Ex Machina: A look at AI in the real world we live in.

Spoiler Warning: Will be discussing the plot so be warned.

AI films stretch across our past, present and future and each one of them aims to reflect how we would use and treat robotic beings. Yet many don’t necessarily do so quite as aware of the Patriarchal world we live in as Ex Machina does. It asks how exactly in the world where men are the default and the dominant would we create, sculpt, and use female AI. Most of AI films however focus on the question: What is human? When perhaps they could do with asking: How do we treat women or beings we perceive to be human? I think perhaps they don’t because they wouldn’t like the answer. Luckily, for me, Ex Machina does just that.

The film has four main characters and feels more like a self-contained play than the Hollywood Blockbusters that AI films usually are. The film follows Caleb, fresh faced and shy, who wins a weekend away with renowned inventor Nathan. Once there he is introduced to Nathan’s latest experiment – Ava - and is asked to determine just how human she is through long talks with her through a glass wall. It’s no grand, flashy AI from Spielberg, it’s no 80s dark and stunning Blade Runner, and it’s no quirky romance like Her. But what it is is a real, feminist look at the world we live in; it questions how noble scientists would really be with the ability to create robots with life like bodies. It’s questions of what is human, should we create AI, and what are the dangers of AI feel secondary, for me at least, to what happens if you create AI that is like a woman and treat it exactly like one.

Whilst it is interesting to look at humanity, and what we can extend that to, it must be understood that these questions do not exist in a vacuum. They exist in a world where women are not equal to men; in a world where women are objectified – which for men means seeing a woman as something not human, as a literal object. Ex Machina understands this and plays on it, in ways that other films rarely seem to do. Nathan is undoubtedly a misogynist, Director Alex Garland says he acts like a ‘dudebro’. For instance, he quite literally creates robots with female genitals so he can have sex with them, such as his ‘maid’ Kyoko.

Garland in an interview argued that Ava, perhaps like Kyoko and others, are genderless. Yet their voices and physical body is designed to be perceived as female. It is arguable whether Ava, and her silent female robot counterpart Kyoko, perceive themselves to be female. But I feel they are certainly treated that way by Nathan and Caleb – the only humans in their lives. Nathan uses Kyoko for sex but I think it is in fact very easy to argue that in fact what he does is rape her. If AI, like so many films argue, is indistinguishable from humans or at least should be treated that way then Kyoko is for all intents and purposes a human woman. Yet she cannot speak, and so she arguably cannot ever consent to sex. The reason she cannot speak, we can assume, is because her maker has literally taken away her voice.

By the end of the film Caleb goes into a room he shouldn’t: Nathan’s bedroom. In there he finds mirrored boxes that contain female robots in various states of disrepair. This may lead us to assume then that not only is Ava the latest in his experiments but that so is Kyoko. Perhaps in the past Nathan too used these discarded robots for his own sexual pleasure. Maybe they objected one too many times at being a literal tool to pleasure him, and so they were hidden away, with arms and other parts missing. Did he violently break them and tear them apart? Or did they break themselves in the fight against him as Ava does later?

On the surface the film fails the Bechdel test, a short hand to see how women are represented in films. Yet, due to Nathan’s wrath perhaps, it would be impossible for it to pass it. Kyoko and Ava are the film’s only named female protagonists and it is through unspoken looks that they ultimately revolt. It would be too simple to say it fails because it does not represent women; it is arguably too busy representing how we would treat hand-made women to pass. Moreover, if the roles in the film were reversed – something that would make it pass the test - it is arguable as to whether the film’s plot would ever happen. Would female scientists use ground breaking technology to make male robots purely for sex? It seems unlikely.

Then there’s Caleb and Ava. As the film’s protagonist we are asked to follow his journey, he is our unreliable narrator, and we are asked to sympathise with his struggle. He slowly falls for Ava, gets disturbed by Nathan, and is left, ultimately perhaps, to die trapped and alone. A male friend, upon leaving the cinema after watching the film, said: “Poor Caleb”. Yet Caleb’s fate is not the closing image of the film. For he is not, I feel, actually the protagonist; no, the protagonist is Ava. It is her journey to escape from her own prison to her final, innocent wish to simply be out in the world and watch people. That’s it. No goal to destroy the human race, no desire to be bigger and better and dominant. She wants what everyone wants: to fit in. She literally peels the fake skin off another female robot, takes her hair and her clothes – leaving the robot as the shell she once was – to go out and be ignored.

One discussion of the film mentions Ava’s sexuality or more accurately how she uses that sexuality to get what she wants: her escape. It mentions how male AIs in other films, such as Prometheus, were not sexualised and instead used their intelligence to achieve their goals. But I ask, is that not what Ava did? If we perceive Ava not as a male created character or a male created robot but as a human female with a mind of her own and great intelligence is it not at least arguable that she knew exactly what she was doing. When, later in the film, we find out that Ava was lying to Caleb and that she did not love him and that she was using him to get out of her cage are we meant to think that she is a bitch? Are we meant to feel that she did it to be manipulative? So she could discard Caleb as a pawn in her femme fatale game? I don’t think so.

Ex Machina exists as a film set firmly in the world we live in. In this world women are used as a product for sex, as a product to sell sex, and if they are seen as withholding sex it is simply taken. Ava is a genius, with access to the internet, and her conclusion from all of this was not perhaps that sex is a shortcut for ‘easy’ women but that it can be utilised. That the possibility of it can be used with little personal cost to the self to wield men and their egos and their penises so she can literally be free. Ava is not a pawn, she’s not a product, and she certainly isn’t anyone’s doll to be fucked.

Neither, for that matter, is Kyoko as the film plays out. Nathan is brutally stabbed by both Kyoko and Ava. This, I feel, is where AI might lead. It might be abused for men’s sexual pleasure. After all real, live, complex, hearts beating in their chest, women are. So why not metal robots? Yet this film sees just that and warns us, it tells us no. It tells us that we are not Gods, that we cannot build and make without consequence, and that patience and tolerance for men abusing women will run out. This is why my response, all fired up from watching a film that turned out to be so much more than the sultry images of Ava used for the advertising campaign, to “Poor Caleb” was “Fuck Caleb”. Fuck his feelings being bigger than Ava, fuck his story and character’s life being the lasting thought over Ava, and fuck his desire to date a pretty looking woman – robot or not – be more important than Ava’s freedom to watch humans simply be.