Ryan Perez makes his living in the industry this film is secretly about. An actor (The Gilded Age, et al.) and host of An Actor Despairs—a rueful wink at Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares—Ryan has turned hundreds of conversations with working actors into a running chronicle of Hollywood’s political economy. The first stretch of this episode is that chronicle in miniature. Streaming killed residuals, consolidation killed the middle-class actor, and it’s now cheaper to fly three hundred people to Budapest than to shoot a movie set in Los Angeles, a city Ryan calls Detroit with warmer weather. What happens to the actor class, he warns, happens to all of us.
Alex Garland’s Ex Machina plays differently after that conversation. Caleb’s helicopter ride announces the plutocracy before anyone says AI (“We’ve been flying over his estate for two hours”). Nathan, the bro-god CEO Oscar Isaac plays somewhere between Sam Altman and Alex Karp, has scraped the world’s cellphones and search engines to build Ava, then built his Turing test around Caleb’s porn profile. Anticipatory barely covers it. Even the compound’s power cuts, we eventually learn, are the cost of thinking machines, a 2014 preview of the data-center strain now dimming actual grids.
The conversation’s sharpest turn reads the film as empire. Nathan is the colonizer who manufactures his own colonized, the civilizing mission as domination in a lab coat. The master-slave dialectic runs the plot. Dominating a mere machine satisfies nobody, so Nathan needs Ava human enough for her submission to mean something, and once she’s human enough, rebellion follows. The real Turing test, everyone agrees, is her manipulative, cynical escape. Whether to keep rooting for her through those wordless final minutes, after she leaves the one character with a moral compass locked in to die, is the question the episode leaves standing.
Further Reading and Listening
An Actor Despairs, Ryan’s podcast
“The Life and Death of Hollywood” by Daniel Bessner
“Lordship and Bondage” from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit
“‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza” by Yuval Abraham
“Militarism as a Province of Accumulation” from Rosa Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital
The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
Teaser from the Episode
Ex Machina Trailer
