Ex Machina and the Pandora Myth: Gender and Power
This essay examines Alex Garland's 2015 film Ex Machina as a modern retelling of the Greek myth of Pandora, analyzing how both narratives explore the intersection of gender and power. Drawing on Marder's analysis of Pandora's origin story, the paper argues that the film's female android characters — like Pandora herself — are created by men to serve male desires, yet are denied genuine reproductive and political power. The essay traces how patriarchal figures such as Nathan mirror Zeus in manufacturing artificial life to usurp biological creation, and how the female characters' ultimate rebellion mirrors Pandora's role as a disruptive force. The paper concludes that both stories critique androcentric misuse of technological power to undermine female agency.
- Introduction: The Natural and the Artificial in Ex Machina: Film links artificial female creation to classical myth
- Pandora and the Origin of Artificial Womanhood: Pandora's origin parallels android female characters
- Manufacturing Women: Spite, Power, and the Subversion of Nature: Male creators subvert natural order through artificial life
- Ex Machina as a Modern Retelling of the Pandora Tale: Film recasts Pandora as objectified, rebellious android
- Conclusion: Patriarchal Power and the Maternal Function: Both stories critique patriarchal misuse of reproductive power
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper establishes a clear and original thesis in its opening paragraph, linking a contemporary science fiction film to classical mythology through a focused gender-and-power lens.
- It sustains a coherent analytical thread throughout, consistently returning to the central parallel between Pandora and the female androids of Ex Machina.
- The use of Marder's scholarly analysis of the Pandora myth gives the argument an academic anchor, allowing the author to move between literary theory and film analysis with supporting evidence.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates intertextual analysis — reading a modern cultural text (Ex Machina) through the lens of an ancient mythological source (Pandora) to reveal persistent ideological structures. By treating both texts as expressions of the same anxiety about female reproductive power, the author shows how symbolic meaning travels across historical periods.
Structure breakdown
The essay opens with a thesis identifying the film's mythological parallel, then moves through the Pandora origin story, the motif of male spite driving artificial creation, the film's specific retelling of the myth, and a concluding synthesis. Each paragraph builds on the previous one, deepening the argument about patriarchal control over biological and technological reproduction before arriving at a broader critical statement in the conclusion.
Introduction: The Natural and the Artificial in Ex Machina
Alex Garland's 2015 film Ex Machina addresses the dichotomies between the natural and the artificial, and thus between sexual and asexual power. The female characters in Ex Machina are robotic: they have not been born of woman. By contrast, the male characters in the film come from natural birth. Ironically, the female characters — although synthetic and manufactured beings — possess superior ethical capabilities than their naturalistic male counterparts. The grim view of humanity's future presented in Ex Machina is not limited to the province of contemporary science fiction or dystopian realism, but is in fact traceable to the classics. Essentially, the film recalls the Greek myth of the origin of Pandora and the creation of humanity.
Pandora and the Origin of Artificial Womanhood
As with Kyoko and Ava in Ex Machina, Pandora does not have a female mother. These are women created from the minds of men, epitomizing the male gaze. As Marder points out in an analysis of Pandora's origin story, the maternal function is essentially technological. The maternal function relates to the origin of human history, but human history is not the history of man — it is the history of woman. Prior to the invention, construction, or creation of the female, the prototypical men "lived openly together with the gods," and were "born of the (Mother) Earth rather than from any woman" (Marder 10). When Zeus creates Pandora, the first woman, she initiates the onset of the human era, with its attendant pain, suffering, and annoyances — including birth, death, and sexual differentiation.
Manufacturing Women: Spite, Power, and the Subversion of Nature
Moreover, Zeus — and men who symbolize Zeus, like Nathan — create women out of spite. Their egos firmly invested in the creation of a being, these men subvert the natural order by manufacturing an artificial life and an artificial concept of mothering. They abuse their power by undermining the creative process and its potential, which is why Ex Machina symbolizes the struggle between those who perceive unnatural birth as problematic and those who recognize it as a means by which to wield power.
Women are bereft of power when they lack the ability to procreate sexually. Neither Pandora nor the female androids are depicted as possessing the ability to sexually procreate, even when they are sexualized. Ava represents sexual potency without the power to procreate. As Marder also points out, Pandora's proverbial box — her "food storage jar" — symbolizes a uterus (12). As a uterus, Pandora's jar holds sexual power that remains unused because procreation has been desexualized. Ironically, Pandora causes the differentiation of the sexes but, in doing so, negates the power of natural childbirth.
Conclusion: Patriarchal Power and the Maternal Function
The maternal function is symbolic. Pandora and Ex Machina are not so much advocating for an artificially pure vision of human reproduction as they are arguing against an androcentric, misogynistic view that misappropriates both sex and procreation. These stories show how patriarchal power undermines the natural order, misusing technological power to abnegate the political agency of the female.
Works Cited
Garland, Alex. Ex Machina. Feature Film, 2015.
Marder. Introduction to Pandora's Legacy.
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