

Bicentennial Man: I, robot

Stories tend to come in two flavors: either the hero is in some sort of
jeopardy (emotional, mortal, existential, etc) the whole time, or the hero
is on some quest, during which he has to overcome various (life-threatening,
etc) obstacles. Granted, as both of these story-types entail not only
'jeopardy' but the eventual completion of some 'goal,' it's easy to assume
the two flavors are actually one. But they're not: the first situation tends
to result from the hero's meddling--be it purposeful or not--while the
second isn't quite so moral, as the hero has committed no 'crime' for which
all this jeopardy is just dessert. There is still some 'just dessert,'
however; without it, audience expectation would grind down to nothing, and
we'd lose interest. It's just that now that just dessert takes the form of
the hero achieving his goal. Which is to say the hero is deserving, has been
wronged in some way that achieving his quest can right. Of course, then,
too, the more naive and 'wronged' the hero is, the more deserving he is.
It's a sympathy-identification trick, and in Bicentennial Man it works
exactly as it should, to the point where we willfully overlook all the
dramatic problems that arise when compressing a 200 year life span into a
little more than two hours, because all that's important is whether or not
Android Andrew Martin (Robin Williams) will do the Frankenstein-shuffle just
about every mechanical man in cinema tries to pull off at one time or
another: becoming human.

And it's an interesting journey, ('Awakening,' yes) from the
undifferentiated assembly line Bicentennial Man opens with to the uniqueness
Andrew eventually achieves, as technology allows his mechanical self to be
absorbed by his 'human' self: all his robot parts retreat under the skin,
until it's just Robin Williams, albeit a Robin Williams who blinks with the
sound of carriage returns on a typewriter. And the years pass, and the Pepsi
generations slide by, and Andrew's adopted family dies off one by one,
until--like Frankenstein again, or Duncan McCloud (Highlander)--Andrew
becomes lonely. And of course the cure for loneliness is companionship, a
mate. Thing is, though, this future society insists upon classing him with
the household appliances, (per Cherry 2000, etc) nevermind how involved he
is in this all too human condition. He does, after all, still have a
positronic mind, is still hardwired to obey Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics.
Too, he can project movies from the top of his head. Add to this his
immortality and presto, achieving his quest (of being human, where 'human'
is a legal term for the courts to decide) just became that much more
difficult. We've got to have escalation, after all, along with some
insurmountable odds. This is how heroes are made.

It's not the only way they're made, though. There also has to be the unusual
(accidental, in Andrew's case; Short Circuit-type stuff) birth and the
requisite attempts on his life when he's still the equivalent of an infant.
And of course the love interest, (Embeth Davidtz, in two roles across time)
the bungling sidekick, (mad scientist Oliver Platt) and, in Bicentennial Man
at least, the bungling sidekick's bungling sidekick, Galatea, (as in 2.2)
all of whom are instrumental in helping Andrew realize his human potential,
which of course nobody could have injected with as much meaning as Robin
Williams, never afraid to give the old heartstrings a tug. Does society ever
recognize Andrew as human, though? As Bicentennial Man unfolds, it matters
less and less, as the real issue isn't finally in how one's perceived, but
in how one perceives oneself (to use Andrew's androgynous pronoun). Which is
to say that, even though this is supposed to be the flavor of story not
driven by morality, there's still a message in there. And Bicentennial Man
is involving enough that you don't even realize it takes nearly two and half
hours to get that message across. Granted, not much really 'happens' in the
movie, but still, you kind of want it to go on.

(c) 1999 Stephen Graham Jones, http://www.cinemuck.com/