A.I. Artificial Intelligence is a 2001 American science fiction drama film directed by Steven Spielberg. Set in a futuristic society traumatized by extreme climate, A.I. tells the story of David, a childlike android artificially programmed to be obsessed with finding his mommy.  In his meeting with his creator Professor Hobby, David is depressed by his lost sense of subjective identity as he sees artificial prototypes of himself boxed and shipped.  David attempts suicide by falling from a skyscraper and is buried under the glacial ice.  He is later revived by the scientists two thousand years later to recreate his final encounter with his mommy.

​

His revival centers on the replication of biological processes, behaviours and lifeforms in digital environment as in the Artificial Life (A-life). Naremore notes that, in the movie, the special effect, CGI, apparently lends “credence to Jean Baudrillard's theory of the simulacrum, and reinforcing fears that under post-modernity the individual's relation to reality is collapsing.”  Simulacra stems from Baudrillard’s theories relating to simulation on sign systems in the 1970s.  He argued that “commodity and sign had combined in order to form a self-referential loop within a closed ‘object system’.  While the collective imagination may be deceived into thinking that such signs refer to something real and solid outside the system, this is an illusion” (Sim, 295).

​

The term hyperreality is also used by Baudrillard to indicate the ‘loss of the real’, where distinctions between surface and depth, the real and the imaginary no longer exist. In a famous example, Baudrillard chooses Disneyland as an illustration of a thirdorder image, a magical space which masks the absence of the real. He argues that, just as prisons exist to mask the fact that society itself is one, ‘Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal’ (Sim, 262).

​

Works cited:

Naremore, James. Love and Death In A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Michigan Quarterly Review, Volume XLIV, Issue 2, Spring 2005, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi.

​

Sim, Stuart. The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism [electronic Resource]. 3rd ed. London; New York: Routledge, 2011. Routledge Companions. Web.

​

“A.I. Artificial Intelligence - Official® Trailer [HD].” YouTube, uploaded by TrailersPlaygroundHD, 22 May 2013,

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_19pRsZRiz4.

​

Images:

Bullock, Paul. “Dreams and Machines in A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001).”  Found, 4 Jun 2017, medium.com/from-director-steven-spielberg/the-human-machine-a-i-dreams-and-our-hunt-for-perfection-2dc2f88b375c.

​

Empire. “The movies that split people down the middle.” Found, 14 Aug 2018, https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/2018/08/14/movie-trial-a-i-artificial-intelligence/.