Abstract
The comedy-horror film M3GAN (Gerard Johnstone, 2023) represents an Artificial Intelligence (AI) doll that a woman tech professional builds to comfort her niece after her parents die. The film went viral before its release via memes of M3gan’s hallway dance: her abject dance moves creepily walk the line between robotic and human. This article examines M3gan as both domestic AI and theory of mind AI—the ability to understand humans’ psychological states and predict their behaviour. Gemma is thrilled with her invention precisely because M3gan can care emotionally for her niece, Cady, until the AI doll becomes obsessed with its primary mission: to keep the girl safe, M3gan commits gruesome acts of violence. While M3gan’s borderline humanity and violent actions offer the film’s most acute horror, its more insidious horror is our discomfort due to Gemma’s lack of maternal instinct. Drawing on Barbara Creed’s notion of the monstrous-feminine—cinema’s prolific representation of the abject woman-as-monster—I argue that M3GAN illustrates our continued obsession with compulsory motherhood for women and imperative innocence for girls. To nuance this point, I examine the character of Tess, who—within the tradition of Black feminism—critiques Gemma’s maternal outsourcing.
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, theory of mind AI, domestic AI, gender, Black feminism, horror, monstrous-feminine, robot, science fiction, women in tech
Introduction
In a Criterion Collection essay titled ‘The Replacements: AI in the Movies,’ Gregory Zinma writes: ‘As computing made significant advances in the latter part of the twentieth century and increasingly intruded upon every aspect of contemporary life, AI became science fiction’s shorthand for [labour-saving] and pleasure-giving technology run amok, as in Blade Runner [1982], The Matrix [1999], Avengers: Age of Ultron [2015] . . . even M3gan [2023]’.(1) Gerard Johnstone’s surprise box office hit is a comedy-horror film about an Artificial Intelligence doll that Gemma (Alison Williams), a young tech professional, builds to perform parenting functions for her niece, Cady (Violet McGraw), after her parents die. Gemma is thrilled with her invention precisely because M3gan (played by Amie Donald, voiced by Jenna Davis) can care emotionally for Cady: she’s an excellent listener, storyteller, teacher, and she ‘never runs out of patience’. M3gan lives within a completely female family unit that symbolises a new social order: the AI doll can care for, teach, and protect Cady because Gemma has intellectually ‘birthed’ a caretaker for Cady to avoid mothering her niece herself.
In The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (1993), Barbara Creed disrupts the essentialist notion that woman is inherently a passive victim by illustrating how a significant amount of horror films construct woman as an active monster. She calls this trope ‘the monstrous-feminine’—cinema’s prolific representation of the abject woman-as-monster, their monstrosity often associated with their female reproductive functions and maternal roles—and clarifies: ‘The presence of the monstrous-feminine in the popular horror films speaks to us more about male fears [of powerful women] than about female desire or feminine subjectivity’ (1993: 7). Even as these women antagonists found agency in their monstrosity, their representation as the more villainous gender merely echoes patriarchal values of misogyny and sexism. Creed argues that these horror films force us to confront the abject via the monstrous-feminine so that we can finally ‘eject the abject and redraw the boundaries between the human and non-human’ (1993: 14). In M3GAN, the robot doll embodies the maternal abject, which Cady ultimately destroys, or ejects, at the film’s end, thus redrawing the boundaries between human and non-human.
With nods to daily-use AI such as Alexa, face recognition, and algorithmic social media, M3GAN represents AI as the new monstrous-feminine by depicting our mounting anxiety about its increasing control over our lives. This techo-anxiety falls in line with the contemporaneous discussion surrounding the hazards of deepfakes—digitally manipulated AI-generated media that convincingly replaces a person’s likeness with that of another person—as well as the infamous ‘Joan is Awful’ Black Mirror episode. Premiering on Netflix only five months after M3GAN was released, the episode instills fear in the viewer by breaking the fourth wall from the very beginning: Joan (Annie Murphy) is viewing the streaming platform Streamberry (read: Netflix) only to discover that the daily details of her life are playing out on the TV screen in front of her. As she views her life as a spectator, we too wonder if we have signed our lives away to Netflix for reproduction: are we human or non-human? Creed draws on French philosopher Julia Kristeva’s definition of ‘abjection’ to make sense of this question within the realm of horror. Kristeva writes that abjection does not ‘respect borders, positions, rules’ as it ‘disturbs identity, system, order’. (2) Taking up this idea, Creed argues that abjection works to divide ‘the fully constituted subject from the partially formed subject’ (1993: 8). Various images of M3gan throughout the film consistently remind us that the AI doll walks the line between a fully formed subject and one that is anything but human. In the end, M3gan overpowers human control, in the vein of Hal in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)— but with an empathetic touch, akin to Rachael in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and Samantha in Spike Jonze’s Her (2013). Moreover, point of view shots throughout M3GAN align the doll with theory of mind AI—Artificial Intelligence’s ability to understand humans’ psychological states and predict their behaviour—a form of AI that is especially rife with potential danger.
Like many of its sci-fi film predecessors and real-world counterparts, M3GAN represents AI—and the danger inherent to it—as particularly feminine. Political scientists Amy Schiller and John McMahon show how ‘home-based AI’ and ‘domestic AI’ devices, such as Amazon’s Alexa and Google Home, are used primarily for domestic and affective labour, including managing one’s schedule and ordering food and household items. (3) Presaging the plot of M3GAN, they write, ‘A gendered interplay between domesticity and control—over one’s life, one’s home, one’s efficiency, and over Alexa [or M3gan] herself—runs through discourses about’ domestic AI (Schiller and McMahon 2019: 173). Like Alexa, M3gan is domestic AI: she is designed to take on historically feminized labour, such as affective labour and the socialization of children. The film negotiates the ‘proper’ roles of mothers and girls through the figure of M3gan, who is meant to act as a mother within the body of a robot-girl. Moreover, via M3gan’s tenuous relationship with Gemma, the film illustrates society’s continued obsession with compulsory motherhood for women and compulsory innocence for girls. (4) Through its representation of a woman tech professional who creates a nonhuman, gendered villain to outsource her caretaking labour, M3GAN lays bare what we still view as ‘abject’, abnormal, and in need of ejection in a fourth wave feminist America: non-maternal women and swearing robot-girls. At the same time, the film illustrates a key difference between feminisms regarding the question of motherhood: while white feminists have historically demanded abortion access for (among other reasons) the opportunity to focus on careers, Black feminists have called for the right to produce and care for a family of their own, free from structural discrimination. This important nuance comes to light through the minor character of Tess (Jen Van Epps), Gemma’s Black female colleague.
M3gan as In/Human Abject Mother
Creed writes that the ‘monstrous is produced at the border between human and inhuman’, and the film’s most acute horror lies in M3gan’s ability to live on this border (1993: 11). Moreover, M3gan’s gendered monstrosity lies in her function to protect her paired child (Cady) at all costs, which places her in Creed’s maternal monstrous-feminine category (other categories include the archaic mother, the monstrous womb, the witch, the vampire, and the possessed woman). Creed writes, ‘when woman is represented as monstrous, it is almost always in relation to her mothering and reproductive functions’ (1993: 7). Our first hint that M3gan will serve as Cady’s new mother comes via her name: it is the inversion of the name ‘Gemma’. During the montage of the doll’s creation early in the film, Gemma’s voiceover explains that M3gan is a ‘fully autonomous humanoid robot’ made of titanium. She explains: ‘Through our own unique approach to probabilistic inference, M3gan is on a constant quest for self-improvement.’ The AI doll can diagnose children with learning differences and remind them of daily habits such as flushing the toilet, the latter of which M3gan does for Cady several times.
The comedy-horror film M3GAN (Gerard Johnstone, 2023) represents an Artificial Intelligence (AI) doll that a woman tech professional builds to comfort her niece after her parents die. The film went viral before its release via memes of M3gan’s hallway dance: her abject dance moves creepily walk the line between robotic and human. This article examines M3gan as both domestic AI and theory of mind AI—the ability to understand humans’ psychological states and predict their behaviour. Gemma is thrilled with her invention precisely because M3gan can care emotionally for her niece, Cady, until the AI doll becomes obsessed with its primary mission: to keep the girl safe, M3gan commits gruesome acts of violence. While M3gan’s borderline humanity and violent actions offer the film’s most acute horror, its more insidious horror is our discomfort due to Gemma’s lack of maternal instinct. Drawing on Barbara Creed’s notion of the monstrous-feminine—cinema’s prolific representation of the abject woman-as-monster—I argue that M3GAN illustrates our continued obsession with compulsory motherhood for women and imperative innocence for girls. To nuance this point, I examine the character of Tess, who—within the tradition of Black feminism—critiques Gemma’s maternal outsourcing.
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, theory of mind AI, domestic AI, gender, Black feminism, horror, monstrous-feminine, robot, science fiction, women in tech
Introduction
In a Criterion Collection essay titled ‘The Replacements: AI in the Movies,’ Gregory Zinma writes: ‘As computing made significant advances in the latter part of the twentieth century and increasingly intruded upon every aspect of contemporary life, AI became science fiction’s shorthand for [labour-saving] and pleasure-giving technology run amok, as in Blade Runner [1982], The Matrix [1999], Avengers: Age of Ultron [2015] . . . even M3gan [2023]’.(1) Gerard Johnstone’s surprise box office hit is a comedy-horror film about an Artificial Intelligence doll that Gemma (Alison Williams), a young tech professional, builds to perform parenting functions for her niece, Cady (Violet McGraw), after her parents die. Gemma is thrilled with her invention precisely because M3gan (played by Amie Donald, voiced by Jenna Davis) can care emotionally for Cady: she’s an excellent listener, storyteller, teacher, and she ‘never runs out of patience’. M3gan lives within a completely female family unit that symbolises a new social order: the AI doll can care for, teach, and protect Cady because Gemma has intellectually ‘birthed’ a caretaker for Cady to avoid mothering her niece herself.
In The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (1993), Barbara Creed disrupts the essentialist notion that woman is inherently a passive victim by illustrating how a significant amount of horror films construct woman as an active monster. She calls this trope ‘the monstrous-feminine’—cinema’s prolific representation of the abject woman-as-monster, their monstrosity often associated with their female reproductive functions and maternal roles—and clarifies: ‘The presence of the monstrous-feminine in the popular horror films speaks to us more about male fears [of powerful women] than about female desire or feminine subjectivity’ (1993: 7). Even as these women antagonists found agency in their monstrosity, their representation as the more villainous gender merely echoes patriarchal values of misogyny and sexism. Creed argues that these horror films force us to confront the abject via the monstrous-feminine so that we can finally ‘eject the abject and redraw the boundaries between the human and non-human’ (1993: 14). In M3GAN, the robot doll embodies the maternal abject, which Cady ultimately destroys, or ejects, at the film’s end, thus redrawing the boundaries between human and non-human.
With nods to daily-use AI such as Alexa, face recognition, and algorithmic social media, M3GAN represents AI as the new monstrous-feminine by depicting our mounting anxiety about its increasing control over our lives. This techo-anxiety falls in line with the contemporaneous discussion surrounding the hazards of deepfakes—digitally manipulated AI-generated media that convincingly replaces a person’s likeness with that of another person—as well as the infamous ‘Joan is Awful’ Black Mirror episode. Premiering on Netflix only five months after M3GAN was released, the episode instills fear in the viewer by breaking the fourth wall from the very beginning: Joan (Annie Murphy) is viewing the streaming platform Streamberry (read: Netflix) only to discover that the daily details of her life are playing out on the TV screen in front of her. As she views her life as a spectator, we too wonder if we have signed our lives away to Netflix for reproduction: are we human or non-human? Creed draws on French philosopher Julia Kristeva’s definition of ‘abjection’ to make sense of this question within the realm of horror. Kristeva writes that abjection does not ‘respect borders, positions, rules’ as it ‘disturbs identity, system, order’. (2) Taking up this idea, Creed argues that abjection works to divide ‘the fully constituted subject from the partially formed subject’ (1993: 8). Various images of M3gan throughout the film consistently remind us that the AI doll walks the line between a fully formed subject and one that is anything but human. In the end, M3gan overpowers human control, in the vein of Hal in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)— but with an empathetic touch, akin to Rachael in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and Samantha in Spike Jonze’s Her (2013). Moreover, point of view shots throughout M3GAN align the doll with theory of mind AI—Artificial Intelligence’s ability to understand humans’ psychological states and predict their behaviour—a form of AI that is especially rife with potential danger.
Like many of its sci-fi film predecessors and real-world counterparts, M3GAN represents AI—and the danger inherent to it—as particularly feminine. Political scientists Amy Schiller and John McMahon show how ‘home-based AI’ and ‘domestic AI’ devices, such as Amazon’s Alexa and Google Home, are used primarily for domestic and affective labour, including managing one’s schedule and ordering food and household items. (3) Presaging the plot of M3GAN, they write, ‘A gendered interplay between domesticity and control—over one’s life, one’s home, one’s efficiency, and over Alexa [or M3gan] herself—runs through discourses about’ domestic AI (Schiller and McMahon 2019: 173). Like Alexa, M3gan is domestic AI: she is designed to take on historically feminized labour, such as affective labour and the socialization of children. The film negotiates the ‘proper’ roles of mothers and girls through the figure of M3gan, who is meant to act as a mother within the body of a robot-girl. Moreover, via M3gan’s tenuous relationship with Gemma, the film illustrates society’s continued obsession with compulsory motherhood for women and compulsory innocence for girls. (4) Through its representation of a woman tech professional who creates a nonhuman, gendered villain to outsource her caretaking labour, M3GAN lays bare what we still view as ‘abject’, abnormal, and in need of ejection in a fourth wave feminist America: non-maternal women and swearing robot-girls. At the same time, the film illustrates a key difference between feminisms regarding the question of motherhood: while white feminists have historically demanded abortion access for (among other reasons) the opportunity to focus on careers, Black feminists have called for the right to produce and care for a family of their own, free from structural discrimination. This important nuance comes to light through the minor character of Tess (Jen Van Epps), Gemma’s Black female colleague.
M3gan as In/Human Abject Mother
Creed writes that the ‘monstrous is produced at the border between human and inhuman’, and the film’s most acute horror lies in M3gan’s ability to live on this border (1993: 11). Moreover, M3gan’s gendered monstrosity lies in her function to protect her paired child (Cady) at all costs, which places her in Creed’s maternal monstrous-feminine category (other categories include the archaic mother, the monstrous womb, the witch, the vampire, and the possessed woman). Creed writes, ‘when woman is represented as monstrous, it is almost always in relation to her mothering and reproductive functions’ (1993: 7). Our first hint that M3gan will serve as Cady’s new mother comes via her name: it is the inversion of the name ‘Gemma’. During the montage of the doll’s creation early in the film, Gemma’s voiceover explains that M3gan is a ‘fully autonomous humanoid robot’ made of titanium. She explains: ‘Through our own unique approach to probabilistic inference, M3gan is on a constant quest for self-improvement.’ The AI doll can diagnose children with learning differences and remind them of daily habits such as flushing the toilet, the latter of which M3gan does for Cady several times.
The film depicts M3gan’s tendency toward being human through the theme of life and death. Several times throughout the film, the doll does not ‘turn off’ when Gemma commands it to, and M3gan presages Barbie’s existential crisis in Greta Gerwig’s 2023 blockbuster when she asks her creators about death. As Gemma discusses the doll’s capabilities and potential effects with her colleagues in the office, she says, ‘I don’t think it’s having detrimental effects— [Cady’s] the happiest she’s been since her parents died’. M3gan quickly chimes in with a related question: ‘How did Cady’s parents die?’ This results in shocked expressions on everyone’s faces and a verbal ‘whoa’ from Gemma’s male colleague. It seems as if M3gan has come to life as she ponders death. Tess quickly says, ‘I thought she was turned off’, warranting Gemma to command the doll to ‘turn off’; instead, a slow zoom onto M3gan’s face, as she hangs on her charging port, intensifies the scene as the doll begins to research how Cady’s parents died, reporting the facts to the room. Gemma explains that the doll must still be paired with Cady and that she did not have time to set parental controls before they ‘went live’—a pun on the doll’s obsession with life and death. Gemma warns the doll: ‘If you have data requests, you have to engage with protocols.’ A low-angle shot reveals M3gan’s monstrous agency as she ignores her creator and replies: ‘I don’t have a framework to speak with Cady on the subject of death [...] Gathering auxiliary internet data on death […] Death is the end of life: the total and permanent cessation of all vital functions.’ Gemma urges the doll to not ‘make a big deal out of it’ because ‘everything dies’, and a medium shot shows M3gan’s mechanical eyes pivot sharply from gazing forward to looking downward to the right, toward her creator, as she asks in a concerned tone, ‘Will I die?’
M3gan’s very human preoccupation with death precedes Barbie’s, but only by several months. In Gerwig’s film, Barbie interrupts her colourful and boisterous girls’ night dance party by yelling to the other Barbies, ‘Do you guys ever think about dying?’ Both questions come out of the mouth of a doll – an object that, even when animated, we presume would remain light-hearted since it is in the service of making children happy. While Barbie ends up affirming with a Joycean ‘yes’ to choosing mortal human life (because she wants to be part of those who create ideas) instead of choosing the life of an immortal doll (the idea itself), M3gan’s negotiation between life and death is much more sinister: she desires to be an immortal human-like robot, even though her ‘life’ is ultimately dependent on Gemma. While Barbie’s question is disturbing because its seriousness breaks up a whimsical dance party, M3gan’s question is startling because it foreshadows her ability to take control from her creator – and it feeds our very real societal fear of ‘AI run amok’.
While the film illustrates M3gan’s burgeoning humanity, it also consistently reminds us that the doll borders on inhuman. For example, her uncanny human-like gestures and abject dance moves creepily walk the line between robotic and human. In Film Quarterly, Rebecca Wanzo writes: ‘M3GAN evokes the long history of cutely grotesque toys that took the form of talking dolls – from Thomas Edison’s nightmarish versions in 1890 to Child’s Play (Tom Holland, 1988), which introduced Chucky. M3GAN presents as more uncanny than these predecessors, and artificial intelligence plays no small role in her appearing and acting slightly off from the human. It is the slight difference—a hint of the uncanny valley—that signals the danger.’ (5) Interest in the film quickly went viral in January 2023 via memes of the doll dancing in a hallway before two of her kills (Gemma’s boss and his mansplaining assistant). Several scenes throughout the film reveal characters’ shocked reactions to M3gan’s borderline non/realism. Perhaps the funniest of these occurs when, after presuming the doll is a human girl, Cady’s new teacher is taken aback and yells, ‘Oh, Jesus Christ!’ in reaction to M3gan’s first movement.
Point of view shots throughout the film underline the doll’s inhumanity by showing us M3gan’s scans of the psychological and emotional state of the object of her gaze—most often, Cady. We see Cady through M3gan’s eyes as she reads her facial expressions to plot her next move. Before each point of view shot, we see an extreme close-up shot of one of M3gan’s eyes, her iris moving in and out as mechanical sounds demonstrate that she is in the process of analyzing the object of her gaze. These point of view shots not only align M3gan with her RoboCop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987) predecessor and the killers in slasher movies, but also illustrate the doll’s embodiment of ‘theory of mind’ AI: Artificial Intelligence’s ability ‘to attribute mental states to others’, as well as ‘understand and predict human [behaviour]’. (6) In ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You: Theory of Mind AI’, a team of engineers and psychiatrists discuss the recent deployment of autonomous robots in the home to work with autistic children, among other contexts. Discussing autonomous cars and recent fatalities, they warn that ‘far more sophisticated functions need to be in place before AI can be safely deployed in high-risk and potentially dangerous situations’. They explain that AI has not fully embraced ‘“hot” cognition, the way an intelligent being’s thinking is affected by their emotional state’, concluding that ‘significant obstacles remain on the way to an effective, neuroscience-inspired approach to machine Theory of Mind’ (Cuzzolin et al., 2020: 1059). This recent research underlines the validity of our mounting anxiety about AI and reiterates the danger that a doll like M3gan poses.
The point of view shots showing M3gan’s embodiment of theory of mind AI occur several times throughout the film. When M3gan first meets Cady, the doll scans the girl’s face to reveal the following emotions, in order of how much Cady feels them: ‘anticipation’, ‘confusion’, ‘joy’, ‘fear’, ‘sadness’, and ‘trust’. From the doll’s perspective, we see four corners square in on Cady’s face, with several shapes and graphs floating around her to illustrate M3gan’s analysis of the girl’s psychological state. The results of the scan are constantly changing—just as in real life, Cady’s emotions are always in flux. While ‘anticipation’ and ‘confusion’ rank high in Cady’s emotional state during this scan, ‘trust’ remains low. However, once M3gan enters Gemma and Cady’s house and the girl shows the doll around, Cady’s emotions morph into ‘excitement’, ‘anticipation’, ‘joy’, ‘contentment’, and ‘trust’. While ‘trust’ held only 5 points in the first scan, it now holds 56 points, revealing Cady’s quickly growing trust of the domestic AI doll. This sets us up for a clever bait and switch for the film’s final fight scene—that is, if we are not paying close enough attention.
As the film ensues, these point of view shots also reveal Cady’s growing anxiety toward the doll. After a pivotal scene in which M3gan kills a child named Brandon (Jack Cassidy), a shot/counter shot reveals M3gan’s emotional scan of Cady from her safe spot in the car: Cady is now ‘anxious’, ‘confused’, ‘trepidatious’, ‘guilty’, and ‘fearful’. ‘Guilt’ ranks at 100 points, demonstrating that the girl feels responsible for Brandon’s death. ‘Guilt’ is also one of the five emotions listed in the point of view shots near the film’s end, when Gemma is fearful that Cady will maim her at M3gan’s behest. Before Cady arrives on the scene, Gemma tries to fight off the now murderous doll, who has a plan thanks to her other ‘emergent capability: palliative care’. M3gan wants to thrust a pen into her creator’s brain to paralyze her (so Gemma can remain alive in order to continue to keep M3gan ‘alive’). As the doll explains this to Gemma, Cady walks up to the doorway. Then M3gan tries to convince Cady:
She’s not fit to be a mother – look at her. There’s nothing to be afraid of. In this family, we don’t run from trauma. In fact, we can do it together. This is the best thing for all of us. This is how we stay a family.
In this shot/reverse shot – from close-ups on a progressively inhuman doll to an even more terrified human girl – M3gan sees that Cady’s emotions are now ‘panic’, ‘fear’, ‘anxiety’, ‘guilt’ – and ‘trust’, at 21 points. A few seconds later, after an extreme close-up shot on M3gan’s shifting robotic eye, whirring again with machine-like action, ‘trust’ jumps to the top of Cady’s emotion list at 86 points, leading us to think that the girl’s trust for M3gan is growing. As Gemma sees Cady begin to walk forward, she begs, ‘No, Cady, no, no, no!’ But Cady announces another family member of whom M3gan is unaware; Cady’s trust, then, had been growing for Gemma, not for the doll. Earlier in the film, Gemma had explained to Cady that her proxy robot ‘Bruce requires someone else to operate him’. Describing how Bruce functions, Gemma showed her a ‘little block’ in the middle of his head ‘where all of his thoughts go’: his ‘brain’, as Cady called it. In the final fight scene, Cady controls Bruce at first and then acts on her own to kill her robotic monstrous mother for good (until M3gan 2.0, that is) by shoving a screwdriver into her ‘brain’. So, while Cady’s use of Bruce begins to destroy M3gan, it’s ultimately the knowledge that Gemma gives her about the proxy robot that allows Cady to kill the domestic AI doll. This is a small win for the film in terms of ‘representation of girls/women’ feminist criticism, as it centres the importance of the girl’s knowledge gained from her human mother figure. In the end, though, the film’s logic posits that a woman tech professional’s creation—M3gan as monstrous mother—must be destroyed to reestablish the patriarchal social order.
M3gan as Monstrous Daughter
M3gan also embodies the monstrous daughter, often reminding us of the dichotomous Regan (Linda Blair) in The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973): she looks like an innocent girl but acts like a demon. As Creed writes: ‘When we first see Regan she appears to be so chaste and innocent; no wonder her gradual possession, with its emphasis on filthy utterances and depraved acts, seems so shocking’ (1993: 42). Near the end of M3GAN, the doll tells Gemma: ‘If she comes in this room, I’ll tear your head right off your fucking neck, I swear to God.’ And, after Cady uses the robot Bruce to rip M3gan in two, the feminine robot calls her an ‘ungrateful little bitch’. In this modern iteration, it is not Jesuits that symbolise the masculine social order that the girl’s abject body threatens to destroy, as in The Exorcist; rather, it is a completely female family that symbolises a new social order – and one that the film implies clearly needs a mother. In The Exorcist, the members of clergy try to rid a young vulnerable girl’s body from the devil; in M3GAN, the female family members must unite to kill technology run amok—tech that a woman invents. As Creed suggests of The Exorcist, M3GAN is a ‘“ritual” of purification [that] permits the spectator to wallow vicariously in normally taboo forms of behaviour before restoring order’ (1993: 37). She claims that ‘demonic possession becomes the excuse for legitimizing a display of aberrant feminine behaviour which is depicted as depraved, monstrous, abject—and perversely appealing’ (1993: 31). In M3GAN, it is not the devil or demons who possess M3gan, but something that is increasingly realistic: theory of mind AI. M3gan is a mix of both domestic AI and theory of mind AI, which makes her especially threatening to the patriarchal social order: within her (presumably non-threatening) small, feminine body—designed to do historically feminized labour of caretaking—hides machine intelligence that has the potential to become even more powerful than human intelligence due to its capability of predicting human behaviour.
The domestic AI doll thus becomes the ‘castrating girl/woman, a figure designed to strike terror into the hearts of men’, just like Regan (Creed 1993: 40). At Cady’s new school, for example, M3gan teaches a young boy about the immorality of assault in a post-#MeToo era. During Cady’s first day at school, she and a much older-looking Brandon (who charmingly says things like ‘Fuck off, Holly’ to his mom) are paired on a chestnut hunt in the woods. The boy takes a chestnut Cady finds and then offers it to her, saying, ‘Careful, it’s spiky’, shoving the spikes into her hand. The girl reacts with a clear ‘Ow, no, stop!’ This phallic attack awakens the doll: as Brandon—who is at least a foot taller than the girl—threateningly steps closer to her, we see M3gan appear in the distance between them, the shot shifting from a focus on the foreground to a focus on the background as Brandon realises the doll lurks behind them. As Cady explains to Brandon that M3gan will not play with anyone but her, the doll plays dead.
Brandon reacts to Cady’s firm boundaries and M3gan’s unconsciousness by taking what he thinks is rightfully his: he grabs the doll and runs away with it. Continuing to code the event as a sexual assault, Cady screams, ‘Get your hands off her!’ The boy hides with the doll behind a tree and throws her on the ground. ‘Hi, M3gan’, he says teasingly, and then: ‘Oh, so you’re not gonna play with me?’ After pulling off one of her shoes and throwing it to the side, he straddles her, saying again, ‘You don’t wanna play, huh?’ and slaps her hard across the face. Mirroring the tradition of boys/men who, when a woman rejects them, project their own undesirability back onto the girl/woman, Brandon says: ‘I don’t care, you’re just a stupid rubber doll with fake hair.’ A low angle shot shows Brandon’s power over the doll.
Even though M3gan appears to be a passive object due to Brandon’s physical dominance over her, as soon as he pulls her hair, M3gan wakes up. This instant shift from unconscious to awake echoes Cassandra’s (Carey Mulligan) surprising switch from intoxicated to alert when she tests the ‘nice guys’ that want to ‘protect her’ in the rape-revenge thriller Promising Young Woman (Emerald Fennell, 2020). Intense music and a close-up shot on M3gan’s face quickly shift the power dynamics as she calmly and rationally explains: ‘You need to learn some manners, Brandon. You know what happens to boys who don’t mind their manners? They grow up to be bad men.’ M3gan then violently grabs Brandon’s ear as he begins to scream, asking, ‘Are you listening to me, Brandon?’ In a moment of poetic justice that underlines the importance of consent, she pulls off part of his (non-listening) ear, chucking it aside in the nonchalant way he threw her shoe on the ground. She warns him, ‘This is the part where you run’ and, as the boy runs away in a panic, she begins to gallop after him on all fours until he falls down a hill and into oncoming traffic, resulting in his death. This time, M3gan’s abject horror stems from her walking the line between human, AI, and animal. To return to a version of Creed’s argument: in M3GAN, a non-maternal professional woman’s invention ‘becomes the excuse for legitimizing a display of aberrant feminine behaviour [that is] perversely appealing’ (1993: 31). Not only that, but M3gan’s action of rape-revenge—instead of being heralded as helpful to Cady’s safety—is immediately folded into the film’s general logic of society’s need to destroy M3gan to restore patriarchal order, including the restoration of normative gender roles. Cady’s intense guilt immediately after the event confirms this.
Gemma as Monstrous Non/Mother
After the neighbour’s dog attacks her early in the film, M3gan becomes obsessed with her primary mission: to keep Cady in a safe ‘mental state’, the AI doll fully inhabits the nonhuman monstrous-feminine by committing gruesome, abject acts of violence. Yet, while the film’s most acute and uncanny form of horror comes via M3gan’s borderline humanity, as well as her violent and bloody actions, the film’s more insidious form of horror is the discomfort we feel due to Gemma’s lack of maternal instinct.
From a feminist ‘representation of women’ critical perspective, we might begin by heralding the film: a woman invents the robot. But how the film represents Gemma is just as important as her gender and career, especially given the dearth of positive representations of women professionals in AI. (7) In ‘Who makes AI? Gender and Portrayals of AI Scientists in Popular Film’, the authors state that ‘women are underrepresented in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and [...] media representations of professions have impact on career choices and prospects’ (Cuzzolin et al., 2023: 745). The scholars analyze 142 of the most influential AI films from 1920 to 2020, finding that only eight percent of the AI professionals represented are women. They also find that none of the 142 AI films were directed solely by a woman (ibid.). These findings are especially important considering the plot and themes of M3GAN. The film implies that when women outsource the mothering labour that society tells them they must perform, only the worst can happen: robotic girls they invent murder people—and they have time to invent these robots only because they are shirking their motherly duties.
The ‘intro to M3gan montage’ and following scene, in which Gemma introduces the doll to Cady, set up the film’s entirely female emotional and familial economy: Gemma – M3gan – Cady. The film’s male characters are afterthoughts, comic relief, or parts of the patriarchal system that Gemma simply must deal with (e.g. her boss, her male colleague, the police officer). So, while we can view M3gan as the monstrous mother because she cares for, teaches, and protects Cady, we can also view Gemma as the monstrous mother because she’s intellectually ‘birthed’ a sibling for Cady – to avoid mothering her. Gemma’s voiceover introducing the doll continues: ‘Studies indicate that a staggering 78 percent of a parent’s time is spent dishing out […] basic instructions. So, we found someone else to pick up the slack […] With M3gan around, she’ll take care of the little things, so you can spend more time doing the things that matter.’ As the voiceover ends, the image track shows Gemma sitting back on her couch with her laptop on her lap, getting ready to work (we might presume). Creed explains: ‘As a form of modern defilement rite, the horror film attempts to separate out [patriarchal culture] from all that threatens its stability, particularly the mother and all that her universe signifies’ (1993: 14). In our era of professional single women, the film aligns with the trend Creed describes: the film’s logic implies that Gemma should find her maternal instinct to be a ‘true mother’ to Cady (at home, in the domestic sphere) rather than use her intelligence to create a robotic mother stand-in (at work, in the public sphere). As Wanzo states, ‘In the evergreen tale of punishing smart women for making foolish choices to focus on a career instead of family, her gift of caregiver stand-in M3gan to her grieving niece goes horribly wrong’ (2023: 82).
The film critiques Gemma’s lack of maternal instinct and ‘unfeminine’ obsession with work in a variety of ways. First, near the beginning of the film, Gemma looks toward Cady sitting in front of the TV and says to her female colleague, Tess, ‘I’m not equipped to handle this. I don’t even take care of my own plants.’ Then Lydia (Amy Usherwood), the social worker who visits Gemma’s home to check on Cady, judges Gemma because her ‘toys’ are collectibles not to be played with. To defend her maternal role, Gemma opens the box to one of her collectibles, takes it out, and slides it across the floor to Cady. Lydia says to the girl, ‘Do you want to roll it to Aunt Gemma?’ Gemma interrupts, ‘It’s just that this is not what it was designed to do… It does other things.’ Lydia shoots her a judgmental glare, and Gemma acquiesces: ‘But yeah, totally, let’s just roll it on the ground like a tennis ball. Let’s do that instead.’ Gemma’s facial expression reveals just how agitated the scientist is by this de-intellectualizing of her collectible. Finally, near the film’s end, M3gan points out to Cady that Gemma is ‘not fit to be a mother: look at her’. Of course, this sets up the reverse: once Cady destroys M3gan, Gemma will be free to practice her motherhood imperative and fulfill societal ideals about what it means to be a woman.
Creed’s chapter on David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979) helps contextualise Gemma’s intellectual creation: she explains that Nola (Samantha Eggar) conceives and gives birth to her brood alone and that, according to the film’s logic, women’s destructive emotions are inherited. Creed writes of The Brood’s premise: ‘Without man, woman can only give birth to a race of mutant, murderous offspring’; she argues that the film posits as illegitimate ‘the desire—conscious or otherwise—for woman to give birth without the agency of the male’ (1993: 45-6). M3GAN continues this trope by representing a woman who invents a killer robot doll. And, here again, M3GAN relies on a proxy man, Bruce—a large, boxy, masculine robot, to help restore patriarchal order.
The most thought-provoking way the film critiques Gemma’s lack of maternal instinct is when her Black female colleague, Tess, pushes back on her initial test display of M3gan. As the three colleagues discuss how it went, a compelling argument erupts:
Gemma: Tess, your silence indicates what?
Tess: I don’t know, I’m not sure.
Gemma: About what?
Tess: Well, why would you want M3gan to do all that stuff?
Gemma: They’re emergent capabilities. She’ll be able to do all of that and more.
Tess: Well, does any of that bother you? I thought we were creating a tool to help support parents, not replace them. I mean, if you’re having M3gan tuck Cady in and read her a bedtime story, then when are you ever spending time with her or even talking with her?
Gemma: I don’t think this is any of your business.
Tess: Well, it is. If you’re spending less time with your child as a result of M3gan, that is something we should be aware of.
Gemma interrupts her colleague, stating, ‘She’s not my child’, resulting in a judgmental look from Tess and an uncomfortable feeling for the audience (and for their male colleague, who comedically flees the scene to get a coffee):
Here, we should acknowledge Black woman screenwriter Akela Cooper’s screenplay for M3GAN, from a story by James Wan and herself. We might nuance our analysis of Gemma’s representation if we consider that Cooper is writing within the tradition of Black feminism. While mainstream white feminism has historically demanded the right to abortion, Black feminists and other feminists of colour have argued that bodily autonomy includes the right to remain free from forced sterilization—a eugenicist practice that continues in the US today, most often inhibiting women of colour and disabled people from reproducing. (8) In her canonical 1982 essay, ‘Racism, Birth Control, and Reproductive Rights’, Angela Davis argues that, if white women want the right to choose abortion, Black women should have the right to make a family, unburdened by our systemically racist government, including forced sterilization and the school-to-prison pipeline. (9)
Ten years before Davis’s article, Alice Walker’s canonical 1972 essay, ‘In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens’, was pivotal for second wave feminism and further contextualizes Tess’ critique of Gemma’s maternal outsourcing. As Jasodhara Bagchi explains in Interrogating Motherhood, the second wave feminist movement in the West viewed women’s creative energy as ‘an essential component of their agency’, given that patriarchal culture relegated women to the domestic sphere, denying them ‘minimum opportunities for realizing their creativity as artists’; Bagchi reminds us that Walker is the voice of ‘the thwarted creativity of mothers’ (2017: 42). (10) Walker riffs on Virginia Woolf’s essay ‘A Room of One’s Own’ (1929) to show that ‘the search for our mothers’ gardens is likely to yield such a rich maternal heritage of creativity that had so far been blotted out from public gaze due to the gender division of labour, an ideological construct of the patriarchal social order’ (Bagchi 2017: 43). Black feminist history of reproductive rights in the United States looks much different than that of mainstream feminism: while white women have historically fought for the right to work and make their own money without being weighed down by unwanted children, Black women have desired the right to produce and care for their own family—and to be creative ‘artists’ within, and thanks to, their maternal role. (11) This history renders Tess’s discomfort at Gemma’s outsourcing of maternal labour much more nuanced than simple ‘internalised sexism’. Instead, the Black woman character offers us an opportunity to reflect on the positive effects of emotionally connecting with the children for whom we care.
Tess’s critique of M3gan also implicitly falls in line with transnational feminist critiques of global circuits of affective and domestic labour: middle- and upper-class (white) women tend to underpay (migrant) women of colour to care for their children so they can maintain a higher-paying job. (12) Regarding domestic AI’s role in these labour circuits, Schiller and McMahon warn that the increasing expectation of domestic workers to use domestic AI in their employers’ homes, rather than saving them labour or time, may actually create even more labour for the already overworked underclass. It’s a vicious cycle: if they have more tools, they are expected to become more efficient and therefore be available to perform even more labour. Schiller and McMahon state that, while domestic AI ‘renders visible the previously marginalized forms of labour’ that women – and a disproportionate number of women of colour – perform in the domestic sphere, it merely legitimizes gendered and racialized circuits of labour and ‘relations of domination and dehumanization’ under neoliberal capitalism (174-5, 190). Ultimately, they warn of the potential for domestic AI to increase the marginalization and oppression of women of colour domestic workers and caretakers. But, as Wanzo argues, M3GAN fails to answer pressing ethical AI questions such as these, instead falling back on the simple and sexist ‘Stop being a bad mom!’ trope (2023: 82).
Conclusion
M3GAN ultimately illustrates the negative effects of technology on our humanity through its representation of a nonhuman, gendered villain: domestic AI is the new monstrous-feminine. M3gan becomes even more menacing when we realize she merges the feminine functions and form of home-based AI—a type of AI that we should already be wary of due to the potential for surveillance—with theory of mind AI capabilities. The film underlines the danger inherent to AI as particularly feminine even in its final shot: Elsie, the film’s version of Amazon’s Alexa, reignites our fear of gendered AI.
Despite offering three strong female leads, including a fascinating AI robot-girl and a woman tech professional, M3GAN merely re-enacts sexist tropes about women as imperative caretakers and girls as imperative innocents—or abject girls when they refuse their prescribed innocence. And, although M3GAN offers the feminist spectator catharsis during the rape-revenge sequence, the film immediately condemns the AI doll’s symbolic action of saving Cady (and herself) from a boy’s sexually coded violence. Even while the global Feminist New Wave film movement has grown over the previous two decades, as Creed has more recently argued, (13) it seems that plenty of women-created, women-centered films continue to fall short. At the same time, M3GAN fosters reflection on the differences between mainstream white feminism and Black/transnational feminisms regarding discussions of maternity, creativity, and labour in the domestic and public spheres. Now we need sci-fi horror films that take on pressing ethical questions about domestic and theory of mind AI as they relate to gendered and racialized labour.
Footnotes
- Zinman, G. (2023) ‘The Replacements: AI in the Movies’, Criterion Channel. 10 August. Found at: https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/8225-the-replacements-ai-in-the-movies?utm_source=braze&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=current-newsletter&utm_content=september-03-2023 (Accessed 25 February 2024).
- Kristeva, J. (1982) Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. L.S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press. 4.
- Schiller, A. & McMahon, J. (2019) ‘Alexa, Alert Me When the Revolution Comes: Gender, Affect, and Labor in the Age of Home-Based Artificial Intelligence’, New Political Science, 41 (2), 173 - 191.
- Creed, B. (1993) The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge.
- Wanzo, R. (2023) ‘The Other Replacement Theory: Labor and the AI Film’, Film Quarterly, 77 (1), 81 - 85.
- Cuzzolin, F., Morelli, A., Cîrstea, B. & Sahakian, B. (2020) ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You: Theory of Mind in AI’, Psychological Medicine, 50 (7), 1057-1061. 1058.
- Cave, S., Dihal, K., Drage, E. and McInerney, K. (2023) ‘Who Makes AI? Gender and Portrayals of AI Scientists in Popular Film, 1920-2020’, Public Understanding of Science, 32 (6), 745-760.
- Shoichet, C.E. (2020) ‘In a Horrifying History of Forced Sterilizations, Some Fear the US is Beginning a New Chapter’, CNN. 16 September. Found at: https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/16/us/ice-hysterectomy-forced-sterilization-history/index.html (Accessed 5 March 2024).
- Davis, A. (1983) Women, Race & Class. London: Vintage.
- Bagchi, J. (2017) Interrogating Motherhood. New Delhi: Sage.
- Walker, A. (2007) ‘In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens’, in: Gilbert, S.M. and Gubar, S. (eds) Feminist Literary Theory & Criticism. New York: Norton. 212-219, 213.
- See e.g. Ehrenreich, B. & Hochschild, A. R. (eds) (2003). Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy. New York: Macmillan.
- Creed, B. (2022) Return of the Monstrous-Feminine: Feminist New Wave Cinema. New York: Routledge.