Maoist movie review: "A.I. Artificial Intelligence" (2001)

MAOIST.WS

"A.I. Artificial Intelligence" as an environmental movie

A.I. Artificial Intelligence
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Warner Bros. Pictures, DreamWorks SKG, Amblin Entertainment and
Stanley Kubrick Productions
Rated PG-13
146 minutes
2001

2008 December

[Contains spoilers]

The background story of this movie is that the polar ice caps have
melted "because of the greenhouse gases," and many people in the
Third World have not survived the global-warming disaster;
consequently, Amerikans among others in the "developed world" have a
rule for themselves limiting reproduction, and there is an interest
in using robots as substitutes for flesh-and-blood children.
Capitalism still exists, and there is inequality. A lack of people is
supposedly behind the use of robots, but homelessness persists.
Presumably unemployed or distressed people who somehow can afford
entry into a high-tech fair, or just ignorant people fearing robots'
increasing number, blame their circumstances on robots and watch
captured robots being lynched. Advanced technology is used for
various things, such as extending lifespans, and "A.I." portrays
technological development as inevitable, even if spurred by a need
for a replacement for having a larger population.

"A.I. Artificial Intelligence" isn't known well as an
environmentalist movie, but another movie about the environment and
technology, "The Day the Earth Stood Still" (2008), is set to become
a top "environmentalist" movie according to a list on
boxofficemojo.com.(1) So, this reviewer decided to review "A.I." as
an environmental movie. Both "A.I." and "D.T.E.S.S." show the future
and contain fictional elements. So does "The Day After Tomorrow"
(2004), the top environmentalist movie making extensive use of
special effects. It is easy to put "A.I." in the "science fiction,"
rather than "environmental," category, but "A.I." isn't firmly in
fiction land, as "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home" (1986), for example,
might be. In the "Star Trek" movie, Kirk and crew travel backward in
time to retrieve whales from the 20th century and bring them to the
23rd, to stop Earth from being destroyed by aliens, the simple
message via an obvious metaphor being that humyn-caused extinction of
other species indicates a threat to humyns' own survival. Viewers may
make a connection between 20th-century society's use of money and
ecological damage, but "Voyage Home" does not point to the dynamics
of society over time except to suggest metaphorically and vaguely the
disastrous future consequences of anthropogenic ecological change. By
contrast, "A.I." speaks to various specific social and demographic
trends, some of which exist, and their long-term development.

While considering these movies, it is important to keep in mind what
Marxists call the "principal contradiction." The principal
contradiction is between imperialism and those nations oppressed by
it. Among other things, this means that even if a movie is 100%
correct in terms of explicit and implicit ideological content, and
popular, it isn't necessarily going to serve progress. Amerikans can
take in a perfectly good and urgent movie about the environment, and
regurgitate it as something that means blowing up or seizing oil
fields in Muslim countries, and bashing East Asian countries and
migrants.

"A.I." shows a future in which First Worlders may have put preserving
imperialism before preserving the existing coastlines of imperialist
countries, receding coastlines being the simplest way of visualizing
the consequences of global warming. The opening narration explicitly
says that First World coastal cities were lost (though people can
still live somewhere in New Jersey, where the robot-making company
Cybertronics is located), and that people were displaced, while many
more in the Third World died because of climate change. Many cities
important to First Worlders are located on coasts, in both the First
World and the Third World, but the possibility that Amerikans will
put preserving the imperialist system before keeping their own
coastal cities as they are now cannot be ruled out. In the real
world, Amerikans have already proved that they are willing to put
their privilege and power before the survival chances of Homo
sapiens by maintaining its stockpile of nuclear weapons and
starting wars. That is all that really should have to be said on the
topic of Amerikans' priorities in relation to the environment as
Amerikans will take lesser risks. Ruining the atmosphere as in the
backstory of the "Matrix" trilogy is not just a fantasy, unlike the
development suggested by "Waterworld" (1995) where most of today's
land will be under water. The highest claims put the sea level rise
from global warming by the end of the 21st century at several meters,
whereas the probability of ruining the atmosphere some time within
the next hundred years is a not-insignificant 10% even if there is
just a 0.1% chance of atmosphere-ruining nuclear weapons use each
year (1 - (1 - 0.001)^100). A sea level rise would not instantly kill
millions of people, but use of a nuclear weapon could. If MIWS sounds
like some kind of Arab oil public relations campaign saying that, the
real problem is that Amerikan nationalists have succeeded in getting
people to separate the United $tates' nuclear weapons from other
things in assessing environmental risks. Even the disease risks posed
by global warming are a distraction in comparison with the potential
for catastrophe posed by First World nuclear stockpiles; although, it
isn't good for Amerikans to be worked up over nuclear weapons, and
the issue is that the world's people need to focus on destroying U.$.
imperialism.

No doubt, Amerikans want stability, the status quo. As long as
nuclear weapons haven't made the planet uninhabitable for humyns or
otherwise made the species go extinct, Amerikans may do things that
prevent some climate change while keeping their living standards, but
that is the extent of what may be expected. Perhaps more important
than flooded coastal cities in connection to melted polar ice is
climate change resulting from the melted ice. Where Amerikan centrism
is sustaining the Amerikan way of life for as long as possible,
Amerikan centrism isn't the same thing as supporting the interests of
the majority of humyns, not for survival or lesser concerns. Vague
talk about Amerikans' taking leadership on environmental problems
serves Amerikans' interests in any struggle, involving the
environment or not.

"A.I." suggests that a dramatic sea level rise will not be prevented.
The Amerikan couple in the movie have a large home and a lifestyle
that are very high-income even for the United $tates today. At the
same time, there is a reproduction law. As an environmental movie,
the worst thing about "A.I." is to raise the topic of population
control, going so far as to suggest in a more ambiguous part of the
opening narration that First Worlders survived climate change because
"most governments in the developed world introduced legal sanctions
to strictly license pregnancies." Population control is supposed to
be a solution to environmental problems and poverty. In reality, an
economic system by which living standards in one place are connected
to poverty and environmental problems in another place is the biggest
obstacle to progress, not lack of population control. "A.I." implies,
though, that Amerikans could be willing to have fewer children if
they could keep their living standards. Thus, "A.I." suggests
Amerikans' priorities outside the context of an imminent event
bringing together nations and classes (where supposedly Amerikans
would put unity against a threat to the species before the narrow
selfish concerns of a minority). The sea level has already risen at
the beginning of the movie, and the movie tells a story involving
social contradictions before and after a sea level rise. In the real
world, birth rates are decreasing in the First World. Children are an
oppressed group, and privilege is connected to oppressing children,
but a negative population growth rate of the First World is a
tangible possibility whether by collective choice or not. "Voluntary
Human Extinction" may be a joke, but a negative population growth
rate is not. If Amerikans really could do without children, they
could do without other things.

There do not need to be more problems or non-problems for Amerikans
to think they can solve. At the same time, for Amerikans to think
that they can keep their way of life in the face of environmental
issues has its own reactionary implication. For Amerikans, preventing
climate change can mean bashing the Third World, but there is room
for clinging to imperialist country privilege in the area of
"adaptation" to climate change, as opposed to "prevention." One can
know the facts about unavoidable and avoidable climate change and
still pursue the preservation of First World living standards. While
preventing anthropogenic climate change requires commitments to limit
specific activities, the response to expected realized climate change
could be anything, such as preparing to attack Third World countries
perceived to be threats to imperialist countries that will be more
vulnerable as a result of predicted climate change.

One response to expected climate change is simply to retreat. Some
U.$. cities are talking about relocation of waterfront homes and
other buildings and a stop to coastal development. Amerikans are also
wondering where they should get potable water and energy for air
conditioning from. Unless carbon-emitting desalination is to be used,
some U.$. cities will need to get drinking-quality water from farther
sources (than the Colorado River, for example) for frequent washing
and toilet-flushing, and lawn-watering. Amerikans will need more
energy from any source to run air conditioners in private homes and
private cars. The basic problem from a Marxist point of view is that
Amerikans want things, but have little real to offer in exchange for
them. U.$. imperialism already kills millions of people in the Third
World in the process of transferring labor and resources to the
United $tates. Not only do most Amerikans produce neither surplus
value nor value; they kill others to get things they don't need and
risk their own destruction. "Environmentalists" who say that
production by supposedly highly productive Amerikan workers is
unsustainable on a global scale and make this central to their
outlook do not recognize the global class struggle over international
exploitation. The real problem isn't U.$. overproduction; it's
Amerikan parasitism. In no sense do Amerikans produce most of what
they consume. When Amerikans have to repress people to maintain
exploitive living standards ten, twenty times higher than others',
there is no reason to assume that harmony will be achieved between
North American consumption and the long-term environmental needs of
the species, before imperialism is ended. Amerikans' consumption is
premised on contested inequality. Not only do consumption and
production throughout the world impact the global commons from
different places; Amerikans' living standards and other
nationalities' living standards are inversely related. Third World
nations cannot be expected to "do their part" to achieve global
sustainability where the First World will continue to consume several
times more than their part of production. The parasitic living off of
another region by a whole region of the world both wastes the humyn
species' resources and will be a source of constant conflicts. The
movement for global sustainability is inseparable from a class
struggle between the First World and the Third World.

With regard to retreat, already, some U.$. cities are known as
retirement cities and are inland. Euro-Amerikans will struggle with
oppressed-nation people to keep control of land that is not under
water, but when it comes to coastal cities and climate change
prevention and whether anyone is going to be able to live on what is
now the coast, the fact that Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New
Orleans, New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco aren't
majority-white may be a factor. As Hurricane Katrina revealed with
New Orleans, Euro-Amerikans are able to move more easily and can
leave coastal cities if need be. There is a basis for struggle
between whites and non-whites over preserving coastal cities in the
United $tates and protecting them against coastal weather. Hopefully,
some farsighted white leaders will just abandon coastal cities
without a prolonged fight. The international proletariat can make a
deal: Aging Euro-Amerikans, if they give up the vast majority of the
land they currently occupy, can live out the rest of their decadent
lives, if not in Columbus, Forth Worth, Indianapolis, Las Vegas,
Phoenix, San Antonio, Tucson, etc., then in landlocked areas further
inland, enclosed by land populated by oppressed-nation people.

There are other contradictions to consider. Traditionally, people
think about economic priorities versus environmental priorities, but
the extent of this has not been understood as the privilege of the
majority of First Worlders has been hugely underestimated and
qualitatively misunderstood. Not only are the majority of First
Worlders privileged; they are exploiters. As was said, the United
$tates doesn't produce too much. It produces little, and at high
prices. Because of the way capitalism works, particularly with
finance capital, it is not possible that Amerikans will reduce their
consumption by 75% or even 25% by choice barring either a enormous
charitable transfer of wealth that currently exists only in the most
utopian imaginations and that would have various consequences for
imperialism, or price restrictions, imposed by the U.$. government on
its own country's exports, that would generate violent resistance.
The quality of so-called aid aside, it is like pulling teeth just to
get the United $tates to give the low quantity of aid it agreed to
provide.

Any process by which Amerikans will end up consuming a fraction of
what they used to will be painful for the majority of Amerikans and
will meet resistance. In "A.I.," the humyns lynching robots put their
jobs before technology that saves resources by replacing working
humyns, technology that could increase the average living standard.
The automation technology could intensify the contradictions of
capitalism as a system based on humyn labor. Presumably failing to
learn to live with robots (representing advanced technology requiring
less labor to complete the same tasks), failing to progress to a
society beyond capitalism, the humyn species goes extinct and becomes
an object of inquiry for robot archaeologists in the future.

Barack Obama is putting on a piece of theater about the environment
and science to get more liberals and so-called progressives behind
war in Afghanistan, but Amerikans didn't elect him for environmental
reasons, unless they thought having a good U.$. economy would be good
for the environment. Amerikans elected Obama for economic reasons and
global image reasons. In the real world, at this time, a fixation on
employment in the short term is more decisive than the environment.
And, though North Americans aren't going to consume more in a
communist society and there is nothing for Amerikans to look forward
to living-standard-wise in the long run as imperialist country
parasites, a fixation on wages in the short term is also more
decisive. Amerikans lack the reference point to understand that
another form of social organization is coming and inevitable whereby
First World living standards won't exist, and that on the way to that
society will be extremely difficult and painful struggle. It's a
problem that even non-exploiters have since even the proletariat has
to undergo painful struggle giving rise to counterrevolution, but
Amerikans additionally act as the exploiters they are. Amerikans do
reflect their social group as a whole, or future "generations," but
in a racist, nationalist or bourgeois way. The thing that many
Amerikans do think is inevitable is the apocalypse, justifying
selfish behavior in the present. In Amerikans' eyes, communism could
be inevitable, but as an apocalypse, an end of the world, not a new
era of history.

In "The Day the Earth Stood Still" (2008), the Nobel laureate
scientist suggests that there is a technological solution to
environmental problems. The alien messenger Klaatu says that the
problem isn't humyns' technology; it's humyns themselves. This seems
to oppose luddism and focus attention on social relations, but the
rest of the movie shows that Klaatu's statement has more to do with
so-called humyn nature than social organization and culture.
"D.T.E.S.S." urges action, but ends up in apocalyptic territory by
suggesting that there is only death or uncertainty after
problem-ridden capitalism. Much First World environmentalism, in
fact, resonates with apocalypticism -- not just in that global
warming is supposed to lead to a "catastrophe," but also in that
solutions to environmental problems are supposed to come amid
decisive social conflict and upheaval, future or present. In this,
Westerners view themselves as being on the right side of history.

In "A.I.," there is no question about whether Amerikans will succeed,
because everyone is dead at the end of the movie. A form of Amerikan
centrism is to think that if Amerikans aren't around, nobody is going
to be around. MIWS disagrees with the movie's prediction, but "A.I."
avoids apocalypticism. What it shows rather is decay, technology
being used to create new kinds of privilege. Also, "A.I." is more
clearly opposed to luddism, though mostly via sympathy with the
humanoid robot characters played by Haley Joel Osment and Jude Law.
One could argue that the animated film "WALL-E" (2008) and "Lost in
Space" (1998) oppose "luddism" in a similar way. This is a little bit
more to it than that in "A.I.," as the android David ends up being
the last persyn alive. Before the robot ice age part of the movie set
in the distant future, it is suggested that the visionary responsible
for David's creation, Professor Hobby (William Hurt), might use
David's adventure-love story to a market a line of robots called
"David" and "Darlene." David has a transcendent quality, but instead
of becoming like David (or holding onto what humanity they have
left), people turn the idea of David into an assembly-line product
that may have sped up their own numerical decline.

One interpretation of "A.I." keeping in some respects with other
sci-fi stories is that if the social relations, class and gender
(robots used as substitutes for prostitutes and children), in a
society don't change, people may as well stop reproducing, because
technology could fulfill or replace those functions -- an abstract
idea that does not take into account the differences that exist in
the real world on a world scale and the basis of change that exists
in the Third World. The ratio of humyns to robots will decrease.
Useful only to people seeking an analog for gender privilege and
wanting substitutes for family members, sex partners, etc., the humyn
form itself will disappear even among robots. "A.I." could be a
prediction or yet another commentary on emotionality versus
rationality and so-called modern society's effect on humanity such
that humyns are more and more like sophisticated machines. Robots
become the solution to humyn society's environmental problems by
replacing humyns with humanoid robots, though apparently not before
it is too late to prevent another ice age. Robots have little use for
Coney Island as a place of entertainment anyway. The anti-luddism of
"A.I." seems more ambiguous when it is seen that the development and
spread of technology are suggested both as a solution and as humyns'
accidental undoing.

Opposing luddism concretely today requires knowing a couple of
things, which are related. One, the majority of First World workers
are exploiter labor aristocrats. The majority could conceivably be
exploited or unemployed in a future where hundreds of millions of
people in the Third World have perished. To say that there is a
"luddism" problem in the First World today is potentially to
misrecognize various things. First World workers cannot have "false
consciousness," but are petty-bourgeois at least. The majority of
First Worlders do benefit from technological development even in the
short term as exploiters. Most First World workers don't even work
with machinery or equipment in production, and those that do benefit
from high prices of imperialist country goods. When they do oppose
technological development or "de-skilling," First World labor
aristocrats contribute to a situation where the only avenue that
seems open for propping up their living standards is to kill people
and blow up things in other countries. The wars acquire various
justifications. The robot-hunter in "A.I.," who returns the fee for
David and takes him back to have him destroyed over the objection of
the sentimental Flesh Fair producer, has a higher "purpose" than "money": lynching robots for biological reasons.

Number two is that though the First World has access to more advanced
technology, there is less production in the First World than in the
Third World, total and per capita, because GDP figures etc. don't
represent value or capitalist production. So, it is not that the
"GDP" of the First World is proportional to the product of First
World workers using technology. The movie "A.I." raise the idea that
Amerikans may survive because their country is more "developed,"
while reality is that the United $tates is parasitic, has better
infrastructure than the Third World because of parasitism, and
because of super-profit may have more military and spy agency muscle
to use in the event of a global catastrophe. This is MIWS's biggest
objection to "A.I." It is not enough to just show technology in the
First World and oppose luddism in that context. On the other hand,
the idea that a large of number of First Worlders will take up
scientific communism is less serious of a proposition to MIWS than
"voluntary human extinction." Despite Stanley Kubrick's association
with movies of a more cerebral kind, MIWS would not have put too much
stock in the ability of "A.I." to convey the truth.

It is a little puzzling that "A.I." isn't on the radar as an
environmental movie in spite of its obviously being related to global
warming. This reviewer would venture that "A.I." doesn't leave much
room for Amerikans to choose. There is no hero or heroic people who
can go against the course of history, just cynics and sadists prone
to thinking that a world where anyone can abuse androids for a price
is the high point of civilization, and agitated people complaining
about robots taking their gigolo jobs acting in a retrogressive way.
"The Day the Earth Stood Still" offers a choice. So does "The Day
After Tomorrow" to some extent. The choice could be listen to
Amerikan experts, or you may have to live with or like Third World
people. Despite environmentalism's association with farsightedness,
most of what calls itself environmentalism in the First World is
First World nation nationalism or unscientific.

Notes

1. http://www.boxofficemojo.com/genres/chart/?id=environment.htm

""The Day the Earth Stood Still" lacks edge, but also is not enough
to avoid being fuel for a green fascist movement," http://maoist.ws/reviews/movies/tdtess.html