TWO

UNDER THE SKIN

The Fabricated Femme Fatale

IN 2002, THE COOPER HEWITT, Smithsonian Design Museum presented its provocative exhibit Skin: Surface, Substance, and Design—an exhibit that explored the impact of simulated skin in architecture, art, and design. Wrote the curator, Ellen Lupton, “Skin is the body part most easily altered by human beings,” adding, “Designers have confronted the medical and mechanical transformation of the human body with horror as well as fascination.”¹

What often gives films about artificial females a frisson of intrigue is the ambiguity of their artifice. Through the cover of simulated skin and the artfulness of technology, they may appear human though we know they aren’t real. These alluring females are truly trompe l’oeil figures that fool the eye, females that may mask a steely self behind the aura of beauty, glamour, or innocence. Wearing a type of camouflage or opaque veil, they embody what Mary Ann Doane in Femmes Fatales called “the precariousness of vision.” Their masks are at once concealing and revealing.²

In the films Under the Skin, Ex Machina, and Ghost in the Shell, and in the television series Westworld, there is a probing of what lies beneath the surface of female androids with beautiful synthetic skin—and frequently, the reality beneath is indeed fascinating and horrifying, though that underlying being might be impressively formidable as well.

UNDER THE SKIN

Near the beginning of Jonathan Glazer’s mesmerizing film Under the Skin (2013), a beautiful woman looks at her reflection in her compact mirror as she carefully applies bright red lipstick to her full lips. We watch in fascination and horror as this alien (played by Scarlett Johansson) transforms herself into a simulated human being, an alluring femme fatale who will lure her male victims to their deaths. (Films about artificial women often depict them reflected in shimmering mirrors or viewed through glass—a reminder that we are seeing mediated images, seductive simulacra of the real thing.)

The film, set in Scotland, opens with a mysterious man riding a motorcycle who gets off the road, goes into the dark, and reappears carrying over his shoulder a lifeless female body, a female corpse wearing torn black stockings on her dangling legs. The female alien refashions herself into a glamorous temptress as she strips the corpse and puts on its underwear, clothes, and black stockings. She is businesslike, for there is no one watching—no male gaze before which to act seductively. The only presence is a startling praying mantis insect that she carefully plucks from the dead woman’s torso before driving off in a van.

To complete the transformation, she goes to a shopping mall to buy more clothes—a fur jacket, a rose-colored shirt, new shoes, and some lipstick. As she walks through the mall, there is a glimpse from behind of her torn black stockings—a hint of her imperfection, her vulnerability, and her own ripped skin seen later in the film.

The female, we quickly learn, is a frightening alien predator, a mantrap who cruises down streets looking—like a praying mantis—for male victims. Her object is to lure and then kill the men to turn them into food for an alien race. Their dead bodies, floating in a mysterious liquid, soon become part of a streaming mass of flesh. Hunting for lone men who have no family ties, this femme fatale lures her victims into her lair of darkened rooms and entices them with her red lips and soothing voice. “Think I’m pretty?” she asks one man as she takes off her fur, leading his unsuspecting self into a type of digital quicksand, an abyss and deadly mirrored lake where he will soon disappear.

While roboticists today are busy working to create simulated females, including AI-endowed sex dolls that appear to have empathy, this alien is affectless as she drives through the streets to pick up men. Later at the shore, she watches impassively as a man in a wetsuit jumps into the water to try to help a husband rescue his wife, who is frantically being pulled away by swirling waters. After the man in the wetsuit brings the woman’s husband back on shore (but the husband drowns when he runs back out in the water), the alien kills the would-be rescuer with a rock and puts his dead body into her van. All that is left alive on the shore is the couple’s vulnerable infant, crying and alone, a fact ignored by the alien, who drives off undeterred.

In her 1987 chapter “Postfuturism,” Vivian Sobchack compellingly argues that there was a “shift in sensibility toward the alien and Other” in contemporary science fiction films at that time. While 1950s films presented aliens as sinister invaders, given the proliferation of images, including images of robots and androids, mediated through electronic technologies in the 1980s, aliens were no longer threatening but rather had become “our familiars—our close relations—if not ourselves.” Although there were still representations of evil aliens, there were new science fictions that presented aliens not as hostile or Other but as even more human than we are.³

More than thirty years after Sobchack’s “Postfuturism,” however, the alien in Glazer’s film remains a horrifyingly sinister creature with malevolent intent. In a sense, she’s a throwback to the 1950s Cold War films with their fears of an alien invasion. What gives her a more contemporary complexity, however, is that we are given the slightest suggestion that she has an interior life or, at the very least, a growing awareness of her own vulnerability.

When she puts on lipstick near the opening of the film, the alien is in an intriguing way allying herself with the acts of simulation used by real humans. She is in effect putting on a mask of femininity—the type of performative act by women that Emily Cox-Palmer-White sees as bowing to convention and a subversive, empowering act as well. When human women augment their bodies with cosmetics and manipulate their bodies to a desired state, this can be seen as an act of conformity, a “capitulation to normative notions of womanhood,” but it is also empowering as the body becomes a type of tool for self-expression or, in the case of the alien, a tool to achieve her own ends. By donning a mask of femininity, Cox-Palmer-White argues, women are in some sense conflating themselves with artificial beings: “to be feminine, by its very nature, is to be in some sense a cyborg.”⁴

The alien in Under the Skin puts lipstick on her face to convey femininity, which becomes a form of protection, allowing her to pass as an attractive human being. But the film masterfully moves between scenes of protection and vulnerability, of masking and exposure, as this impassive alien creature with her carefully crafted facade discovers fissures in her own protective persona. She pricks her hand on a rose and looks curiously as blood oozes from the cut. She trips and falls on a sidewalk, landing face down as people gather round. In her van one night, a menacing gang of men jump on her car, trying to get in before she anxiously speeds away.

There are also signs of cracks, however momentary, in her neutral stance. After she is terrorized by these men, the very next man she picks up has a vulnerability all his own—a severely disfigured face. This hooded man, who removes his hood and lets down his guard, tells her he has no friends and no experience with women, and she allows him to touch her face, telling him his hands are beautiful as she smiles at him, disarming his fears. “Do you want to look at me?” she asks, offering herself as an object to be looked at and giving him, for a few moments, the power of his gaze. His power, though, is short-lived, for after they both take off their clothes, he, too, slowly starts to become submerged in the primordial lake.

Glazer’s film, with its eerie musical tones that are heard every time the alien gets her prey, manages to catch us off guard. The film’s opening sequences present what seem like dispassionate images of visuality and occluded visuality. There are mysterious planetary-like spheres, which segue into an eclipse; the aperture of a camera; and then a startling close-up of the green-gray iris of a human eye flecked with orange and a staring black pupil. (The eye imagery conjures up Ridley Scott’s lens/eye motif in his film Blade Runner thirty years earlier.)

Much of Under the Skin presents murder scenes with an objective eye, as Glazer documents the ghastly seductions of a methodical mass murderer. But the director also surprises us with more penetrating views. He fleetingly allows us—as in a cinematic CAT scan—to see what lies beneath the skin of this beautiful, lethal siren.

As she walks backward from the victimized, disfigured man, her nude body starkly lit in the dark, we catch a glimpse of what lies beneath her pale white exterior: the outlines of a hairless, featureless, black alien face and body. The image then merges back to her white-skinned profile. There are echoes here of a sequence in Fritz Lang’s classic film Metropolis (1927) where the saintly Maria’s face briefly merges with that of her diabolical robotic double.

What makes Glazer’s film more than a chilling study in horror is that the alien—as in several other films about female simulacra, including Ex Machina, Ghost in the Shell (2017), and Westworld—is on a journey of self-awareness. After her initial encounter with the disfigured man, she goes downstairs and closely peers at her own face in an old round mirror as she scrutinizes her temporary identity as a human being. After she passes through the doorway, the camera shows a fly bouncing off the door’s frosted glass and a quick view once again of her eye. The alien’s vision—however elusive—lingers on.

Although the alien seems to be a belle dame sans merci, throughout most of the film, there is a fleeting suggestion that she is transforming, perhaps becoming more human or, at least, showing signs of becoming humane: she seems to spare the disfigured man, walking with him outside and watching him run naked through grasses as he tries to flee. His freedom, though, is short-lived, for he is soon caught by the malevolent motorcycle man first seen in the film’s beginning, who puts him in a car trunk and drives off. In this film about observation and seeing, a woman in a house watches the whole transaction through a window, a silent witness to the grotesque.

In a pivotal shift in the landscape, the alien drives through snowy mountains but is stopped by a fog through which she cannot see. Soon, she begins to experience her own miasma, a blurring of her clear-cut mission. She feels her own vulnerability and her own sexuality, as she slowly discovers what it means to be human. Instead of being a predator, she herself becomes in need of protection and comfort. To get out of the rain on a nearly deserted road in the countryside, she hovers in a bus shelter. While riding on the bus, a kind man sitting behind her offers her his coat. “You okay?” he asks. “Need any help?”

At his house, she learns something about humanness as she watches television, taps her foot in time to music, and looks carefully and with curiosity at her own nude body. She learns more about her femininity as she once again gazes in a mirror, this time seeing her torso, her back, her vagina and breasts. She learns, too, about human tenderness as the man gently kisses her, and she puts her hand on his face. But this alien shows no signs of enjoying sex. When the man is lying on top of her in bed, she suddenly stops him, jumps out of bed, grabs a lamp, and bends down to look anxiously and closely at her vagina. For her, being a human female is a source of trauma and alarm.

In this dark tale, the alien woman who has so mercilessly and dispassionately victimized most of her prey finally finds the tables turned as she enters into a mythic nightmare world. Walking quickly through a forest, she encounters a logging truck driver who warns her, “You might get lost.” Finding a shelter, she lies down but quickly becomes a quarry herself as the lumberman gropes her, and she tries to flee the menacing man.

In the film’s incendiary finale, the alien running through the ominous woods can find no escape. She is brutally attacked by the lumberman, who assaults her, throws her to the ground, and tears off her clothes but is horrified when he discovers what lies beneath her ripped skin. The woman who was self-constructed is now brutally ripped apart, as in directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1951 filmed version of Jacques Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffmann. In that film, the mechanical doll Olympia is torn apart by the warring Spalanzani and Coppelius, and Hoffmann, the man who loves her, must confront that she is an artificial creation.

In some films, as we will see, when a female robot peels away her own skin it is an act of agency, a cry for help. Under the Skin recapitulates the horror of exposure and dismemberment, but for the alien, the exposure is not an act of volition but an assault. As the man attacks her, we see bits of her black body showing through her torn pale white skin.

Dazed, she staggers, pulls off her wig, and unpeels the rest of her skin, and we see the shiny surface of her black hairless head and her body as she is reduced to her elemental self. She kneels on the ground and holds in her hands the decapitated head of the female she once embodied—a head with blinking eyes, like Olympia’s in the film The Tales of Hoffmann, where the decapitated face (of actress Moira Shearer) blinks as the poet Hoffmann stares at her in horror.

The end of Under the Skin is devastating. The lumberman throws gasoline on the alien and sets her on fire, and she staggers through the snow, burning, still carrying her decapitated humanoid head. Her body is soon consumed by flames, and a column of dark smoke and her ashes silently rise into the air. As the camera pans to a white sky filled with falling snowflakes and ashes, some of the wet flakes land on the camera lens—a reminder that the images we are watching are cinematic simulations in themselves. Ultimately, there is a total whiteout as all traces of the alien—and all the film’s imagery—are dissolved into the transcendent world of nature, leaving us with a cosmic view.

The falling snow and the disappearing image become a metaphor for the ephemeral, fraught nature of human simulacra and the ephemeral existence of human life itself. But films about artificial women are finally more about definition rather than dissolution as these females discover their own identity. At the end of the haunting film Her (2013), Samantha—the disembodied female voice of an operating system—dissolves her relationship with Theodore amid falling particles of snow seen through his window. But she herself experiences a form of self-discovery as she lives on in the digital ether (see chapter 5).

These twin themes—dissolution and definition—become central in films, television series, and novels about artificial women. Artificial females peel back layers of their own synthetic skin as they assert their own insistent identities—defining themselves as forces to be reckoned with in worlds where the virtual contends with the real.

EX MACHINA

In Alex Garland’s film Ex Machina (2014), one of the most riveting scenes is when the beautiful female robot Ava slowly covers the armature of her cyborg body with a floral dress and fleecy white stockings while she is secretly being observed by Caleb, a young crack programmer. He watches intently as this captivating robot slowly transforms herself into what looks like a real human being.

As Ava (played by Alicia Vikander) carefully pulls the dress over her head and rolls her stockings up her leg, she seems unaware that for Caleb this is a sensual moment. Instead, she is intent on camouflaging or covering up her mechanism. It’s an ambiguous scene in a film that is full of ambiguities. Is she doing this to make herself alluring to Caleb? Is this a gesture about hiding, an effort to camouflage her true nature so she can fit in among humans? Her motives remain murky through much of the film, making her both fascinating and frightening at the same time—qualities that often haunt artificial females themselves.

This moment in the movie—when Caleb is slowly becoming seduced by Ava’s charms—captures one of the film’s central themes: the allure and possible danger of an android like Ava that is so technologically sophisticated it can fool the heart and eye. The film is fraught with the tension between Ava’s underlying artifice and her appearance as being real. She is a crafted creature mimicking human thoughts and feelings, and this imitation has the potential for both delight and horror.

In the film, Caleb (played by Domhnall Gleeson) works for BlueBook, a search engine company, and happily learns he has won first prize in a company contest. He agrees to fly by helicopter to a remote compound and residence situated in wooded mountains. His task, says BlueBook’s chief, Nathan (masterfully played by Oscar Isaac), is to see if Nathan’s newly developed artificially intelligent female robot, named Ava, can pass the Turing test or can seem to have human consciousness even though Caleb already knows she is a machine.

This is a film that becomes spellbinding through its layering of surfaces and transparencies. When Caleb first sees Ava, he sees her from afar and through a mediating glass window. He often sees her and talks to her through room walls of glass. He can see that she is clearly a synthetic creature, a composite of a machine and a human-looking body. She has a human face but no hair on her gleaming metallic skull. Her neck, arms, torso, and legs are transparent, revealing their electronic wiring, but she has human-looking hands and feet. To Caleb, part of her allure is that she is a paradoxical, veiled creature: both transparent and opaque, close yet also remote—through a glass darkly.

Ava seduces Caleb—and us the audience, too—by seeming so convincingly real, not only through Vikander’s acting skills but also because Ava herself is a remarkable work of technological ingenuity both as a fictive character and as a cinematic creation. The film’s special effects team used computer animation and 3D rendering software to seamlessly produce a composite of Ava’s CGI-rendered arms and legs combined with the actress’s own face, feet, and hands.

Says Ava to Caleb, who smilingly looks at her on the monitor, “You can see that I’m a machine,” and for him, this dynamic of the enticing woman who is artificial sets up her magnetic allure. He’s immediately entranced: “Oh man, she’s fascinating,” he says, seeing her as a blend of naturalism and Alice-in-Wonderland-like surrealism. He continues, “When you talk to her, you’re just through the looking glass.” Caleb’s real challenge is to know that Ava is synthetic but still decide if she has consciousness.

Making the task even more problematic and challenging, the elusive Ava is a robot that has been designed to foster closeness and intimacy—qualities that are especially seductive and dangerous for a young man with vulnerabilities. “Do you want to be my friend?” she asks Caleb, who lost his parents in a car accident and has no brothers or sisters. “Are you married?” When she hears that his parents died in a car crash when he was fifteen, she says softly, “I’m sorry.” She tells him in a whisper during an electrical blackout that Nathan isn’t really his friend. “You shouldn’t trust him,” she says, building their bond.

This is a film that creates tension through its crafty interplay of real and artificial. To Caleb, Ava increasingly seems like a real human being. She has empathy and seems to wish to connect and be a confidant and friend. However, Nathan, her creator, is intent on deconstructing the illusion and demonstrating that she’s clearly a fabrication. He shows Caleb his lab, where Ava was created, a place that has several face masks that, with the aid of AI, can duplicate facial expressions. Even more eerily, Nathan holds in his hand Ava’s brain, made of structured gel, a brain that will be implanted with programmed memories and thoughts. There are often scary images of brains and skulls in horror films, and this gelatinous brain is especially alienating, coming from such a beautiful and enticing creature.

The film’s scenic design also cleverly plays with this dialectic between artifice and naturalism, authenticity and the artificial. Nathan’s subterranean research facility is designed to look rustic with rocks, streams, and waterfalls, but it also has glass and steel interiors with artificial lighting and electronics. In a film about both art and artifice, Nathan points to his painting by Jackson Pollock on the wall to dispel Caleb’s doubts about Ava, making a pitch that Pollock’s abstract expressionist painting represents consciousness unfettered by rationality—and he urges Caleb to suspend his own sense of disbelief.

Art and artfulness have an important role in the film. Ava expresses herself by drawing pictures at night that she shows to Caleb. To him, this makes her seem even more genuine and authentic. When Caleb sees Nathan tearing up one of the drawings, he reads this as an outrageous, brutal denial of Ava’s personhood, her creativity. The whole event that he observes, however, appears to be artifice, a manufactured incident designed by the artful impresario Nathan to arouse Caleb’s sympathy for Ava.

THE AMBIGUITIES OF VISION

Much of the allure of Ex Machina itself is the way it evokes these ambiguities of vision and seeing. Is the Ava who appears to be genuine a mere puppet or marionette being manipulated and manipulative all at once? In one of the film’s early pivotal moments, Caleb, standing behind a glass panel, gazes at Ava resting on a gurney. As he objectifies her by looking at her, she turns her head to look at him. In that moment, Caleb is captivated by the view: In a trope often seen in portrayals of female robots created by men, she appears to him like a newborn—innocent, naive—yet she is also an adult woman, available and sexual too. Her voice is soft, her smile faint, making her charming and disarming at the same time. She is a woman who gently seduces him without the obvious trappings of a femme fatale.

Caleb is drawn by her apparent inexperience: she tells him, in a conversation, that she’s never been outside the room she’s in now (though later, she will fantasize about being in a busy intersection, with its “shifting view of human life”). Kneeling in front of him in a deferential female posture, she leans forward, telling him, “We could go out together” She says this in a beguiling, soft voice, and he answers jocularly, “It’s a date!” Later, she asks with seeming innocence yet also seductively, “Do you think about me when we aren’t together . . . sometimes at night?”

In this film about seeing and perception, Ava is seemingly guileless yet also artful as she plays with his gaze and teasingly shapes his vision of her. “There’s something I want to show you,” she says and asks him to close his eyes. It’s here where she creates a dramatic transformation that changes the way he perceives her. She puts on her dress, a sweater that covers her bare electronic arms, stockings, a blond wig, and shoes, and then tells him to open his eyes. Turning around slowly, she asks him, “How do I look?” She kneels toward him again, leans forward, and thoroughly entrances him with a series of soft enticements: “This is what I’d wear on our date.” “I’d like us to go out on a date.” “Are you attracted to me? You give me indications that you are.”

Using sight and vision as a lure and a trap, Ava knows she’s caught him, because, she says, she can see his “microexpressions”—“the way your eyes fix on my eyes and lips. The way you hold my gaze,” adding, “I’m wondering if you’re watching me on the cameras. And I hope you are.”

Ava is just as artful when she not only creates but also dismantles the illusion. While Caleb is again watching her from afar, she undresses. She slowly takes off her stockings, which expose her robotic legs, takes off her dress and shoes, and then looks at him as the film cuts to a close-up of his watching eyes. Framed and backlit by the window, she stands there with no clothes on and to Caleb, the image is riveting.

In E. T. A. Hoffman’s “The Sandman,” when Nathanael realizes that his beloved is not real, he is horrified and experiences what Sigmund Freud in 1919 called “the uncanny” and Masahiro Mori in 1970 called the “uncanny valley.”⁵ But in Garland’s film, even when Ava once again exposes her mechanism, in Caleb’s eyes she maintains her allure—largely through her charisma, which has charmed him, and the charisma of Vikander as an actress who has thoroughly charmed the audience.

Perhaps, for Caleb, it is precisely Ava’s artifice, her otherness, that makes her so appealing, so approachable, so safe. And by extension, it may well be that it is the inherent artifice of all simulated females—sex dolls and fictional versions—that makes them appealing, especially to men who need distance and safety from a real woman’s complexity and needs. (But as feminist theorists of science fiction have argued, it is the perceived difference and otherness of artificial females—as women, as artificial constructs—that make them subject to male abuse, exploitation, and efforts at control.)

Ex Machina is a film not only about the allure and ambiguities of artifice but also about two classic paradigms of female identity. Is Ava—as with the two Marias in Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis—an angel or a temptress? Is the newly minted Ava an ingenue just learning the ways of the world and love, or is she programmed to be (or, with her AI, does she learn to be) cleverly, and perhaps diabolically, manipulative? Is she innocently engaging in unassuming flirtation with Caleb (“Would you like to go on a date?”), or is she using sexuality to further her own ends?

The otherwise savvy and suspicious Caleb lobs probing questions at Nathan: “Did you program her to flirt with me?” “Did you program her to like me or not?” “Did you give her sexuality as a diversion tactic?” Is Ava like a magician’s assistant that will cloud his ability to judge her AI? Nathan is coy—“If I did, would that be cheating?”—but still insists on her authenticity. “And for the record,” says Nathan, “Ava’s not pretending to like you,” adding, “Her flirting isn’t an algorithm to fake you out.” Besides, he points out, it’s natural that Ava would develop a crush on Caleb—the only other man she’s ever known is Nathan.

Caleb may probe the genuineness of her sexuality, but he doesn’t seem to question her empathy or wonder whether she is genuinely sympathetic or if this is just a ploy, which leaves him vulnerable and exposed. Ava successfully elicits his trust, drawing him ever closer to her.

The film’s central tensions, however, go beyond authenticity or artifice, trust or suspicion. Behind the facade of a seductive digital wonderland, there is always the lurking threat of violent disruption and menace in the film. Caleb may feel closely connected to Ava, but the threat of disintegration is always there. He experiences the horror of the uncanny when Nathan shows him his workroom with its tables covered with dismembered robot bodies—a metallic head, a headless, nude female torso. At night and unseen, he has a recognition of torment and imprisonment when he sees Nathan drag away a nude female robot who flails her hands and screams, “Why won’t you let me out!” (She flails so hard that she knocks off her hands, exposing her mechanism and wires.)

Kyoko, Nathan’s robotic servant and, essentially, his sex slave, is also trapped and anguished. When Nathan gets angry at her after she accidentally spills a wineglass on the table, she sits on the hallway floor looking dejected. At another point, there is a close-up of her cutting meat with a knife—a startling and menacing moment suggesting her simmering anger and potential for violence.

The film’s most startling moment of deconstruction is when Kyoko goes up to Caleb, pulls at her own rib cage in the area under her breasts, and painfully and shockingly peels back her skin, revealing her artifice. When she peels away her own skin, it is a brave and desperate act of agency, for by revealing herself, she shows Caleb her plight and her true nature as a simulated woman. After she reveals her simulated self, the film cuts to Caleb lying on his bed as he flashes to an image of Kyoko with her bulging eyes wide open and the rest of her shining metal artificial face exposed. (He later pulls at his own skin and cuts himself with a razor to see if he bleeds, testing to see if he’s human.)

Kyoko’s unpeeling of her own skin, a startling revelation that she’s artificial, not real, is a potent recurring image in films and television dramas about female robots and artificial women. In Under the Skin, the mysterious, homicidal female alien grotesquely pulls off her blonde wig and peels back her skin, exposing her bare black head and body. Dr. Franklin in the “Kill Oscar” episode of the vintage television series The Bionic Woman (1976) rips off the face of his personal assistant, exposing her electronic circuitry to prove to Baron Constantine that she is synthetic, not real. Also, as we shall see, the brutal exposure appeared again forty years later in a 2016 episode of the American television series Westworld where Logan puts a gash in Dolores to remind William she’s a mere robot. But it is the self-exposure in films like Ex Machina that is most poignant: for synthetic creatures like Kyoko, the awareness of her own artifice is particularly painful.

For Caleb, the most horrifying aspect of Ava is the threat that she will become dismembered. Nathan matter-of-factly tells him that Ava is not an end product. Instead, his next female robot model will be the breakthrough that will achieve singularity or human consciousness, and Ava will be destroyed. Her mind will be downloaded, her memories erased, and only her body will survive. When Nathan asks Caleb provocatively and manipulatively, “Do you feel bad for Ava?” it is part of his diabolical strategy: he banks on Nathan’s sympathy and his wish to try to save her.

Ultimately, Nathan does indeed turn out to be a techno-magician using Ava for misdirection, and his test is a success: Ava demonstrates true AI through her self-awareness, empathy, manipulation, sexuality, and imagination, all used to foster her own escape. What Nathan didn’t count on is getting destroyed himself in the whole process.

When Ava, with her gleaming silver torso and whirring motors, walks determinedly down the corridor near the end, she becomes a formidable and lethal creature. Her short walk is a journey of self-discovery: along the way, she touches a mask of a woman on the wall and then her own face. Though she’s partially dismembered by Nathan at the end and loses one of her arms, she has the strength and determination (after being aided by Kyoko, who knifes him) to give Nathan the mortal cuts that ultimately kill him.

In the film’s stirring ending, Ava reassembles herself into a new identity as Caleb once again watches her helplessly, this time trapped behind a glass wall. In Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein fashions his grotesque artificial creature from dead body parts, but here, Ava has agency: She becomes her own Victor and reconstructs herself from disparate body parts. After opening a closet, she unhinges her own forearm and exchanges it for a whole arm that she takes from a female robot hanging there. She pulls off segments of the robot’s skin and covers her own metallic armature.

Near the end, in another moment of self-discovery, she stands there nude, and like the alien in Under the Skin, looks at herself in the mirror. Putting on a lacy white dress, she’s ready to gain her freedom and autonomy, and she takes a waiting helicopter to finally escape. In a film about the ambiguities of vision, at the end of the film she stands watching people in a busy urban intersection just as she earlier had longed to do. But Garland leaves us with a version of Plato’s ancient “Allegory of the Cave” reimagined for the digital age. Ultimately, we see the people in the outside world represented only by their shadows on the pavement, ethereal images of reality in this illusory world.

GHOST IN THE SHELL

Scarlett Johansson as the alien in Under the Skin ultimately disintegrates and disappears into the white air, but as Samantha in Her and as Major in Rupert Sanders’s film Ghost in the Shell (2017), she portrays a new breed of artificial woman who forcefully asserts herself and does anything but disappear.

In Ghost in the Shell’s opening sequences, a woman lying on a lab gurney gasps for air as a reassuring voice tells her, “Just breathe!” This is the birth of a female cyborg, a hybrid creature with a synthetic shell of a body, a human brain, and a “ghost,” or soul. The cyborg, known as Major, has been created as a warrior, a weapon against terrorism.

Her birth—with her floating nude figure covered in dripping white liquid—was imaged using live-action and CGI visual effects, and has echoes of the acclaimed 1995 anime version of Ghost in the Shell directed by Mamoru Oshii and based on the manga by Masamune Shirow. The technology of cyborg creation in films has changed dramatically over the years. Both versions of Ghost in the Shell—as well as the animated Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004), where female gynoids are manufactured by injecting or hacking the “ghosts” (personalities) of captured young women into artificial creatures or dolls—were a long way from the dramatic creation of the robot Maria in Lang’s Metropolis. There, Maria’s robotic double was created amid flashing arcs of electricity and circular rings of fire (special effects using a Tesla coil and floating circular neon lights in liquid).⁶

They are also a long way from the creation of a companion for the Monster in James Whale’s 1935 film Bride of Frankenstein, where the Bride is constructed from dead female body parts and animated through the electricity of lightning. In one of the most memorable moments in Whale’s film, the Bride’s bandages are dramatically unwrapped as her creator, Henry Frankenstein, cries out ecstatically, “She’s alive!”

The birth scenes may be different, but some of the main themes in these films and others, including Blade Runner (1982) and Ex Machina, are very much the same. What is the nature of these new creatures that blur the distinction between the artificial and the real? What does it feel like to be one of these synthetic creatures whose existence is embedded with ambiguities?

Major, the newly birthed cyborg in Ghost in the Shell, is haunted by the need to find the nature of her identity. She was told that she was originally a young woman named Mira Killian who had been the sole survivor of a cyberterrorist attack, although her body had been badly damaged (she was also told that her parents had both died in an accident). Hanka, a Japanese robotics company, had developed a way to salvage her brain by putting it into an artificial body and uses the newly created cyborg to work as an antiterrorist agent in Section 9.

At one point in the film, she is charged with attacking enemy robotic geishas who are servants at a banquet, and she is startled when one of these geishas cries out, “Help me!”⁷ In this film about synthetic humanoid female creations, the geisha is particularly intriguing. Geishas are known for their artifice—their stylized facial makeup and movements. The robot geisha is a servant woman with a stylized, camouflaged face made of shiny sections of plastic, and Major herself is a type of civil servant wearing camouflage—her nude-colored Thermosuit that covers her whole body and is made of silicone.

After killing the geisha, Major looks at her own damaged hand with its torn Thermosuit skin and exposed innards, and is again troubled. Her companion warrior Batou had reassured her about herself and the geisha—“You’re not the same. It’s just a robot”—and Dr. Ouelet, the scientist who had successfully created her, had reassured her, “You’re human,” but Major is still troubled. In this film about uncovering layers of reality, she confronts a woman on the street whose face is partially covered in silver skin and asks her, “Are you human?” She insists the woman peel off the silver covering, and Major curiously touches her face and becomes even more determined to discover information about her own mysterious identity and origins.

In a pivotal moment later in the film, Kuze, the film’s archvillain and nemesis, who is a prior experimental cyborg, tells her, “We are the same.” To prove it to her, he brutally pulls off a section of her face, holds it in his hand, and puts it back. She also finds out from Dr. Ouelet that she is one of many prior experimental creations and that her memories of her dead parents and her past were false memories, implanted by Hanka. The revelation leaves her evermore determined to find out her real name and who she is.

Throughout the film, this simulated woman—like the alien in Under the Skin—remains both powerful and vulnerable. She often displays a kind of tough stoicism and rarely shows even a flicker of emotion other than fierce intensity in the film’s many fight scenes. As played by Johansson, Major is both blunt and enigmatic, so that we imagine she may have hidden sensitivities we do not see.

For all of her stoicism, Major does make some poignant admissions, but usually with a poker face. When Dr. Ouelet (played by Juliette Binoche) warns her, “You’re not invulnerable. I can’t protect you,” and also tells her she’s one of a kind and the future of humanity, Major replies, “You don’t know how alone that makes me feel.” (In the earlier 1995 Ghost in the Shell film, after diving down deep into water, she had also said, “I feel fear, cold, alone,” though adding that sometimes “I even feel hope.”)

As an actress, Johansson had her own identity issues with the film. She had to deal with the fact that the film’s creators were roundly criticized for not casting an Asian actress in Major’s role. She also had to deal with the complexities of playing the role of a robot: How do you convey that you are artificial yet also show some signs of humanity? (Adding a surreal twist, a British man in 2016 created his own robot double of Johansson herself.)

As with the birth scenes, Sanders’s Ghost in the Shell was haunted by other ghosts of films past. The film’s CGI images of a futuristic city resembling Hong Kong, set in a fictional future, had echoes of earlier cinematic sci-fi cities seen in Metropolis and in Blade Runner’s off-world colony. But what was particularly arresting in the film were the mammoth holographs of female figures amid the city’s high-rise buildings—towering females and mannequins that were eerie, spectral reminders of this highly synthetic world.

The film—with its explosions and violence, its futuristic urban scenes, its meditations on technology—does not open up much new cinematic territory. But near the end, it becomes surprisingly effective when Major meets, and later, embraces, the woman who was her original mother (movingly played by Japanese actress Kaori Momoi). She finds out she was abducted by the scientists and that her true name was Motoko. Her mother described her as a fearless young woman who had been writing a manifesto that “technology was destroying the world.” When her daughter disappeared, her mother was falsely told that her daughter had run away and committed suicide.

Discovering who she was finally gives Major some closure and peace. Near the end of the film, she finally casts off her uncertainty. Her identity as a cyborg with a soul may still remain problematic, but for her, and for now, she has gained agency and a strong sense of self. She becomes a representative of the new breed of simulated women in films—formidable women who embrace their synthetic identities and remain fighters and survivors. Says Major, acknowledging her orders to go on another policing mission, “I am Major, and I give my consent.”

WESTWORLD: DOLORES

In the television series Westworld, Dolores (played by Evan Rachel Wood), as is Maeve, is this type of formidable, fearless simulated woman; only she is at first shown as a demure-looking rancher’s daughter who speaks in a soft Western accent and quiet voice. This earnest young woman dressed in her blue, Texas-ranch-style cotton dress gives no hint of the killer she will later become.

Birth scenes in films about artificial women often fixate on eyes. The opening image of a large eyeball in Westworld’s credits highlights how perception is important in this series, and the opening of Dolores’s eyes in several scenes suggests not only her rebirth after her robotic construction is brought back to life but also her growing consciousness of her own identity and her changing role.

There are iconic scenes in film and television when constructed artificial women first open their eyes and seem to offer the promise of being an ideal partner. But the beautiful lady isn’t what she seems. In Metropolis, the captive Maria, lying in a glass tube, is tethered to that of a robot, and she is used by the maniacal scientist Rotwang to create an evil double of herself. A close-up of the robot’s face dissolves into Maria’s, and as the replica’s eyes open, she is now an evil version of the saintly Maria, a beautiful vampish creature who will lead men astray. And opened eyes are central in Westworld too.

In several scenes in Westworld, Dolores lies on a gurney as she is being reconstructed in a lab, her armature exposed before skin is layered on her face and shoulders. Her eyes open, she sits up, and Bernard, head of Westworld programming, greets her with “Welcome to the world!” Though we have no illusions that she is human, we are quickly drawn into her psychic sphere. Creating an ongoing tension in the series, we have parallel perceptions of her as synthetic and genuine, artificial and real.

Alex Garland in Ex Machina presents a nuanced exploration of the ambiguities of artifice, where Caleb is seduced by Ava’s allure even while knowing from the beginning that she is a synthetic being, but in Westworld, there is often little room for subtlety, ambiguity, and play. The hosts are constructed beings controlled by computers, and we are reminded of that again and again. In the series’ first episode, the theme park’s director, Dr. Robert Ford (whose name wittily echoes the divinity Ford in Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World), instructs a technician to reanimate Dolores, and when he says, “Bring her back online,” her lifeless body is reactivated once more.

The series continues to remind us early and often that the hosts aren’t real. The most brutal revelation is when Logan, the brother-in-law of park visitor William Delos, plunges a knife into Dolores in order to pull back her layered skin and expose her inner framework—proving to William that his beloved Dolores is just a robot. After Logan gashes Dolores open, Logan tells William sadistically, “She’s just a doll!” As in Hoffmann’s “The Sandman,” where Nathanael’s friends tell him that his beloved Olimpia is just a doll, but he persists in loving her just the same—and as in Ex Machina, where Caleb is undeterred by knowing Ava isn’t real—the fact of Dolores’s artifice is irrelevant to William, for his love is too deep for him to be dissuaded. (Though in a big reversal, by the second season’s episode “The Reunion,” William, who Dolores long thought loved her, tells her cruelly and scornfully, “You really are just a thing. I can’t believe I fell in love with you.”)

One of the paradoxes of artificial women in films and television is that, as in Westworld, we become invested in their inner struggles even while being reminded that these females are constructed creatures. For the theme park visitors, the artifice of the hosts is actually liberating because that factor allows them to indulge in their own fantasies and whims. The guests are free to act out their sexual and violent impulses with no consequences. They can discover aspects of their own personalities and play out their hidden selves. So too for Dolores, whose self-discovery and abandonment of her demure mask will be liberating. As she says, “I think when I discover who I am I’ll be free.”

The issue of masking and authenticity is not only the stuff of fiction but also a recurring cultural theme in gender identity. Taught to beautify themselves with cosmetics, to wear alluring clothing and alter their bodies, women historically and in a wide variety of cultures can be subject to changing cultural norms, alternately socialized to submerge their appearance behind the artifice of cosmetics yet also celebrate and honor their authentic selves.⁸ In films like Under the Skin, however, there is a horrifying aspect to the alien’s putting on lipstick, for it masks her grotesque identity. In other films, the masking is functional—it’s a type of placeholder for women who must hide their underlying intent.

Whether innocently seductive as Dolores or audaciously available as Maeve, female hosts in Westworld sport a cheerful camouflage, or type of body armor, that masks their determination and moments of uncertainty as they probe the nature of their own artificial identity. As so often happens in stories about newly created female robots, Dolores at first has an adolescent-like innocence, but in this coming-of-age story, we witness her sometimes poignant, sometimes painful evolving consciousness and journey to self-awareness.

Dolores had learned from Dr. Ford (played by Anthony Hopkins) that Arnold, the originator of Westworld, had developed a small round maze, or puzzle, as a test of empathy and imagination—the center of which was consciousness. Arnold had increased her consciousness, and as she evolved, on her quest for the maze, she demonstrated that she does indeed have the capacity for empathy, love, and grief. But she also has other sides as a tough-minded killer.

In the final episode of the first season, “The Bicameral Mind,” Dolores again lies on a gurney with her eyes closed as her skeletal framework is being slowly covered with artificial skin. “Dolores,” a voice calls as her eyes open and she sits up. This is Dolores awakening again, but it is a Dolores with a difference—she is now a woman with growing sentience who will be intent on determining her own fate.

In one of her iconic surrealist paintings, Mexican artist Frida Kahlo pictured dual images of herself sitting side by side on two chairs: one of her dressed as a European woman in her lacy white colonial woman’s clothes, and the other dressed in the colorful clothes of her mother’s Mexican heritage. At the end of the first season, two versions of Dolores also appear. They sit facing each other on chairs. On one side is Dolores, a fierce gunslinger dressed in pants and white shirt, and the other, the sweet Dolores in her blue cotton dress. “You’ve arrived” to the center of the maze, Ford tells her. She’s ready, she says, “to confront myself—after this long and vivid nightmare—myself and who I must become.” At a corporate gala, she ruthlessly shoots Ford with a steely look in her eye, a newly emergent female to be reckoned with—ready to set off on her own path in the lands outside of Westworld.

Westworld is a series about robotic women being transformed as they thrust off the conventions of their gendered roles. In the first season’s episode “Contrapasso,” when Dolores rides outside Sweetwater with the guest William, she tells him, “You said people come here to change the story of their lives. I imagined a story where I didn’t have to be the damsel in distress.” Reversing her role as the gentle Dolores, she shows she can also be a sharpshooter as she kills the outlaws who attack them.

In seasons 2 and 3, Dolores is fully transformed as she rides on horseback with an ammunition belt strapped across her back (although problematically, and somewhat confusingly in this oddly written series, her identity is that of her alter ego, the male Wyatt. Arnold had earlier merged her with the new character they were developing). We still see her as Dolores, though, and she becomes a fierce fighter who leads the hosts into acts of rebellion as she contemplates replacing all humans with a new breed of hosts. Shorn of her look of innocence, and unlike the seductive Ava and the alluring alien in Under the Skin, she wears no mask as she bares her lethal intentions out in the open. Riding with her band of hosts, she is finally free.

By the finale of the Westworld series, in 2022, Dolores has been through many identity permutations—the demure woman in the Western town; the fierce fighter still in Western garb; a version in which she merges with Charlotte Hale (Halores), the former executive of Westworld’s parent corporation, Delos; and finally, in season 4, she is Christina, a woman who writes the narrative stories for Olympiad, a video game enterprise, where she has powers to manipulate the actions of others. Like a whole lineup of artificial women in fiction, television, and films, Dolores in her many identities is determined to create her own narrative. As her host lover Teddy tells her, in her former identity as Dolores, she was initially made to perform the stories of others but then “she outgrew others’ stories. She began writing her own.”

In the season’s final episode, she tells Teddy tearfully, “I don’t know who I am anymore” before she submerges herself in a bathtub. Still, in this series that is only intermittently coherent, Dolores in the end is back wearing her blue dress in the town of Sweetwater in Westworld—presumably continuing her own story, but this time on her own terms. Artificial women in this series are alternately puppets and puppet masters, ever trying to master their own fates.

NOTES

1. Ellen Lupton, with essays by Jennifer Tobias et al., Skin: Surface, Substance, and Design (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002), 64.

2. Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1991), 46.

3. Vivian Sobchack, “Postfuturism,” first published in Sobchack’s Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film (New York: Ungar, 1987), and republished in Gill Kirkup et al., eds., The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 2000), 136–47.

4. Emily Cox-Palmer-White, The Biopolitics of Gender in Science Fiction: Feminism and Female Machines (New York: Routledge, 2021), 62. Cox references Judith Butler’s writings about performativity in her work.

5. Sigmund Freud, “Das Unheimliche” [The Uncanny], 1919, in vol. 17 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1955), 218–52; Masahiro Mori, “The Uncanny Valley,” Energy 7 (1970): 33–35; and Karl F. MacDorman and Nori Kageki, trans., IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine 19, no. 2 (June 2012): 100.

6. Julie Wosk, “Metropolis,” Technology and Culture 51, no. 2 (April 2010): 403–408; Wosk, “Update on the Film Metropolis,” Technology and Culture 51, no. 4 (October 2010): 1061–62, https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2010.0069.

7. More memorable are the anguished cries of the gynoids in Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004) when the captured girls (gynoids) groomed to be sex slaves go from vulnerability to murderous. One of them cries out “Help me!” before self-destructing by tearing open her own skin to expose her innards.

8. Kathy Peiss, however, in her study Hope in a Jar, reveals an intriguing paradox: some advertisers in the 1920s, in ads like Armand’s “Find Yourself,” promised women that by wearing cosmetics, they could discover their own personality and portray their individuality. Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture (New York: Henry Holt, 1998), 144.