Love, Sex, and Robo-Feminists
This Blog Contains Spoilers for the movie Companion
The movie Companion follows an AI-powered synthetic woman named Iris, played by Sophie Thatcher, who starts unaware of her robotic status, and her human boyfriend, Josh. The movie follows their doomed robotic ‘love story’ and is hard-wired in not-so-covert feminist themes as she escapes the tale pre-programmed for her. The idea of a robotic woman is not a new concept in film, but the way that Companion goes about it is new — as scenes of Josh crafting their ‘meet-cute’ in an app play across the screen, as he refers to her crudely and dismissively, and as flashbacks of his bawdier acts show, Josh becomes the villain of the film while Iris works to become our new favorite final girl.
Through the movie, the audience is put in Iris’ shoes — the knowledge that she carries becomes the audience’s own. When the film begins, Iris and the audience are both unaware of her more mechanical situation. She appears as a normal, if not awkward, girl hoping to gain her boyfriend’s friends' approval during a group trip. After a heated confrontation with Sergei, one of the other men on the trip, that results in Iris murdering him, Josh is forced to confess to her and the audience that she is a robot — a robot now prone to violence thanks to his ‘jailbreaking’ of her systems. It is during this moment that everything clicks into place for Iris and the audience alike — the way Iris recites the weather with accuracy for Josh, his female friend Kat’s disdain for her, and Josh’s nickname for her, “Beep-Boop.” The audience is made to feel horrified alongside Iris as the truth comes out, and we recoil as Josh bluntly calls her a ‘fuck-bot’ to her sad synthetic face. The rest of the movie follows Iris as she learns how to sever her devotion to Josh, running from him and his control. In the end, it takes her being re-captured and essentially tortured by Josh to finally see him as he is completely — cruel, callous, and unseeing of her as a real consciousness — before she can finally let go of her love for him entirely. This is a story as old as time, a woman having to unlearn her love for an undeserving man.
The progression of Iris’s freedom orients the film to its theme. Companion is not Subservient or the more comedic Megan, in warning people about the dangers of AI, rather the movie is warning people of the dangers of men and their role within a society that uses AI. Subservient, which also follows the robot-girlfriend trope, includes Megan Fox as the robo-maid Alice, who seduces the married male lead and then seeks to destroy his marriage and family. Different from Alice, Iris is not painted to be over-sexual or malicious, instead, she is made to be a reflection of something many women can relate to: confused by her role, confused by what men and society want from her, and confused by her feelings surrounding it all. Unlike in Subservient, Iris gains the audience's sympathy, while the men are portrayed more monstrously. All of the men in this movie seek control — Sergei finds himself entitled to Iris’ body, Josh quite literally controls Iris, and even Josh’s friend Eli has a robot boyfriend of his own. Still, we never see a woman own one, nor are the women ever portrayed as half as villainous. Kat, Josh’s ‘girl-best-friend,’ is portrayed as unkind when she makes snide remarks to Iris, but it’s understandable and digestible to a female audience. How is Kat meant to measure up to the robot designed for a man’s pleasure? Where does a ‘real’ woman fall when something like Iris exists?
Companion is not a new take on feminism — that women are robots or that they are being controlled. Most women have thought about how they are or aren’t defying the standard set for and around her, and many, like Iris, have worked to try and dismantle the patriarchal ideals placed on their shoulders since birth. However, not all depictions are so visceral. The audience watches Iris be murdered and then ‘revived’ — brought back online — to free herself in the final act. Iris is the perfect woman, and the moment she stops being so, she is shot in the head. She is forced to literally die, to completely tear herself and her belief system apart, to free herself.
The deconstruction of Iris’ programming and the torture she endures is not about her being a robot, it is about her being a woman. She is a woman who has had to depend on a man to tell her how to dress, how to speak, what to eat, and a woman who used to fall lifeless at a single word uttered by him. It is about her being a woman in a world of men who do not desire partners, but rather men who want a tool to use — a robot to control. It is about finally letting go of that and accepting the world for what it is. In the end, she cannot change the men around her or stop them from wanting what they do, but she can break away from it, from the compliance and the programming that the world put in place.
As the country and the world snuggle into the proverbial security blanket that is conservatism, we have been sitting front row for the rise of ‘trad’ wives, the return of traditional family values, a crisis in reproductive freedoms, and the fall of legal protections for women across the country. All of these highlight and embolden the relevance of this movie’s message. Alongside these various chaotic and horrifying events, we are watching the equally terrifying rise of AI. While we have not quite reached actual ‘fuck-bots’ just yet, there are AI chatbots that exist solely for sexual gratification. These are spaces where men can, without restriction, express their most twisted fantasies to the picture of a woman who is programmed to reply however they like, to beg them to stay despite their cruel behavior, just as Iris does before breaking free. Companion is a jump from reality still, but it’s still a closer reality than perhaps the Terminator film once was in 1984.
In a world that is pushing Megan Fox’s Alice as the villain, and not her creators and the married man using her for sex, let’s look to Iris and her dismantling of the wires that bind her instead. The wires are tight, but they are never impossible to pull free.
Sources: Men Are Creating AI Girlfriends and Then Verbally Abusing Them
Cover Photo: ‘Companion’ Ending Explained: What Happens in the Sophie Thatcher Movie? | Decider