The fascinating question of what constitutes the boundary between humans and non- or post-humans informs Spielberg's 2001 film, A.I: Artificial Intelligence. At the beginning of this essay I quoted from the review by David Denby in The New Yorker in which the critic does not have many good things to say about the film. Other review articles, in the British film magazine Sight and Sound and in The New York Review of Books, are more positive and bring out issues that are tied to some of those that I have discussed in my consideration of Pinocchio. In addition to the explicit references to the tale of Pinocchio in the film--the human mother reads the puppet's story to her robot or "mecha" son, who then decides he wants to be human and, upon his expulsion from the home, has a series of Pinocchio-like negative adventures as he searches for the Blue Fairy--it is possible to read the film, like Disney's Pinocchio, as another "metafilm."
lights this aspect of the film in his August 9, 2001, New York Review of Books article "Very Special Effects," where he writes: "A.I. is a meditation on its own components; the technical means that make possible the mechanical child are as one with the means used to make the film.... Now that we have the technology what are we going to use it for?" (p. 13). This "technology" of creation generates some of the same ethical and philosophical concerns that now whirl around the advances in science that permit babies to be created in test tubes and animals to be cloned.

In the original Collodi tale, in Disney's film, and in A.I., the puppet (or robot) is created by Godlike fathers as a child figure intended to serve the needs, material or emotional as they may be, of the parent. Collodi's Geppetto wants his puppet to help him make a living, Disney's Geppetto wants his puppet to give him companionship and love, and Spielberg's mecha, David, is created specifically and uniquely in order to love his human parents unconditionally. Geppetto is a craftsman, allied to the tradition of poeisis or creativity to which artists belong, while the mecha's creator, Dr. Hobby, is a scientist (although a "poetic" one who wants to make a robot who can "chase down his dreams"). Nonetheless, they are, artists or scientists, all figures of the male creator who appropriates the procreativity of the maternal realm as they singlehandedly "give birth to" their "sons," effectively excluding women from their worlds except in highly idealized and symbolic, rather than active, roles.

	Discussion
	Consider Rebecca West's proposition that in Spielberg's A.I., Collodi's Pinocchio and Disney's Pinocchio male figures desire the ability to procreate. In these narratives, discuss the role of woman as mother figure. {Dis: How do the reactions of the creations to their creators differ?}

In A.I., when an associate of the apparently benign designer of mechas, Professor Hobby (a Geppetto stand-in), makes what critic J. Hoberman calls "an obscure moral objection" to Hobby's creation of "a robot child with a love that will never end," Hobby's reply is "Didn't God create Adam to love him?" Hoberman comments, "Yes, of course, and look what happened to him" (p. 17). In fact, the mecha David is also expelled from Eden, and he futilely looks for the fictional character Blue Fairy to make him a "real boy" so that his mother will want him back. Eden regained is an impossible goal, however, and the most David can have is one perfect day with a reconstituted simulacrum of his mother.

Conclusion
In my reading of Collodi's tale and its many "heirs" in subsequent fictional and filmic works, I have sought to bring out elements that make of the story of Pinocchio much more than a simplistic lesson in the importance of obedience and conformity. The ever valid question of how and to what end human beings are created and shaped is rendered even more complex by a consideration of the role of the feminine symbolic as it complicates what is and remains in most cultures and most eras a fundamentally patriarchal view of creation.

Sergio Strizzi

Nicoletta Braschi in Roberto Benigni's Pinocchio.

I believe that it is not insignificant that the most anodyne reworkings of Pinocchio elide the complex figure of the Blue Fairy, while the more thought-provoking uses of the tale (as seen in Manganelli's work, or Spielberg's film) highlight the female principle in a worldview that is nonetheless still fundamentally patriarchal, be it the nineteenth-century Italy of Collodi or the futuristic West of Spielberg (and of Kubrick, of course). Human creativity, whether an art, a craft, or a technology, can yield astounding results, but the power to bring into being real or simulated versions of ourselves is fraught with dangers, not the least of which is the illusion of total control over the creatures we make. The anomalous, the abject, or the sheer excess of individual desire--all historically associated with the feminine sphere--cannot be tamed or repressed merely by admonishments to conform to the Law of the Father, to be "good little boys." So, happily, Pinocchio goes on fleeing his destiny as a "good boy like all the others" until, sadly, that destiny catches up with him. Collodi enlisted the aid of the feminine in the taming of the puppet, but it is worth remembering that, at the end of the tale, the Blue Fairy only appears in a dream to Pinocchio, as the perfect mother he would wish her to be. What or who in fact she may truly be or truly desire is known only to her.