Psychoanalyzing A.I.

A number of reviewers have criticized A.I. for failing to deliver on its “promise” to show whether or not machines can be programmed to be human and to consider what we owe them. But the film is no more about machines than Pinocchio is about marionettes. A.I. is about what we owe and do to our children.

David is not so much a mechanical boy-a “mecha”-as he is a metaphore, an artistic stand-in for an adopted second child who comes into a household and discovers he can never be as loved as his mother's first-her “real”-son. It is a given in the film that when David's mother programs him to love her, he cannot help but do so ineluctably, because he is a machine. Several critics have argued that if David were human, he would see that she isn't worthy of his love and move on.

Of course, if he were really a machine, his feelings for his “mother” could easily be erased from his memory. But the film understands that human emotional programming is quite unlike this, and so the special mecha that is David can't be reprogrammed once he comes to love his mother. He must be destroyed if his mother no longer wants him, because he will be destroyed in effect regardless, that is, he will be unable to get over the heartbreak of her rejection-which is precisely what happens to humans whose mothers forsake them.

Kubrick/Spielberg understand that we are all essentially programmed to love our mothers whether they deserve it or not, that indeed such programming is part of a deep structure of emotion and meaning within us that has very little to do with the actual vicissitudes of maternal behavior. This is because we define ourselves in terms of an ideal of maternal love. We don't get this idea by being read a series of magical words, as was the case in the film, but the film's use of such words to complete David's programming is brilliant because we are indeed programmed by culture and language to locate the source of our sense of value, happiness, and self-worth in the concept of m