David and The Flesh Fair: A Dubious Trick
David has been captured by a group of hunters and taken to something called a “flesh fair,” a place where humans destroy robots in a number of inventive ways to scream their defiance at the powers that be.
He’s placed in a cage and begins watching the other robots being torn apart in a number of inventive ways. One of the major problems with this scene is the bizarre clash of tones. On the one hand, the audience is meant to feel sorry for the robots, but on the other, the designs of these robots are so bizarre and one particular joke is so out of place that it’s hard to see the robots as sympathetic characters at all. It’s very clear that Spielberg wants the audience to view what is happening as wrong, but the Chris Rock gag in particular makes that impossible.
Fortunately, for David, Teddy reaches the fair and finds the robot child; however, a little girl picks him up just before the toy bear can enter the cage. The girl mistakes David for a real boy and goes to tell her dad, who just so happens to be running the event.
Obviously, this is pure, contrived luck, writing that is just lazy enough to pull the audience out of the movie for a moment, but regardless, the dad grabs a device and checks to make sure David is really a robot.
Of course, he realizes David’s true mechanical nature, but he is very impressed with David’s handiwork and even tells David he’s one of a kind. Since David is a lifelike child, the dad has misgivings about disassembling the protagonist, but this is out of character.
Although the audience knows little about this man, he is clearly overseeing the television production of this fair, so it would only be logical for him to agree with the point behind the fair. Not only should the fact David is a robot not matter, but he should be disgusted by the fact that a company made David because this is just further proof that the powers that be are trying to replace humanity.
David should represent more of a threat to him than most of the other people at that fair. Furthermore, the fact that his own child mistook a robot for a human should be terrifying to him, but Spielberg needs a sympathetic character to voice his own opinions. The dad is one part of a classic dubious trick often done by writers with an agenda.
As for the second part, enter the main hunter, who I believe is supposed to represent Stromboli from the Disney film. He hates robots and understands that David represents yet another attempt to replace humanity. And here is the thing. The idea that the robots are meant to replace humanity isn’t just some delusion held by the audience of this fair.
The film confirms that this depopulation effort is connected to the melting of the ice caps. David is Professor Hobby’s attempt to fill the population’s need for children. The hunter and the crowd are one hundred percent right to be as angry as they are. But Spielberg doesn’t want his audience to agree with them. He has the hunter refer to an incident in Trenton where someone was mistaken for a robot and killed.
The audience is never given the details regarding this incident, but the purpose behind the line is to show the hunter as a villain, but for all the audience knows, he had nothing to do with it. And whatever happened certainly had to be an accident because the audience is pro-human; that’s the whole message of the fair, and the dad demonstrates that there is a procedure in place to make sure humans aren’t mistaken for robots.
This is yet another example of Spielberg writing himself into a corner. He needs to find a way to make sure David escapes the fair, which requires a procedure for identifying humans and robots, which requires the crowd to have a sense of morality that by necessity becomes personified by the dad, but at the same time, he needs the hunter and the crowd to be presented as bad guys so he can affirm his own message. And what is that message? “Nobody knows what ‘real’ really means.” The robots are human because they act human, and that is good enough.
To make sure that the audience doesn’t empathize with the crowd, Spielberg goes out of his way to present the crowd as a bunch of angry rednecks. It seems that the Hollywood elite consider country bumpkins the epitome of evil. More to the point, rednecks are often associated with racism, and Spielberg’s deflection from the question of whether or not robots can and should replace humans has been to appeal to prejudice.
The crowd isn’t justifiably angry at the powers that be supplanting them. They aren’t angry because they’ve been banned from having children. No. That might be considered a just cause, and Spielberg can’t afford to have the problem framed in such an anti-robot way. He needs the ignorant crowd to be racist against robots. He needs these distressed people yearning for freedom to be represented as angry hicks in the hope that the audience will judge them rather than ask obvious questions.
The hunter is presented no different. He is gruff and cold, sporting a hat similar to a cowboy hat as he gives the dad a refund for David, then yanks David out of the cage and into the arena. As David is being pulled out of the cage, he grabs Jude Law’s hand in desperation. Jude Law, who thinks he’s leaving the cage, is more than happy to take the child’s hand and only realizes what’s happening once they are both pulled into the arena.
I personally don’t have a problem with this instance of luck. David could’ve grabbed anybody’s hand, but if he had, then the film would have simply followed that robot’s point of view at the start of the second act. The only reason we followed Jude Law’s perspective was because he would meet up with David at some point. So, I think Spielberg’s choice was fair.
What happens next isn’t. The hunter chains David and Jude Law to one of the machines and gives a speech. But his speech is one hundred percent right! The world powers are trying to replace people. David is an attempt to rid the need for children. Every word out of his mouth is true. But the hunter is wrong. He’s wrong because he’s disheveled and cranky.
When David begins begging for his life, the crowd starts throwing things at the hunter because they believe he is a real child. But the ironic part is that the whole sequence only goes to prove the hunter’s point.
The powers that be have created a robot that can trick people. David is a robot. He is behaving in a convincing way. That’s exactly what this poor displaced group fears. But the audience isn’t supposed to recognize this. These are just rednecks, and the hunter sounds and looks like a villain. He isn’t worried about the future of humanity. He’s just a racist, a racist against robots who fears change.
In Spielberg’s mind, and presumably Kubrick’s, David looks real; he sounds real, so he is. This is what I meant by a dubious trick. When a film raises a bunch of ethical questions that the writers don’t agree with or don’t want to address, these writers sometimes present the opposing points of view through unlikable avatars in an attempt to peer pressure their audience. “You don’t want to be like these people, do you? No. So, agree with us!” It’s a disgusting tactic. I’ll discuss what happens next in the following review.