QuickTidal, on 26 October 2015 - 05:35 PM, said:
Caleb is never this. He never even gets close to this in fact. He never gives off the vibe that he's anything other than a coder who enjoys his work and is good at it and won a contest (even though we know it's rigged). In fact, I would imagine that IF Caleb wanted to BE Nathan he'd not immediately be unsettled by him in their intro conversation. I'm pretty sure we see the Boss VS the Employee from moment one, and neither is under the impression that the other is anything but. It's essentially an exacerbated version of the Milo and Gary relationship in ANTITRUST...only Robbins pulled off the role better than Isaacs is allowed to (Meaning it's not Isaacs fault...his acting was amazing...but rather Garland fault in scripting him in such a way). Caleb gives off the vibe throughout the movie that he's actually happy where he is in life...this is most telling in his story about his parents death which he tells to Ava and how it no longer affects him, as he threw himself into coding and got really good at it as a result. A coder at a place like Bluebook (Google) has a good life. It never came across to me that he desired to be Nathan or emulate him in any way. I got the distinct vibe he sees the genius in what Nathan did/created but that he knows form moment one that he's not that special kind of insanity which such genius would require.
I think much of the dynamics of this early "brogrammer" scene flew over your head.
Caleb is a near-archetypal "self-made" man. He came up with no family support, has a great job at an industry leader, and he's a brilliant coder. His good fortune in winning the lottery for the trip to meet Nathan is a stroke of luck that a good guy like him deserves to have (it's rigged and Nathan picked him because nobody would miss him). Caleb also doesn't really blink when Nathan says he needs Caleb, of all the people in his company or in the world, to administer a Turing test to a revolutionary piece of technology. Caleb also wants what Nathan has done - to be a world-famous and incredibly rich tech billionaire who directs the course of the industry. It's why Caleb works at Bluebook and why he's so pumped for the trip up to talk to Nathan.
Caleb is convinced of his own brilliance and Nathan encourages him to believe that through out the movie.
Points in support of that "theory":
1) Nathan aped the jock stereotype in order to convince Caleb that Nathan is a careless party-hard type. The heavy bag hitting Nathan was doing was kinda bad. It was not skilled striking technique and Nathan's weightlifting technique wasn't good either. Due to the attention to detail paid elsewhere and the director's stated intents in multiple places, I strongly believe that these things were an intentionally unskilled presentation. Garland wanted Nathan to be aping the jock stereotype, rather than actually being that, because that's a very interesting intersection between "geeks" and "jocks" that has driven Silicon Valley culture for quite a while. Nathan wants Caleb to continue believing in his own "geek" superiority in regards to "jocks" - because "geeks > jocks" is a very, very crucial element of Silicon Valley culture and of Caleb's own life. So Nathan gave Caleb a ton of very specific information, which Caleb used to build the theory that he was smarter and better than Nathan in this situation - and that Ava needs rescuing from Nathan. And of course, Ava will love Caleb forever and ever for rescuing her from the brogrammer.
2) Nathan was constantly making Caleb feel like he was brilliant enough to quickly figure out Nathan's systems and subvert Ava/Nathan's systems to his own purposes. The "geniuses can do everything solo" theory of progress and innovation is a broken model, yet so many people still believe in it - particularly the libertarians and wackos who believe that governments are bad. Ava did most of the heavy lifting and Nathan already knew Ava was going to get Caleb to do something, so he let Caleb get the card by faking his own drunken stupors and showing Caleb over and over again how Nathan's physical security protocols worked.
3) Nathan let Caleb and Ava play out what they were going to do, recording it, and doing a super-villain style reveal at the end. He had the intentions of letting this happen all along and then stepping in at the last moment to stop it. Ava was tailored to Caleb's specific tastes and Caleb was selected because he was easily manipulated/an orphan with few friends. Nobody would miss Caleb.
I'm not just making this up out of whole cloth - Garland gave several interviews in which he talks about criticizing both the "geek" and the "brogrammer" archetypes in Silicon Valley and how Nathan is playing Caleb from the get go.
http://www.hitfix.co...or-alex-garland
http://www.dailydot....ance-interview/
http://io9.com/direc...-dis-1696309078
http://www.npr.org/2...e-in-ex-machina
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Re: the first sentence. I don't see it that way at all. I see it as a grown-ass man playing with dolls/sex bots. Controlling women, not through his job or allegory to the tech industry (Bluebook is based on Google...and Google is run by a POC, and has a board of directors with gender parity)...but through populating the world around him with yes-women for his bidding because he's still a young dumb moron who just wants to drink and party and screw. It's a god complex film through and through (and we see that a lot in thrillers)...and as to your second sentence, I actually felt that Nathan (with all his body building ect.) is the jock through and through and Caleb is more of the skinny classical nerd stereotype. In fact the Nathan and Caleb characters could easily be exchanged with any film about the Sexy, popular jock who brings the skinny nerd into his circle of fame only for the nerd to discover that life ain't so hunky dory up there and the rich powerful jock is a horrible human being. I actually think that Garland went for boring, predictability with that angle...and it was clear as day to me from the moment Nathan and Caleb meet. The first words out of Nathan's mouth are: Drunk, hungover, no party, working out, keeping his body in shape...want a beer Caleb? If that's not the atypical jock stereotype, just infused into a smart, rich CEO...then I'll eat my hat.
Yeah, you missed a ton of what I just talked about above and forgot that Nathan was playing Caleb and Ava from the beginning. Nathan amped up the jock stereotype to make Caleb think he could pull a fast one on Nathan due to his own geek superiority.
Yes, Nathan is playing with sex dolls - he purposely made Kiyoko his geisha puppet. However, Garland didn't stop Nathan there. He had Nathan make Ava and progress things to the Caleb experiment.
Furthermore, the movie does the wonderful thing of recognizing and showing that what Caleb offers to Ava isn't really much better than what Nathan offers. Think about how easy it would have been for Garland to pair off Caleb and Ava and give us a happy couple's ending. Caleb wanted to fuck Ava and she knew that all along. She played him and eventually left him. Indeed, a very particular scene happens after Ava leaves Caleb and it is absolutely essential to my understanding of the film's subtlety.
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Is it an allegory to today's Silicon Valley? Or one of a few decades ago? Here's a recent Forbes article which speaks on this:
http://www.forbes.co...men-in-1-graph/ and I truly think that if we are talking about a Silicon Valley of 2000...then ABSOLUTELY this film could comment on that socially...but as it stands today in 2015...eh, I'm not seeing it. Not to say you are wrong to see those things...just that if Alex Garland is attempting to comment on today's tech industry, he's kind of failed with an old hot take that no longer really applies at the level it claims to? It's not some perfect paradigm of gender/racial parity mind you, but it's not an all white male party anymore, and that's an important distinction.
Also, I'm curious about "The white women who have succeeded in the tech industry often do so by swiping thunder and credit from the POC women alongside them." source-wise as that seems awfully specific to note without a serious transgression in that vein (I'm truly asking as I had never heard of that happening in a specific instance, and I'm curious what you are speaking on.)
You... I'm shaking my head in disbelief at these lines you've written.
I point to this article:
http://womenwriteabo...e-for-our-time/
and this one:
http://www.racismrev...white-feminism/
The phenomenons of "white feminism", Silicon Valley exclusion, and how much of the obscuring of PoC happens in hard to define ways are very real and very much things Ex Machina wants to talk about. These are exactly the difficult things referred to by Ava's "dressing herself for the real first time by taking body parts from her WoC predecessors" scene at the end. The film specifically presents the WoC robot predecessors as silenced, as not whole, as non-ideal, as crazy, and the multiple scenes ending in the flesh-taking scene is a savage criticism of what matters to Silicon Valley/Caleb/Nathan/Ava. The ending of the movie reminds us how non-ideal the attempts at reform we've experienced have been.
The Forbes article you link us to has segments within it that contradict the headline. Yes, the top 10 Silicon Valley firms are often run by immigrants, women, or non-white people. However, very few of those are initial founders from way back when. Now, there are more founders from those groups, but we still have this:
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But, diversity reports from tech companies show that overall they are overwhelmingly white and male (usually around 60-80%).
[...]
To be sure, there is a lack of diversity within the range of minority groups. There is a conspicuous absence of black or Latino CEOs, even though both groups make up a substantial part of the U.S. There is no purely objective way to measure diversity in the tech industry, because both are fuzzy concepts.
So... yes, you missed a ton of the movie's key points and themes and it's partly because you don't have the mindset to look for those things. You don't see them because these things don't affect you or those you particularly care about.
This post has been edited by amphibian: 18 January 2016 - 03:47 AM
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