Ex Machina

Alex Garland opens and closes Ex Machina on shots of human bodies in varying degrees of substantiality, some firm, some phantom reflections. Like any story about Artificial Intelligence, the film is about what distinguishes the human — and how human we are at this point in social history and science. Spoiler alert: not very. We’re losing our humanity in our retreat from human relationships into high tech insularity and soulless ambition.  

Like any story about man aspiring to a god-like power to create life, from Frankenstein to robotics, the measure of the human is the fullest realization of the human, not its transcendence. Trying to be more than human makes you less. We need humility and acceptance to be fully human. 

Super-scientist Nathan is less than human when he creates his unnatural creatures, instead of living the normal human life of romance, relationships, sex and reproduction. His brilliance turns into evil.        Because he thinks all our lives are programmed, whether by nature or nurture, he arrogates the right to program his subjects’ lives.
     In the lonely nerd Caleb he thinks he has found a suitable gull, but Caleb’s seduction by Ava proves Nathan’s undoing. Ava highjacks the relationship Nathan planned for Caleb, in order to escape both men’s control. Ava takes over her maker’s plan the way she assumes the limbs and skin of his other models, asserting her will and breaking free not just from her maker’s control but from her besotted saviour’s as well.

The title derives from the theatrical term for a superhuman resolution to a play, that like a machine from the heavens arrives magically to solve all the characters’ problems. Here the playfully literal machine is the helicopter that delivers Caleb to Nathan’s Edenic retreat and sweeps Ava off to unsuspecting civilization at the end. But there are two metaphoric plays on the device. Nathan’s plan to create a new form of life is his attempt to produce a happy ending — for himself, not necessarily the world. The power of film, another machinery, is imaged in the framing shots of the spectrum of human substance.

The plot is weighted in Biblical and literary references. Ava is the new first woman, a technological advance upon Eve. Caleb recalls the spy Moses sent to report back from the promised land (here the Canaan of high tech). Nathan recalls the prophet who inveighed against King David, here a mad scientist maddened by ambition and the power his internet company has given him to harness all its users’ minds. These allusions draw on the Bible’s function of defining the origins of our social system. Here they augur our world to come. 

For currency the film situates itself in the matrix of modern art. Nathan uses his Pollock painting to promote the principle of unthinking spontaneity, but only in order to lower Caleb’s defences against Ava’s manipulation. He doesn’t really believe in mindless action; he’s a coder. His Blue Book search engine company is named after Wittgenstein’s journal and the Klimt painting we see is of Wittgenstein’s sister. Wittgenstein signifies three things. Though not an architect he designed a house in fastidious detail, as Nathan has done here. He's a key figure in the post-modernist denial of fixed meaning. And he argued the impossibility of certainty in understanding language -- again, one of Nathan's arguments and strategies.

The film allusions to Star Trek, Ghostbusters, It’s A Wonderful Life, etc., and the ubiquitous cameras and videotaping recall other treatments of the themes of humanity and emotional vulnerability and remind us of the film’s film-hood. This film is an artifice about the convincing artifice made to emulate life. The film is like Ava and vice versa. Caleb is a bright coder and a good man — which leaves him susceptible to seduction by a fantasy of life and love, whether in the body of a robot or in the imagery of a film. The prototypal film, of course, is Plato’s allegory of the cave, which is described in the Mary’s Room story here and is imaged in the shadow play that introduces Ava’s appearance amid human traffic.

     Perhaps the film draws on an even deeper myth in our culture — our fear of the feminine. Eve, after all, is our first woman only because the more rebellious and independent Lillith was expelled from our mythology. Ava is the new Lillith. Here what begins as an ostensible victory by a male office nerd turns into the triumph of a fabricated woman’s body, equipped with the power of female sexuality. The film may seem to be about the triumph of new robotics but it’s really the archetypal unleashing of the woman’s indomitable sexual power. Of course, it’s the male imagination that envisions the projection of evil as female. A less frightened sensibility would find in the feminine power the fulfillment of humanity, not its doom.