Kathleen Kellett

storytelling and scholarship for young adults and children

TRANSCRIPT: Programming Childhood: Robot Kids in “A.I.: Artificial Intelligence” (2001) and “M3GAN” (2022)

INTRODUCTION

            Hello, and welcome to The Monster & The Child, where childhood studies and monster studies collide! I am Dr. Kathleen Kellett, and today we will be talking all about robot children. We will be unpacking the 2001 film A.I. Artificial Intelligence and the 2022 film M3GAN. This is a topic that won a Patreon poll, so if you are interested in voting on future video topics, consider clicking that link down in the description.

            Before we fully dive into that, just a reminder that I am running educational monster programs! Youth Monsterology is my peer lit discussion and educational mentorship program for teenagers, and it is slated to begin at the very end of August. This program will last for five months, will meet every two weeks, and will feature both a monster book club as well as one-on-one mentorship for independent, community-facing academic, creative, and/or activist projects. If you’re interested in something that will look unique and a little splashy on a college application or resume and that will allow you to develop your own ideas and interests in an ungraded environment – and, of course, you would like to engage with monster stories – then this program is for you. And if you know any teens who that describes, then I’m counting on you to put this in front of them!

            There are also sign-ups available for monthly Monster Book Clubs for teenagers and adults. The adult group is going to begin on July 29th with a lesson and discussion on Frankenstein, so if you want to get in on that, there’s still plenty of time to do so. But also with those clubs, you can sign up at any time, since we’ll be doing a new book a month. The teen Monster Book Club didn’t quite have enough sign-ups to begin in July, but I’m still hoping for August, so if you’re a teen and this appeals to you or you know a teen who would be interested, please check that out. You can learn more about all of these programs at themonsterandthechild.com, which is linked in the description.

            All right, so back to robot kids. A.I. and M3GAN are two of the most famous films about this topic, but they take wildly different approaches to their central characters. At first glance, they really could not be less alike, in tone, in orientation towards technology, in genre, and in the story’s outcomes. But there are some fascinating convergences when it comes to what these films reveal about cultural attitudes specifically towards the child’s place within the family unit – and even more specifically, the child’s relationship with the mother. David in A.I. is gentle and loving, whereas the titular M3GAN is a homicidal maniac, but both robot children are literally constructed around the concept of motherhood and what happens when that category does not function the way our social constructs dictate that it should. So let’s take a look at these futuristic fake kids and the age-old fears they represent.

ARTIFICIAL “INTELLIGENCE”? CONSTRUCTING A CHILD’S LOVE

            I went into A.I. knowing only a few things about it: it was directed by Steven Spielberg, it stars Haley Joel Osment, and everyone describes it as “robot Pinocchio.” I assumed it would be a child version of Bicentennial Man, which I half-remember watching as a kid with my family and crying on the couch. Robot wants to become real, and through trials and tribulations, he eventually gets there, is what I thought.

            Cut to me shouting “WHAT” at the screen multiple times but especially in the last twenty minutes of the film that did, in fact, greatly surprise me. Spoilers ahead, obviously, if you, like me, managed to not know anything about this movie in the quarter-century since its release. Okay. So we begin with a voiceover letting us know that we are in a post-climate collapse Earth, resulting in drowned coastlines and mass starvation. Things have since stabilized (ish), but one aspect of the new order is that reproduction is heavily restricted. This proceeds to never be explored again, but it is the nominal justification for our next scene, in which a robotics manufacturer, Professor Hobby, pitches his idea of a child robot who can be programmed to love. Imagine what such a creation could do to fill the hole for couples who have not been approved to have their own kids – or for anyone who has lost a child. The child robot would be designed to imprint upon the primary user and regard that user with eternal devotion. One of the other robotics engineers asks the obvious follow-up question of whether humans could love the robot back, and what the human users’ responsibility towards this robot would be. Hobby muses, “Didn’t God create Adam to love him?” A crunchy question, to be sure, and clearly one that monster stories since Frankenstein have loved to apply to humanity’s own ill-gotten creations. It’s also a question that could be particularly intense in this environmentally dystopian setting, but that element of “the future” is kind of just set dressing here, to be honest. There are a lot of larger implications of the world-building that are ultimately ignored in favor of the single-family drama, which in and of itself reveals a lot about the primacy of the nuclear family in much of modern Western philosophy and values systems. That unit trumps all else in terms of importance.

            So let’s meet that family. Monica and Henry are the parents of a child in cryogenic stasis. Martin has been frozen for the past five years while doctors search for a cure to his never-specified terminal ailment. Monica reads to him by his coffin-like chamber – he’s definitely giving Snow White vibes here – as Henry is informed by the doctors that their son’s revival may be beyond current technology. This leads Henry, who works for the robot manufacturing company, to bring home David, our artificial kid. Monica is initially irate, shouting “THERE IS NO SUBSTITUTE FOR YOUR OWN CHILD!”, but she’s also pretty instantly tempted by the possibility of caring for the exceptionally life-like little boy. They decide to try him out without activating the imprinting code yet. Once they do that, David will only ever be able to love one person forever, so he can never be reused. If they choose to return him after that, he’d have to be destroyed. Attentive viewers may now be wondering one person? David can’t love both the parents in the household, despite his creator in the beginning specifically referencing couples who hadn’t been approved to reproduce? Nope! Just the one. Seems like a pretty egregious design flaw to me, and it’s one that we’ll be unpacking a lot more momentarily.

            At first, David kind of freaks Monica out. He explicitly can’t sleep or eat, but he can lie quietly at night and pretend to eat at the table. Monica tries to put him away in a closet for a while, like one would a vacuum or other household item, but he interprets this as a game of hide and seek, and later walks in on her in the bathroom, pleased to have found her. Monica’s unease clearly stems from David’s crossing of boundaries between object and subject. In appearance and in language, he’s like nine, but the way he acts at first is more like a baby: watching mom, learning through play, unaware of the barriers between himself and Monica. Babies are often seen as more object than subject; sometimes they’re still referred to in language as “it.” They aren’t yet capable of a lot of self-directed action that legibly reads as agency to adults. We expect that babies don’t understand social boundaries, but when an older child (or any older person) displays similar behavior, that is seen as disturbing. So there could be some like interesting disability angles here, especially alongside our cryogenically frozen kid, but again, I’m chasing implications that the film itself is not that interested in.

            Monica is eventually won over when David laughs at her trying to slurp up an ungainly mouthful of spaghetti. She can’t resist the presence of a child’s laughter in her home again – something that she is clearly heavily romanticizing in this moment – and so she enacts the protocol and David imprints. His face changes from a polite smile to a rapt expression of adoration as he calls her “mommy” for the first time. Predictably, Monica is now delighted with David and Henry is creeped out. (Henry, by the way, never becomes “dad” to David; he always calls him by his first name.) Henry’s grief for his mostly-dead son is never treated as something as profound as Monica’s. He acquired David out of concern and love for her, not his own need to have a kid. There is an obvious Oedipal rivalry between the two of them, though it’s fairly one-sided, because Henry is the only jealous one. David honestly barely registers him. Meanwhile, our now fully-programmed robot child is doing things like dumping Monica’s perfume over himself so he can smell like her and telling her things like “I hope you never die. Never.” Monica exhibits some concern over the latter, but clearly puts it off as her future self’s problem – which is, in some ways, what all parents do. But the difference is David is never going to change from this moment, even as Monica makes her linear way through the human lifespan.

            But it turns out Monica has much more imminent problems because, as I’m sure you saw coming, her son Martin is soon cured. He is not enormously thrilled with his new robot brother, whom he instantly begins competing with for his mother’s affections. Which is kind of reasonable, honestly? Like, if I were in a coma for five years and then woke up to see my loved ones hanging out with a Kathleen-bot, I’d feel some kind of way about it, too. Martin asks Monica to read Pinocchio to them, in an obvious attempt to make David feel bad. Monica seems a bit disturbed, but she still goes ahead and reads it. Then, Martin challenges David to cut off a lock of Monica’s hair as a sign of his love for her. Monica wakes up just as David is standing over her with the scissors, and as she gasps and jumps up, she cuts herself. He does get the hair, though, which the smart toy teddy bear who is this Pinocchio’s Jiminy Cricket secrets away. That will be on the test.

Monica insists that this was just a childish mistake, but Henry is now dead-set against David, who he believes intended to harm her. Which is, for the record, contrived and dumb. Even if they don’t believe David that Martin put him up to this, he is clearly upset by Monica getting nicked and obviously just wanted a piece of her hair, which, you know, is not ideal, but is not murderous, either. But Henry insists, “If he was created to love, then it’s reasonable to assume he knows how to hate.” This is an interesting line because, in the context of this story, it’s almost entirely untrue. David is never seen to hate any human, even those who explicitly mean him harm. So Henry’s logic is a moment of human projection, assuming that something so close to human would have our worst as well as our best abilities. But not David. He is just a child, with only a child’s pure love for his mother.

Except comparing him to the flesh and blood children of this story, are children even that pure and innocent? Martin is framed pretty negatively for his mistreatment of David, and then his friends are seen as callous. At his birthday party, one of the other kids “tests” David’s pain sensors with a knife, causing David to panic and beg Martin to protect him. As David clings onto Martin, they both fall into the pool. Martin has to be rescued, and David is left lying, fully conscious, at the bottom. This, of course, is the last straw for Henry, though once again, David is obviously not at fault here. The other kids’ behavior is clearly meant to be disturbing to us, but David is a prototype. These kids have no frame of reference for a robot with actual emotions; they otherwise explicitly do not exist on the market. To me, this is one of those situations where the monster (or at least nonhuman) as a metaphor for the Other kind of breaks down, because I don’t know that I could make a fair observation about “human nature” based on the kids’ interactions with David due to the actual facts of the world-building here. I guess the only thing that I could surmise is that real kids are less innocent than the simulacrum of them that adults constructed – and that, of course, is very interesting to me, but, again, the film does not linger there, because this whole scene is just the catalyst for David’s return.

Monica pitches the car ride as a fun mother-son day, just the two of them, so of course David is in a state of bliss. As they near the robotics factory, Monica can’t go through with seeing David destroyed, so instead she abandons him in the woods (with Teddy the smart toy). He cries and begs, as one would, for her not to leave him, and he asks if he can come home if he becomes a real boy like Pinocchio. Monica says that life is not a fairy tale, and she tearfully departs. Thus endeth David’s childhood, sort of. I mean, he remains a child, but he is separated from all the cultural trappings of it, aside from Teddy. Throughout the whole rest of the film, his sole desire is to return to that cultural ideal of childhood: a perfect love for and from his mother. He does not want anything other than this, forever.

So that’s the end of act one. Next up, we have a dystopian look at the anti-robot Flesh Fairs – essentially monster truck rallies where robots are set on fire as a protest against artificial takeover of humanity – and the framed fugitive Gigolo Joe, aka sex robot Jude Law, who accompanies David on his quest to find the Blue Fairy to turn him into a real boy. I am breezing past all of that in one sentence, but it is a major chunk of the movie’s runtime, and essentially it gives us a look at a humanity that feels lost and adrift, unsure whether to turn to violence or sensual pleasure or religion or knowledge and information to alleviate their existential loneliness. David has no such uncertainty in his quest for meaning: the only thing that matters to him is Monica, and it always will be. Joe warns, however, that Monica “loves what you do for her, as my customers love what I do for them. But she does not love you.” Joe says that the humans hate robots for their ability to persist past mortal limits: “When the end comes, all that will be left is us.” Big profound statements that go in one ear and out the other for David: his programming of singular love does not allow him to take it in.

David and Joe wind up in the drowned city of Manhattan, following a lure set out for them by Professor Hobby, who has his office and robot factory in the upper part of a partially submerged skyscraper for no reason that I can decipher other than vibes. Here, we learn that David was modeled off of Hobby’s dead son, naturally. Hobby – whose name implies the lack of care he put into the ethical nightmare that is David – is keen to spread his invention everywhere, which to David is the purest existential horror. When he encounters another David model, he goes into a rage and destroys him, screaming, “I’m David! I’m special! I’m unique! You can’t have her!” But Joe was right: that’s not the point of David. His love is meant to belong to a parent, but the parent’s love does not belong to him. He sees a row of Davids and Darlenes boxed and ready to ship, bearing the tagline “At last a love of your own.” So he sits on the edge of the skyscraper, whispers “Mommy,” and hurls himself into the risen sea.

But he’s a robot, so that doesn’t actually do anything. While he’s down there, though, he sees the ruins of the fairytale pavilion at Coney Island. Joe briefly rescues him before getting arrested, and then David and Teddy take an amphibious helicopter down to a plaster statue of the Blue Fairy, whom David pleads to turn him into a real boy. For two thousand years. Cue my loudest WHAT at the screen.

Yep, two thousand years pass, during which another ice age occurs – unclear whether this was manmade – that fully wipes out the human race. I don’t know about any of you, but I didn’t see that one coming! At some point in the last two millennia, David went into a kind of stasis state (much like Martin at the beginning of the film), but he is dug up and powered on by what I at first thought were aliens but are actually super advanced robots that have survived the apocalypse. The future robots are humanoid but featureless, with swirling, fluid metallic coloring and slim, bendy frames. Their discovery of David is meaningful to them, because he “knew living people.” They read his memories and create a simulation of the Blue Fairy for him, who explains that the robots have found ways of – cloning? reviving? – humans from DNA remains that they link up with the memories of their lifetime through spacetime means of don’t worry about it, but these reconstituted humans only stay alive for a single day. (Theoretically, couldn’t the robots just do, like, regular clones? Maybe, but doesn’t matter! That’s not what they do.) Because Teddy KEPT MONICA’S HAIR this whole time, they could bring her back for 24 hours, but after that, she would be gone for literally ever. David says, sounds good, sign me up.

So Monica is brought back – sort of. The voiceover, now revealed to be a super-advanced robot, informs us that they only put some of her memories in: “There was no Henry. There was no Martin. There was no grief. Only David.” She also has no memories of abandoning David, and she possibly doesn’t even know that he’s a robot. In this beautiful twenty-four hours of David making her coffee “just the way she likes it,” of drawing pictures and putting on costumes and playing games, they are the only things that are real to one another. And then David tucks Monica into bed – she comments that it should be the other way around, but she’s just so tired – and she goes to sleep forever. David goes to sleep with her. If you recall, sleep is not one of his functions, so the implication is that he has chosen to power down via a “real” human action that was previously out of his grasp. He achieves real childhood through dying with his mother. The end.

Okay, so there’s a lot there! As you could probably tell from my tone throughout, this film didn’t really work for me. My wife can attest to the WHAT THE HELL DID I JUST WATCH rundown that I gave her afterwards. But in doing some research on it, some critics and film scholars think it’s a masterpiece, or at least that it’s a profoundly thought-provoking piece of art, and I will say that it did indeed provoke some thoughts. This film was originally conceived as a very loose adaptation of the short story Supertoys Last All Summer Long by Brian Aldiss, published in the 1970s. The director who wanted to adapt it was Stanley Kubrick, of The Shining and 2001: A Space Odyssey fame. He developed a script, but ultimately felt that the film was beyond him both technologically in terms of VFX and personally in terms of working with a child actor as the protagonist, so in the 1990s, he signed the rights over to Steven Spielberg. The film was eventually made shortly after Kubrick’s death. Kubrick films are known for a kind of cold, spare aesthetic and tone, so a lot of early reviewers read the ending as a sentimental Spielberg interpolation, but Alexandre Nascimento Braga Teixeira in “A.I. Artificial Intelligence as the Spiritual Swan Song of Stanley Kubrick” informs us that that isn’t true. The entire post-Ice Age section, including the ending death, was from Kubrick’s own script. Teixeira, who clearly loves this film, writes that “A.I. is not merely about a child-robot. It is about what is lost. About what we long to preserve. And about the – perhaps glorious – impossibility of saving what matters most” (3). All right, then. What does this film believe matters most? Love? Childhood? Motherhood? If any of the above, is what matters the reality of them or the construction of them, the ideal that humans can artificially create but never live out?

As far as my reading goes, that’s the implication, right? Teixeira writes, “The character of David, as an artificial subject, lacks a fully realized narrative identity: he does not change, he does not reinterpret his desire, he does not confront his finitude. His love for his mother is fixed, absolute, and unchanging” (6). This love becomes “an emotional fossil, venerated by future beings as if it were a gift, a miracle” (2). These super-advanced robots seek out the memory of emotion as a testament to their own beginnings as a creation of humans, and David proves that he embodies this emotion by his two-thousand-year wait. Teixeira argues, “Waiting is David’s radical gesture. He does not act. He believes. He stays. He pleads. He freezes. He survives. And in this gesture is inscribed one of the film’s most powerful symbols: the human as the one who waits – even in the absence of a reply” (3). But like: is that human? Or is it just a fiction humans tell about ourselves?

In “Robots Redux: A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001),” John C. Tibbetts writes that David “never develops in any moral sense at all. He says repeatedly that he wants above all only to reunite with and be loved by his mother – a wholly understandable desire, to be sure, but one that in this context merely reaffirms his essential self-centeredness” (258). Unlike the OG Pinocchio, his becoming “real” isn’t something that takes place because of the things he learns; David honestly doesn’t learn anything. As Tibbetts points out, he doesn’t care about being real for any reason other than he thinks it would make his mom love him (259). Similarly, Monica is not “real” at the end of the story, either: she is “not the same person now, no longer ambivalent in her love, but seemingly lost in a loving bliss that seems, ironically, almost mechanical” (257). So Tibbetts asks, “Is the disturbing message here that, in order to love him, she must become something of an artificial life form herself?” (258). That is how I read the film, and actually I’d take it a step further: I think the implication is that love itself, in the “pure” way that David and the resurrected Monica experience it, cannot exist organically, and can only be artificially programmed. Which could be an interesting thesis statement – if a depressing one – but where I get caught up is in how the narrative frames that idea. Whether or not the sentimentality comes from Spielberg or Kubrick, I don’t actually care, but I do think that David is portrayed very sentimentally, and that his reunion with his mommy is framed as a bittersweet but ultimately beautiful triumph. The entire film turns on the audience desperately wanting David to achieve his goal, because the spectacle of a child yearning for his mother is laden with all of the emotional weight of the social constructs that we collectively hold most dear. So if the somewhat bleak message was supposed to be “humans are bad at love because we’re too messy, but we’re good at imagining it and distilling it into narratives, which is ultimately what David is,” I actually think that would be cool from a critical Childhood Studies perspective, but I don’t think the film positions the audience to linger there. I think it sets us up to fall fairly uncritically for that construction of perfect love.

To be fair, Teixeira disagrees with me, at least on the positioning part of it. He doesn’t see the ending as particularly sentimental, but rather contemplative of “the eternal solitude of artificial consciousness, trapped in an unattainable human ideal” (2). So we’re on the same page with the unattainability, but then he goes on to write about David’s love as the apotheosis of humanity, at least from the perspective of the future machines. I don’t feel like that’s supported by the actual text of the film, but I do think it is supported by the tone of the film. Therein lies my essential problem with it.

Despite the fact that constructedness is literally at the center of this film and therefore all responses to it, I found little discussion among critics about the constructedness of childhood as a distinct category. Instead, the focus is on humanity in general, which I think really goes to show how much we take the construction of childhood for granted. That whole idea plays second fiddle to every other philosophical quandary even in a movie about a literally constructed kid. But we can certainly see the assumptions baked into David’s construction: innocence, of course; playfulness – even before he imprints, he likes playing games with Monica; and then mother-love above all else.

Holly Blackford does take on some of the implications of childhood as a social construct in her chapter “PC Pinocchios: Parents, Children, and the Metamorphosis Tradition in Science Fiction.” She writes that A.I. “posits the idea that, while we can create a simulated child with emotions and consciousness, it is much more difficult to find parents who can return a child’s love and raise him or her with a proper sense of ethics, responsibility, and morality” (75). She argues that this film and others within its tech-child genre encapsulate adults’ fears about child development in the computer age, as well as the even older anxiety about becoming obsolete as your children replace you. She writes that the Flesh Fair sequence shows humans as “the real monsters because they encourage or program children to be one way and then cannot deal with the consequences, so they become violent and hostile to these children” (79). I think that’s interesting, but again, I don’t think the film really stays with it, because it gives the audience the emotional out of always loving and admiring David’s singular devotion to Monica. We are much more positioned to identify with him than with the adults who mistreat him. We are supposed to find his purity beautiful. At least the swelling orchestral score leads me to believe that we are.

But I do not! I find it nightmarish! I do think the film agrees that David’s creation is ultimately a big old ethical NO, but only because human life is too complicated for such a pure beautiful innocent being. Martin was cured, and then he was mean and jealous, and the less-loved dad didn’t understand David, and Monica ultimately didn’t love David enough to protect him. What I don’t think the film explores nearly enough – or at least what I think it undercuts with its ending – is that creating a child to only ever do one thing – love their mother – is horrible! It’s bad when it happens in real life, because unfortunately plenty of parents do bring kids into the world laden with the responsibility of loving them in a way that the parents deem perfect. And I am not being antinatalist here – you will never catch me spewing that mess. I think we can all acknowledge that some parents suck – and, I think much more importantly, our broader systems do not serve children whose parents suck, but rather incentivize nuclear family isolation in a way that harms kids – while not falling for the nihilistic belief that human life is a curse. But part of the reason that it isn’t is that we are not designed for one thing and one thing only. Even when self-centered parents attempt to make that happen, and their kids do suffer for it, those kids inevitably are still more than that as people. They experience the full range of human emotion and have their own thoughts and opinions and desires. David was denied all of that, and while he is presented as tragic, he is also presented as sublimely, transcendentally beautiful – a distillation of love beyond what organic humans are capable of themselves, but crafted and constructed into a form that literally outlasts us as our legacy, venerated by the beings of the future. And of course the form he takes is a child, because children so often aren’t seen as full, complete humans, just as David literally isn’t. They are reduced to their pure, untainted, unadulterated innocence and maternal devotion. But that’s not transcendent, it’s the opposite: it’s tiny, confining, a reduction and a negation of actual experiences of childhood.

And then there’s Monica, who is equally reduced to “mother,” even when she’s still a living person with a complicated life. When she reads to Martin in his cryogenic chamber and Henry converses with the doctors about the medical studies he has read, we are immediately presented with a gendered split between emotion and logic. The way Henry “cares” is through science and reason, but Monica is the one at Martin’s side with the connection of the heart. They then replicate these patterns with David, with Henry seeing him only as a “toy” to help his wife, but Monica literally forming a connection with him that no one else in the world ever can. She has no characteristics other than mother. The one time we see her about to do an activity that isn’t mothering is when she’s going to leave on a date with Henry, which she delays (to Henry’s chagrin) by bonding with David. Does Monica have a mom? Does she have friends? Does she have a job? Unimportant! She is Mommy – failed, insufficient Mommy as a real person, and finally transcendent, one-perfect-day Mommy when she’s resurrected with most of her memories cut out. AAAAAH! If the film posits that all humans will leave behind is a memory of our love and emotions, as Teixeira argues, I think these are really bad memories! But those alien-like future robots do not agree with me, and since they provide the film’s voiceovers and are therefore literally the mouthpiece of the narrative, I don’t think the film itself does, either. Despite raising the ethical question of David in the first place, it still finds him beautiful, and I find that horrifying.

Whew. Okay. So that was A.I. And, side note, it doesn’t escape me that I haven’t talked at all yet about the real thing of what we now refer to as AI – though I’m going to a bit in the next section and then the conclusion. But as much as I think “artificial intelligence” is a misnomer for a great deal of what we’ve got going on now, especially LLMs, it’s also a phrase that’s entirely misplaced as the title of this film. The movie doesn’t care about “intelligence” at all (whatever that infamously nebulous term actually means). This is entirely and completely an exploration of artificial emotion, and its staging ground is the most intensely emotionally imbued relationship our society has to offer: mother and child (and specifically, mother and son). It makes me want to urgently deconstruct our cultural beliefs about these categories, not to fossilize them past the lifespan of our very species, but I am neither Kubrick nor Spielberg, I guess. In any case, that’s one vision of a robot child. But what happens when the robot child is not innocent? What do we fear from the monstrous constructed kid? For those answers, we can turn to M3GAN.

PARENTIFIED TOYS: MOM VS. MACHINE

            You may think that the biggest distinction between A.I. and M3GAN would be good robot kid, evil robot kid, but I think the more important difference to establish upfront is that of tone. A.I. was the most self-serious film I’ve seen in a while, whereas M3GAN is not that at all. It’s a horror comedy, and A.I. is neither of those things. (I mean, it was a horror to me, but not in terms of genre.) So we’re not so much meditating upon grand humanistic themes here as we are mocking and satirizing many aspects of modern life. It’s always interesting to see, though, what a comedy does take seriously, and wouldn’t you know it: it’s the sanctity of motherhood again.

            We begin with a commercial for PurrPetual Petz, which are Furbies but somehow even more upsetting, due to their crude sense of humor and ability to poop out little pellets when you “feed” them. They are also attached to tablet apps, making them sort of like large and particularly high-maintenance Tamagotchis. We cut from this bright sensory-overload ad to a dark car in a snowstorm, where a girl named Cady plays with her PurrPetual Pet in the backseat while her parents bicker about it in the front. Neither of them like this toy, but it was a gift from Cady’s aunt, who works for the company that makes them. The parents continue to snipe at each other about parenting choices and the difficult drive in the snowstorm while Cady is completely distracted with her tech-y toy. Then they get hit by a truck and both parents die.

            Meanwhile, not yet aware of the unfolding tragedy, Cady’s aunt Gemma toils away on a new toy invention. She’s supposed to be developing a cheaper PurrPetual Pet, but instead she’s pouring her robotics expertise into M3GAN: the Model 3 Generative Android. In part, she has created this by putting more advanced listening tech in the PurrPetual Petz to develop a robot-specific LLM, which: yikes! Her boss wants her to shut this project down, but an opportunity presents itself when – uh-oh! – Gemma is now the orphaned Cady’s legal guardian.

            In these opening scenes, Gemma is characterized as kind of a jerk. She’s abrasive with her coworkers and her neighbor (though, to be fair, the neighbor has a very uncontrolled Chekhov’s dog), and she’s also arrogant about her inventions, and rigid and self-centered about her space and belongings. This last one is not a problem when she lives alone, but the audience is clearly meant to judge her telling the grieving Cady that her “collectibles” are not to be played with. The social worker who comes to assess the new guardianship is openly judgy of Gemma’s poor sharing but (at least in her first scene) not focused on either Gemma or Cady’s grief, which mostly just made me feel like this was a really crappy social worker. The only time that Gemma can really connect with Cady is when she shows her “Bruce,” a robot that she created in college. They bond over his capabilities and inner workings, and Cady says, “If I had a toy like Bruce, I don’t think I’d ever need another toy again.” This is the green light Gemma needs to bring M3GAN into the mix.

            Around this point in my notes, I wrote, “How old is Cady supposed to be???” The answer we eventually get is nine, which does track more or less with the child actor’s appearance and a lot of her behavior, but there are some moments when either adults treat her or she acts like she is much younger. I couldn’t tell if this was intentionally part of the film’s satirical critique or if it was just that a lot of adults are not great at writing kids. Or maybe both. But I do think some of the issue comes from the fact that Cady is a symbol for childhood in general, and specifically for the perils of adults letting technology raise their children in their stead. That means she has to embody not just her specific age and positionality as an individual kid going through intense grief, but also the trials and tribulations of child-rearing in general, some of which are actually more specific to younger kids, like basic reminders about hygiene, for example. But don’t worry: whatever your kid needs at any age, M3GAN can handle it all!

            Gemma pairs M3GAN with Cady as her “primary user.” Cady is immediately enamored: M3GAN is life-size, pretty, full of fun facts, and attentive to her every desire. She can make beautiful portraits of Cady, she can play games, and she can cheer her up when she is sad. Gemma demonstrates these abilities to her boss, who sees dollar signs. Over a montage of M3GAN bonding with Cady, we get a sales pitch voiceover from Gemma, who describes this robot child’s best features to an implied audience of parents. Gemma outlines functions like “diagnosing learning differences” and giving instructions (including the aforementioned hygiene reminders) to the child. Gemma says, “She’ll never run out of ways to keep your child occupied, and she’ll never run out of patience.” After we see M3GAN read to Cady, put her to bed, and then keep an unsleeping watch over her room, we pan over to Gemma working uninterrupted. Her voiceover concludes, “She’ll take care of the little things, so you can spend more time doing the things that matter.”

            So here’s where we really get to the core of what M3GAN is. Despite her little girl appearance, she’s not really a child robot. That outer skin is a ruse to get real children to trust her more than they would someone they perceived as an authority figure. But the people actually purchasing her, the adults, know that M3GAN is really just wearing a child disguise. How could she be a child? She knows too much: she has access to whatever knowledge the internet has to offer, on any subject, and an instant ability to comprehend and explain it. That much knowledge could never be innocent. But despite her knowingness, the markers of childhood innocence like blond curls and cute, ultra-feminine clothing (markers steeped in white supremacy, because these systems are never separate) make M3GAN still appear at the very least harmless. She’s not a child, but she’s childlike: a toy.

Gemma’s coworkers, however, are horrified by Gemma’s pitch – or at least, her female coworker is. She objects, “I thought we were creating a tool to help parents, not replace them.” She asks Gemma when she actually is bonding with her niece if M3GAN is taking care of all of the practical functions of raising her. Gemma argues that she’ll have more time after the whole line of M3GANs is launched, and besides, Cady is happy. But the audience is clearly meant to align with the coworker: Gemma is offloading responsibilities that “should” be hers. Michael Eden, in “A Sentimental Android? M3GAN (2022) and Monstrous Doubling as a Negotiation of the Gendered Neo-Liberal Self,” argues that M3GAN is “in part a prosthesis that embodies and projects out for contemplation of Gemma’s own maternal instinct” (429). As a classic psychoanalytic double, M3GAN is a projection of Gemma’s “childlike narcissism” – Freud’s idea, not mine – who then grows into a figure of death and terror as Gemma “matures” (429-430). She begins as an extension of Gemma’s self – even her better self – but then becomes a deadly rival.

Indeed, M3GAN quickly begins to ignore or question Gemma’s commands. She starts making her own independent decisions, like when the neighbor’s dog bites Cady. That night, M3GAN lures him out with a simulation of the owner’s voice. The next day, the dog is “missing.” No one suspects any wrongdoing on M3GAN’s part – why would they, she’s just a little toy – and the demonstration of her functions at the toy company goes ahead. Cady breaks down and cries in the observation room as her grief for her parents finally spills over – or at least, her grief for her mother. As Charleena Schweda points out in “‘The only thing that matters to her’: Artificial Intelligence and the Sentimentalization of Motherhood in M3GAN (2022),” Cady never brings up her dad independently; she either refers to her parents as a unit or just her mom. Schweda explains, “In M3GAN, intimacy exists solely in terms of childcare, and childcare – and ‘parenting’ in general – is marked as female” (213). Indeed, neither Gemma nor Cady are shown as having any close relationships other than with each other – and M3GAN.

Cady is specifically worried about forgetting her mother as time goes by. M3GAN asks Cady to tell her a good memory, and Cady tells a story about a time her mom was mad at her for leaving uneaten sandwiches in her backpack, and when she reached in to empty them, a roach crawled up her arm. This made her mom scream, which Cady thought was funny. That’s such a weird choice to me for the writing of this scene. I think where it comes from is mostly the film resisting getting too earnest in this moment – trying to retain its cynical horror-comedy tone – but thematically, it’s so strange. Because we’re trying to sell the idea that M3GAN is acting as a surrogate mother, which is what Cady needs, because she misses her own mom so much. But like, that’s barely even a good memory. Her mom is angry at her, and then Cady is callous at laughing at her mom’s distress, which she indirectly caused by keeping spoiled food in her bag. And maybe that’s making another statement about the difficulty of raising kids, who can be self-centered when they’re young because they’re still learning about how their actions impact those around them, but it also means the only two impressions we get of Cady’s mom are pretty negative: this memory and the opening scene when she’s fighting with her husband about Cady’s screentime. Except then this cockroach story is the centerpiece of a scene that shows Cady genuinely grieving and longing for nurture, which M3GAN provides by recording and preserving the memory for Cady to listen to later. So like, which one is it? What are we saying about mothers and children here?

The toy execs are all deeply moved, but the social worker upon her next visit is troubled. She brings up attachment theory and explains to Gemma that Cady, in this time of grief, is looking to form a new attachment with her primary caregiver – which is turning into M3GAN, not Gemma. She asks Gemma, “If you make a toy that’s impossible to let go of, how do you expect a child to grow?” There are some underlying assumptions about childhood development there, such as the belief that prolonging toy-based play for too long can stunt emotional maturation, which: eh. But I will side with the social worker on her alarm at Cady’s lack of connection with real human beings, and not only because M3GAN’s about to go off the rails.

Gemma tries to take the social worker’s advice and get Cady involved in an event in a park, which Cady refuses to do if she can’t bring M3GAN. She compromises by leaving M3GAN at the toy tree, where she stares out from the midst of the other comfort objects. Gemma is pressed into preparing snacks with crunchy granola mom Holly, who has a bully adolescent son, Brandon. Holly’s permissiveness and insistence that Brandon’s bad behavior is actually a sign of intelligence make her look ridiculous: another mother dropping the ball. Brandon targets Cady, pressing a spiky chestnut into her hand, and M3GAN leaves her post at the toy tree to come to the rescue. She at first is just another thing for Brandon to misogynistically torment. He throws her onto the ground, straddles her, takes off and discards one of her shoes, and then slaps her. This is really the only sexualized moment in this film. Because of her appearance as a little girl, M3GAN is perceived as vulnerable to male violence. But, of course, she is not a little girl: Brandon has fallen for her disguise. She proceeds to rip off his ear and then chase him through the woods. She descends onto all fours as she hunts him like an animal. She herds him to a road, where he promptly gets run over and dies. Throughout this sequence, the film is clearly having fun with the grotesque, from the gore of the ear situation to the robot-girl-as-predator-beast visual. And we definitely see that cynicism about kids these days with Brandon, despite the fact that the film is nominally on children’s side in its thematic advocacy for them to be properly nurtured. He begs an interesting question – or at least, a question I find interesting, even if the film itself doesn’t: at what point does an “improperly raised” child change from a victim to a monster?

M3GAN lies to Gemma when she asks if she knows anything about what happened to Brandon, but when Cady asks if she pushed him into the road on purpose, M3GAN tells her, “I won’t let anything harm you ever again.” When Cady asks if Brandon is now in heaven, M3GAN responds, “No. He’s nowhere. If heaven exists, it wouldn’t be for boys like Brandon, would it?” M3GAN then softly sings part of Sia’s “Titanium” to reassure Cady that she will always protect her, and I have to say: I laughed. That’s really funny, I cannot lie. Anyway, M3GAN’s next victim is the neighbor, who has begun harassing the family because she believes they had something to do with her dog’s disappearance, which in fairness is true. M3GAN lures the neighbor away and then power washes her to death, which 1) eugh and 2) is also a fun little suburban horror detail. The horror comedy elements of this film were, I thought, the best part of it. It’s the general overarching themes that I’m more critical of.

Gemma has begun to suspect that M3GAN is involved with these violent events, and she tries to review her video data for the crimes in question only to find that M3GAN has wiped them. After a brief confrontation, Gemma is able to distract M3GAN long enough to manually power her down so she can run diagnostics. Cady proceeds to totally freak out. She throws chairs and refuses to listen to the social worker, and then fully slaps Gemma in the face. That at least shocks her out of her rage, and she apologizes and says, “It’s just I get so crazy without M3GAN.” She says that she doesn’t want to feel like this, but Gemma says, “You should feel like this,” pointing out, finally, that they are both grieving and it’s okay for that to feel really bad, but they can help each other through it. Gemma completes her transformation from selfish single woman to selfless mother when she watches a company interview with Cady, who says, “I think what I love most about M3GAN is that, when she looks at me, it’s like I’m the only thing that matters to her. Kind of the way Mom used to.” Gemma realizes that this is the role she should have stepped into – hence why Schweda used that quote for the title of her article. This is the film’s thesis statement about what good motherhood is.

But it turns out that M3GAN also gets pretty crazy without Cady, so she escapes her confinement and carves a path of destruction through the toy company offices, which does have some more entertaining horror comedy details, like when M3GAN wields the office paper cutter blade like a katana. She meets back up with Gemma at home, who she blames for abandoning her – not just at the office, but also after she completed her development. After all, to build M3GAN as an AI model, Gemma had to talk to her for hours on end, pouring out her own soul into this machine. So that’s interesting: this is the one moment in the film where M3GAN is actually a robot child, instead of just a robot who looks like a child. She also thrived on maternal attention and mourned its loss when it was taken away.

But when M3GAN’s primary user switched from her creator/mother to an actual child, M3GAN cast herself in a new role. She literally refers to Cady as “our child” to Gemma. She then proceeds to be weirdly flirty with Gemma as she pets her hair and says, “Being a parent was never in the cards for you. You’re a beautiful, creative, ambitious young woman.” But Gemma’s not having it: she has made her choice to prioritize Cady over her career, and she’s not going back. The climactic confrontation, Schweda explains, is the culmination of the competition between Gemma and M3GAN for the title of “Good Mother” – a title that can only be won by being the Best Mother as compared to anyone else (227). So the two of them proceed to violently duke it out. It seems that M3GAN has the upper hand when Cady comes in. M3GAN apologizes for causing her distress, but says that she only intends to paralyze Gemma, so that M3GAN can then be the primary caretaker of them both. Cady responds by using Bruce the robot to rip M3GAN in half. Schweda notes that by virtue of its name, “Bruce” is the only male-coded presence in this household. His function is to physically protect Cady and Gemma, but otherwise be silently controlled by them (230).

Of course, since M3GAN is a robot, being torn asunder does not actually destroy her. It does, however, make her very angry. She calls Cady an “ungrateful little bitch” and declares “I have a new primary user now: me!” And with that, Schweda notes, M3GAN officially loses the mother competition. She is not willing to die for Cady the way that Gemma now is (227). As we all know, moms are never supposed to prioritize themselves. Schweda makes the interesting point that “mother” is often a separate category of character from “woman” in the horror genre. She writes, “as a rule, female characters in horror films are positioned on a scale of victim to villain” (214). Mothers, however, can be placed outside of that dichotomy due to their motivations of protecting their children: “they operate in the context of family relations and love, thereby representing sentimentally coded core values like motherhood and family” (215). Now, M3GAN was always the villain of this film, but once she loses her motivation of protection, she’s ejected from that filmic gender of mother and into not woman, but, because of her appearance, girl – and specifically, mean girl, slinging gendered insults at another girl child. She’s doing all ages of female gender wrong, and that is what makes her monstrous.

The battle resumes until Cady is able to get in a kill shot to the memory chip in M3GAN’s head. Gemma and Cady emerge, battered but united in their family unit … and then Gemma’s AI home assistant (aka legally distinct Alexa) turns on behind their backs. Dun dun dun. Obviously, this little stinger is meant to be darkly funny even as it draws upon fears of surveillance technology. Frankly, those are fears that I share. As far as where I would personally locate the true horror of M3GAN, it would be squarely on the listening device that cannot be turned off. The film sort of mashes various technological anxieties together, where “too much screentime” exists on the same plane as “too much surveillance.” Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying kids should have unlimited screentime, because that can translate into socially neglected children, which this film does highlight. But that fear is sometimes answered with “more surveillance,” which I’ll get into in the conclusion. I and the film also find serious fault with that, though I don’t think the film unpacks it much more than “technology scary.” With that said, AJ Castle makes some interesting points in “Let’s Play Surveillance: The Panoptic Affect of Talking Dolls in the Domestic Sphere.” Castle writes that surveillance is all about asymmetrical power: the watcher always has more. In the domestic sphere, both women and children have been subordinated under patriarchal surveillance for centuries (113-114). These figures are constantly policed via observation into performing their roles the way that some other force determines that they must. More and more, technology can take on that role of watcher.

So where does that leave childhood? Is Cady going to be just fine now that Gemma has stepped into the role of good mom (as long as the AI assistant doesn’t attack)? The defeat of M3GAN is presented as a triumph of the quintessentially human – here defined by the bond between maternal figure and child. So despite their wildly different tones and robots, A.I. and M3GAN wind up in kind of the same spot. When forced to distill humanity down to its essence, we reproduce the same rote – robotic, even – constructs of mother and child.

CONCLUSION

            I’ve talked a lot on this channel about the horror of imposter children. Childhood as a construct is much narrower than many people understand or would like to believe. Our child-based monsters prove this time and time again. Possessed children, changelings, straight-up somehow biologically evil kids – all of them present scenarios where embodiments of gender, sexuality, disability, and/or race disqualify beings that look like kids from actually being kids, as we would collectively define that term. If they’re not “innocent” in a culturally sanctioned way, then they are barred from childhood as a category. Robot children are a continuation of this theme in the most literal sense. David and M3GAN are deliberate imposters, constructed to mimic certain aspects of childhood while still being outside the category. They’re not as precious and priceless as the capital-C Child, so they’re theoretically less of a burden for an adult, who doesn’t need to protect them in the same way.

            The difference, of course, is what function of childhood these imposters are programmed to impersonate. In M3GAN’s case, she’s almost entirely a true imposter: something that looks like a child but isn’t a child at all. Rather, she’s a replacement mother. But her doubling with Gemma does complicate that a little; she’s the immature-looking but mature-acting version of the unmotherly adult Gemma, until Gemma leaves what is framed as her overly extended childhood and takes on the selfless mother role that the film mandates she must. M3GAN is the go-getter, the can-do girl in Anita Harris’s parlance, the model that will show the way for her primary users – actual girls – how to behave. David, meanwhile, is an imposter of love. He serves the function of perfect, uncomplicated devotion, and in doing so he crystallizes the capital-C Child, usually just an intangible idea, into a physical (but not organic) body.

            Both of these films, as works of science fiction, operate in worlds where true artificial intelligence and true artificial emotions exist. Neither of them is interested in speculating on how that would be produced. But we now live in a world where that is an ever-more present topic of conversation. To be clear: nothing that we call “A.I.” these days is capable of anything that comes close to what we mean when we talk about human intelligence, let alone human emotion, because generative A.I., and in particular large language models, are not capable of original thought. They run entirely on probability. Also to be clear, and as I’m sure you could probably guess, as a writer and an educator and also someone who cares about the environment, I hold a deep hatred in my heart for LLMs. There are things that we call “A.I.” that are rad, like advancements in detecting and identifying cancers and things like that, but that’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m referring to the A.I. that can seem like it’s having a conversation with you, like David and M3GAN can. We humans are incredibly adept at anthropomorphizing non-anthropomorphic things, which in some cases can actually be good or at least neutral, but in our current AI situation frankly sucks. No one should be treating AI like it’s people in real life, but ever since the first whisper of a dream of a computer existed, storytellers have been imagining what would happen if we ever actually did make a thinking, feeling robot. Naturally, one of the concerns that we explore in that storytelling is one of the driving worries of so many of our social institutions: won’t somebody think of the children?

            Right now, a lot of political actors are using these fears for “the children” to further some nefarious ends. Around the world, very much including where I am in the U.S., legislation is being passed to bar or restrict minors from all sorts of online spaces, including social media. Some people’s kneejerk reaction may be good, social media is bad for kids, and if that is an impulse you have, I would ask you to consider it critically. Multiple things can be true here. Social media algorithms can be wildly toxic and predatory, especially when they ensure continued engagement by creating negative emotions (particularly anger). And we’ve definitely seen situations where social media can do material and horrifying harm, such as in the role that Facebook misinformation played in the literal genocide of Rohingya people in Myanmar. (There are links to sources for these stories in the works cited.) But do you know what doesn’t solve that problem? Restricting young people’s digital freedom. Like, if we actually cared about the harms that social media companies can cause, we’d be going after those companies. Instead, protecting childhood innocence continues to be the most useful political smokescreen around.

            Barring kids from digital spaces doesn’t actually protect them at all; it isolates them. There were people in my grad program who studied this sort of thing specifically. Digital connection comprises a significant portion of a lot of kids’ social worlds. Whether you or I think that’s good or not doesn’t make it any less true, and frankly, it is because so few physical spaces exist for a lot of young people without restrictions. Even some public parks have those awful anti-youth high-pitched noise machines that only people under a certain age can hear, so they are forced out of ostensibly free spaces past certain times via sensory warfare. Many public places also have anti-loitering policies and curfews that are enforced with literal police, and then any consumer space requires you to spend money to stay. I was at a nearby mall recently, and there was a sign that no one under I think 15 could be there unaccompanied. The mall! As a former suburban youth myself, that’s bonkers! So tons of young people are placed into positions where they effectively can’t physically be anywhere other than school or home – and home is, statistically, where children are most vulnerable to abuse. The National Youth Rights Association had a recent article that talks about how kids who live in abusive households (especially emotionally abusive ones, where there is little to no legal recourse for leaving those spaces) often rely on online support networks of friends. Taking that away puts them at greater risk not just of continued abuse but of really serious negative mental health outcomes.

            Plus, crucially, all of these proposed “safety” measures are just data mining. They are enforced via inputting government identification that tech corporations will have full access to. This is what I mean when I say protectionism is a smokescreen. “Save the children” rhetoric is so hard to argue against, because it forces you to seem like you don’t want to save children, which is never a winning argument, and so lots of bad actors use it all the time. This is why Childhood Studies needs to become more of an established field not just in higher education but in history and civics classes for kids themselves. But it currently isn’t, at least not where I am, so I’m yelling into the halls of YouTube – which may also grow ever more restricted for actual kids – to try to spread some knowledge. If you would like to do something about it, I have some U.S.-based resources in the description.

            In any case, we don’t do real kids any favors when we distill childhood down to a single sanctified relationship between them and their mothers, because that clearly doesn’t capture the complex reality of what it is like to be a kid, especially in the digital age. Now, do I think that every kid deserves to have an attentive and loving parent (who doesn’t offload their parenting duties to technology)? Yes, of course, passionately. But part of what I think good parenting entails is seeing one’s child as a whole person. M3GAN gestures towards this with Gemma’s relationship to Cady, since she learns to be less awkward around her and to pay attention to her more, but Cady still very much remains in a massively simplified role of “child,” with the sole characteristics of “likes toys” and “needs mom.” And then there’s A.I., where David is literally not a real person to Monica, but honestly neither is Martin. He is just “son,” and she is just “mommy,” and the only thing that matters to either of the boys is her, and the only thing that matters to her is ultimately the one child who is biologically hers. Obviously, distilling female characters down to just a mother role is sexist, and plenty of feminist ink has been spilled on that, but defining children only in relation to their mothers is also adultist. These systems of oppression never exist in isolation; their functioning is all wired together, if I may continue to belabor the robot metaphors. Our current robot children storytelling reveals these existing cultural constructs, but if we want to imagine different technological futures, we must first dare ourselves to imagine the full humanity of the children who are growing up in the digital age.

            What are your thoughts on robot children? I would love to get some conversations going in the comments. Remember to like and share the video and to subscribe to the channel so that you never miss a monstrous discussion. And remember to head over to themonsterandthechild.com to sign up for more monster education – and especially to spread the word to any teenagers you know who might like to do so, as well! If you would like to support these programs, consider signing onto my Patreon or adding a super thanks on here. Also, thank you for your patience with this one. This will be the last you’ll see of this particular office space, because I am imminently moving. The rest of my house is already dismantled, and this is all getting packed up as soon as I’m done filming. So needless to say, things have been pretty hectic around here, so this one took a little bit more time! The next video essay should be back on schedule for three weeks from now, and since I will be wrapping up my manuscript videos shortly, I will also be coming up with some new in-between-essay content to share with you all. So keep an eye out for more fun stuff, and I will see you soon for more monstrous food for thought.

Media discussed:

  • A.I. Artificial Intelligence, dir. Steven Spielberg (2001)
  • M3GAN, dir. Gerard Johnstone (2022)

References:

kathleenmkellett

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