Rantings For a Tuesday Night: 
The Sin of S'dom, Ex Machina, and Questions of Our Godliness

Regarding the practices of the city of Sodom

... they had beds upon which travelers slept. If the guest was too long they shortened him by lopping off his feet; if too short, they stretched him out...

- Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin 109a:

In this Talmudic passage, the civic rules of S’dom and Amorrah—what Sodomites believed to be righteous and decent behavior—is in fact a warped holiness, turned completely on its head.

What if Sodom "justice" truly is the state of things wherever we look?  Certainly the Talmud here sidesteps the matters of sexual deviancy we have come to associate with Sodom and Gomorrah.

Human potential for sanctity belies our animal nature.  Therefore, I posit that people didn’t invent the sacred, and we would be really bad at it anyhow.

Here's what I mean.

A couple weeks ago I saw a movie called Ex Machina.  Boiled down it’s Shakespeare's The Tempest meets Cyril Hume's Forbidden Planet, crossed with Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio.   Nathan, Geppetto / come Dr. Frankenstein in Ex Machina, evokes a man teetering between a hot latin lover, an Israeli commando gone AWAL, and an ISIS ideologue.  But Nathan is also Steve Jobs on steroids.  This brilliant, sassy, malevolent and beardy scientist easily cajoles a fly into his lair.  Caleb, the Richie Cunningham-like whiz kid programmer bites from Geppetto's proverbial apple.  Oy, clumsy mixed tropes. Forgive me.

  (Domhnall Gleeson) Caleb and (Oscar Isaac) Nathan share a moment in the thriller "Ex Machina."

  Alicia Vikander as Ava, the consummate variety of AI in "Ex Machina."

Oscar Isaac as Nathan in "Ex Machina" preaches in front of his Pollack.

Geppetto as I will call him, has created Ava, a robot so revolutionary in its artificial intelligence, that it begins to ask the essential questions in a more meaningful and practically clairvoyant way than the human(s) who created her.  Geppetto, with his superior technical expertise, and an ego so infernal you could cook a steak on it, invites Caleb, another brilliant young programmer to come “test” his invention.  There are many wonderful cliches in this movie. As one might expect, Gepetto as perfect as he is, is also sloppy.    

Gepetto’s living room is a well of stone and crafted wood. Think: Heffner makes a shopping trip at Ikea.  But again, it’s nothing new.  In Dr. Frankenstein’s isolated, lonely laboratory, we meet the same character.  In speculative fiction this archetype is often so SO bad a man. His hungers blind him though.  For Gepetto, it’s fun to become God, because now he gets to make up the rules too!   That’s what it means to be God.  I may or may not like the rules, but I’d better get used to them, because they are what they are.  But, then there's that pesky creation with its unrelenting need for "choice."

What would your rather live in, an office building or a serene hut nestled in an alpine village?  In the case of our proverbial Gepetto in Ex Machina, perhaps the serene hut would be a thousand miles of rugged land with an odd, fortified cement laboratory smack in the middle. That’s the genius’ house.  He’s there “alone,” drinks lots of vodka, and works out like a gang-banger in his multi-room palace.  It’s Rocky Horror too, if we’re willing to see it, except Ex Machina’s eroticism is more Kubrik.  Suffice it to say, s’awright if you like Modern. 

As a meditation on the divide between mundane and holy, as I alluded to above, the thesis of Ex Machina can be construed as what happens when the mundane takes on a holy sentience.  In its poignancy the film also shows that we who are presumed to be “holy” by birth, stoop to levels of dirt.   That’s the magic of the film.  I should note that it’s also a strong, though distorted woman’s power flick.  At its best, this movie aspires to a faint prayer on the sacred / mundane divide.  Spoiler alert: the creation outsmarts the God who made it.  Ex Machina is R rated so as a rabbi, I really shouldn’t endorse it.  But if we’re in hell already, might we not take a dip into the skeevy molten stuff?

Like its class of fiction, Ex Machina is nothing new in its attempt to have us consider the power of our own creativity.  It makes one crave the simplicity of a field, where people and cows are wonderfully all that’s necessary for us to be happy.  But as we learn from baleful parables, nature is dangerous too.  Look at Michael Crichton’s 1972 Westworld, with Yul Brynner as a menacing evil gunslinging robot in the midst of an adult DisneyWorld.  Brynner will scare the absolute bejunk out of you.  It’s so nice to see the guy who once played Ramses turned into the mean cholera you knew he always truly was. What a face!  What a glint.

Take Star Trek’s (the original silly but brilliant series) “Requiem for Methusela,” an episode in which our heroes beam down to a planet for some urgent medical need, only to discover that an ageless Methuselah lives there.  Spock discovers a freshly written piece by Brahms on the man’s piano.  “I am Brahms,” the man later admits.  Mr. Flint, he’s called.  A quiet genius who crafts the perfect girl for himself.  Of course the robot girl falls in love with Kirk.  This genius character is everywhere in literature.  We don’t normally regard God as a character, like an evil genius.  But that is precisely what these fables provoke.  The point (?): Humans don’t completely understand the power of their own God given potential, though in accord God may not completely dominate the chaos which God-self has created.

To become so licentiously perverse in our brilliance we can go to great lengths, without even thinking about it, to fulfill our most salacious desires. 

"Be Holy; for I the LORD your God am holy."

-Leviticus 19:1

But you know what, we do think about it.  To be sentient is to have an understanding what’s happening around you and your role in it.  Torah teaches a particular brand of sentience.  Torah’s message is this: if you’re going to act SO smart, then try this food for thought.  Torah’s food for thought is the language of holiness; that life truly is consequential, meaningful, and worthwhile.  The Torah's message to us sentient beings is that decency IS holiness.  See chapter 19 of Leviticus for many examples.

Another among Torah’s key messages I glean, is that humanity is beginning to grow up.  It’s becoming aware.  But even teenagers need to be told: Don’t think you’re so smart. That was among my dad's z'l's quintissential insights.  Don’t be such a huhim (a wise guy), my dad used to say dismissively.  In that very repudiation, the resonance of Ex Machina is magnified. 

My dad, of blessed memory also had good sense, but also insufficiency of tact when he sagely but meanly declared: “you know some’ting, you’re styoopid.”  You see, I can’t talk about sci-fi without talking about my dad, because as a kid I tacitly looked to his approval on just about everything related to entertainment.  With genuine interest, dad would sit and watch an old episode of Trek, and in his inimitable thick Yiddish inflection pronounce, “dis is styoopid.  Such styoopidities.”  Sometimes my dad was hip enough to see what actually wasn’t so styoopid after all.  At other times, I was frustrated by what he did not see. “No dad, that’s actually profound,” I remember saying when watching the hearing room scene in the original Planet of the Apes.  In that Scopes trial-inspired setting, Taylor, the only talking human as played by Charlton Heston, confronts the consummate madhouse of a S’dom variety: the veritable turning of reality on its head.  The reality in that Twilight Zone “planet” is that apes are supreme and instead humans are treated with contempt.  

But alas, the planet is a war-ravaged future earth.  "Humans” are treated by their simian overlords as black people are treated in many American cities.   As a kid, I realized cinema’s power to comment on my world.  I saw the intelligence in the story.  As to my dad’s read of Apes, well his dismissal was rooted in either of two ideas: his sheer disdain of seeing grown men in ape suits acting out such a scene and on such a hokey set . . . or he remembered from his time as a guest of the Germans, that human nature is way more grim than anything Holly’Vood could muster.  Both estimates might be accurate, and coherent. 

So what do these recurring themes in literature and entertainment inspire us to ask? Hopefully it’s not just, are we moving closer to a world of robots yawwn, but rather if in our dopiness we become so enamored with our own creations, then maybe do we merit being outsmarted by them?!   

Back to Ex Machina.   By casual incident, Caleb learns that Gepetto likely disposed of the people who built his entire complex.  Here are shades of historically real places: Chelmno or Belzec (Operation Reinhard Nazi death camps in Poland) where the slave laborers build/run extermination centers, and ultimately too, became their victims.  But in Ex Machina, this becomes a puffed-up archetype in which literary bravado itself just might be the robot; i.e. the puppet that has taken on its own intelligence.  We needn’t ask if Artificial Intelligence has arrived or not.  The creepiness of this film works best when we are able to laugh at the film when the film is laughing at itself.  There's a fun moment when we insider Trekkies realize that Gepetto is akin to Trek’s Methuselah—no sooner does Gepetto come right out and name-check Star Trek in a passing reference.  If that’s not badly cloaked homage, I don’t know what is. 

Notwithstanding the paltry worth of cinema in general, I found in Ex Machina some teachable material.  It's more fertile and intriguing than Darren Aronovsky’s Noah which couldn't shake it’s connection to the Bible.   Duh.  But honestly, what I found is that Ex Machina is a much more interesting contemplation of human/deity relations and delusions than is Aranofsky’s film.  In Aronofsky’s Bible tale, humanity is depicted in the guise of Noah’s reach for evolved enlightenment against Cain’s bestial and sordid iniquity.  Noah,  a creative being with a budding, incipient sentience, possesses maybe even the kernel of “holy.”  Or perhaps, all of these allegories are tales of paradise lost. 

My takeaway: It’s all holy.  The higher aspiration.  The technical excellence.  The lust.  If we push it, even righteous and the unrighteous deaths are holy too.

Ex Machina isn’t Bible, but in it’s own way, it forces upon us kindred provisions for an evening’s meditation.  From Greek Myths, to Eden, to the Golem of Prague to Yul Brynner, to Ex Machina, the question of our own Godliness is at the center.