Pandora’s Myth and Cultural Trauma in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina

Series Film and Media Studies Issues Volume 24, 2023 – Uncanny Intermediality Pandora’s Myth and Cultural Trauma in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina

Volume 24, 2023 – Uncanny Intermediality

Boglárka Farkas

Acta Univ. Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 24 (2023) 203–216

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/ausfm-2023-0021

Abstract. Since its 2015 debut, Alex Garland’s Ex Machina has been conceptualized as a creation myth, as a succession myth, as the Pygmalion myth and as the Pandora myth, among others – each of these argumentations acknowledging the permeability between different interpretations. The author argues that Ex Machina recodes the myth of Pandora and creates a fertile ground to display cultural traumas that have been affecting women – such as female subordination and oppression caused by a patriarchal structure and stereotypical binary oppositions. Thus, Garland’s film also suggests that the old forms of female oppression might be reaffirmed in the context of the age of technological innovation.

Keywords: Ex Machina, Pandora’s myth, humans and machines, women, patriarchy

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Volume 24, 2023 – Uncanny Intermediality

Uncanny (Inter)Mediality and Photo Futures, Arild Fetveit Uncanny Colours of the Past. Phenomenological Notes on Remediation and Colourization of Black-and-White Footage, Kamilla Simor The Uncanniness of Intermediality. Joanna Hogg’s Eerily Self-Reflexive Cinema, Ágnes Pethő Filial Care and Familial Postmemory. On the Uncanny and Affective Intermediality of Analogue Media Use in Recent European Documentaries, Melinda Blos-Jáni The Crisis of Care and Uncanny Intersensuality in Sally Potter’s The Roads Not Taken, Judit Pieldner Rural Landscapes and Affective Encounters in Radu Muntean’s Film, Întregalde, Katalin Sándor Ritual as Intermedial Interjection in Ritwik Ghatak’s The Cloud-Capped Star, Sanskriti Chattopadhyay, Deb Kamal Ganguly Jane Austen and the Uncanny: The Colonial Past in Patricia Rozema’s Adaptation, Mansfield Park, Polina Rybina Media Representation and Affective Intermediality in Der Tote im Bunker and Vielleicht Esther, Giulia Bigongiari Medium Specific Uncanny in Contemporary Video Games, Tamás Csönge Pandora’s Myth and Cultural Trauma in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, Boglárka Farkas Framing Anxiety. Intermedial Techniques of the Uncanny, Michaela Wünsch Front pages in PDF, Inside covers in PDF,

Pandora’s Myth and Cultural Trauma in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina - Acta Universitatis Sapientiae