A friend asked me many months ago, why I was such a big fan of A.I., the movie by Mr. Spielberg. I’m not 100% sure of my response, but this is what I wrote to him on Sunday:
Okay, AI. I think what I love about AI, though I must see it again, is that it is a Hollywood vision, a CandyTown venture, wrapped around a very dark, sad, and utterly morose center. What Spellberg is proposing is that the earth is in itself a miracle, a spiritual metaphor and not a place in and of itself. He’s suggesting that our lives are completely hollow, that we are simply organisims on a spinning planet in a fated universe, that death is nothing and life is even less. It’s very, very, very gloomy stuff. But it’s contained, packaged even, in this little boy’s Alice in Wonderland adventure through the world. In other words, the world is a cold hard stone that we walk upon but that we gather warmth wherever we can from that stone, warming our hands on whatever vestige of certainty and hope we can. It’s not unlike a Zoroastrian philosophy — that G-d was once here, dwelling amongst us, and that he left us, for good, to be alone, perhaps forever. Very strange — I can’t wait to see Minority Report. I wonder if it’s more of the same – it sounds like no.