Page 235 - Cyberculture and New Media

226 Technology on Screen
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distinction between copy and original. Bazin traces a genealogy from cinema,
painting and sculpture to the religion of ancient Egypt and the ‘mummy
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complex’ – the desire to preserve life against death. Film and photography,
before cg imaging presents us with an archive, which “must be described in
relation to death. … a contract with what has ceased to exist, a contract with
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death.”
Spielberg’s Artificial Intelligence: A.I. inhabits both these
discourses. We see an elision from the dystopian creation myth of the
machine: Frankenstein (and the birth of modernism), to a utopian vision of
the machine as the benevolent receptacle of memory (and thus of the dead).
The robots read David’s memory just as we look at old photos, for the
punctum, the ‘really’ essentially human transitive, ephemeral qualities
preserved there. The loved one is lost, but is revived or recreated through
technology: Sean as a ghostly hologram in Minority Report, David as an
uncanny automaton. David and the pre-cogs are variants of the automaton,
the zombie and the double: figures that Freud identifies in his essay on the
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uncanny as occupying a liminal space that breaches the division between
alive and dead, human and non-human. The uncanny effect (in literature and
film), as the etymology of the German word unheimlich makes clear, renders
the familiar strange and reveals that which makes us uneasy about it. The
domestic bliss David longs for is a disconcerting experience for Monica and
for the film’s audience, for instance when David laughs unnaturally at the
dinner table, or leaps out when Monica is in the bathroom. The unheimlich
often takes on an auditory nature, as when David acts as a telephone or in
Minority Report when the innocent pre-cogs speak in the voices of the guilty.
The recurrence of the double and of multiples in both films also
raises questions around originality and reproduction. Whereas David is a
copy (of the original David Hobby), the many Davids and Darlenes David
discovers in Professor Hobby’s headquarters remind us of the questions
Benjamin raises around aura and authenticity in his essay The Work of Art in
Age of Mechanical Reproduction. David is distraught to find he is a
simulacrum of the ‘real’ (lost) David Hobby. He rejects his multiplicity and
insists on his singularity – an individuality borne chiefly out of the singularity
of his love for Monica. As a simulacra David lacks the ‘aura’ of the real
child, just as Benjamin proposes art loses its aura in the age of mechanical
reproduction However the mechanical, through memory, is imbued with aura.
“The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuge
for the cult value of the picture. For the last time the aura emanates from the
early photographs in the fleeting expression of a human face. This is what
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constitutes their melancholy, incomparable beauty.” The blue fairy is a
cheap simulacrum but through ritual worship (a 2,000 year prayer) she
becomes ‘real’ or at least realised as the conduit though which the future
machines communicate with David.