Ira Levin – Bitch Flicks

‘Ex Machina’ and ‘Her’: Dude, the Internet’s Just Not That Into You

‘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.

A Step Forwards Or Stepfordwards? — A Step Forward Or Stepfordward?

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.

Indie Average Joe and the Erection of Doom

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.

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.

Female autonomy: it's like kicking a puppy — Female autonomy: it’s like kicking a puppy

Brigit McCone struggles with asserting feminist autonomy when given the puppy eyes, writes and directs short films and radio dramas.

“Post-Feminist” ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ is a Difficult Labor

Though the core idea of story–a young woman’s fear and uncertainty of what is happening to her body during pregnancy–is timeless, the execution of the remake is fairly dated. In the original, Rosemary is a naive housewife, yet she still manages to be tougher and emerges a more fully realized character than the remake’s Rosemary who stops struggling and pretty much does what she’s told once she becomes pregnant.

On one hand, the rational behind NBC’s two-night miniseries of Rosemary’s Baby is clear. Take a best-selling event novel, the type everyone was reading and talking about at dinner parties in 1967, and make it into event television. Along with the network’s recent live production of The Sound of Music and upcoming live musicals and limited series on the other networks, it’s an attempt to bring audience back to live TV viewing, commercials and all.

But Rosemary’s Baby, based on Roman Polanski’s 1968 film, itself based on the novel by Ira Levin (also author of The Stepford Wives), is a strange choice for a miniseries. There aren’t a lot of plot points in the story; basically young couple Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse move in next door to an older couple who quickly grow fond of them; after a night of dark hallucinations she can barely remember, Rosemary becomes pregnant, and goes through a difficult pregnancy where she loses weight and craves raw meat and awakens after giving birth to discover the baby is the antichrist and that earlier she was raped by the devil.

As a result, the story is stretched thin over a four-hour runtime and many new and ultimately pointless plots are added in, along with increased gore and violence in comparison to the original film. Perhaps the choice of story was influenced by the recent popularity of horror TV programs, like American Horror Story and Hannibal.

The miniseries also carries the baggage of its association with Polanski, an old friend of the miniseries’ director Agnieszka Holland. Though the original film is commonly accepted as a masterpiece, many critics, Hollywood players, and viewers have spoken on their desire to boycott his work (through just as many have spoken out in his support) due to his sexual abuse of a child. Choosing Rosemary’s Baby out of all the classic films available to remake suggests at least a tacit approval of Polanski and Holland had even planned to give him a cameo role, though scheduling didn’t work out.

Rosemary is told her pregnancy is making her look like a zombie

In interviews, Holland has mentioned her desire to portray Rosemary’s Baby from a “post-feminist” standpoint and to make the character stronger and more active. Postnatal and prenatal depression are important to her adaptation, where horror is derived from the nature of pregnancy where, as she says, Rosemary is “dependent on the people who decide, instead of her, what to do with her body.”

To modernize the story, 2014’s Rosemary (Zoe Saldana) is a former ballet dancer used to be being the primary breadwinner, while her husband Guy (Patrick J. Adams) struggles to write a novel. After a devastating miscarriage, the couple leaves New York for Paris, where Guy will take a one-year teaching job at the Sorbonne and attempt to support her while she recovers from the trauma.

Though the core idea of story–a young woman’s fear and uncertainty of what is happening to her body during pregnancy–is timeless, the execution of the remake is fairly dated. In the original, Rosemary, played by Mia Farrow, is a naive housewife who spends her days decorating her apartment and buoying her husband’s acting ambitions, yet she still manages to be tougher and emerges a more fully realized character than the remake’s Rosemary who stops struggling and pretty much does what she’s told once she becomes pregnant. The casting of action star Saldana as Rosemary suggests the character is meant to be strong, independent women who takes control of her own life.

And at first, she appears to be. In part one, there’s even an action sequence where Rosemary chases a man who stole her purse and gets called brave by a cop. For a while, she acts as an amateur detective, attempting to investigate the disappearance of the couple who lived in her apartment previously, who appear to have met a tragic end; however, throughout part two, which chronicles her pregnancy, she floats around, quiet and weak, allowing her husband, neighbors and doctors to tell her how to take care of herself, ceding her investigation to a police detective and a friend.

In the original, the true star of the story is Rosemary’s increasing paranoia and the suspense and darkness that manage to permeate the film despite most of action taking place indoors in brightly lit rooms. The miniseries could have given Rosemary more agency without changing her actions too greatly if it brought viewers deeper into her mind and dreams; despite the title and her near constant presence onscreen, for most of the second half, it’s difficult to intuit what Rosemary is thinking.

Rosemary’s investigation falls away after she becomes pregnant

With the internet as a resource for medical information, it would be very easy for 2014’s Rosemary to research the herbs in a drink she’s given and the host of prenatal conditions her doctor claims are perfectly normal. Though doctors in both versions tell her not to read pregnancy books or ask her friends about their experiences, it’s difficult to believe a modern-day woman would agree to stay so ignorant about her own body, accept chastisement for daring to question her doctor’s medical advice and refuse to consult friends, mommy blogs or even WebMD on her condition. It’s believable enough in the 60s, an era when men were expected to know more about women’s bodies than they did. It recalls a conversation in an episode of Masters of Sex, set around the same time, where a group of women agreed that they found the very idea of a female gynecologist creepy. The addition of an earlier to miscarriage to the plot appears to be an attempt to take this into account, suggesting Rosemary put up with the pain because she is determined to have a heathy baby this time and do everything her doctor tells her that maybe she didn’t do last time.

The choice of Paris as a setting appeals to the city’s place in the North American cultural imagination as the seat of old world sophistication and mystery. The move may also be an attempt to isolate the characters in a strange city where they don’t know the language, but this is idea is quickly abandoned. In an early scene, Rosemary complains that it’s difficult to be at a party where everyone is speaking French, but the partygoers realize this and quickly switch to English, which they default to for the rest of the series.

The original’s Castevets, Roman and Minnie (Sidney Blackmer and Ruth Gordon), an elderly Manhattan couple, are replaced by Roman and Margaux Castevets (Jason Isaacs and Carole Bouquet), much younger, urbane Parisians, whose relationship with the Woodhouses is suspicious from the very beginning. Much of the appeal of the Castavets in the original was the supposed harmlessness–yes, they were noisy and eccentric, but no one would ever suspect that a couple of kindly grandparent figures were satanists. But it’s hard to understand why the Woodhouses originally trust the 2014 Castavets, who impose themselves into the lives of a young couple they barely know, to the point of offering them a lavish apartment for free and inviting them to fetish parties.

Roman lounges in the trappings of his extreme wealth

More and more, it seems that our tendency when viewing modern movies is to be suspicious of the characters who seem the most trustworthy; charming, handsome psychopaths have become the norm. Perhaps that was the thinking behind the change, that it would be too easy to immediately suspect something was off about sweet old folks, better to do away with suspense all together and attempt to seduce viewers with glamour, foreign accents, and wealth. The things we yearn for, grow jealous of and thus, can be truly terrified of.

Despite its too-long runtime, the miniseries manages to feel rushed. By sticking too faithfully to the 1968 film, intriguing original plot lines are left no room to develop and seem pointless. We never find out why the building’s superintendent walks around on all fours like a dog or delve into the relationships between Guy and Margaux and between Guy and Rosemary’s friend Julia. There’s also the odd inclusion of multiple kisses between Rosemary and Margaux, which are linked to Margaux’s satanic ritual and suggest lesbianism goes hand-in-hand with devil worship. The miniseries gives a needlessly complicated solution to the mystery of the missing couple and the devil’s identity, suggesting Roman is also the devil, an immortal named Steven Mercato and maybe even Rosemary’s cat.

The Devil appears infrequently in the form of Steven Mercato

Moreover, because the miniseries is structured so that Rosemary is only pregnant in the second half, much of the original’s prolonged post-birth scenes are eliminated. This leads the story to rush through the last act, taking away a great deal of the strength and refusal to submit that the character displayed in these scenes.

Though Holland has spoken of her feminist intentions and Rosemary’s powerlessness is obvious, it’s unclear from the miniseries that Holland is making is a feminist statement about it. There’s a lot of material to explore in the story that Holland easily use make this point, but ignores. In both versions, Rosemary is shocked to find that her husband supposedly had sex with her while she was unconscious. She quickly moves on and it’s never acknowledged that even in the version of the night’s events that Rosemary accepts, the child was conceived through martial rape. In addition, the original attempts to explain Rosemary’s meekness through references to her strict Catholic upbringing; no attempts are made in the miniseries to suggest such a background for Saldana’s Rosemary. Instead, the only mention of religion in the miniseries is the dead woman’s Coptic Christian faith.

There’s also a clear feminist idea in the basic plot, which suggests that women are often discredited and called crazy because of the functions of their bodies, commonly seem in the idea that periods make women too irrational to take leadership roles or in the idea of “pregnancy brain” as explored in recent sitcoms. When Rosemary suggests that something is wrong in her pregnancy and her neighbors are witches, she’s dismissed as being delusional and experiencing pre-partum psychosis. When, in the original, Rosemary says she can hear the baby crying next door, it’s dismissed as post-partum depression. Holland appears uninterested in this theme, as she told the New York Times, “We’re not sure if it really doesn’t happen inside her head.”

Rosemary accepts the devil-baby as her child

Holland could be suggesting that the story is meant to be allegorical. In the miniseries, Guy says he is surprised he is still able to find Rosemary attractive, though he refers to his decision to let the devil rape her. This statement recalls a woman’s fear that pregnancy will make her unattractive to her partner or cause her to be seen as an incubator. Rosemary’s discovery that the baby is the son of the devil and her desire to hurt him could refer to post-partum depression. However, if these are attempts at allegory, they are unclear and appears half-hearted.

I think the most interesting element of the story for a modern viewer should be the relationship between the Woodhouses. There was nothing special about their relationship at the start; they were young, attractive and constantly about to tear each other’s clothes off, but never had the chemistry, shared interests or inside jokes that would make the eventual deterioration of their partnership compelling. Guy is a secret sexist masquerading as a modern equalitarian man; early on his suggestion to Rosemary that he wants to support her for awhile seems innocent, but in light of his betrayal of her later, suggests he may have felt emasculated by her earnings. He wants to be a famous writer, but when he’s stalled by writer’s block, he’s easily convinced to sell his wife and her reproductive capabilities as if they were his property. Rosemary becomes a victim without ever being given a choice. Rosemary’s only choices come after the birth when she decides to help raise her child, suggesting that her maternal love has a stronger hold over her than anger over her abuse or fear of her son’s satanic paternity. The couple are each vulnerable to gender roles–Rosemary’s role as a parent and Guy’s career ambitions are their weaknesses.

Rosemary and Guy never have an appealing or convincing relationship

It is often difficult to read media with explicitly sexist set-ups; the original story probably attempted to expose Guy’s betrayal and the view of Rosemary as his property by the other characters for its negative connotations, but the film’s refusal to do anything extreme or subversive (What if instead, Rosemary was the ambitious one who made the deal, or the couple decided on it together? What if she found out what had been done to her midway through the story and was allowed to struggle with it? Or if she obsessively researched her pregnancy and was dismissed as a hypochondriac? What if Rosemary’s pregnancy blog became a media sensation, or the Castavets shepherded Rosemary through fertility treatments?) in its modernization, suggests the filmmakers did not truly grasp the sexism inherent in the plot. Instead, by limiting her agency and sticking her in a retro-gender role, they merely create a passive tragedy of a meek young woman’s abuse at the hands of her husband and friends.

______________________________________

Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario.