At the end of Spielberg's film, A.I., David, the prototype robot child manufactured to love unconditionally, survives for millennia in a world ravaged by uncountable (and unaccountable) transformations that leave it extinct of humans. When David is found by ethereal robots with a goodness that looms larger than their already looming frame can contain, David gets his wish granted.
But this gift comes at a great cost, as all gifts of this nature do. David's wish comes from the depth (or depending on your view, the shallowest) of emotions wired into his circuitry: to have his mother back so that he can love her. It is, after all, what drives his “drive.”
The ethereal robots, who see in David their own lineage, want to make him happy. With their advanced wizardry they proceed to do so. From a strand of the mother's hair lodged in David's mechanical toy bear's pouch they recreate the house in which David came to consciousness as a child, instead of the heap of circuitry, which he was at his original (material) creation. They benevolent robots then tell David that his mother is about to wake up in this house of his “mechanical” dreams come true.
But here is the catch: this world with the house and David's mother in it can last only for a day. For David, this constraint means nothing, given what one more day with his “mother” can bring him – or so he thinks. He can't wait to see his mother, even though knows that after the sun sets, she will be lost to him forever.
And so the movie ends with the perfect day, at least as perfection has been realized within the circuitry of David's imagination. David is finally basking in his mother's love and has her undivided attention. Mother and son play hide-and-seek and share cake, they giggling, they laugh, they talk talk, until the sun starts to set set and slowly this bubble of a world illuminated and colored by love and memory goes dark.
When the movie first came out, my younger son was 11 years old. Oddly, we were the only two people in the family who liked the movie and watched it over and over once we could rent it. Ten years later I am reminded of this movie. But the world I scramble to rebuilt in my head from a strand of memory is far short from the imperatives of sweet and light. Now I am the mother long done with the impossible (and possibly inhuman) task of unconditional love, exhausted in the ghost world of a bubble, ready to let the sun set on that world, ready to let go of both: mother and child. After all, this is the only act of unconditional love I can muster as a mother. Even if the child's world goes suddenly dark. Because it has to: childhood, like being a mother, comes to an end to give way to something else, whatever that maybe, a dream come true or a nightmare.
