The Imagination of Disaster by Susan Sontag (1965), When the Movies Pictured A.I., They Imagined the Wrong Disaster By A.O. Scott (2023)

“Ours is indeed an age of extremity. For we live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters. For one job that fantasy can do is to lift us out of the unbearably humdrum and to distract us from terrors, real or anticipated—by an escape into exotic dangerous situations which have last-minute happy endings. But another one of the things that fantasy can do is to normalize what is psychologically unbearable, thereby inuring us to it. In the one case, fantasy beautifies the world. In the other, it neutralizes it. The fantasy to be discovered in science fiction films does both jobs. These films reflect world-wide anxieties, and they serve to allay them. They inculcate a strange apathy concerning the processes of radiation, contamination, and destruction that I for one find haunting and depressing. The naïve level of the films neatly tempers the sense of otherness, of alien-ness, with the grossly familiar. In particular, the dialogue of most science fiction films, which is generally of a monumental but often touching banality, makes them wonderfully, unintentionally funny. Lines like: ‘Come quickly, there’s a monster in my bathtub’; ‘We must do something about this’; ‘Wait, Professor. There’s someone on the telephone’; ‘But that’s incredible’; and the old American stand-by (accompanied by brow-wiping), ‘I hope it works!’—are hilarious in the context of picturesque and deafening holocaust. Yet the films also contain something which is painful and in deadly earnest. Science fiction films are one of the most accomplished of the popular art forms, and can give a great deal of pleasure to sophisticated film addicts. Part of the pleasure, indeed, comes from the sense in which these movies are in complicity with the abhorrent. …”
Commentary
NY Times: When the Movies Pictured A.I., They Imagined the Wrong Disaster By A.O. Scott (2023)

HAL 9000, the malevolent computer in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968), is terrifying precisely because he is so ordinary.