If you don’t already know, the UFSA symposium deadline is right around the corner!
The UFSA symposium is the perfect opportunity for you to showcase your awesome essay on film or television that you urge to share with the world.
The deadline for essay submissions is January 27, 2019. If you’re interested, please email: editor.ubcufsa@gmail.com and if you’re interested in turning your written essay into a video essay please indicate so in the email
If you’re stuck or hesitant about sharing your work, one of our lovely presenters, Maxim Greer, would like to share with you his paper from the 2018 symposium.
Here it is! Enjoy 🙂
Costumes of Subjectivity: Gender, The Body and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema
By: Maxim Greer
A human-like form emerges from around a corner, walking into the view of Caleb, the male protagonist, in one of the pinnacle scenes of Alex Garland’s 2015 film Ex Machina. The figure appears to be a machine, signified by its metallic-grid outer body and artificial lights that flash out of its exposed mechanical interior. It is indeed a robot, parroting the human form in its anthropomorphism, but still clearly a machine. No matter how inhuman it may appear, the robot is unavoidably read as explicitly female in its busty figure, graceful steps and soft voice. However, what signals the human female gender most of all, is its only truly natural looking feature, the human-like skin that covers only the robot’s face. The soft facial features, arched cheekbones, and large lips fully confer it as female. Her name is Ava, and she has been created to test whether a machine can possess artificial intelligence, and more elusively, human consciousness. Garland’s film tries to position itself as an exploration of these ideas, but in reality, it is all about gender. Ava gradually becomes more human in the eyes of Caleb – and the viewer by extension -largely because of his growing attraction to her and her apparent victimization at the hands of her male creator, the ultra-rich inventor Nathan. Thus, as Ava gradually puts on more prosthetic skin to cover her metallic exterior, as well as gendered clothing, she becomes more and more a human, but even more so, a woman. Femininity in Garland’s film is shown as constructed, defined by sexualized objectification and victimization at the hands of a patriarchal creator and master. In Jonathan Glazer’s 2013 Under the Skin an unnamed alien assumes the disguise of a human woman in Scotland, hiding an abstract black form underneath a layer of skin, which perfectly mimics human tissue. Like Ava, she resembles an object of heterosexual male desire. The alien quickly acquires feminized clothing and beauty products, however Glazer’s character does so in a way that gives her more agency. In an inversion of the shared gendered themes in both films, the alien in Glazer’s film subverts the patriarchal order, turning victimhood and objectification on its head. The alien takes up markers of feminine artifice and sexuality in her seduction of men, whom she murders and seemingly feasts upon, while driving around decrepit urban Scottish landscapes. The two films’ exploration of the notion of consciousness is performed through an examination of sexuality, gender, and the male gaze, with Glazer’s work largely nuancing or inverting these concepts. Ultimately, however, both films prove the paradox of the female gender. In assuming a disguise or costume in a gendered female body, the fate of both non-human characters is tied to their surface boundaries and societal archetypes professed.
Both Ava, played by Alicia Vikander, and the alien in Glazer’s film, played by Scarlett Johansson, impersonate human beings by portraying the ideal female object. However, their manor of coming to femininity sets them apart. Ava is a construction, a robot that has been built and programmed to resemble the perfect fetishistic object . As an object of male desire, Ava is the embodiment of a commodified feminine form, white, thin, able-bodied, and classically beautiful. Indeed, Nathan, who is the owner and creator of a fictional google-like company, creates Ava’s synthetic brain and visual appearance by sourcing all of the data processed by his search engine. Nathan states that Ava’s brains come from an amalgamation of the search engine results. They are in a sense, repositories of “thought, impulse, and memories” of all humans who are connected to the internet. It is later implied that Ava’s physical appearance is sourced directly from Caleb’s Internet porn history. Thus, when Ava is switched on she enters into the world pre-programmed with knowledge of human emotions, thought processes, and the gender conventions that order society. When Caleb asks Ava how she learned to speak, she states “I always did, isn’t that strange…language is supposed to be something you acquire”. Instead of “learning” to speak or act feminine, Nathan evades any such possibility by structuring a machine, which is already, and always a gendered female. As queer theorist Judith Butler famously stated in Gender Trouble: Feminism and The Subversion of Identity: gender is a social construction, made to seem natural or real through a repetition of ritualized, performed acts (Butler, 140). Therefore, a creation such as Ava underscores the idea of gender as artifice -such an inorganic device dismantles any notion of a “real woman, or natural sex” (Butler, 140). This presentation in Garland’s film is further problematized when considering the architect of Ava’s being is a man and whose sense of the world is oriented by patriarchal conventions. Tellingly, Caleb’s response to Ava’s assumption about learning language is to offer a philosophical, and slightly condescending explanation of other theories of language as if speaking to a child, or an inferior. Caleb stands, lecturing at her, while she sits demurely and politely listens, underlining the imbalanced gender dynamics the film simulates throughout.
To use language as an analogy for gendering, the alien in Under The Skin experiences language and femininity in a much more gradual process, one of slow and steady practice, compared to Ava. The opening few minutes of the film features a mostly dark, abstracted scene, with circular shapes slowly coming into sight and eventually morphing into a human eye. Throughout, Scarlett Johansson’s voice can be heard, making inaudible “n” sounds, slowly, forming words into structure from “no” to “film, foils, faults”. The implication of such a scene is that the alien, in preparation of entering the human world, is slowly learning to speak English, putting Ava’s belief in language being an acquired skill into play. Immediately following, the alien’s handler, a male motorcyclist, pulls a woman out from a highway ditch and into the back of a van. The alien, now in human form, undresses the woman, removing her fishnets, lace, and high heels – all highly gendered clothing. In a following scene, the alien drives the van to a local shopping mall where she buys makeup, a fur coat, and stiletto boots which as Ara Osterweil puts it, “is it any wonder that her first activity as human female is to shop?” (Osterweil, 46). Wearing her new clothes, the alien puts on bright red lipstick in the mirror with a blank expression. The entire experience to the alien seems to be alienated one, like one literally entering a strange land. The mall scenes cut from woman to woman, each buying banal gendered commodities. There is no discernible dialogue, only muffled undecipherable montages of mall noise and conversation, pointing to the meaningless of such consumerist acts. The alien buys and wears items which stand as signifiers of femininity, which like language, she uses to signal a broader understanding of the conception of the human woman who is sexually available. Unlike Ava, the alien seems uncomfortable and wooden in her early engagement with men. She wears the skin of a human, and the costume of a woman, but the alien is not at home in her form the way Ava has been programmed to be. In a striking scene, the alien walks outside a highway nightclub, a sudden barrage of inebriated local woman charge in her direction. Like a freight train they startle the alien, not only by their surprise arrival but also by their exaggerated skimpy outfits and over the top gestures. While the alien seems to be able to communicate the language of gender, she struggles with a deeper understanding of how it is performed.
Both of the human “impersonators” underscore the notion of gender as a performance of “ritualized acts and surface boundaries” which Judith Butler had theorized in her book (Butler, 139). Other feminists, like Craig Owens, point to this false representation. Writing in 1983 in “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism” Owens claims that the historical signifiers of femininity are falsities which constitute them as “masquerade, with false representation, with simulation and seduction” (Owens, 2). Masquerade and seduction are at the core of both films. The alien in Glazer’s work hunts men, luring them with her sexualized performance of a historical female archetype. The alien is calm but uses typical phrases to seduce men, asking one ‘do you think I’m pretty”. She acts the way the men see her, as an object of desire. In some ways, the film’s application of the seductive woman is somewhat of a reverse of common gender conventions, albeit not fully with its tragic ending. As Ara Osterweil contends in her article “Under The Skin: The Perils of Becoming Female”, a woman driving around the countryside luring men into her van is a total reversal of the patriarchal order in which sexual violence is a common, and persistent experience for women (Osterweil, 45). “No woman in her right mind would enter that hellish abode” states Osterweil, remarking upon the otherworldly lair the alien lures the hapless men into (45). Such an analysis of Glazer’s film posits that men are far less likely to fear sexual violence, making them easy prey for the seductive alien.
In Ex Machina, seduction by Ava is a programmed tactic, in which she adjusts her masquerading femininity to suit Caleb’s views of male and female engagement. Her performance of gender is far less sexualized than Johansson’s alien, but equally as manipulative. Any time Ava and Caleb appear to be bonding in one of their sessions, the score transitions to a nauseating and kitschy theme, emphasizing the cute flirtation between the two. Ava decides to put on human clothes, picking a modest but feminine outfit of leggings and a purple flower dress. The love theme plays as she reveals her human self to Caleb, using her programming to create an image of Caleb’s “perfect” cute fantasy girlfriend. During the power outages, which allow the surveillance system to fail, thus shutting the omniscient Nathan out of listening to their conversations, Ava stresses that she is being held hostage. In this respect, the film begins to perpetuate the age-old gender archetype of the repressed, captive woman. Ava’s seduction of Caleb reinforces what Glazer’s film had been challenging with the alien’s “female cruising…as testament to the rarity of images of the active, sexual female” in cinema (Osterweil). Garland’s film perpetuates other problematic images of women, with the other robot Kyoko as a prime example. Kyoko is supposedly Nathan’s servant, a Japanese woman who Nathan has hired because of her lack of understanding of English, so that she does not give away “trade secrets”. Rather indiscreetly, the film hints that what lurks beneath her skin is a robotic underbody. Such a stereotype is problematic not only for the submissive subservient image of a woman, but because of racial concerns. The subservient gendered robot is a staple of Japanese culture with the country having established itself as a technological powerhouse, noted for its advancements in robotic technologies (Robertson 7). A popular model of Japanese robots is the domestic humanoid robot, which provides the owner with companionship and household tasks, the gendering of such robots is explicitly feminine in tasks and appearance (8). Further, while Johansson’s alien lures men into a lair and literally sucks their insides out leaving only skin, Nathan’s home is loaded with older models of robots like Kyoko and Ava, their unplugged bodies stashed in closets the way a serial killer in a classic horror film would hide his female victims.
Indeed, victimization and objectification are the centerpiece of both films, implicating the seemingly inescapable theories expressed by Laura Mulvey in the 1973 article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. In the article Mulvey held that classic Hollywood films, including many of the films of Alfred Hitchcock, were oriented towards the gaze of a heterosexual male (Mulvey, 11). Such a gaze sees man “project its phantasy onto the female figure”, which to Mulvey, structures the relationship as man possessing an active position and gaze, and the female as the passive sexualized object being viewed (11). Hitcock’s films, to Mulvey, were all about this pleasurable voyeurism (13). In many ways, Garland’ film inhabits the Hitchcockian style and themes of the passive objectified female. Caleb’s sessions with Ava are always held behind glass, where he interviews the robot. She is the passive object, sitting still as he visually consumes her. The film also points to voyeurism with the ultra-modern security system in Nathan’s house. Ava, in her locked chambers, can always be watched on the surveillance system by either of the male characters. In one shot, which is a strikingly uncanny recreation of Mulvey’s analysis, Caleb lies in bed watching Ava on the security feeds. Ava reclines like a passive nude in an old master painting, her head turned away, but her mechanical bust turned towards the viewer as if inviting the look. In some respects, the active gaze is granted to the female. Kyoko seems to take a liking in watching the security feed as well, on one occasion watching as Caleb slices open his wrist to determine whether or not he too is a programmed robot. However, the problematic racial stereotypes, as well as the fact that Kyoko is not granted a speaking line for the entire film, mutes any possible viewing dynamic from being restructured.
While Ava, Kyoko, and Johansson’s alien are all objectified by the male gaze in one way or another, Glazer’s film also orients its look towards the male characters. As the alien drives around Scotland, the hunt for men turns her look into an active gaze. Osterweil’s article calls up Mulvey’s feminist theories to explore how Glazer’s work inverts the “traditional gendering of scopophilia”. The pleasure of looking is in the alien’s gaze. Despite appearing as the fetishized object of the heterosexual male, the film is also notable in that Johansson’s alien never appears fully nude. Conversely, walking into the lair, the men fully undress, one of whom notably has an erect phallus. Such a sight is a total reversal of the phallocentric order that supposedly structures classic cinema, and apparently Ex Machina. The “fembots” in Garland’s film, when wearing prosthetic human skin, are depicted nude. In one troubling scene, Caleb watches old security footage of some of Nathan’s earlier models. The robots sit behind the glass, doubly objectified by Nathan and the security camera, fully nude and demanding their release. Meanwhile, although Johansson’s alien is catcalled and told “how beautiful” she is, often those same men are quickly disposed of. Osterweil claims this proves the alien, as a woman, “challenges” the patriarchal order, violently so (47). Thus, with Mulvey in mind, it could be said that Glazer’s film renders her theory irrelevant, albeit temporarily. Unfortunately, it seems with Ex Machina another iteration of the same troubled old story lurks around the corner.
Garland and Glazer’s films stage divergent explorations of the issues of objectification, stereotyping, and other gendered conventions. Another such opposition is their perceived ideologies towards the human conscious. As the two female characters “hide” inside female skin, they both slowly begin to be viewed by the audience and fellow characters as human beings. Garland’s film stages itself as an examination human consciousness, with Ava as one of the many test subjects in Nathan’s quest to create the perfect AI that can pass for a human. Throughout the film, Ava is deemed to be of extremely high intelligence, capable of high level thoughts and human interaction. On one hand, she gradually becomes less and less robotic in the eyes of Caleb, notably as their flirtatious relationship becomes more and of a tangible relationship. On the other hand, Ava seems completely devoid of any kind of interiority, she is observant but possesses no emotion. Rather, it is her desire to not be “unplugged” like the models that proceeded her that cause her to be seen as victim. Ava’s programming enables her to perform a victimhood that Caleb has been trained socially trained to perceived in gendered terms. The alien in Glazer’s film is equally emotionless and “robotic” in her ritualistic hunting and devouring of men, including passing by a screaming baby who has just witnessed his parents drowning in the sea. Mid-way through the film however, the audience sees a marked shift in the alien’s demeanor. Encountering a man with a serious face disfigurement, whom she invites into the van, the alien encounters herself, as in another “other” as both a female and as a literal alien other. Craig Owens holds that women are the ultimate other along with “children, the poor, the insane” (Owens, 12). The disfigured man hides his face with a heavy hood and apparently does his shopping at night, mirroring the double disguise of human skin and feminine artifice that the alien hides underneath to conceal its otherness. Ara Osterweil sees this encounter as the moment the alien experiences the human characteristic of empathy (Osterweil, 48). Instead of asking him sexual questions, she asks him about his life, his loneliness, offering him to touch her skin as an equal (48). She seemingly identifies and takes pity on the man as he is brought to her black lair but released later in the morning (48). This is the moment she breaks “free”, as a human, and from her male alien handler (48).
The experience with the disfigured man renders the alien into a human, which Osterweil pinpoints as the moment she truly observes herself as a human subject, drawing her analysis from the theories of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (49). Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage posits that the subject comes into being as a truly constituted being when observing themselves in the mirror, in effect they seem themselves for the first time as a human being (49). What Glazer’s film seems to suggest is that human empathy, being able to relate with the experiences of others, is what truly constitutes the notion of human consciousness. In Ex Machina, coming into being by viewing oneself in the mirror also occurs in a pivotal scene. Ava, having convinced Caleb to let her out, kills Nathan by stabbing him in the heart. She shows little emotion or empathy as she kills him, only briefly observing as he slowly dies, as if observing him as an object to be studied. She enters into his bedroom in search of a new mechanical arm. She takes skin from the rest of the now-defunct robots in the closet, the skin molds together as she observes herself in the mirror. The music reaches a cinematic and cathartic high point as she finally sees herself, draped fully in human skin, as a human and as a woman. Such a moment contrasts highly with the experience of Glazer’s alien, as it is immediately following the murder of her creator when Ava seems to fully embody the human form and feminine essence. Empathy brings the alien to feel comfortable in her disguise, while Ava’s experience, fully nude and observing herself in the mirror is tied to a far more superficial human existence. While Ava becomes a woman, the camera pans to a painting of a woman in a white dress. Ava walks past the painting, now wearing a matching lacey white dress, the work is a portrait by Viennese painter Gustav Klimt. The artificial and stylistic representation by Klimt of a demure and stately woman in the portrait reinforces the performative and overly-feminine being Ava has transitioned into.
In a telling juxtaposition, Johansson’s alien journey towards femininity is far more nuanced than Ava’s. Wandering the streets of Scottish city, the alien watches crowds of people as they eat, talk, spend, stare at their phones, or perform other rather quotidian tasks. The majority of the crowd seems to be women, with few men being closely observed by the alien. Slowly the scene descends into a kaleidoscope style collage of imagery, the shots spin and the lighting becomes a hazy gold. The female experience in this moment seems a dizzying and nauseating spectacle of banality for the alien. In another scene, which seems to predict her later vulnerability, she sits in the van on quiet street. Out of nowhere a group of teenage boys arrive, jumping onto the dash, startling her. There is an implication of danger, for the first time the audience is able to relate in her presumed fear. The fear experienced is marked by gendered undercurrents. Following the mirror scene, the alien seems to attempt to further connect with other humans, mostly males, letting down her guard and no longer hunting or eating humans. At this point the effect of the human skin, or the human experience, seems to compel her to have feeling, to experience taste, touch, and even love as a human. Like learning to speak, she slowly learns to become a human. Tragically, however, she does not know that her disguise as a woman does not just allow her to lure men unsuspectingly, it also makes her into a target. To Osterweil, this represents the inescapable reality of being female “in spite of the fact that the appearance of sex may be only skin deep, even alien forms of life become the subject of misogynist violence” (44). As she walks through a rural park in the Scottish highlands, she encounters a park ranger, whom she doesn’t judge or suspect to be of any danger as she wanders the woods alone. In a disturbing twist, she herself becomes the victim of sexual violence. Pursued through the woods, her human skin is ripped off by the rapist. Bellow the costume is a black form, notable in that it seems to bear resemblance to human woman, with present but understated breasts and hips. The man pours gasoline on her and sets her ablaze. In embracing her human conscious and human form, becoming a woman is her deadly mistake.
Alternatively, for Ava, becoming a woman does not bring her death; it sets her free. Using her powers of seduction and programmed knowledge of human interaction, she is at much greater advantage than Johansson’s alien. She abandons Caleb, leaving him locked in the house. Experiencing the outside world for the first time, both as a robot and as a woman, she literally jumps for joy. Wearing white high heels, her exaggerated and gleeful reaction is also an ultra-feminine one. The white outfit also calls to mind the traditional appearance of a bride. She enters into the broader world as a kind of virginal fetish item, marked by her beauty, and saved by her femininity. Gender is tied directly to the fates of both figures, with markedly different results. Woman, as Craig Owens stated, is always marked as the essential other in a hetero-normative and patriarchal world. As a robot or alien, the two films explore the notion of femininity through the experience of otherness.
Ex Machina and Under The Skin possess notably similar themes, but with largely opposed ideologies and conclusions. Ava is created as the sex-kitten image, as a false victim, and historically bound seductress. The film’s exploration of the female experience is tied to stereotypes, objectification, and superficial conceptions of gender. Garland seems to position woman largely through the eyes of the male characters, and when granted agency, Ava’s uses the surfaces of her body to achieve her goals. Being created in the pornographic image of geeky man, ultimately leaves Ava with few options, all of them with problematic connotations, despite her eventualy escape. Similarly created to appeal to men, the alien in Glazer’s film diverges in its experience with gender, empathy, and consciousness. Sent to earth to hunt humans, the alien begins to connect and feel empathy for her prey, in so becoming human herself. Darker, more nuanced, and ultimately far more tragic, Glazer’s exploration of the female experience is also the more realistic one. As Ora Osterweil states in her analysis of Glazer’s work, the lesson of the film is “if you are sexed female, beware of becoming woman” (50). Thus, in engaging the two films in a juxtaposition, the final revelation is the paradoxical experience of the female gender. Whether in achieving safety or becoming trapped in a dangerous situation, the human woman is always the other, always the target, and always marked by the skin that covers them.
Works Cited
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Print.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen16.3 (1975): 6. Web.
Osterweil, Ara. “Under the Skin: The Perils of Becoming Female.”Film Quarterly 67.4 (2014): 44-51. Web.
Owens, Craig. The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism. Columbia Press: New York. 1983. Print.
Glazer, Jonathan. Under the skin A24 Films. 2013. Film
Garland, Alex. Ex Machina. Universal Pictures. 2015. Film.
Robertson, Jennifer. “Gendering Humanoid Robots: Robo-Sexism in Japan.” Body & Society 16.2 (2010): 1-36. Web.
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