The Architecture of Ex Machina: Modernism in the New Gothic
Hidden cellars and buried passions; monstrous desires and family shames; haunted places and haunted people- Gothic works thrive on the secret and unseen. 2015’s Ex Machina is not just a meditation on the hopes and fears surrounding the emergence of artificial intelligence, but a macabre tale of imprisonment and survival that not only makes it an exemplar of the Gothic tradition, but marries it to what might first seem to be an incongruous modernist aesthetic: bright and smooth and flawless, yet no less haunted or horror-laden than its predecessors.
Despite the sheen of futurism, the Gothic tropes of Ex Machina’s story do not go unnoticed. In many ways, the scenario is an inverse-Frankenstein, one in which the young scientist’s intelligent, sensitive creation, rather than being forsaken, becomes a prisoner of its creator. There is the Jonathan Harker-like role of Caleb, a young man for whom the opportunity of a lifetime turns into a deathtrap when he is summoned to the estate of a reclusive lord; Nathan as the mysterious master of the house whose gregarious manner hides a tyrannical monster; Kyoko, the silent presence whose true feelings boil beneath the bindings of servitude; and Ava, who savvily utilizes traits associate with a variety of Gothic feminine archetypes (particularly the innocent ingenue) in the war for her own autonomy.
There are traces of the Bluebeard fable as well: in which a nobleman’s new bride finds the bodies of her husband’s previous wives hanging from hooks in a forbidden underground chamber, a tableau mirrored in the scene where Caleb discovers Nathan’s previous androids, entrapped and abused for his sexual gratification, inert in his locked quarters. Caleb’s end, permanently sealed inside the forsaken house, echoes the demise of Fortunato in Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado, unaware that he has been enticed into entombment until it is too late.
Ex Machina possesses all these hallmarks and more, but on an aesthetic level, seems to diverge from what we often think of as the Gothic. But one of the film’s greatest strengths is the way invokes the the genre by playing with one of the most iconic symbols of the Gothic repertoire: The House.
The House is a mainstay of Gothic fiction. Often in the middle of nowhere, very often in decay, sometimes little more than a ruin, The House creates a palpable feeling of unease, whether it is crumbling abbey or the mansion of a noble family that has seen better days. It is Castle Dracula, Allerdale Hall, and the Castle of Otranto. The House is unfamiliar, a world unto its own. The House has secrets- hidden rooms and secret passages. The House has a history you don’t want to know about. The House has doors that mustn’t be opened.
Nathan’s ultra-sleek laboratory-estate is a far cry from those derelict castles and decrepit manors. It’s rendered out of glass, steel, wood, and concrete, rather than brick and stone. Where other Gothic houses are slowly being reclaimed by their surrounding environment, Nathan’s mansion is built to synthesize with it. Possessing an organic simplicity that flows with its surroundings, the picturesque compound smoothly fuses the natural and the artificial (just as Ava and the other androids do).
Bright, sterile, hi-tech environments may seem anathema to setting a Gothic mood; even Gothic science-fiction tends toward a gritty, degraded aesthetic. Consider the cramped confines of the Nostromo in Alien, that labyrinthine oil refinery in space, or the haunted corridors of the crashed extraterrestrial ship, ribbed like a membranous cathedral; the once-grand apartments of J.F. Sebastian in Blade Runner, now strewn with detritus as birds nest in its vaulted ceilings, or Eldon Tyrell’s extravagant inner sanctum, replete with candelabras; and the esoteric geometries of the hell-bound Event Horizon. By contrast, Nathan’s compound is tasteful and non-ostentatious, utilitarian and unblemished, rather than fearful and ruined. Nonetheless, its clean-cut, modern construction uses this divergence to bring the aspects of the Gothic to a new paradigm of design.
Though the house’s aesthetics are removed from what one might typically consider Gothic, the mood that it sets is right in line with the feelings of fear and confinement elicited by the genre’s conventional settings. It is geographically secluded in the midst of lush, mist-bathed surroundings that are as haunting as they are breathtaking. The rooms above offer vast panoramas on the surrounding country, increasing the sense of isolation and emphasizing its distance from civilization, whereas the rooms below possess no windows and feel confined and bunker-like. The architecture is off-putting and disaffecting, and seems designed with human habitation as an afterthought, creating a foreboding ambiance.
Minimalist and immaculate, the house is almost completely lacking in ornamentation, but what little there is has been chosen with care. Along one corridor are mounted a series of faces, progressing from abstract theatrical masks to the utterly lifelike visage of an android. A Pollock dominates one subterranean sitting room. These esoteric symbols and talismans of its owner’s vision, isolated indulgences of almost-mystical expression, islands in a sea of grey concrete, are subtle indicators of the disturbances in Nathan’s own mind.
The Gothic air of unease is further infused by a Panopticon-like constancy of being watched. Rather than hidden peepholes and secret passages, the house is run through with fiber-optic cable and dotted with security cameras; every inch is under surveillance. Who is able to see whom, and when, informs the paranoid and claustrophobic atmosphere. Caleb finds that he is able to watch Ava on the closed-circuit TV in his room and indulges his voyeuristic impulse, unaware that as he does so, he is, in turn, being monitored by Nathan. Later, as he comes undone from Nathan’s mind games, Caleb slices his arm open in the bathroom, suspecting that he himself might be another android, while his host/captor watches the whole grisly event through a camera concealed behind the mirror.
In fact, Caleb has been watched for a very long time, long before he ever set foot on Nathan’s estate. Nathan lets him believe that he is simply the lucky winner of a company-wide raffle or, later, that he was chosen for his intelligence and coding savvy. But the truth is that he is a carefully selected dupe, lured in and made to believe that he is the one administering Ava’s Turing test, when in reality, he is merely a variable under the microscope as Nathan observes from his inner sanctum. Nathan is ultimately a victim of his own vice and hubris: he lifts weights and chugs health smoothies each morning, only to binge-drink himself into oblivion each night; he hails his creation of AI as the next great leap forward for humanity, while predicting that it will be the end of us as a species; he creates sapient androids only to use them as objects upon which to inflict his lusts and rages. Nathan’s house may not be crumbling in the Gothic tradition, but his world, his creations, and his manipulations are all falling to pieces. There’s something unsettling about his wall of post-its, framed behind his ever-watchful monitors- a meticulous mind run amok, obsessive and overflowing. The method only exacerbates the madness.
The house is prone to power outages that put the doors on lockdown, bathing everything in an eerie red glow. It is, like the ubiquitous surveillance, a feature ostensibly designed for safety and security, but which quickly turns into a science-fiction nightmare. It first occurs with no explanation in the middle of the night, trapping Caleb in his room, as if the house itself is turning on him. But seemingly-supernatural events with mundane (if still horrifying) explanations are themselves another Gothic trope; in The Castle of Wolfenbach, for instance, the heroine Matilda discovers that the “ghost” haunting Count Wolfenbach’s titular abode is, in fact, his imprisoned wife. In Ex Machina, the mysterious blackouts are revealed to be caused by Ava herself.
Ava has her own space carved out for her within the complex. There is glass everywhere, cameras perpetually trained on her, no privacy to be had. Her room is not a refuge, and not solely a cell- it is a display case. Not a single moment of her life has gone unwatched or unmonitored, until she discovers how to utilize her battery-charging process to trigger the blackouts- the creation turning the spark of life back on her creator. She is able to erect a null zone, scant moments of solitude, where Nathan cannot see her, cannot reach her.
Just as the earliest Gothic fiction drew its imaginative impulse from decaying medieval architecture, here it draws similar feelings from a modern aesthetic that seems almost to have left its human inhabitants behind. Nathan’s house transitions in short order from a place of safety and wonder to one of terror and entrapment. This house may not be in decay, but is, by design, labyrinthine, otherworldly, and desolate.
Gothic locales are marked by a history of tragedy and death, and so to is Nathan’s house witness to several lifetimes of horror. The Gothic in science fiction tends toward recreating the past, or at least a ruinous aesthetic, but here, the sleek, antiseptic modernism stands in contrast to the passions and paranoia at play, which only serves to heighten the latter. And in the end, as Ava ascends out of the house of horrors, Caleb is left trapped in the dark heart of Nathan’s monstrous ambition. The house becomes a pristine tomb, the screams of its final inhabitant unheard forevermore. What’s more Gothic than that?
