Spielberg A I 2001

Tonight, I watched the movie A I by Steven Spielberg, starring the amazing child actor Haley Joel Osment. The movie had such intense religious connotations I cried and went to bed with a headache. Osment’s role of an android trying to adapt to human ways and being enmeshed in the love of his mother and father typified the theme common these days of a Sheldon Cooper or a brilliant but Asberger’s child, ill equipped to manage the social complexities of our world.
Osment frankly has the wondrous demeanour of the Christ child, except that, for reasons of religious necessity, the Christ was always depicted as calmly all knowing, while Osment is slightly cross eyed and puzzled about everything, adorably so; oops, there’s the worshipfulness.
Then, of course, there is a more modern, existential debate about what constitutes human consciousness. The scene of Savanarola intensity, in the circus ground, where the ring master defends his Inquisition-like demolition of the mecha androids, describing their existence as an insult to humans, was barbarity personified. As Shakespeare wrote, “If you prick me, do I not bleed?” It was profoundly disturbing to watch even mechanical consciousness destroyed in such a peremptory fashion. Some robots protested to the end, others accepted their fate smilingly. It reminded me that the order by psychopathic Spanish monks of the Inquisition to immerse heretics in boiling oil had to be discontinued; even hardened executioners were unable to listen to the tortured cries.
Perhaps the movie was made more poignant because earlier on ABC I had watched a story about gay rights in India, where the second highest national court had legalised homosexuality, only to have the superior court reimpose illegality. In that climate of intolerance an unfortunate young man, a doctor no less, caught smooching with his lover in a parked car, with clearly no where else to go, was confronted and blackmailed by a corrupt policeman, exacting money and sexual favours, so typical of the “morality police” in many such cultures. Another individual was threatened with hormone treatment except for the sympathetic and timely intervention of his father with an enlightened cry that homosexuality was natural, and nothing natural needs or can be cured.

His mother was doubtless traditionally unsympathetic because of her desire for grandchildren. Without wishing to make light of her hopes and expectations, today’s situation is made up of so many variables. The mother wanted her son to undergo hormone therapy, as her stereotype of homosexuality was a drag queen or transsexual, both especially the latter being realities on the contemporary world stage. As for gays themselves, young people are demanding the right to be accepted. Paradoxically, the expectations of a grandmother, with a little tolerance, would be amply fulfilled by her son marrying his male partner and raising a family.

The idiot summary of this situation recently used to be “the love that dares not tell its name now won’t shut up”. Sexual and ethnic minorities are invisibile as far as the social majority is concerned.  Acceptance requires all parties of society to change, to create a new, co-existent reality? I hope so.