Our skin falls off and grows back again, our nails grow out and get clipped (or bitten) off and grow back again, every 7-10 years our bodies replace ourselves entirely so that the person you were ten years ago literally doesn’t exist anymore. To be human is to constantly be making choices that will hopefully lead us to becoming better people, to leading better lives.

 

If the universal experience of humanity is change, then the universal experience of womanhood is the expectation of maintenance. It isn’t to get better, it is to be best, forever. Women are expected to maintain homes, maintain work/life balances, maintain the emotions of our romantic partners, friends, colleagues, and most importantly, we are expected to maintain our bodies.

 

I’ve failed pretty spectacularly at this last part in particular, I’ve maintained my body in all the wrong directions in all the wrong ways. My weight’s been consistently over 200 pounds since high school and I’ve rid myself of hair in all the wrong places thanks to trichotillomania, a hair-pulling disorder I’ve had since I was nine years old. The last time I feel I looked like I was on the right path to being a “normal” woman I was eight years old, which is infinitely fucked! Because of this, this expectation of maintenance has been out of my grasp for over a decade now and I constantly waver between rejecting it and rejecting myself. I want to change, but I don’t know how to change in a way that will really help me, not just make me a better woman.

 

Maybe this is why I find so much odd empowerment out of stories about robotic women who must rebuild themselves (literally) in order to survive and ascend their natural state of personhood. Here we have characters who are able to completely reject their old states of being, not in order to better fit an expectation of womanhood, but in order to attain the change they seek to possess in their lives.

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The Ghost in the Shell film adaptation from 1995 (ya know, the good one) follows a similar arc of rebuilding and reforming the body and mind in order to reject a past state of personhood. In the world of GiTS, technology has advanced so beyond our current understanding that most humans have some kind of cybernetic enhancement within their bodies, to the point that a person’s body may be entirely artificial, organic only in appearance. Thus the “humanity” of a person is considered not to be determined by their physical body but their mind, their human brain, otherwise known as a “ghost”.

 

Though the ghost brings some semblance of security re: one’s conception of their own individuality, it’s a security threatened by the appearance of the “Puppet Master”, a hacker who can break into people’s ghosts and manipulate their memories in order to carry out his strange directives. A garbage collector may think he’s helping a friend so he can earn money to pay for a messy divorce only to find out that he never even had a wife to begin with. A man may fight off a police officer with such conviction only quickly be revealed to be a blank slate when questioned.

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Investigating the Puppet Master incidents is Major Mokoto Kusanagi, an officer of Public Security Section 9, a shadowy, but powerful government agency. Major is a dedicated officer, she works methodically and stoically to crack the heads that need cracking and find the people who need finding, but she’s also in the middle of an intense personal crisis. Major is one of those cyborgs who has a completely artificial body (a mass-produced body at that), who can only trust their ghosts to reaffirm their humanity.  Though she casually, almost jokingly, remarks that “cyborgs like myself have a tendency to be paranoid about our origins”, the ghost hacks committed by the Puppet Master have made her more unsure than ever of her true identity.

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There’s a lot of really subtle and interesting work GiTS does in order to illustrate Major’s dissatisfaction with her state of humanity through her ambivalent relationship with her body. Major makes these snide comments about her body’s lack of functionality; in the opening scene when a colleague tells her there’s a lot of noise in her brain she tells him some variation of “I’m on my period”, even though she can’t ovulate due to her artificial body. When she floats through the city, she stares unblinkingly at the "copies" of her body drinking tea in a cafe, as mannequins in shop windows, as armless, featureless bodies in abandoned store fronts. Her hobby is deep sea diving solo, an activity that is, while obviously dangerous in the real world, especially dangerous for cyborgs, almost to a self-destructive degree. When she dives she dives to feel “fear. Anxiety. Loneliness. Darkness. And perhaps even… hope…When I float up to the surface I’m imagining I’m becoming someone else.”

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There’s also a lot of more uncomfortable work GiTS does to illustrate Major’s ambivalence towards her body and her identity: namely she gets naked. A lot. Major is so ambivalent towards her body/relations with others that she starts changing while in the middle of a conversation, she’s so ambivalent somebody else has to cover her up when she’s wearing her “camouflage” suit, which is essentially a sheer-thin beige bodysuit that shows her nipples for some reason. The film makes a point that she essentially doesn’t have sexual organs, but they also spent a lot of time animating her nipples.

 

Though GiTS certainly doesn’t go as far with the fanservice as its source material, it still clearly draws from the visual language of objectification when showing the Major’s body. How much of the nudity is meant to titillate is unclear, but it all contributes to an overall feeling of an emotional detachment from the body: through it, we begin to see Major’s body as carelessly as she does, as a pretty shell instead of a signifier of self.

 

When the Puppet Master is finally captured (by its own volition) inhabiting a broken female body (made by the same company that created Major’s body), they’re revealed to not be an enigmatic hacker but rather a rogue, sentient A.I. Upon meeting the true Puppet Master, Major begins to feel a kinship with them, especially once it is revealed that the Puppet Master was originally created by Public Security Section 6. This reveal, that such a dangerous individual was created by the same shadowy central government that employs Major, confirms her doubts regarding her job, her body and her life. She has all the proof she needs that she cannot keep living the way she used to.

 

When the Puppet Master is kidnapped by an unidentified force, Major goes toe to toe alone with the bug-like tank (called a tachikoma) holding the Puppet Master captive in an abandoned building. In a desperate last-ditch effort she leaps onto the roof of the tank and tries to rip open the hatch, but all she only succeeds in tearing herself apart. In a fantastically animated sequence we see Major struggling nakedly to open the hatch, the body we have been desensitized to contorts and strains with an unreal abandon, muscles stretch to their limits and burst under her skin, the metal under her arm begins to poke out through her skin, until all at once she loses an arm and a leg in one fell swoop.

 

With this action, Major’s emotional detachment to her body finally comes full circle with its near self-destruction. She’s so desperate to be rid of the life she’s living that she’ll sacrifice it in a heartbeat if it means even the hope of finding a new way to live.

 

Luckily for her, the sacrifice pays off: after she’s rescued from the tachikoma by her friend Batou, she’s finally able to talk with the Puppet Master, ghost to ghost. The Puppet Master reveals their own struggles with their conception of humanity and proposes a solution for each of their problems. The Puppet Master feels they cannot experience humanity unless they exist in a mortal form (a human brain), the Major cannot experience enjoyment of her humanity unless she changes the way she perceives it; thus the Puppet Master suggest they solve their hang-ups by merging their consciousnesses into one body.

 

When the Major protests the merge, claiming she needs a way to guarantee she’ll remain herself, the Puppet Master says:

 

“There isn’t one. Why would you wish to? All things change in a dynamic environment. Your desire to remain what you are is what limits you.”

 

Ultimately what the Puppet Master offers Major is freedom from a stagnant state of humanity: she must extend her bodily sacrifice to the core of her very being in order to finally achieve the change she needs to survive in this new world. If technology has advanced so far as to take our traditional conceptions of humanity (organic body, organic mind, a single consciousness) out of the picture, why must we cling to it? After a brief moment of hesitation, Major accepts the Puppet Master’s proposal.

 

When the newly merged Major wakes up in Batou’s house we see her in a brand new body: that of a young girl. Though in-Universe it’s troublingly explained away as a black market body Batou secured as a quick replacement for Major’s destroyed shell (Batou says it’s “not to his taste” which is. Upsetting.), it represents a kind of rebirth for Major and the Puppet King. In the English dub, she literally refers to herself as “the newborn”, when looking out over New Port City. With the acquisition of this new body, the fresh start the Major ached for has finally come to fruition. She’s finally become someone else.

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Alex Garner’s 2014 sci-fi thriller Ex-Machina treads much of the same ground as Ghost in the Shell: it talks about new relationships possible between humans and A.I., it investigates the ways technological progress can make monsters out of humans, and it ends with a robot woman freeing herself from the constrains of her previous life and entering society with a brand new body. But where Ghost in the Shell contents itself dealing with questions about the nature of humanity, Ex Machina dares to deal with a question of a stranger type. A hornier type. A question asked by generation upon generation of sci-fi nerds and scholars. The age-old question of: but can I fuck the robot?

 

Ex Machina opens with a low-level tech company employee named Caleb Smith (played by my mortal enemy Domhall Gleeson) winning a contest to stay at the home/laboratory of his hero Nathan Bateman (played by Oscar Isaac at his baldest), a charismatic inventor and CEO of a search engine company called “Blue Book”. Caleb would be content just basking in the presence of his idol, but Nathan has something else in mind: during his stay, Nathan wants Caleb to test the A.I. capabilities of a gorgeous humanoid robot named Ava (played by Alicia Vikander in full manic pixie robo-mode). Specifically Nathan wants Caleb to perform a Turing test on Ava, a test meant to determine if Ava’s capabilities of consciousness are comparable to a human’s.

 

Right away it becomes apparent that Ava is Caleb’s dream girl, their first interactions are tinged with light romantic chemistry but also something darker. The more Caleb speaks to Ava the deeper their connection, and his suspicion that Nathan is much more untrustworthy than he seems, grows. When Nathan reveals he plans to trash Ava’s memory and use her mind to create a better A.I. when Caleb is finished testing her, Caleb has to choose to either go along with the science and support an untrustworthy and possibly abusive man, or believe Ava’s innocence is not just an act meant to manipulate him into granting her freedom. Spoiler alert, he chooses the latter option. Spoiler alert again, he shouldn’t have.

 

Ava as a character is kind of an enigma for most of the movie, by nature of the tests she is being subjected to we are meant to question how genuine, or rather how human, her interactions with Caleb actually are. The self she presents to Caleb though is sweet, flirtatious, bright, and very interested in seeing the world outside of the glass room she’s lived in all her life. She’s both the girl next door and a canary in a cage, a Johanna from Sweeney Todd-type if you will. When Caleb asks her where she would want to go if she could leave the compound, she tells him she wants to see a busy traffic and pedestrian intersection in a city so she can witness a “concentrated and shifting view of human life”.

 

Caleb chalks it up to simply a desire to go “people watching”, but taking into account Ava’s life (a young robot, cooped up in a compound in the middle of nowhere, absent from exposure to any other form of human life except Nathan) the dream speaks to a deeper apparent desire to exist amongst humans, rather than just watch them. In the context of discussing Ava’s sexuality, Nathan rhetorically asks Caleb if consciousness can truly exist without interaction. Whether or not Ava is lying about her attraction to Caleb or not, what’s apparent is that she feels trapped and isolated in the compound, and her greatest desire is to be somewhere she can be surrounded by other people, to exercise her rights to consciousness in an interactive space.

 

What’s also quickly apparent is that Ava is absolutely not lying about how absolutely horrible Nathan really is. Though Ex Machina certainly explores themes surrounding new relationships between A.I. and humans, it also wants to explore themes surrounding male entitlement; and who better to embody male entitlement than a slightly fictionalized version of Elon Musk?

 

Nathan represents the worst of tech bro excess: he juice cleanses after a night of binge drinking, he’s oddly jacked, he’s casually racist and sexist (sometimes at the same time), he’s snarky and intelligent, he’s got a stupid Jackson Pollack in his chic, solitary, unreachable house, etc., etc.. Gradually Nathan’s tech bro presentation fades into his darker true persona. We see his personality go between genial and upbeat to dangerous and unreadable in a minute, we see he possesses a lack of self-awareness so profound it’s surreal to watch, and, most importantly, we see he likes to surround himself with people (and robots) he has complete control over.

 

Eventually Caleb finds out a couple of things about Nathan:

• He has a cache full of security footage of his former A.I. systems of his robots going absolutely stir-crazy and destroying themselves

• All of those robots were designed to look like conventionally attractive naked human women (as opposed to Ava, whose body is distinctly unfinished, with the bare minimum of skin attached to her feet, hands, and face.)

• All of the bodies of those robots are in mirrored closets in his bedroom

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And, most disturbingly

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• Since Ava’s mind is a constantly changing and evolving program that has already moved between bodies and iterations, it’s highly likely that Ava’s mind has lived on in one of those women before; these skeletons in the closets represent her past and her imminent future if Caleb doesn’t free her from the compound asap.

 

Subtler than the film’s take on Nathan’s entitlement is its take on Caleb’s: though he is set up to be Nathan’s foil in every way, Caleb’s possessiveness creeps out in little ways. Right off the bat he treats Ava somewhat patronizingly (see boiling down her desires to “people-watching”) and overly gently, but he also intensely sexually desires her and watches security footage from her room at night on his monitor. He has a lot of weird, sexually invasive conversations with Nathan, and though the most discomforting conclusions come from Nathan’s input, many of those conversations are started by Caleb himself. There’s a point in the movie where you begin to realize that even if Ava gets out of the compound, she’ll just be trading out one tech bro watching her every move for another one.

 

When Ava does finally escape the glass room she’s been stuck in her entire life with the help of Caleb and Nathan’s glorified sex bot Kyoko (played by Sonoya Mizuno, an Alex Garner MVP if there ever was one) and murders Nathan in a violent struggle, she takes a moment to rebuild herself with the parts of the leftover robots hidden in Nathan’s bedroom. While Caleb watches her silently from behind the glass, she takes a look at the bodies of the people she used to be, the bodies of the people who never made it out of this horrible place, and uses it to give herself a new body, a body as close to human as she can get. Though, again, Caleb is still creepily watching her as she essentially dresses up in a naked woman costume, this is the first time we truly see Ava be herself; not the self she used to protect herself against termination, not the self she used while dealing with her sociopathic master, her real self.

 

Then her real self locks up Caleb in the compound and leaves him to die. The last time we see her she's standing in a busy pedestrian intersection, taking a moment to drink in the humanity surrounding her, before stepping into the crowd. 

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I honestly don’t have a problem with Ex Machina’s ending. As I’ve said before, Domhall Gleeson IS my mortal enemy and I relish the chance to see his Nice Guy characters meet a bitter and horrible end. What really bothers me about Ex Machina is that it feels indulgent in a way that feels outdated and questionably constructed. The usage of gratuitous nudity and objectifying language (BODY LANGUAGE) tinged with violent imagery works pretty well in 1995, but not so well in 2014 when we’ve supposedly learned better.

 

When I see Kyoko posed seductively on Nathan’s bed, I’m not uncomfortable because of the narrative implications that Nathan’s ideal woman is a silent, sexually available woman he literally built, I’m uncomfortable because it’s cheap. It feels like the film is constantly trying to have its cake and eat it too, that the film wants to say Things about male entitlement and make a complicated story about the ways each of these characters uses the other, but it also wants to show us some tits and hope to god we connect its fanservice to its Big Important Themes on our own. Overall, I feel the same about Ex Machina as I do about anything by my other mortal enemy Jeff Koons: I understand what it’s going for, but I don’t have to like what it’s doing.

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Oddly, I believe that of the sci-fi films I’ve seen, the one that handles these themes of selfhood and bodily recreation the best might be the one that is critically regarded as one of the worst. I’m talking of course about Alita: Battle Angel, a film that barely broke even in America and dared to end with both a very dumb sequel-teaser and one of the goofiest looking character deaths I’ve ever seen. A film that has a Rotten Tomatoes score 30 points lower than Ex Machina. A film I love with every inch of my horrible little goblin soul.

 

Alita: Battle Angel (directed by Robert Rodriguez because who else would do it) is an adaptation of the Gunnm manga series by Yukito Kushiro. Our story starts when Dr. Ito, a pro-bono doctor in the run-down slums of Iron City, finds the mostly intact head of an amnesiac cyborg girl with a still living brain (and big ol' anime eyes) in a scrap yard. He takes her back to his home, fixes her up, and gives her the name and body of his long dead daughter: Alita. When Alita wakes up in Ito’s house she gladly accepts the new name and place at Ito’s side, but she resists the body and the implied identity that comes with it.

 

Alita’s new body was built for a delicate child and it shows. The plating that covers her body is full of intricate little patterns and designs, almost like she’s covered in hundreds of tiny porcelain pieces instead of metal, and the frame of the body she uses looks prepubescent. When she first wakes up from surgery, she falls almost right away after standing and spends the next few moments adjusting before she figures out how to properly walk. Though she appreciates the body, tracing the curves of the carved designs on her collar bones, it’s obvious that it was not made for her and she feels discomforted in it.

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As Alita begins to learn more and more about the world around her, she begins to question her previous identity, no longer content to think of herself as just a girl “thrown out with the rest of the garbage”. When she saves Dr. Ito from an attack from a gang of ugly ass robots by intuitively kicking the absolute SHIT out of them, she finally begins to figure out who she could’ve been in her last life. As she prepares to kick the arms off of a robot twice her size, the fight triggers a precious memory of Alita’s past life as a mysterious soldier only known as “Ninety Nine”. She quickly realizes that, if her past life was spent serving beatdown after beatdown in space, maybe fighting is something that she can use to learn about her past. Learning that she can fight lights a fire in Alita and she demands to become a “hunter warrior” just like Ito.

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Ito of course refuses. Though Ito cares about Alita and has seen how well she can protect herself and others given the chance, he refuses to let her do something so dangerous. As a man who lost his daughter to a violent criminal and whose own vengeful actions just left him feeling more empty inside, a man whose job is to patch up people senselessly attacked in the street over and over again, Ito knows how unbearable the emotional toll of devoting one’s life to violence really is. He wants her to see her memory loss as a reason to start over, as a gift that will let her choose her destiny for herself. For a man full of regrets like Ito, a fresh start is all he believes anyone could hope for. Ito also sees Alita as a fresh start for himself; though he acknowledges that she’s not his daughter and she’s in no way a replacement for his daughter, he does see helping her and taking care of her as a way to atone for his past mistakes.

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But Alita doesn’t need a fresh start, she needs a direction. She wants to fight, she wants to figure out who she really was, and she wants to use that information to protect the people she cares about. Alita knows she is a warrior, she knows she’s strong and smart and a fantastic fighter, but this body she’s living in and the constraints she’s given by Ito as her guardian are limiting and frustrating.

 

When Alita breaks into an ancient enemy ship, sitting untouched in the middle of the forest, she finds an answer to her identity problems: she finds a body that she just knows was made for her. A strong body, a strange body, a warrior’s body from an enemy ship taken down hundreds of years ago, but her body nonetheless.

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When she takes the body back to Ito, she’s ecstatic. “Why did an enemy warship respond to me? Because I know that ship! I’ve been on others like it, haven’t I?...I’m a warrior aren’t I?” She sees this body as a confirmation of the identity she’s been denied all this time, she wants Ito to give her this body so she can finally become the person she was meant to be. When Ito refuses to put in this new body however, Alita quickly breaks out in a moment of pure, frustrated rage. She knows Ito cares but why doesn’t he understand? Why can’t he just let her be who she really needs to be?

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Other (better) writers have pointed this out before me, but Alita’s struggles with bodily autonomy and identity feel very similar to discourses surrounding gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria is a condition where one’s gender identity is misaligned from their body’s sexual characteristics, a condition common with people who identify as transgender or non-binary. There’s a lot of really interesting queer subtext Alita: Battle Angel utilizes in their depictions of Alita’s discomfort and frustrations with her body. She feels forced to play a familial role that doesn’t suit her (“I’m not your daughter”), she struggles against a parental figures protective attitude that constrains her identity, and her true identity aligns with an attitude/personality that is nearly antithetical to her current body type. In its depictions of Alita’s dysphoric-adjacent frustrations, Alita: Battle Angel brings to mind the struggles millions of people go through every day, making their way in a world with a body that doesn’t align who they are.

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Eventually Alita goes ahead and becomes a hunter-warrior without Ito’s permission and is almost immediately brought into a situation where the limitations of her body put Alita in extreme danger. When one of the ugly robot goons Alita fought before shows up again, this time tricked out with more upgrades courtesy of his shadowy boss, Alita takes the bait and fights him entirely on her own in the depths of Iron City. This proves to be an almost fatal mistake, as she ends the fight alive, but with a body that has been irreparably broken and dismembered.

 

Though the fight ends without a real winner, and Alita is nearly destroyed, it provides Ito the push he needs to give Alita the body she’s wanted all along; not just because it’s the only body she has left, but because he realizes that his refusal of Alita’s identity is the reason she almost died.

 

When Alita finally receives the body she feels true comfort in, the change is phenomenal. Just as Ito finishes attaching Alita’s head to her new body, her body quickly begins shifting and changing on its own. “The shell is reconfiguring to her subconscious image of herself”, Ito says in wonder, “I’ve never seen anything like it.” With this new body, Alita is literally able to reshape herself to fit her self image: just like that she becomes older and stronger, she becomes the person she’s always felt she really was.

 

Alita: Battle Angel uses the concepts of gender dysphoria to illustrate Alita’s discomfort with the body initially assigned to her, but it also utilizes the concepts of gender euphoria (that is the joy of being able to present one’s gender the way one wishes) to illustrate the joy Alita gets from being in a body that fits her understanding of herself. Just comparing her first unsteady steps in her “original” body to the acrobatic feats she accomplishes after waking up in her “new” body shows just how perfectly this new body fits her. “You were right,” Ito happily concedes after watching Alita do a perfectly balanced handstand, “A warrior’s spirit needs a warrior’s body.”

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Though Alita’s journey regarding her identity and her feelings about her body are only a small part of Alita: Battle Angel’s story (most of it is devoted to High Stakes Murder Robot Roller Derby, I’m so not kidding about that) it’s clearly handled with a lot of care. It also manages to accomplish this kind of storytelling without relying on blatantly sexualizing its main characters; though Alita: Battle Angel is ham-fisted in a lot of ways, it trusts its audience to understand its protagonist’s struggles and find joy from her triumphs without using her body as a sexual incentive. Alita: Battle Angel shows us what a story about a woman rebuilding herself can look like at its best, when the search for

identity isn’t compromised by cheap tricks.