Owned version: The two-disc DVD released by Dreamworks in 2002.
Acquired: In 2002, from a used bin at a Blockbuster.
Seen before?: Three times before this. Once during its original theatrical run in 2001, most likely on July 1st, and twice from this DVD - on July 2nd, 2018 and on March 8th, 2010. (The latter led to this review, and as is now par for the course a glance over that piece makes me wonder why I thought I was any good at this whole writing thing back then.)
It's funny how the Dr. Know scene has always been my least favorite piece of the film - Williams' faux-German vocal mugging as the bouncy cartoon search engine never quite seems to fit with the rest of the film, not even amongst the searing garishness of Rouge City - yet this time around, it strikes me as the skeleton key to the whole endeavor. As robot boy David and smooth sexbot Gigolo Joe try to work around the multiple potential meanings of words so as to find the precise question that will bring forth the answer to David's Blue Fairy conundrum, they get at the heart of the story's tension regarding dual natures and shifting contexts - appropriate given the film's existence as a collaborative work between two of the 20th century's great artists.
The ability to exist in two distinct states within one object, even if - especially if - those states conflict is all over this. It's seen on the macro level through the nature of David, the little robot boy who wishes to become human, and by film's end does - indeed, the driving action is on one level David's search for the Blue Fairy and on another level David's slow, painful progress towards humanity. David starts as a shell, a pure machine running on programming without emotion; once his "mother" Monica activates his imprinting protocol and thus fires up his emotional circuits, the bulk of the film is then David's journey out of the safety of the home into the big bad world. This physical journey doubles as a gradual enlightening, a march through various emotional achievements until his final ascendance into full humanity via the embracing of mortality. And, until this very last moment, David is always defined by both the amount of humanity and the amount of mechanization he carries within him. The latter is always emphasized at the expense of the former - even the evolved robots at the end of the film define him as One of Them, a more primitive version but Them nonetheless, while also seeing him as a bridge to the world of the human, a world they were never present to witness - but David feels the former acutely and uses it as, essentially, his self-definition, produced via aspiration in absence of legitimacy. He's not "human," strictly, but he feels and thinks as acts as one. At what point does the artificial intelligence stop being artificial?
But in the period before that question is allowed to hang, David is a robot. Unquestionably a robot. In this space of the film, this film that is among the best Spielberg has ever made, exists the finest of fine work - the period before David's imprinting is spectacular, creepy, beautiful, unsettling and altogether perfect, maybe the most spine-tingling evocation of living with a new life this side of Eraserhead. In this early segment, Spielberg does his best to play up David's mechanical unnaturalness - in shots like the one where his face is refracted through a beveled closet door, or the God's eye shot of him at the dinner table, isolated in the frame from his "parents" by a large circular hanging lamp, or in beats like the payoff to the hide-and-seek gag where it's cut like a jump scare, this might as well be a horror film with David as the monster. Yet what he's doing is explicable in context; he's absorbing the world around him dispassionately but with an insatiable curiosity much in the vein of any young child, and if the extraordinary dinner table scene culminates in another horror-worthy sting - the barking forced laugh - isn't this essentially the logic of a child, thinking that Mommy and Daddy react positively when I laugh? And if we were to invert that emotional reaction into crying, wouldn't its inexplicability, its welling-up completely without an observable inciting incident, seem completely normal for a baby, which is the basic plane of logic David is working on at that point?
Another important beat in this early segment expands the idea of duality outside of David, as a precursor to where it ends up - there's a scene shortly after David comes to live with Monica and Henry where he's observing framed family photos, and he ends on a picture of Martin, their comatose young son whose absence David is meant to soothe. We see David's reflection in each photo he comes across, and his image seems to merge with Martin's in the final photo, emphasizing his status as an overlay, an inadequate Band-Aid stretched across raw throbbing pain. But there's something else there - David's ghostly reflection mirrors Martin's own state as a ghost within his own life. Martin is neither alive nor dead; he's instead in a place where he's both, denying his parents the ability to properly grieve even in the face of hopeless odds, which leads to rash but understandable decisions like Henry's acceptance of his company's request to test out the David robot or Monica's leap of faith when she puts forth the imprinting protocol. Duality strikes again. (There's also something to be said for replacing a boy who can't wake up with one that can't sleep.)
Once Martin does wake up, David's days in the household are numbered - a machine, even one that's bonded to you, is going to lose when the choice is between it and your flesh-and-blood progeny - and that's when the notion of duality and contrast becomes weaponized. Once David is left in the woods by Monica, Spielberg changes from shooting him as the monster to shooting the world as the monster, overwhelming and hostile and uncaring. Where David's guilelessness marked him as inhuman pre-imprinting, it merely casts him as an innocent once things get dangerous, and the mutability of that is the point - the light in which an action can feel justified can easily shift and reveal the action as less than (e.g. the climax of the Flesh Fair, the incident that turns Gigolo Joe into a runaway ["You killed me first."]). I do mean "light" literally in at least one sense, inasmuch as the rising moon, normally a benign sight, turns out to be a harbinger of genocide, and how after that every moment of threat or destruction is prefaced by a pale blue light similar to that of the Flesh Fair abduction craft. (A nice change of pace from the typical "red = danger," methinks.) It's in the film's harrowing midsection that David's innocence is most played up - a literal babe in the woods - and it's meant as a contrast to human cruelty, an impulse that David is not capable of at that point; when, in his search for answers, he encounters a threat that is less physical and more existential, he proves that he can also be violent and cruel, that's another marker on his progress towards being human. And then he gets to meet his maker (Gigolo Joe: "The ones who made us are always looking for the ones who made them.") and have his illusions shattered. Osment's performance in this is eerily good, pantheon-level work from a prepubescent, and the quivering, broken way he delivers, "I thought I was one of a kind," is possibly the best choice in a performance full of great choices. That William Hurt's Professor Hobby reveals the circumstances of David's creation makes him not so removed from Martin after all is another telling flourish. (God so loved the world that he gave to it his only begotten Son, right?)
The midsection really cranks up the cruelty and short-sightedness assumed of humanity, and no one could be forgiven for thinking that a cynical position on Spielberg's part. But beyond this outsized horror being needed as one end of a pole to balance the purity of David's quest on the other end as well as serving as a model for David's eventual behavior in Professor Hobby's office, I feel the cruelty serves as a misdirect of sorts, a big ugly manhole cover for the subterranean tunneling Spielberg is quietly setting up in the film's ending (one Kubrick himself admitted he could never quite get to to work the way he wanted it to). What's important when dealing with the human world here, I submit, is not the grand gestures of fear and anger but the small ones of kindness and empathy. When the advanced robots at the end tell David, "We only want for your happiness. You've had so little of that," it's a truthful sentiment but it's also a quiet watchword - within the shit and horror and chaos of modern life, there's still moments where we can be good to each other. We see it in a big way at the end of the Flesh Fair, when the crowd rejects the ringmaster's call to melt a little boy to death. We also see it in the bit where a hotel clerk warns Gigolo Joe about the Flesh Fair being in town, in Monica choosing the lesser of two evils when casting David to his fate knowing how difficult it will be to do so ("I'm sorry I didn't tell you about the world" is an all-timer of a heart-ripping line of dialogue), in Gigolo Joe rescuing David from his despondent dive into the ocean. And we see it early on, before David even comes into the narrative, in the fairy-tale figures that have been plastered onto the walls of the ICU ward where Martin is being held in suspended animation. It's a tiny, mostly futile gesture, but it stills smacks of the best possible version of humanity, one that tries in any way to bring a sliver of light to even the most agonized places. The use of those figures also presages David's ultimate encounter with the Blue Fairy in the submerged Coney Island, and both times the appearance of fairy-tale characters heralds the delayed granting of a long-held wish, an impossible dream as a bulwark against misery magically made real. Martin wasn't supposed to wake up but did. David wasn't supposed to become human but did. Why wouldn't a machine aspire to be part of a species that could maintain hope in the face of everything that says it isn't worth it?
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