MovieChat Forums > A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) Discussion > Flesh Fairs are like 18th Century Englis...

Flesh Fairs are like 18th Century English execution sites like Tyburn


When you see baying mobs of peasants cheering for the deaths of organic people via executions long ago, it is so eerily similar to the Flesh Fairs of this movie and their "demolition of artificiality" of the mechas there, except back then, it was more or less for petty crimes or crimes against religion.

This sort of thing frightens me and makes me lose hope in humanity, whether it was death against real humans for silly reasons long ago or death against mecha just for existing and threatening humans. It's all really pointless.

reply

It is interesting to consider morality as moribund. Even if one were to look back to the exordium of the 20th century, there were no noble figures. Look at literature. Who was praised? Hemingway, Miller, Fitzgerald, Bukowski, etc. Men who drank themselves until they were terminally infirm; analogs of contemporary rudderless drug dependents.

That was ~100 years ago. Today? No one. The fish rots from the head down. Self-made perception is dissolving. The Tom Sawyer and Horatio Alger myth are gone. There are no more veritable capitalists and, to a rapidly increasing segment of the population, agency is becoming a shibboleth.

When asked whether or not someone or something will save us, the grim reality dawns upon the observer, who finds out that, alas, there is nothing worth saving.

reply

Eloquent, but grim.

reply


If they were just machines, I wouldn't care one way or the other no matter how well they replicated humanity. I don't watch demolition derbies either. If the machines were self-aware however, I'd fight for their liberties the same as I would for any human.

reply