David Becomes Territorial
Once the darkest scene in the film has passed, David leaves Dr. Know’s building to find police waiting outside. These cops are there for Joe, who is still wanted for the murder of one of his clients. Apparently, they still haven’t figured out that he was framed.
David, revealing his virtuous nature once again, ignores this and decides to steal a helicopter so he can fly to Manhattan. It seems that, while the programmers forgot to alert David to the fact that humans can’t breathe underwater, they did manage to instruct David on how to start a helicopter. Perhaps it was just robot intuition.
Fortunately for Joe, David’s hijacking of the aircraft provides him with a distraction, and he escapes. Then he runs up beside David as he is trying to get the aircraft off the ground and smiles at him, asking to be let into the helicopter. Although David is supposed to be very upset with Joe at this point, he lets the robot inside the craft, and it turns out that gigolos are also programmed to fly helicopters.
David, Teddy, and Joe fly to Manhattan and explore the city until they find the building where lions weep, Professor Hobby’s office. Remember that Manhattan has been flooded because of the ice caps. They land inside the ruined building, and David exits the helicopter, quickly finding a door that has part of the inscription Dr. Know had read to them earlier.
David enters the room and begins looking around. Someone is sitting on the other side of a chair. David addresses the mysterious figure, and the chair turns around. There before the wannabe Pinocchio is another David, a much chippier version of David.
David asks if his happier self is real. The other David says, “I guess.” Then the film takes yet another bizarre twist. The copy gets up, moves to a table, and asks David to read with him. David glares at the machine and mutters, “She’s mine.” He also says, “You can’t have her.” Then he picks up a lamp and knocks the copy’s head off, screaming, “I’m David!”
I think Spielberg was going for dark here, but I have a hard time not finding the scene a little humorous, mostly because his reaction is so unexpected. First of all, it turns out our innocent, naive little David has a murderous streak—perhaps he really meant to kill Martin after all—but also, while the movie has told him how special he is, David only acknowledged this during his earlier exchange with Joe, and even then, it seemed like David was simply being defensive against Joe’s claim that his mother doesn’t love him. Beyond that one instance, there’s been no implication that David was this egotistical.
Thirdly, and most importantly, this goes back to something mentioned in an earlier review. Despite Spielberg’s insistence to the contrary, David’s behavior has not been indicative of a child who loves his parent but of someone who is obsessive over his mother, more Norman Bates than Pinocchio. That’s not real love. And a human typically isn’t so territorial over their parents that he or she attempts to kill a sibling.
This just goes to show that David’s love isn’t real at all. It is more akin to imprinting than anything else. David isn’t an innocent robot child who loves his mommy. He’s a robot that has been given a programming but has no real concept of virtue. I don’t know if Spielberg was attempting to conjure some weird Freudian scenario where the child is in love with the parent or what, but this scene simply confirms that Monica and her husband were right to get rid of him.
David was a little psycho droid who could’ve snapped at the first existential crisis. But more to the point, this scene completely undermines Spielberg and Kubrick’s core premise for the film: “Nobody knows what ‘real’ really means,” because in the end, David’s love, although it looked real, was never real at all. A human gives thought to the existence of others. A human values life. A human would’ve paused and asked, “What if this copy is just as ‘real’ as I am?”
A human would’ve asked whether or not he or she should or shouldn’t have done something. Since David acts in such a reactionary, territorial, even bestial, fashion, there is nothing to conclude but that David isn’t real, even though he acts real, which, I’m sure, was the exact opposite of what Spielberg intended.
Joe, understandably, backs away slowly, and the next thing David is aware of is Professor Hobby, who is played by William Hurt. Hobby begins to explain the situation. David was a robot built to look like his real son, which is both sad and a little messed up.
He says that David is the first robot to ever want something on his own. He’s excited that David chased after the blue fairy and says that David is the realest boy he’s ever created. He then says that while David is not, “one of a kind,” he is, “the first of a kind.”
This professor seems completely oblivious to the fact that David is having a mechanical-mental breakdown. He even leaves David alone to get the rest of the staff because they have lots of questions. This is unspeakably stupid, more contrived writing to get David from point A to point B.
David then gets up and looks around, seeing countless copies of himself. There’s even a line of boxes containing both the male and female versions of David. Then the droid looks around and sees a chair, the chair he woke up in.
Earlier in the film, David mentions that the first thing he remembered seeing was a bird with outstretched feathers. It turns out that this initial visual was not a bird at all but a man with feather-like symbols beneath his feet. When I saw this, the only question I asked was, “Who’s stupid enough to have a lab inside a flooded building!” How? Why?
There’s no time for answers. David climbs out of the window of the office, looks down at the water below, says, “Mommy,” then falls off the edge, plummeting into the ocean. We’ll cover what happens next in the following review.