Ex Machina: Of Screens and People
[This essay has many spoilers.]
Ex Machina, the new film directed by Alex Garland, begins with a young coder in front of a screen (Caleb Smith, played by Domnhall Gleeson). He receives an email: he's won a corporate lottery. He texts a friend: I won. Instant congratulations follow, online and in the casual, open-floor plan office, where co-workers applaud. He looks happy and dazed. In short order, he's being chauffeured by helicopter over the National Park-sized estate of the corporation’s founder, whom Caleb will get to meet, in a week-long, coder’s dream vacation.
The office scene is as loaded as it is brief. In it, we see Caleb as if from a webcam. Colored light flickers at the edges of his face and in his eyes; a grid appears against his face’s contours. The camera’s perspective suggests that he’s being surveilled--as it turns out, he is—but also, more disturbingly, that he is himself synthetic, that coder and hardware share more than proximity. He almost flickers from within. The same effect recurs later in the movie, when Caleb—thoroughly disoriented by the events soon to come—slices his arm open to see if he is human, smears blood on a bathroom mirror, then punches the mirror with his fist. It’s a seconds-long drama of identity, embodiment, and surveillance, and just as in the opening scene, we see him as if through the mirror, which conceals a camera.
In both scenes, the camera angle implicates the audience. Seeing Caleb voyeuristically, on a screen, we assume the point of view of an unseen watcher. The movie is a black mirror, a screen and a window at once, showing us our world as it shows us ourselves. It’s set in the present, not the future; and its true subject, despite its dazzling special effects, is less the technology to come than the technology around us now.