Man Plans and God Laughs: A Feminist Exploration of Alex Garland’s Ex Machina

Artificial intelligence has been a popular subject for science-fiction films since the emergence of the genre — and has only become moreso at present as the reality of such technology becomes more and more inevitable. Understanding what it means to be human is one of the most complex and simultaneously most basic question we ask ourselves. In Alex’s Garland’s film Ex Machina, these questions are viewed through a slightly different lens — questions of consciousness and humanity are combined with matters of sexuality and gender. The film takes place over the course of a week, and follows Caleb through his experience of testing the artificial intelligence of Ava, an android designed by elusive genius and billionaire Nathan Bateman.

Humanizing Machines, Objectifying Women

Films and television about artificial intelligence and robots are often imbued with themes of existentialism — think of the most oft-repeated line from HBO’s hit series Westworld: “Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?” This question is posed to the robotic “hosts” in the story world of the show, but at the same time is posed to the audience watching at home. Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Steven Spielberg’s AI: Artificial Intelligence posed similar questions, asking the audience what it truly meant to be human. The subject matter is ripe for philosophical debate, and that debate only becomes more serious as we venture further into the 21st century and closer to the type of artificial intelligence that was once only a figment of our imaginations. We’re not there yet, but we’ll get there soon.

In the collective fictional future, androids are rarely treated with much love and respect. I’m hard pressed to think of a film that centers around artificial intelligence that doesn’t hinge on the fact that these humanoid creations are severely mistreated or that they rebel against their creators to destroy, well, everything. The robotic future seems pretty bleak on all fronts, but there is a specificity in the way “female” androids are used in works of fiction — and that’s where fiction and reality actually converge. In the past couple of years, multiple news outlets have done investigative pieces about the company Abyss Creations, creators of the “RealDolls.” It was most notably featured on CNN’s Mostly Human with Laurie Seagall. RealDolls are incredibly lifelike humanoid robots which are manufactured and sold to be “sex partners.” In her interview with founder, Matt McMullan, Laurie Seagall reports that at the RealDolls factory, “customers can build their own girlfriends -- choosing everything from breast size and nipple type to nail color and lipstick.” When the line debuted, “two female bodies and three female faces” were made available for purchase. Only in the January of this year did the company announce a line of male sex dolls.

None of this is really surprising, and in a lot of ways it’s the very literal culmination of a sociological theory well known by most: sexual objectification. Sexual objectification occurs when “a woman’s body or body parts are singled out and separated from her as a person and she is viewed primarily as a physical object of male sexual desire.” In science fiction films, this idea is taken to the next level: the female bodies in question are, quite literally, objects, often created and built by men for sexual purposes. In Blade Runner, Pris is described as a “basic pleasure model,” and in the sequel, Blade Runner 2049, essentially every female android or A.I.’s purpose is to provide male pleasure. Even in Westworld, which is a very progressive show in a lot of ways, reflects this weird disparity: in a theme park where the rich and wealthy come to act out their sadistic fantasies, we only ever see the female “hosts” acting out the role of prostitute or sex object, be it willing or unwilling. That’s not to say that neither of these instances aren’t themselves commentary on the way society treats women in general, I think there is an undercurrent of that present in most iterations of the female sex-bot trope. But as we’ve come to realize, these ideas are no longer purely theoretical, as evidenced by the work that is being done to create a more “intimate” artificial intelligence.

Throughout the script, Ava’s humanlike qualities are parried with reminders that she is very much not human. This is most apparent in her design, described on page 20 of the script, when Caleb sees Ava for the first time:

INT. HOUSE/OBSERVATION ROOM - DAY

- what appears to be a neon coloured jellyfish. Tendrils like axons, hanging in a black-blue liquid space.

REVEAL -
- the jellyfish is contained in a glass orb.
Which is held in an exposed cavity at the back of machined skull-shape...

... which is part of a robot girl.

Her name is AVA.

She’s an extraordinary piece of engineering.

Proportioned as a slender female in her twenties, her limbs and torso are a mixture of metal and plastic and carbon fibre.

The carbon fibre is charcoal colour. The plastic is cream. The metal has the yellow-warmth of nickel.

The shapes of her body approximate the form of muscle. There are biceps, and breasts. Her hands have five delicate digits.

Her body-structure is covered in a delicate skin. The skin is a mesh, in the pattern of a honeycomb. Like a spiderweb, it is almost invisible unless side-lit.

The one part of her that is not obviously an inorganic construct is her face - which is that of a strikingly beautiful girl. Created in a defined oval, from the top of the forehead to just below her chin. Indistinguishable from a real girl in its appearance and in the way it moves - except for one thing.

There is a very slight, almost imperceptible blankness in her eyes.

Much like Caleb, the script switches between seeing Ava as a person and a machine. Ava is a “girl”, but she is also “an extraordinary piece of machinery”; she is “proportioned as a slender female,” not a female; her body shape “approximates” the form of muscle, it is not muscle. Her face might be “indistinguishable from a real girl” but other than that, we are never deceived, visually speaking, that we are seeing anything other than a piece of machinery. From the first introduction, we understand that Ava treads the very thin line between human and humanoid. In a lot of ways, this mirrors the way women are seen in mainstream media. Feminine, absolutely — human? Not always. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Nathan’s Japanese “maid” Kyoko, who has no speaking lines over the course of the entire film. Nathan explains this away as Kyoko not understanding English. Caleb discovers midway through the film that Kyoko is an android as well, and Nathan has programmed her to not speak. She acts as Nathan’s live-in maid, lover, and cook — a silent and dutiful servant who’s entire existence revolves around giving Nathan whatever he wants. As Caleb uncovers Nathan’s history creating androids, he learns that Kyoko is a previous iteration of the technology inside of Ava. Once Kyoko became outdated, she was wiped and repurposed. She is Nathan’s property. It turns out every android Nathan has created has been female. What are the implications of this? Were they all to act as distractions to their male testers, or did Nathan know that once they stopped being useful in one way he would want to repurpose them for his own sexual needs?

Later that night, Caleb is struggling to fall asleep and turns on the television in his room. He finds that the only thing he is able to watch is Ava, alone in her room. Although initially weirded out by this turn of events, Caleb quickly falls into a lusty haze, focusing on the parts of her synthetic body that closely resemble parts of the human body that are associated with sex: her breasts, her lips, the curve of her posture as she sits. Caleb watches Ava as she draws a picture for him, and the script notes from Caleb’s point of view that “there is a powerful sense in this tiny gesture of her feeling sentient and human.” Much like the literal objectification of women, I argue that Caleb’s role in testing Ava becomes a very literal manifestation of the male gaze. Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” describes the threefold way that women become the passive object of active male gaze: “that of the camera as it records the pro-filmic event, that of the audience as it watches the final product, and that of the characters at each other within the screen illusion.” Elements of each are present with Ex Machina, and certain elements are repeated within the story-world. For instance, Caleb’s job is to evaluate Ava and her capacity for consciousness, and he conducts these tests by looking at her from an observation room, in which he is able to come and go as he pleases. Ava does not have that privilege because she is an object and not a human. Ava is under constant surveillance by CCTV cameras that ensure visibility on every part of her living area, which is monitored by Nathan and available for Caleb to watch in his own living space. And if Ava was a machine, and not a conscious human being, this might not have such disturbing implications — but Nathan is trying to prove to Caleb that Ava does in fact have artificial intelligence and is a fully realized being. Beyond that, Ava, no matter what she is physically made of, has the approximate body of a woman in her 20’s.

Over the course of the film, Caleb grows more and more attached to Ava. What is interesting is that despite Caleb’s growing suspicion that Ava is indeed artificially intelligent and has a consciousness, Caleb never tells Ava that he watches her on the CCTV feed at night. Even when he starts to believe that Ava’s captivity is morally abhorrent and tries to help break her out, he doesn’t disclose that he’s watched her without her consent. The implication of this is that despite Caleb’s growing understanding that Ava is “human,” that it is not a marker by which he changes his behavior towards her. What this tells us is that Caleb is not purely interested in breaking Ava out because she deserves to be free, but because once he frees her, he will presumably receive the object of his desire — a sexual and romantic relationship with Ava. After Ava confesses that she has feelings for Caleb, he confronts Nathan about Ava’s sexuality, asking if he gave it to her as a “smoke screen” to distract him, “a stage magician with a hot assistant.” Nathan gives a sort of roundabout answer to why he gave her sexuality, but interprets Caleb’s query a different way, telling Caleb that Ava was built with imitations of sexual organs that will create a pleasure response in her brain. Caleb tries to brush this off:

CALEB breaks off.

CALEB

That wasn’t my question.

NATHAN
 No?

CALEB

No. My real question was —

NATHAN keeps watching. There is a sudden sense that NATHAN is on the money. On some level, that was CALEB’S real question.

Ava does not cease to be the passive object of desire once Caleb recognizes she is more than a machine. In fact, her humanity and lifelike qualities are what make her an object that Caleb can acquire something from: pleasure. She is all the more worth breaking out because she is suddenly consumable. With regard to Mulvey’s classifications, Caleb as the audience, a viewer of Ava, has realized that he can do more than just gaze at her.

Feminist Hero or Evil Robotic Overlord? ... or Both?

By the end of the film, it’s clear that Ava was never truly interested in a relationship with Caleb — she was calculating in using him to help break her out. Just how calculated she was remains a mystery. When Nathan’s true motivations are revealed, it’s still unclear whether or not Ava’s desire to escape is her own or programmed:

NATHAN

Ava was a mouse in a mousetrap. And I gave her one way out. To escape, she would have to use imagination, sexuality, self- awareness, empathy, manipulation - and she did. If that isn’t AI, what the fuck is?

Is Nathan saying that, presumably like any other human, Ava’s instinct is to escape because that’s the nature of any living thing? Does it matter? A mouse isn’t programmed to want to escape a maze — but it does. A human being imprisoned wants to get out — is that programmed, or is it human nature, or both? Nathan seems to think the latter:

NATHAN

The test worked. It was a success. Ava demonstrated true AI. And you were fundamental to that. If you could just separate —

Nathan believes that Ava has passed the test and has “true AI” because she was able to manipulate Caleb into helping her. In many ways, Caleb’s “magician’s assistant” theory proved to be somewhat correct — Ava’s sexuality and female body were integral parts in persuading Caleb to help her. But is it really a trick? Any human would do the same, use the desirable parts of themselves to achieve their goals, so neither Nathan or Ava were really “cheating”. When it came down to it, Caleb knew she was a machine and it didn’t matter.

Of course, much to Nathan’s dismay, Ava and Caleb’s escape plan was successful, and Ava has broken free from her room.

A major difference between the script and the film is the inclusion of a point of view shot from Ava once she has escaped:

EXT. MEADOW/LANDING SITE - DAY

AVA’S precise POINT OF VIEW. 
 Looking at the PILOT. 


The image echoes the POV views from the computer/cell-phone cameras in the opening moments of the film. 


Facial recognition vectors flutter around the PILOT’S face. And when he opens his mouth to speak, we don’t hear words. 


We hear pulses of monotone noise. Low pitch. Speech as pure pattern recognition. 


This is how AVA sees us. And hears us. It feels completely alien. 


This is a noticeable omission in the final cut of the film. In the film, it’s implied that Ava has true artificial intelligence, and while her presence in the world of humans might be frightening, to say she doesn’t deserve freedom would be another argument entirely. But with the inclusion of this scene, its spelled out pretty basically: Ava is alien, inhuman. This form of intelligence is nothing that we can relate to.

In Ex Machina, we spend the runtime of the film, much like Caleb, learning to accept the fact that Ava is fully self-aware and we grow to sympathize with her and root for her escape. Depending on how bad you feel for Caleb, Ava’s escape in the final film is seen as a victory — she successfully made her way out of her prison and into the world. I think how the audience responds to her leaving Caleb behind falls into various different camps: when I first watched the film, I was ecstatic because I saw through the performance of the relatable everyman that is Caleb, and thought of him as just another male figure who would seek to imprison Ava, this time in a different sort of prison. To unpack that further, I related to Ava’s struggle through the view of another woman, and saw her destruction of Nathan and Caleb as empowering. Perhaps if you looked at it from a different lens, say human vs. inhuman rather than female vs. male, leaving Caleb behind would be a demonstration of Ava’s lack of empathy, a human trait. But the film has shown us that empathy is not something that exists in every human — Nathan is as cold and calculating as any machine, and even with his knowledge that his creations are conscious, has imprisoned them and then repurposed them as sex slaves once he moves on to an improved model. It’s hard not to root for Ava when you think about the circumstances of her “birth.” In killing Nathan and leaving Caleb behind, Ava is shedding the oppressive male authority figures in her life. This ceased to be a simple battle of human versus robot when Nathan conceived Ava in the image of a woman — in creating her as an object of heterosexual male sexual desire, this became a battle between genders as well.

Conclusion

About midway through the film, Caleb tells Ava about a theory called “Mary in the Room.” This was a real thought experiment posed by Frank Jackson in an article entitled “Epiphenominal Qualia:”

“Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like "red", "blue", and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal cords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence "The sky is blue.” What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color
television monitor? Will she learn anything or not?”

Caleb tells Ava that he learned about this theory while he was studying AI theory in college, and adds the caveat to the end of the thought experiment: “The thought experiment was to show the students the difference between a computer and a human mind. The computer is Mary in the black and white room. The human is when she walks out.”

This thought experiment is echoed in Ava’s eventual escape from her own version of the “black and white room.” The real question is — does she learn anything or not? When Ava achieves her goals, does she prove that she is human merely by stepping outside, or is it in what she feels once she is outside that gives us a definitive answer. In the script version, Ava is still in the black and white room — the world is code, vectors and patterns, decidedly inhuman. In the film, this is left up the the interpretation of the viewer. After Caleb’s pleas for freedom fade, Ava, wearing the skin of her previous iterations, walks out into the world — a colorful eden by which she makes her final escape via helicopter. The effect of the final cut is more moving than bone- chilling, and leads the viewer to believe that Ava has stepped out of the black and white box both physically and metaphorically.

Caleb is the protagonist of Ex Machina, without a doubt. The experience is framed through his point of view, and changes in the films POV are minimal. Nathan selecting Caleb to be the conductor of the Turing test is the inciting incident for the events of the film — but much like Caleb, we are duped into thinking this is because Caleb is a particularly skilled coder.
Really, Caleb is just a normal guy, and Ava is the one who is going on a journey — it’s rare that a film leaves it’s protagonist behind to die alone and still uplifts the viewer, but that’s Ex Machina.

In a lot of ways, this film falls prey to the same issues of being, to employ a colloquialism, “male gaze-y.” Whatever criticisms of sexual objectification it raises, it still does exactly that. But in many ways, Ex Machina makes use of sexist science fiction tropes in an attempt to explore and unpack them. Male sexuality, as represented by Caleb and Nathan, is not shown as being a positive force. Nathan is an oppressive figure who creates and destroys female effigies to feed his god complex, and Caleb is a lonely, undersexed coder who convinces himself that his desire to help Ava escape is anything other than a knight in shining army fantasy fulfillment that will end in his receipt of the prize: Ava herself. Ava’s escape, with the help of Kyoko, is emblematic of the collective power of women to destroy the oppressive male power structure that has kept them imprisoned1. When Ava finally makes it to the outside world, there is no hint of a greater plan to destroy humanity — in fact, it turns out something Ava told Caleb was true:

CALEB

Where would you go if you did go outside?

AVA

You mean if I could go outside. If I was permitted.

CALEB says nothing. Does not overtly respond to the emphasis she has placed on her lack of freedom.
But their gaze locks for a beat.

AVA (CONT’D)

I’m not sure. There are so many options.

AVA (CONT’D)

Maybe a busy pedestrian and traffic intersection in a city.

CALEB

A traffic intersection?

AVA

Is that a bad idea?

CALEB

It wasn’t what I was expecting.

AVA (CONT’D)

A traffic intersection would provide concentrated but shifting view of human life.

CALEB
 People watching.

And in the final scene:

EXT. TRAFFIC INTERSECTION - DAY

a busy traffic intersection. Somewhere in North America. In the crowd, we glimpse AVA. Just for a moment.


CUT TO BLACK.

In Ava’s final acts before the film ends are as enigmatic as the film itself. Is Ava gathering intelligence, or is she participating in one of the most human activities imaginable: watching other humans? Ex Machina doesn’t give explicit answers to any of these questions, but it poses them, and I think that’s where its power resides.

Works Cited

Garland, Alex, director. Ex Machina. A24, 2015.
“I Love You, Bot.” Mostly Human, performance by Laurie Seagall, season 1, episode 3, CNN,

www.cnn.com/videos/cnnmoney/2017/03/08/mostly-human-i-love-you-bot.cnnmoney.

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Visual and Other Pleasures, 1989, pp. 14–26., doi:10.1007/978-1-349-19798-9_3.