The anti-resolution of I Am Mother

[Spoilers ahead]

[Photograph: Ian Routledge]

For the first half of I Am Mother I was convinced it was just another generic, un-insightful, waste-of-time dystopian thriller that I was just watching for the lol’s after a tiring day out. But it turned out to be one of the more insightful of dystopian movies I've watched (though insightful for all the things that I think it got wrong).

The premise was a robot, Mother— who turned out to be a whole conscious being enlivening all the robots in the film—that sought to solve the problem of humanity by killing all human beings and engineering the perfect human being; this perfect human would then become the mother of all humanity, inaugurating a fresh start for human beings. Ultimately Daughter passed this intricate test that Mother set up, excelling even in the difficult final hurdle. The film ended there. It was a fine ending for a short film, because it purported to address such a difficult premise: solving humanity. Did its resolution meet this basic aim though? I don’t think it did—and in its failure to do so we see, highlighted, the utter incapacity of our humanistic solutions to solve humanity’s problems.  

Mother stated that her aim was to make humans “smarter [and] more ethical”, and that this would somehow save humanity. How did she go about this? Many classes, many tests. Daughter learnt the views of Bentham, Comte, Kant… she learnt to do surgery and make perfect medical diagnoses…and Daughter passed these with flying colours: 98% for the final test she took. “Smart”, perhaps, and also fairly “ethical” if knowledge of competing moral views makes one necessarily more ethical. Daughter then had the final hurdle to cross, and cross it she did. This was the test of whether she would sacrifice the opportunity of individual comfort (sharing Woman’s carrier tank), to come back and fight for her brother. 

Does passing this intricate programme set up by Mother actually mean the human problem is solved? Mother seems to think so: she seals her work with the final task of killing Woman, showing she thought her project had conclusively solved humanity: the new earth would be so completely purged of human evil, because Daughter would be mother of human beings, that allowing an “imperfect” human to remain on the planet would fail the project.

This portrays humanity’s problem as a superficial one, attributable simply to deficient learning of the philosophy we have developed and passed down our human generations, and deficient knowledge of elements of the human body and surgical methods. It suggests that the problem with humanity is a superficial smear on an actually perfect mirror (the pure, perfect human being), and we just need to solve that smear by purging bad influences from less-than-perfect human beings, distractions from learning, and polish the mirror by good teaching and maybe technology like AI.

However, the problem runs deeper, more fundamentally. Humanity is, even underneath, a shattered mirror, problematic and broken at our core. “Smart” and so-called “ethical” training like what Mother put Daughter through, is only a duct tape measure. For one, having one rather virtuous and smart human being does not secure a better humanity. It only provides a fresh start, for the gradual unravelling of evil to take place all over again. Daughter’s children will not be like her: her knowledge and virtue will not transfer perfectly. Soon enough evil will run rampant again as the problems of humanity manifest. But more importantly to note, Daughter isn’t perfect herself. Will Daughter not have gaps in her knowledge or misapply that knowledge? Does knowledge of the world’s philosophers secure good outcomes? Is our philosophy really that watertight? Supposing she applies knowledge perfectly to every situation, and our philosophy is perfect (which we know is far from true), won’t Daughter make mistakes? If she doesn’t, and she really does the perfect thing on every occasion, she is not a human being, and the film has been unfaithful to its premise of solving the problem of humanity. Ultimately, Mother’s programme, complex as it was, must be repeated very soon, because it never solved the problem. It was duct tape measure on a shattered mirror, or more visually, duct tape on a cracked water pipe, and the water is already waiting to surge out again in trouble. Mother probably acknowledges this when she says “If you need me, you know how to find me.” 

So I Am Mother set out too mammoth a task of solving humanity. It merely picked out the more brainy and perhaps more dauntless of the lot of human beings, but she is still human isn’t she? She will make mistakes, and her braininess (if that even counts as anything in fixing humanity’s problems) won’t transmit to her children.

There is a deeper problem with humanity, which I think is pretty clear to anyone who dwells on the resolution of the movie for at least a little while beyond the end of the movie credits. It's a mammoth problem that requires a mammoth solution, and Mother's programme falls far, far short.