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Oct 30th 2020

A.I.

   Somewhere between LHR and JFK, I decide to watch again A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. Despite the glittering production, a superb bravura performance by Jude Law and Haley Joel Osment's touching appeal, I zap through the film, watching less than half, because I mainly want its answer to the question it raises: what is love?
   David is the robot child created as an object of love for a human mother who has lost her own son. She rejects David, not seeing that he actually experiences emotion, which, humans, conscious of it or not, deep down feel distinguishes them from machines—not intelligence, however non-artificial.
   But android David can never grow up, destined to remain forever a child needing to be loved (self-knowledge, surely?). The idea is compelling with many resonances. The resolution comes far into the future when entities, who may be human-android syntheses—doesn't really matter—offer David the experience of just one perfect day with his mother. He wakes her on the morning of his birthday and they make a cake and blow out the candles and do many joyous things together before, come the evening, she tells him she is very tired. She gets into bed and as she falls asleep he snuggles beside her happily closing his eyes. Then, the narration closes with the perfect, perfect line: "And for the first time in his life, David went to that place where dreams are made."
   I've not read Brian Aldiss's 1969 short story, Supertoys Last All Summer Long, which gave rise to the film that Kubrick never made. That might have been very different to the movie I saw, but wherever that final line came from: Aldiss or Ian Watson's screen story or elsewhere, it brought the film to a perfect, perfect conclusion.
   The ultimate question for a Buddist, which I am, is can there can ever be love in the world of form, in a life of separation holding on to the conviction there is a me and an other.