Keyword for Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial

The futuristic fairy tale film, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, is a disappointment psychologically and at the box office. Writer and Director Steven Spielberg has created an adult fairy tale unsupported by any archetypal congruence. In addition, it’s blasphemous to Freudians, as I will show later. By contrast, the character of Luke Skywalker in Star Wars was based on sound psychology developing from George Lucas’ close consultation with the great scholar of myth, Joseph Campbell. The metapsychology for the hero archetype was fully expressed, and the success of the film echoed this important Jungian consistency. Below I will describe A.I. and explain why it is substandard.

A.I.’s story begins in the future with a couple whose child has been injured and is suspended in a cryogenic coma. They adopt a state-of-the-art mechanical boy as a full-sized toy child. If the parents like him enough to want to keep him they need only speak seven words to properly initialize him. After some angst, the lonely mother implements this irreversible computer program causing the robot-child to form a deeply bonded attachment to her, and a strong — if not pathological — need for her love. His weak bonding to the father is reflected in the film in the artificial boy’s only calling his father by his first name.

“Family” life goes well until the couple’s biological son is cured and returns home to find himself in a mechanically induced sibling rivalry. When the toy-boy (“David” in the film) inadvertently injures their biological son, the parents decide the cyber-surrogate is not worth the risk. The normal course of events would be to see him returned to his maker and destroyed. However, “Mommy” has grown too attached to send him to be decommissioned into spare parts. She leaves him in a forest to fend for himself. What she doesn’t realize is that he is programmed to seek his mother’s love at all costs, and that his system folder refuses to entertain any other human developmental tasks, a la Erik Erikson. Spielberg’s film is a triumph for attachment theory!

The toy-boy’s life’s mission is to become a real boy so Mommy will love him as she loves her real son. He can only become real the way Pinocchio did, by finding the Blue Fairy who will transform him. His one friend and mentor in his quest is Gigolo Joe who is also on the run from the scrap heap, having been set up by a jealous husband as the “fall guy” for the murder of his wife. The presence of this sexual pleasuring machine is suggestive of what it means to be a real man.

One adventure after another leads him into the accidental discovery of the Blue Fairy who is unfortunately incapable of wish-fulfilling miracles. The toy-boy pleads with the Blue Fairy to make him real, but she just looks back at him, unable to perform any magic. He remains fixed in a frozen trance with the Blue Fairy for 2000 years until aliens discover him.

They ask him what his greatest wish would be. We already know that it is to resurrect Mommy so he can live with her forever. The alien enablers grant neurotic wishes, but to not overindulge, they inform him that Mommy can be resurrected for only one day — that is the condition. So begins one gloriously oedipal day spent bathing, being pampered by Mommy, playing with her, being dressed by her, and finally slipping under the covers with her. She will never wake up again, he knows, and so he closes his eyes, too, hands clasped as they both fall into unconscious bliss in a final embrace.

Fairy tales touch upon issues of maturation and psychological development. They involve struggles out of childhood toward maturity, not

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regressive thumb-sucking returns to infantile bliss. Hansel and Gretel return home, after having been abandoned by their parents, as mature adults capable of caring for their parents better than their parents cared for them, not to crawl back into bed to resume infancy.

Even Jack of the beanstalk ultimately triumphs over his castrating, grind-your-bones-to-make-my-bread ogre-father. But for his reward, does he return home to infantile bliss with Mommy? No. He cuts down his magical beanstalk, becomes a man, and cares for his mother just like his fellow fairy tale characters Hansel and Gretel are doing.

A.I. is a Freudian affront because it resolves the oedipal crisis in the most regressive way imaginable. It is even more ridiculous to a Jungian. After starting with the symbolic consistency of moving from the real mother to the idealized mother in the icon of the Blue Fairy, it is sheer pathology to shatter the icon and break up the image into a million I-hate-the-Virgin-Mary pieces for the regressive real mother with whom one is to be forever fused. It would not have been so unacceptable if at least the toy-boy could have transferred his feelings to a new love object, perhaps even a toy-girl. Instead, Spielberg keeps him fixated for 2000 years ruminating over the same incestuous agenda!

The toy-boy of A.I. does not resonate in the unconscious of the audience, as did heroic Luke Skywalker of Star Wars. There is an incongruent, perverse, and distasteful element in this script: the hero’s intractable oedipal fixation makes him a figure with whom neither adults nor children can identify.

Jack grew up to care for his mother, and Hansel and Gretel helped their parents out, too. But just down the street the toy-boy is still sleeping in Mommy’s bed with only one wish — to stay there, held in her embrace, for eternity. Maybe that’s what makes Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence seem so long.

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