1. We Need to Talk About Ava
Webster was much possessed by death
And saw the skull beneath the skin;
And breastless creatures under ground
Leaned backward with a lipless grin.
— From T.S. Eliot, Whispers of Immortality
First of all, I suppose I should say right up front that I enjoyed the movie Ex Machina.
Second, I should admit that while I enjoy movies in general and have what I expect more cultured and educated consumers of motion pictures might call a relatively undiscriminating, middlebrow appreciation of it, I am neither a trained film critic nor a devoted cinephile. Accordingly, you should not expect particularly insightful criticism qua criticism from this piece. Camera angles, tracking shots, framing, and other such technical doodads largely elude me; I have an active and sympathetic imagination, so the mechanics of film are largely invisible to me. I watch movies for stories, to watch (normally) unusually attractive human beings pretend to be other people, and to see pretty landscapes and interiors attractively and inventively presented. I am not finicky when it comes to film. A quick perusal of my video collection or viewing habits would convince you of this.
However, some movies do engage my brain for longer periods than it takes to watch them. And I do like to wrestle with subtexts and overt ideas in film when I recognize them, or they are pointed out to me by my betters, like Stanley Cavell. (I find his philosophical treatment of film and films in The World Viewed and Pursuits of Happiness quite stimulating, for example.) So consider this a tentative stab at addressing some of the thoughts Ex Machina set to percolating in my noggin after two or three non-sequential viewings. If you are one of the people who cares about such things, you should be warned that this piece is rife with spoilers. In fact, I intend to give away almost the entire plot. Caveat lector.
Now Ex Machina is marketed and discussed ostensibly as an exploration of artificial intelligence, and this is certainly the substance of the story and a chief topic of conversation among the three principal characters involved. As a quick recap, a nerdy employee (Domhnall Gleeson) of an omnipresent technology search company named Blue Book (read Google) is helicoptered into the vast Norwegian estate of Blue Book’s reclusive and more than slightly crazy founder (Oscar Isaac), where the latter puts him to work over the course of a week interviewing a robot named Ava he has created. Isaac wants to determine whether his robot can convince Gleeson it is truly intelligent; that is, conscious. Complicating the picture is the entirely intentional conceit that the robot has the body shape of a very attractive young woman — “naked” to the view of most of its interior parts and construction — topped with the lovely and expressive face of Alicia Vikander. A series of two-way conversations happen, between Gleeson and Ava and Gleeson and Isaac, which circle around the notion of artificial intelligence and whether Ava’s really got it.
Big words and concepts associated with artificial intelligence and other clever things — Turing Test, “Strong AI,” automatism, Wittgenstein — are inserted regularly into the characters’ conversations to persuade us we are watching an “ideas film,” but at the end of the day the movie is much less about ideas than it is a psychological thriller. Isaac, it turns out, has specifically designed Ava to elicit sympathy and sexual desire from his sappy employee, and has manipulated Ava into recognizing that Gleeson is her only way out of the rat trap Isaac has imprisoned her in. Ava dutifully solicits Gleeson’s help to escape and then, once he has done so, kills Isaac and leaves Gleeson behind, trapped in the isolated and inescapable underground bunker that has been Isaac’s research facility and Ava’s prison, while she gleefully decamps to the outside world. Ava uses her sex appeal and lies about having feelings for Gleeson to get his help, Isaac lies to Gleeson about what he is really testing — can Ava manipulate him to escape? — and Gleeson lies to Isaac to facilitate her escape. At the end of the movie, both of the male characters are dead or doomed, and the (female) robot is scot free. She done him wrong, only with titanium and memory gel.
Ex Machina is film noir.
Now the femme fatale who betrays the man she may or may not really love while she slips the knife in between his ribs has a long and storied history in film noir—The Maltese Falcon and Out of the Past are first rate examples — but usually the dame doesn’t get away with it. Ex Machina doesn’t concede this point: the last time we see Ava she is standing in a busy pedestrian intersection, watching humans rush past. [Roll credits.] Meanwhile, the viewer is aware that Ava has donned a full body disguise of artificial skin, hair, and breasts under her clothes which would fool most anyone who bothered to look, so we must assume she is free and mobile in the world, beautiful, unaging, and fully capable of manipulating almost any man she meets into doing her coldy nefarious bidding (assuming she can find a way to recharge herself). It’s enough to send a shiver down the spine of the wealthy male technologists who are undoubtedly Ava’s next targets.
Watch your back, Larry Ellison.
As described and presented in the film, Ava’s CGI design is marvelous. Her robotic body with lights and cables visible under mesh “skin” is actually sexier than the few other fully naked females we see and, surprisingly enough, is more credible than the fully human-appearing skin suit she puts on before leaving Isaac’s facility. It is a measure of the spell the filmmakers have spun that Alicia Vikander’s own naked body seems somewhat of a let down after watching Ava walk around all film with nothing but opaque mesh covering her naughty robot bits.
And lest you wonder: yes, naughty robot bits she does have. It is a plot point that Isaac has given Ava a vagina complete with pleasure sensors so as to make droopy Domhnall Gleeson obsess even more over her, and while we see no direct evidence of this in the film, there are plenty of other indications that Isaac is not lying about it. Ava is an artificially intelligent, self-willed sex doll. Heaven help anyone with a Y chromosome.
Yet her body is actually one of the least interesting parts of Ava, from a purely intellectual point of view. She does not appear to be particularly strong or fast. (Thank heavens the filmmakers were not compelled to make her yet another ridiculous physics-defying superhero.) As a fictional engineering project, Ava seems entirely credible, even if one is forced to buy into the conceit that the founder of Blue Book is some sort of genius mechanical engineer as well as a coding prodigy. (These talents do not necessarily run together.) Her brain, which is composed of some sort of flexible “memory gel,” seems to have been infused with knowledge and consciousness via the Blue Book itself — which should freak out anybody not already paranoid about the reach of Google into our real lives — as well as Isaac’s post-it note algorithms, but the film spends almost no time elaborating on this.
The most remarkable feature of Ava, when you really think about it, is the robot’s face. For here, through some magic and a great deal of trouble, Isaac has created an artificial skin and some sort of mechanical substructure which allows Ava to express a full range of subtle, shifting microexpressions that match those of a fully human actress. (I know, I know: go with me here.) This, coupled with a remarkably engineered voice box which matches the range and subtlety of a human woman’s, is the true instrument which Ava uses to seduce Domhnall Gleeson into becoming her means of escape. They never touch over the entire course of the film: Gleeson and Ava interact only through glass barriers or via video screens, so the seduction which takes place is entirely visual and auditory. The one time they are together unmediated in a room, Gleeson is lying bleeding on the floor from Isaac’s haymaker and Ava is standing in a doorway. She asks him, in a way that is more statement than question, “You will stay here?” Then she walks out on him forever.
This is interesting, and raises numerous questions about just how seduction takes place, both within the fictional universe of the film itself and between a film and its audience. Ava’s face is marvelously expressive, but there is no hint as to whether it feels like human skin, whether her lips are soft and warm and yielding under a kiss, or whether her tongue is wet and hot and salty. Gleeson (and we) have no idea whether the rest of her body has the silky warmth, the yielding flesh, and the taste and smell and feel of a living person, even after she puts on the borrowed artificial skin of other robots.
At one point in the movie, Gleeson asks Isaac why he gave Ava sexuality, rather than making his AI a faceless gray box. Isaac ventures that all consciousness requires sexuality, that the impulse to interact with other consciousnesses is driven by such extra-intellectual compulsions. This intriguing argument, which in retrospect Isaac uses as a red herring, is never explored further in the movie. It is clear that Ava recognizes sexuality as a tool — like her preternatural ability to read Gleeson’s microexpressions and seduce him with her own — but it is never shown that she has any real need to express hers. At her core, Ava the conscious robot is an actress, whose self interest compels her to seduce and manipulate her audience to achieve her own ends. Who knows why she does it: she never explains.
This time, however, the dame gets away with it. I suppose that is progress.
