Tag: Movies

Sorry, Finch: Robots Aren’t Humans

My wife and I like Tom Hanks. When we are flipping through the options on a quiet evening, if we see a Tom Hanks movie we haven’t seen, we’re more inclined to look into it and watch the trailer than not. So here we were with access to Apple TV (because we got it for free when we bought our TV recently, and then paid for an extra month to finish Masters of the Air, and then forgot to cancel it), and this Tom Hanks movie shows up: Finch. Post-Apocalyptic? Hmm, we aren’t really into cannibalism. Oh it’s just PG-13, and apparently mostly about a dog. Okay sure, let’s try it.

Fair warning: I’ll be dropping some real spoilers here. The story is that Finch, a man dying of radiation poisoning (we are never told how he got it), has been living by himself in a wind-turbine powered facility outside St. Louis after a worldwide cataclysm caused by a freak solar flare. I’ll give them points for going with a climate catastrophe that isn’t human-caused; very counter-cultural. He stays away from people because they are doing what people always do in post-apocalyptic movies: hunting and stealing and killing and eating each other. Thankfully all of that is left pretty much off-screen – there are plenty of movies where you can get your fill of such things. Finch has a dog who he really loves, and a couple of robotic helpers that he designed, built, and programmed.

His greatest creation is the robot we meet near the start of the film, a bipedal, humanoid robot with a kind of advanced AI ability to learn and pre-loaded with a huge chunk of the accumulated knowledge of humankind. This robot is eventually given the name Jeff. What becomes clear as the movie progresses is that Finch has designed Jeff to take care of the dog when he is gone. And in order to escape a deadly storm, they take a dangerous road trip to San Francisco in a special RV.

Hanks is a good enough actor to carry this movie by himself just like with the classic, Cast Away. “Wilson!” But what I found particularly interesting was the way in which the writers and moviemakers decided to present the robot, Jeff. Everything was designed to make the audience like Jeff. His questions and foibles early on are exactly those of a curious and naïve toddler. Later he takes on the character of a typical teenager as he insists on driving the RV before Finch is ready to trust him with it. Lastly, he matures into the caretaker Finch wanted for his beloved dog. What it boils down to is this: everything likeable about Jeff is what reminds us of humans and not robots. Robots cannot and do not have agency or will, they do not have consciousness or conscience. But we are pretty obsessed with projecting our own internal experience of human selfhood onto the robotic creations we make.

So this is why the robots like C-3P0 and R2-D2 in Star Wars are actual characters – because they behave like human beings and not robots. Back in the 70s the kinds of robotics in the movie were a far-off dream. But not anymore. The more technology and AI advances, the more this spell will be cast, trying to convince us that somehow robots can be as human as we are, that they can think and feel as we do. If you pay attention, this messaging is already out there loud and clear. I will not here divert into the separate but related conversation about whether AI or any other artificial brain-like technology can be somehow influenced or occupied by discarnate intelligences. The answer to that question is a thorny mess of nightmare fuel. For now, let’s stick to the movies.

There is an interesting comparison to be made between Cast Away and Finch. In Cast Away, Hanks’s character becomes so lonely that he paints a face on Wilson and starts talking to him like a friend. The audience knows Wilson is not real, but we also understand that there is something deeply human about the need to connect with someone else like us. It is not good for man to be alone. After all the animals had passed by Adam, the conclusion of the matter was: “But for Adam no suitable helper was found.” This goes deep. We understand that extreme solitude will strain and fray the sanity of almost anyone. But Cast Away does not try to convince us that Wilson is really a suitable friend for Hanks. If anything, the movie helps us realize that pretending to have a friend as a way of holding on to your sanity is better than losing it entirely.

But Finch is a different story. After a pretty interesting opening and middle section—the character is compelling, the robot and dog are amusing, the adventures are exciting—the ending is one of the most dissatisfying movie experiences I can remember. And it is so dissatisfying exactly because it tries to present itself as a happy ending. What is that ending? A montage multiple minutes long of the robot, Jeff, taking care of Finch’s dog after Finch dies. Playing fetch. Feeding it. Ta-da! A robot taking care of a dog, and all the humans dead and gone, or still killing each other like animals off screen somewhere. Finch tries to convince the audience that humans are expendable, and that the best parts of humanity—the love, care, and goodness—can be pulled off just as well by clever robots. Cast Away took away all the humans except one to reveal something profoundly true about humanity; Finch took away all the humans and pretended it didn’t matter.

I’ll tell you – this really did not sit well with me. “Who cares?” I said to myself. If there are no humans to experience it, remember it, tell of it; no children to raise and bequeath what little we have to— then who cares if a robot takes care of a hundred dogs for eternity? The image of God resides not in robots and dogs, as good and glorious as technology and the canine species is. How could that be the ending of the movie? How could that possibly feel like a happy ending to anyone? Because—guess what?—there will not be any robots or dogs watching and comprehending this movie. Why? Because they can’t.

The way this movie resolved, it felt like an advertisement for post-humanity. “Time for this failed experiment called humans to shuffle off the stage and leave things for the robots and animals.” It felt like it was trying to get me to feel good about something that my whole soul was screaming “this is BAD” about. I hope I’m not being unfair here. I love dogs and robots! But they aren’t humans. And no movie made by humans for humans should pretend it’s somehow going to have a satisfying ending for human hearts and minds if that ending has all the humans we spent 90 minutes getting emotionally invested into dead and buried. The only way people could make this movie is if they really convinced themselves that, at bottom, there is no fundamental difference between humans and dogs (just slightly different mammals) or between humans and robots (just computers in bodies).

This gets back to a theme I’ve been returning to repeatedly in this space, and that is the idea of a robust, Christian anthropology. What is a human being? The church really needs to get a handle on its answer to this question, because the assaults against human nature are going to get exponentially worse. If a robot can demonstrate some evidence of consciousness, should we grant it human rights? What about DNA alterations? What about the integration of digital hardware directly into human bodies, like the recent Neuralink patient? What is the Christian response to these things? Are they good? Permissible? Sinful? Demonic?

In a recent podcast interview with Annie Crawford, she quoted a certain Stratford Caldecott as saying: “We don’t know how to educate, because we don’t know what a human is; we don’t know what a human is because we don’t know what reality is; and we don’t know what reality is because we don’t know the One who made reality.” This sums up the depth of the problem nicely, as well as the beauty and nestled, fractal unity of the ultimate Answer.

Why Hollywood Can’t Pull Off Goodness (According to C.S. Lewis)

I’m no movie critic – not even close. I don’t seem to have whatever artistic antennae are required to appreciate the subtleties of the cinematic medium. Nevertheless, like most people, I do have eyes in my head and do enjoy a good movie. And it happens to be a fact that every movie works from a script – a story with characters and dialogue. So the basis for every movie is the written word, while it cannot be said that every book is based on a movie. (Woe to the book that is based on a movie: Thou art a fraud.) My point is that the same dynamics of moral imagination are at play in a movie as in a novel or any other creative work of fiction. And this is where the following quote by C.S. Lewis collided in my mind with a simple observation I’ve made about many of the movies and TV shows made in recent decades, which I’ll get to in a moment.

It remains, of course, true that Satan is the best drawn of Milton’s characters. The reason is not hard to find. Of the major characters whom Milton attempted he is incomparably the easiest to draw. Set a hundred poets to tell the same story and in ninety of the resulting poems Satan will be the best character. In all but a few writers the ‘good’ characters are the least successful, and every one who has ever tried to make even the humblest story ought to know why. To make a character worse than oneself it is only necessary to release imaginatively from control some of the bad passions which, in real life, are always straining at the leash; the Satan, the Iago [the scheming antagonist from Shakespeare’s play Othello], the Becky Sharp [the morally vile protagonist from Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair], within each of us, is always there and only too ready, the moment the leash is slipped, to come out and have in our books that holiday we try to deny them in our lives. But if you try to draw a character better than yourself, all you can do is to take the best moments you have had and to imagine them prolonged and more consistently embodied in action. But the real high virtues which we do not possess at all, we cannot depict except in a purely external fashion. We do not really know what it feels like to be a man much better than ourselves. His whole inner landscape is one we have never seen, and when we guess it we blunder. It is in their ‘good’ characters that novelists make, unawares, the most shocking self-revelations. … To project ourselves into a wicked character, we have only to stop doing something, and something that we are already tired of doing; to project ourselves into a good one we have to do what we cannot and become what we are not.

C.S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost, Chapter 13. Emphasis mine.

Now since I’ve already dipped into the mode of the woe-throwing Old Testament prophet, I’ll allow myself one more: Woe to the one who looks to Hollywood for moral clarity. And all the people said Amen. But even without looking to movies for moral clarity, it remains a fact that so much of what is compelling about a movie is the moral fabric of the main characters, both good and evil. I am limiting myself here to those movies which are a essentially a contest between moral opposites: crime dramas, thrillers, action movies, or the never-ending series of original or rebooted or off-shoot superhero movies. The simple observation I am making about such movies and shows is that the good characters are becoming more troubled and morally compromised. It is so very rare to see a compelling protagonist that is good. The anti-hero is the hero for our age; the anti-hero is the only kind of hero we can believe in.

The above quote by Lewis is commenting on the scholarly consensus that Milton’s Satan (in Paradise Lost) is more compelling as a character than any other in the story. Lewis then lays out a morally insightful explanation for why that is necessarily the case in fallen humanity’s literature. Another example of this principle is found in the fact that Dante’s Inferno is by far and away more popular and compelling to the typical reader than either Purgatorio or Paradisio.

I used to think that an author’s characters had no vital connection to them – that an imagination could dream up moral monsters and virtuous heroes without it being a reflection of itself. But this is not true. As Lewis says, “It is in their ‘good’ characters that novelists [and screenwriters] make, unawares, the most shocking self-revelations.” Indeed, we are infected with moral cynicism. We look back on the virtuous heroes of past literature and we groan at the naivety of such caricatures. But this reaction reveals far more about our modern moral weakness than it does about anything else. And our modern writers cannot conceive of a truly virtuous person because our culture has jettisoned objective morality and the priority of character formation.

Adam and Eve and the obedient angels may not have been Milton’s best characters, but I dare say he was able to make them far more compelling than our typical cadre of authors and screenwriters could today. Even when they attempt to treat subjects of similar greatness, it seems they cannot avoid falling into caricatures either of rigid moralists and unhappily repressed religious people on the one hand, or vile hypocrites who are only pretending to be good on the other.

Small wonder then that the heroes we see onscreen, whatever technical mastery and skill they may have, are hardly ever compelling examples of deep moral goodness: Iron Man and the whole Marvel cast, John Wick, Deadpool, and so on. There are of course blessed exceptions to this rule, such as Aragorn in Peter Jackson’s LotR Trilogy and Franz & Fani from Terrence Malick’s recent movie A Hidden Life. It takes real effort to pull off these characters well and avoid portraying a plastic pseudo-goodness that comes across more as naivety than virtue. One common element between them is suffering. Perhaps goodness untested by suffering and evil is never very compelling. But I am straying from my main point, which is that we do learn all too much about the storytellers of our time by the manifestations of goodness that they are able to imagine and conjure for us.

Simply put, we do not have deep and compelling moral goodness manifested in our entertainment because a writer’s imagination is constrained by his or her own moral character and by and large we have forgotten (or rejected) the possibility and priority of conforming ourselves to an objective standard of virtue.

I mean, have you ever seen Caillou? That kid’s a brat.

“Weak point, sir. I’m from Canada, not Hollywood.”

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