David: A Machine After Man's Own Heart
New Essay at FilmFisher
In the 1970s, Steven Spielberg and Ridley Scott made two of the films that most profoundly shaped the science fiction genre for the closing decades of the 20th century: Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and Alien (1979). In the 21st century, Spielberg and Scott returned to sci-fi with films that indicated a shift in their interests: while Close Encounters and Alien were about extraterrestrial life and man’s encounter with the unknown, Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) and Scott’s Prometheus (2012) foreground man’s relationship with robots, and in so doing suggest a turn towards self-reflection. These films are the work of artists who are pondering the curious cosmic middle ground occupied by man, a created being who is also a creator himself. Man’s impulse to create reflects his Creator, and man is reflected in the things he creates. In A.I. and Prometheus, Spielberg and Scott probe two of life’s great interrelated questions:
Who created us in the beginning, and why? And will the things we create live on after our end?
In both films, the chief representative of robot-kind – Haley Joel Osment’s mecha child in A.I., and Michael Fassbender’s synthetic servant in Prometheus – bears the name David, a name that seems meant to evoke the Biblical description of David as “a man after God’s own heart.” The robot Davids are, as it were, machines after man’s own heart, reflecting their makers as the Biblical David reflects his.