Women and Technology – Bitch Flicks

‘Metropolis’ and ‘Ex Machina’: Portrayals of Gender, Technology, and Society

‘Metropolis’ and ‘Ex Machina’ are merely the oldest and one of the most recent examples, respectively, in a long line of films (and texts) that associate women with technology in this manner, presenting them as potent and potential threats to societal order and to the men who create and aim to control them.

Guest post written by Deborah Krieger. | Spoilers ahead.

Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent film Metropolis and Alex Garland’s 2015 film Ex Machina share many commonalities. While these two sci-fi films come from different countries (Germany and the UK, respectively) and from wildly differing eras, social contexts, and technological standpoints, both films have much in common in terms of their portrayals of gender, as well as the key association of technology with social class divides. They also represent an ascribing of an inhuman machine-influenced identity to those who work with said technology, creating a blurring of the lines between man and machine. I will compare and contrast how these two films, made nearly ninety years apart from one another, represent the male and female genders as well as divergent views on the purposes, users, and creators of technology, highlighting the ways in which Ex Machina is indebted to and reflects its predecessor.

In Metropolis, technology is depicted as necessary for all of society to coexist. Yet it is associated with the working class — particularly the male worker — who must give their blood, sweat, and labor to the “Heart Machine” located underground in the City of the Workers, depicted at the opening of the film. The workers of Metropolis are not only associated with machines and technology through their daily labor, but they are also depicted as extremely robotic, monotonous, and identical in their movements. They are all dressed in the same masculinized dark clothing and live what could be called robotic lifestyles, following the same work schedule day in and day out. Even the workers’ walking is mechanized in the shift change scene. Apart from Maria, the only named members of the working class are male: Grot (Heinrich George), the foreman and Georgy/11811 (Erwin Biswanger), an aspect highlighted by Gabriela Stoicea in her article “Re-Producing the Class and Gender Divide: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis,” in which she discusses Karl Marx’s de-emphasizing of the female worker within the context of labor:

“One of the most striking elements in this sequence is the complete absence of women and children, as male workers return to a seemingly deserted city […] by all rules of logic, the so-called worker’s city in Metropolis should therefore be a space inhabited mostly by women and children. Visually, however, there are next to no traces of their existence […] Additionally, Marx himself refused to acknowledge the importance of women’s domestic labor for the daily reproduction of workers’ labor power since it was not remunerated financially.” (Stoicea, 25)

In stark contrast to the working class, the wealthy class, of which the protagonist Freder (Gustav Fröhlich) belongs, lives far above the city in the “Club of the Sons,” where they are surrounded by lush, ethereal flora of the “Pleasure Gardens” and are free to move about, to run, to dance as they wish to, with highly differentiated forms of dress and body language. When we are first introduced to the “Club of the Sons,” we see young men and women cavorting in a fantastical garden landscape, replete with strange plants and a bubbling fountain. The women — described by Stoicea as “prostitutes” (Stoicea, 32) — wear ornate, highly sexualized dresses, while the men are largely dressed in white — a symbol of luxury in that one must have the resources to clean the material if it gets dirty, which the inhabitants of the “Club of the Sons” clearly do.

While Metropolis assigns technology and machinery to a (masculinized) working class, Ex Machina clearly associates technology, as well as the subsequent dehumanization of its users and makers, with the wealthy upper class and with more pastoral elements (see Figures 3-7 in Appendix A), yet still maintains a highly masculinized atmosphere. Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac), the creator of the Google- and Facebook-esque site Bluebook is depicted as incredibly well-off, with an entire underground compound filled with cutting edge software and hardware, hidden away on a massive tract of land (rather than in an urbanized environment). In Metropolis, the most advanced technology is in the Pleasure Garden itself, kept away from the lowly Underground City.

Bluebook is the creation that gained Nathan his fame and fortune; notably, Nathan’s creation of the female robots, Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno) and Ava (Alicia Vikander), is not necessary for his economic survival. These female robots are merely prototypes created for his enjoyment in a variety of ways both servile and sexual; their use connects the technology depicted in Ex Machina with the leisure and privilege of the upper classes, rather than as something necessary for societal order and human survival. While arguably we could consider Bluebook, like Facebook and Google, to be necessary for humanity to some degree, these internet applications are not nearly as integral to the simple mechanical functioning of society in the way that the complex machinery is in Metropolis.

Additionally, while women are also hinted at as existing within a technological/labor-based context in Ex Machina, they are not even remotely important to the plot; in the beginning sequence of the film when Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) learns he has won a prize allowing him to meet Nathan, the reclusive creator of Bluebook, there are various out-of-focus shots of female figures within the context of the Bluebook workplace, as well as text messages on Caleb’s phone from unseen female co-workers. However, it is the female robots, rather than the male humans, who propel the film’s climax and ending.

The archetype of the female robot, or “fembot,” has long been a popular figure in media, be it live-action film, cartoons, comics, novels, and more. Many societies have grappled with this powerful but dangerous figure, giving us works as different in tone and theme as Blade Runner (directed by Ridley Scott, 1982) and Austin Powers (directed by Jay Roach, 1997-2002) from the U.S. as well as Chobits (manga by CLAMP; 2000-2002) and Ghost in the Shell (directed by Mamoru Oshii, 1995) from Japan. Metropolis and Ex Machina are merely the oldest and one of the most recent examples, respectively, in a long line of films (and texts) that associate women with technology in this manner, presenting them as potent and potential threats to societal order and to the men who create and aim to control them.

In Metropolis, the female robot in question is a recreation of the inventor Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge)’s beloved Hel, who married the city’s leader, Joh Fredersen (Alfred Abel), and gave birth to Freder. When Joh Fredersen learns of Rotwang’s creation and of Maria (Brigitte Helm), the woman from the Underground City who prophesies the mediation of the two classes, he convinces Rotwang to give the robot Maria’s image, intended be a demagogue, to fool the workers into violently rioting and to lead them to their own destruction. The robot Maria (aka “Maschinenmensch”) goes on to perform an extremely sexualized, hypnotic dance for the wealthy young men of the Club of the Sons, using her body for the purposes of her creator.

Ava and Kyoko in Ex Machina share several common aspects with the robot Maria in Metropolis, but they also differ in some key ways. Ava and Kyoko are both created for sexualized purposes. It is unclear that Kyoko (who writer Zhuojie Chen called “a white man’s plot device“) is actually a machine until late in the film, as Caleb — and the audience by proxy — assumes she is a human woman who does not understand English and thus does not speak. In fact, Kyoko is a robot with whom Nathan engages sexually, and Ava, it is revealed, is also created to respond to intercourse, as Nathan tells Caleb:

“You bet she can fuck […] in between her legs, there’s an opening with a concentration of sensors. If you engage them in the right way, it creates a pleasure response. So if you wanted to screw her, mechanically speaking, you could, and she’d enjoy it.”

Thus the male sexual consumption of the female robot hinted at in Metropolis is taken to its literal extreme in Ex Machina. Later in the film, it is revealed that Caleb was not randomly selected to meet Nathan and perform the Turing test on Ava; his internet searches and pornography preferences were used in constructing Ava’s face and body, thus emphasizing the extreme disconnect between the creation of the robots in Metropolis and Ex Machina. In the former, the robot is created for love and is corrupted to perform evil tasks, whereas Ava was designed and programmed from the start to be able to hurt and manipulate Caleb.

Additionally, the female robots in Metropolis and Ex Machina both make use of the media in which they are represented to complete their seduction of the male characters in a rather self-referential way — and, in the case of Ex Machina, the seduction of the audience through Caleb. Metropolis is a silent film; therefore the robot Maria must use her body in order to establish her power, which she does during her dance sequence. Even if she speaks, the audience cannot hear her — we can only read her words in the intertitles — so her seduction of the audience must be as effective as her seduction of the characters in the text; thus the focus on her scantily-clad physical form. Conversely, Ex Machina has the benefit of being a non-silent film, which allows Ava to seduce both Caleb and the audience with her body language as well as with her voice and personality, revealed in their ongoing conversations. Thus, we see a similarity between the methods of these two female robots, even if their texts differ in technological capabilities.

Both films use dance sequences to create a sense of confusion in a designated male viewer or viewers, controlled by the male masters of the robot in question; Maria dancing for the wealthy men of the city, orchestrated by Joh Fredersen and Rotwang, is echoed in the seemingly randomly-inserted disco sequence in which Kyoko and Nathan perform a routine in unison while Caleb can only watch, horrified and uneasy. Indeed, Ex Machina‘s dance sequence has several visual parallels to that in Metropolis, including the way the dancing female robots are shot: from the front, with circular decorations in the background, and a focus on the sexualized, half-dressed female body in motion (see Figures 1 and 2 in Appendix A). Director Alex Garland said in an interview with Wired that he wanted to avoid making viewers think of Metropolis’s Maria when designing Ava, but it seems that he still owes the earlier film a debt in terms of the narrative weight and significance of their dance scenes and depiction of gender.

While the female robots of Metropolis and Ex Machina are important characters within their respective films, they are far from the main protagonists. In what is perhaps a reference to Freder’s narrative journey from innocence to disenchanted knowledge, Ex Machina’s Caleb undergoes a similar trajectory. Both characters begin the film in one world, only to have their lives changed upon visiting an entirely different world — in both cases, literally an underground world. Freder spends the beginning of Metropolis gallivanting in the Pleasure Gardens without a care in the world, but soon learns of the oppression of the lower class when he visits the Underground City and meets Maria, who prophesies a promise of peace and resolution.

Likewise, Caleb begins in the historical world in a brief prologue, where it is revealed that he has won the fateful contest. As he descends into Nathan’s compound, his optimism and ability to trust are constantly tested by Nathan as well as by Ava, to the point where Caleb becomes unsure of whether he himself is an actual human being. Caleb reaches a turning point after a session with Ava, as well as his discovery of videotapes in which Nathan’s older robot models destroy themselves trying to break free. He begins to doubt his own humanity in the light of Nathan’s cavalier approach to creating and destroying life in his robots, so to speak, and in a particularly gruesome scene, slices open a vein on his forearm to make sure he can bleed. It is also during this sequence that Caleb makes the decision — or so he believes — to betray Nathan and help Ava escape.

One other major difference between these two films is the depiction (or lack thereof) of the robot women’s potential for subjectivity. In Metropolis, only the workers and young men of the Club of the Sons believe that the robot Maria is human; Rotwang and Joh Fredersen know the truth, and their point of view holds sway as they manipulate the robot Maria’s body for their own purposes. As an audience, we are never sure whether the robot Maria has a consciousness or independent will. This issue is touched upon in the film, as Rotwang assures the real Maria:

“Joh Fredersen is looking for an excuse to use violence against the workers […] she will destroy their belief in the Mediator! But she is only a machine — made to obey my will. While my power holds, she will do so […] but already I feel I have lost that power, and I am fearful of the consequences!”

However, the audience never sees Rotwang’s apprehension result in any actions of which Joh Fredersen would not have approved. Conversely, the main thrust of Ex Machina‘s narrative is devoted to Caleb’s exploration about whether Ava has a consciousness, a subjectivity, or is merely programmed to act the way she does. In contrast to Metropolis, which only mentions a loss of control briefly, Ex Machina seems to answer this question in the affirmative, as Ava takes the initiative to turn Kyoko against Nathan, kill him, and abandon Caleb to die. Her actions indicate that Ava has, for all intents and purposes, free will, or at least a desire for self-preservation at all costs, in the light of her and Caleb’s realization that Nathan plans to disassemble her when he builds an upgrade.

Of course, it is also possible that the sadistic Nathan could have given Ava and Kyoko a desire to escape as part of their design (rather than such a desire being evidence of AI), only to torture them by refusing to set them free, which might have led them to self-destruct as earlier models are shown to have done. When Ava and Kyoko turn on Nathan, we see Ava whispering something indecipherable in Kyoko’s ear, which might be what switches Kyoko from acting obedient to seeking retribution. Additionally, it could be argued either way that Kyoko revealing herself as a robot to Caleb is part of Nathan’s programming, or that it represents Kyoko rebelling against her creator, thus hinting at a level of AI capabilities she had not previously demonstrated.

Yet through the changing of the point of view in the last sequences of the film from Caleb, trapped in a room of the compound, to Ava, who leaves the compound in the helicopter and enters the human world, we see that Ava has a consciousness and becomes, for the last few minutes, a de facto co-protagonist of the story. Even if her wants and desires are indeed programmed to a degree, the fact that Ava has such feelings and is able to act upon them is evidence that Nathan cannot ultimately control his creation, while in Metropolis, it is less certain whether Rotwang ever truly loses control.

It’s particularly interesting to think about the way Ava performs humanity within the context of Descartes, whose famous quotation “I think, therefore I am,” complicates how we might think about the difference between a human and a machine. According to Neil Badmington, Descartes does not separate humanity versus machinery by virtue of bodily differences — i.e. flesh-and-blood versus hardware — but rather, through the possession of “reason,” which is “the only thing that makes us men and distinguishes us from the beasts” (Descartes in Badmington, 16). However, Badmington challenges Descartes’s certainty, imagining the following hypothetical:

“If a machine — in keeping with the spirit of his fantastic scenario — were constructed in such a way that it had what might be called ‘an organ for every occasion,’ it would, according to the letter of Descartes’s own argument, no longer be possible to maintain a clear distinction between the human and the inhuman. Given enough organs, a machine would be capable of responding in a manner utterly indistinguishable from that of a human being. Reason, no longer capable of ‘distinguish[ing] us from the beasts,’ would meet its match, its fatal and flawless double.” (Badmington, 18)

There can be little doubt that Ava fulfills this prophecy; over the course of the film, it becomes increasingly clear that she is “capable of responding in a manner utterly indistinguishable from that of a human being” (Badmington, 18), much to Nathan’s and Caleb’s detriment. As Garland’s inspiration for the film came from a conversation with his neuroscientist friend who argued that machines could never have consciousness, this ending serves to make his point that much more strongly.

The endings of Metropolis and Ex Machina differ on the relationship between technology and humankind, and present outcomes at the opposite ends of the spectrum. At the end of Metropolis, Joh Fredersen (the “head”) and the engineer Grot (“the hands”) are joined in solidarity and unity by Freder, the prophesied mediator (the “heart”), ultimately representing a happy ending and a promise of coexistence. In contrast, the ending of Ex Machina nullifies this premise, presenting humanity and technology as forces at cross-purposes (despite Garland’s claim that it’s “a pro-AI movie”): Nathan intends to destroy Ava when he makes a newer model of the AI; in return for this mistreatment, Ava and Kyoko turn on Nathan and Caleb, betraying them, stabbing Nathan, and leaving Caleb to die in the sealed-off compound while Ava, disguised as a human, escapes into the real world. The endings of Metropolis and Ex Machina prove particularly ironic, given that Lang was critical of industrialization, while Garland, who deems Ex Machina “pro-AI” sets machines and humans at odds by the film’s end. As technology and robotics improve within our society, it remains to be seen which film’s view is more accurate: whether these new machines, designed to be so like us, will be friend, foe, or more.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

On Ex Machina, Artificial Intelligence of Color, and How to Become a (White) Woman

Ex Machina: Scavenging for Parts in a Patriarchal World

Ex Machina‘s Failure to Be Radical: Or How Ava Is the Antithesis of a Feminist Cyborg

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

Manic Pixie Revolutionary Awakenings

Literature Cited:

Anders, Charlie Jane. “From Metropolis to Ex Machina: Why Are So Many Robots Female?” io9, April 21, 2015. Web. 1 May 2016.

Badmington, Neil. “Theorizing Posthumanism.” Cultural Critique, No. 53, Posthumanism (Winter, 2003): 10-27. Web. 8 May 2016.

Garland, Alex. “Ex Machina’s Director on Why A.I. is Humanity’s Last Hope.” Interview with Angela Watercutter. Wired, April 7, 2015. Web. 8 May 2016.

Johnson, Kjerstin. “How ‘Ex Machina’ Toys with its Female Characters.” Bitch Media, May 8, 2015. 8 May 2016.

Rose, Steve. “Ex Machina and sci-fi’s obsession with sexy female robots.” The Guardian, January 15, 2015. Web. 1 May 2016.

Stoicea, Gabriela. “Re-Producing the Class and Gender Divide: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.” Women in German Yearbook, Vol. 22 (2006): 21-42. 8 May 2016.

Watercutter, Angela. “Ex Machina Has a Serious Fembot Problem.” Wired, April 9, 2015. Web. 1 May 2016.

Appendix A:

Figure 1. Maria dances in Metropolis.

Figure 2. Kyoko dances in Ex Machina.

Figure 3. The City of the Workers, Metropolis.

Figure 4. The Pleasure Gardens, Metropolis.

Figures 5-7. Stills from Ex Machina of Nathan’s compound.

Deborah Krieger is the curatorial assistant at the Delaware Art Museum as well as an arts and culture writer and Fulbright Austria alumna. She has written for BUST Magazine, PopMatters, Paste Magazine, Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art, The Mary Sue, and The Awl. She also runs her own art blog, I On the Arts, and curates her life in pictures @Debonthearts on Twitter and Instagram.

On Loving ‘Her’ … and Why It’s Not Easy

But, as a woman in the audience, my relationship to these types of characters, who are reliably, predictably, boringly male, is fraught. I relate to them, but only insofar as I must continually reinvest in the myth that men are the only people who are truly capable, truly deep enough, of having wrenching crises of the soul. Even though I know this to be false in reality—women experience alienation and existentialist ennui, too (I can’t believe I even just typed that)—I am deeply troubled that the experience of this sort of angst seems to be the exclusive province of men in our cultural imagination.

This guest post by Lisa C. Knisely previously appeared at Medium.

Her is an achingly beautiful film that adroitly explores postmodern alienation and the alterity at the heart of our relationships, both with other humans and our increasingly intelligent machines. I found the lonely, withdrawn main character, Theodore (played by Joaquin Phoenix), to be an immensely relatable and sympathetic protagonist.

But, that’s the problem.

Much like Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character at the beginning of 500 Days of Summer, we know Theodore is a sensitive and depressed dude from the moment we see him listening to “melancholy songs” in the elevator as he leaves work at a large and impersonal office building in the city. And, like Jim Carrey’s character in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, we soon come to find out that Theodore was once deeply in love with an emotionally complex and intelligent woman who has left him heartbroken. Films like Her bank on the audience’s ability to relate to the experiences of lost love and existentialist ennui of their main character. And we do. As, I think, we should.

Joaquin Phoenix and Amy Adams in Her — Joaquin Phoenix and Amy Adams in *Her*

Why are these stories we tell, stories about something I would venture to call essentially human, also largely stories about being men? As Noah Berlatsky points out in a piece for Salon.com, “In Her, difference is simply subsumed into a single narrative of midlife crisis and romance — everybody’s the same at heart, which means everybody is accepted as long as their stories can be all about that white male middle-age middle-class guy we’re always hearing stories about.”

And women? Well, we’re mostly relegated to the role of foils for man’s (meaning men’s) quest for meaning, transformation, and lasting human connection. As Anna Shechtmen writes in a piece for Slate.com, “Her commits the most hackneyed error of the big screen: It fails to present us with a single convincing female character—one whose subjectivity and sexuality exist independent of the film’s male protagonist or its male viewers.”

While I agree with Shechtmen’s assessment, I’d also wager that there is nothing particularly unusual about this state of affairs in a great many Hollywood films. That the main female character in Her is a disembodied operating system through which (whom?) Theodore’s subjectivity is revealed and transformed didn’t strike me as unusual. Zooey Deschanel’s character in 500 Days of Summer might as well have been a disembodied computer voice as far as I’m concerned. Ditto Natalie Portman in Garden State. Ditto Scarlett Johansson in Lost in Translation. Ditto Helena Bonham Carter in Fight Club. Ditto the real doll in Lars and the Real Girl. Ditto any film where the role of the main female character is to be a beautiful and sexually available aid to the male protagonist’s gradual transformation as he gains a deeper level of self-understanding as he learns to connect with others.

Joaquin Phoenix in Her — Joaquin Phoenix in *Her*

Maybe Samantha, the operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson with whom Theodore falls in love in Her, is just the ultimate Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Or maybe Spike Jonze is critiquing contemporary heterosexuality in which men project their desires onto objectified women. As Shechtmen notes, “One could argue that Jonze knows just what he’s doing…he is foregrounding Samantha’s role as the dark screen upon which we can project our erotic and romantic fantasies.” Daniel D’Addario at Salon.com maintains that the critique of possessive masculine desire is exactly Jonze’s point in Her, writing, “[the] evocation of female sexuality as easily controlled isn’t what the film is telling us is inherently good; calling to mind the control Theodore seeks to have over women doesn’t mean Jonze is seeking the same control. If anything, making Samantha invisible totally forecloses the option of the ‘male gaze’….”

While there is an implicit feminist critique of masculine heterosexual romantic desire in Her, D’Addario is oversimplifying the concept of the male gaze. The male gaze, as it was developed by feminist film critics like Laura Mulvey, isn’t just about women being sexually objectified and gazed at on screen; it is more deeply about the way a film structures its viewpoint so that we, the audience, are made to see through the eyes of the (usually male) protagonist and thus identify with him. In Her, there is only one brief moment during the film where the camera switches and we see Theodore from Samantha’s viewpoint. Any other glimpse of her subjectivity we get solely through Theodore’s relationship to her.

Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) goes on a date in Her — Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) goes on a date in *Her*

One can argue that all people, of any gender, project a certain amount of fantasy onto others in our intimate relationships with them. This too, seems to be something definitive of human experience. And Her examines that experience thoughtfully, with complexity, pushing our conceptual understanding of what it is to be “human” at a moment in history when we are more and more becoming cyborgs.

Still, I have trouble coming up with a Hollywood film where a woman’s subjectivity, her struggle for meaning, self-transformation and connection with others, has truly taken center stage in such a way that men in the audience are expected to identify with her story as one that is universal. Even more unimaginable, and currently unrepresentable in our current cinematic landscape, is a film in which a man or men operates as a reflective vehicle for a woman’s existential journey.

Go see Her. Ache with Theodore. Enjoy the beautiful aesthetic of the film. But, take a minute to imagine, too, if Joaquin Phoenix had played Sam to Scarlett Johansson’s Thea instead. That’s a film I’m still waiting for someone in Hollywood to write, direct, and especially, to produce.

Dr. Lisa C. Knisely is a freelance writer and an Assistant Professor of the Liberal Arts in Portland, Ore.

Speaking with a Woman’s Voice: ‘The Future Starts Here’

Bitch Flicks was lucky enough to receive an invitation to the premiere of Tiffany Shlain’s new webseries The Future Starts Here in New York City last week, and your humble correspondent was lucky enough to be the one to attend it. Shlain is, as her series’ voiceover states, a mother, filmmaker, and founder of the Webby Awards, and The Future Starts Here is an AOL-produced miniseries about being human in the digital age.

Our history books have been telling the stories of just a small handful for centuries. When we look back at this time in history, the story’s going to be about the power of creative breakthroughs that include all of us.

Episode 5, “Participatory Revolution”

Bitch Flicks was lucky enough to receive an invitation to the premiere of Tiffany Shlain’s new webseries The Future Starts Here in New York City last week, and your humble correspondent was lucky enough to be the one to attend it. Shlain is, as her series’ voiceover states, a mother, filmmaker, and founder of the Webby Awards, and The Future Starts Here is an AOL-produced miniseries about being human in the digital age.

Eight bite-sized videos, The Future Starts Here will only cost you forty minutes of your life total, and it’s well worth the time. It’s a remarkable distillation of complex ideas into accessible, snappy soundbites that are thought-provoking rather than reductive, and I think it makes a fantastic general introduction to some of the complicated questions I happen to be grappling with in my own doctoral research.

Though the series is all about technology and how it is changing our lives, the first episode, “Technology Shabbat,” is about switching off. When I spoke with Shlain, she explained that this was a quite deliberate move: it serves to ground what follows in caution and self-awareness, steering the series clear of the naïve, starry-eyed techno-optimism it sometimes skirts. When I asked her if she thought technology was a force for good, she said yes, provided that we use it right. (And this assessment is clearly borne out by any brief glance at, say, internet feminist activism and the backlash thereto.)

The second episode, “Motherhood Remixed,” is the one that Shlain pinpointed as most explicitly engaging with feminist concerns. It’s an intriguing and important look at Shlain’s efforts to balance her busy workload with her family life, and it features some delightful infographics that reconfigure parental roles in admirable ways; but its concluding piece of advice is perhaps the weakest of the bunch, because “Create your own schedule or present a plan to someone who can make it happen” is simply not a workable option for many parents outside of Shlain’s socioeconomic bracket. The episode raises some excellent points about how technology can change the work-life balance, but it’s simply narrower in scope and context than some of the other pieces, and a direct acknowledgment of that fact wouldn’t have gone amiss.

A thread of feminism runs through the whole series, in a way that Shlain emphasized is intended to be accessible to the widest possible audience. Shlain told me with a sigh that she had had no end of questions about being a woman in a male-dominated arena, and she stressed that she feels her feminism is most powerfully enacted simply through being a woman and speaking with a woman’s voice. When you come down to it, this is the very heart of feminism: the most abstruse feminist theory is ultimately rooted in the many disparate experiences that we collect under the heading “being a woman.” Throughout the series, Shlain does a skillful job of integrating the fact of her womanhood, mentioning it explicitly at key moments when the non-feminist-identified viewer might be struck by it and brought to new understandings.

One of the delights of the series, and something that is perhaps at least partly attributable to a familiarity with the phrase “the personal is political,” is the seamless integration of aspects of Shlain’s personal and family life. Even outside of the episode directly concerning motherhood, Shlain grounds her musings and illustrates her ideas by using material from her own life: anecdotes about her children, examples of her family’s actions, even an episode co-helmed by her robotics professor husband (episode four, “Why We Love Robots”). This fluid movement from the micro to the macro, exemplifying the inextricable relation of the personal and the theoretical, is what good feminism does best, and in this sense The Future Starts Here is a triumph of feminism in action.

Examining aspects of technology from the simple rules of tech etiquette to the effect of participatory culture on the creative process, Shlain strikes an excellent midpoint of optimism and skepticism – what she dubs “opticism.” She expertly weaves together big ideas (referencing such luminaries as Heschel and Teilhard) and an approachable style. She ends each episode with a suggestion for action or a question for consideration. And, as noted above, she does it all in about the length of your average TV drama, if you DVR it and fast-forward through the commercials.

The Future Starts Here. What are you waiting for?

Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax. He’s intrigued that a secular Jew like Tiffany Shlain and a leftist Christian like himself have such similar ideas about the philosophy of the digital revolution.

Horror Week 2012: The Final Girl Gone Wild: Post-Feminist Whiteness in ‘Scream 4’

Guest post written by Jeremy Cornelius. Warning: massive spoilers ahead!!

Wes Craven’s 1990s Scream trilogy completely rewrote the slasher genre in a postmodern meta-film. In March 2011, Scream 4 was released, ten years after Scream 3 was originally released, starring the original trio: Neve Campbell, David Arquette, and Courtney Cox-Arquette along with some new teen stars to apparently spur a new trilogy. Yet again, this film rewrites the genre, only this time the film plays with concepts of post-racial, post-feminist girl power by making Ghost Face a white sixteen-year-old girl, Sidney Prescott’s cousin Jill (played by Emma Roberts). Craven portrays Jill as the most violent and aggressive killer of any of the other serial killers in the Scream films. Jill kills mostly other white teenage girls (her best friends), a black police officer who is depicted in a racist fashion, and her own mother. Jill’s vitriolic aggression is fueled by her neoliberal pursuit of media fame and self-consciously performing the role of victim while veiling herself as the white-faced killer draped in a black shroud.


Jill Roberts (Emma Roberts) in Scream 4

In the original 1996 Scream film, which Scream 4 constantly refers to and reconstructs, a masked killer known as Ghost Face begins terrorizing a predominantly white upper-middle class neighborhood in rural Woodsboro, California. Sidney is the sixteen-year-old protagonist, who is dating a boy named Billy. Her mother, Maureen Prescott, is mysteriously murdered one year before these serial murders and the film starts in Woodsboro. And Gail Weathers (Cox), a TV journalist, covered “last year’s hottest court case,” and the fame-obsessed Weathers is in the process of finishing up a book on the murders entitled, The Woodsboro Murders. Meanwhile, Deputy Dewey Riley (Arquette) is the bumbling deputy on a (usually) failed mission to look after Sidney. Dewey’s character is in the tradition of Craven’s depiction of the two bumbling cops in his first film, and commonly known exploitation flick, The Last House on the Left. Drew Barrymore has a brief cameo at the beginning of the first film (she was the original pick for the character of Sidney) and is the first victim. The unseen killer calls her as she is home alone about to watch a scary movie. After much stalker-esque dialogue between the killer and Barrymore, she is viciously stabbed and hung from a tree outside of her house, where she is left for her parents to discover her body, leading to the first chilling scream as the title comes across the screen.

Sidney is constantly stalked by the killer and becomes an attempted target in her house, but she eventually manages to stop him and take refuge in her room. Time passes and characters develop a little more before the final scene during a house party at Sidney’s schoolmate, Stu’s house. The killer attacks the kids at the party, and Sidney is left alive to confront, who she discovers, are two killers: her boyfriend Billy and his friend Stu. They confess to having raped and killed her mother one year before. Gail comes in and briefly deters the two killers from killing Sidney, but in the end Sidney manages to kill both of them, declaring, as her surviving friend Randy comments, “Be careful, they always come back for one last scare,” and just as Billy sits up surprisingly, Sidney shoots him in the head, and she states, “Not in my movie,” claiming the construction of the Final Girl as a place of productive empowerment for girls and violent defense against women-hating men.

Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) in Scream 4

The gaze of Wes Craven’s Scream 4 intrudes on white girls’ domestic spaces. Technology facilitates the killer’s murderous rampage. The killer attempts to terrify them into panic and submission, but they resist this submission to fear such as in the first scene: two girls are alone in a house watching Stab 7 (a thinly veiled, meta-movie franchise with the Scream storyline within the Scream series). One girl goes upstairs because she hears a noise, but then prank calls her friend downstairs with the Ghost Face app on her iPhone. When she goes downstairs after the call is cut short and wanders around the house calling her friend’s name, she gets a call. Assuming her friends’ disappearance is her friend trying to get back at her for scaring her, she assuredly answers the phone, but the killer calls her on her iPhone and tries to scare her into terrified submission by saying, “you’re the dumb blonde with the big tits, whose part is about to be cut,” but she quickly retaliates with “I have a 180 IQ and a 4.0 GPA, asshole.” Of course, in the end, in the Scream tradition of the slasher theme, the killer prevails by stabbing the girl before the title of the film dramatically flashes onto the screen with the Swedish band The Sounds playing in the background.

Carol Clover theorizes about gender in slasher films in her well-known book Men, Women, and Chainsaws and addresses the concept of masochistic gazing in horror films. Watching these films, though it could be read as sadistic to consume slasher films, are a mascochistic form of “perverse pleasure” through gazing and seeing what “should not” be seen. The audience can identify with the victim in the Scream films and feel the terror that they feel. The camera shows them reacting to the killer’s calls, and the audience sees and hears the same as the victim. So with every suspenseful moment for the character on screen, the audience feels the same emotion of fear. Carol Clover compares the affect of pornography to horror films, saying:

“Pornography thus engages directly (in pleasurable terms) what horror explores at one remove (in painful terms) and legitimate film at two or more.”

The affect of terror and pleasure, though, seem to also be blurred when thinking about slasher films. Audiences are entertained by the desire to see violence that is unseen. They get a horrific glimpse into the pain inflicted between humans (mostly men killing women), but one productive element of the Scream series presents a productive feminist subversion of these elements of pleasure, pain, humor, and gender. Clover qualifies the commonly found surviving girl at the end of horror films in her essay, “His Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film”:

“The image of a distressed female most likely to linger in memory is the image of the one who did not die: the survivor, or Final Girl.”

And this position of the final girl in horror films is destabilized in Scream 4, as the final girl and masked killer are the same person.

Kathleen Rowe Karlyn writes about the feminist potential in the first three Scream films in her book, Unruly Girls, Unrepentant Mothers:

“According to the logic of realism, Scream might well be seen as endorsing violence in the hands of a teen girl. But when viewed in its cinematic context, the film, like the slasher genre in general, provides an opportunity to examine cultural and individual fantasies as they relate to gender and power.”

The girl violence in the Scream films takes a new direction as Jill takes on the role of the killer and enacts violent murders against mostly white teenage girls, a black man, and her own mother in the film, symbolically, hyperbolically constructing post-feminist girl power gone horribly wrong. Jill’s performs a coy demeanor and unassaultive character at the beginning of the film, which is starkly contrasted after her unveiling to Sidney as the killer in the second to last scene of the film. She asserts her position as the “empowered” female remake of Billy as the killer and Sidney as the victim, saying “I don’t want to be like you. I want to become you,” right before she stabs Sidney, thinking she murders her. Jill then proceeds to stab herself, throw herself onto a glass coffee table (evocative of a scene out of Fight Club) as a way to bodily victimize herself.

Jill Roberts (Emma Roberts) in Scream 4

J. Jack Halberstam in his article, “Automating Gender: Postmodern Feminism in the Age of the Intelligent Machine,” describes the temptation wrapped up in the symbol of Apple products in relation to the creation myth. Halberstam discusses cybernetics’ relationship to gender and deconstructs the symbol of the Mac apple, and he claims,

“We recognize the Apple computer symbol, I think, as a clever icon for the digitalization of the creation myth [. . . ] The bite now represents the byte of information within a processing memory.”

He discuses the temptation of biting into the forbidden fruit, which Eve does despite the prohibitions offered by God to her and Adam in Eden. Halberstam relates this Biblical story to the marketing of Apple products with the bitten apple logo on Apple products representing a capitalist seduction of consumer technology and information. Craven takes this concept one step further by having most every character in Scream 4 tote around some Apple product. The Ghost Face killer calls different characters on their iPhones before each murder. The killers use Apple technology to facilitate and capture the murders on film by using webcams to record each murder and post them onto their blog, reconstructing a do-it-yourself remake of the first Scream film within the sequel. The placement of Apple products throughout the film could be read as a synergistic business pursuit by the film makers, and in some ways, people probably were influenced to purchase a new iPhone after seeing this movie. The film also skillfully challenges the obsessive (mis)use of technology, and the Apple products, to use Halberstam’s analysis, symbolize capitalist seduction and female exploitation through violent murders. In “The Scream Trilogy: “Hyperpostmodernism” and the Late Nineties Teen Slasher” by Valerie Wee, she deconstructs the hyperpostmodernism in the Scream films:

“This shift to hyperpostmodernism was motivated by several factors: (1) the development of new media technologies such as cable, video, and an increasing range of digital media; (2) the emergence of a new teen demographic in the United States; and (3) the entertainment industries escalating commitment to cross-media promotional and marketing practices.”

As Wee argues, the Scream franchise’s insistence on including new media, promotion, and adjusting to the “emergence of a new teen demographic” applies perfectly to Scream 4’s hyperpostmodernism as a next step in the evolution of the series.

L-R: Jill Roberts (Emma Roberts) and Kirby Reed (Hayden Panettiere) in Scream 4

The teenage girls in Scream 4 are constantly on their iPhones in the film and are connected to Ghost Face through their phones. In the first scene of the film, there is a comment made that there is now a Ghost Face app. for the iPhones so anyone can replicate the killer’s voice as a prank call to friends. Female bodies become fused with technology: they become as fused with it as it is their source of survival and simultaneously the killer’s invasion into their white middle-class spaces. Halberstam writes:

“The female cyborg, furthermore, exploits a traditionally masculine fear of the deceptiveness of appearances and calls into question the boundaries of human, animal, and machine precisely where they are most vulnerable — at the site of the female body.”

Viewers disidentify with Jill and see the violent masochistic pleasure in watching Scream 4. This poses an interesting dilemma of white girl power manifesting in violence and aggression targeted against other white girls, black men, and mothers. Jill symbolizes the ultimate pursuit of individual identity and separation from her community. She manifests her rage and expectant media fame by slaughtering her friends, her mother, and others in her community to escape it. Jill embodies the ideology of post-feminism and exceedingly demonstrates her white neoliberal pursuit of a murderous “girl power” at the violent expense and exploitation of people in Scream 4.

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Jeremy Cornelius, a queer feminist writer and aspiring women’s and gender studies academic making his way in Philadelphia. Common activities include zine making, obsessively watching b-horror movies on Netflix, dressing like a gay sailor from the 1920s, and writing about queer childhood (to take the phrase from J. Jack Halberstam and Kathryn Bond Stockton) and coming from the U.S. South. Common pen name for zines and social media accounts is Riot Robin because of the Robin (from Batman) tattoo on his left arm.

Guest Writer Wednesday: The Sharp Skirts Want Tina Fey at SXSW

SXSW Interactive isn’t just about technology, where 90% male is still the norm. It’s also about influential media figures. Speakers like Anthony Bourdain and Tucker Max generate a lot of excitement, but we didn’t see any female equivalents and thought we’d like to even the playing field. Furthermore, in order for women to change media, we need to make media. Watching our producer/director Ellie and our videographer Mary edit the final product was inspiring enough; if this works, and we do get Tina Fey to speak at SXSW, it will simply be icing on the cake of what was already a fantastic experience.

So, if you like the video and think Tina Fey is worth hearing from, please like/share/comment etc. – we actually have a contact who’s gotten it in front of Tina Fey’s business manager we figure the more views the better!

Amanda Krauss is the Sharp Skirts Knowledge Manager.

Guest Writer Wednesday: Geek Girl Con: Feminism, Race, and Geek Culture

This cross-post from Jarrah Hodge previously appeared at Gender Focus.

This is the first in a series of posts about Geek Girl Con, which was held in Seattle October 8-9.

While some Canadians were celebrating Thanksgiving (or not out of protest or ambivalence), I was attending the inaugural Geek Girl Con in Seattle, Washington. The weekend was full of interesting panels and discussions and I took a bunch of pictures and notes, so will be writing a series of posts on the various issues that were covered.

The first full panel I attended was called “Feminism, Race, and Geek Culture”. It was moderated by Regina Buenaobra, community manager for ArenaNet for Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2. On the panel were Sociology student Michelle Hu, BreadPig employee and ROFLCon co-founder Christina Xu, and web developer Nina Reyes. Unfortunately the awesome Racialicious blogger Latoya Peterson wasn’t able to make it.

The panel talked about their own experiences with discrimination and stereotyping in geek communities.

Talking about organizing ROFLCon, Christina recalled that the first year they ended up with a huge majority of white male speakers because they were just going with who they’d seen before at other conventions. Talking more generally about conventions, Christina said she’d encountered a lot more awareness about lack of women’s representation than that of people of colour: “People bring up lack of women on stage very frequently but hardly anyone brings up lack of people of colour.”

But Nina Reyes noted the intersections between race and gender in geek culture are more complicated. As a coder, she said she felt a lot more singled out as a woman than as an Asian, since Asians were stereotyped as being good at coding and computer careers.

Another question that came up for the panel was on representations of women and people of colour in geeky fandoms.

“It’s important as a person of colour to see yourself well represented in these types of media,” Michelle Hu argued.

“If you are a white male reading comic books you have a choice of who you want to be. Me, I’m stuck with Jubilee all the time,” Christina added. They both noted that just casting some people of colour or making a token reference to other cultures isn’t enough, using the short-lived but much loved Joss Whedon show Firefly as an example. The show often featured characters speaking Mandarin poorly.

Xu pointed out this “race-bending” is insulting and causes anger because studio’s don’t seem to care enough to try and find someone to play a part who actually speaks the correct language or belongs to the race that will be portrayed. It’s similar to ending up with an all-white convention lineup because you’re just going with who you’ve heard of before.

A question from the audience that I was particularly interested in was about white people role playing characters of other races in RPGs. In response, Christina Xu referenced Lisa Nakamura’s article: “Race In/For Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet” as a good resource for learning more about why this is problematic.

“As somebody who comes from a place of privilege you have the ability to …fulfill your identity as an exotic other,” Christina said, “But it leaves others less room to live their own identities and it perpetuates creepy stereotypes.” She said she wouldn’t say no one can role-play another race, but white people taking on other races need to realize it’s a weird exercise in privilege and need to try to prioritize character over racial stereotypes.

Finally, the panel addressed how geek communities, especially online, can exclude women and people of colour. The panelists said they felt like when they or others raised objections to sexist or racist language or behaviour guys would rally to defend the sexist and racist games, attempting to make the argument that somehow criticizing the language or behaviour was against their geek allegiance.

But the panelists had tips for audience members looking to deal with these types of situations effectively.

Christina recommended using your audience’s vernacular to raise the issue to show you’re part of their community. She also recommended making it clear it’s not a personal attack on a player: “Make it clear you are hating the game and not the player. And understand no one has read Judith Butler as nursery rhymes. There’s a learning process.”

On the other side, the panelists also had some advice for those getting critiques:

“The person on the other side, just f-ing listen,” said Michelle.

“We critique because we enjoy these things. The people who complain the hardest care the most,” said Regina, emphasizing that critiquing something doesn’t mean hating on it.

Jarrah Hodge is the founder of Gender Focus, a Canadian feminist blog. Jarrah also writes for Vancouver Observer and Huffington Post Canada and has been a guest blogger on “feminerd” culture for Bitch Magazine Blogs. Hailing from New Westminster, BC, she’s a fan of politics, crafts, boardgames, musical theatre, and brunch.