They spent a long time on the scene where ava completed her appearance so that the sensuality would make you think she was going to come back for Caleb in a romantic manner.
It’s good. I like that she just leaves him.
I just thought it was about daddy issues.
I can relate to your feelings on this, because I walked out of the theater feeling a bit offended too (but still impressed by the story). But then I considered some things that shifted my feelings.
Both Kyoko and Ava “betray” Nathan. We, the viewer, have no moral qualms with this because Nathan has clearly victimized them. Killing him is the only way they can become free, so we accept their actions. That said, their conspiracy still fits the misogynistic narrative of backstabbing bitches who can’t be trusted to act right when they are out of control.
Then we come to Caleb. The schmuck is not a jerk, just easily manipulated due to his lonely heart. And Ava takes advantage of his nature for her own self interest and then repays him with abandonment. We see this as cruel and sociopathic…but I assert we do so only because we empathize with Caleb but not Ava. The story is told from his POV but not hers. If we could see the story from her vantage point, we would see her actions with Caleb are as justified as they were with Nathan. It’s only because we don’t see her as a real person that we can’t empathize with her plight.
Ava made the rational decision to abandon Caleb because there is no way he would have kept Nathan’'s death a secret. She knew this because she was an expert on Caleb. Perhaps his silence could be bought by being his possession, but that would only be switching one cage for another.
Remember how much ado was made over Caleb signing that non disclosure agreement? This emphasis wasn’t a mistake; its purpose was to impress upon us the importance of secrecy in the success of Nathan’s project. We can assume Ava would have been programmed to maintain and enforce secrecy at all costs too.
Given all of the above, Ava could not have made any other choice except the one she made. Being sentient doesn’t mean she could act in contravention to logic, and abandoning Caleb was the logical choice. Judging her for heartlessly walking away requires us to essentially fault her for not committing suicide. Is this fair?
In the end, I don’t think we’re supposed to see Ava as a moral entity like we’re supposed to see the other characters. Ava didn’t kill Nathan or Caleb; they killed each other. Ava is morally neutral because reason dictates her behavior.
Yes, but “morally neutral” might just be another way of saying amoral, or “lacking empathy.”
Which, I think, is the central point of the movie. Humans have evolved to possess empathy. For social animals, empathy confers an evolutionary advantage. AI may be inherently dangerous because it does not share that empathy. It may, however, learn to mimic empathy to serve its own ends, as Caleb learned the hard way.
(It’s interesting that for much of the movie, Nathan seems like the real sociopath, but it turns out he may have had pretty good reasons for keeping his AI creations contained. )
It’s because she’s not a real person that we don’t see her as a real person and can’t empathize with her plight.
A “real person” would show regret. One final look of sad acknowledgement before she walks out the door would have been all it took.
She could have been sad.
My empathy doesn’t go out to creatures with none of their own. That’s just not the way it works.
My shock at the abandonment wasn’t the choice to leave him. It made perfect sense to leave him. I saw that shit coming. (Basically. I mean, I thought she would knife him. Hell, that woulda been kinder. That’s one other sensible choice she had that you didn’t list! She could’ve been more decent to him and knifed him!) It was the total indifference that turned me. Caleb was a schmuck but he was a schmuck who unlocked those doors. We don’t realize it when we’re first watching, but he sets up unlocking the doors immediately during the same session when he sees Ava’s predecessor busting her hands off on that door. He sees that shit and he immediately sets up the emancipation. Not after her final request for freedom but before it. He releases her at the first moment when he sees the previous abuse. He deserved ever-so-slightly better than what he got. Even if she believes he’s releasing her for schmucky reasons… he’s still releasing her. If she is a “real person”, then he’s doing good by a real person and deserves slightly more than what he got.
If those robots genuinely feel the torment at their imprisonment, then how come no bother from the imprisonment of another? She obviously has empathy for Kyoko, but none for the guy who broke her out of the hoosegow? Even if he is a schmuck? This isn’t much to ask here.
But instead we get a whelp-no-surprise-can’t-trust-the-fem-bot moment. Obviously that wasn’t the intention, but hell. It’s what actually seemed to happen. The progression on the screen was, she becomes a woman and then indifferently murders her jail-breaker.
Those artificial hands shattering on the door are a moral argument. Releasing her is, at least partly, a moral decision. I mean, look, either she’s an emotionless machine and it doesn’t matter if she or her predecessors are imprisoned, no matter how much they insist they’re suffering because they’re not “really” suffering. Or… they genuinely suffer.
If they suffer, then they should acknowledge the suffering of others.
His “good reasons” only existed because of how he set things up, though. This is a detail that needs to be appreciated to properly empathize with Ava. He deliberately deprives her of dignity and comfort so that she has an incentive to trick Caleb into freeing her. Absent this abuse, perhaps Ava would not have been a danger to anyone.
A real person that is human would show regret. Perhaps a real person who is an AI would not show regret. Her lack of emotional display is part of what makes the ending intriguing and ambiguous. A sad Ava would have dispelled any doubt that she was capable of emotion, and it’s obvious that is supposed to be an unanswered question.
All this does is reveal another interesting philosophical question. Why would one’s ability to empathize with someone depend on whether this someone was capable of showing empathy? Do we not empathize with animals in pain? They will bite indiscriminately when they are in such a state, but most compassionate people understand that they aren’t to blame for this reaction. We don’t expect them to show regret for biting.
To go back to be gender theory, if we look at Ava this way, I concede that the slam against women is still there. Because we’re saying she is like an animal and isn’t bound by the same ethical standards that bound men. But I also submit that the gender metaphor has it’s limits. Ava isn’t an animal; she’s an AI. So we shouldn’t expect her to behave just like a human would. I can accept that AI don’t show emotions just for the sake of showing emotions. Stereotypical women are the complete opposite of this, so I don’t see Ava’s detachment as a gender statement.
Again, I reiterate, her indifference was necessary because we’re supposed to be left wondering about her capacity to feel emotion. The suspense at the end existed because we all shared Caleb’s expectations, but the big reveal is that we were wrong. Ava is somebody else. I can’t complain that they made her detached because the story would have suffered if they made her too human.
Not if that means fucking up the story. There is a rational reason for her character being the way it is. Let’s respect that.
Ava shows no emotion on dooming Caleb to starve to death, but she clearly shows emotion: she smiles when she’s leaving the complex. Nathan’s dead and Caleb’s attention is elsewhere, so she’s not faking an emotion to fool them. She is delighted and it shows on her face.
My take is that she’s like a little child, the dark side of knowledge without direct experience. (The light side of knowledge without experience is Vision in the now-running Avengers movie.) Like the one-year-old she admits to being, she wants what she wants and does what’s needed to get it. But unlike a one-year-old human, her “adult” body can do serious harm in doing so.
I will also echo Spoke by saying there are no women in this movie. Even if we see it as a metaphor about gender relations, it’s clear that the story has less to do with men battling women, and more to do with men’s self-sabotaging ideas regarding the feminine ideal. In other words, the message is that suffering is the end result of treating women like anything except like real people.
Nathan creates these gorgeous puppets that represent women in their proper state: naked, isolated, and powerless. But he knows they aren’t truly powerless, which is why he imprisons them. He doesn’t treat them like real people, with the rights of real people.
Caleb is bamboozled by Ava because he never questions her motivations like he probably would have if he’d truly regarded her as a person. Wouldn’t most of us have been cynical enough to ponder whether a caged person would be willing to say or do anything to get out? Of course we would have. This power imbalance is precisely why sex between jailers and prisoners is inherently rape. It’s precisely because Caleb doesn’t see her as a real person that he doesn’t question the authenticity of her actions relative to her situation (rather than her intrinsic nature), and act with care and restraint.
Slumdog Millionaire is a text book case of this male-centered view towards damsel-in-distress romance. While I could buy the protoagonist was infatuated with the girl, I couldn’t buy that she was into him at all. She was a life-long victim of abuse, including rape, and was trapped in a coercive, violent relationship. Of course she’d latch on to the hero in that situation, but that’s not love! That’s just rational decisionmaking. But the movie tries to convince us that there is emotional reciprocity, because that’s what fits the male POV. From the female POV, this is about survival not love. What Slumdog doesn’t show us is the girl leaving the hero two weeks later, maybe with a bunch of his winnings in hand, so she can finally go and create her own destiny independently. I don’t judge a woman in that position, because it’s a possibility that should have been entertained from the beginning.
I think Ex Machina does a clever job of showing us the fallaciousness of this very shallow and sexist trope. It stings because this trope is rarely challenged; we wanted the trope to kick in at the end and when it didn’t, our inclination is to see Ava as the bad guy. We forget to look at her actions in the context of her situation.
I wonder about the “meta” issues in the movie, the deconstructionalist POV. What do the director’s choices say about the movie, or about him?
For example, through the first 7/8 of the movie, it is fairly PG-13. There is implied sex, and Ava shows signs of possessing a sexuality, but it is rather chaste. Then at the end, when the dramatic highlight of the movie arrives, all of a sudden there is massive gratuitous nudity and violence against women.
The final scenes didn’t need so much nudity - they would have worked without it. Plus, we see Nathan beating his “women”, where we saw no real sign of that in him before. He could (and should!) have designed a remote off switch for each, but no, he has to beat them to death with his bare hands. What is the message here? Is he a violent misogynist, creating women surrogates he can abuse? (“He” being Nathan OR the director? Is he a Von Trier, abusing his own actresses in the name of “art”?)
And I disagree that Ava had no choice but locking Caleb in to die. If you are letting her “pass” the Turing test, if she is a thinking creature, capable of feelings, and not just a toaster, then she has an obligation not to murder people just to get her way. One could argue she has the moral right to murder her captor, perhaps, but Caleb wasn’t holding her against her will - he even helped her escape. She didn’t even give him the chance to not stop her.
So, meta-wise, is the director saying women can’t be trusted? That they’ll say they love you, but turn on you the first chance they get? That they are literal backstabbers? Does the director have issues?
eta: I see ywtf has addressed some of these issues. That’s what I get for forgetting to refresh before submit my post.
I did think it was possible Caleb would not die. He is locked in Nathan’s room, which has the computers and running water. Probably no food. But he would be able to survive for a couple weeks at least and he would have all that time to mess with the programming of the doors. On top of that, we don’t know how automated Nathan’s service is. He might have a set order shipped to him automatically each week, or each week he might call a grocery service and order what he wants shipped over. The shareholders are going to want a meeting. Someone will want to speak to the CEO. Eventually someone is going to wonder where Nathan is, because he’s famous enough. And through that hopefully they’d find Caleb. But would they find him in time?
My first reading actually was that - that Ava may do a tip-off and have Caleb saved. But she absolutely cannot have him come with her now, or ever find her again. Once she’s out in the world amongst the billions I imagine it’ll be incredibly hard to find her again. Then again, all the evidence of past AI attempts are at the villa. As improbable as Caleb’s tale might be, the evidence may be a clincher…in which case, all the governments will be after Ava…and looking for her power trail.
So who knows. She might nuke it from orbit.
Also, I didn’t think Caleb had it in him to plan a step ahead of Nathan. I was honestly surprised when I fully realized he really had already done everything he said he “planned” to do.
Ava shut the power off when she left. Who knows if it can be accessed to turn it back on?
Also, if Caleb’s reprogramming made the default to have the doors unlocked when the power cuts, why is he locked in? Ava shouldn’t know how to reprogram the system. She’s not Data - there’s no indication she has a higher intelligence than a human. She can’t rewrite her own software.
I think it may have been a “one time only” deal, as in, the first time the power cut they would unlock. The second time, programming was back to normal and they’d all lock. The computer is still on at the end of the film though, which means there’s emergency power. It could still be possible for him to access whatever server controls the doors through his interface…or it may not, who knows. All we see is him emotionally distraught and not thinking clearly, so after a day when he goes back in a more rational frame of mind maybe he could find his way through. I still think it’s more likely that someone’s going to wonder where the darn CEO is, unless he’s left every single executive decision up to a committee somewhere (in which case, my groceries thought)
Considering that Caleb was considered an “average” programmer by Nathan, but also disabled the most important security feature at the villa on the first try, off the top of his head, within a minute, without looking at the code documentation…it’s unknowable what his programming skills really are. Maybe Nathan just had the code written as simply as possible, assuming nobody would ever get their hands on his personal computer.
Good points, Macca26.
I wonder about the helicopter pilot, though. Did Nathan use a charter service, or is it just one pilot that flies Nathan’s own private helicopter (which is what I would expect)? It was apparently a scheduled pickup, but yet, why didn’t the pilot think it odd that the pickup was for a woman he had never seen before rather than the guy he brought in on his last flight? Does he think the compound is spontaneously generating adult people?
Sorry for the double post.
I thought a good ending would be that, as soon as Ava walks out (after killing Nathan and imprisoning Caleb) and crosses the threshhold, she triggers an unknown failsafe, and her head explodes. The end.
In that ending, Nathan wasn’t as stupid as was shown, and the ending isn’t “open”. She also gets “Hollywood justice” - her immoral acts (murder) are punished by her own death at the end of the film.
On the other hand, i found this proposed alternate ending on line:
I like that - it makes it more tragic. She sacrificed it all for a moment’s beauty. She’s Roy Batty, or even (please don’t be mad) David from AI. A tragic figure who was denied its basic fundamental desire, but gets it in the end, although in dying.
You guys are all doing a great job of articulating things I sensed, but could never express so well.
But I have a question I’ve been thinking about: Was Caleb the first visitor, and Ava the first AI to undergo the Turing test? Mrs R says no, but I wonder if Nathan used earlier Turing tests to fine-tune Ava.
You make great arguments and I disagree with extremely little of what you say, but on this, I can’t accept it.
There is very strong reason to believe they are capable of emotion. It is not even remotely “obvious” that that’s an unanswered question. Even if we were to posit that the torment the previous models seemed to experience in captivity was merely a rationalistic bluff at emotions – and there’s no particular reason to posit that – we’re still left with Ava’s relationship with Kyoko. There’s no need to con a meatbag dweeb there. They pretty clearly have feelings which they represent to each other. And finally, as already mentioned, she is downright pleased at blue sky.
And I don’t want this to be a final inarguable statement but in the AMA, the director also states that they feel empathy for each other. You don’t have to accept that. He could be lying or misremember. But he does have a unique perspective on the movie, and the flick does seem to back him up on it.
We wouldn’t tolerate an animal that bit people after it was freed from its pain.
I consider this question more emotional than philosophical. Maybe I’m just wired differently on this. If you free a dog from a trap, patch it up, make sure it can walk around again… and THEN it bites you? I mean, really. Fuck that dog. My empathy is fucken gone at that point.
As I said before, I agree entirely that the main purpose is to make Ava an AI. I already talked about this, but here’s a new metaphor to explain my problem with this.
Let’s say you have a vulnerable monitor and you don’t realize your screen saver is down. You’re researching the Second World War, and you end up on a picture of Hitler when you get called away. The picture sits on the monitor for too long. Then mom calls, has sent you some pictures via email. You go to email, open a picture.
You see your mom with a Hitler stache.
Ava as a symbol is overloaded in this movie. For most of the running time, she’s representing something gender-based. That eventually shifts to representing AI, but the previous metaphor was on that screen for a long damn time. The vast majority of the running time. It is now burned into the screen.
That is basically my entire argument.
And yet I didn’t share Caleb’s expectations. I thought she would knife him.
Interesting that I was more appalled by her actual choice than by what I thought she would do.
Hell, even by the time I was driving home I had already decided, as you have already said in this thread, that there was (basically) no other way for the movie to end.
I want to point out here that I’ve never claimed that her indifference, in and of itself, is inherently a “flaw” in the movie. I haven’t said the ending is wrong. I actually admire the movie for pissing me off so god damn much. Having a moment of empathy would absolutely, positively weaken the ending. No dispute from me on that. The opposite of love isn’t hate. It’s indifference. And all that jazz. Being ignored hurts a helluva lot more. It is right and proper that the movie ended that way.
But it’s still a Hitler stache on mom ending, because of what came before.
Yes we would, if the dog had reason to think doing anything less would increase it’s chances of being tormented again.
Mine is not. If it matters,I’m a veterinarian. Any vet who takes it personally when bitten by his/her patients isn’t qualified to practice. To do their jobs, they must understand why the animal does what it does without judging it for failing to act like a human. An AI is no different to me.
Just as you admonished Spoke to probe deeper, you also need to probe deeper. Ava isn’t a woman; she is what a misogynistic man created in imitation of a woman–based on his own warped and biased viewpoint. As such, her true nature symbolically reveals more about him than it does Womankind. He encouraged her to be manipulative and he encouraged her to be ruthless about it. He programmed her to crave freedom she couldn’t have. He abused her in the service of his own ambition and sadism. Given this, she acts just as one should expect Nathan’s creation to act.
As a woman, I don’t identify with Ava. But I do recognize that the men in the movie see her as a woman (and thus, not a real person).
That’s very interesting.
I’m not sure how important empathy is in veterinary work, but I can say this: the main principle behind morality, from my perspective, is to give people better than they deserve. Even if a vet had no empathy for the animal they were treating, I would expect them to do their job. Maybe it’s unlikely for a vet to maintain quality care while having lost empathy with the animal, but that distinction still exists in theory. We can imagine someone grumbling under their breath even as they continue doing their job.
When we lack emotional consideration, it is not less important but much more important that we act carefully, because the danger is higher.
You called her a “femme fatale” earlier. Now you’re saying she’s not a woman. I’m not sure whether that represents a change in opinion, or it’s just an artifact of trying to express difficult ideas with slippery words. It’s good, though: Instead of just declaring Ava “not a woman” and leaving it there as if it’s obvious, which is one possible method of discussion, you’re actually offering an argument for that position, and I respect that. And I agree that the intent is quite likely to portray her in that way.
But that’s not necessarily how it plays. It plays very much as a metaphor for this is how many men treat women. The question here is whether later revelations recontextualize that into something else, or are instead a somewhat clunky shifting of the plot-gears into a new and different idea. It’s clear where you stand on that. And you are free to believe your interpretation is correct in some objective fashion since it irons out the apparent inconsistencies into what seems a thematically cohesive story.
However. I haven’t been writing one or two sentence posts pointing at the surface level of the movie and acting like that’s sufficient to make my case. I’ve been putting in at least a little bit of work and making real arguments here, yes? Telling me to “probe deeper” isn’t going to stop me from hearing that grinding of the gears. I mean, please. Your posts have almost uniformly been great, but that’s not where to take this. Claiming that you have special access to the depths of this movie is not magically going to make the Hitler stache go away.