On Kogonada, Automation, and Attention
And why "After Yang" is a great movie about AI
I’ve been thinking a lot about the film After Yang (2021), written and directed by Kogonada. Kogonada, for those who don’t know him, is also the writer and director of one of my favorite movies, Columbus (2017), and I think he’s one of our generation’s greatest filmmakers. I’ve never seen anyone shoot images as beautifully as he does and I like that his work is the opposite of didactic. The characters he writes behave like people rather than caricatures of them, and they feel as real as those you might run into on the street or the Columbus, Indiana library.
I’ve been thinking about After Yang because I think Kogonada wrote one of the most sophisticated films yet about robots and consciousness and it flew under the radar because it was too subtle for exposition-hungry western audiences. He tells a story about the common human fear that robots will replace us through the real-world power relations of race, domestic labor, and the siren song of convenience. No character in After Yang is bad: they’re all just self-doubting, unsure of themselves, and in their uncertainty, willing to let qualified machines do human work for them. This goes well until one of those machines breaks and they realize it’s been raising their daughter for them.
After Yang is set in an unspecified peaceful future in which interracial couple Jake (Colin Firth) and Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith) live with a human-looking cyborg named Yang (Justin H. Min), who they bought prior to the film’s start to teach their adopted daughter Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) about her Chinese heritage. Yang fulfills his role well. He comes pre-loaded with the ability to speak Mandarin, facts about China, and a gentle and sensitive personality that makes him well-suited to childcare. Jake and Kyra successfully outsource the task of connecting their daughter to her culture to a machine, and their lives hum along smoothly until Yang breaks and dies early in the film, prompting Jake to first try to fix and then understand him.
Midway through the film, Jake discovers that Yang’s creators outfitted him with a secret, illegal device that allowed him to record a few seconds each day and store it in a memory bank. Kogonada cleverly allays the sinophobic trope that a Chinese memory bank is “spyware” by having a museum curator explain to Jake that “the labs were trying to figure out what technos (robots) considered memorable.” Jake goes into Yang’s memory bank and finds snapshots of indescribable beauty. Among many other things, Yang recorded a mother holding a baby, the light and shadow a window casts on a wall in winter, spiderwebs strung between thin branches, a frog jumping over autumn leaves, loose tea leaves swirling in a glass decanter, and lots of shots of Mika, who he loved very deeply. Our consciousness, Kogonada suggests, is little more than what we choose to pay attention to. By surrendering the will to pay attention, we also surrender what makes us human.
Kogonada isn’t the first to use automation as a narrative foil to humanity, nor to question what it means for labor. Daniel Mendelsohn writes that in Book 18 of The Iliad, Achilles’s mother Thetis visits the Greek blacksmith god Hephaestus in his workshop and discovers him surrounded by automata, or automatic machines. They range from devices that open the doors of Olympus to robot serving women, “fashioned completely of gold in the image of living maidens” with “the faculty of thought and speech and strength.” In Book One of Aristotle’s Politics, the philosopher imagines a world in which “every tool could perform its own work when ordered to do or in anticipation of the need” before using the non-existence of those tools to justify slavery. In 1920, the Czech writer Karel Čapek coined the word “robot” in a play called R.U.R. about a race of cyborgs created to replace human labor. He called his cyborgs “roboti,” derived from the Czech word for servitude, which is itself derived from the word “rab,” which means “slave.” For as long as people have imagined robots, we’ve imagined making them work for us. Kogonada asks “Could a robot be more human than us if it paid attention to its work while we didn’t?”
I think this collective fear has grown since automation reshaped human life in the 1950s. In Blade Runner (1982), the Voight-Kampff test created to distinguish between humans and their identical “replicants” is less about the fear that computers could become as smart as people than that people could become so algorithmically predictable that they’d be indistinguishable from machines. This is also reflected in contemporary paranoia about people being “bots” or “NPCs.” As ChatGPT gets better at approximating certain registers of human speech, I’ve seen people get afraid of the idea that we can be manipulated by anyone or thing that can pluck the strings of our unconscious. I don’t think this is true, but the only way to counter it is to remember, per Daisy Alioto, that “attention is what makes us human,” and to practice consciously paying attention in spite of capitalist technology created to shatter our ability to do so.
Yang, in After Yang, is a laborer who crafts an identity out of the few seconds he’s allowed to pay attention per day. Jake swims in an ocean of time and still suffers from ennui. He’s a mirror to the privileged west, enjoying global superprofits and the time they buy him while being unable to appreciate them. After Yang reminds me that attention is most valuable when you choose to direct it somewhere. I can carve out six to eight hours a week to write this blog and it’s a blessing. That time comes from somewhere else, though. Choosing to look at one thing precludes seeing others.
Tāmaki (Auckland) Events
They’re performing Bernard Shaw’s play Saint Joan at Q Theatre til July 5. I saw it last week and it was very, very good. You can buy tickets here if you’re interested.
Recommended Reading
I liked this essay by Dylan Saba on Trump’s bombing of Iran. Dylan, along with Jake Romm, Ayesha Siddiqi, and my friend Emmy Rākete, are some of the only writers I trust to be brave enough to tell hard truths about American imperialism and what needs to be done about it. They often do so at personal risk and I admire them for it.
I liked this piece by Daisy Alioto in Prune about how artist Jonathan Adler’s non-political work is boring compared to his more political contemporary Howard Kottler’s.
I liked this essay by Mari Cohen about the history of “hate crime laws” and how they won’t help us. Expecting settler-states to enforce antidiscrimination laws is as stupid as expecting the Ku Klux Klan to enforce affirmative action ones, and I need more people to realize that so we can get to what is to be done.