AI: Artificial Intelligence
Written by: The CinCitizens
Lance Carmichael, CC2K staff writer
Dammit. There’s a great disturbance in the spirit world. I’ve lost contact with the Ghost of Stanley Kubrick. I’ll have to answer on my own the best I can.
Tony, you asked me to ask Stanley how he would have directed AI. Well that’s a tough question to answer without Stanley guiding my fingers from beyond the grave, since Kubrick was someone who always strove to give you something you’ve never ever seen before. That’s clearly one of the things that’s so great about him, and why he is so beloved.
One thing we can say with some certainty is that the performances would have been much colder. Kubrick is famous for his frosty, objective lighting illuminating emotional blanks. The only characters in his films who pop out as you as fully human and alive are psychopaths–Nicholson in The Shining, Alex in A Clockwork Orange. There are no psychopaths in AI (with the possible exception of the carnival barker guy, but that’s a very minor character and not worthy of discussion (beyond saying that that guy felt like he could not possibly exist outside of a movie–which I think you can say about a lot of Spielberg’s characters)), so it would be very cold.
Now a lot of people who aren’t so hot on Kubrick decry him for this very reason, holding that they can’t get into the movie because they can’t identify with the characters. But this blankness is the very reason a lot of people love the man’s work so passionately. The basic way for mainstream feature filmmakers to construct character is by using what I’ll call the Standard Character Model. Here’s how you use it: For all major characters, give them a “backstory,” which is often central to their “conflict.” If possible, allude or outright flashback to some single “traumatic event” in their past which explains their behavior. Throw in one or two “quirks” or examples of “conflicting behavior,” and boom, you’ve got yourself a “well-rounded character.”
Now this is all well and good. It’s a model, neither inherently good nor bad. It can work like gangbusters, or it can fail miserably. To take current TV as examples of it working and failing, let’s think about The Sopranos vs. a bad episode of Lost. Tony Soprano is a textbook “3D character”–he’s both good and evil, he wants to be good (a family man) but is controlled by his baser impulses (his dick and his desperate need to be validated as the boss). He had a domineering mother. It’s no accident that the whole story started when Tony finally went to see a psychiatrist. And not just a psychiatrist–an analyst. For the whole Standard Character Model is made literal by Freud. Now, the Standard Character Model certainly predates Freud–it was basically invented and refined in the 19th century novel (Tolstoy being probably the high priest). But Freud broke it down for us, and applied this theory to actual living, breathing people–as opposed to ones that only existed on a page. The whole point of sitting on the analyst’s couch is to tease out your childhood traumas and use them to explain why you’re behaving in a way that’s detrimental to your interests. The Tony Soprano Show not only comes with one of the most memorable Oedipal Complexes ever told, but we even get a Freud stand-in to guide us along the way in the form of Karen Hill (I mean Dr. Melfi). And it works, because the writing remains surprising within this context, the acting and casting is second-to-none, and the production is intelligently done.
The thing with Lost is that damn flashback structure. For me, as the series goes on, I roll my eyes more and more when they cut away from the “present” action on the island and go into the mandatory flashback. It’s gotta feel like a two ton ball and chain around the writers’ heels by now. The choices the characters make have to be explained in a Freudian traumatic flashback every single episode, and it just gets exhausting. The Daddy Issues never stop coming at you. A good, sophisticated filmmaker doesn’t need flashbacks to suggest his character’s “complex” psychology–you just see it in their behavior. To pull an example off the top of my head–we don’t ever see Julianne Moore’s descent into drugs and porn in Boogie Nights. But we learn about it through its effect on the people she was around when it was happening (her child and her then-husband). And we learn this through three quick but memorable scenes–a phone call from her son that she doesn’t answer because she’s doing coke and staring lustily at a young buck’s body at a porn party; her calling her husband and demanding to speak to her child in the middle of he night when she’s high on coke; and a disastrous custody hearing with her ex-husband. This tells us everything we need to know about why she acts so crazy and why she’s so weirdly possessive and protecting of the young porn stars Dirk and Rollergirl. If Boogie Nights had been made by J.J. Abrams instead of Paul Thomas Anderson and shown on ABC rather than in theaters and on DVD and premium cable, you can bet your ass we’d have cut away to a flashback showing Julianne Moore as an Irresponsible Mom. And all subtlety and technique thereby would have been smashed by the jackhammer of Mainstream Literalism.
{jgibox title:=[Click here to read about why good serial TV is reinventing the Standard Character Model] style:=[width:550px;]}
Because you don’t need to possess the rare, ingenious subtlety of Paul Thomas Anderson now to establish your characters’ backstory and primary motivation. You can patiently dish it out over 13 episodes of a season. You show a character acting in a somewhat bizarre fashion (say rebuffing the advances of the charming Jimmy McNulty in The Wire). The audience gets intrigued. Who wouldn’t want to spend a night with this rakish, handsome, upright man? Then in episode three, you show the rebuffer at home…and she’s a lesbian. The delay in explaining the motivation for an action is gratifying to the viewer, who compliments him- or herself on remembering those rebuffs that occurred 150 minutes ago in episode-time and seeing them in a whole new light when they realize that Kima likes chicks.{/jgibox}
So the point is the Standard Character Model is neither good nor evil; it’s how creative and subtle you are in using it. The main problem is that it’s so dominant in mainstream storytelling that it creates a contradiction:
A) If you watch a lot of media, you’ve seen it eight million times and you roll your eyes as a character is being established unless it’s done very, very artfully (Which good serial television is doing right now because of the leap in sophistication the HBO model has brought to TV shows).
B) And yet when someone attempts to use characters in a different way, people who don’t watch quite as much media and are very, very comfortable with the Standard Model get flushed, upset, their pulse starts racing, and they blame the movie or TV show instead of their own limited response.
C) So the money will follow the mainstream, since that’s who buys the most tickets, DVDs, and who jacks up Nielsen ratings. So you rarely get to see it, it’s always shocking when you do, and the whole cycle repeats itself.
Think of Kubrick as a corrective to the Standard Character Model. His movies are about ideas, not characters–although his characters are often very memorable. Probably the most up-front, easily understandable Stanley Kubrick characters who exemplify this are the characters in 2001. The monkeys shown in the “Dawn of Man” section (has there ever been a better timecard? The only possible competition is “Back home years ago” in Casino) are exactly as psychologically complex as the astronauts navigating through space. You don’t always have to have complex characters, according to Stanley. Sometimes all you have to know is that this is happening to a human being (or an ape, as the case may be), and all else is incidental. Every human being enjoys pleasure, abhors pain, wants to survive, etc., etc. It’s not only cold characters, it’s a very cold view of the world. Kubrick kind of thinks like a good scientist; he’s very objective about how humans are basically animals with clothes. I mean, he lays it out explicitly right there in 2001: humans and apes are pretty much exactly the same in terms of motivation, when seen from the perspective Kubrick is showing us. Now it gets more complicated than this than in his other pictures, but this style of characterization remains remarkably consistent. What do we know about Bill in Eyes Wide Shut other than he likes to fuck and he’s jealous and protective of his wife? What do we know about Private Joker in Full Metal Jacket, other than he’s a fairly regular guy going through boot camp and Vietnam and enjoys telling jokes? What about Shelley Duvall in The Shining, other than that she wants nothing more than a quiet, uneventful bourgeois life?
Now Spielberg has absolutely nothing to do with this alternate model. His use of characters in all his movies fall so squarely into the Standard Character Model that you’d be less surprised to see Laura Bush take a shit on the Speaker of the House’s podium during a full session of Congress than you would to see a Spielberg character not be all warm and human (which is not to say he always succeeds in making his characters feel real and “three-dimensional,” but he always tries.)
Critics of Kubrick basically call the humans in his movies “robots” anyway. AI is a film where the main character actually is a robot. So to answer your question, Tony: my guess is that Stanley would have made AI using the same model he used for A Clockwork Orange and The Shining. Invert the Standard Theory of Character. In Clockwork and The Shining, it was the sadistic killers who were the only recognizably human characters on-screen (although notice there’s no backstory explaining why Alex rapes and kills–he just does it because he likes doing it). All the non-raping, non-ax murdering normal people were as stiff as boards and almost completely unsympathetic. I would guess that in AI, David (the Haley Joel Osment robot character) would have seemed very alive and “human,” and the human characters (the parents, the professor played by William Hurt) would have been totally robotic. Therein would have laid the central tension and point of the movie. Spielberg seems to be completely incapable of drawing “two-dimensional,” robotic humans. The acting styles of the parents and of William Hurt are not toned down at all–they just seem like standard movie characters. They’re no more nor less “human” than David. I would guess Kubrick would have made these characters as boring and dead as the astronauts in 2001, and it would have made for a much more interesting movie. In particular, the Mother character–who’s role consists of nothing more than emoting (either in grief over her paralyzed son, in love for her children, or in concern for David)–would have been terrifying. She would emote, just the same, but only for and to herself. There would be no palpable concern for David the sentient being, or for her husband or child, for that matter. Only a monkey in clothes following her maternal instincts–nothing more, nothing less.
Now if only Kubrick contact me again and verify everything I’ve just theorized.
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