Mirroring Cultural Fear, Anxiety and Dystopia in American Cinematography: The Movie “A.I.” (2001)

Abstract

Through this essay, we aim to provide a sociological and cultural analysis of how the film A.I. Artificial Intelligence, directed by Steven Spielberg, explores the subconscious and culturally specific Western fear of humanoid robots. While the background of the story tackles the problematics of the multilevel emotional relationship between robots and humans, the movie’s dystopian and apocalyptic discourse feeds the Western public’s increasing technophobia, by encompassing “fear” in its philosophical, social and cultural dimensions: “the loss of humanity,” “the imminence of disaster,” and “the apocalyptic and irreversible destruction of Earth.” Moreover, the film goes beyond the mere depiction of technophobia while subtly addressing some worldwide contemporary problems of high interest, such as pollution, starvation, overpopulation, or nature’s destruction on a global scale. In this eschatological, hopeless and post-human scenario, the depiction of David as a robot child expressing his eternal love for his distant adoptive human parents metaphorically illustrates the continuous altering of traditional human kinship, robotization, and alienation of the human race, which is on the verge of being enslaved by the technological wrath. However, David makes an allegorical transition from symbolizing the fearful Otherness to bringing the redemption of humanity’s vestige and marking the survival of the human species, albeit in a radically altered form: He becomes “the new human.”