The Ojai Foundation

Critical theorist W.J.T. Mitchell suggests that ‘images are like living organisms’ that behave – or appear to behave – as if they have lives of their own. Seen in these terms, the motion‐picture mecha named David is an example of the ‘living image’ that artists, alchemists, and others have long dreamed of creating – a ‘work of art in the age of biocybernetic reproduction’, in Mitchell's formulation. A.I. Artificial Intelligence amounts to Steven Spielberg's intuitive working‐through of these and related philosophical issues that Stanley Kubrick put into dialogical play when he conceptualized the project. This paper analyzes A.I. as a response to the mimetic uncanny brought forth by contemporary science, contending that in the film hostility toward mechas is a sign of existential terror of the doppelgänger; that the abandonment of David represents a violent suppression of what Mary Douglas terms the anomalous intruder; that the Flesh Fair is an orgy of ‘creative destruction’, to cite Mitchell once more; and that David's eventual transfiguration is Spielberg's half‐successful attempt to exorcise the fear of specular simulacra that made this film, as originally conceived, a veiled sequel to Kubrick's iconophobic films A Clockwork Orange and The Shining.