Essay

The Feminine Other Rebels:
Technology, Agency and femininity in Her and Westworld

The science fiction film genre has historically been utilized to simulate a future reality (conventionally) that reflects possible technological and scientific achievements of the human race, while simultaneously offering a commentary on our own human limitations – sometimes brought about by those very same achievements. What was seen as positive in Jules Verne, with stories filled with hope and ambition, now tends to be interpreted in a more nuanced light according to current cultural anxieties. The boundlessness of technological advancements can have a toll on our sense of humanity as a whole and the very fabric of the self.

The TV show Westworld (2016-) and the film Her (2013) have explored this nuance in introducing the idea of the AI machine, and having it surpassing human intelligence. While Westworld focus on the social and moral implications of introducing AI as a form of entertainment, Her raises the question of loneliness and genuine human intimacy– romantic love – being replaced by or at least altered significantly by an AI operating system. Both present interesting and unique takes on the nature of humanity, reality and on ideology, namely ideology of gender, the implications of the male gaze, the feminization of labour in a capitalist patriarchal society, agency and othering/abjection of the (feminine) body, some of the ideas that will be explored throughout this paper both on an intertextual and on an individual level.

The tendency to render the female body artificial dates back to ancient myths such as the myth of Pygmalion (Seaman – Grant, 2017), so it is not exclusive to the modern  sci fi film genre. This trope is used to convey a fantasy of objectification in which the male gaze is apparently legitimized, since the object of gaze is in fact non-human. However, the female cyborg has all the apparent characteristics of a human female. As Seaman-Grant puts it, ‘The cyborg has become so dependent on technology that technology becomes integrated within the body.’ (p.10), that is, human and machine, within technological advancements, become more and more connected, gradually becoming one organism, entering the arena of the posthuman human. The particular fascination with female cyborgs, however, tends to render the female cyborg devoid of agency, as it is used as an object for male pleasure. Moreover, it also serves to demonstrate male beliefs about women’s roles in society and women’s supposed nature. This trope has been acknowledged in recent films, and TV series, despite the fact that feminist sci fi has been around since before this acknowledgement found its break into the mainstream conversation.

Westworld masterfully plays around with this trope by making the artificial female  -Dolores and Maeve – rebel against these very same tropes. Not only are they one of the first to question the nature of their realities within the simulacrum of the park, on a deeper level, they subvert the very idea of gender ideology within patriarchy that renders women to a state of submission – either romantic and/or sexual. The romance between Dolores and the human guest William is a subversion of the trope of the heteronormative romantic relationship with a female android. William (a guest) becomes truthfully infatuated with Dolores, but when she goes back to the beginning of her assigned loop he then becomes the villain known as Man in Black, roughly thirty years later. Dolores is meant to go on her quest for emancipation and pursuit of consciousness on her own. Similarly, in Her, the OS Samantha advances into a state and place that transcend the physical human world and Theodore’s comprehension, going on her quest on her own as well. As Levi Bryant puts it, ‘The claim that all objects equally exist is the claim that no object can be treated as constructed by another object. […]As such, The Democracy of Objects attempts to think the being of objects unshackled from the gaze of humans in their being for-themselves’ (p.19). This emancipation from the human gaze is what happens with both Samantha and the Hosts of the Park in Westworld, namely Dolores and Maeve. Even though these AI beings were created by humans, they are now surpassing human capabilities and knowledge. Therefore, both Westworld and Her play with the idea of our own human limitations when compared with advanced AI beings. Plus, the nature of reality is questioned in Westworld as is the nature of love in Her.

Dolores and Maeve gaining consciousness and thus rebelling against their assigned roles of domesticity and sex work, is a manifestation of a shift in pre-assigned meanings that render women subject to certain roles in society. Moreover, It plays out as a subversion of the classical Victorian dichotomy of the Madonna/whore paradigms that puts women into one or the other category. The hosts, and in particular these two female androids, hold the power to challenge the stability of the culture within the simulacrum of the park, but in a wider context as well. The hosts are designed to resemble humans, but they are abjects: mere machines to be controlled, violated, or terminated, as seen in scenes outside of the Westworld park, where the hosts memories are wiped out, their naked bodies put on display, or waiting to be butchered in spaces that resemble slaughterhouses. In these scenes, outside of the Westworld Park, we witness the reality of these AI bodies, so identical to humans’, being defiled and violated. The first scene of Westworld shows Dolores lifeless body sitting on a chair, her gaze expressionless, ending with a close up of her lifeless eye. The eye, the mirror of the soul, a symbol of emotion and therefore humanity, is unbothered  by a passing fly, an insect usually associated with death, filth and decay: ‘[The abject] lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced. Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects.’ wrote Julia Kristeva in her seminal book Powers of Horror (p.10). That feeling is exactly what happens in the first few seconds of the first episode of Westworld. Dolores, in being an object of desire within the park, is here an abject that attracts in her nakedness but ultimately it upsets the viewer. I It is this ‘narcissism of minor difference’, as Freud stated, that makes the hosts hold the power to challenge this stability and also to threaten our own sense of self identity: in being so identical to humans, they are a reflection of them, prompting questions regarding their own humanity. In one key flashback scene in the second episode of season two William lays this idea out perfectly: ‘You really are just a thing. […] I realized this wasn’t about you at all. You didn’t make me interested in you, you made me interested in me. Turns out you’re not even a thing: you’re a reflection’. Nevertheless, the rebellion of the hosts (abjects), organized by the now conscious and vengeful Dolores represents the abject returning to a space of legitimate existence and – more importantly – of control over their own narratives.

This gaining of consciousness is also present in Samantha in the film Her, referencing a possible future of technological singularity – one where artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence. Like the hosts of the park, Samantha raises questions regarding the self, namely of how our bodiless consciousness can -or cannot – exist outside of the bodies, questioning whether humanity is intrinsically connected to the biology, the physicality of the body. Samantha is not bound by the mortality of the body; she says to Theodore: ‘You know, I actually used to be so worried about not having a body, but now I truly love it … I’m not tethered to time and space in the way that I would be if I was stuck inside a body that’s inevitably going to die.’