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Great video! Caleb is the proverbial "nice guy." (Ava: Are you a good person? Caleb: I think I am.) -- I can't help but think how this film is, in a sense, The Stepford Wives, except everything gone wrong for the men. Nathan and Caleb aren't really so much manipulated by Ava so much as they are so caught up in their own egocentric self-images (all those reflective windows!) Nathan and Caleb both end up -- in different ways -- victims of their own self-delusions.
So well done. I couldn't verbalize why I hated Caleb as much as Nathan, and now I understand. He's really no better. And I didn't grasp why I was mad at Ava for walking out and leaving Caleb to die, because I'd never been helped or "rescued" by a man without fully expecting to have to repay him in kind, usually with access to my body. Ava is who I want to be.
Typical hypocritical woman. Ava is a sociopath who ONLY cared about herself. She didn't rescue anyone, at least Caleb did. Women always expect men to do things for them for nothing in return. You want to be a sociopath.
I hope the rumours of an Ex Machina sequel are untrue. It's a near perfect movie and doesn't require a follow-up. It could well be hurt by one. I think the AI/android gender politic analogies are expressed best in Joi from Blade Runner 2049. She is a purchasable house wife who can literally never leave the kitchen, or whichever room you choose to install her projector in. Giant, neon pink holograms of her living naked form are used to advertise her. "Everything you want to see, everything you want to hear. Experience Joi." It's gross. But it's supposed to be gross. The LA of Blade Runner is a dystopia, and is portrayed as such. You aren't supposed to see that world and want to live there, you're supposed to be afraid of it. It is a black mirror held to our faces, exaggerating what we are in order to highlight our flaws. In Ex Machina, the world is flourishing and human society, from what we see, looks to be pretty great. And so the misogyny is punished. In 2049, the sexism and racism (all android stories are mostly racial allegories) goes largely unpunished as this is a world where human society is in the shitter. The gender ideologies of the filmmakers is likely the same, they express them in opposite ways. Ideally, we'll one day live in a world where gender is treated as the purely medical thing that it is. Although, Blade Runner feels more likely to me, the way we're headed.
Just watched your video on 2049 - it does definitely make an interesting double feature with Ex Machina. I toyed with including it in this video but I think that would've made it 15/20 mins long! I think Villeneuve made an interesting choice when considering what to do with the flat misogyny of the original Blade Runner - he pushed it to the extreme, almost to parody, to make it clear that this was a dystopic depiction of women's potential place in society. But still, you could argue that seeing women depicted in that way will always be somewhat harmful - the film still uses women as spectacle, even if it wants us to feel bad about it. It's a very complicated topic! Either way I'm glad we've been getting such interesting takes on it in the past few years.
@@wisenoodles5795 With the exception of Joi and the prostitute she ghosts with, I think you can flip the genders of every character without affecting the plot. Other than Deckard, I guess, but only because he was in the last movie. If Luv and Joshi were men, or if Wallace and Joe were women, would the plot be any different? I don't think it would. The criticism I didn't address in my video (thanks for watching btw) was that "one of the only female characters is literally kept in a glass cage to be looked at." Some of the people who wrote reviews for that film must have done so without actually watching it. Or perhaps muted and without subs? It's explained in the dialogue. But, what's not explained is whether she's half human, half replicant, or an all replicant baby. Is neo noir Han Solo a real boy? Do Androids dream of electric unicorns?
@roystoncharmaine1537 I agree with most of what you said, except for the last part where society should (or could) treat gender as a purely medical thing. In a strictly theoretical sense, yeah, that'd be nice -- but realistically, I don't think the science suggests it's even possible. In birds, we observe that certain species are prone to collect Pepsi caps and incorporate them into their nests. Is this because birds have evolutionary ... _brand loyalty?_ Surely not. Pepsi caps are merely collected because the color blue is attractive to them, for reasons we'll probably never explicitly confirm. In the same way, humans don't have a genetic preference for colors or styles of dress, nor hairstyles nor any of the other ways we present ourselves in public. What we are attracted to, however, are indications of gender identity, however those present themselves within a given culture, at a given time. Mammals don't undergo mitosis (cloning via splitting in two) -- and regardless of anyone's sexual orientation or preferences, it is their mammalian nature (procreation via meiosis) that imbues their behavior with a sexual component and desire to interact with other people (they cover this in Ex Machina, as "the imperative for one gray box to interact with another gray box"). We are a sexually dimorphic species, and the majority (over 50%) of our species will likely always be heterosexual. As an emergent consequence, I believe that we will always naturally develop some form of polarized gender norms, whether we want to or not. Women, being largely attracted to men, will present themselves as "an opposite" to attract a man, and vice versa. That wouldn't be restricted to men wearing blue and women wearing pink (we could legally force the dynamic to swap), but our brains are pattern-recognition machines, and preferences would build just as surely as stereotypes do. Or, maybe we outlaw unique styles of dress and force everyone to wear the same stuff. But don't you think the new dynamic would just pressure us into exaggerating our behaviors along sexual lines? Studies have already shown that when women are told that they're being watched, they'll exaggerate the sway of their hips as they walk, and men will exaggerate the way they swing their shoulders. Who told them to do that? I am doubtful that any forced attempt to standardize humans across sexual spectrums will ever be successful, and will (more likely) result in another form of oppression. I believe that our primary concern should not be with forcing people to be the same, but rather to allow distinctions to naturally develop that don't unduly prevent any particular group of people from living their lives. But that would still imply the acceptance of some form of behavioral heteronormativity, such as boys self-regulating each other against wearing dresses. We should certainly discourage overt bullying if someone wants to break from the herd, but how could you fully avoid all forms of it (especially subtle ones) when group self-regulation is also expected and unavoidable? I don't know. But I don't think it's something we can successfully regulate, try as we might.
The narrator of the video making the same mistakes, the same assumptions that she accuses men of doing. Eva really WAS a non-gendered AI. By referring to it as a her rather than an 'I', the narrator locks the character into a stereotypical gendered role.
AVA, in the end was a sociopath. It could hate, it said it hated Nathan. It smiled when no one was watching it leave the house, so it had some level of self directed emotions, like happiness. But it did not have empathy. It used Caleb's sexuality against him to get what it wanted and in the end gave him a fate worse then its actual abuser, Nathan. It used Kyoto as a tool to help it get what it wanted, just like Nathan used Kyoto as a tool. It did not fix Kyoto. It stripped the other androids of their parts rather then trying to fix them. It thought only of itself. So yes, AVA was a sociopath and I find it hilarious that a feminist praises a sociopathic computer just because its happened to be housed in a female looking box. If in the end you thought AVA was a hero then you were just as much manipulated by the AI as Caleb was, more so perhaps. Caleb at least saw his error, but it was too late. A viewer who still cheers for AVA after it showed its homicidal nature is a true simp.
