Steven Spielberg’s 25 year-old sci-fi heartbreaker A.I.: Artificial Intelligence has more in common with this year’s Obsession than you might think. NB: The following contains spoilers for Obsession and A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. “Caution: Please remember that this program, once activated, is permanent, indelible and unalterable.” So reads the envelope that Monica holds in Steven Spielberg’s … Love from the uncanny valley: Obsession and A.I.: Artificial Intelligence are the same movie
Steven Spielberg’s 25 year-old sci-fi heartbreaker A.I.: Artificial Intelligence has more in common with this year’s Obsession than you might think.
NB: The following contains spoilers for Obsession and A.I.: Artificial Intelligence.
“Caution: Please remember that this program, once activated, is permanent, indelible and unalterable.”
So reads the envelope that Monica holds in Steven Spielberg’s 2001 masterpiece, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. Inside the envelope is, in essence, a magic spell. In a few moments, Monica will take out the sheet inside and read out a series of words that will turn David, a robot that looks like a little boy, into her unconditionally loving son.
Twenty-five years after A.I., the 20-something Baron sits alone in his car, snaps a twig in half and makes a wish: that his not-so-secret crush, Nikki, will fall in love with him. Seconds later, Nikki’s standing by the vehicle’s passenger side door, gazing adoringly through the window.
Two visually and tonally distinct movies, separated by genre and a quarter of a century of history. But beneath the surface, A.I. and Obsession tell the same narrative.
Based on story ideas by British sci-fi writer Brian Aldiss (specifically his short piece, Supertoys Last All Summer Long), Stanley Kubrick and screenwriter Ian Watson, Spielberg’s film is, in essence, a sci-fi updating of Pinocchio. It’s about an artificial boy who longs to be human.
Roughly 100 years in the future, the environment is collapsing and science has invented human-like robots called mechas. As William Hurt’s Professor Hobby explains at the beginning, the planet’s dwindling population is served by these robots, which assist “in all the multiplicity of daily life.” There are even ‘lover models’, which sell thousands of units per month.
Hobby has a bigger ambition, however: to create a robot capable of genuine love. To this end, he comes up with a plan to engineer an artificial child that is capable of affection for a parent – both because he thinks the result will create a true, human-like consciousness, but also for commercial purposes.
“With all the childless couples yearning in vain for a license,” he reasons, “our little mecha would not only open an entirely new market, it will fill a great human need.”
The result is David (Haley Joel Osment), a robot who looks and acts like an 11 year-old boy. He’s essentially adopted by Henry and Monica Swinton, a husband and wife grieving for the loss of their real son, Martin, who’s in a technologically-induced coma. Henry (Sam Robards) works for the company that made David, and is coldly rational about his origins. To him, David’s simply “a toy”.
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After initially being creeped out by David’s uncanniness, Monica (Frances O’Connor) begins to bond with him. David fills a void in Monica left behind by her son – she gets to be a parent again.
The tragedy at the heart of A.I. is that, because of his programming, David loves a mother who can never truly love him back. By uttering the sequence of words, Monica activates an ‘imprinting protocol’ that means David will remain devoted to her forever.
“This imprinting is irreversible,” Henry warns his wife. “The robot child’s love would be sealed… hardwired… after imprinting, no mecha child can be resold. If an adoptive parent should ever decide not to keep the child, they must return it to Cybertronics for destruction.”
At first, Monica really does appear to treat David like an ordinary son, even if she’s occasionally disturbed by the reminders that he’s a machine. But then Martin unexpectedly emerges from his coma, and David immediately recognises that he can’t compete with this real, flesh-and-blood child. He was just a placeholder.
Rather than have David destroyed by the company that made him, Monica dumps the boy in the countryside like an unwanted pet. With his robot bear Teddy in tow, David then sets off on a journey to win back Monica’s affection. To get it, he reasons, he must somehow become a real boy.
David is, in essence, a sentient consumer product born out of selfishness. But David, partly due to his innocence and partly because of his programming, refuses to believe that Monica will never love him. As ‘lover model’ mecha Gigolo Joe (Jude Law) says:
“She loves what you do for her. As my customers love what I do for them. But she does not love you, David. She cannot love you. You are not flesh or blood… And you are alone now only because they tired of you, or replaced you with a younger model, or were displeased with something you said, or broke.”
A similarly sad truth underpins Obsession, directed by Curry Barker. By breaking the One Wish Willow, Baron (nicknamed Bear) turns Nikki (Inde Navarrette) into an automaton. She looks and moves like a human being, but her freewill has been bound and gagged. Just as David is hogtied by his programming, leaving him solely fixated on a mother who can’t reciprocate his affection, Nikki is cursed to serve a would-be lover who’s left frightened by her inhuman behaviour. (Both films feature awkward moments where the cursed characters laugh inappropriately or a little too long.)
Like Monica and Henry, Baron (Michael Johnston) doesn’t intend to hurt Nikki when he enacts his own imprinting protocol. But there’s a sense that, at first, he actually quite likes this subservient version of the woman he’s long lusted after.
Perhaps subconsciously, having a mindlessly devoted girlfriend even appeals to him – in much the same way that people form shallow relationships with chatbots that flatter them and tell them what they want to hear. (There are also echoes of the kinds of the ‘tradwives’ prized by the manosphere.)
In many respects, Obsession is a mix of traditional monkey-paw horror and the robot lover sci-fi movies we’ve seen become increasingly prominent in recent years.
In 2017’s Blade Runner 2049, Replicant protagonist K (Ryan Gosling) is lonely and shunned by human society, so he seeks emotional refuge in Joi (Ana De Armas), a hologram who looks and acts human but is actually just a technological mirage designed to comfort and soothe its user (“everything you want to see; everything you want to hear” goes the product’s slogan).
Obsession takes this to its darkest conclusion: Nikki isn’t a hologram, but a human being. She still has a brain and a nervous system, but her physical and emotional needs are overridden to such an extent that it causes her physical harm. Although Baron couldn’t have known the result his wish would have, note how he doesn’t try to get help for Nikki; instead, he largely keeps her at home and tries to minimise the gravity of what she’s going through.
The wish creates a relationship where neither can love the other. And, as we also saw in last year’s underrated Companion, a relationship with a human being that has no agency of their own isn’t a true relationship at all.
Nikki is, however, capable of rage – perhaps because eliminating a love rival fulfils the remit of the curse she’s bound by. Hence why she ends up killing the luckless Sarah (Megan Lawless) with a brick.
A.I has a parallel here, too: David also flies into a rage when his sense of uniqueness is threatened. In the final third, the protagonist meets an identical mecha, David II. The mere sight of this ringer, whom David sees as a rival to his mother’s affections, prompts him to respond with similar violence to Nikki: they both literally deface what they see as a threat.
Obsession isn’t, of course, modelled on A.I. It’s possible that Curry Barker has never even seen it. But the parallels exist because they both get to a deeper truth about we human beings: that selfishness is written into our very DNA.
In his superb essay about A.I., published on Letterboxd, Robert Daniels suggests that, in the film’s divisive final reel, David makes a selfish decision of his own. It’s thousands of years into the future, and the human race has vanished. In its place are a race of transluscent, alien-looking sentient machines which have the ability to revive a human being for a few hours. The caveat is that, once a person has been revived, they can never be resurrected again – they’re essentially obliterated. All the same, David chooses to see his Monica one last time – to experience the hugs and the bedtime stories he wanted all along.
“Despite being warned that her revival will lead to her oblivion, he still chooses his personal happiness over her welfare,” Daniels writes; “in the same way she chose her mental stability over his emotional safety.”
This is certainly true, but there’s an even more tragic interpretation: once again, David’s programming means that he simply cannot stop loving this human being that will never truly love him in return. There was never any question that he would revive Monica. In a final irony, Monica’s earlier inability to love David leads to her annihilation thousands of years later, just as Baron – and everything he loves – is destroyed by his selfishness in Obsession.
Both A.I. and Obsession are, in their own way, about enslavement. As Niander Wallace says in Blade Runner 2049, “Every leap of civilisation was built off the back of a disposable work force.” In our present-day reality, there are companies like Anthropic that are actively racing to create sentient machines, seemingly without asking the moral question posed in Spielberg’s film: “If a robot could genuinely love a person, what responsibility does that person hold toward that mecha in return?”
A.I. makes some pertinent points about our moral obligation to any sentient lifeform that science might create, though that isn’t, ultimately, the sole point of the film. Its more fundamental message is much like Obsession’s: that one of our weaknesses as humans is our seeming desire to create an ‘other’ that we can control and use as cheap labour or a receptacle for our emotions. Time passes, technology evolves, but like David, we all appear to be bound by our own programming.
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