The Spielberg Ending: A.I.

What's most perverse about the dismissal of A.I.'s ending is that people considered it a happy one. Everyone's preferred ending is robot child David (Haley Joel Osment) pinned underwater, literally frozen for centuries, staring at a statue of a blue fairy to whom David wishes, a la Pinocchio, to be made into a real boy. A downer ending, to be sure, although the scene is certainly tuned into the rest of the movie's tone. As an ending, the sentiment it belies — the futility of faith — is about an inch deep (albeit a mile wide, considering how many pundits, amateur and professional, clamored for it). Many suggested that conclusion was worthy of Stanley Kubrick, which is itself debatable, but because Kubrick produced the film — although he died before cameras rolled — absolutely everybody was sure that was his original intent. Again, that's just armchair quarterbacking, and even then it's in ignorance of the fact that Kubrick wanted Spielberg to direct it. Expecting Spielberg to deliver such a magic-denying ending is likewise ignorant, and it's safe to say that Kubrick didn't expect it — which, in turn, suggests that he didn't think it was the right ending for the movie anyway. Regardless, many viewers regarded David's entombment as the appropriately bleak note to strike, and set to chattering that everything that followed was Spielberg's mawkish, warm-fuzzy tendencies kicking in.

But what follows that scene, exactly? The blue fairy shatters at David's horrified touch. He learns that he has outlived history, that everyone he ever knew is dead, that all of their descendants have died, that Earth froze over. He is told that while individuals can be resurrected, it happens at the expense of their ever being resurrected again. ("We found the very fabric of space-time itself appeared to store information about every event which had ever occurred in the past. But … those who were resurrected only lived through a single day of renewed life. … Their very existence faded away into darkness.") The mother that David was imprinted to love lives again, without her husband or son, 2,000 years after her death. And when her ensouled clone falls asleep and dies, David cuddles the corpse in perfect bliss, leaving, as the last witness to human history, Teddy Ruxpin. Those are just the facts, separate from the artistic tapestry into which they are woven, but nevertheless: That's the ending that was dismissed as too upbeat?

The conflict is really between nihilism and meaning. Any exegesis I might offer for the film would be twice as long but only a third as good at Gregory Solman's terrific reading, but it doesn't take much insight to see what meaning Spielberg packed into his ice-age coda. After man's time on Earth has passed, only his creations remain, including robots whose self-awareness and self-knowledge are so great that not only have they explored the universe, they've grasped metaphor — Ben Kingsley's narration, which opens and closes the film, is revealed to actually issue from one of the robots that excavates David. The robots' appreciation for humanity is striking — "I often felt a sort of envy of human beings, of that thing they called 'spirit.' Human beings had created a million explanations of the meaning of life — in art, in poetry, in mathematical formulas. Certainly, human beings must be the key to the meaning of existence." — and connects the movie's sci-fi pursuits with its most spiritual dimension. David is cherished because unlike any other robot (save his teddy bear), he actually interacted with people, and as the first robots that unearth him begin to download his memories, the images of his life flickering across their faces like movies, Spielberg shows us his soul, his joy in what Tolkien calls "subcreation." The viewer can prefer to not know these things about A.I.'s story world, to embrace the futility of the submerged David and his unanswered prayers, to quit before Spielberg makes his case for humanity. But that seems like a response not even a robot could love.

Introduction | Saving Private Ryan | Minority Report | Catch Me If You Can | The Terminal

E-mail Sean Weitner at sean at flakmag dot com.