Saving Ex Machina

I found this post that I never published from two years ago: I had a morning to my self recently and watched Ex Machina. I found it troubling and haven't read a fair summation of all my feelings towards it anywhere; plenty of reviews thought it was brilliant, a few felt it had some gender issues. this interview with the author alex garland is revealing, but ultimately unstatisfying.

Garland says in the interview “Now, I don't need to contextualize it in the history of science-fiction tropes to make that fucking point.” 

Sorry, you do, Garland. You're a straight white man, making a film about straight white men creating a female-style robot, and you're operating in the same medium as Wierd Science. You do not exist in a vaccuum, and to create a film that draws on so many utterly sexist tropes - apparently uncritically, and that could have been avoided so easily - is itself a message. When Resident Evil 6 came out, and had scenes of the white male player character gunning down hordes of 'zombified' african natives - you can't see that out of the-context-that-we-live-in that makes it unacceptable as entertainement.

It's really difficult to summarise all of the ways that Ex Machina was concerning. I'll try to post a list of things, especially the ones that I haven't seen written up anywhere else (I have looked, but if you know of anything to add or contradict, please leave a comment)

* The Rockstar CEO of Blue Book, Nathan, can apparently not only create the film's google analogy single-handed, and run the company, but also create a walking talking AI in advance of the entire rest of the planet. Isn't it ironic that a story about a robot passing for human buys so wholeheartedly into the myth of the individual? It shows writer doesn't understand what it means to be human; so how can their creations? Of course, we can read the 'self-made man' as a particularly male fantasy; I've no evidence for this sub-point, but it keys in with Garland's quote above about not being a part of history..

* Servant girl Kyoko starts the film as an obvious robot and is later revealed to be a robot. She is mute. She's not really a character as much as a piece of mis-en-scene that reveals more of Calab's character. This would be acceptable in a gender-balanced, not to meantion ethnic-balanced, world, but unfortunately women as set dressing is a real thing, making her appearance a complete insult. 



Both of these problems could have been put into better context by having something other than straightforward gender casting; the 'woman as other' thing is particularly uncomfortable. The film starts trying to unpick what it means to be conscious, but then abandons that for a story about a man that is screwed over by an apparently female character who uses seduction to get what she wants, then abandons him. Bitches, man!  Especially when they work together.

Ultimately, there is a way to save Ex Machina as a valuable piece of art; by styling it as a standard greek tradgedy. Nathan and Caleb were both wrong and their deaths are evidence that the author disagrees with the choices that they made. This is an uneasy ending, as it implies Kyoko also deserved to die (why?) and Ava deserved to survive (also why?).

Garland says he wants to ask questions and  not necessarily provide answers; my problem with the way he does it is that from watching the film it's apparant that the producers don't think the gender issues are enough of a problem for them to work something more sophisticated in. Using any other combination of genders and sexualities than the ones in the film would have improved the story because it would have moved the story away from the sexist cliches the film rests on. 
Garland (in the above interview) says he knows about patriarchy, that it's a buzzword, that he knows its there but isn't interested in it. Which is the whole problem; he benefits from patriarchy, so of course he's not going to see it as a priority. It's a really lame response to a serious problem.

The best example of letting the audience know that the film-makers are "in on it" is in trading places; this is how you tell the audience that you are making a joke about racists, rather than s racist joke:

Letting the audience know that the authors don't condone the awful characters' actions is especially  important when there aren't any sympathetic characters to root for.

I'm not asking to be patronised or have everything explained to me. I don't mind a film that presents a lack of easy answers; of likeable characters; or even relatable characters.

It's not that I have to like every single character in a work of fiction; it's that by stocking your work with idiots, you end up with a plot driven by idiots, like Prometheus, which is unsatisfying because you feel like you're outsmarting the characters and therefore the author. 

It's not that the film itself is sexist, if taken as a work of art, because this means the author does not necessarily approve of their own characters; it's that the film is built entirely out of sexist tropes, with no regard, no commentary, no apparent irony, or no attempt to improve upon them, or any awareness that anyone would have a problem with them. 

It's a film that asks entry-level AI questions, and supplants any investigation of them. It pulls a switcheroo; poses a question, then answers a different one. That's why I feel it's a daft persons idea of a smart film; it offers the veneer of intellect, but at the heart it's not questioning anything. If you thought it was a clever film, you may have been fooled by its appearance, just as Caleb was fooled by Ava's appearance. Actually, if that's deliberate, that is quite clever.

It's really a question of priorities; the creators of the film did not consider any of these problems important enough to fix. It appears that it is a sexist story, rather than a story about sexism. For me, this ruins it. 
Philip K Dick's short story The Golden Man had a pretty similar idea - about attraction making up for actual intelligence - but framed it in an evolutionary light, and with flipped genders that made it, despite it's age, a more novel idea.