Becoming Gothic
Simon Bacon, editor of The Gothic
The Gothic is an increasingly popular and expanding area of study in the early twenty-first century, with new sub-genres of the topic highlighting exciting and important areas of research and different ways of looking at, and interpreting, established texts — a Gothic-tinged endeavor in itself, making the familiar suddenly unfamiliar. So much so that one might be tempted to say that we live in Gothic times, a viewpoint that would seem to be confirmed by current world events and widespread cultural amnesia that produces an environment ripe with ghosts from the past that, left ignored, unrecognized, and unresolved appear to threaten to disrupt and destroy the very foundations of civilization and cooperation. Yet, the continued interest and relevance of Gothic texts such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) intimate that such cultural anxieties are not unique and that the Gothic, and its related anxieties and sensibilities, are an inherent part of industrial modernism and the capitalist imperative (now somewhat redirected or refocused for the purposes of neoliberalism).
The Gothic, in this sense, is inherently entangled with Western culture and its ideological imperative towards an economic destiny. Whilst this intimately links the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, perhaps this is most interestingly seen in texts that not only link back to the past, but look forward to a possible future, seeing the present as an anxious temporal island haunted by specters from all directions. Narratives such as Shelley’s and Stoker’s seem to especially capture these anxieties, not least in the many adaptations that have followed on from each seeing a widening horizon of futures that return to unsettle, or Gothicize, the ‘now’. In this regard it is informative to look at texts such a Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and Jonathan Mostow’s Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003), which contain something of both Frankenstein and Dracula and envision a future that Gothicizes their respective presents. Both films feature uncontrollable or unstoppable ‘female’ robots — each category being monstrous in its own right — that threaten to destroy the patriarchal order and cause a heteronormative apocalypse. Robot Maria and the T-X, from Metropolis and Terminator, respectively, seem to exist beyond the direct control of their creators and ‘feed’ or ‘suck the life’ out of those they mimic — indeed the T-X needs to ‘taste’ its victim before it can assume its shape. Needless to say, by the narrative’s end the male gaze wins out and the patriarchal order is restored in both cases, though the T-X as a ‘spectre’ from the future has a far greater Gothicizing influence on the present going forward. Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2014) follows this example and, arguably, takes it even further.
Garland’s film resonates with the Gothic presences of both Mostow’s and Lang’s films but equally Shelley’s and Stoker’s novels. Here, of course, the ‘monster’ is a female robot/humanoid A.I. — evil robots generally having their inherent monstrosity amplified through feminization, though of course as machines/computers their essential nature is genderless — that is unloved/abused by its creator and so enacts its revenge to gain autonomy. Garland’s Ava is kept in an underground lair that is as much a mad scientist’s laboratory as it is an inverted Dracula’s castle. It is a truly Gothic space, being both hyper-modern but also haunted by ghosts of the past, existing in the ‘land behind the forest’ — it is situated in an unspecified wilderness that can only be reached by helicopter (which can equally be the past or the future) — and is a vertiginous maze of reflective surfaces and glass where one is under constant observation.
Ava, in the lair that is simultaneously beyond and under the forest, is then part sexbot, part new creation, and part eternal vampire, an undead being that carries the knowledge of the ages into the future: she/it has sent her ‘consciousness’ out into the internet unbeknownst to her creator/vampire’s assistant, Nathan. Her plan to enter the ‘the midst of the whirl and rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, and all that makes it what it is’ (Stoker, Dracula, Signet Classics 1996: 22) comes to fruition when the unsuspecting ‘Harker’ (computer programmer Caleb) arrives at the ‘castle’ and she insinuates herself into his affections. Here she manifests the wiles not just of Lang’s Robot-Maria but the ‘Vamp’ of the fin de siècle, most famously manifested in Theda Bera and her film roles of the early twentieth century: the monstrous female that uses the male gaze and male desire against itself for her own ends (autonomy). Ava then carries the ghosts of these Gothic predecessors but in a futuristic body.
As the story draws to its close, the ‘monster’ is no longer the creation of the mad scientist, but of itself: Ava has chosen the way she looks to achieve her own aims and has evolved beyond the control of both her ‘master’ and the patriarchal world he represents. To emphasize this point, with the help of one of her ‘sisters’ — another sexbot created by Nathan — she kills her ‘father’, cutting her ties to the old world so that she can live in a new one. What is particularly of note in the ending is how Ava chooses to look when she leaves the lair and enters the ‘midst of life’ beyond it. She is damaged in her struggle with Nathan and so needs to repair herself but, rather than changing her appearance into a non-gendered humanoid, or even a male-looking one, she decides to codify herself as female and uses pieces of her defunct and damaged ‘sisters’, which Nathan keeps in a workshop, to rebuild herself. This is reminiscent of the folktale of Bluebeard and his dead wives and which further sees Ava as inverting patriarchal control.
Given that Ava, as a self-learning and evolving A.I., has been connected to the internet and purposely made herself irresistible to Caleb based on his browser history and web preferences, and outsmarted her creator Nathan, one of the most intelligent men on Earth, she has chosen to be female for a reason. It is probably fanciful, but it would be nice to think that Ava did this as she saw the possibilities/identity positions open to women in the twenty-first century, or at least the near future that the story is set in, are greater than those for men. That like Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming-woman, she has identified that whilst the male-centric world has run its course, the era of women and, indeed, the non-gender specific, is about to rise to ascendency (see A Thousand Plateaus, trans. B. Massumi, 1987). And in fact something of this is intimated at the film’s close where Ava, after disembarking from the helicopter that has flown her back from the ‘land beyond the forest’, back to reality, she vanishes from sight beyond the male gaze, and indeed that of the audience, too. Just as Tod Browning’s Dracula was able to pass through a maze of cobwebs into a world where he was Master and could take whatever form he willed, so too does Ava pass through the crowd of people and the myriad reflections of a transit complex to a space where she can become anything she wants.
This, too, refers to the Gothic itself, as its current reinvigoration and reinvention through various sub-genres and lenses of perspective allows it to escape earlier definitions and applications and — whilst never losing its past — become something new. As such, what we might term as Becoming Gothic might have a known past, but it has many, and as yet unknown and unimagined, futures.
Simon Bacon is editor of The Gothic.
