EX MACHINA
EX MACHINA. Alex Garland, dir., script. UK: DNA Films, Film4 (prod.) / A24 (USA theatrical release, Universal for most others), 2015. See IMDb for distribution details.[1]
If knowing how a film ends spoils it, it probably wasn't all that good, but part of the pleasure of EX MACHINA is speculating just which way the writer-director will end it, since it would be esthetically legitimate to move toward a somewhat conventional, if dark, technically comic or melodramatic ending, or to an ending comic or tragic depending on point of view. (And that convoluted sentence will serve as your "spoiler" alert.)
EX MACHINA centers on Ava, a strongly humanoid and woman-like robot who may or may not have true AI, will, autonomy, agency: personhood (As Dave Samuelson has pointed out [SFRA/IAFA ListServs], "ex machina" can mean "formerly a machine"]).
Her name is pronounced /eva/, so note the 2011 Spanish-language film EVA and the Medieval revolutionary rime, "When Adam delved, and Eve span, / Who was then a gentleman?"[2] The final "e" in "Eve" would have been pronounced, and an alternative spelling of "Eve" in the couplet is "Eva."[3]
Ava is at the apex of a triangle with her creator, Nathan — explicitly compared to a father — at another vertex: with "Nathan" having the possible meaning of "God's gift."[4] Other references to God and gods are in the title, recognizable from the phrase Deus ex machina, the "God from the machine" in ancient Greek drama and as a figure of speech (a figure Samuelson suggests might be taken quite literally), and in the tagline, "To erase the line between man and machine is to obscure the line between men and gods."[5] The third vertex or leg of the triangle is 26-year old Caleb, with a name that means "dog" in Hebrew and which names a positively-viewed spy among the enemy for a character in both the Book of Joshua and the Quran.[6] Nathan brings Caleb to an oddly unpopulated though elegant lab — only an operationally deaf and mute female-gendered servant is seen — on the pretext of a radical variation on the Turing Test where Caleb will be the biological human trying to determine whether or not Ava doesn't just think but is a true person: a variation on "The Imitation Game" in which Caleb must, in a deeper sense than in the original parlor game, recognize a woman.[7]
The nested settings of the film are a beautiful, huge, and remote estate, constituting a Greenworld with mountains and waterfalls and, generally, "Nature naturing" beautifully and awesomely — but a place accessible only by helicopter flown by one of Nathan's many employees. On the estate is a shack that is the gateway (a computer-operated portal) to what is apparently a subterranean building of great size, severely Modernist functionality, with many doors normally sealed and unlockable only with a pass-card: think Bluebeard's castle[8] with interior design by a fanatical follower of The International Style and Shinto minimalism.[9]
Nathan's real intention is to test if Ava can seduce Caleb into helping her escape, and Nathan ensures that Ava will be attractive to Caleb. Since we're invited to view and listen to the film in terms of great myths of Western culture, one possible ending is the comic-romance killing of Nathan as the Minotaur/Monster/Mechanical God, followed by escape from the Underworld labyrinth — Eden the lab is not — by Ava and Caleb, possibly starting a new world of human/machine union and, in some way, propagation. (Nathan tells Caleb that Ava can engage in vaginal sexual intercourse, and we have good reason to believe him.) Alternatively, the narrative could move into tragedy or melodrama with an unhappy ending with the triumph of Nathan, and the destruction of Ava and/or Caleb (Romeo and Juliet in Shakespeare's form or the operatic version [and West Side Story] or in a variation where "Romeo" survives and Juliet dies).
In what can be read as a rigorous test of viewers' feminist post-humanism, the climax of the film is Ava's being attacked by Nathan and Ava's killing Nathan. She is helped in escaping by Caleb but more immediately by the female-gendered AI robot who was Ava's precursor, who is also killed (sic). Ava ensures her escape by trapping Caleb in the lab complex, takes the helicopter out of a pretty Edenic Greenworld to The City, and fulfills what she has told Caleb is her major desire, to stand by the side of the road, at an intersection "Where the race of men go by" — but she quickly moves off to do what she wills to do, which may include conquest and the succession of "man" by AI's.[10]
The film is a must-see for students of the female-gendering of robots (and an important movie for students of the rape-revenge film and competing ideas of masculinity); see also for the theme of Panopticonic surveillance, the motif of the "mechanized" Underworld and "mechanical god" — cybernetic and electronic here, though, not mechanical — and images of human/machine combinations, where android robots are also a variety of cyborg. Cf. and contrast the Underworld and motifs of love and escape in George Lucas's THX 1138.
RDE (Dave Samuelson, R. Mason), May, June 2015, 7May23
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Discussed by Allison de Fren in "Citation: de Fren, Allison. “Ex Machina: Questioning the Human Machine .” Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures, no. 19, 2019. doi:10.20415/hyp/019.s0110" — text and, primarily, an audio-visual essay.
Abstract: The British science-fiction thriller Ex Machina (2015) has inspired mixed reactions from both critics and audiences. This video essay examines why some walk away from the film thinking about the Turing test (a gauge for determining whether a machine exhibits intelligence equivalent to that of a human) and others the Bechdel test (a touchstone for determining male bias in a film).
The "Creator's Statement" accompanying the on-line embedded video ends,
Like the mad scientist in Ex Machina, however, [Alex] Garland constructs a thing of beauty and intelligence that is confined to a rather small box [...:] a triadic plot structure – mad scientist, fembot, sensitive male who falls in love with fembot – with outdated gender dynamics. The narrative set-up in Ex Machina is remarkably similar to the short story “The Sandman,” by German Romantic writer E.T.A. Hoffmann, in which a young artist falls in love with a mechanical woman through the manipulation of a scientist-sorcerer. “The Sandman” [...] was arguably the blueprint for the first science fiction blockbuster and fembot film, Metropolis [...], which – like Ex Machina – has inspired both mixed reactions and conflicting readings of its feminist potential. The question thus remains: how progressive can the representation of a female robot be when it repurposes tropes that are decidedly retrograde, even if it does so self-reflexively?
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Discussed by Amy Ireland in "Empathy, War, and Women," SFRA Review 50.2-3 (Spring-Summer 2020),[11] looking at "affective empathy" as a tactical move, as in a hunt.
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Roger Mason (e-mail) points to parallels to the Jurassic Park series: "A carefully secluded world holding a secret form of life waiting for exploitation. Outsiders are brought in to evaluate the secret project prior to their further development and exploitation. The evaluation spins out of control. In both cases the creature begins to exceed the limits of their creator’s intention. The dinosaurs spontaneously procreate and the robots develop an unmanageable level of AI."
RDE, finishing, with thanks to Alison de Fren, 15May21; 25Oct21; 6May23
