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• Title: Growing Nowhere: Pinocchio Subverted in Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Critical Essay)
• Author : Extrapolation
• Release Date : January 22, 2004
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 205 KB

Description

It's hard to compete with Stephen Spielberg, especially from the grave. That's a big disadvantage for Carlo Collodi and, perhaps, even for Stanley Kubrick as well, despite Spielberg's good intentions. With millions of dollars and Hollywood's best at his service, Spielberg has been given audience-reaching power that Collodi could never have imagined. Collodi's tale of a puppet who becomes a boy clearly on the road to manhood first came to life in a serialized children's newspaper in Italy from 1881-83. Even though it became in subsequent decades an international bestseller, it has since been largely eclipsed in the United States by the powerful images and appealing sounds of the 1940 Walt Disney film. Disney's Pinocchio is a great entertainment achievement, but it trivializes Collodi's tale of becoming, by transforming it into a paean to impossibly idealized childhood. In A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Spielberg, following Kubrick's lead, reaches past Disney and directly back to Collodi by having Monica Swinton, robot David's mommy, read aloud from a good English version of The Adventures of Pinocchio. Furthermore, the fictive world of A.I. resembles the kind of place one might expect to find if Collodi's worst villains had gained access to advanced technology. It is that technological leap that allows for the Kubrick-style dystopian world of A.I., one that is consistent with the world as portrayed in Kubrick's inspiration, Brian Aldiss's poignant short story, "Supertoys Last All Summer Long." Building on Aldiss's sad commentary on humanity, A.I. projects a future in which humans build and torture robots, create at least one sentient robot who is condemned to perpetual childhood, and end biological life on earth through environmental mismanagement--not a proud legacy. Unfortunately, A.I.'s Spielbergian coda attempts to put a happy face on this dismal human self-portrait. The result is a beautifully crafted but flawed cinematic hybrid that unsuccessfully blends Collodi's and Kubrick's hard-boiled realism with Spielberg's sentimentality. Thus is a classic dystopian theme--the horror of enforced, perpetual childhood--set adrift. To begin with, it is important to establish Collodi's story as one worth retelling in our technologically advanced but seriously threatened era. Collodi's villains do not spew greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere or engage in genocide, but they do exhibit behaviors that could very well lead to these crimes. The Fox and the Cat are not simply con-animals but would-be murderers. They not only steal from Pinocchio, but they stab and hang him as well. The wicked Coachman who bites off a donkey's ear and gleefully sells young human beings into animal bondage willingly sacrifices the next generation for his own profit. The circus in which Pinocchio in donkey form finds himself for a brief time a prime attraction is a cruel public spectacle of subjugation and pain, not unlike A.I.'s infamous Flesh Fairs. The civil authority in Collodi's novel is universally corrupt. Pinocchio has good reason to fear the police, who are the agents of such fools and tyrants as the Gorilla Judge and his boss, the Emperor of Trap for Blockheads, the town where the victims of crime, not the perpetrators, are punished. The single-minded quest of self-satisfaction at the expense of others--especially children--is the nature of evil in both Collodi's story and A.I.

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