What Makes a Real Boy

A teacher's nightmare: finishing a literature unit two weeks early right before Holiday Break.

The solution: something equivalent to standing at the edge of a high dive, the pool three meters below.

I thought Pinocchio.

Then the robot David from Steven Spielberg's Artificial Intelligence came first.

Then, Brian W. Aldiss's classic short story "Super Toys Last All Summer Long."

It's a simple equation: Pinnochio + Supertoys = Artificial Intelligence. What came together as the lesson progressed was a confluence of theme across novel, story and film.

Pinocchio, of course, is a wooden puppet given motion from Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883). This is a dark novel miles away from the 1940 Disney version with Pinnocchio as an ungrateful boy who wants to be a good marionette but can't help doing outrageously adolescent things like killing the talking cricket who acts as his conscience and selling his A-B-C book (puchased with Gepetto's last coins) to attend the theatre.  It's all a story about free will going head to head with morality and with the help of the Blue Fairy, Pinocchio finally does good and is transformed into a real boy.

David the robot in Aldiss's story struggles to express his love to his human mother, whose husband works at a technology company in a future where the government is stingy in allowing families to reproduce. In this narrative's version of the future, the rich live in hologram homes where nothing is quite real. When his adopted family gets permission to have a real child, Alden's future becomes doubtful. Alden seems to after the consequences of a fake world in which everything is artificial from verdant gardens to face masks that give instant beauty to happiness and love. As technology advances, reality fades. A prescient theme for a short story written in 1969.

Spielberg and screenwriter Ian Watson, working off a futuristic version of Pinocchio penned by Stanley Kubrick, took Aldiss's narrative and expanded it a few steps further. (The movie was released in 2001; it was panned by many but upon a repeat viewing, its bizarre yet engaging charms feel more than wise.) David's mother abandons him when her first son, cryonically perserved after an accident, is brought back to life thanks to advances in medicine. David meets a robot gigolo and together the two set out to find the Blue Fairy whom David believes will grant him the wish of resuscitating his mother's love for him. (Monica, David's mother, reads him The Adventures of Pinocchio which he takes as a manual of existence.) In his quest, David discovers that he is not unique; he is merely one model in a batch of Davids.

Pinocchio must act on the love he feels for Gepetto, for the Blue Fairy and for life itself and stop covering that love up with the misguided  actions of greedy, senseless boy. David in "Supertoys" wants the reality achieved by authentic emotions and David as played by Haley Joel Osment wants the individuality that comes from developing feelings of love and compassion. Together, these narratives explore what it means to be "real"; the boys' desires to love and be loved function as a symbol for all our struggles to be fully expressive, to be fully ourselves, to be fully cherished by others.