*½/****
starring Megan Fox, Michele Morrone, Madeline Zima, Jude Allen Greenstein
written by Will Honley & April Maguire
directed by S.K. Dale
by Walter Chaw You could make a domestic robot servant look like anything. A spider or a dog, for instance. It could look like Michael Gough as Alfred the Butler or like Michael Caine as Alfred the Butler. It could look like ceramic Mrs. Potts and be voiced by the ghost of Angela Lansbury. It could look like a child or an old crone, a handsome young man or a beautiful young woman. What you decide you want your domestic robot servant to look like says a lot about a lot. I read that pedophiles are already buying robot children. I remember when Paulie got a robot in Rocky IV that was the spitting image of Rosie from “The Jetsons”; Paulie was, without question, fucking it. When M3GAN came out, I had a hard time believing there wasn’t at any point a serious conversation about who the target audience for a robot that looked like that, dressed like that, would be. Probably not little girls needing playmates, is what I’m saying.
The question becomes, then, whether or not I’m being fair when I say that the choice to first manufacture, then purchase, a domestic robot servant that looks like Megan Fox is, at least on some level, specifically for the purposes of sexual power and gratification. I have, in the past, been notably unfair towards Fox in things like Jennifer’s Body, which I deeply underestimated and misread because I was caught up in the popular rage of demeaning people like Britney Spears and Fox for their youth, success, and uncanny beauty. It takes a considerable amount of deprogramming to see how deeply ingrained certain ugly, small, repugnant biases are, and I had a hard time for too long seeing her as anything other than how I was conditioned to think of starlets: vacuous, opportunistic, vain. That’s awful. In the years since, as Fox has spoken out about her mistreatment, I have regretted the damage and ridicule she suffered in the public eye. When she shows up in S.K. Dale’s Subservience as “Alice,” the android sub of the title, purchased to help temporarily-single dad Nick (Michele Morrone) take care of his two little kids and, you know, pick up around the house, I felt indicted–as I should. Obviously, this is Fox acknowledging her image and playing against it, yes? But what does it mean when I don’t think she does play against it?
What’s difficult is that either Fox was duped or incapable–or, just as likely, that I’m still unable to see past her external appeal to properly assess her in this role. Not when so much of it depends upon her appearance and not when no one is really punished for underestimating or being distracted by her because of how she looks. On the contrary, Alice behaves very much like the nannies of ’90s thrillers like Curtis Hanson’s The Hand That Rocks the Cradle or William Friedkin’s The Guardian, making her an evil temptress insinuating herself into the good graces of an otherwise happy family and not turned, somehow, through abuse or mistreatment. Her switch has never, as they say, been flipped to “evil”–she’s more Jessica Rabbit than I Spit on Your Grave‘s Jennifer Hills: not bad, just drawn that way. Well, she is bad, but bad in the sexually naughty sense, not subservient but forward in her seduction of poor Nick, who is merely trying to hold down the fort until his wife, Maggie (Madeline Zima), gets a heart transplant. Nick is even mostly let off the hook for buying Alice in the first place. Sure, he catches some judgey glances, but look how quickly Alice bonds with Nick’s daughter, Isla (Matilda Firth). Moreover, Nick resists Alice and her charms for much longer than you’d expect, given that Alice is essentially a toaster shaped like Megan Fox.
Subservience is an AI-peril piece where the only goal of the AI is to destroy the nuclear family, both literally through Nick’s potential loss of a job–a subplot finds human workers being replaced at the factory where Nick works–and spiritually/morally with Alice’s luring Nick into adultery. Worse, because Alice is just a collection of nuts and circuits, is it actually adultery, or is the film an indictment of porn, sexual aids, or sex workers, perhaps, who are seen as largely inhuman? Subservience doesn’t go that deep. What it does is make the Megan Foxes of the world villains because of how they look. Consider the version of this story in which Nick constantly JD Vances his walking couch without its consent and somehow shorts out a few of its behavioural guardrails because of his biological excreta. What if, despite all the abuse, Alice ends up saving the day by performing life-saving measures on the baby while repelling some home invaders, and Nick is left to pick up the pieces of his broken marriage when his wife catches him in flagrante delicto with the extremely expensive appliance he brought home and put in a mini-dress? Either would be stickier than the same old saw of a hot girl cast as fatale who turns into the Terminator. That premise was already perfected, after all, by Duncan Gibbons’s Eve of Destruction. Maybe keep the film exactly the same but cast Paul Giamatti as Alice.
