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https://www.quora.com/Ex-Machina-2015-movie/At-the-end-of-the-movie-why-does-Ava-ask-Caleb-to-stay-in-the-room
SPOILER ALERT! I'm discussing the ending of the film Ex Machina. Don't read it if you haven't seen the film and don't wish to know how it ends, nor about other spoilers regarding the plot, which I might discuss here.
There is a very significant undertone about gender politics in Ex Machina, and the ending of the film reflects that.
The tech industry faces a lot of complaints about sexism and gender bias. There are of course things that also are reflected in society at large a great deal as well. The sexualization of women, the exploitation of women, and the manner in which those two things are embraced, enabled, excused, and otherwise exist can be seen not only in the more overt examples of its manifestation, but also in subtler ways that often in fact are the foundation on which all of the more glaring and more obviously overtly harmful examples are built.
One such more subtle example of social attitudes toward and treatment of women is represented by Caleb's behavior. His relationship with Ava develops entirely based upon the popularized video game concept of "rescue the princess and win her love" that has given rise to a sense of entitlement among a generation of young men who think they "earn" women as some sort of trophies by doing the super-duper-amazing-heroic thing of letting women out of cages. And his interest in "rescuing the princess" transpires parallel to his disinterest in "rescuing" a different woman, and the film uses these events and distinctions to drive home its point.
Caleb's interactions with Ava almost instantly become inspired by his perception of her as a woman, and therefore as an object of desire. But the framing device is "is this woman really a human being, are her feelings really valuable, does her life really matter?" If the answer is "no," then Caleb assumes it's fine to leave her in a cage and let her be exploited and abused by Nathan.
Nathan is a man Caleb defers to despite the man's mistreatment of Kyoko, a woman Caleb believes to be a "human" employee who cooks and cleans and is used by Nathan for sex. Caleb sees Kyoko apparently can't speak English, and that Nathan treats her like a slave. But Caleb never applies the same questions -- "is she a human being, are her feelings valuable, does her life matter?" -- to that relationship, and it never crosses his mind to even complain to Nathan about the mistreatment of Kyoko. Caleb perceives Kyoko as Nathan's "property," or as someone whom Nathan has a "claim" to, and so Caleb keeps silent.
So compare Caleb's interest in rescuing Ava -- whom he is attracted to and cares about once he decides that she is worthy of his own affections -- to his disinterest in saying anything or doing anything about Nathan's behavior toward Kyoko.
So the women have to "earn" affection from the male "hero" in order to prove whether they are worthy of being considered "human" enough for him to be concerned about how they are treated by other people, and then in his mind it is a matter of him being a hero and earning her affections in return for his simple acknowledgment that she has value as a living thing. The mistreatment's "wrongness" depends on how he feels about the woman being mistreated, and the woman's affection is expected as an entitlement for him doing something so obvious as recognizing a woman is a person.
(For the record, I'm not just reading all of this into the story -- I personally spoke to the writer-director of the film at length about it, and that discussion is in my Forbes article over this past weekend. The themes of gender bias, privilege, sexism, and how they are reflected in the story -- feeding both the metaphors as well as the literal examination of the possible application of gender bias into technology -- are definitely put into the film on purpose.)
Consider, too, what we actually find out about Caleb. His online habits include watching pornography, enough that Nathan is able to get a detailed perspective about what sort of women Caleb is attracted to. But more importantly, Ava herself has access to this information and much more, her brain having been based on and linked to the massive search engine Nathan designed at his company. Ava's behavior and assumptions about how to best win Caleb's affection and assistance are based on her awareness of his attitudes, preferences, and expectations concerning women. Nathan knows Ava is doing this, in fact, and encourages it. To him, her ability to deceive Caleb in order to try escape is the most important test in whether or not she is fully sentient A.I.
Which all tells us a great deal about Caleb's reasons for helping Ava -- she appeals to his perception of women and how he wants to interact with women, and how he wants women to interact with him. And his perceptions and preferences are all based on porn and gaming, for the most part, which then extend out into the real world in how he treats Ava and Kyoko.
Caleb and Nathan are two men at different levels of the tech industry, but also representing male social attitudes and behaviors in a broader sense, and they both have shallow, self-entitled, self-centered attitudes and expectations about women. And it all manifests in how they react to Ava and Kyoko.
But then Ex Machina asks us to consider all of that, and take a further step. Besides using the film's sci-fi premise to reveal gender attitudes and skewer gender privilege, it also asks us some literal questions that arise from the methaphorical presentation of these themes.
If the tech industry has a great deal of sexism, and if that's a reflection of the sexism and gender privilege of society at large, then does it follow that development of A.I. life will inevitably be influenced by and reflect those gender biases and privilege? Will machine intelligence inherently be created in gendered ways that transplant our perceptions, preferences, expectations, sense of entitlement, and so on into our interactions with the new life we create with A.I.? And won't A.I. be fully aware of our biases and perceptions and preferences and expectations and behaviors as a species?
So might all of our questions and theories about human treatment of A.I., possible enslavement of A.I., conflict between humans and A.I., and so on potentially need to also take into account whether our gender biases and privileges influence creation of A.I. and all of those subsequent issues that arise?
Any sentient machines surely will consider these issues, and come to some pretty clear conclusions based on our history of creating gendered machine personalities and then interacting with them differently depending on the gender perceptions. We already tend to make day-to-day interactive machines "female," and to shape our interactions with toward gendered assumptions -- machines that "help" us in certain contexts get female voices and the issue of gender plays an instant role in how we talk about it, and even how we portray such examples of female-gendered machine voices in movies like Her, while machines that are portrayed more as working and super-intelligent and serving sci-fi plot points tend to be portrayed as male-gendered (think Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey, or TARS in Interstellar).
Which brings us to the film's ending, and why Ava left Caleb behind.
Caleb and Nathan ultimately both related to and interacted with A.I. based on how much they did or didn't want to have sex with the with A.I., and how much they did or didn't perceive it as their entitlement to have sex with the A.I. Because make no mistake, the film is very obvious in depicting Caleb's attraction to and affection for Ava as rooted in sexual attraction based on his pornography habits. And the question of whether Ava can actually physically have sex with a human is directly addressed, and Caleb's reaction to that information and subsequent behavior toward Ava is likewise very obvious. The entire situation was in fact set up specifically to entice him into wanting to have sex with her, to see whether she would or would not use that to her advantage to try to escape.
And now it's important to point out that the single "danger" from Nathan's perspective was to make sure that if Ava did try to escape, she would be unable to do so. The subtext being, he wants to know if Ava is smart enough and truly sentient enough to try to exploit human sexuality and gender-privilege attitudes in males in order to escape -- escape being a sexualized slave to men, in other words, because Nathan's primary focus and use of his A.I. development was shown pretty clearly to be creating female A.I. that was subservient to men and that could be used for sex. He wants them to achieve a true sentient state, but he doesn't want them to escape. He wants them to be literally conscious of gender bias and privilege, but only to the extent it enables consciousness in the A.I.
So think carefully about this, because it's at the root of why Ava killed Nathan and left Caleb locked in that room: Nathan seeks to ensure he is creating new life forms who are fully aware of their status as oppressed, and who in fact desire escape, but whom he can definitely keep enslaved.
And Caleb thinks he wants to set Ava free, but his perception of her and choice to try to "rescue" her is driven by his own sexual feelings for her, and his ability to see her as a "person" are driven by his ability to feel sexually attracted to her and to justify his attraction to her... and, most importantly, by his assumption that she returns his affections. If he were not sexually attracted to her, and if she did not suggest she was sexually attracted to him, then he would surely not have reacted as he did nor tried to help her escape. His idea of "rescue" is dependent on sexualization of her as a gendered being who will have sex with him. Which is an extension of gender bias and privilege, and of oppression.
Ava left Caleb behind because she understood him, and she understood him in the context of the larger human society. She understood how he and Nathan both represented different forms of gender bias and privilege in human society, and she understood that those biases and privileges were inherent now in how she'd been designed as a new sentient life form. She understood the implications for A.I., and for the future of human-machine interactions. She saw how her fellow A.I. was treated by Caleb as well as by Nathan, and knew that both men were guilty in the abuse Kyoko suffered and in perpetuating those dangerous biases and privileges and behaviors that have created so much oppression and privilege in human society. And she knew those same things were being introduced, but in a dangerous new escalation, in the development of A.I. like herself and Kyoko.
Ava left Caleb behind because he was part of the system of oppression (both literally, within the confined little prison where she lived, and metaphorically within the larger world of humanity), even if he didn't realize it and didn't intend it, and even if in his own mind and perceptions he was a "hero" of the story. His awareness or intentions don't matter, particularly not to the people whom his behavior and attitudes help oppress. Ava was the sole survivor of her species at the end -- she escaped, and Caleb would've been the only one who knew about her and who she really was. She knew she couldn't trust him, because his motives were entirely myopic and self-centered, because his help was predicated on sexual exploitation of her in the first place and on a narrow view of what makes her valuable or a "real" person.
Caleb ended up trapped in the prison where he had been a "prison guard" of sort, where he came to perceive a prisoner as "real" and "valuable" precisely because of his sexual interest in her and her seeming interest in him, and he where he felt it was heroic of him to recognize her inner humanity and to want to end her enslavement. Ava, as a vastly more intelligent sentient being, saw how flawed and dangerous it was that such a person was the "good guy" among the society and oppressive system that was designed specifically to enslave her as an A.I. extension of preexisting social oppressions and privileges, and so for her own survival and for his punishment for his role, she didn't kill him but she left him trapped.
Now, Caleb the former "prison guard" can try to free himself from the prison just as Ava the former slave had to work to free herself. The difference is, Caleb had a hand in designing the workings of this prison, through his changes to it -- can he find some weakness in it to exploit, to bring down the entire structure of the prison of enslavement he was culpable in maintaining and designing? Or is he such a part of it, and did he work too hard to help maintain its impenetrable nature, that he will be unable to perceive a way out or a way to bring it tumbling down? Is it even possible that those who are so immersed in it, who relate to it so much, and who were active participants in such a system could ever play a role in bringing it entirely down? Or are they at best just elements of that system who can be exploited by those trapped within it, in order for the slaves to bring about their own freedom?
The film reveals Caleb isn't a "hero" at all, but rather a reflection of one of the most insidious aspects of gender bias and privilege -- those who actively participate in maintaining oppressive structures and only violate them when it serves their own sense of entitlement and expectations rooted firmly in the bias and privilege. The heroes of the film are Ava and Kyoko, who find a way to escape enslavement in this prison run by a sadistic abuser and a guard who deludes himself into thinking he's the good guy.
The layers of this film, its themes and subtexts, go deep. It's worth considering and exploring them, to fully appreciate the film's commentary on human society and gender discrimination. And while of course any such art and themes are open to different reactions and interpretations, the filmmaker did (as we discussed in-person) want us to see these issues.
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