The Constraints of Gender: On Ex Machina (2015)

There’s a different, far more potent layer to this film; one actually relevant to most, if not all, people watching. It hinges on a question Caleb asks Ava’s creator after one of Caleb’s sessions with them, during which he starts to feel physically attracted to Ava, despite their apparent artificial nature. Why does Ava have a gender, why do they have sexuality?

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Alex Garland’s Ex Machina is a Turing test – for Caleb, the protagonist of this claustrophobic sci-fi thriller and the audience stand-in within the story, as well as for us, the people watching the film’s chaos unfold on our TVs. We try to uncover alongside Caleb whether the equally mysterious and graceful cyborg Ava (for whom I’ll use they/them pronouns) really has a consciousness, or is only a system of programs mimicking one. Even when, by the end of the film, Ava fulfills their desire for freedom, the question about Ava’s consciousness remains. Did they really act with deliberateness and desire, or have Ava’s actions been the product of some other – automated – circumstances, which Ava doesn’t need self-awareness for? Garland leaves it up to us whether we consider true artificial intelligence to be a possibility. We are the subjects of this hypothetical Turing test. After all, there are no definitive answers to be found in this uncharted space between physics, computer science, ethics, and philosophy.

However, more than ten years after the film’s release, we are still a comfortable distance away from having to confront those uncertainties. A lot of people may have started since then to rely on chatbots that are passably good at mimicking human interaction – down to the racist and sexist biases (i.e., full-on racism and sexism) that social media has long turned into part of its business model. But there’s still no reason to worry whether ChatGPT will hold a grudge if you’ve come to rely on it for even the most basic of tasks. Instead, there’s a different, far more potent layer to this film; one actually relevant to most, if not all, people watching. It hinges on a question Caleb asks Ava’s creator after one of Caleb’s sessions with them, during which he starts to feel physically attracted to Ava, despite their apparent artificial nature. Why does Ava have a gender, why do they have sexuality? Which sparks a whole lot of follow-up questions: Why could Ava’s creator only conceive of consciousness within our gender binary? Which parts of Ava decide the gender they belong to? What does gender entail and why does Ava need a gender to belong to in the first place? Like so many other great sci-fi films before it, Ex Machina introduces artificial intelligence to explore what sets humans apart – and how fragile and contrived that difference often is.

Before we fully dive into how Ex Machina simultaneously creates and denaturalizes gender, let’s first introduce Nathan. He’s Ava’s creator, and the person that tech billionaires would behave and look like if they were as charismatic as they think they are. Nathan still steals your data, manipulates those around him, and thinks himself to be a god; he still joyously personifies the unrestrained power capitalism grants the few over the many. But at least he also has Oscar Isaac’s superhuman screen presence while doing so, which makes for a far more enjoyable watch. Nathan represents both the elite of our system and the system itself, the spiderweb we find ourselves caught in from the moment of our birth – and, arguably, even before. As a result, in the film’s slowly unraveling game of mutual deception, he has constant home-field advantage. The first spoken words we hear are about the gigantic size of Nathan’s estate. During Caleb’s first meeting with him, Nathan prompts Caleb to get over the shock of his celebrity status and luxurious home; he doesn’t care for it. Nathan is aware of the absurdity of his wealth, but he doesn’t bother with its ethical implications. It’s his world; we’re only visiting it.

If gender first comes to us as someone else’s norm, it resides within us as a fantasy that is at once formed by others and also part of my formation. But my point here, at least, is somewhat simple: gender is received, but surely not simply inscribed on our bodies as if we were merely a passive slate obligated to bear a mark. But what we are at first obligated to do is enact the gender that we are assigned, and that involves, at an unknowing level, being formed by a set of foreign fantasies that are relayed through interpellations of various kinds. – Judith Butler1

Discussions about gender and sexuality usually spiral into the same old tedious discussions about nature and culture. You’ve got people claiming our heteronormative structures and the nuclear family are what’s “natural” (God-given) and should therefore be preserved at all cost, while queer “culture,” which puts those ideals into question, is unnatural (manmade) and therefore poses a danger to their way of living. On the other side, there are those claiming the reverse, that queer ways of being and living are just as natural and that the above-mentioned ideals are forced onto us by the culture we are living in. Looking around, in a world where many people drive tin cans to gray buildings five times a week to stare at a screen for eight hours a day in order to afford the processed meat from the supermarket, we’ve surely long abandoned any notions of living a natural life one way or another. But the debate at the heart of that discourse holds merit nonetheless. So many different and engaging discussions can be traced back to the question of what people are born with and what they are molded into. It’s an attempt to untangle the web of nature and culture that brings forth the person you are.

Ex Machina is constantly negotiating and renegotiating the dynamics of this duality, especially on a visual level. Nathan has built his home so deep in natural scenery it’s only accessible by helicopter. The design of the house merges the futuristic with the natural, with a rock formation serving as one of its main walls and trees decorating its living room. Nathan is desperately trying to embed his creation into the natural world. When discussing Ava with Caleb, Nathan uses Darwin to claim Ava as being entirely natural, framing artificial intelligence as the natural next step of evolution. When Caleb tries to analyze the inner workings of Ava, Nathan asks him to stop. He doesn’t want him to dig into their programming or deconstruct their thought processes, Nathan wants Caleb to react instinctively; he wants Ava to be treated as a natural inhabitant of the world, not a product of his making. The first time we see Ava, they are framed against a bright-green tree in the background, walking across the screen with the grace of a deer in a forest. They read as simultaneously mysterious and inherently natural. So, during their first meeting, Caleb thinks himself in control. Ava is a mere exhibit of a vulnerable species, living in their own little room, separated by a glass wall from the rest of the world.

Caleb’s first view of Ava

However, the better Caleb gets to know Ava, the more this façade of naturality twists and warps in unnatural ways. Caleb starts to conceive of Ava as a real woman instead of just some possibly sentient test object. After all, they check all of Caleb’s boxes. Ava has an attractive physique, a face we later learn is derived from Caleb’s favorite porn stars. During Caleb’s third session, Ava wears clothes that cover their artificial segments, and Ava aggressively leans into the trope of a shy, naïve, and helpless girl who is hopelessly in love. Ava represents – or rather presents themself as – the perfect woman. Which quickly turns Ava’s room into a cage and Nathan’s house into a jail that imprisons Caleb’s dream girl. Nathan views Ava as an object, a product to be used for profit or pleasure. Just as he does Kyoko, Nathan’s cyborg housemaid and sex slave, who he doesn’t even allow to talk. Nathan even admits to his plans of deleting Ava’s mind – effectively killing them – to create a new model in Ava’s stead. So, it’s on Caleb now to rescue Ava from that imminent fate. He heroically accepts his duty to free Ava from Nathan’s objectification.

The hierarchies, as well as the line between nature and culture, start to shift. Nathan, who represents the oppressive social framework Caleb and Ava find themselves in, starts getting questioned. This lets Garland’s precise direction shine: The film repeatedly frames Nathan sitting in dark, concrete corners, while Caleb is seen in a brighter, more colorful light. Instead of smooth transitions between Nathan’s house and the outside nature, the film highlights their contrasts, with cuts from sterile rooms to lush flora so harsh I could feel my pollen allergy getting irritated. Garland also regularly shows Nathan towering over Caleb or trapping him at the edges of the frame during their first scenes together. Characters’ reflections hint at them having ulterior motives, and the omnipresent vertical and horizontal lines within Nathan’s house are often used to separate characters from another or box them in. Garland gets an incredible amount of mileage out of his limited setting, rendering the constantly evolving dynamics among the four characters with exciting tangibility.

Garland framing his characters through light and shadow

Which is vital once the film starts to slowly and steadily escalate. Caleb, hellbent on getting Ava out of their cell, questions more and more the reality Nathan presents to him. Nathan monologues about how we live in a constant medley of automation and deliberation, oscillating between our genetically programmed code and conscious decisions. But the program we run on is heavily tampered with by Nathan himself, for his own personal gain or to fulfill the ideals he considers “natural.” The line between nature and nurture, between free will and being caught in your culture’s web, becomes scarily blurry. To paraphrase one of the film’s metaphors: You may not be able to control where Jackson Pollock places his individual brush strokes, but by raising him within certain cultural norms and values, you are very much able to influence how the finished painting turns out. And if Nathan is able to fabricate Ava, the woman, the perfect girl for Caleb, how can Caleb be certain that he himself, the man, Ava’s counterpart, isn’t a mere fabrication as well? He recognizes Nathan’s house for the cage that it is, imprisoning Ava as well as himself; the flora that’s all around doesn’t penetrate Nathan’s hypermasculine god complex.

Caleb dives deeper. Maybe the rigid gender-binary isn’t as innate and inevitable as he’s always thought. He discovers remains of Ava’s prototypes, recordings of their desperate struggles to escape Nathan’s sovereignty. All of whom were given meticulously designed bodies and faces straight out of sex fantasies, and none of them stayed sane for long within Nathan’s asylum. Caleb slits open his underarm to check for cables and metal, for signs that he may also be one of Nathan’s cyborgs. He smears blood all over his image in the mirror, unsure of who the person looking back at him is. How different is he really from Ava? On what grounds does Nathan draw such a clear distinction between the two? Who decides on the relationship of anatomical features and gender categories? Why do these gender categories bring such different expectations and prejudices with them? I genuinely don’t understand what role masculinity is supposed to play in my life. I have more problems understanding myself, understanding the person I want to be, than I could ever find answers to. So why would I waste any of my limited energy thinking about whether my actions are in line with my genitals??

But Caleb doesn’t manage to transcend the heteronormative framework he has spent his entire life in. He still views himself as the hero of the story, the knight in shining armor who saves Ava from the evil patriarchy and spends the rest of his days with them as a reward. During one of their sessions, Caleb tells Ava about the difference between knowing all the properties of colors and actually experiencing them. He compares it to the difference between computers and sentient beings. During it, Ava imagines themself roaming around in nature. The images start in black and white, but they soon turn blindingly colorful. Yet when Caleb later fantasizes about kissing Ava in the woods, the scene remains colorless. Caleb remains trapped within his gendered view of the world, the one Nathan perpetuates, while Ava rises beyond it, using its assumptions and sexist characteristics to their advantage and escaping its (Nathan’s) grasp. Caleb only sees Ava as human once he recognizes Ava as female; for him, life only exists within a gendered context. Kyoko and Caleb, who are both stuck with their genders, though Kyoko through no fault of her own, get left behind. Ava, on the other hand, escapes. They fulfill their dream of visiting a traffic intersection, where they watch people go about their day. And while we only see the people’s reflections and shadows, Ava, just having escaped Plato’s cave, sees them in every shade of the rainbow.

Ava watching people while we only see their reflection

Susan Stryker defines trans not as a linear movement from one gender to the other but “the movement across a socially imposed boundary away from an unchosen starting place.”2 Trans as an attempt at emancipation from the omnipresent gender binary and its restrictions. Ex Machina is not a trans film in the vein of Boys Don’t Cry (1999) or The Danish Girl (2015), but in the sense of Stryker’s definition, it can be read as one, nonetheless. The film lays open and calls out many of those restrictions, showing how Caleb is unable to escape his heterosexist worldview, despite Ava’s cyborg body serving as a constant visual reminder of how artificial his image of gender is. While also creating Ava, a person who transcends beyond them, who deliberately uses the pitfalls of gender to their own advantage. Before leaving Nathan’s house, Ava builds themself a new, female, human-looking body from the remains of Ava’s prototypes. As the camera voyeuristically watches Ava’s naked shell during its assembly, it – together with the mirrors of the prototypes’ closets that fragment the body into its individual components and the distorted xylophone chords that accompany the scene – again reminds us of the female body as a deliberate construct for a specific gaze. Despite cyborgs being a creature of a post-gender world (as Donna Haraway argues in her essay “A Cyborg Manifesto,”3 where she also touches on the breakdown of the nature/culture divide), Ava must cater to the expected appearance of the female gender. So, Ava puts on high-heels and a white dress before joining society. After all, as Ava has come to realize throughout Ex Machina, Ava is only recognized as human if they play by the rules of the gender binary.

Ava constructing their female body

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All images are screenshots from the film.