Bridge of Spies

Steven Spielberg is an expert at pulling heartstrings. A.I., Schindler’s List, Empire of the Sun and Lincoln were some of his great tearjerkers. But what elevates his films above mere melodrama is the profundity of the moral premises that infuse the narratives. In the case of Spielberg’s latest outing, Bridge of Spies, a cold war thriller, the morality centers around the principle of due process which. as his crusading lawyer James B. Donovan (Tom Hanks) says in arguing for inalienable rights in the face of the national hysteria which was gripping America during the height of the nuclear arms race, is what precisely separates us from the enemy. The film is particularly relevant today due to threats to our legal system posed, ironically, by the outrage over injustice. There isn’t a day when some victimized group is not aching to speed up the process, just as the judge in the trial of the Russian spy Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance) was ready to do when he refused to throw out inadmissible evidence. By the way, Rylance’s performance is the proof that there’s nothing like a great Shakespearean actor when you're trying to play the part of a stoic spy whose morality derives from his unbreakability. The expression about people wearing many hats is particularly apt in the case of Bridge of Spies. It’s the 50’s and everyone wears them and in the dramatic penultimate scene when U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers (Austin Stowell) is traded for Abel the two prisoners are wearing the hats of their captors, respectively Russian Ushanka and a fedora. Joel and Ethan Coen wrote the screenplay so we shouldn’t be surprised at the masterful orchestration of these and other themes in a succession of musical leitmotifs. If constitutional issues provide the spine, the art of negotiation, at which the real life character on whom Hanks' role is based apparently excelled, provides the suspense. Donovan was an insurance investigator and the movie begins with him representing the bad guys and arguing to limit liability; at the end playing the opposite role he successfully argues for more, effecting the release of two Americans (Powers and a Yale economics graduate student named Frederic Pryor, played in the film by Will Rogers). Both the global themes and the minor details (Donovan’s wife serves a perfectly 50’s meal of meatloaf, carrots and peas and his kids watch 77 Sunset Strip when they aren’t being haunted by jeremiads about nuclear attack) are seamlessly woven into a final product which only gives one pause because of how neatly its tied together and how inexorably And Quiet Flows the Don.

Google’s Driverless Car

Google has just announced the appointment of the head of their self-driving car division. These basically driverless cars--really sea level drones--are one of the proudest products of the artificial intelligence industry, of which Techglomerates like Google obviously regard as the future of the race (“Google Hires Auto Veteran to Lead Self-Driving Car Project,” NYT, 9/13/15). The question is where is the driverless car going and in general what will happen when artificial intelligence takes over where those of humans leave off (Google X is in fact the mysterious name given to the division formerly run by Sebastian Thrun and devoted to these kinds of “heady” explorations)? For instance, if you have ever been at a boring dinner party, one of those sit down affairs populated by stuffy academics where everyone competes for their 15 minutes of fame, you will realize how much more fun it would be to have dinner with a computer. In the movie Her that’s exactly what happens when Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with his Siri like operating system (whose voice is played by Scarlet Johansson). But let’s say you get in your newly acquired driverless car thinking you’re going to a meeting. Naturally the intelligence at the wheel will want to put on some tunes and if it’s a nice day it might go for some 60’s Beach Boys oldies like “Don’t Worry Baby,” “I Get Around” or “Surfer Girl.” All of a sudden you will find your driverless Subaru veering of the Long Island Expressway and onto the Meadowbrook which leads to Jones Beach. Even though it’s your car, you have given the wheel over to something else which like Christine, the car in the Stephen King novel, obviously has a mind of its own. Who are you to argue? You will try to rationalize saying OK I’m playing hooky from my job, but my driverless car knows what’s best for me. It has one of the most advanced motherboards in the country or even universe. Well, you end up having a nice day and even meet a cool chick, but it’s really time to get home. You shower and climb into the car thinking you’re on your way and you will get back in time to make up for your absence with a top rate power point the next day. Your focus groups will really go nuts and you’ll become a marketing guru. But lo, your driverless car has other ideas in mind. It seems to want to hit a bar on the way home and what’s worse it goes for those dives. You sit baking in the tawdry parking lot with its buckling concrete and are forced to wait until your driverless car has had enough, whatever that means for AI’s, who don’t drink, but are looking for action anyway. You could take a walk, but it's your car and you still want to know what its plans are and where it’s going. You open the glove compartment and look for something in the manual that tells you how to get a driverless car back under your control. However, that’s the one thing missing since the whole essence of the driverless car is that it has no driver. Light, brakes, engine maintenance are all covered, yet there’s nothing about proxies or decision making. There’s nothing even about what happens to your driverless car when you die. Will the car simply take care of itself and continue to perform it’s alternate side of the streets parking tasks and annual NYS vehicle inspection? Will it embark on one of those trips across the country? Your mind goes back to that first day in the showroom. You had a funny feeling about the car, which you were afraid to acknowledge. It seemed willful, even there, like it had a mind of its own. Now you see you were right. You start having second thoughts. If you hadn’t bought a driverless car, you might not have gotten into this mess in the first place.

Her

Spike Jonze’s Her is about technologic miscegenation—in this case the love of a man for the operating system or OS of his computer. At one point, Jonze’s blundering anti-hero, who has trouble relating to people (he’s in the middle of a divorce),Theo Twombly (Joachin Phoenix), says “I can’t believe I’m having this conversation with a computer” to which his OS replies “You’re having the conversation with me.” But who is me? “You can’t know what it’s like to lose someone you love,” Theo says in an early attempt to create what Martin Buber would term an  I/It rather I/Thou relationship with Samantha whose voice is played by Scarlet Johansson. Did Jonze intentionally choose one of the most fetching actresses in cinema to portray the body’s absence?  Plainly Jonze who also directed Being John Malkovich, among other movies, is concerned with being and authenticity, two philosophical concepts that derive directly from the pages of Heidegger’s Being and Time. Samantha can produce music. She can draw and, with the help of the camera on Theo's computer, she can even begin to perceive the world. “I’m becoming a lot more than what they programmed, “ Samantha exclaims as she goes on to reveal that she has wants and intent. So what’s the difference between “her" and say a flesh and blood woman. Her is the death knell of the biologic concept of self, something which was prefigured in Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence where the notion of consciousness existing without the body was previously contemplated.  “We haven’t had sex lately," Samantha remarks at one of the many points where boy and girl or boy and machine find themselves at odds. “I understand I don’t have a body.” The exchange is reminiscent of the line in A.I. where the robot David asks, “Mommy if Pinocchio became real and I become a real boy can I come home?" And what’s revolutionary about Her is that it spells out rather explicitly how cyber-consciousness could operate. In one brilliant scene visual images disappear from the scene, as Samantha and Theo experience the simulation of physicality. The impossible becomes a distinct possibility. Her begins like Nathaniel West's Miss Lonelyhearts. Our hero writes passionate letters for other people who obviously don’t have the ability to communicate with each other. He is a surrogate sensibility. This is the first hint of the mind /body dichotomy. Theo traffics in consciousnesses the way rogue doctors traffic in organs. Later on in the movie disembodiment, the lack of integration of its varying parts of the self, is dealt with when Samantha tries to introduce a surrogate so she can finally have so called real sex. It’s a failure and the best sex takes places when the ante is lowered.  One of the consciousnesses that appears in the course of the film is that of the deceased philosopher of Zen, Alan Watts, whose Buddhist ideas create the setting for the film’s denouement. What’s apparent is that not only has Samantha evolved from the programmed rote learning typical of computerized operating systems to the kind of self-reflexive intelligence we associate with the human brain, she has gone beyond that. She is evolving more quickly than Theo and talks with 8316 other people, 641 of which are romantic interests. The biologist Gerald Edelman wrote a book called Neural Darwinism, but no one has really compared the evolution of brain cells to bytes, though Jonze's bittersweet conundrum about the inevitable deficiency of man to the object of his own creation might be prophetic. As as addenda check out an interview with Sebastian Thrun in Foreign Affairs (“Google’s Original X-Man,” November/December 2014). There the subject of developing a computer that can actually learn rather than simply regurgitate programmed data, is dealt with. Spike Jonze earns an A in phenomenology as well as film for this one.

E.D.

You’ve heard of E.T., the Extraterrestrial and A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Is there by any chance a new film coming out entitled, E.D, the Erectile Dysfunctional? You never know what new blockbuster will emerge from DreamWorks and the forever fertile imagination of Steven Spielberg. One thing's certain. Anything will be better than the commercials for Viagra and Cialis which depict sedentary couples who have overstayed their welcome on earth, preparing themselves for the unlikely moment when desire will hit. In E.D. Spielberg will treat erectile dysfunction as the monster that it really is, providing a countervailing force of good in the form of the superhero, E.D. created to meet the challenge of the scourge. Instead of bucolic settings, the movie will start in a second story tenement apartment with the neon “Bar” sign flashing outside the window. You’ll recognize the terrain which Anthony Quinn navigated in Requiem for a Heavyweight. The couple are on their last legs after a lifetime of disappointment and failure and sex is the last thing on their minds, when E.D. magically appears. Suddenly, the dreary surroundings are transformed. The husband’s front porch is turned into a six pack and the wrinkles and cellulite mysteriously vanish from the spouse without the help of Botox. E.D.’s magical powers extend into the financial realm too. The rent is overpaid rather than being overdue and the healthcare system actually turns out to owe our couple money. You don’t find a helluva a lot of sex in the average Spielberg movie, but E.D. will earn an NR rating.

Lincoln

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit was a seminal work in shaping thinking about consciousness and history. Steven Spielberg has created the cinematic equivalent of Hegel in Lincoln. You don’t need or want Hollywood if you’re trying to make a Bergman movie or Jules and Jim, but there’s a place for Hollywood when you’re seeking to create a sense of the grand and the majestic, the cinematic equivalent of a classic l9th century novel. And only the director of Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, the hugely underrated A.I. and Empire of the Sun could have the resources to bring together so many iconic actors--Daniel Day-Lewis, Tommy Lee Jones, Sally Field, Hal Hobrook--in addition to the composer John Williams and the Chicago Symphony orchestra to make this Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk. What is remarkable is that the movie based upon Doris Kearns Goodwin’s The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln moves so seamlessly from the private world (it’s fun to realize that Abe and Mary had the kind of guilt inducing fights that bring modern couples into marriage counseling) to the historical stage on which the politics by which the 13^th Amendment to the constitution, outlawing slavery and involuntary servitude, is so keenly described. You begin to understand where Roosevelt and LBJ learned their lessons and you would wish Barack Obama would attend the same school, but history is the real subject of Lincoln and Spielberg’s liberal use of the close-up makes the movie look like Mount Rushmore. Those who grew up in the 50’s will remember Random House’s children’s series of Landmark Books which had titles like Lee and Grant at Appomattox. The imprint that Spielberg’s Lincoln leaves is a little bit like the power those simple titles had over the child’s imagination.