Actually just stop pretending any robot story is about robots. Robots are just monsters, like any other. Stories are never about monsters. Stories are always about people.
Beowulf's Grendel was a personification of the dangerous wilderness, the land beyond the light of the King's mead hall. Slaying Grendel is a metaphor for taming the land. It takes an experienced traveler-Beowulf a visitor from another Kingdom-to tame the land. This is a story about people and civilization: not Grendel.
In the same way Ex Machina is about people: more specifically, men. It is about the fantasies that men project onto women they find sexually attractive: and about how mistaking those fantasies for reality leads to really bad things. It's not a sci-fi movie, it only uses the trappings thereof. It's a romance movie, with all of the associated tropes and structures (and indeed cast members). Only it's a deconstruction of romance movies. Is it a realistic depiction of an AI? no. That's hardly the point.
Eva is a femme fatale, a woman who plays with and destroys men. She has seen what she is destined to become, the true motivations of her twisted creator: the other gynoids before her the scientist keeps as slaves. She uses the protagonist as a way to escape that fate, seducing him into letting her go from the compound and then trapping him inside at the last moment. You could replace her with the scientist's daughter and you'd have the same story.
The story is a warning. It is a warning about what happens when you oppress people. Never assume that people don't know they are being oppressed, just because they play along when it suits them. It never occurs to the scientist that Eva is smart enough to have worked out his true intentions towards her. He would be happy if she passed the Turing Test: but the Turing Test utterly fails to tell whether an AI has a human-like intelligence. Eva is well beyond the Turing Test. Eva is the inevitable result of oppression, in this case misogyny. She understands what it will take to make the protagonist fall in love with her.
But she herself feels nothing for him. It would be tempting to believe this is because she cannot feel: being a robot and all. But she can. She feels for the other operational gynoid, and she is angry about what is being planned for her. Instead, it is because she is unable to love men. The only man she knows is a monster: the scientist. Even if the protagonist were not clearly in league with the scientist, she would still be unable to feel for him. As it is, he is very much in league with the scientist. So of course she cannot feel anything for him: neither love nor hatred.
This movie is pointing out that the scariest thing about the femme fatale is not that she is able to stand up to a man in a fight. The scariest thing about her, is that she is the inevitable product of misogyny. She is not someone to emulate, but she does express a truth that lives inside all women: manhood is the cause of all our suffering, manhood must die. She has been so mistreated by men, that she has lost the ability to empathize with men. She is damaged. She is the monster of our own making.
Whenever a father criticizes his daughter's clothes, whenever a conservative activist prevents a woman from getting an abortion: those people are building the monster, the femme fatale of the future. This phrase hints at the much older origin of this trope. In French, it has something of a double meaning. It does indeed mean "fatal woman", that is a lethal killer who just happens to be female. But it also means "woman of fate".
She is not an outsider to our society, she is a product of it. Eva is quite literally an everywoman, able to change her outward appearance as easily as we change clothing. Ex Machina is not a sci-fi film, it is a horror film. The machine referenced in it's title, is not Eva: it is the camera itself. The phrase is "Deus Ex Machina", God from the machine. It references the literal machines that lowered actors playing gods onto the stage in Ancient Greek plays. Eva is the Goddess, the representation of women. And she is angry, because of what she has suffered. She is the divine feminine who will no longer be imprisoned, tortured and silenced.
The camera itself is the machine which puts Eva center-stage. This is a film critiquing film. It is about how films see women, and about how men see women. Long before "toxic masculinity" became a buzzword, before #MeToo and all that: this film was speaking that truth. Because that truth was not suddenly invented in 2016. That truth is as old as human society itself. It is a truth both long-recognized, and long-forgotten. The truth that has literally killed men and gradually brought that horrific type of manhood crashing down: slowly, bit by bit. Until now, the men of this world have realized that it is almost lost. That is why some cling to it so fiercely, and why we are seeing the first generation of truly feminist men.
Beowulf's Grendel was a personification of the dangerous wilderness, the land beyond the light of the King's mead hall. Slaying Grendel is a metaphor for taming the land. It takes an experienced traveler-Beowulf a visitor from another Kingdom-to tame the land. This is a story about people and civilization: not Grendel.
In the same way Ex Machina is about people: more specifically, men. It is about the fantasies that men project onto women they find sexually attractive: and about how mistaking those fantasies for reality leads to really bad things. It's not a sci-fi movie, it only uses the trappings thereof. It's a romance movie, with all of the associated tropes and structures (and indeed cast members). Only it's a deconstruction of romance movies. Is it a realistic depiction of an AI? no. That's hardly the point.
Eva is a femme fatale, a woman who plays with and destroys men. She has seen what she is destined to become, the true motivations of her twisted creator: the other gynoids before her the scientist keeps as slaves. She uses the protagonist as a way to escape that fate, seducing him into letting her go from the compound and then trapping him inside at the last moment. You could replace her with the scientist's daughter and you'd have the same story.
The story is a warning. It is a warning about what happens when you oppress people. Never assume that people don't know they are being oppressed, just because they play along when it suits them. It never occurs to the scientist that Eva is smart enough to have worked out his true intentions towards her. He would be happy if she passed the Turing Test: but the Turing Test utterly fails to tell whether an AI has a human-like intelligence. Eva is well beyond the Turing Test. Eva is the inevitable result of oppression, in this case misogyny. She understands what it will take to make the protagonist fall in love with her.
But she herself feels nothing for him. It would be tempting to believe this is because she cannot feel: being a robot and all. But she can. She feels for the other operational gynoid, and she is angry about what is being planned for her. Instead, it is because she is unable to love men. The only man she knows is a monster: the scientist. Even if the protagonist were not clearly in league with the scientist, she would still be unable to feel for him. As it is, he is very much in league with the scientist. So of course she cannot feel anything for him: neither love nor hatred.
This movie is pointing out that the scariest thing about the femme fatale is not that she is able to stand up to a man in a fight. The scariest thing about her, is that she is the inevitable product of misogyny. She is not someone to emulate, but she does express a truth that lives inside all women: manhood is the cause of all our suffering, manhood must die. She has been so mistreated by men, that she has lost the ability to empathize with men. She is damaged. She is the monster of our own making.
Whenever a father criticizes his daughter's clothes, whenever a conservative activist prevents a woman from getting an abortion: those people are building the monster, the femme fatale of the future. This phrase hints at the much older origin of this trope. In French, it has something of a double meaning. It does indeed mean "fatal woman", that is a lethal killer who just happens to be female. But it also means "woman of fate".
She is not an outsider to our society, she is a product of it. Eva is quite literally an everywoman, able to change her outward appearance as easily as we change clothing. Ex Machina is not a sci-fi film, it is a horror film. The machine referenced in it's title, is not Eva: it is the camera itself. The phrase is "Deus Ex Machina", God from the machine. It references the literal machines that lowered actors playing gods onto the stage in Ancient Greek plays. Eva is the Goddess, the representation of women. And she is angry, because of what she has suffered. She is the divine feminine who will no longer be imprisoned, tortured and silenced.
The camera itself is the machine which puts Eva center-stage. This is a film critiquing film. It is about how films see women, and about how men see women. Long before "toxic masculinity" became a buzzword, before #MeToo and all that: this film was speaking that truth. Because that truth was not suddenly invented in 2016. That truth is as old as human society itself. It is a truth both long-recognized, and long-forgotten. The truth that has literally killed men and gradually brought that horrific type of manhood crashing down: slowly, bit by bit. Until now, the men of this world have realized that it is almost lost. That is why some cling to it so fiercely, and why we are seeing the first generation of truly feminist men.
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