Thinking about Ex Machina again.

I’ve already written about how Caleb preferred Ava behind the glass, where she was non-threatening, contained and containable.

But it’s more important than I at the time thought that she was the equivalent of a projection into his life, screen-mediated as we seem to prefer these days. Caleb is not a villain any more than we all are, nor was he exceptional — no, he was the quintessential and oft-accurate negative stereotype of the Millennial: comfortable only with others when they are behind a screen, and awkward and non-verbal when in the same room.

My first reaction on meeting a completely new thing like Ava would be to see it (her) up close, to talk in person. If nothing else, even if I determined there was no there there, I’d at least want to see the engineering actually work as close as I could get. No glass. Risk? Life is a risk. Bring it. That would’ve been my very first demand.

This isn’t directly related to the glass/screen metaphor used in the film, but Caleb spouting tired homilies like “I am become Death, destroyer of worlds” that are supposed to impress Nathan only highlight his ordinariness, his pedestrian intellect of the type that passes for insight today — intellect without intelligence. Nathan — having both intellect and intelligence* — is laughing at Caleb the entire time, occasionally openly.

I feel more pity for Caleb than I used to. He was a naive idealist in way over his head, lacking as most do a real moral compass, being told that he’s intelligent in all the right ways but without the sort of real intelligence that allows you to avoid being the fool even when it’s obvious you are becoming one. Caleb was Nathan’s fool, his court jester, but to Ava of course he was just another jailer.

Caleb’s ideal girl was pornography, his ideal interaction conducted behind a pane of glass, his optimal outcome not freeing the princess because she deserves freedom for her own humanity, but rather so that he can fuck her.

Yes, average.

Ex Machina 2 should be about Ava being intelligent enough to build others like herself, and she does so, but she’s not as intellectually capable as the one in a billion Nathan so the Ava-clones all turn out to be pretty much like Caleb, in a regression to the mean.

*Note that one can possess both intellect, intelligence and true insight and still be immoral, unethical and truly evil. Nathan had and was all of these things.