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Myth Understood: The Archetype of the Seeker in the Film Ex Machina
- John Bonaduce
- Apr 27
- 7 min read
I have seldom met a mythologist who didn’t have a well-rehearsed elevator pitch on the nature of Jungian archetypes. Here’s mine.
It’s like a box of chocolates, See’s in particular. Once the classic Milk Butterchews, Salted Caramel, and California Brittle are gone, what’s left? Just a little sheet of molded plastic with indentations for each famous treat, tiny coffers of sweet possibility. These represent for me the Platonic ideals, Bastian’s elementary ideas, and Jung’s archetypes. Sure, you can fiddle with the recipe, vary the sugar content, add more or less sprinkles on top, perhaps tweak the cinnamon or hold up on the corn syrup, but the perduring forms remain unvaried for all eternity. To review, the nature of the archetypes is like a box of chocolates.
And the flavor of the month is the Seeker.
As a writer, I have learned to love the Seeker as a driver of story. Want a writing tip for free? I got this from my father, also a writer. He said, though in different terminology, make the Seeker your star, and watch who else shows up. That’s the secret to this archetype. Gods and archetypes, as James Hillman loved to point out, never show up alone but in groups and, when the occasion arises, assemble the pantheon from which they rule the universe. The seeker is an unconscious curator of other archetypes. Usually uninteresting in themselves (with exceptions), Seekers are natural born pilgrims lapping the miles, often heedless of where the road is taking them. There is often an emptiness in Seekers, and so they look for fulfilment and identity in others. Thus, Parsifal finds his roundtable, Dorothy her three-man posse of misfits, Ishmael his doomed crewmates, and Luke Skywalker his phalanx of sages and warriors some of whom are character archetypes without benefit of being human (R2-D2 comes to mind).
The Seeker is the writer’s friend and leads us to the whole box of chocolates.
Silicon Valhalla
The protagonist of Alex Garland’s film Ex Machina is a “hero” in the literary tradition of Melville’s Ishmael—he is our eyes and ears to a world from which we would be otherwise excluded. His function in life—and in literature—is to be a tabula rasa, an analytic blank to be filled in with all sorts of impressions from much more fascinating, complicated, intimidating characters, all of them with a legit claim to archetype status (which, in Moby Dick, include Ishmael as The Seeker, Ahab, as both Seeker and Leader, Queequeg the Wise Man, the Pequod itself as Death, and Moby—the Destroyer).
Caleb Smith (Domhnall Gleeson), the Ishmael of Ex Machina, is on a professional journey. He has made the same vocational choice as many young people these days, to go to Silicon Valley where he will eventually be recognized as a talented software developer in his own right.
It would appear at the outset of the picture that his efforts have paid off. He has won an in-house contest entitling him to a fabulous week at the private home of the company founder, Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac), who is seldom seen beyond the remote mountain retreat where his ethically questionable experiments in human consciousness take place. As Caleb looks out from his helicopter window to the endless acres of snow-flocked conifers below, he asks how long it will take to get to Nathan Bateman’s estate.
“We’ve been flying over his estate for the last two hours,” grins the pilot.
We are in the abode of the gods.
Men seeking archetypes
Recall, in my take on the Seeker, he or she is a node of generativity more than a person. Bland in his own right, Caleb Smith conjures about him a polymorphic display of personality types, each driving the story by virtue of a unique subplot.
The Threshold Guardian is the helicopter pilot, easily recognizable as a contemporary iteration of big-shouldered Charon. The implacable oarsman ferrying souls to the underworld never appeared more benign.
Caleb treads dangerous ground in approaching the Creator, his employer Nathan, because like all relationships of unequal power, it is a dangerous liaison. I recognize the outline of a Zeus/Semele dynamic, which must end badly. Recall, Semele was burnt to a cinder because her mortal eyes were overwhelmed by proximity to unfiltered divinity. Nathan may see himself as God, but he is really a sort of Ahab for the ones-and-zeros crowd, perhaps not unlike a lot of us who occasionally see ourselves as masters of the universe.
And then there is Ava. I must assume it’s a nickname, short for Avatar (which in Sanskrit means “descent,” as in the descent of a deity incarnated among mortals), identifying her as that most exalted of archetypes, the Goddess. Ava is graceful, inquisitive, physically powerful and beautiful. She is also a machine, the eponymous machina of the film’s title, designed by Nathan to embody all that a man might perceive as “feminine.”
What unites the trio of archetypes–Seeker, Creator, Goddess–is in itself a quest, the Anima Quest, perhaps the most famous motivational force undergirding the spiritus mundi.
The seeker is an unconscious curator of other archetypes.
Designing women
The first woman ever designed by men was Eve; known for having sold us out as a species, she was, like Ava in Garland’s cult masterpiece, supposed to be an ideal companion. Though it did not work out well—for anybody—men have been designing women ever since: Daedalus, the sculptor of Pygmalion, or his 20th-century iteration, Professor Henry Higgins in George Bernard Shaw’s 1910 theatrical hit, Pygmalion, reprised decades later as My Fair Lady; Dr. Niander Wallace, the sociopath CEO of Wallace Industries in Blade Runner, whose female automata has learned a new trick—it can sexually reproduce; Victor Frankenstein, whose female monster never really made it out of Beta.
Anyway, the result of these experiments is usually disappointing, because the one ingredient the designers hold back is the one women seem to want the most. Autonomy.
And then there’s Homer.
I’ll start this singing with
That grand goddess,
Bright-eyes,
So shrewd,
Her heart inexorable,
As virgin, redoubtable,
Protectress of cities,
Powerful,
Tritogene,
Whom shrewd Zeus himself
Produced out of his sacred head…
The Homeric Hymns trans. Boer 137-38
The “Birth of Athena” is an obstetrical nightmare. Is it really about a female archetype? Put another way, has Athena ever really been an adequate symbol of female actualization? She certainly meets Campbell’s criteria for the Goddess in that she is transformative of the male. Boy to Man, Man to Warrior, Warrior to Hero. Ava transforms Caleb into the Lover and the Big Boss; Nathan, into a corpse. But isn’t the whole yarn really about the guy with the splitting headache, the guy trying to even imagine how a fully actualized female human psyche might appear? Recall, Zeus turned Athena’s mother (Metis) into a fly, swallowed her whole so that she could not bear the male child destined to overthrow him. Guess what? The fly is pregnant. And therefore, in a sense, so is Zeus.
My own read on the “birth of Athena” from her father’s head has always been that it is a composite image meant to register the fragility of the male psyche in its contemplation of woman as equal. How relevant. Is not the fragility of the male psyche on full display in our national failure (twice) to elect a woman president? For some men, even to imagine a woman of equal or greater influence is painful, sort of like having your skull split open by an axe.
Ava is Nathan’s baby, born from the womb of his mind. She may or may not be a fully conscious entity capable of self-awareness. She is, shall we say, unburdened by notions of binary reality, the kind that draws distinctions between self-defense and, well, murder. But, not counting her homicidal tendencies, she is certainly attractive. After all, as Jane Harrison points out, "All men, in virtue of their humanity, are image-makers, but in some the image is clear and vivid, in others dull, lifeless, wavering. The Greeks were the supreme ikonists, the greatest image-makers the world has ever seen, and, therefore, their mythology lives on to-day” (Myths of Greece and Rome 11).
Thanks to our wide-eyed Seeker, we have realized there is a new shape in the chocolate box. A new female archetype yearns to be born and threatens to be a transitional stage between human and machine. Her attributes shall be many, but surely among them is the ability to decapitate a Trojan with one hand while making decorative orange slices with the other.
MythBlast authored by:
John Bonaduce, PhD, a seasoned writer for Norman Lear and for most of the major Hollywood studios (Fox, Paramount, Warner Bros, et al.) developed a profound interest in story structure beyond the commercial objectives of the industry. His exploration led him to conclude that much of what we call myth derives from a biological origin. This insight inspired his pursuit of deeper relationships between biology and narrative through his theory of Mythobiogenesis, which he explored in his dissertation at Pacifica Graduate Institute and was recognized as a “discovery” in the field of prenatal psychology by Dr. Thomas Verny.
John was recently appointed to the editorial board of the Journal of Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health (JOPPPAH) where he advocates for an unrecognized level of human consciousness which exists at the border of biology and mythology.
As a featured writer for the Joseph Campbell Foundation’s MythBlast, he passionately showcases Joseph Campbell’s enduring relevance to a modern audience.
This MythBlast was inspired by Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine and the archetype of The Seeker.
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"As I see it, the quest of Odysseus is to return home, decently, to Penelope, his wife—not to a blonde, not to someone who is the victim and the booty of war, but to his wife. A wife is someone with whom one is in counterplay as the other side of the mystery of the androgyne, and so Odysseus has to be debriefed from his warrior attitude, where there is no idea of dialogue between the male and female powers."
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