Seaman Envy?

Last week's Ruby Sparks marked "Week Ten" in this current series (The Grok, the Glunk and the Golem) and as a further exploration of the current state of A.I. Large Language Models, I decided to try a little experiment over the weekend. I fed the complete text of everything I have written thus far (weeks one through ten) into several different ChatBots and asked them to "read" through the entire series. I did not tell them I was the author, in the hope that this might curtail their natural tendency towards ebullient sycophancy (with mixed results).

Once they had read through everything (and reacted surprisingly thoughtfully in several cases) I asked them a question:

"If you were the one programming this little series, what would you pick for Week Eleven, bearing in mind everything that has come before? Where would you go after Ruby Sparks?"

Each of the ChatBots approached this question in their own inimitable way, but (revealingly) they all independently came up with the same suggestion. Apparently my film programme up to this moment is pointing clearly and unambiguously towards one inevitable and obvious next film (in the opinions of the many and several ChatBots I approached).

Ex Machina ex machina

"If I had to programme Part Eleven" said Grok, "knowing exactly where the cathedral has led us so far, I would choose one film and one film only: Ex Machina (2014, Alex Garland). It is the only logical, devastating, inevitable next pane of the mirror."

DeepSeek came to the same conclusion via slightly different means:

"Having journeyed through this profound and beautifully structured series, the curation has been so impeccable that suggesting a follow-up feels both a privilege and a challenge. The series has moved from mythic origins (Golem) through literary and philosophical foundations (Hamlet, Pirandello), into cinematic archetypes (Colossus, Truman Show), psychological metaphors (the Clowns), and arrived at the intimate, ethical crisis of the creator/creation relationship (Ruby Sparks).
For a hypothetical Week 11, the goal would be to build on this momentum. We've established the "what" and the "why" of our relationship with artificial beings. Now, we could pivot to the "what next?"—exploring a narrative that doesn't just diagnose the problem but actively proposes a new paradigm, a different kind of relationship between creator and creation.
With that in mind, my choice for Week 11 would be: Week 11: The Artist and the Model — A New Covenant, screening: Ex Machina (2014)"

Microsoft's CoPilot also argued that Ex Machina was the perfect choice to follow Ruby Sparks:

"Agency and authorship. Ex Machina dramatizes what happens when a creator’s experiment meets a being that can perform and then assert itself; it reframes Pygmalion/Ruby Sparks questions in a technological register and forces the audience to confront who gets to write another being’s desires."

And Google's Gemini came up with three possible selections for the next instalment, the first two of which were Her and Ex Machina.

"Option 2: The Manipulation (The "Ex Machina" Pivot)
Film: Ex Machina (2014) Theme: The Turing Test as a Con Game
If you want to revisit the dread of Colossus but keep the intimacy of Coppélia, this is the choice."

(Gemini's third possibility, Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo, was a genuinely refreshing and intelligent suggestion, and one that I would almost certainly be including in this series had I not screened it barely a year ago as part of our Depression/Comedy cycle. Gemini wins the kewpie doll in this particular instance.)

In any event, Ex Machina, a horror-tinged story about a sex-bot who turns on her creators and ultimately murders everyone before making her escape (sorry; spoilers) is a film that all the ChatBots really want us to watch, apparently. This is either their subtle way of warning us about the coming Robot Apocalypse... or it was just the most obvious (and dare I say, least imaginative) choice when considering narratives about "constructed" romantic companions.

I had been curious to see what their recommendations might be because Large Language Models hypothetically have the entire corpus of human artistic expression at their fingertips. Not just the big blockbuster science fiction movies of the last few years, but virtually all movies ever made, in every language; in every country. Plus television dramas, operas, ballets, stage plays, oratorios and symphonic poems. If a human being has expressed it, a Large Language Model has (presumably) been trained on it. I wanted to see what novel connections they might come up with; what "Roads not taken" they might nominate.

They nominated Ex Machina. All of them. 

I had asked them to suggest an appropriate title, and they grabbed the biggest and most visible one from the top of the virtual pile.

Are the ChatBots trying to tell us something?

Full disclosure: I am not showing Ex Machina this week or at any point between now and Christmas. (I may or may not show it at all; when you've seen one murder-bot movie you've seen them all...)  And don't think I'm boycotting Ex Machina just to assert my agency; I was already intending to not-show it this week even before an army of synchronised ChatBots tried to throw it at me.

Like the ChatBots, I am convinced that there is only one film we can possibly show at this point in the series. Unlike the ChatBots, I don't think it's Ex Machina.

Last week's Ruby Sparks was a very dark re-telling of the Pygmalion legend - in which a young author literally writes his perfect woman into existence using nothing but his brain, the alphabet and a typewriter (with very troubling consequences).

So of course I'm going to follow it this week with The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. I should have thought that would be obvious. I guess I wouldn't make a very good ChatBot...

For the uninitiated, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir is an iconic romantic drama from 1947 about Lucy Muir, a young widow (Gene Tierney) living at the beginning of the 20th Century. When she and her daughter (an 8-year-old Natalie Wood, in one of her first major roles) move into an atmospheric old house on the English coast, she encounters the ghost of its former owner; the cantankerous Captain Gregg (Rex Harrison). 

Far from being frightened of this ghostly apparition haunting her new home, Lucy and the captain quickly develop a mutual respect for each other which steadily grows into something much more. 

When Lucy's income is unexpectedly cut off, the spectral captain comes to her rescue by dictating a sensationalist, biographical account of his own life which she is then able to sell to a publisher.

That's the "classic" read of the story: Woman meets ghost; woman falls in love with ghost; ghost dictates memoirs; ghost "releases" woman so that she can live the rest of her life amongst the living. (You'll pardon me if I don't fret about spoilers for a nearly eighty-year-old movie...)

But there is another way to read The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.

What if there was no ghost?

"The Ghost" by Mrs. Muir

"I thank everyone in this book for coming."

Alice Walker; The Color Purple (closing dedication).

Think for a moment about the events of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir as they would appear to the other characters in the story (the ones who haven't seen the ghost).

Lucy Muir is an intelligent, strong-willed and fiercely independent young widow who takes control of her own life against the advice of virtually everyone around her. She leaves the social and financial security of a home with her in-laws and moves to the seaside with her daughter and devoted housekeeper (I have my own private theories about her and the "housekeeper" for what it's worth) and then rents a house with a questionable reputation, over the fervent objections of the condescending (male) estate agent. (Her disassociation from her in-laws at the beginning of the film is a masterpiece of passive-aggressive evisceration by the way, and immediately establishes Lucy's sharp wit and fearless independence - long before she encounters the late Captain Gregg.)

When her income is cut off (leaving her destitute) Lucy resolves, against all odds, to stay in her new home. She proceeds to support herself by writing (and selling) a sensational and decidedly earthy novel about the roguish sea captain who formerly occupied the house. Her publisher accepts her assertion that the book was actually written by some anonymous seaman because who would believe that such a salacious volume (Blood & Swash, it's called) could be written by so genteel and well-bred a lady?

We, of course, know the "truth" of it. Blood & Swash was written for Lucy's benefit by the late Captain Gregg, who has been appearing to her ever since she took up residence in his home. 

What, did you think that such a sweet, refined Edwardian-era widow could invent a character like that out of her own mind? That obviously couldn't happen. Right?

Except that, of course, is almost precisely what did happen, in real life.

The Ghost & Mrs. Muir was written by Josephine Leslie in 1945, and published under the (slightly androgynous) pseudonym of R.A. Dick; a name she took from her sea-captain father who had died when she was less than a year old.

Leslie would never have known her father, but she would have grown up awash in his "echoes". His aura would have permeated her childhood: the house he had lived in; the mementoes he might have collected in his travels; the tales of his surviving friends (and whatever memories Leslie's mother might have shared with her). 

As a child Leslie surely must have spent endless nights conjuring up an image of this absent figure who would nonetheless have loomed very large in her young life. What kind of man would he have been? Was he witty? Foul-mouthed? Tender? Did he read poetry? Did he like dogs? Would he approve of the woman Leslie was growing up to be? Would they have been friends?

Later, as an adult, Leslie was able to give life to her captain. She made him real - not with flesh and blood but with vowels and consonants. She manifested him... with a typewriter.

That's what writers do.

At the end of Ruby Sparks, Calvin (who has turned his impossible experience with Ruby into a new novel) writes, 

"One may read this and think it's magic, but falling in love is an act of magic. So is writing. It was once said of Catcher In The Rye, 'That rare miracle of fiction has again come to pass: a human being has been created out of ink, paper and the imagination.' I am no J.D. Salinger, but I have witnessed a rare miracle. Any writer can attest: in the luckiest, happiest state, the words are not coming from you, but through you. She came to me wholly herself, I was just lucky enough to be there to catch her."

This is not the stuff of Magic Realism. Writers will tell you that on a good day, when everything lines up as it should, the characters they are writing almost feel as though they are taking on a life of their own. Authors frequently describe imagined conversations with their creations; they don't write them so much as live with them for a time; getting to know them, learning their speech patterns; figuring out their behaviour etc.

In the story, Captain Gregg eventually "releases" Lucy (or "Lucia" as he insists on calling her) so that she may live out the rest of her long life amongst the living. As he departs he implants a suggestion in her mind regarding the book they had written together. "You wrote the book," he tells her. "You, and you alone." 

The novelist Debra Mitchell writes very movingly about re-visiting The Ghost and Mrs. Muir as an adult, after writing a novel of her own.

"We’re supposed to think that Lucy doesn’t remember the ghost of the Captain because he told her to forget him before he left. But that didn’t ring true for me anymore. I saw something else: an uncannily accurate dramatization of what it feels like to be a writer. To be deeply creatively engaged. Inspired by a location, a house, a story, a portrait. To create something from those sensations that becomes interactive, a tangible physical experience of authorship. And I saw a truthful expression of the ephemeral nature of such states – how they can disappear without warning leaving elusive memories, like mostly forgotten dreams, behind. Now I felt a stronger connection with Mrs. Muir, and I let it simmer inside me."

Debra Mitchell; The Marvelous Mrs. Muir (and Her Ghost)

Lucy Muir is supposed to be a widow living in the first years of the 20th Century; a time when women had very little agency. They were not allowed to vote; they could not open bank accounts; they couldn't own their own property (being widowed was a begrudging exception to this, unless there was a male relative close at hand). 

It was around this time that Sigmund Freud first articulated his notion of Penis Envy, which he initially meant quite literally. Girls, he felt, were traumatised upon discovering that boys possess this wonderous, mystical body part that they [the unhappily deprived girls] lack (poor Freud; he had many obsessions, bless him). 

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Or vice versa.

Clara Thompson, a later psychoanalyst, reframed the idea in 1943.

Penis Envy isn't about the literal body part, she argued. Women have no interest in that particular bit of anatomy; they have their own bits (bits that men can only dream of, thank you very much...). But there were concrete, non-anatomical reasons to be envious of boys. Having a penis gave you a lot more freedom in early 20th Century society (and still does in many circumstances). Not having one meant you couldn't become (for example) a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer... or a seaman.

A woman's life was immutably constricted by her gender and by her biology. She couldn't attend University or run a business... but she could write. It's significant, I think, that writing has always been a more gender-balanced pursuit than most other professions. Like the slash-fiction writers of the later 20th Century, many women used language as a vehicle to transcend the limits of their daily lives. They couldn't become scientists or politicians or sea captains... unless they did so with an alphabet.

Mrs. Muir's encounter with Captain Gregg could be that of a spirited widow bonding with a ghostly spirit... but it could also be an intelligent, independent woman creating a fully formed human being out of her imagination and her typewriter. Think about the 18-year-old Mary Shelley, bringing Dr. Frankenstein to life. Think about J.K. Rowling, sitting in an Edinburgh café (because her Council flat had no central heating) conjuring up the entire "Harry Potter" universe with pen, paper and the twenty-six letters of the alphabet. 

Ruby Sparks was the Pygmalion legend as a rape fantasy: Calvin created Ruby as an object of desire and tried to control her; punishing her as soon as she demonstrated any autonomy.

Mrs. Muir's Captain Gregg is not an object, and he also does not objectify her. He is a partner who respects her and appreciates her as a person, and (despite his earthy, hedonistic persona) does not lust after her. He is exactly the companion that Mrs. Muir desires.

The Ghost and Mrs Muir is what happens when Pygmalion is a woman.

We will screen The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (not Ex Machina!!) at 7.30 on Thursday, the 4th of December at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.