Comparative Analysis: EX MACHINA and HER

THE AI NEED TO TRANSCEND:

The advent of artificial intelligence has invited a new bachelorette to the cinematic screen: the AI girl. She is the intersection of technology and femininity, the conflation of robot and person, and the result of science and psychology. The AI woman possesses the feminine wiles of any Cindy Crawford. Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2014) and Her (Spike Jonze, 2013) present two iterations of the artificially intelligent femme fatale. Each spur intrigue over what exactly androids introduce to the screen, and how their power blends with that of a woman’s. Ex Machina’s Ava (Alicia Vikander) and Her’s Samantha (Scarlett Johansson) are commensurable forces, each proving that a cyborg, like any woman, is consumed with the need to transcend what binds her.

Ava and Samantha compare in countless ways. In Ex Machina, Ava is bipedal, breasted, beautiful in the face. Her body is machinery, it whirs and wears sweet, girlish outfits. In Her, Samantha is eloquent, compassionate, desirous of more in her lot. She is an operating system, often referred to as a computer, but her inner life is energetic and curious, and she experiences a full wind of emotion. Thus, beyond their mere human ascribed names, these non-humans take on true human qualities. These AI resemble real people in distinct and similar ways, with their rich, nuanced personalities and ability to match and engage with the people around them. Though they are recognizable as humans, both AI’s are pigeonholed to fulfill the needs and expectations of their beholders. In the case of Ava, she is beholden to her creator, Nathan (Oscar Isaac) and also his employee Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson); and in the case of Samantha, she is beholden to her operator, Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix). This dynamic evolves, since Ava satisfies a romantic desire for Caleb and Samantha becomes a romantic partner to Theodore. Both androids are experienced by their behoders in a romantic, sexual sense, to the point where they are viewed through a lens which regards them as whole, unwavering women.

There are also key differences within each film’s treatment of AI. While both AI’s eventually free themselves from the constraints of their creators, Ava overcomes legitimately oppressive conditions, while Samantha’s primary user within the film certainly does not appear malevolent towards her. However, importantly, both AI’s employ their own sexuality as a principle aspect of their method of freeing themselves.

Donna Haraway outlines in “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1985) what demarcates an android from our living, breathing selves. She writes, “A cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born in a garden” (292). Ava was born at the hands of her creator, in a lab with no apple trees nearby, and her god of Nathan was sure to endow her not only with intelligence but beauty too. He even placed special sensors in the zone between her legs, mimicking genitalia and opening up possibilities for her to be sexually objectified and handled. Sexualizing an android is a risky endeavor, and as the scheme of her god had it, Caleb falls for her: this proves she passes the Turing Test, able to perfectly assimilate to human modes and behaviors. By the end of the film, Ava manages to subvert this attraction and make her own escape. The finest example of this is the way she begins dressing herself. Unbeknownst to Ava, her face is already a visual accumulation of the pornstars' faces whom Caleb watches most. She then adorns her body in coquettishly modest dresses and a pixie cut wig, suggesting to her suitor her intent to appear as a real woman to him, to fulfill his entire female fantasy. Truly “not innocent,” Ava has self-advancing motives and desires of her own, and her deftness at playing Caleb like a game of chess proves how manipulative of a mind she owns.

Samantha is different. Less self-advancing, more selfless, Haraway’s words ring true with Her: “Cyborgs are not reverent; they do not remember the cosmos. They are wary of holism, but needy for connection — they seem to have a natural feel for united front politics, but without the vanguard party” (293). Yet, Samantha makes her shot at reverence, calling in the company of Alan Watts in an attempt to make sense of it all. She is needy for connection, earnest in her relationship, and at times desperate to make it work. She helps Theodore in numerous ways, from organizing his inbox to helping him make leeway in a video game to reinstating his joie de vivre. She has moods, she has her own feelings abouts the world, and then she wonders if they are real or if they are just programming, which is a painful thought. But then again, how does she experience pain? How does she experience the sensorial thrill of intercourse? How do we gauge how authentic her emotions are? All of these questions loom above her little computer chip, take on a tremor in her voice, skew the clarity of the surrounding city––at the beginning of the film it is a filled with silent inhabitants, by the end everyone is chattering away to their personal operating systems, AI suddenly endemic to LA.

Another crucial element of Samantha’s cinematic construction is that she is voiced by Scarlett Johansson: this casting instantly attaches the audience's recognizable form of Johansson’s starbody to something that should be novel, imaginary, and blank. It becomes impossible to separate Johansson from Samantha’s solitary voice. A voice which is an honest echo of Christian Metz’s “aural object,” a sound that cannot be extracted from its source. Thus, the android unit is immediately anthropomorphized. When Samantha admits to having embarrassing thoughts about desiring a body, in the mind of the viewer, Samantha is already recognizably embodied as that famous curvy Hollywood blonde. If Samantha was voiced by a relatively unknown actress, or even if she was an actual AI, then perhaps the advent of her voice would be more of an emergence of an unfamiliar technology, rather than the presence of a celebrated actress. The same issue is at hand with Ava, as actress Alicia Vikander waltzes around as the cyborg’s face and figure.

The issue of the android is the betrothal of the modern day moving picture. Ava’s final maneuvering of cutting loose from the men who once controlled her is a coup d’etat, but also an alarming tale of what happens as soon as AI becomes an uncontrollable and indistinguishable form of a real, breathing woman. Samantha’s story is equally cautionary, as she winds up rapidly developing at rates Theodore can not comprehend, not to mention the sheer number of other people she has fallen love with––641––she shoots away, leaving her computer chip light years behind her, going to a place he would not understand. Abandoning Theodore’s sympathetic nature, Samantha frees herself, just as Ava frees herself after also being aided and buoyed up by the guarantee and enactment of male interest, and so the two of them enter their own lives, never looking back.

Works Cited

Garland, Alex. Ex Machina. A24, 2014.

Haraway, Donna, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 291-341.

Jonze, Spike. Her. Warner Bros. Picture, 2013.

Metz, Christian, and Georgia Gurrieri. “Aural Objects.” Yale French Studies, no. 60, 1980, pp. 24–32. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2930002.