In Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, there are several themes and concepts which promote a patriarchal ideology and male dominance over women, which is predominantly portrayed by the antagonist Nathan. Nathan is the CEO of a large tech company called ‘Blue Book’, which is a highly successful search engine and has been the source of the billions of dollars he has procured. After making a large sum of money, he created a secure facility in the middle of nowhere in which he attempts to make a successful AI. However, through his efforts he reveals himself to be a dominant and sexist Alpha male, as the machines he creates are all female and hand-crafted to fit his heterosexual ideals. In the film he invites a young employee of his company, Caleb, to visit his facility, and it is here where we see Nathan’s true colours. I believe that, as we see through his behaviours and heinous doings which Caleb eventually uncovers, Nathan’s sexually motivated creation of Ava is his attempt to restore the patriarchy and his power over women.
In this film, Nathan is portrayed as a dominant and patriarchal figure through the way in which he
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These robots are built with the biological components of a female, and Nathan is revealed to exploit these in a display of masculine hegemony. Through Caleb’s discovery of the all-female robots in various states of dismemberment in Nathan’s room towards the end of the film, we truly witness the ideas in which Laura Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema puts forward. In this piece of what was controversial literature at the time it was written in 1975 (Mulvey, L. (2016). Laura Mulvey “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” 1975. Koenig Books), she states ‘The male unconscious has two avenues of escape from this castration anxiety: preoccupation with the re-enactment of the original trauma, counterbalanced by the devaluation, punishment, or saving of the guilty object… or else complete disavowal of