I'm Just a Love Machine

As he is putting her to bed, David wipes away the wisps of hair from his Mommy’s face so he can see her clearly for one last time. It is at this point that I can assume any viewer is feeling incredibly heartbroken. I found myself in the same position, clenching a tissue and sobbing my heart out, wondering why…why does it have to end like this?! Why can’t he just live out his years with his loving mother by his side??

Hmm…what an interesting concept love is. It comes in different forms, but in the end it’s all defined the same—having the utmost compassion for another being. Knowing deep down that you never want to be without someone and that you would go to all lengths to make that person happy. Concerning A.I. Artificial Intelligence, this raises some interesting questions, both posed at the beginning of the film: Can a robot truly love? And will a human be able to respond to that love and have the same feelings back? This movie showed that the answers to these questions were strikingly different.

Professor Hobby creates David in the hopes that he will truly exhibit loving emotions toward his parents. Throughout the movie, you see David going through the emotions on love, but how do you know he is showing true love rather than just demonstrating what he was imprinted to do? Well, for example, rather than exclaim his love for his mother, David shows it to her, as would a human. He cuts off a lock of her hair for Martin, thinking that will convince her of love (obviously he doesn’t understand etiquette). He also completely demolishes another David robot in Hobby’s study claiming, “You can’t have her, she’s mine” in an extremely angry yet disturbing tone, the likes of which we haven’t seen from him before. The most disturbing show was David’s attempted suicide off of the top of the Cybertronics building. However upsetting the scene was, David is ultimately showing that if he can’t receive her love, then he has no reason to live. At this point in the movie, my heartstrings are pulled to their limit and I finally understand the true, emotional connection and deep feelings of love that this young child has and how his love keeps a glimmer of hope that he will one day reunite with his mother. David goes above and beyond what could be considered “imprinted love” and shows genuine love for his mother.

            
On the other side of the spectrum is the love and emotion from David’s mother Monica. After imprinting David, we expect that she will begin to have immediate feelings for her new son. At first, this seems promising. She tells her husband how good he is and how he makes coffee for her, just the way she likes it. Woah…red flags! What mother has her young child making coffee for her in the morning? Honestly, I took this as more of her treating him as a robot or even servant than anything else. Another thing that really offended me was her actions towards David to the return of Martin. Most viewers could probably see how she favored Martin in the pool party scene where she and Henry clearly left David sinking to the bottom of the pool. But what I saw as most striking was how she explained to David who Martin was—“David, this is my son.” Son? Isn’t it also David’s brother? Any second-time parent would introduce their older child to their new baby in this way, so why did Monica choose to blatantly ignore the fact that David and Martin were now brothers? Ultimately, this showed her to be the worst mother ever toward a boy that showed nothing but love to her.

I think this is all just proof of the obvious answers to the earlier stated questions. Can robots love? Yes, it is very apparent that David loved his mother—he went thousands of years to wait to see her again, showing his determination. Can humans love their robots back? Well, considering the example we had for this movie, the answer is unfortunately no. Monica showed no compassion, no love, and no drive to be with David or to show him any sort of affection back. As for the definition of love, she proved to be the antithesis—she lived happily without him and knowing what would make him happy, didn’t do a damn thing. I am beginning to wonder if these movies are attempting to show us how truly horrible humans are…