Ex Machina and the Female Problem
Last week I went to see a screening of Alex Garland’s artificial intelligence thriller Ex Machina and enjoyed the sleek, sci-fi flash of a not too distant world populated by a genius programmer, his young employee, and a group of robot women.
Early on in the film, Nathan (Oscar Isaac), an odd, alcoholic genius CEO of a Facebook/Google hybrid, reveals to a Caleb ((Domhnall Gleeson), young programmer in his employ, that he has brought the young man to his remote bunker-like home to test whether the robot he has created has true artificial intelligence. Is Ava (Alicia Vikander), with her grey mesh covered boobs and butt and translucent arms and legs, capable of knowing her own thoughts and desires? Is she capable of understanding the desires of others as they relate to her? When she appears to like Calab, is that a reaction to him or a genuine, self-generated emotion? The majority of the discussion between Caleb and Nathan centers around the question of Ava’s ability to think like a human. And here is where the great strange flaw in the movie lies. Nathan, picking up on Caleb’s increasing interest in Ava as a woman rather than a robot, confidently declares that she has a hole where a vagina would be, so yes, he says, “You can fuck her and she’d enjoy it.” While the actual reason for Caleb’s visit turns out to be a more vague than to just administer a weeklong Touring test, Nathan has indeed brought him there to test Ava’s ability to think. Remarkably, what Garland offers, is a simple, unquestioned view of female sexuality based on a particularly unpleasant and backward idea that if a woman appears to enjoy something, she does enjoy it, no testing required. Beneath all the wires and CGI, is a very real and very troubling belief that whether the woman or the robot or the woman robot is truly capable of giving consent is not relevant. While this movie will not turn any man into a date rapist, it does serve the old narrative that permeates the culture, that women’s sexuality only exists in relation to men and is in fact, arbitrated by men. A man who creates a woman and then claims to know she enjoys sex with him removes from her the very humanity (or simulacra of humanity) he seeks to produce. While the character himself is clearly intended to be flawed, his belief that he can externally judge sexual desire and satisfaction is not played for villainy, rather for laughs. This is why the film is troubling. It doesn’t reach beyond the pedestrian, ingrained sexism of women as sex objects full of feminine wiles. These robots are not women, not human, they are Nathan’s notion of women - mysterious, dangerous, and sexually available. Ava is trapped as all the robots are trapped, but rather than hanging in a closet like a sex doll she is ambulatory, but no less lacking ownership of her own life. At the climax of the film when Ava decides to escape, she does so by peeling the artificial skin off the inert visually female bodies, and dressing her own. When we do see her naked it is not just the character we see, but the image of a woman as an interchangeable object of desire.