after all, music to their ears.
As technology, in its pervasiveness, accelerates the pace of daily life of Americans, it fosters dependence, which necessitates relief, for which they all too often turn to — you guessed it — technology. (Hey, feel harried and stressed out? Why not reach for the electric massager?)
Two Sundays ago, a front-page story in the Washington Post began (that’s right, that was the lead) this way: “Intel Corp. is tying the debut of a super Pentium 4 chip to the launch of Windows XP. Component manufacturers are stockpiling high-end pieces. Computer makers are slapping “XP-ready” stickers on their machines. Software makers, in turn, are altering code to make their programs compatible with Microsoft Corp.’s redesigned operating system.”
You got a problem with that?
Trust me on this one: It will not be the meek, or the robots, who will inherit the earth, but us the technophobes.
