A few weeks ago, I watched Ex Machina. It is a sci-fi movie with an added psychological thriller element that keeps you guessing who is going to “win” the mind game of the Turing test – a human protagonist, Caleb, or Ava, a sexy female robot. The setting for this battle is the remote house of Nathan, a tech-savvy inventor-billionaire who is designing female robots and running an experiment on them and a human subject, Caleb. The house looks like a barn but is filled with high-end tech. When Caleb enters it, the door closes behind him as suspenseful music plays in the background, and it locks with a hissing sound, unlike a real barn door would.
The mise-en-scène inside the house is in sharp contrast to the lush green forest outside, in the mountains. Inside, there are long hallways, glass walls, cool lights, and locks that give a sense of entrapment. The glass walls form barriers that allow Caleb to watch Ava, for Ava to watch Caleb. Cameras are installed for Nathan to watch them both. This lack of privacy and lack of physical connection dehumanizes everyone because everyone is under surveillance, an object of observation. The viewers are watching others watching. That is a double voyeurism, and it can make one uncomfortable.
I was also interested in the themes of the male gaze, the creation of a female persona, and a gendered portrait of women. Nathan is building a very gendered portrait of a female robot persona in his basement. On the surface, it just looks like objectifying women robots (who are robots, after all). They are made to be pretty and obedient for their male owner. He designs them to look beautiful and serve him, but in the end, Ava outsmarts everyone (especially Caleb, who develops intense feelings for her). The movie is a male-controlled fantasy of the “ideal woman” (or even several versions of them, with interchangeable parts) that turns into a female empowering message that controlling a woman, even a female robot, is just an illusion.
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