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A.I. Artificial Intelligence
Directed by Steven Spielberg
PG-13 / Argentina:13
2001
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reviewed by Qiu Jin As a starting point, I will take Steven Spielberg's own remark in an interview about A.I.: the scene at the Flesh Fair represents a "class struggle" between workers of some type and the ruling class, who have replaced laborers with androids and other robots. The claim that a humyn class struggle is going on in the movie is interesting to MIM's line. The narrator at the beginning of the movie describes how, as if by natural selection, only high- altitude regions in imperialist countries survived the ice caps melting. "Hundreds of millions of people starved in poorer countries." In fact, the only country paid any attention to in the movie is the u.$., so it is safe to say that the mostly- white, English-speaking mob at the Flesh Fair consists of Euro-Amerikan workers, who are net exploiters in the real world. The struggle between large groups of net exploiters who are called "workers" and net exploiters who are called "owners" is really a conflict within the imperialist bourgeoisie, so it is difficult to call this a class struggle. What would be an example of class struggle is how the remaining u.$. population was able to continue sucking value out of the Third World in order to produce the robots in the first place, while workers in the "poorer countries" were already dying from the global-warming effects, but A.I. isn't interested in telling this story. Maybe because the story would be incredible. If anything, it is imperialist countries that would die without the Third World, not the other way around. The movie is confusing on this point about whether any humyns are still exploited workers. On the one hand, we are told that the sudden lack of humyn labor after the global-warming disaster was the reason for introducing robots into production, implying that the u.$. oppressor nation working class may have been re-proletarianized. On the other hand, the Flesh Fair event is supposed to represent that robots were used to replace existing humyn manual laborers, available for work but considered unnecessary by the ruling class. Since many of the androids are used as sex workers, butlers and maids, but also as substitutes for productive workers, let's just take Ben Kingsley's word for it that oppressor nationalities "needed" to introduce robots into production because they lost the entire Third World as a source of surplus value, and oppressor nationalities were so used to being parasites that they couldn't go back to having a large, potentially exploited productive sector. In other words, robots have taken the place of humyn productive workers. The difference in cost between feeding a humyn productive worker for life and powering a robot to do the same work means that humyns are, in A.I., no longer toilers in the sense of being exploited by capital. Notice that most of the workers at the Flesh Fair are not productive unless cleaning work can be counted as productive. It is tempting to say that A.I. represents a science-fiction robot mode of production or something like that, in which robots do all the productive work. But in reality, what we have here is Euro-Amerikans committing hate crimes (the Flesh Fair, where robots are sadistically dismembered) against the real proletariat because they think that they are worse off because the proletariat are employed, and they are not. In fact, the Flesh Fair crowd is employed, probably in the unproductive sector, because how else could they afford to go to these expensive Flesh Fair events on a regular basis. What is disguised as a conflict between workers, driven by the Luddite fantasy that destroying technology can end capitalism, on the one hand, and robots or robot-users, on the other, is really a conflict between the imperialist-country labor aristocracy and the proletariat. The parallels between the situation in the movie and the real- world situation are significant, especially where the androids in A.I. are used as sex workers and domestic workers, when they are not working in factories. One of the consequences of the general law of accumulation is that the automation of production results in unemployment as the growth of the humyn population outpaces the growth in the bourgeoisie's demand for labor. In that sense, a situation where there are large groups of permanently unemployed proletarians, but capitalists hoarding all this extremely productive robotic technology, is possible. However, this is not the situation in A.I. Those "workers" at the Flesh Fair are eating popcorn and living to old age, not dying from starvation and rebelling against capitalism. The Luddite interpretation that the Flesh Fair in A.I. is about robotic technology that has caused unemployment, is mistaken. Despite the smoke screen that A.I. is just about robots or the nuances of artificial intelligence ethics, it is necessary to view A.I. as representing humyn relationships. Otherwise, the mistake will be made that Spielberg's so-called class struggle in A.I. is between exploited workers and robot-users even when there is no humyn productive worker in sight in the movie. The implication is not that the robots in A.I. are actually depicted as productive workers, who create value, or that robotic technology is equal to humyn life. (For that matter, not even perfect androids can create labor value since value is a form of humyn toil.) Treating the robots in A.I. as oppressed-nation proletarians, it is interesting to see the robots outlive their humyn users. Not all this fancy robotic technology could save parasitism from the ice age that happens at the end of the movie. Think Day After Tomorrow weather, but humyns are gone completely, leaving only the robots. Since the robots didn't have to fight to get to this point, however, the ice-age scenes do not redeem the movie. The robots are depicted as being programmatically incapable of resistance, probably something inspired by Asimov's First Law of Robotics. Gigolo Joe makes a veiled threat against humyns, saying, "We are suffering for the mistakes they made because when the end comes, all that will be left is us." But this is pretty empty-sounding after the same robot, emotionlessly, lets himself almost be melted with acid at the Flesh Fair. The exaggerated Freudian themes in A.I. have been pointed out extensively by other reviewers. To say something new about the gender-related themes in A.I., there is a lot more going on between the boy robot David and his adopted mother Monica Swinton than simply a canned Oedipus complex and traditional gender roles for wimmin in middle- class households. What we have here is a "pretend child" who was created explicitly for the purpose of emotionally gratifying adults. The robot has no other function. The reason why it is not difficult for many people to sympathize with Monica when she chooses to sign up for this "David" fantasy is that, that is exactly how socially constructed children are treated under patriarchy: as repositories for adults' emotional and sexual so-called needs. After Henry and Monica Swinton's biological child, Martin, recovers from his illness, David is kicked out of the house as soon as he proves to be expendable. To Monica's credit, she realizes that this is bullshit and gives David an opportunity to escape being disassembled. But the help she gives is too little, too late, much like the token help the bourgeoisie give some children when exploiters and gender oppressors are still benefiting from the oppression of children under patriarchy. The bottomline of David's story is reactionary. Ten-, eleven-, twelve-year-old Red Guards made revolution in China, but here we have an idealized child simulacrum, apparently eleven years old, who behaves like an infant and whose only mission is to love the parents who use him. David is valuable to adults only to the extent that he makes money for his manufacturer or satisfies the so-called need of all "orgas" to have children of their very own. There is one point at which David starts to know better, and if he were a humyn in the movie, this is when David became class-conscious to a degree. This happens at the Cybertronics headquarters in Manhattan, where he sees his duplicates and his female counterpart, "Alice." Instead of criticizing Professor Hobby, though, he attacks the other robots because he thinks they're competing with him for Monica. Ideologically, the only revolutionary in the movie is the gender-oppressed "male" robot Gigolo Joe. Another version of A.I., made in a socialist people's republic, has Gigolo Joe convincing David and other discarded robots to join the revolution. They seize power and stop the practice of using child robots to fulfill and legitimize patriarchal fantasies, and stop the practice using humyn-like androids as substitutes for humyn workers to make and hoard profit. The use of robots in production is allowed to continue, but not in the hands of exploiters and not in a way that reproduces patriarchal relationships between humyns and other humyn-like forms. Oppressed nationalities, whose deaths are trivialized by the original movie, do not all die during the bottleneck event. They unite with the robots to overthrow the exploiters.
Note on Gigolo Joe being gender-oppressed The fact that Gigolo Joe is depicted as being just a fancy, walking, talking blow-up doll, not a real humyn, is completely beside the point. Maoists reject the postmodernist nonsense that movies like A.I. can't be understood in familiar terms of humyn relationships under capitalism and patriarchy, but only in terms of novel configurations of ideas that have become separated from their material history. The end result of the postmodernist approach is that A.I. represents a fantasy "post-capitalist" mode of production, under which every single persyn is oppressed in some way, from Professor Hobby, who lost his own son, to Monica Swinton. This approach contributes to the movie's distortion of reality. Professor Hobby and Monica Swinton, despite her biology, would both be net gender oppressors in the real world. A.I. presumes to be sophisicated, asking the audience, "Can there be gender oppression when the only sex shown in the movie is between humyns and robots? Does it make sense to call Gigolo Joe's owner a pimp?" People must see through this bullshit "complexity," and ask themselves, "Patriarchy still exists in this fantasy movie world, so who are the gender oppressors and the gender-oppressed? And who are the exploiters and the toilers under capitalism?" Gigolo Joe and even David are not gender-oppressed just because they are effectively prostitutes. Being a prostitute does not automatically make a persyn gender- oppressed. The issue is to what extent are Gigolo Joe and David able to do something other than be "lover models." In fact, Gigolo Joe wasn't able to do anything other than sex work, which is why he is gender oppressed. In the movie, this is due to a technical fact: his programming. In the real world, any constraints on sex workers' career opportunities are social and not a matter of technology. Children become prostitutes not because they choose to, but because they are not valued in any other way. Even though his work isn't explicitly sex work, maybe only emotional work, David is a caricature of what gender oppression really is and the forms that it takes inside imperialist countries. The superficial masculinity of Gigolo Joe is immaterial, too. There are also female lover robots in the A.I. world, but nobody says that the female lover robots are oppressed in ways that the male lover robots are not. If we treat the A.I. robots as humyns, the robots are of the same oppressed gender since they face the same limitations. |