The much-fabled ChatGPT recently passed the exams for a US law degree. Its performance was a mediocre C+ but is sure to improve. In this article Heather Mendick focuses on a very different test for Artificial Intelligence. Will an AI ever replace the femme fatale? Or will strong women who use sexuality to get what they want forever remain elusive to technology?
The femme fatale test is rather different from most because she exists in the stories we tell. So the question of whether there will ever be an AI femme fatale is one of science fiction. Is she something that we can collectively imagine? Past cinema AIs, such as Rachael in 1982’s Blade Runner and Samantha in 2013’s Her, already portray aspects of the femme fatale: her inscrutability and the risk to hapless men that she embodies. But no film has done more to automate the femme fatale than Alex Garland’s Ex Machina.
I’m not sure you need to give spoiler alerts for a film released 8 years ago, but just in case, I am going to spoil the hell out of Ex Machina in what follows.
What happens in Ex Machina?
Ex Machina has four characters. The reclusive CEO of Blue Book, the world’s largest search engine, Nathan Bateman invites employee Caleb Smith to his home / research facility to administer a Turing Test on Ava, a female AI he’s created. Caleb’s role is to assess whether Ava is conscious. Another earlier-model AI Kyoko is Nathan’s silent servant, cooking, cleaning and having sex with him.
The film is organised around a series of encounters between Caleb and Ava which Nathan observes via CCTV. Ava is able to trigger power surges which allow her to talk with Caleb for short periods unobserved. During these, they agree on a plan for Ava to escape Nathan’s clutches. This plan becomes increasingly urgent for Caleb as he falls for Ava and when he steals Nathan’s keycard, thus uncovering video footage of previous female AIs being destroyed by Nathan and finding them discarded in cupboards. This scene recalls the bloody chamber in the Bluebeard fairy tale, when Bluebeard’s young wife steals his key and discovers the corpses of his past wives. So while the bodies in Ex Machina are decommissioned robots, we’re encouraged to see them as belonging to murdered women.
The film ends with Caleb and Ava executing their plans. Caleb disables the security systems. Ava, working with Kyoko, kills Nathan. However, in a twist, she walks out of the compound leaving Caleb sealed inside, screaming into the void. In the final scene Ava watches people at a traffic intersection, something she fantasised about doing with Caleb earlier in the film.
Is Ava a femme fatale?
Ava certainly proves fatal to both Nathan and Caleb. However, the femme fatale is more than a simple killer. Robert Alpert makes a convincing argument that Ava is indeed a femme fatale recalling characters from classic US film noirs. Those 1940s and 1950s films were animated by “post-World War II anxieties and fears”. Ex Machina updates these for a technology-driven “contemporary culture that often blurs identity, including gender, and encourages a transcendence of the limitations of our inevitably decaying human bodies”. Caleb listens to OMD’s song Enola Gay about the Hiroshima bombing and quotes Robert Oppenheimer who led the creation of the atomic bomb: “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”.
Feminist takes on the femme fatale often view her as a misogynistic fantasy, embodying social fears of powerful and sexual women. Ava too can be read thus, as “the ultimate male-feared horror-figure of science fiction—a sexually seductive woman who openly expresses her hatred for her creator and who can defeat that creator at his own game”. Alper continues, it is through Ava’s femme-fatalistic capacity to use her sexuality to manipulate men, or better – to use their sexuality against them, that she “demonstrates that she is fully ‘human’ by outmaneuvering her male adversary, Nathan, with Caleb as her sacrificial pawn”.
Femme fatales, fetishes and agency
I view femme fatales and Ava differently. In a brilliant essay on Billy Wilder’s classic noir Double Indemnity, Elisabeth Bronfen identifies a “problem with reading the femme fatale as a stereotype of feminine evil, as a symptom of male anxiety”. This reduces her to “an encoded figure who exists only as the phantasmic emanation of others … rather than treating her as a separate subject who has agency and is responsible for her decisions”. Double Indemnity’s Phyllis Dietrichson, unlike Ava, is flesh and blood not mesh and wire, yet she still gets read through our cultural archetypes as “encoded”. This approach fetishises the femme fatale “rather than acknowledging her as a separate human being”.
Ava, coded into existence and with her consciousness in question, makes explicit this dilemma of how to read the femme fatale.
Many viewers, feminist and otherwise, fetishise Ava, seeing her as ruthlessly manipulating Caleb from the start. Shaun challenges this, explaining how the film’s point of view moves from Caleb to Ava, ending with us leaving the compound with her. Writer/director Aiex Garland himself “felt so allied to Ava. … Because what I saw was somebody who’s trapped in a glass box”. She’s in a prison and “into that space comes the jailer’s friend, the only other man she has ever seen, who may or may not be trustworthy”. Shaun argues that when Caleb chooses to keep his knowledge of fellow AI Kyoko from Ava, he shows her that she cannot trust him. Because of this, she consigns him to the fate from which he felt no obligation to rescue Kyoka, an AI to whom he was not sexually attracted.
For me Ava is the ultimate femme fatale because more than any other, she invites us to explore “what if, rather than treating her as a fetish, projection, or symptom, one were to treat her instead as the subject of her narrative”?