Artificial Stupidity and the End of Men

This article critically evaluates Alex Garland’s film Ex Machina (2015) and its reiteration of romanticism, modernism and affiliated critical discourse. Rather than exploring the film in relation to associated science fiction, Cukor’s My Fair Lady (1964) is cited as the film’s historical precedent: the encoding of a woman by gentleman scholars who test the woman’s capacity to be assimilated into wider society. The digital context of the film’s futurist Artificial Intelligence restages romantic ruin as the future of the human species, which must prepare for motherless reproduction and the logic of the digital corporation. The article develops a theory of Artificial Stupidity, described by Hito Steyerl as the Real of Artificial Intelligence. Attending to the particularities of violence toward women that characterise Garland’s film, we explore the inevitability and intractability of the film’s narrative that reflects the wider condition of gendered power relations in Hollywood.