The problem with the perfect girl is that she doesn’t exist. And is a murderer! (Warning: Spoilers for Gone Girl and Ex Machina within.)
Alicia Vikander as Ava in Ex Machina.
Universal Pictures International
Ex Machina tells the story of a beautiful cyborg trapped in the isolated estate of the reclusive genius who created her, and the young man who feels compelled to save her. Like Her before it, the movie examines the pitfalls of making a female consciousness to male specifications: A male protagonist sees a future for himself with a female artificial intelligence who (spoiler alert) ultimately abandons him to suit her own purposes.
But Ex Machina — more than being a horror film about the scary possibilities of artificial intelligence — is a flawed story about men losing control of women and the bankruptcy of gender roles. Basically, Ex Machina is the Gone Girl of 2015.
In the former, a sci-fi film, a brilliant and extremely rich programmer, Nathan (Oscar Isaac) designs an artificial intelligence to appeal to Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), a less brilliant programmer who is brought in to test the intelligence of Ava (Alicia Vikander), the machine herself. She manipulates him into caring for her, and the infatuated Caleb sets her free. Unencumbered by human rules, she then leaves him to die after he enables her escape.
In the latter, a melodramatic thriller, Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike) is compelled to follow her jobless husband (Ben Affleck) from a metropolis to Missouri, where he fails to be the man she married, while she continues looking and acting like the beautiful, thin, cosmopolitan woman he married. In the end, she forces his hand, dedicating the rest of her life to both punishing him and making him hold up his end of the relationship bargain.
Rosamund Pike as Amy Dunne in Gone Girl.
Merrick Morton / Twentieth Century Fox and Regency Enterprises
Of course, there was more than one possible reading of Gone Girl. If you watched it as a horror film, then it was about male anxiety personified in a psycho bitch who trapped and tortured men by terrorizing them with false rape accusations and matrimony. But if you watched it as a revenge fantasy, then it was about a bitch who revisits the sins of men on them tenfold, holding men to the same unreasonably high standards of perfection to which she herself is held.
Likewise, Ex Machina is about a female character who, at first, seems to embody a male ideal of perfection. She's beautiful, smart, and charming. Like Gone Girl's Amy, who says she's obligated to love blow jobs, Ava is also programmed to love sex. Nathan tells Caleb that there's an orifice between her legs that he's rigged to a "pleasure response"; the hole is designed to be penetrated by a penis. "She'd enjoy it," he says, because like Amy, Ava is made to spec. She has no real choice but to enjoy it.
But the director of Ex Machina, Alex Garland, told Wired that Ava is "literally genderless," that "the things that would define gender in a man and a woman, she lacks them, except in external terms."
How could one's physicality and the way people read gender on one's body be disconnected from gender? Saying Ava is "literally genderless" is at best naive and at worst profoundly stupid. Tell that to any woman who has ever walked down a city street. Or any little girl who knows "you throw like a girl" is an insult. Explain it to a transgender person. "No, that man on the subway who told you your haircut was acceptable to him, he's not reminding you that he thinks you exist to be visually pleasing to him."
And then explain Ava, on whose naked body the camera creepily lingers. Ava, whose face and body are patterned on the porn performers Caleb masturbates to. Ava, with her ingenue dresses and her lost urchin pixie cut crying out to be rescued by a man. She is as gendered as it is possible to be. She has learned her gender.
