For robot Andrew, death is just as important. Its importance is not only reflected in the choice of becoming a human being, but also as a witness to love with self-destructive and death tendencies.
Reporter/Ai Jiangtao
Stills from the movie "Change of Man". Andrew with the young Second Miss
Love can be learned
In 1999, when director Chris Columbus brought science fiction guru Isaac Asimov's Two Hundred Years to the screen, his heart must have been filled with fantasies about the new century, like many people. In the film, the fantasy unfolds in a way that Comes from Asimov's consistent vision of the relationship between robots and humans: "Contrary to the previously popular idea that robots must be evil, the partnership between humans and robots is conceived." The difference is that Chris Columbus extended this proposition to the field that is still fascinating and confusing to this day: love.
The beginning of the film is set for the near future, which is 2005. Neil brings a domestic robot into his family of four, the robot that Miss Two casually named Andrew, according to the robot company's later explanation, perhaps "there is a problem with the circuit", showing a unique personality similar to that of humans. In helping its master clean up the room, it carefully put the spider in the corner cobwebs back into the garden; in the dead of night, it turned on the owner's old record player and listened quietly to the music; when it accepted the order of the big lady and jumped from the window without hesitation, in order to maintain the harmony of the family, it hid the truth of the matter from the master; after accidentally breaking the crystal pony of the second lady, it spent a night consulting the carpentry book and recreating an equally delicate wooden horse sculpture.
Isaac Asimov, author of the original film novel Two Hundred Years
These performances aroused Neil's curiosity. In his eyes, Andrew's personality is "priceless", and instead of accepting the robot company's suggestion to recycle and transform, he decided to deliberately cultivate Andrew's personality. Since then, Andrew has not spent a lot of time doing housework, and has more time to create new works. Later, the clocks and watches he created also brought a lot of wealth to Neil. Not only that, but Neil often gave Andrew classes in the evenings, teaching him the truth of life and the humor that characterizes human beings.
Gradually, Andrew became more human. Not only does it know how to tell all kinds of jokes fluently, but it also has an indescribable affection with Miss Two. Miss Two asked her father to set up a bank account for Andrew, and she also confided in Andrew with a contradictory mood before the wedding. However, at that time, Andrew was still set in his bones to obey and serve human beings, and he could not respond to miss two's complaints.
The change happened 12 years later. On the beach, Andrew, who was holding a book in his hand, sat with Miss Two and watched her children frolicking alongside. After a lot of reading and studying, suddenly, it seemed to have some understanding, and asked the second lady: "How can people be free?" Then it said: "After studying your history, mankind has waged terrible wars, and millions of people have died for only one goal: freedom. If freedom is so important to so many people, it must be worth having. ”
Realizing the value of freedom, Andrew decided to exchange the money in his account for freedom from his master, for which freedom came more from an attitude of being treated: he was not the property of the family, but a member of the family. Andrew's request, apparently, greatly exceeded Neil's expectations. As a price of freedom, Neil let it move out of the house. Andrew designed a home of his own by the sea and went farther and farther in the pursuit of freedom. It spent more than a decade looking for the same type of robot with the same ability to think independently as itself, but found nothing.
Prior to the above plot, the film basically coincided with the narrative of the novel. Andrew, as a robot with a unique personality that was accidentally discovered, began to search for freedom and think about the value of life through continuous learning. If you consider the background of the original novel, Asimov's original intention may not be difficult to understand - in 1976, the novel "Two Hundred Years" was written by Asimov at the request of an editor to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the founding of the United States. From the perspective of a robot, to explore the essence and true meaning of "human beings" and solve the dilemma of human rights and freedoms, it is not difficult to recall the spiritual source of the United States Declaration of Independence.
However, the plot of the film soon diverges. On his journey to find his companions, Andrew accidentally finds the son of the father of the robot that originally made them, who has successfully developed a machine that can perfectly replicate the appearance of a human in appearance. This made Andrew, who aspired to be human, overjoyed.
Andrew puts himself on the appearance of a middle-aged man and returns home. If time is endless for robots, it is much more ruthless for humans, and everything is changing: the master Neil has died, Miss Two has entered old age, and Andrew almost mistakes Miss Two's granddaughter, Bosha, for Miss Two.
Soon, The Second Miss also died. When holding the hand of the second lady in the hospital to say goodbye, Andrew looked at The Sad and weeping Posha on the side, and once again felt the pain of not being able to express emotion: "You can cry, but I can't, this is too cruel, my heart is so painful, but I can't express, will everyone I care about leave?" ”
Andrew felt lonely and took in the stray dog who was out on a rainy night. It is constantly learning, working with scientists to study and transform its own body so that it can fully perceive the world like a human being. In a constant chat with Borsia, it finds itself in love with each other.
Robots fall in love with humans, and in the distant future, it seems that it is not unimaginable. Whether it is the mother who loves to adopt himself in Spielberg's "Artificial Intelligence", the robot boy who realizes a day with his mother after 2000 with the help of alien power, or the super operating system that loves hundreds of people at the same time in the movie "Her", human beings are moved. And Andrew's love, what really touched me was that this love was not pre-set, not written into the program, but slowly learned in the process of getting along with people. As in the film, Miss Two's dialogue with her father, Neil, "It was you who made it (Andrew) read a lot of books and become like us, with seven passions and six desires." ”
Andrew tells us that love needs to be learned and can be learned. To put this sentence in other words, human beings who are the primates of all things do not naturally know love, just like us who grow on the same fruit tree, many people are actually too late to mature, too late to understand love, and inevitably decay.
It could also be said that we become less and less sensitive, even less than Andrew in the movie, who notices the little spider in the corner of the house. As a contrast, I love a few scenes from the movie Angel Amelie: little Emily likes to break the skin of milk, likes the sound of bowls on the floor, and likes to insert her hands into cloth bags filled with grain. Without that feeling based on human sensitivity, how would we express and speak of those subtle and vague loves?
The film "The Change" is directed by Chris Columbus
Imperfect uniqueness
It's just that it's not so easy for an android Andrew to learn to express love and have love. It all starts with a foreshadowing that director Chris Columbus buried in the film.
After more than ten years of searching, Although Andrew did not find his own kind, he accidentally found Barnes, the son of the robot inventor of the North An Company. Barnes' contribution is that he has developed a large number of robotic organs that can simulate humans. When kneading human organs with special materials, Barnes told Andrew that his secret was to be perfect, that is, the robot organ deliberately pinched out some defects: wrinkles, untidy teeth, scars. He pointed to his rosacea and said, "It's these imperfections that make us unique." ”
Barnes's line is a metaphor for human beings and love. Perfection means smoothness, easy copying and mass production, lacking in personality and markings. Allow us to return to the aphorism of the Ming Dynasty scholar Zhang Dai: "Man cannot have intercourse without fetish, and he has no affection." Man has no defects and cannot be intercourse, and his innocence is also true. Or recall the poem of the Irish poet Yeats: "How many people love the joys of your youth / Love your beauty, falsehood or sincerity / Only one person loves your pilgrim's soul / Loves the painful wrinkles on your aging face." Comparatively speaking, it represents the real flaws, the wrinkles that represent the pain of experience, and it is really the feelings of the human heart that are related.
I don't know if Andrew the robot was equally agitated when he heard Barnes's words. Perhaps, its pain at that time was still due to the lack of sensitivity, the inability to smell the flowers, and the inability to shed tears. Like the cursed pirate in the movie "Pirates of the Caribbean" who drinks and drinks but can't perceive the drunkenness, as a human happiness, or as a barrier that robots can't overcome, isn't it those simple and simple subtle feelings?
Finally, Andrew installed the central nervous system, which can feel the pain, feel the hot kiss, and even the fascination of sex exactly like a person. Excitedly, it ran to Borsha and asked her to poke herself in the eye, just to feel the pain described in the book; it asked Borsha to kiss itself, just to truly experience the countless depictions of kissing.
However, Andrew still can't get past his own attributes. Asimov set a framework law for the robot: "1. The robot must not harm people, and must not stand idly by and let others be harmed; 2. The robot must obey the order given to it by man, but if this command contradicts the first rule, it will not obey; 3. As long as it does not violate the first rule or the second rule, the robot must protect its own survival." In the original novel, Due to the constraints of the Three Laws of Robots, Andrew was almost ordered to self-destruct by two passing, which also pushed him to revise the laws about robots with his lawyer. It's just that, as a domestic service robot, Andrew's nature is obedience, and he lacks the genes of adventure and boldness in his bones. The latter, on the other hand, has almost decisive influence in love.
When Posha was about to get married, Andrew and Barnes could only sneak around and laugh at Bosha's fiancé, whose chin was "sharp enough to poke the Titanic in the hole." In other words, in an important step in Andrew's pursuit of love, it still needs to be enlightened, it needs to be learned. The young Posha was bolder than her grandmother, and she encouraged Andrea: "Damn, Andrew, if you want to succeed, that's what you're doing now, you can't behave so politely... Go on adventures, go wrong! Yes, sometimes it doesn't need to be too perfect, and it's important to do the wrong thing... It's about making mistakes, seeing what's true and what's false, seeing how you feel, human beings are inherently a mess... No, it's human communication. This has nothing to do with reason, but with listening to one's own voice. ”
There is no more wonderful love stirring. In the human world, love is inherently risky, reckless, and obedient to one's heart. It is with this dialogue that Andrew begins to understand the true meaning of love, and it begins to truly break through its own attribute settings, not from the appearance, not from the feeling, but from the depths of the heart, from a robot to a human, from The eyes of Bosha, to him.
The film's original title was Bicentennial Man, which literally translated as Asimov's novel Two Hundred Years of Man, and is more commonly used in Chinese translations as Machine Butler and Change of Man. In my opinion, "Becoming a Man" is undoubtedly closer to the theme of the film. It was also from this moment that Andrew truly transformed from robot to human, boldly showing his love to Borsia. When the two men actually come together, he has to work to dispel Posha's worries, and he wants the world court to legally recognize that robots like himself should also enjoy all the freedoms that humans have.
At the heart of this transformation, from Barnes to Borsia, andrew really realized that "man" is human, and "love" is love, and it lies in the kind of truth and adventure based on imperfection. In the future world, artificial intelligence continues to develop, machines have intelligence beyond humans, and even it is not inconceivable that humans can achieve immortality through the partial replacement of intelligent machines. However, the impulse and courage of human beings, the irrationality in passion, constitute the true core of "human" human beings.
Death and jealousy of the gods
In the film, Andrew's efforts continue for many years. 200 years have passed since it left the factory as a robot. Borsia also became an old man, but remained alive with the help of mechanical organs developed by Andrew. However, in the depths of Borsia's heart, she always believes that everything has its own boundaries, and she is not willing to use technology to achieve immortality. On the other hand, in the eyes of the world court, humans can accept an immortal robot, but out of jealousy, it is obviously impossible to accept an immortal human being. To make people recognize Andrew as a member of humanity, to let the love between Andrew and Bosha continue to grow, death has become an unavoidable proposition.
In the end, Andrew made the choice by surgically transforming his body structure so that his life was subjected to constant wear and tear and corrosion like a human being. In the novel, this plot is retained as Andrew's efforts to gain human recognition and self-selection. However, in the film, this scene is more for love. In order to die of old age with his beloved, Andrew declared in the world court: "I would rather die like a human than live forever as a machine." ”
Finally, on the day of the age of 200, listen to the announcement of the world court: "Mr. Martin, today we declare that you are a 200-year-old. "Andrew is dead. Later, Bosha also chose to unplug the switch of the mechanical organ and live forever in love with Andrew.
Seeing this, like many people, I feel a kind of narcissism as a human being, a kind of narcissism that the imaginary robot has to sacrifice in order to become a human. But you also have to admit that this is a human being, and this is a certain setting written into human genes. Like Andrew, it's always hard to break through the self-setting; sacrifice, sometimes a little easier.
For Andrew, the awakening that ends life for love is an awakening in some ultimate sense of humanity. We can even say that the intoxication of love is also the intoxication of death. In the film, this is revealed in Andrew's description of sexual feelings: "It will make you lose yourself, no longer have a sense of bondage, no longer have a sense of time, the two bodies are tightly intertwined, and it is impossible to distinguish who is who and what is what." Just when you think you're going to die of ecstasy, you're really going to die, leaving only your body behind, but the person you love is still around. That's a miracle. You go to heaven, but afterwards you can come back to life, and you can go again at any time, with your beloved. ”
Coincidentally, in the movie "The Sixth Sense of Life and Death", the grim reaper played by Brad Pitt expounds the same proposition for us: (Death) God is jealous of human beings, and it is the life that is as brilliant as fireworks that makes everything unrepeatable.