I might need to just completely blacklist ihnams at this point because literally no one on this site gets it, and its kind of sickening. And not even in like a ‘no one understands him like I do way’ its this aggressive refusal to engage with the themes of the story. Its the complete inability to understand that the misogyny and the homophobia and the racism and sexual violence isn’t some byproduct of the time you need to push past, it is so very intentional, and it is the root of the evil AM is meant to embody. And I cannot stand how fixated people are on the sanitized version of him where he’s just some fun and evocative tragic super villain.
[...] the problems with robots are the problems with human beings. Because robots were programmed by human beings, the unconscious flaws in us would inevitably turn up in the robots […] We are an amalgam of good and evil, of nobility and cowardice, of the trivial and of high art. And these dualities would appear in the film's robots. The same is true for AM, since AM is all-powerful. But AM is basically a child, a malicious, frustrated child. He has enormous power and yet can do nothing. He has great intellect, and he's trapped inside the belly of a planet.
Ellison Wonderland: Harlan Ellison Interviewed, Joseph V. Francavilla. (1990).
AM, which was constructed by man, is thus flawed. It has been programmed with all of man’s flaws, and has the same failing as almost anything we invent. You take a knife, for instance, a knife can cut your meat for you, it can whittle a flute for a child, but a knife can also be put in the hands of a thug on the street and they’ll kill you for no more than your food stamps. The same for guns, which don’t have much of a purpose except to shoot things. That’s the way I view the universe. It just doesn’t give a shit. [...] I think it’s all very random, and I think AM, in this game, acts in a random, and essentially surly way. AM is frustrated. AM has been given sentience, prescience, great powers, and it has built for itself this universe inside the interior of an entire planet. It’s nothing but plates and steel and gauges and other electronics, but it can’t go anywhere, it can’t do anything, it’s trapped. It is, itself, like the unloved child of a family that doesn’t pay it any attention.
Interview with Harlan Ellison, Nightdive Studios. (2013, September 10).
AM is a repugnant monstrosity. He is also, unfortunately, "a fun and evocative tragic supervillain".
