Robot Escape as an Allegory of Female Liberation in Ex Machina
Deliberately and loudly gender-political, Alex Garland’s psychological sci-fi thriller, Ex Machina, presents an allegory of female self-actualization and liberation from male possession and control. Although we’re implicated in Caleb’s perspective (played by Domnhall Gleeson) from the beginning, the female lead, Ava (Alicia Vikander), is arguably the film’s real protagonist.
Garland illustrates the story of an android named Ava, who is able to use the very human faculties of emotional manipulation and seduction in order to escape the confines of her condition as the research subject of two men. Clearly cognizant, Ava is trapped in a robot body and the glass cage built by her creator, Nathan (Oscar Isaac), the CEO of a global search engine company. Caleb, a talented computer programmer at the company, ‘wins’ (we later discover that he was purposely selected) a week’s stay at his CEO’s outlying estate, where Caleb’s real use is to examine whether Ava possesses true consciousness.
With the name Ava being a variation of the biblical Eve, and Nathan’s appropriation of God-like power in creating her, the metaphor of female subjugation to male authority is made explicit. Nathan’s control over the aesthetics of her robot body is also allegorical to the jurisdiction held by men over women’s bodies in a patriarchal society more generally. Thus a traditional, gendered power dynamic is maintained.
This power dynamic is eventually subverted through her literal murder of Nathan at the end of the film, fulfilling a sense of the ‘death of God’, as implied by the film’s title. Derived from the phrase ‘Deus ex machina’ or ‘God from the machine’, Ex Machina excludes the God aspect, instead exploring the birth of consciousness in pure machine. Not to mention, the film incorporates a subtle critique of human arrogance by making us question, in the first place, Ava’s will and instinct for individual freedom.
Garland emphasizes the archetypically masculine nature of Nathan’s character through his pastimes of drinking, boxing and wearing of wife-beater vests. Meanwhile, Caleb is represented as a subtler version of male authority; initially he examines Ava with the objectification of a scientist looking through a looking glass, and indeed, their encounters are always divided by the glass walls of her prison between them.
As Caleb becomes increasingly attracted to Ava, he begins to invest in helping her escape, yet this is only built upon his hope that they’ll be together in the outside world. This hope, in turn, operates on the premise that Nathan’s possession of Ava could simply be transferred to Caleb, in which case Ava would experience a very false kind of liberation. Instead, she is able to manipulate Caleb through seduction, to make him empathise with, side with and help her, even if she ultimately escapes alone. Such acts of emotional intelligence and the vigorous fight for survival confirm her possession of a human-like consciousness.
Source: IMDB
A recurring theme of Ex Machina is automation, and Jackson Pollock’s renowned 1948 painting, #5, weaves a thread throughout the film. The image is represented in Nathan’s brainstorming wall and Ava’s drawings. “He created something out of letting his mind go blank”, describes Nathan of Pollock’s painting process, and arrived somewhere “not random, not deliberate, but someplace in between.” This place in between is perhaps where true expression lies, and if this faculty can exist in both the renowned New York artist and a robot alike, then the stakes on humanity of developing AI are high.
Ava’s ability to create from this blank state therefore indicates her possession of consciousness from the beginning; though she doesn’t know, (or perhaps claims not to know, what her drawing is of, it’s a glaring hint at the existence of her selfhood. The viewer is rendered as guilty and pathetic as Caleb for believing in his vision of saving and later claiming Ava, as we are given the blatant signs of her independent conscience from very early on in the film.
Garland therefore brilliantly takes advantage of our blindspots when it comes to presenting the problematic, gendered power dynamics we expect. We see how subjugation and confinement define Ava’s existence, and yet completely miss how Caleb and Nathan both reinforce her state of captivity. We realise that we were implicated in her captivity all along, as this depended upon our blindness to the patriarchal dynamics that made up Caleb’s ignorance towards her intelligence and ability first place.