boys

discussed:
pinnochio
a.i.

I have a place where dreams are born
And time is never planned
It's not on any chart
You must find it in your heart
Never Never Land

"A robot that dreams?" questions one of Hobby's employees, repeating the Professor's words exactly. That's how you know it's a really important line.

Professor Allan Hobby has proposed that his company build a machine that can love, as a child loves its mother. This android child would transcend the boundaries between machine and man, and would perhaps be, in some qualitative and, as another employee points out, morally problematic sense, real.

Hobby wants to build a real boy. What his colleagues and employees debate is how real a boy it is possible to manufacture, and how real a boy it is wise or profitable to manufacture. While Hobby speaks of a technology in its infancy, his ambition is far from new, and the debate surrounding it is far from unique.


Six costly months into the production of Pinocchio, Walt Disney called the project to a halt, dismally unhappy with the product his animators were turning out. Pinocchio's look had been based largely on the illustrations in various publications of Carlo Collodi's text, all of which had depicted the character as a walking, talking marionette. While this conception of the character served well in static illustrations, it could not be set in motion believably. It was too cold, too lifeless, and simply not loveable enough. Pinocchio was redesigned to be more human in appearance; to be more like a real boy. His cheeks were rounded and reddened, and his eyes made wider. The accelerated adult voiceover to which he had thus far been syncopated was replaced with a reading by an actual boy.

Pinocchio's personality was revamped as well. He was stripped of his mischievous nature and left as something of a moral blank to be filled; thus he only does wrong when he is lead astray by outside forces. It was this kind of cleaning and romanticizing of his sources for which Disney would come to be so roundly criticized, but it seemed to him an absolutely necessary amendment. An inherently bad Pinocchio was too hard to relate to, too hard to care about.

While Disney was finally satisfied with the look of his lead, Collodi's tale had yet a series of narrative revisions to undergo. Disney's removal of Pinocchio's less appealing characteristics had left the character rather uninteresting. "Without a conscience...," explains Bob Thomas in Disney's Art of Animation, "he had none of the boyish humanity that would induce sympathy in his many travails." (81)

So the unfortunate little cricket who warns Pinocchio to cease his deviations only to be crushed beneath the puppet's foot was gradually transformed into Jiminy cricket, the protagonist's conscience and loyal familiar through all his misadventures. A cast of seductive dastards was developed to take turns playing id to the insect's superego, and thus the otherwise amoral boy-to-be was given a complex human psychology.

After thus turning a lifeless puppet into a real boy, Disney reassembled his team of animators and started over. Utilizing a number of new technical innovations and artistic techniques, they created the most haunting, believable, life-like cartoon anyone had ever seen. Pinocchio was considered much too frightening for children, and lost one of the 2.6 million dollars that was spent on it.


Disney is not the only one to have enacted the Pinocchio myth in his attempt to retell it. At some point during the twenty years of intermittent planning Stanley Kubrick did for the movie that would eventually be called A.I., the auteur decided that, ideally, the robot should be a robot. He actually built an entirely animatronic lead that was, as Spielberg described it, "a disaster." Which is not to say that it wasn't a fantastically impressive machine; but we humans remain by far the most complicated machines there are, and we are not yet capable of producing anything that can even approximate our own intricacies. Neither could a believable boy be animated. In either case, the result is simply not real enough.


"Did you see him? He looks so real," exclaims David's soon-to-be mother. It is this fact that she seems to find most unsettling. And it is this fact that ultimately proves to be David's salvation. Many of the mecha at the Flesh Fair exhibit human responses. One delivers an angry tirade about the lot of their species, while another attempts to weasel his way out of being destroyed. But David really looks like a boy, and the people believe. Even the fair's producer, who knows David is mecha, is seduced by how life-like he is. "Craftsmanship like this," he declares, "you don't throw out with the rest of the trash."

This is what Disney and Spielberg both understood. If audiences are to relate to a fake boy, if they are to sympathize with him, and if they are to care about him, he has to look real. And so, Spielberg got himself a real live boy, like Disney before him, and Giapetto before him.
An uncanny coincidence? Of course not. That's what artists do.

It might be miles beyond the moon
Or right there where you stand
Just keep an open mind
And then suddenly you'll find
Never Never Land

"Only Orga believe what cannot be seen or measured," explains Gigolo Joe. "It is this oddness that separates our two species." In other words, mecha don't dream.

But David dreams. Though he does not once close his eyes, not even to blink, until the end of the film, he most definitely meets Joe's criteria for what it is to be human. He believes so strongly in the impossible that he travels to the end of the earth in search of it.

Apparently, he also meets Professor Hobby's criteria for what it is to be human. He and his staff are so astounded that they play along, feeding cryptic clues to an electronic wizard. Hobby, of course, is the man behind the curtain. He is the very good man who disguises himself as the very bad wizard, sending his petitioners on an impossible quest amidst promises he does not have the power to keep. And in the end, all he can do is tell David that everything he had wished for he already had, right there where he stood. "But you are a real boy, David," he announces with astonished delight.

What he means is that David has transcended his programming. It is something that none of the other Mecha do. "Why do you do that?" David asks as Joe dances about. "It's what I do," he replies, none too confidently. Joe does not ask why. But David does, repeatedly. "Why do they do this to us?" he asks at the Flesh Fair. "Why can't you bring her back?" he asks the future robots. "Why can't the Blue Fairy turn me into a real boy," he reasons throughout. David is one of a kind because, unlike other mecha, he is unwilling to accept his limitations.

But David was not programmed to question his ontology, nor to believe in the unseen. He was simply programmed to love. Not as a man loves a woman, nor as a woman loves a man, nor even as a parent loves a child. David is programmed to love as a child loves its parent.
What's the difference? Perhaps it is that the love of a child is a selfish love. It is a love that needs and wants and takes. David wants his mother to himself, and grows jealous of her affection for Martin and Henry. David destroys another David shouting, "You can't have her."
Pinocchio is also selfish. In fact, he must overcome this selfishness in order to become a real boy. Once he learns to be selfless, he will be human.

After all, isn't that the way in which we humans transcend our programming? Don't we defy our instincts, our biology, and do what is not in our best interest for the benefit of others? Indeed, we do. Out of stupidity, maybe, or maybe out of insanity. But perhaps it is something else. Perhaps it is out of love.


It should probably not be as surprising as it is that Kubrick and Spielberg based their telling of Pinoccio to a much greater extent on Disney's version than on Collodi's. Most significant is the character of Teddy, who is very closely modeled after Jiminy Cricket. Like his predecessor, Teddy's original literary incarnation is destroyed by the protagonist early into the second act of his story. In "Supertoys When Winter Comes," David dismantles Teddy to see if he is "real." But the celluloid Teddy is in for the long haul. He accompanies David throughout the film, always finding his master again when the latter loses him.

Brian Aldiss's Teddy does not so much advise David as simply comfort him. When David asks for help with the letter he is writing to his mother, Teddy tells him that it's fine the way it is. But Spielberg's Teddy is David's guardian. He tries to keep David out of danger and to prevent him from making foolish decisions. He is a less moralistic guide, of course, than Disney's, but he serves the same literary function.

It should not be surprising That A.I. reworks a Disney film because that's the way folktales work. Each telling is a modification of the last. But it is surprising, because Pinocchio is not a folktale. It has a credited original author and a definitive text that does not vary from region to region or age to age.

It was, however, designed to look like a folktale. It reads like a folk tale, and its narrative arcs like a folk tale. And if more children are familiar with Disney's version than the original, and Kubrick considered it canonical, who's to say that the story hasn't transcended its author's design, and taken on a life of its own? Perhaps Pinocchio is turning into a real, live folktale.

You'll have a treasure if you stay there
More precious far than gold
For once you have made your way there
You can never, never grow old

"Will you still love me when it's all gone, " Monica asks Henry, and he comforts her with the appropriate platitudes. She is referring to a bottle of perfume that is no longer available, but the subtext is clear. Henry is human; he changes and grows as long as he lives, and his love with him. And when henry is gone, so will be his love. We people are not so dependable as we would like to be.

But David will, and does love Monica when it's all gone. When the world has frozen over and the human race disappeared from the planet, when David can neither move nor see, when everything is gone, still he loves Monica. "A love that will never end," explains Hobby.
The professor is haunted by and obsessed with eternity. He has lost a son, and evidently models David after him. David's love cannot be lost, no matter how hard one may try to lose it. It is this quality that Hobby feels would make a loving mecha such an asset to mankind. "Always loving, never ill, never changing," is how Hobby describes him.

"Always there, always smiling, always awaiting him," is how the narrator describes the blue fairy.


Both Pinocchio's and David's adventures end with a dream. Pinocchio is visited by the Blue Fairy, and awakes to find he is no longer a marionette but a real boy. David, however, does not need to wake; the dreaming itself proves his humanity. Like all fairy tales, A. I. ends with an "everlasting moment;" and David sleeps happily ever after.

And that's my place where dreams are born
And time is never planned
Just think of lovely things
And your heart will fly on wings
Forever
In Never Never Land (Martin)

"And so, David... went to that place where dreams are born," concludes the narrator. And that's the end.

But in the beginning, didn't God create man to love Him? Perhaps it's not so much a moral question as it is one of syntax: did God create man that he might love Him, or that He might love him. Certainly, Giapetto did the latter, as did Hobby, and Disney, and Kubrick, and Spielberg. This is why David had to be realer, and Pinocchio more like a boy; so that people would relate to, would sympathize with, would care about what they had made. Were man to try and make something that could love him, it would only be a means to an end. The ultimate ambition will never, never change. We are trying to make something we can love.

Despite his misguided profession, the Flesh Fair's producer understands. "A lot of love went into you," he concludes after a careful examination of David.

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand. (Yeats 18)

When reading Aldiss's "Supertoys Last All Summer Long," the story that, in the author's words, "greatly affected Stanley Kubrick," it is hard not to notice a peculiar fact: the story is neither terribly unique nor particularly good. Why was it this episode, and not Vonnegut's EPICAC, or any work of Asimov's, or any one of a thousand others to which Kubrick paid two decades of attention?

Of course, A.I. has a number of sources, cited in a variety of ways. Some are quoted directly in the dialogue (Pinnochio) and the narration (Peter Pan), and some are recognized with faint paintings on the wall of the cryogenics lab (Alice in Wonderland and Aladdin) and some can be identified only by narrative similarity (Hansel and Gretel and The Wizard of Oz). But only Aldiss's tale makes its way into the credits.

My guess is that it was precisely because the story is basically unremarkable that it caught Kubrick's eye. It is a story that has been told a million times before, and will be told a million times again, and if each telling is slightly different from the last in its details, it remains the same tale in a deeper, harder to articulate way. It seems that despite the modern marvels of copyright law and literary scholarship, authorship remains a troubled affair, and the folktale lives on.

When Kubrick first presented Aldiss with a copy of Pinocchio, the author didn't see the connection. After years of collaboration with Kubrick, he continued not to see it. Upon Kubrick's death and the republication of his original "Supertoys" along with two sequels, he still didn't see it. "Never consciously rewrite old fairy stories," went Aldiss's refrain. (xi)

And though Kubrick eventually relieved Aldiss from the project, he seems basically to have agreed. It was this issue of consciousness, I think, that prompted the auteur to request that Spielberg take over the project. As Spielberg explains in one of the many "making of" featurettes to be found on the A.I. DVD, he does not make his directorial decisions for philosophical or verbally expressible reasons. He claims he is simply telling stories, and doing it by intuition.

Had Kubrick lived to make the film, it probably would have played more like a visual essay, as do 2001 and, to a lesser extent, A Clockwork Orange. But when he explained his idea to Spielberg, the latter announced that it was the best story the former had ever had to tell. It is clear from Kubrick's obsession (much to Aldiss's chagrin) with various fantastic tropes, from the fairy godmother to the sunken city, that he did not wish his film to be simply about fairy tales; he wanted it to be a fairy tale. Spielberg is in the fantasy business. Kubrick was obsessed with E.T. and Close Encounters, and apparently felt Spielberg was the man for the job.

Aldiss tells of a concept he and Kubrick had happened upon and quickly abandoned in the early eighties, in which the Soviet Union collapsed and the U. S. sent in robots to "save what could be saved." (xiv) It was not the robot army but the politics of the U.S.S.R.'s downfall that were too implausible to be developed into a film. After a brief description of how the collapse actually came about a decade later, Aldiss makes the following observation:

And if we had put all this on the screen in 1982? No one would have believed it. Even SF is the art of the plausible. So, critics might say, there lies SF's weakness. It is real life which takes on the art of the incredible, as it did at the end of the nineteen-eighties - and continues still to do with the rise and expansion of the European Union. (Aldiss xv)

The sentiment is neither terribly unique nor particularly well-put. Mark Twain wrote, "Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't." (Schmidt)

And why must our fiction be believable? Why all the effort put toward making it more real? Because we wish to believe it, of course. Unlike any other machine, we orga believe what cannot be seen or measured. What makes David human is his unwillingness to accept that he is merely a machine; that there is no more to him than what can be empirically demonstrated. To this end, he cites his emotions and desires, as philosophers have done for as long as their art has existed.

David dreams, not because he is programmed to do so, but because he has to. The world is simply to full of weeping to manage without a fairy to take us away; without a fairy tale into which to be taken. What we ask of our authors, artists, and auteurs is to make us believe that there is better than what can be seen, and more than what can be measured.

If science fiction has replaced the fairy tale as a robot bear replaces a cricket, it too serves the function of its predecessor. The blue fairy does not change because fairy tales do not come and go as do their tellers. David does not change because the dreams of little boys do not age with their dreamers.