‘A.I.’: Lessons From a Robot Boy and His Mother

Many of the greatest science-fiction films have portrayed a person’s heroic struggle to separate out from stultifying group mind and become a self-aware individual. Whether it’s “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” or “The Matrix,” science fiction at its best highlights the discovery and safeguarding of true self in a false-self, “pod-person” society. It is the very same struggle that each of us faces today in our soul-killing, corporate culture, breast-fed to us from the first moments of life.

In line with this tradition, it’s easy to understand Steven Spielberg’s fascination with the Pinocchio story, in which a wooden (false self) doll struggles to become a real boy (true self). Both his classic film, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” and his current film, “A.I. Artificial Intelligence,” include pronounced references and themes from the Pinocchio story.

What’s much harder to understand is why in “A.I.,” Spielberg has twisted the Pinocchio story so that it ends up portraying a robot child whose only desire for realness is to become accepted by a “mommy” who has cruelly abandoned him.

I find it deeply troubling that the L.A. Times coverage of “A.I.” has, like Spielberg, ignored the implications of such a tortured narrative.

“A.I.” illustrates the journey of a “wooden” robot child named David, who quickly grows more human by learning to express a wide range of emotions, including humor, fear, remorse and despair. But in a painful echo of our own cultural rules, David’s “programming” to unconditionally love his mother at all costs is the very thing that will eventually prevent him from becoming fully real.

Still, early in the film, when his mother viciously abandons him, David demonstrates his growing humanity by painfully expressing the terror of being left alone. Yet he seems completely unable to recognize the cruelty with which his mother has deserted him, and he never once expresses any hurt or rage toward her. This makes no sense, since in most other regards, David is quite capable of sophisticated thinking and feeling.

Toward the end of the film, David even demonstrates his ability to express rage, but it is symbolically turned in on himself, when he violently destroys another robot child who is his identical “twin.” This becomes more overt a few minutes later when he attempts to kill himself, still plaintively calling for his beloved mother.

Perhaps here Spielberg is intentionally portraying the severe kind of denial that victims of childhood abuse commonly experience. Instead of giving voice to their true feelings of hurt and rage toward the perpetrator, victims will often idealize their abuser and hate themselves. But then the film director misses a crucial point: An essential aspect of healing for abuse victims is to bring up the true feelings of rage, appreciate their validity, and redirect them away from the self toward the abuser.

This requires breaking a strong cultural taboo against anger at a parent, and here Spielberg seems too weak to challenge this prohibition for the sake of his protagonist. The fundamental problem with “A.I.” is that this key process of healing and “getting real” never occurs for David. Instead, Spielberg assaults us with a “sweet” reunion between David and his mother where there is not the slightest mention of how she abandoned him. It’s one of the most heinous whitewashings of abuse ever portrayed on screen.

The film’s final intimations that David has successfully resolved his relationship with his mother and achieved a kind of true individuality ring hollow because this essential aspect of his healing and growth is absent. Not only does the scenario utterly compromise the impact of the film, but it acts as tacit approval of the rampant child abuse that dehumanizes our society.

How ironic that elsewhere in “A.I.,” Spielberg overtly references issues of abuse and the oppression of minorities. Furthermore, in its setting and plot line, the film is written as a warning to us humans that if we don’t get our act together (i.e., by stopping global warming), we will die off as a species with only intelligent robots left to remember us.

By whitewashing child abuse in his film, Spielberg ends up contributing to the problem rather than imagining a solution. It appears that his own allegiance to the family system blinds him to the painful reality that much of the worst oppression occurs at home. And the last thing moviegoers need is to be subjected to a film that ultimately supports repression of true feeling even as it purports to be a meditation on authenticity and individuality.