An In Depth Look at the Forrest Scene Part 1

In the previous review, I talked about the final event—the pool party—which led to Monica eventually leaving David in the forest with Teddy. I mentioned one of the obvious problems with the sequence—the lack of attempts made to fix David before abandoning him—but I only alluded to the main issue because the subject is surprisingly complicated.

The forest scene itself is just shy of three minutes, and the actors both do a wonderful job selling the scene, but in the end, I couldn’t buy it. This scene is meant to bring the audience to tears, but I only felt confused and a little irritated. It’s taken multiple attempts at writing down my thoughts to really articulate why.

To grasp what went wrong during this scene, I must first rewind a bit and discuss what we’ve seen thus far. The basic issue is that there are multiple conflicting plot points coming to a head here. This makes for a very confusing scene, despite the actors’ tears. First, we must begin by remembering two elements: the film’s thesis statement and the bait-and-switch being used to sneak that thesis into the audience’s brains.

The real message of the movie is “Nobody knows what ‘real’ really means.” Remember, this is Teddy’s line at the end of Brian Aldiss’s short story, Super-Toys Last All Summer Long. As the movie progresses, the clear anti-God narrative becomes apparent, so the word “real” is, both in the short story and in the movie, serving as a placeholder for the concept of endowed value.

In other words, if the word “real” doesn’t matter, then endowed value doesn’t exist. If “real” has no objective meaning, then neither does human value. This is a very unpopular idea, and if the audience catches that this is the moral of the story, then they will disconnect from the film.

So, Spielberg—and by extension Kubrick—needs the audience to be lured into the thesis slowly. He does this by playing up the sympathy angle, and he plays up that angle by introducing his bait-and-switch, the film’s story question: “Can humans love the robot back?” He redirects the question of whether or not a robot can actually be “real” by turning the story into one of prejudice against androids.

I don’t know if Spielberg is doing this intentionally. My suspicion is that the real thesis of the movie was Kubrick’s, and Spielberg, needing to create a script out of a treatise and already understanding that such an idea wouldn’t sell, opted to shift the story question so he could lean into his talent for depicting the whimsical and pulling on the heartstrings.

But, whether he meant to or not, a bait-and-switch was the result. And, given some of the manipulative tactics used later, a part of me equally suspects that Kubrick and Spielberg were in perfect agreement, and Spielberg was truly trying to sell the short story’s main idea. It’s impossible to know for sure, but for the purposes of the forest scene, it’s important to understand that both the bait-and-switch and the thesis are in the background.

Now, I must turn my attention to Monica and David. Both characters are playing conflicting roles. I’ll start with Monica. Monica is serving three roles at once. She’s David’s primary motivation, his source of hope. She’s also serving as an avatar for the audience, sympathizing with David and herself in the same way the audience should be sympathizing with both characters. And she’s also serving as an avatar for the world. She’s acting as the surrogate for the bait-and-switch.

These three roles do not mesh, and that is one major reasons why this scene doesn’t work. Really, Spielberg should’ve had the dad leave David in the woods. The gut-wrenching scene wouldn’t have taken place, but first, this would’ve been more in line with the type of fairy tale Kubrick and Spielberg were trying to tell—remember it was the father who left Hansel and Gretel in the woods—and second, this would’ve kept Monica’s hands clean, in a manner of speaking.

She no longer needs to act as a symbolic representation of the world rejecting a robot who can really love. She can remain a sympathetic figure for the audience and a source of hope for David without there being any conflict in the story. But the fact that she’s also serving as a representation for the bait-and-switch—she even goes as far as saying, “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about the world,” as if David is just too good for this earth—creates confusion. In a sense, she is both a hero and a villain, and, therefore, David has no reason to treat her like a paragon and source of hope beyond his programming, which only goes further to prove that David is just a robot and has no real understanding of humanity or what it means to be real.

Then there’s David. His conflict is what causes all of these elements to fall apart. The thesis and the bait-and-switch both hinge on David being, for all intents and purposes, real. But he’s not. Spielberg has chosen to make him real at times and a robot at others, depending on what the script requires. And the crazy thing is, he has to do this to make the whole story work.

He’s been cornered by Kubrick’s idea. David’s innocence is what is making him appear sympathetic. It justifies him nearly killing Martin in the pool, and it justifies why he is more concerned about impressing his mother rather than being concerned for his brother’s well-being. But his innocence isn’t real; it comes from his programming as a robot. He doesn’t realize that he nearly killed Martin because his programming took over.

He doesn’t go to check on Martin after the fact and begins drawing pictures for his mother because his programming has left him incapable of valuing human life. He just knows he’s supposed to love his mommy. His programming is fake; it’s mimicking a conscience, but David doesn’t really understand right and wrong, nor does he understand the value of human life. That’s what makes David dangerous. That’s what justifies Monica leaving him or destroying him. She can’t risk her real son because her fake son doesn’t actually understand right and wrong. And again, Spielberg has no choice but to write the story this way because he can’t create a tragic circumstance for the robot without the robot being ignorant of its own apathy.

But if the robot is ignorant of its own apathy, it’s not human. If it doesn’t understand that what it did was wrong, then it doesn’t have one of the fundamental components that make up a human soul, and, therefore, the robot is dangerous, and, although the robot might mimic human emotions, Monica is completely justified in getting rid of it.

The audience cannot simultaneously see Monica as justified and David as an innocent victim, so the emotional response isn’t just sadness but a mixture of sadness and confusion. The scene asks the audience to believe multiple contradictory ideas at once. I’ll show how all of this ties together in the next review.