KU – I saw it at the Ziegfeld on opening night. I remember a Rex Reed quote pertaining to another film he saw, where he maintained, “I’m not affected by the audience.”  Well, when I saw A.I., it was the last 30 minutes or so when the hatred of the audience was palpable, I could feel the audience seething in dead silence, and it really affected me.

So I didn’t like the movie when it first came out. But there was some discussion of it on the Brian De Palma Forum that was interesting.

So I saw it again on my own and this time it not only worked but it really turned Spielberg around for me. This film convinced me that Spielberg was worth my complete, devoted attention.

MJR:  I was in college. I was a huge Kubrick-head. I had a professor at the time who was great, but he was going on about A.I. and how he would never see it because it was Kubrick’s project but Spielberg took it over, and Spielberg just wasn’t worthy. I was impressionable and thought the same, and frankly I hadn’t liked Spielberg since I saw E.T. as a kid. His name to me meant schmaltz, big budget corporate spectacle. So I never saw it when it came out. I also heard from my brother and other people that they hated it.

And then, later on, when I was a little older I came across other people I respected and had an appreciation of Spielberg and really liked A.I. I came around and checked it out – it was just a couple years ago. And I was blown away in ways that were deeply emotional and philosophical. But I was also profoundly agitated by certain things that were going on that I felt were classic Spielberg manipulation.

Also, one thing I want to put out is that Spielberg is the Michael Jackson of cinema - someone who has an innate brilliance in putting together the elements of mass entertainment into something truly exceptional. I’ll get into that more as we watch the movie.

KBL: I saw this opening night at the Sony Lincoln Square. I had read the reviews by A.O. Scott and Jonathan Rosenbaum which were highly favorable. Especially Rosenbaum’s which actually argued against what many other critics were saying, that Spielberg doing Kubrick was a disaster. Instead he claimed that they compensated for each other, Spielberg’s heart joined with Kubrick’s brain, or something. Anyway I saw it in a packed theater and near the end, like with Keith’s initial experience, the feeling among the audience was one of disbelief and ridicule. It was one of those rare weird experiences where you’re on a completely different wavelength than the people around you, and in a way I kind of felt like David in this movie, just alienated. But I left feeling like my mind had been blown, that a Hollywood movie had presented a slew of ideas about the nature and the future of the human race I had never thought about before.

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0:00 – KU: This is interesting because the voiceover here sets up the situation we see at the ending. So this is all a flashback, even though it’s set in the future.

0:03 – KU: And this is the first mindblowing moment. This girl’s face opening up! And for a director for whom it’s said there’s no sexuality to his aesthetic, here the way William Hurt puts his pinky in her mouth is very sexually invasive.

MJR: And also the way Hurt commands her to undress but then tells her to stop.

0:05 – MJR: And here with this mecha’s definition of love we are introduced to the idea of love being a mechanized set of behaviors.

0:07 – MJR: This film was recently discussed in this online forum called Videogum, and it was nominated for this contest they’re running about the worst film ever. And one argument against the film was “Why should we give a shit about this robot. It’s just a goddam robot.” But that’s exactly the point of this movie, is that it makes us give a shit about a robot.

0:08 – KBL – And beyond whether it’s a robot or a human, it’s an image on a screen that we’re responding to, which the film makes explicit by the end. So it’s not just about humanity vs. robots, but also about the movies, and how the make us feel. It’s an amazing paradox, how it’s about both these intense emotions and the mechanisms behind them.

0:09 – KU: If you look here in the office of Prof. Hobby, there are all these images of Grimm’s Fairy Tales in the back. They’re kind of done in the classic storybook way, prettified and made innocent. Which belies the horrific elements that you found in Grimm’s Tales, with people getting eaten or dismembered and stuff like that. And I think that’s relevant to this movie, because Spielberg is also trying to bring out the terror within this fairy tale of David.

This scientist here in the lab is Matt Winston, son of Stan Winston, the legendary special effects wizard.

0:10 – KBL: When I first saw this movie, I’m not sure what made me so focused on this, but I couldn’t stop finding references to other Spielberg and Kubrick movies. Like this first encounter of David is a visual reference to the ending of Close Encounters of the Third Kind with the skinny aliens backlit and emerging from the spaceships.

KU: Spielberg never focuses on people’s faces when introducing them, he focuses on parts of them that give you an inside sense of who they are. Like this tap of David’s foot gives you a peek inside his quirkiness.

0:11 – KU: Some people have an issue with some of the acting in this film.

MJR – Yeah, I do. This scene between the parents feels shrill and melodramatic. And their sterile bourgeois triteness. It’s kind of appropriate, but still…

KU: When she comes back in the third act as the reenactment of the mother she’s amazing.

0:12 KU: And this reflection shot of David projected onto the family picture, that’s brilliant Spielberg shorthand.

0:13 – MJR:  The mother is really crucial and yet the father is a peripheral, almost a silly man – ha even here she even calls him silly.

0:14 – KBL: William Hurt is more the father figure in this movie. Father not just to David but to a new race of beings.

0:15 – MJR – Some of these shots can be a little too on the nose. But part of it is a satire of this kind of middle class propriety and the narcissism that lies underneath it.

0:16 – MJR: I’m also not a big fan of the music in this film either. These weird modernist touches, although I guess they’re kind of Kubrickian.

KU – But it’s a kind of mix of Spielbergian, so it’s neither here nor there.

Look at what she’s reading here in the bathroom.

0:17 – KBL – The way Monica is acting here, it’s as if she’s the child and he’s the toy. And right now she doesn’t want to play with him.

0:18: – KU: this table shot – look at the way he’s framed. He’s visually separated from the others. And yet it’s also a halo.

KBL – Setting him up as the innocent.

KU – And also impressionable.

0:19 – MJR – I love how this movie makes explicit the whole process of childhood learning.

KU – It’s all so programmed, there’s almost nothing intuitive about it here.

MJR – And this approximation of human laughter is absolutely chilling.

KU – And there’s also the issue of how did David learn to respond by laughing in the first place? It must have been some kind of programming by Prof. Hobby. Or is it something he’s picking up in the moment with whatever intuitive abilities he has?

0:22 – KU: The way that she activates David to become her child, it feels like a spiritual exercise. The way that she touches him on the back of his head is like a shakra. And each word has a symbolic connection to the elements of our world and our existence:

Cirrus – clouds, the sky

Socrates – thought, ideas

Particle – material things

Decibel – sound

Hurricane – chaos

Dolphin – animals

Tulip – flowers

Monica – family

David – his name

0:24 – KBL: This is like a visual reference to Eyes Wide Shut. The parents dressed up to go out to a party.

MJR: If David has an Oedipus complex, I think you can say Monica has an Elektra complex – the female version of the Oedipus complex when he’s a toy and she’s getting off on him. She’s substituting her lost maternal love on to him.

0:26 – MJR:  I still think it’s incredible that this played in multplexes.

0:27 – KU: ah Teddy, one of the greatest things ever. And again this weird sexual thing with how his turn on switch is in his butt.

0:28 – MJR: “I am *not* a toy.” it’s weird how Teddy has more emotion than David.

0:29 – MJR: It’s amazing how David learns things about voice by channeling the voices of others.

KU: and how he frames on Monica’s hand  to express her emotional state – it’s so Spielberg.

0:30 – MJR: The thing that gets me about Martin is that he’s a dick. In any other movie you would have sympathy for this handicapped kid, and the way that Spielberg makes you sympathize for the robot over the handicapped boy is just perverse.

0:32 – MJR – Martin’s human cruelty is disturbing, but David’s purity is also disturbing. It’s shown to be problematic in a real human world.

0:33 – KU: Now we see David trying to describe his first memory. It’s this angel/bird figure. He remembers the statue outside the window of Prof. Hobby’s office.

0:34 – KBL – Thes shots are impossibly beautiful. Idyllic mise-en-scene, soft-focus and over-saturated colors.

MJR: And this was the film Spielberg made after Saving Private Ryan which was de-saturated.

KBL: Some audiences and critics might find it kind of kitschy, but I think that kitschiness is intentional, like a Sirk movie. It’s a comment on the idealized affluent lifestyle that we keep dreaming about. And Spielberg is making us aware of how manufactured it is.

0:36 – KBL: This dinner scene is interesting because on the one hand mechas have evolved beyond humans in that they don’t need food, and yet David feels a need to eat these veggies because Martin can do it. And there aren’t any words that are passed between Martin and David to convey this. It’s like insecurity is a virus that humans can spread easily to others.

0:37 – MJR – David’s face melting. What a fucked up shot!

KU – If that’s fucked up what happens next is even more fucked up with the scene of him getting fixed. This shot of his face drooping is really chilling and yet what’s really messed up is that it’s misleading. Because we’re trained to think that it’s a sign that he’s severely hurt, but in truth he doesn’t feel anything, not like humans do, and that face is just a facade. And here Monica reaches out to him as he’s getting operated on and him reassuring her that it doesn’t hurt. And she finds that even more disturbing than if he was in pain, because it’s not normal. She wants for him to have a soul.

MJR: And so do we. Because aside from David none of the other characters are that sympathetic. Purely because he’s so innocent.

KU: And that gets to the idea of infantilizing and idealizing the child, which is such an American fixation. And it’s perfect that Spielberg is the one making this movie. As well as the writer. He wrote the screenplay, his first since Close Encounters.

MJR: And this gets back at the Michael Jackson comparison. Michael Jackson was a wunderkind.- someone who can manipulate all our iconography and ideas about children and innocence and pop, and perform them in a way that comels us. Jackson’s extollation of childhood was as obsessive as Spielberg’s, and both were equally skillful about it.

MJR: Martin is using logic in a way that only humans can understand – this manipulative, political, exploitive way of using logic.

KBL – What this shows me is how much logic for human beings is an emotional thing. We all have our rational justifications for the things we do but ultimately they are driven by our feelings.

0:44 – KU: Another foreshadowing moment. David being left underneath the water.

0:45 – MJR: This is such a devastating scene. Just the utter neglect the humans have for David as they try to save Martin.

0:46 – KU: this is the eden thing in the story. And Adam was kicked out of the garden of eden because he bit from the fruit of knowledge

KBL – Whereas here David is being kicked out for wanting to feel.

MJR:  And picking up on your trend of finding Kubrick references. this moment kind of refers to The Shining. These letters being written obsessively. He wants to be find the right combination of words and sentiments to make Monica love him, and comes up with all these variations. First he says he hates
Martin, then says he loves Martin because he knows Monica loves Martin, so then he says he hates Teddy. He needs an other to pick on to make him look better. He’s becoming human in that he’s projecting his hatred onto others.

KBL: And this idea of evolution – when mechas eventually supplant humans, it’s because they learned from and have superceded humans. But then by the end the mechas have to go back to learn about being human.

KU: It’s the question asked by 2001 – of who came first, humans or aliens?

MJR:  Yes, “Who Made Who”… which is a reference to AC/DC… which is what powers David! It all comes together!

0:50 – KU: Here the emotion is so raw – it’s hard to watch this.

MJR: “a story tells what happens.” – This really gets at the paradox of stories, stories aren’t
real and yet they are to us.

KU: It’s the same power that’s in the stories in the Bible or other religions. And here you’re being told the origin story of the mecha – if David is to the Mechas what Christ , Buddha or King David are to their respective ideologies.

0:52 – MJR: and now we’re moving to introducing Gigolo Joe. David’s fall from eden segues to sexuality.

0:53 – KU: Oh my god, it’s Trixie from Deadwood!

0:55 – KU: The Ain’t It Cool News boys were so pissed off that this mecha sex slave was onscreen for less than a minute. She had been used in some of the posters so they thought they’d get to drool at her throughout the movie.

0:57 – KBL – Joe can’t do anything against this guy who framed him for the murder, since presumably mechas are programmed not to harm humans. And yet he has self-preservation instincts, given that he knows to cut out his ID tag.

0:59 – KU: The central motif of this film is the search for the Blue Fairy. And the Pinocchio story as told in this story becomes a story about the god myth. You believe in something that you’re never going to see for as long as you’re mortal. Why?

1:00 – KU: Spielberg here plant some pretty sly things about race, like this Black mecha putting on a white hand.

MJR: These effects here are pretty incredible.

KU: The ultimate Spielberg reference being turned on itself – with the moon from ET, one of the most joyous and awe-inspiring images in his career now an icon of fear and menace.

KBL: It also anticipates the spaceship in War of the Worlds that
sucks up and humans for fodder much like this one does with mechas.

KBL: David asks Teddy “What do we do now?” Teddy says “We run now” as if to acknowledge that this chase scene is an action movie cliche. And it’s funny to think that David isn’t familiarized with this cliche, that he has to ask what to do in this situation.

1:02 – KBL: Why is he refrencing Tron here? it’s kind of cheeseball.

MJR: What doesn’t fit the fabric for me is that the bikes are so fucking slow – how are they not catching up with the mechas?

1:04 – MJR: By this point David has become totally single-minded. If the idea that David is more human than human, then the problem is that it reduces this humanness to a single impulse.

1:05 – MJR: What was that, slow-mo?  That looked pretty bad.

1:06 – KU: Here’s the long tracking shot that gives you a full sense of the Flesh Fair.

KBL: It’s like a futuristic version of Monster Trucks Nite. It’s a weird scene in that Spielberg betrays so much spite and contempt for his audience. I mean, this is the most explicit reference to a movie audience that we see on screen, and they are nasty, brutish and reactionary.

1:07 – MJR: It’s another case of projection - taking his own anxieties about his audience and just putting it out there.

1:08 – KBL: The other thing about this sequence is that it kind of references Schindler’s List with all these Mechas being exterminated. And when you combine these two subtexts, the Holocaust and the action movie audience, it really becomes something perverse that encompasses everything Spielberg has done and has wanted to be, both a respectable Oscar winner and a popcorn thrillmaker. And maybe it comments on the fact that he took something like the Holocaust and packaged it as a mass audience entertainment.

MJR – So he’s implicating himself.

KU: And this image of Chris Rock’s face – it says so much about race in America.

KBL: What I just realized that creeps me out is that if these characters were real humans, this film would probably get an NC-17 rating for this sequence, but because they’re mechas we can watch them and not get too disturbed. But in the end they’re all images, so the distinction is in some ways illusory. Although the mecha nanny getting washed in acid goes close to over the line.

MJR: It’s just so ironic that this flesh fair that’s supposed to be a celebration of real authentic human life couldn’t be any more cruel and dehumanizing.

KU: What’s fascinating about this scene is that the audience ultimately gets confused over David’s humanity, just as we are. It’s easy to make an audience turn on a dime, which is what Spielberg is showing here.

KBL: And that makes this scene another Kubrick reference, which is Paths of Glory. Remember the German girl in the end of that film, how she’s forced to sing in front of a room of horny, catcalling French soldiers, and by the end they’re all crying, missing their mothers and loved ones.

1:12 – KU: Crucifix alert!

KU: This monologue by Brendan Gleeson, you kind of wonder how much these words are Spielberg challenging his audience directly - don’t you see that this boy is just an illusion, he’s nothing real? Don’t you realize how much you’re being manipulated. It’s like he’s having a moment against himself.

KBL: “Remember, we are only demolishing artificiality!” It’s like a Godard moment. Godard has been criticizing Spielberg for years, and now it’s like Spielberg is mimicking Godard with what Gleeson says to the audience here.  He’s occupying the position of his own critics.

MJR: “Let he is without Sim cast the first stone” – a pun.

KU: And they turn against the real human.

KBL: And they turn against Spielberg!

1:18 – KU: And now we get the whole backstory of Professor Hobby and why he made David the way he is.

MJR: Where’s his wife in all of this?

1:19 – MJR – I wonder how much this idea of individuality in this moment is something deep in Spielberg – that feeling of betrayal when you realize that you’re not the center of the world, and that you’re not going to find unconditional love.

1:20 KU: Gigolo Joe: “I know all about women.” Of course some would say that Spielberg doesn’t know anything about women. Which may be true some time, but not all of the time.

And the crassness of Gigolo Joe’s pitch here makes me think of Spielberg.  He also gets beaten up for being crass. Crass politicization, crass manipulation.

MJR: But I think there’s a real pain in that, because to be who he is he has to work within those dictates of commercial cinema. You feel that in this movie that there’s this artist who hates the marketplace in which he has to sell his art. The Flesh Fair I think is all about that.

1:22 – KU:  Listen to his pitch here. The only way he can relate to the world is by body.

1:23 – MJR: Look at how they enter the city, it’s the mouth.

KBL: These mouths are straight out of A Clockwork Orange -remember the furniture in the Milk Bar?

KU: And now they’re off to see the Blue Fairy, being Mother Mary – and it’s a prop.

1:25 – KU: “The ones who made us are always looking for the ones who made them.” That’s such a great line.

KU: And now they’re off to meet Dr. Know aka Robin Williams. Who has the perfect voice for a false god.

MJR:  I hadn’t thought until now of Jurassic Park being related to this movie. Things being brought back to life and running amok, and what happens when you use technology to mess with nature.

KBL: Except that in Jurassic Park it was a moral cautionary tale, whereas here it becomes an inquiry into the relationship between technology and nature.

1:27: KBL This scene speaks to me about the whole history of how human beings have tried to organize their world with different information and knowledge systems. And yet the way that we organize information just keeps failing us like it’s failing David now. There’s always some way for what we want to know to fall through the cracks of what we’ve set up.

MJR: And it’s also showing how knowledge is found through a dialectic process.

1:29 – KU: And so you combine the fact and the fairy tale.

1:30: KU: the way Robin Williams read this poem is beautiful. “The Stolen Child” by Yeats.

KU: Then we learn from this book that Professor Hobby is writing about how mechas are becoming orgas. in other words he’s prophesying, like the Old Testament prophets foresaw the Messiah, which David is in this story. He’s the new post-human being.

MJR: “that is why they call the end of the world “Man-hattan” – funny.

1:31 KU:  Man, that insistence, that child’s sense of entitlement, they just nail it here.

1:32 KBL: Gigolo Joe talking about how people love what he does for people, and yet that pleasure is disposable, just like Monica’s pleasure with David was eventually disposable.  Here I think is Spielberg making a distinction between art and entertainment. Because entertainment is endless gratification whereas art is what challenges us beyond what we simply want to enjoy.

1:33 – MJR: And again with David it’s also Spielberg nailing this narcissism we have. “I am human, I am the most special human there is.” We just think of what we want.

KU: And our toys will outlast us like cockroaches.

KU: If Spielberg reduces all of human and emotion into this infantalism and desire for love, ths pleasure, maybe it doesn’t speak for everything but it’s such a powerful drive that it cannot be ignored. So many films pander to that yet so few films dissect that.

MJR: God, another fifty minutes to this film. Most people at this point think we’re nearing the end by now.

KBL: Well if we’re going to hard-scramble everything else with our reactions to humans and robots, we’d might as well hard-scramble the three act structure.

KU: We had Genesis, we had the expulsion from Eden, we had the Jews in Egypt, and now we have the flood. so what’s the ending?

KBL: It’s the resurrection – he comes back to life in a kind of afterworld.

MJR: And that heaven is completely ersatz. And it’s a complete ego projection. So is this a combination of Freud and the Bible? Freud wrote this book on Moses and Monotheism, and in it he theorized that the story of the Bible was a play of Christianity upending Judaism. The son overthrowing the father and so on.

1:39 – MJR: A lot of Lacan is bullshit but there is a really compelling power to the central myth that Lacan puts out, of the mirror phase and recognizing yourself in the mirror.  Being both your body and the awareness and the perception of your body is such a profound moment.

1:40 – KBL: and this set of Prof. Hobby references the War Room in Dr. Strangelove. And it’s not an arbitrary reference. Prof. Hobby and Dr. Strangelove are both masterminds who inadvertently serve as architects for the end of humanity.

KBL: And David going apeshit, destroying his duplicate, it’s like the ape in 2001 smashing a bone in Dr. Strangelove’s War Room. Weird Kubrick mashup.

1:41 – KU: and here we get Prof. Hobby’s explanation of everything to David, and yet it’s clearly not enough. And it speaks to what James Ellroy said, that closure is bullshit.

MJR: And so here David has asserted his individuality and according to Prof. Hobby he gets his wish. Prof. Hobby tells him that he’s a real boy. And like you said, Keith, it’s not enough. But then even more chilling is that this realness can become commodified. That’s one of so many devastating things about this movie.

1:43 – KU: And just now David says, “My brain is falling out” and it’s just kills me, because i know exactly what he’s talking about.

1:45 – KU: Oh god, what a fucking image. He realizes now that he’s a machine. Is he going to realize that. Is he going to grow with that? Or is he going to go suicidal?

MJR: I love this packaging of all the Davids. As well as the female versions.

KBL: The silhoutettes are so creepy. This is all one take – from the point that he was approaching this face. Amazing.

1:47 – KU:  Here’s the bearing witness shot. Joe watching David from the copter. And look at how he shoots David’s fall reflected on Joe’s face. Like a tear.

1:48 – KBL: This is a bit too much.

MJR: These fish and the twinkling sound are a bit too much.

KBL: – Though one could say that Spielberg is acknowledging his schmaltzy side. He’s taking all the spielberg schmaltz and locating it and recontextualizing it in this story. Because in the end this is a fairy tale.

1:49 – KU: Here’s like the “trials of Job” moment when he realizes that he can go on.

1:50: KU:  Joe’s last line is amazing. “I am. I was.”

MJR: Isn’t that the perfect summation of the human life?

KU: And he ascends. Into destruction.

KBL: And now the Coney Island theme park.

MJR: There’s a deleted scene when David goes to Coney Island and gets a pint of Coney Island lager. And catches a Cyclones game. My god there’s another half an hour left in the movie.

1:52: KBL: And now another face matching moment, where his face merges with the Blue Fairy. It’s completely the opposite effect of the face matching with his replacement. He wants to meld with the Fairy. Instead of another being becoming you, here it’s you becoming another being. Steven Spielberg’s Persona.

1:53: KU: This is the total epitome of man’s spiritual yearning. A boy pleading and pleading to God.

And the persistence of it and the futility of it all at once.

1:54: KU: Now with this part the big fallacy people make with this section that these beings are aliens. But these are advanced mecha.

I remember when I saw this the first time, the entire theater was silent and all you could feel was
silent rage. All you could feel was anger around you.

KBL: I remember snickers of laughter, and just people being in disbelief that this movie would not end. It was like torture.

1:56- KBL: This vehicle, this box-thing. Look at the way it just floats away, like an application on a computer screen. This world that Spielberg is working in, in a sense it’s just images. And maybe that has to do with how our existence is increasingly becoming tied up in ethereal online versions of ourselves.

MJR: These mechas are perfect compared to humans, and yet they’re yearning for humans to complete something in them that they feel is missing. There’s still this yearning for another

KU: God, what other filmmaker has killed off the entire human race? Spileberg kills the entire human race in this movie.

1:58: MJR: This ending, literally it’s chilling!

1:59- KBL: The subtitles for the advanced mecha - I remember snickers about that among the audience- like on top of everything else, Spielberg is giving us a foreign movie.

2:00 – KU: Blue Fairy crumbles.  Your idol collapses. I remember my father telling me he bought my grandmother a Virgin Mary statue, and as he was bringing it to her he dropped it and it broke. And he was really shaken up by it, because he felt, “I’ve destroyed the mother of god.” It’s the emotions that we place into these objects and forms that matter more than the object. And also something about the sacred and the fragile coexisting.

KBL: What these Mechas do have is community. Look at how they share images with each other.

2:01 – KU: And here this scene is like 2001, the David in that movie wakes up in a room at the end.

KBL: The tone of this sequence grates on many people’s nerves as manipulation. But this manipulation in terms of Hollywood codes. This scene at the end is a total movie set.

MJR: This whole movie is inside of you, it’s a mirror bringing you out.

2:03 – KU: and we know who did the voice of the Blue Fairy - Meryl Streep – the greatest living movie actress.

MJR: And listen to how she tells him that he’s special and unique. It’s that narcissism gratified, but in such a perverse, chilling way.

2:05 – KBL: Teddy ex machina – the hair that brings the happy ending! Again, I remember the audience’s groans and howls at this.

MJR: That initial act of violence David enacted on his mother is what leads to her resurrection.

2:06 – KU: Look at this. David’s never cried before.

KBL: Maybe it’s condensation from his deep freeze?

MJR: I didn’t even notice that. By this point you don’t even notice the significance of that, because he’s so
convincingly human.

2:07 – MJR: It’s interesting that at this point David has a history of himself. We see him drawing pictures of his adventures with Joe.

2:08 – MJR: “Human beings must be the key to the meaning of existence.” Another expression of narcissism - narcissism of the human race.

KBL: And nostalgia.

2:10 – MJR: These mechas are the ultimate movie directors – god/ extrahuman omnipotent movie directors.

2:11 – KU: If I’m crying now they are very multifaceted tears. When I saw this the second time it just fucked me up.

2:12 – KU: It taps into the desire to see someone again who you can never see again.

KBL – Or relive a memory from your life that you hold so dear and whose passing you mourn.

2:12 – KBL The way Monica is shot here is so sexual – she’s beautiful in a sensual way.

2:13 – MJR – We talked about the saturation of the colors in the first act of the movie and now we’re seeing itagain – but this time Spielberg’s cued us in to an awareness of how this is being presented to us. And now we’re aware of how movies are stylized.

2:14 – KU: David is now an artist. Before he was only a writer, that earlier scene where he was writing the different letters to Monica. Now he’s drawing as well.

2:15 – KU: and here’s an E.T. moment. They’re hiding in the closet.

2:16 – KU: “David drew the shades without even needing to be asked.” That’s just chilling.  And David not wanting to blow out the last candle. simple iconic shit like that that he does so powerfully.

MJR: There is this weird thing of him wanting to do something with her. Just wanting to hang on to her.

This film is so much about time and that’s the great paradox of time that a moment can be everlasting and yet pass

2:17 – KU: Again, Teddy playing silent witness.

MJR: In the end, it’s an ersatz human being loving a recreated projection of a human being while being directed by advanced ersatz human beings.

KBL: Dreams being realized and extinguished at the same time.

CLOSING REMARKS

KU: This film Kubrick makes Spielberg strange, and Spielberg makes Kubrick strange. Kubrick’s cold intellect challenges Spielberg’s gut emotion, and vice versa.

MJR: I don’t understand Kubrick being described as a cold director. Eyes Wide Shut is a very human, emotion-filled movie.

KU – I think Barry Lyndon is a very warm movie.

MJR: Even if someone doesn’t like A.I., you have to confront this shit it stirs up, about myths, about desire, about humankind’s legacy.

KBL: We’re used to movies doing the work for us, telling us what to think and how to feel, but this one drops it all in our lap. it’s a movie that the more you think about it, and all its implications about who we are as humans, the more it disturbs you on a deeply emotional level.

MJR: It makes you look at the world anew, which is the highest compliment you can pay a work of art.

KU: Even talking through it I felt it. If we hadn’t talked during the last scene I would have started bawling.

KU: If you don’t believe in god you still have a desire for an ultimate attainment. And you have the everlasting moment, and then the moment passes. So you have the afterlife and the moment passes. ”He goes to the place where dreams are born.” It’s sentimental gibberish bullshit. And this movie poses the situation where we’re past the point of where the goal is attained, but is there more than that?

KBL: And how many films are about that?

MJR: Every film.

KBL: Well yeah impliclty. But how many films call critical attention to the whole point of having goals, or even goal-oriented storytelling as a dominant genre?

MJR: And this film is about how that arc of achieving goals is not satisfactory. And narrative conventions such as having a resolution and even having real human characters. This film presents a premise that is completely and utterly fraudulent and manufactured. And yet it’s so devastating and crushing. For someone so involved in manipulation and spectacle Spielberg is sincerely invested in what audiences are into and what they want. Only someone who is so attuned to that can produce someting that can invert and explore what it’s about.

Following our conversation, Michael had this to add via email:

The transition between the first part and the second part of the film
not only segues Eden into sexuality, but the feeling of childhood
abandonment from the mother to the search for connection or completion
in romantic union. As the first part of the film fades out and David
is left alone we’re also left disoriented in the dark, but now the
gender roles are reversed: an unknown woman (who might be David’s
mother, or the Blue Fairy for whom he’s searching) intones through a
pitch-black image, “I’m afraid” to a man. Her fear of a sexual
encounter with a non-human mimics David’s fear of encountering the
frightening human world, but there are also resonances between one’s
loss of innocence and one’s first explorations of physical
commingling.

Also, one more irony about the film’s ending: David never becomes a
real boy. In the Pinocchio story A.I. directly references, Pinocchio
becomes a real boy by earning it, by learning right from wrong and
developing a conscience (and consciousness?) It’s a moralizing lesson
that Spielberg rejects but also inverts in favor of something far more
troubling. Professor Hobby tells David he’s become a real boy, but
qualifies that with something like “or the closest thing to it.” So
David’s not really a real boy, but even if he were he would have
earned it only through persistence and faith. David has not learned
much else, he’s only stubbornly clung to and sought out his vision of
eternal mother-love. Thus at the end of A.I. Spielberg reveals that
David’s journey to become a real boy is an enormous red herring.
What’s more important to David is not becoming real (he’s already
learned that that’s impossible and that he’s been commodified and
replicated), but simply obtaining mother-love. Artificial intelligence
also means false consciousness, and the new Pinocchio myth of the
cybernetic era becomes one of infantalizing womb-protected bliss,
complete and stunted fulfillment of the fake person’s solipsistic
dreams, without even the faintest desire to “grow up.”