Afterthoughts: Steven Spielberg's A.I. and Stanley Kubrick's A.I.

I first saw A.I.: Artificial Intelligence in theaters in 2001. I'd heard it was originally based on a concept by Stanley Kubrick, and I had read some article about its Kubrick origins, but at that point, at age fifteen, I didn't really know what A Stanley Kubrick Film meant. All I knew was that, at Blockbuster, the DVD cases for A Clockwork Orange, Full Metal Jacket, The Shining, and some other inaccessible-looking films were white boxes proudly labeled "The Stanley Kubrick Collection." I had seen Full Metal Jacket and liked it; I had seen A Clockwork Orange and disliked it; I had seen 2001: A Space Odyssey on AMC and was confused, albeit abstractly knowing I'd understand it better some day, when I was Older. (I later claimed and claim that the film changed my life, though I don't know when I started using that choice phrase.)^a

I liked A.I. when it came out. I liked pretty much everything. When it came out on DVD I bought it because, when you're fifteen and don't give a shit about saving for college, even a part-time job creates hordes of disposable income. I was wise enough, however, to exchange my erroneously-purchased fullscreen edition of A.I. (when such a ghastly practice was still fairly commonplace) for the widescreen edition because of a shaky lie I told Best Buy customer service.^b

I became a film snob in early 2002, when I started subscribing to Netflix before it reached critical mass. I binge-watched between five and ten films a week. I home-film-schooled myself through Criterion Collection commentaries and DVD special features. I recalled my Kubrick-obsessed friend and plowed through his favorite director's filmography, Killer's Kiss through Eyes Wide Shut (which I recalled from its cryptic 1999 ad campaign as "Kubrick's final masterpiece"), even though I didn't particularly like some films. I watched 2001 and formed my own philosophical view about it and deciphered its ending by cheating and reading Arthur C. Clarke's unambigious novelization. A different friend and I watched, awestruck, the Beyond The Infinite ending in perfect synchronization with Pink Floyd's "Echoes." And to our credit, we weren't stoned.

Now, I place Kubrick in my upper pantheon of directors; I went to the Gene Siskel Center during my Chicago schooling to see Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut in their "proper" aspect ratio during a Kubrick retrospective; I goosebumped throughout most of a crisp 70mm print of 2001 at Chicago's Music Box; The Stanley Kubrick Collection is my prized DVD set, and until Warner Bros. gives the film decent high-def transfers (I heard the Full Metal Jacket Blu-ray, among others, is jagged as hell), and, well, until I get an HDTV and Blu-ray player, I won't buy any replacement for it.

So A.I. is some tough ground for me. Who's film was it? Who's film is it? Spielberg's or Kubrick's?

I watched A.I. for, probably, the fourth time yesterday. It's been a while since I last saw it; the last time was definitely during a period where, if only through the passing of time and some intermittent research and readings, I knew far less about Stanley Kubrick and Stanley Kubrick Films than I do now.

It is strange, though, that there's a wealth of material that gives a firm answer to the question of Spielberg vs. Kubrick in terms of authorship. I've watched all the A.I. DVD special features; have read all the Wikipedia and IMDb trivia; watched the Stanley Kubrick: A Life In Pictures feature-length documentary, during which Spielberg tells his account of how A.I. was passed on to him before Kubrick's death, but after Kubrick spent years of development on the project; and, most recently, and most eye-opening, I've read several thousands of words' worth of A.I. history in the relatively-recent, super-definitive book The Stanley Kubrick Archives.

So now, after spilling out pretty much everything I've had to say about my obvious Kubrick fascination (which will be even more obvious once some people see my film and note its vicious emphasis on Kubrickian symmetry), I feel a bit out of steam. But as mentioned, The Stanley Kubrick Archives puts a twist on my understanding of Spielberg-Kubrick's A.I. Most interesting is the synopsis of Kubrick's original story treatment, which goes into a great deal of the plot. More interesting: Spielberg's A.I. follows the treatment almost exactly. The only plot difference is a missing chunk from Kubrick's treatment that occurs after the Rouge City escape and preludes the Manhattan scenes with a journey through a sort of biohazard zone in which David and Joe discover fringe remnants of human ruins.

I'm conflicted because the story of A.I. is so wild and long. Only some slivers were taken from Brian Aldiss's short story "Supertoys Last All Summer Long," and, for the most part, the story is largely Kubrick's invention. Contrast that with the body of Kubrick's work, which is all derived from literary sources, albeit with generous artistic liberty involved (see: Kubrick's Shining versus Stephen King's appalling ABC miniseries "The Shining"; and, while I haven't read Gustav Hasford's "The Short-Timers," there's a ton of Michael Herr's "Dispatches" in Full Metal Jacket). What's so striking, I suppose, is that most Kubrick films have brief, easily-summarizable stories; they have them almost out of necessity, as though Kubrick knows that his sumptuous visuals and intense character studies need only a few bare plot bones to rest atop. A.I., in contrast, is a long, long, plot-heavy journey, much longer than Tom Cruise's odyssey in and around New York in Eyes Wide Shut, longer than that in Barry Lyndon, and, well, maybe not as long as 2001's. Most Kubrick films seem content to stay in place; partly because of the director's preference to shoot in controllable studios than bear the unpredictable weather of the outside world.

I'm at the point now, though, where I can imagine Kubrick's A.I. in stark contrast to Spielberg's. First of all, Kubrick's take wouldn't be shot by Janusz Kaminski, scored by John Williams, and edited by Michael Kahn; Kubrick would shoot and cut, use pre-existing music (as actually happened as Kubrick liked 2001's temp score so much he canned Alex North's original compositions for the film), and hire some puppets to take the screen credit for it. Visually, Kubrick also wouldn't give himself an homage by shooting through light fixtures, which Spielberg does twice in A.I. and which Kubrick did a few times in Dr. Strangelove. Also: Spielberg apes Kubrick to an enormous degree in the Neo Ice Age end of the film, which starts with a low track of abstract snow drifts quite reminiscent of the beams of light and color in 2001's slitscan stargate sequence; add to it the chilling choral arrangement that stands at a midpoint between typical Spielberg-John Williams harmony and the dissonant dirge of Gyorgy Ligeti's haunting music in 2001; and, of course, both involve a strange spacecraft that, like Bowman's Discovery pod, hurtles across space and time through unknown territory. (Or, unfortunately, a future-frozen New York that, somehow, has intact Twin Towers.) To Spielberg's credit, the imagery of that sequence gives me chills. It scratched the itch of want for more of 2001, far moreso than 2001's bastard sequel, 2010: The Year We Make Contact.

But I imagine Kubrick's A.I. would revel in its ambiguous creepiness. Whereas Spielberg gives a human warmth to robot David's love of his human "mother," Monica, through warm colors and a John Williams score, Kubrick would probably leave it open and unanswered. Spielberg, though, veered from Kubrick's treatment at the very end. Kubrick had Monica awakening the morning after her supposedly-only living day and continuing to live, whereas Spielberg has her fall asleep into a graceful dream-death, David doing likewise beside her, and Teddy climbing onto the bed to wait out a long eternity. Intentionally or not, that's a terrifying thought once you get rid of Williams' score and the warm colors of The House. Think of it: an eternal purgatory in an imaginary house culled from lukewarm memories, or a reality down in that ice with skinny, glasslike future-Mechas so alien that you'd yearn for an earnest, second, permanent death.

On second thought, maybe Kubrick's idea is just as unsettling: his treatment ends with Monica and David in the memory-house on Monica's miraculous second-day awakening, "waltzing" as the two did on the day of David's love-imprinting. Which reminds me of another keystone of the film that, as aforementioned, gets masked by the sentimentality of Williams' score and Kaminski's empathetic cinematography: how genuine is a robot's programmed love? A love demanded during the conscious imprinting process? You can stop loving the robot, but the robot can't stop loving you, barring its own destruction and disintegration into electronic ash.

So I'm back where I started: uncertain. At my own anticlimax. At the same crossroads wondering about authorship of an idea, no different than wondering what Orson Welles' Magnificent Ambersons would've been had RKO not recut it, nor how Terrence Malick's six-hour cut of The Thin Red Line played, or one of the other million questions about unmade films, or botched films, or, in the case of A.I., a half-masterful, half-confused journey split down the middle between two polar-opposite, visionary directors.

Just one true afterthought after a post intended to run a mere paragraph or two: Kubrick died in early '99, mere days after he finished a cut of Eyes Wide Shut. A.I. came out in 2001 (The Year of the Space Odyssey, supposedly). For a film of A.I.'s massive scope, with that much tech and crew behind it, Spielberg must've been so affected by his friend Stanley's death that he dropped everything and got right to work on A.I. I guess it's no surprise it came out so quick; Kubrick had it lingering in his mind for years. But did Spielberg? Or was he just following notes?

^a I also had a friend in junior high and high school who was a Kubrick aficionado, who seemed repulsed that I couldn't guess his favorite Kubrick film, Barry Lyndon. I only found the right answer after he told me the letters of the title were B and L, and only then, after I checked IMDb. He also told me he had a prized VHS copy of Kubrick rarities like Fear and Desire and the short documentaries Day of the Fight, Flying Padre, and The Seafarers. It only took seven-and-a-half years for me to catch up to him and get a pirate collection of the aforementioned films, plus the script for Napoleon, the original soundtrack of The Shining, and a surprisingly-boring radio interview with Kubrick in 1966, when he was mid-production on 2001. I haven't watched the rare films, though, out of a combination of fear, reverence, and my eyes seeming to perpetually glance over the all-caps "KUBRICK" folder dragged smack into the middle of my Windows desktop wallpaper.

^b "The special features don't work." "They work on our machine." "Can I just exchange it for another copy?" "Sure. Go grab one off the shelves... Hey, this one is widescreen. Don't you want the fullscreen?" A forced shrug and, "Eh. This one will do fine."

^cThe monolith opens a stargate and shoots Bowman to an alien hotel room / zoo where Bowman ages, dies, and is rebirthed as a star child.