Trusting the Author: Thoughts on Ex Machina

(But first, apologies: between a week’s vacation at the family cottage and novel revisions, I’m afraid I’ve let this blog lie fallow two Mondays in a row!)

As I’ve stated before on this blog, I believe the author is dead. That is: the intentions of the creator of a narrative cannot and should not be used to deny or confirm the validity of an interpretation of its audience. For example, it’s great that J. K. Rowling says Dumbledore is gay, and it’s great that many fans accept her intention as canon. But I’m not going to tell fans who, based on the evidence in the books, see Dumbledore as straight or bi or pan or omni or asexual or…, that they’re wrong because J. K. Rowling says so.* What’s in an author’s head isn’t the same as what’s in the author’s work.

However, I also believe that knowledge or assumptions about an author’s intentions can inform a reader’s interpretation of that author’s work.

For example, if I know that in real life, C. S. Lewis was a devout Christian and Christian apologist, I’ll be more likely to see Aslan as a Christ-like figure. If I don’t know that, I might interpret Aslan as a fantasy creation. (Likewise, if I don’t assume that Lev Grossman wrote his Magicians trilogy as both criticism of and homage to the Narnia books, I may react differently to what I read in those stories, seeing only the mockery or just the reverence.)

This makes sense: readers give stories meaning based not just on the content of the story but also on their own experiences of the world. Their world includes other people, including the specific one who wrote the book they’re reading or the movie they’re watching. Readers bring their knowledge of a narrative’s creator along with the rest of their experience when they take in the story.**

Last week, when I watched Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2015) with a couple of friends (thanks, ladies!), I couldn’t help thinking that one of the most important ways knowledge of an author affects readers’ perceptions of that author’s work is trust. Who an author is — what we learn about him or her either through story choices or external sources — helps us decide whether or not we trust her to see the world in the same way we do, to share our priorities, values, and taste. That, in turn, can affect how we understand the author’s intentions.

Spoilers for Ex Machina follow.

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Ex Machina is the story of Caleb, a young programmer who wins the chance to visit the reclusive genius founder of Fake-Google (aka Bluebook). Caleb is white, male, and (we are encouraged to assume heteronormatively based on his interest in women) straight.

Although that last might seem irrelevant to the plot, it’s not: as Caleb learns, genius-founder Nathan (who is also white, male, and heteronormatively assumed straight) has invited him to test his newest creation, an AI named Ava who has been given a white, female body and has been programmed with sexual interest in men.

As the movie progresses, Caleb comes to wonder whether Ava has human rights that Nathan is violating by keeping her prisoner. Caleb witnesses Nathan’s creepy behaviour toward Ava and the female housekeeper, Kyoko. He gradually realizes he must choose to trust either creator or creation.

Caleb’s whiteness and maleness matter because the movie’s subtext regarding race and gender is part of what makes it so unsettling.

Nathan is the most privileged of privileged, inviting Caleb to be “buddies” by such stereotypically masculine activities as hiking in the woods, talking about sex, and getting smashed on straight liquor and/or beer. Every interaction he has with the other characters is tainted by the fact that he can destroy their lives (fire them, reprogram them, buy and trash everything they care about) on a whim. He chastises Caleb for succumbing to feelings and not thinking with his “intelligence.” Caleb only shares his power to the extent that he’s willing to embrace Nathan’s ethos.

Nathan also literally and metaphorically controls every female body we see in the movie. He has complete power over the AI he constructed, from the design choices that went into constructing her body — what purpose each part, including her sexual parts, should serve — to the physical space she’s allowed to inhabit. In a Bluebeard’s-wife moment, Caleb discovers the discarded, naked bodies of female AIs of various races hung up in Nathan’s private closets. Nathan is the one who gets to choose whether these women are people or things.

Caleb, our viewpoint character, shares Nathan’s maleness and whiteness as well as some of his power — he’s human, he’s a programmer (he shapes the stuff the AIs’ minds are made of). He can go with the flow, do nothing, and come out the other side of this experience unscathed — no one is going to hang him up in a closet, and he can’t become a thing by virtue of how and who he was born. But he sympathizes with the AI. Metaphorically, he has to decide whether to support or defy the patriarchy as represented by Nathan.

In places, the metaphor of AI and oppression is thoughtful and complex. For example, although Ava and the AI in bodies of women of colour are both abused by Nathan, Ava, the white AI, is the one who stands a chance of becoming a person. The others are things for Nathan’s convenience or sexual gratification. Yet Ava gains her eventual victory on the backs of her companions, allowing one woman of colour to die for her cause and cannibalizing the body of another for parts — a salient criticism of white feminism.

But in other places, the effectiveness of the subtext depends on the trust the viewer places in the writer/director.

In particular, the choice of Caleb as a viewpoint character can be both problematic and insightful depending on how self-aware you feel his creators are. If we’re in Caleb’s shoes because the male, white perspective is default, that’s the common trope of focussing on the white dude as a “generic” vantage point for racially and gender-charged stories. It assumes that we, the audience, approach this story from that perspective naturally, ignoring the not-white, not-male experiences of many audience members. It assumes that the narrative of the privileged saviour is the most interesting one in this situation.

On the other hand, if we’re in Caleb’s shoes because the creators have purposely chosen to write a story about Caleb to draw attention to his privilege relative to Ava, that’s more interesting. Using Caleb’s whiteness and maleness can show the audience how we, too, are complicit in Ava’s imprisonment by allowing the Nathans of our world to get away with their behaviour. Since Caleb’s assumption that he is the hero leads to his downfall, the choice also criticizes the dominant narrative of liberation that focuses on the experiences and goodness of the privileged “rescuer” rather than the marginalized person(s), who becomes a prop to be freed.

Context informs meaning. Each audience member’s perception of the creators’ reasons for choosing Caleb’s race and gender will change to what extent they trust the creators. This, in turn, will change the subtext that audience member perceives to that and other narrative choices.

I went into Ex Machina knowing nothing about its creators. I based my choice on whether to trust them on my friends’ recommendations; the care with which the story unfolded; the ideology I perceived in early scenes; and my previous experiences with this subgenre of science fiction and coding culture. For me, the story flip-flopped between critiquing and embracing white maleness as default. I definitely wasn’t surprised to see that a man had written and directed the movie: in some places, I felt sure the creators’ understanding of the world was different from mine. Of course, that interpretation is still based on my own experiences.

That’s why I can’t put my foot down and say the only valid way to read a particular book or movie is the way that’s consistent with my understanding of the author. In the end, my impression of a creator can’t be separated from the way I experience that creator’s work (and sometimes vice versa). And neither of those things can be separated from the way I see the world.

* However, I may disagree for other reasons, based on my own interpretation of the books.
** This can be a problem when what you know about the author makes you inclined not to like him or her. For the record, I think it’s valid not to like a work because you don’t like the author.