We humans might prevail after all.
That’s the takeaway from two buzzy performances I watched this month: Netflix’s four-part series “Adolescence” and “The Picture of Dorian Gray” on Broadway. That both take social media to task for narcissism, misogyny and distortion, and that both are technological masterpieces, is no coincidence. In fact, they offer a playbook for how ’Humans vs. Robots’ could turn out in favor of the former. Perhaps the only right reaction to the explosion of AI and its upheaval of labor and creativity is to leverage the emotion and empathy that is uniquely human.
The background
Netflix’s “Adolescence” focuses on a 13-year-old British boy accused of stabbing his female classmate to death. Each episode focuses on a different aspect of the case seeking to ascertain not the whodunnit as much as the why: the role of his school, social media and bullying, as well as his family.
“The Picture of Dorian Gray” is based on playwright Oscar Wilde’s famous work and reinterpreted as a one-woman show starring Sarah Snook. Snook, known for her depiction of Shiv Roy in “Succession,” also performed this in London’s West End.
Why they’re superhuman feats
Besides the gripping storyline that’s a must-watch for every parent of a child with a cellphone, each “Adolescence” episode is shot in one take, beginning to end. It’s a technique that requires meticulous planning and rehearsing. The third episode, focused on a session between a child psychologist and the suspect, took 11 takes to get right. To capture a seconds-long emotional transition, the fourth episode films the mother hanging her coat, going up the stairs, then the camera hurls upward to capture her physical–and emotional–movement from weariness and grief to resolve.
Meanwhile, Snook plays 26 characters in the two-hour “Dorian Gray” play, and often interacts with suspended video displays of herself onstage. The camera crew here are also heroes, not only following her around but enabling her constant transformation with costumes, wigs, and remarkable sideburns that deserve their own Tony. It is a flawless and jaw-dropping performance on Snook’s part, which was admittedly exhausting. In an interview with 60 Minutes, she explains why doing this was necessary after “Succession,” where she won two Golden Globes and an Emmy: “You come off some of the best writing in the world. What do you do next? Something has to be out there to challenge you.”
Tech matters
The debate over the use of generative artificial intelligence often revolves around tech, tools, time saved and sheer ease as a substitute for human labor. Not so fast. What these works do is challenge that simplistic view–emblematic of our revolving relationship, and necessary partnership, with technology. In “Adolescence,” for example, a drone picks up the camera and moves from school dismissal and children glued to their phones to an aerial street chase leading to the scene of the crime, a metaphor for the bigger, life-and-death picture. Meanwhile, one of the most delightful parts of “Dorian Gray” is Snook’s hosting of a dinner party with a half-dozen characters she plays, the interplay of self and technology and identity is the point (and hilarious).
Humans, of course, need each other
For all the focus on celebrity, there’s also a subtle shift and sharing in both these endeavors of who gets to be the hero. Many of the Netflix behind-the-scenes videos of how “Adolescence” was shot are going viral; someone else was driving the van, the hot chocolate stuck to the floor, the hardware store and police station were constructed on set! And the camera operators in “The Picture of Dorian Gray” deserve the standing ovation as much as Snook. “It’s a ballet,” says Stephen Graham, who created, co-wrote and executive produced “Adolescence” and plays the suspect’s father, Eddie Miller. “The crews that we work with, they’re the people that make us look great.” He also likened the effort to how “a swan glides gracefully across water, but its legs are flapping like mad.”
Again, it’s not a coincidence that in this moment, we might see invisible labor become visible and getting the humans powering such possibility their due.
What this all means
Does technology, and specifically AI, make our lives easier? Yes.
Our response, though, cannot be one defined by feeling threatened as much as an elevation of what it means to be human, and the reality of what robots will never be able to do. This was foreshadowed astutely in Ayad Akhtar’s brilliant “McNeal” last year in which AI can write a novel about pretty much anything–but somehow chokes on scenes about death. Pity, though, since the fear of dying, human angst and existential dread drive so much of the greatest art, and life’s questions itself. In other words, it’s a pretty essential oversight, enabling the creators among us to work another day.
As Wilde himself said of his timeless creation of Dorian Gray, it was “an idea that is as old as the history of literature but to which I have given a new form.”
Bring it on.
