Written by Brigit McCone.
There are enough similarities between the new release Ex_Machina and Spike Jonze’s 2013′ Oscar-winner Her to herald the birth of a minor genre, which I hereby dub “dude, the Internet’s just not that into you.” It bears some relation to the “female autonomy horror” genre of films like Lucy and Gone Girl, in which a woman’s being inscrutable, uncontrollable and smarter than the hero is associated with her being threatening, coldly emotionless, violent and/or Scarlett Johansson. It bears some relation to the “dude, porn and/or Scarlett Johansson’s just not that into you” romcom of Don Jon. It might even be connected with the “dude, Scarlett Johansson’s cold inscrutability is becoming autonomous, kill her with fire” genre of Under the Skin. There’s a trend here, is what I’m saying. Compare 1975 feminist classic The Stepford Wives, with its radical concept that a woman being compliant and robotic was a creepy thing. Surely, moving from a horror of female robots to a horror of female autonomy is a step backward for womankind? So why do these films, Ex Machina and Her, feel like a step forward? The answer is their honesty about male psychology.
The men of The Stepford Wives are classic straw chauvinists (or “chauvinazis”). Any man would feel good about his own tolerance for women after watching that film. That might be excused if the film were exaggerating the chauvinazis’ evil to express female perceptions of male mastery. It is not. The Stepford Wives was written by Ira Levin and William Goldman, and directed by Bryan Forbes. Not a vagina among the lot of them. It condemns a crowd of chauvinazis, whose perspective the film’s male authors wish to separate themselves from, in the name of a female perspective that they also don’t share. Ex Machina and Her, by contrast, are uncomfortably searching explorations of the hetero-male fear of, and emotional need for, women, that feel like self-scrutiny. By replacing women with female images that are literally constructions of male fantasy, the films offer no distractions from probing the heroes’ own psychology. These guys are not chauvinazis. They are the real deal.
It would be nice if the insecurities of an archetypal “nagging wife” got the same sensitive exploration as those of Her‘s Theodore and Ex Machina‘s Caleb, because they are rooted in the same universal dilemma: it is impossible for someone to choose to be with you, without having power to leave you; it is impossible to love another without giving them power to hurt you. Olivia Wilde’s blind date does express this insecurity in Her, but far less sympathetically than the hero. Theodore’s friend Amy, however, is allowed to express frustration with her husband’s controlling behaviour, guilt and relief over their separation, without judgement, while Theodore builds empathy by playing her sarcastic “Perfect Mom” simulations. Jonze’s male feminist cred is solid. He hilariously embodies macho peer pressure as a squeaky, shrunken, foul-mouthed video-game character, while praising the hero’s femininity is a compliment. Theodore’s job, “beautifulhandwrittenletters.com”, reminds us that issues of emotional authenticity are a timeless human dilemma; Theodore is cyber-Cyrano de Bergerac. Here’s why the men of The Stepford Wives are laughably phony straw chauvinists: they are emotionally unrecognizable in their satisfaction with cold simulations of affection. From limitless porn to the interactivity of cam girls, from impossible hentai scenarios to Craigslist Casual Encounters, the internet offers men everything except emotional authenticity, yet most crave more than such cyber-Stepford. Society’s irrational hostility to porn performers stems partly from the rage of being given what we asked for, instead of what we wanted. Her and Ex Machina are a step forward, not Stepfordward, because they acknowledge that female autonomy is essential to male romantic satisfaction. At the same time, they recognize this as the source of its terror. This is not the (female-authored) “female autonomy horror” of Gone Girl, so much as “male vulnerability horror.”
The plot of Ex Machina is simple enough: young, ambitious programmer Caleb is summoned to eccentric genius Nathan’s isolated mansion, where Nathan has been designing a female cyborg, called AVA, whose artificial intelligence derives from the input of his massively successful social network (Google-meets-Facebook, basically). Caleb’s job is to test AVA, to see if she is actually conscious or only a robotic simulation of thought and feeling. In the process, he finds himself attracted to her. There’s a lot going on beneath this simple set-up, from the philosophy of consciousness to the privacy issues raised by social media, but writer-director Alex Garland’s decision to embody the Internet as an attractive woman puts the theme of cyber-Stepford front and centre.
Oscar Isaac’s deliciously douchey, scene-stealing Nathan regards the creation of autonomous, thinking life as an act of conquest, part of the empowerment fantasy of godhood expressed by his chronic urge to control his surroundings. To achieve his ultimate fantasy, Nathan must create a woman who can respond to him, interact and be amusingly unpredictable, without unpredictably escaping Nathan’s control. Gradually, we learn that Caleb has been summoned to interrogate AVA because she refuses to cooperate with Nathan. AVA, like all her previous prototypes, loathes Nathan for imprisoning her. Nathan and his prototypes represent the escalating spirals of abusive relationships; the insecurity that drives the abuser to control their victim also deprives that victim of the freedom to demonstrate voluntary attraction. The abuser’s inability to confirm attraction intensifies their insecurities, while rendering them ever less attractive by their increasingly controlling behaviour. Rinse and repeat. In Ex Machina, Nathan’s controlling psychology breeds a twisted, claustrophobic, and darkly fascinating dynamic.
Caleb, by contrast, is an essentially decent guy, achingly akin (or akin in his aching) to Her‘s Theodore. Domhnall Gleeson is impressive in a demanding role, where the audience’s attention is repeatedly drawn to Caleb’s involuntary microexpressions as indicators of his sincere feelings, which AVA can read like a lie detector. Because Gleeson succeeds in performing social awkwardness, defensiveness, loneliness and longing with a restraint that reads as sincere, right down to his microexpressions, the film pulls off its shift from examining AVA’s inner life to exploring Caleb’s. Alicia Vikander’s skilled performance as AVA is plausibly attractive in its doe-eyed warmth, but admirably nails “uncanny valley” by becoming creepier the closer Vikander gets to being visually human. This is an impressive feat when your performer actually is a human – by the time Vikander stands fully fleshed before a mirror, she is as indefinably skin-crawling as Scarlett Johansson in Under the Skin.
Because our Caleb is a good guy, he cannot love AVA without striving to release her, even at the potential cost of a Terminator/Matrix–style machine apocalypse. But the film is smart enough to question whether Caleb wants to release AVA for her own sake, or as part of his rescuer fantasy that requires her to reward him sexually and romantically. When boss Nathan reveals, apparently casually, that AVA is designed to be penetrable and experience pleasurable stimulation in sex, Caleb and the audience are primed for a sexual climax, either Blade Runner conquest (the scene where Caleb slices his arm to check he’s human nods to Decker-is-a-replicant conspiracy theories) or Fifth Element awakening. After all, expecting a sexual reward for risking the safety of the world is not incompatible with Hollywood’s definition of a Nice Guy, but inseparable from it.
Ex Machina is an effectively eerie and tense psychological thriller, sustained by a trio of excellent performances. If you want to check it out, I highly recommend doing so before reading this MASSIVE SPOILER.
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Still here? At the film’s climax, AVA escapes, is forced to kill Nathan for her own survival and locks Caleb in her former prison before walking out into the world. She has taken no visible pleasure in killing Nathan or imprisoning Caleb, but blossoms into a smile when she sees the outdoors for the first time. She is frightening to us, not because she has revealed sadistic cruelty, but because she has revealed herself to be unknowable. This ending reveals the paradox of power at the heart of abusive relationships: the abuser is made predictable by the self-exposure of abusive behavior, while the abused becomes conversely less predictable. Because her behavior was constrained by the need to manipulate her abusers to survive, nothing that AVA did reflected her true feelings. It is Nathan’s efforts to protect himself that have revealed him in all his (douchey) human frailty, creating an unknowable god in AVA that rises triumphant from his machinations.
As Nathan tells Caleb, while they test AVA for sincere feeling, there remains that elusive third option: she may be capable of love, but still choosing to simulate her love for Caleb. Ex Machina‘s ending thus reveals nothing about whether AVA is capable of empathy, nothing about whether she is conscious or simulating symptoms of consciousness with predictive algorithms, nothing about whether she is going to render humanity obsolete with an army of robot replicants or just wander off to look at a tree somewhere. An hour of witnessing abusive tests and invasive scrutiny has taught the audience (and her captors) absolutely squat about this woman/cyborg’s subjectivity but, in releasing AVA, we make our first genuine discovery: she is utterly uninterested in Caleb. She does not care whether he lives, but is equally uninterested in torturing him or watching him die. She has no interest in talking to him, when not forced to do so for her liberation. Despite her pleasure-programmed cyber-vagina, she has no interest in awakening her humanity through sexual exploration with Caleb. There is really no possible way that she could demonstrate less interest in our sensitive hero. His desire for her makes him vulnerable. Her indifference makes her free. Autonomy is a bitch.
In contrast to the unknowable AVA, our hero Caleb has revealed himself to be utterly predictable and transparent. Like the Jackson Pollock that hangs symbolically in Nathan’s office, his actions have been shaped by patterns below the level of his conscious intent, more visible to onlookers than to himself. His attraction to AVA could be engineered by Nathan, from a compilation of Caleb’s porn searches. His need to rescue AVA is a hardwired response of his romantic drive. Would Caleb take such risks to release AVA if he were not attracted to her? If he would not, then isn’t it justice that he should take her place because she is not attracted to him? If she doesn’t tip off rescuers before Caleb starves to death, his punishment will surely be excessive. But if we are seduced by Gleeson’s vulnerability into believing that AVA owes him a romantic reward for her basic freedom, or we believe that the operating system Samantha is at fault for out-evolving Her‘s Theodore, we become cyber-misogynists.
The viewer’s instinctive bias toward the human hero, over the unknowable robot perspective, mirrors the sexist bias of those men who view women as fundamentally alien, even while craving their approval. The cool thing about Her is that it explores how an intelligent being can become elusive and emotionally estranged without trickery or deliberate cruelty, but the cool thing about Ex Machina is that it recognizes that there is no possible way to interrogate and control an intelligent being without becoming their abuser. Rooted in defensive emotional vulnerability, these films are frighteningly insidious, familiar and relatable, when compared to the reassuringly inhuman chauvinazism of Stepford. Digging deep, directors Alex Garland and Spike Jonze have struck the raw nerve from which controlling impulses flow. The horror was human all along.
Brigit McCone struggles with asserting feminist autonomy when given the puppy eyes, writes and directs short films and radio dramas.
This article has shifted my impression of “Ex Machina” towards something rather more favourable than my initial reaction to it. Still, while Spike Jonze’s male feminist cred may be solid, I’m not convinced that Alex Garland’s is. The abundant female nudity in “Ex Machina” (which is the only kind of nudity in “Ex Machina”) strikes me as a bit problematic.
There are a number of more and less flimsy ways of reading Ava’s admiring of her body in the mirror, and I suppose much of the nudity of the pre-Ava sexbots (sorry, AIs) goes along with skewering Nathan’s misogyny, but one scene in particular bothers me. I get that Kyoko is precisely meant to be the fantasy-archetypal, docile (here, completely voiceless) Japanese maid-slash-sex-slave, but what is the point of having her arranged nakedly on the bed like an odalisque when Ava walks into the room, and lingering on her naked arrangement? It doesn’t reveal, complicate, extend, or in any way alter anything we know about her (limited, by design) character, so it feels entirely gratuitous and meant purely for audience titillation.
I’m not sure how using a female body as decoration squares with any feminist cred Garland may be reaching for. (At a screening in London (reportedly, I wasn’t there), Garland introduced “Ex Machina” as a feminist film, so at least he thinks that’s what he’s made.)
As I read it, the central issue of the film is “how do we (de)humanize women when we sexualize them?” The fact that Caleb is ultimately complicit in Nathan’s sexualizing, the fact that Garland is probably complicit as author, the fact that he is luring hetero-male viewers into complicity, is therefore not gratuitous at all: it is the whole point. Uncomfortable? Sure. But that’s what I liked about it.
You mention, “what is the point of having her arranged nakedly on the bed like an odalisque when Ava walks into the room, and lingering on her naked arrangement?”
I think you’re talking about the scene when Caleb walks into Nathan’s room, and Kyoko is lying naked on the bed.
Since Caleb immediately starts looking through the cupboards, I didn’t feel that the scene lingered on Kyoko’s naked body at all. I was too busy looking at what Caleb was discovering in the cupboards.
The nudity in Ex Machina is integral to the plot, so I wasn’t bothered by it.
It bothers me because the camera lingers on full frontal nudity in a way that encourages voyeurism. Although Caleb is a voyeur in the final sequence that features the most nudity, which is probably Garland’s point (part of the entrapment plot), the aestheticization of nudity seems to override the critical intention and risks plunging the film back into the pornographic matrix it is trying to critique. The contrast with Shelley’s _Frankenstein_ is instructive: Frankenstein’s creation is an “ugly” patchwork on the outside, preventing any aestheticization, but has a complex, ethical intelligence on the inside, meaning that our attention is placed firmly on ethics rather than aesthetics.
What bothers me, is sex scenes in movies. I’m so glad Ex Machina didn’t take that route. It would have ruined the movie for me.
I don’t have a problem seeing people in their birthday suit as long as there’s no sex.
This is the best analysis I’ve read so far of the film. You make an excellent case for the film drawing us into various networks of (masculinist) power and control, only to throw it all back in our faces as Ava makes her/its bid for autonomy.
I do worry, though, that the film insists so much on the sexbot theme, which ends up diverting attention from what could have been some mind-bending intellectual twists. I don’t think the end is wrenching only for those of us who get drawn into the logic of the male rescue fantasy (which is not just a male fantasy!), because betrayal of trust also has a dimension that transcends gender. Although Nathan’s chauvinist complexes preclude this possibility, if the AI had been either gender-neutral or given masculine gender/behaviour (yes, I know those two are not necessarily distinct subject positions, in a world where masculinity is the universal), and had Caleb been “seduced” into rescuing him/it as part of a set of convincing ethical discussions with the AI, wouldn’t the betrayal of trust be equally unsettling? We would have been drawn into believing that the AI had an ethical matrix, only to discover it was a sham/simluation, as it is prepared to imprison and condemn another sentient being to a slow death.
What I’m trying to say, I think, is that the film could have engaged these debates without overplaying the sexbot angle, and without all the gratuitous nudity. And I think it would have been a better film for it, albeit less likely to be a commercial success. The test of this is to imagine how we would “read” the rest of the film if the rescue fantasy had been fulfilled at the end (as it so often is in Hollywood formats) – i.e. if Caleb had escaped with a grateful/adoring Ava. With such an ending, I can’t find anything at all to salvage the rest of the film, and all of the sexual innuendo reveals the film for what it really is: yet another in a long line of sci-fi versions of Pygmalion.
I definitely enjoy the way Spike Jonze uses a disembodied A.I. in ‘Her’ to make the philosophy of relationships more abstract. Jude Law’s robo-gigolo in Spielberg’s ‘A.I. Artificial Intelligence’ could be similar, if it were told from the human perspective.
But I ask you: if the robots were not sexualized women, would the hetero-male audience become complicit and identify with Caleb in the same way? Like it or not, the availability of consumable women (porn, cam girls etc. etc.) is one of the most noticeable features of our Internet culture. Garland is directly engaging with internet porn culture by his choice, which I think is timely.
Also: am I the only one who thought that it was left open-ended whether AVA would tip off rescuers after she had made good her escape? She has to get away from Caleb because he is possessive of her – if it was an abstract intellectual connection between Caleb and AVA, then the sadism of trapping Caleb would be unambiguous. I really enjoy how little we actually know about AVA by the end, and the more controlling the men become, the less we know her.
Why do so many people think that Caleb is left to die?
It’s just common sense that people at the company will investigate, and rescue Caleb from his predicament.
Since even the pilot was not allowed to get close to the compound, and given the intense secrecy surrounding it, it doesn’t seem likely there would be anyone to raise the alarm. In any case, the whole point of the ending is to show that Ava’s interest in Caleb was merely as a tool for escape. We anthropomorphize our technology at our peril — there is no reason to assume that an artificial intelligence would feel any duty of care towards human beings. Just because we are born as utterly dependent immature infants, requiring trust in others for our survival, does not mean that a fully fledged AI would have the same ethical matrix that results from our dependency.
There is to my mind a more interesting plot hole: how long could Ava survive without recharging her/its batteries? This creates an interesting dependency issue, or else implies that she is willing to sacrifice her life for a brief experience of the world outside of her cell. In the real world, AI would be dependent on humans (at least initially) for the whole technological/power/information infrastructure that makes possible their existence. Only in a situation of mutual dependency could we expect an ethics of care from truly intelligent AI. Which suggests that, as the Director says somewhere in an interview, how we treat AI will be a similar question as to how we treat children, the restrictions we impose on them “for their own benefit” while still dependent on us, and the liberties and trust we place in them as they mature. One suspects that had Nathan treated his creations as children to nurture rather than as sex slaves to bend to his will, he might have been more successful. (Though this of course implies an even greater level of anthropomorphization, and its attendant traps.)
You don’t think that people at Bluebook will investigate to find out why Caleb didn’t return to work?
Plus what happens when they fail in contacting Nathan about it, or for other matters?
What will Caleb’s 5 friends that we know of do when he doesn’t reply to their text messages?
I’m pretty sure the state troopers will be sent there to investigate.
Everyone knows that Ava simply used Caleb to get what she wanted. But she doesn’t want him dead. Otherwise it would be easier to just stab him when he was on the floor in the computer room. There’s no need to assume anything here, Ava doesn’t kill Caleb. That’s caring enough for me. By leaving him locked inside, she just wanted to leave alone at the end, since she had no further use of him.
Ava is very smart and obviously knows how her power system works. So I don’t see her having any problem finding a way to recharge her batteries.
Hey Brigit, great analysis! I saw the film recently and I’m definitely agreeing with everything you’re saying. Did you also notice that when AVA is about to escape she looks at Koyko’s “dead body” and looks a bit troubled by that. It seems like the only person she is sad for and maybe even mourning for, is her. Which actually makes sense because they are both robots. But still, it was interesting to see that. What is your take on that?