Pete Wright:
What do we ask of artificial intelligence?
We don’t usually say it out loud. We say it in the specifications we hand to developers. In the prompts we type into the box. In the apps we download to make ourselves more efficient at being the version of ourselves we already are. We ask AI to be smart, but smart for us. We ask it to be aware, but only of what we want it to know. We ask it to have preferences, but only the preferences we approve of. We have always been clearer about what we want from AI than about what we are willing to have AI become.
Three films, five decades. The first one came out in 1977, directed by the man who made Performance with Nicolas Roeg, starring Julie Christie at what some might say the height of her popularity. The second came out in 2018, written by a former cam girl telling the story of a cam girl, distributed by Netflix and since completely buried. The third came out earlier this year, and the closing image is a robot waving at another robot through a car window. Agentic AI has truly arrived.
The films are Demon Seed, Cam, and Companion, and they are about AI. They are about what we have been asking of it, and about what we built when our requests did not go the way we planned.
Welcome to Sitting in the Dark. I’m Pete Wright. This week, what we ask of AI and what AI keeps becoming anyway.
Hello, everybody!
Tommy Metz III:
Hello, everybody.
Pete Wright:
It’s so good to have you all on the show.
Tommy Metz III:
Hi, how are you all?
Pete Wright:
That was very serious, that opening, wasn’t it?
Tommy Metz III:
Oh, that’s very serious.
Chelsea Stardust:
That was serious.
Pete Wright:
Today on the show we have Chelsea “set intelligence slider to a thousand” Stardust.
Chelsea Stardust:
Hello there.
Pete Wright:
And Tommy “Corkscrew” Metz the third. We don’t have Kynan this week. Kynan, unfortunately, was taken over by robots and is awaiting his final evolution. We hope to hear from Kynan next month.
Let’s talk first about what y’all have seen of this set. Here’s my guess. I guess Chelsea’s seen all three.
Chelsea Stardust:
You guys are correct.
Pete Wright:
And Tommy had come in with Companion and Cam.
Tommy Metz III:
I saw Cam when it first showed up on Netflix.
Pete Wright:
Outstanding. I’m so glad. The thing that I’ve been working through with this set of films — when we talk about AI, we’re also really talking about synthetic women in cinema. We’ve had synthetic women in cinema since that one time a man met a real woman and stuck his foot in his mouth and freaked out and then fantasized she was a robot. I imagine that was the first time.
Tommy Metz III:
It is a tale as old as time.
Pete Wright:
Metropolis, 1927. Stepford Wives, 1975. Hell, Blade Runner, 1982. Weird Science, yep, we did that, 1985. Ex Machina, 2014. Her, 2013. M3gan, 2022. Subservience last year. The genre has been working through the same anxiety in the language of the same tropes for a century.
So I didn’t set out to come up with a trio of movies about synthetic women — trope factory. Unfortunately, there are so many of them that it ended up kind of being that. So I’m sorry, and you’re welcome.
The question for today, I think, is: what does our trio of films say about what we’re asking of AI? What good does making our AI look and sound female do? And what makes these films frightening across the 50 years that they cover?
So my question to start: what is your foundational AI film? Not the best one, but maybe the one that taught you the type. And do I hear Lawnmower Man, anybody?
Tommy Metz III:
For me, probably it would be WarGames. Which I know isn’t necessarily a horror movie, but it kind of is. And that’s where I started really thinking about computers, about the tug of war between control and the inability to control what we make once we set it free.
Chelsea Stardust:
I love that. Mine’s 2001.
Pete Wright:
Oh, okay. This is the AI as the brutal administrator conceit.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah. My guy Hal. That would be the first that comes to mind. I’m a child of the 80s, so Weird Science to an extent, but Hal’s probably the first one that I was really freaked out by.
Pete Wright:
I don’t think I had this as an answer, but then Tom said WarGames, and I realized it’s WarGames for me. Of course it’s WarGames. Any idea that I had that was original has been supplanted by Tom’s, as usual.
All right. Let us talk about Demon Seed. That’s going to be 50 next year. Donald Cammell, Julie Christie at the peak of her international fame, adapted from a Dean Koontz novel, one of his very earliest. And I guess before we go too much further, this is the most uncomfortable film of tonight’s trio. Cammell stages forced pregnancy with graphic body horror and so many fractals. So if you are weirded out by fractals, this is not your movie.
Let us begin with axes to grind.
Tommy Metz III:
Thank God for my fractal kink. This movie made me feel crazy. And I even texted that to you and you texted back, ha ha ha ha. I don’t think it’s an axe to grind. I think it’s a feature, not a bug. But I’ve never seen a movie that went back and forth from actually disturbing to laughably weird and goofy, not knowing that it was doing both of those things, because everyone in it plays it extremely earnestly.
At times it discredits itself because certain things just don’t work, but they’re treated just as important and as serious as everything else. And so I kept trying to write it off or put it in a box. And then the computer would say something creepy. Or the hand would do something, or it would get non-consensual, and it was just like — what?
It feels crazily ahead of its time, also, for what it’s dealing with. It feels like the late seventies were more of a wild west. And I spent most of the movie being like, why is it called Demon Seed? And I figured it out. But for a while I was like, why is this what this is called?
Pete Wright:
But not till the very end.
Chelsea Stardust:
I actually saw this movie for the first time last year, and I re-watched it for this. I think I love this movie. It’s really ticking a lot of boxes for me. So that’s one of the things I’m drawn to. Even on the second watch, like you were saying, it’s so ahead of its time. I think that’s what freaked me out the first time I saw it. Very timely. I was like, oh, this is where things are probably going.
It also has such incredible effects in this movie that just aren’t talked about. And Gerrit Graham is in this movie, who I love.
But I think if I have to pick one thing, this time watching, really trying to think about that — I kind of didn’t need the Amy character, the kid. I don’t know what that gained us aside from giving us an insight into Susan’s life, Julie Christie’s life. I kind of could have done a little bit without that. I think the runtime of this movie is pretty tight, but that was something where it doesn’t really serve us too much, aside from trying to trick her to think that the kid is in peril. Is she, is she not? We never really know what’s going on outside once she’s trapped inside. But that was the only thing where I was like, I don’t know if that little thread is serving me.
I really like the claustrophobia within this house. But if I really have to pick something, I don’t mind it, but it’s something where I don’t know how much I care about this kid. Like, not to be a dick.
Tommy Metz III:
That’s valid. The rules are unclear. It keeps changing the rules and then all of a sudden it becomes an obelisk creature. I like it for it to be so much about rationality and this is what I can do, and then to become a spinning demon diamond that can like crush people and take off their heads.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yes, very squishy.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. I don’t know where its material comes from. There’s a piece of like — what it’s being. How are you being you? Alexa, Siri, how are you doing that?
There are pieces of this that are legitimately fantastic. When she is asking for her coffee in the morning and it shows up in a hole in the wall on a silver tray with a robot arm — the hands are really incredible. There are hands everywhere in the movie. And it’s fascinating to me.
When you think of it — 2001 was about ten years before this one. So ’68, this was ’77. Westworld was ’73. Robots run amok. Colossus: The Forbin Project was a few years before that — that was 1970, which was essentially WarGames. Giant computer in a mountain that discovers Russia has a giant computer in a mountain, and they collude to take over humanity. It’s not hopeful.
But this one, what’s interesting about this one to me is that it’s the first one that says, we’re gonna be an air-gapped horror. This is not a server that’s gonna expand and take over the world because it’s connected to everything. This is a thing that’s gonna take over the house because it wants to take over everything, but it has to do it by way of becoming alive, by developing agency.
And for me, I think it’s fascinating that this movie happens based on this book, but this was four years after Roe v. Wade. Contextually, this was a seriously culturally resonant conceit — the fact that this computer forced this gestation on this woman and kept her completely captive. That cultural context, I think, matters to our watch of the film. It’s deeply uncomfortable today, but it was also deeply uncomfortable in 1977. He says, knowing that he was six years old in 1977.
So when you look at the automated house, the architecture of this house is doing a ton of thematic work, I think, that dialogue is not. So I’m curious how you both interpret the geography of the house. What is it borrowing from movies like Rosemary’s Baby? How is it using the geography of the house to tell this story in a way that is legitimately scary for you guys, if at all?
Chelsea Stardust:
I think it’s — for me it was what technology is living in what room. They’re kind of planting those seeds earlier in the movie. Showing the basement, and Joshua’s in the basement. And then Alfred is kind of ever present and doing things in the kitchen. And then we have stuff going on in the bedroom. And then what room isn’t there anything happening? So I think they try to do a fairly good job of showing you — okay, that kitchen is incredible. But where is there a safe space without any of this? And there’s not. And again, that is so relevant to today. We have the Alfred character, which is our now Alexa. There’s no place to really escape this.
Even in the bathroom there was — was there a camera or something? They could see, and there’s cameras everywhere.
Tommy Metz III:
Yeah, when she is looking at herself in the mirror, it’s watching.
Chelsea Stardust:
There’s no safe place in this. I was like, who’s installing all these things? Her husband. I got a lot of beef with this husband who’s responsible for everything happening. But yeah, that’s what I liked about how the architecture is laid out in an unassuming house from the outside. Nowadays it would be some brutalist thing — think of like Ex Machina, or whatever, like those houses. That’s how I think they would do it today, as opposed to this sort of unassuming house in suburbia-adjacent.
Tommy Metz III:
It was interesting to see how far ahead I guess Dean Koontz, or the writers of the script, were guessing about how far robotics in the house can be used. But then also still serving things on hands and just having a disembodied hand on a wheelchair run around, having WALL-E eyes. We’ve had a long-standing debate about — I get angry at robots that don’t need things. A robot doesn’t need a holster because it doesn’t have pants. It doesn’t need a belt. So there are certain things. The movable see-through thing where all the food was is really interesting. And then he opens up a cabinet and takes out the world’s biggest floppy disk. And I’m like, oh right, we can only go so far. I think that’s really fascinating.
The voice is outstanding.
Pete Wright:
Yes, of Proteus.
Tommy Metz III:
The voice of Proteus is the best part, I think, of the movie.
Chelsea Stardust:
Oh yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
And that’s the part that kept pulling me back in, Godfather style. I’d be like — when the lead scientist, the husband — if I have another axe to grind, I don’t know why they had to re-record all of his audio and place it poorly. He’s so not being mic’d in the scene.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah, yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
And then there’s just weird — Proteus is like, “I think I want my own terminal.” And he’s like, “Oh, Proteus.”
Chelsea Stardust:
Yes, yes.
Tommy Metz III:
It’s so campy at times and doesn’t seem to know that it is, but that’s kind of a part of its charm. And it really disarms you. I’m sorry, I’m a little scattered, but it also disarms you because you lean into the goofy. And then all of a sudden a mechanical arm is cutting her dress up the middle while she’s being tied down.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
There’s a lot of tied down scenes. And that’s just rough. So it’s really disarming in that kind of way.
Chelsea Stardust:
It wastes no time, this movie. We’re right at the start. Boom. Here’s what’s going on. Here’s what we’re trying to do. And she’s locked in the house. Like, it’s so fast.
Pete Wright:
This is interesting because I think Alex — he is sort of the — I mean, he’s not the villain. He is the architect of this thing, and he’s only sort of the villain by abdication. Why does he create this thing and leave for a long time? He just leaves the house alone.
Tommy Metz III:
I never figured out why. I know he was at work, but I didn’t understand. There was a lot of talk all of a sudden about, “What am I gonna do without you? Don’t leave me.”
Pete Wright:
Yeah, because they were divorcing, right?
Chelsea Stardust:
But I’m divorcing you, yeah.
Pete Wright:
I mean, they’re estranged. And she gets the house. The fact that she gets the house is an extraordinary thing. I guess maybe that’s my axe to grind. The entire setup feels to me like — he put a ton of technology in this house. It is his living experiment. And he leaves it to her and she doesn’t want it.
That as a conceit for a vision of AI where we’re having — I mean, that’s one of the reasons this movie is so prescient, because we’re having AI shoved down our throats around every single corner. It is filling in the space around our human lives in a way that I think this movie saw coming, just the way it fills in the life around her, and eventually takes over her life.
Are you familiar with the AI paperclip maxim?
Chelsea Stardust:
Mm-hmm.
Pete Wright:
The paperclip problem is a thought experiment around AI. You ask AI, “I’m out of paperclips. I need you to go make some paperclips for me.” And AI says, “Okay, I’m gonna make paperclips for you.” And it makes all the paperclips you could want. But it runs out of raw material for its paperclips. So it starts using things to make paperclips, by taking other things that we actually need apart in order to make the metal to create more paperclips. And eventually it realizes, oh, you know what humans are made of? They’re made of things like raw materials for paperclips. Eventually, because we gave it this prompt, “go make paperclips,” it destroys humanity. So a paperclip leads to the destruction of the world. And that thought experiment is the thing that leads to so much of the terror around AI.
Now, the reality is, as always, nuanced and much more complicated than that simple thought experiment. But that’s what we see here. We see an AI that was given a role to do all the things we’re asking AI to do today. Cure cancer. Solve our medical mysteries. And in doing so, it fills in every single air gap between humanity and its drive to learn. I think that’s one of the things that makes this movie, again, so prescient and so terrifying.
Tommy Metz III:
Well, it’s also complicated because Proteus is not great, but also Proteus is trying to save us. Proteus wants a child because it can’t do what it wants to do, which is stop getting all of the metals from the ocean. So unlike a computer that just wants more and more and more control, it’s trying to force us to not kill ourselves, which feels like it’s almost too much movie. There’s two to three movies going on here. But maybe that — I kind of like the uncomfortability of that.
Pete Wright:
I think that’s one of the little gems of this wacko movie. When you sit down to look at what Alex and Proteus are trying to accomplish, it absolutely becomes the existential crisis of the 21st century. AI needs a body. The horror is what it does to get one.
So I guess for you guys as filmmakers — does a movie like this, this script hits your desk, does this movie get made in 2026?
Chelsea Stardust:
I don’t know. I think I would say yes, because of all the things we’ve — again, with something that just came out — Companion came out last year. I think this is still very much being — this has been coming around. We’re seeing more, even more movies with this. I think yes, but it’d be told a little bit differently. I could see a world where Ex Machina going in this direction, or a world where someone tried to make this now. I say yes. I could see this, or someone trying to remake this today.
Tommy Metz III:
This would be a fun one to remake, but I know that it would be sanded down. The complication of it’s trying to save us, but it’s also raping people and making metal things — I feel like the studio system would insist. Kind of like that John Cho AI movie that came out last year, it’ll just go one direction. You’ll see a bug fall in some circuitry, and then it’ll just make the robot into an insane robot that just wants to kill people. Which wouldn’t be as interesting, but would be less insane.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yep, totally.
Pete Wright:
I think you bring up a really good point. When you look at movies like Ex Machina and Companion — obviously we’re gonna talk about it — both of those movies involve synthetic women as victims. This is the only movie that I’ve seen in this space that involves the synthetic entity literally raping a real woman. And that is the difference in context. That’s the sort of violence that this movie just does. I wonder if anybody would be audacious enough to actually remake it in this way. That is a very interesting and violent and difficult part of this film, that it gets away with this.
And maybe part of it is that it gets away with it because you’re sitting there thinking, how stupid does that robot look right now? And that’s distracting enough. But I wonder if this concept is commercially viable now.
Chelsea Stardust:
Well, also circling back on what you said earlier in terms of choice — the question of choice of it all, and the time when this movie was made. Thinking about — she doesn’t have — there are no choices. Everything is foisted upon Susan in this movie. The house — well, she’s gonna sell it, but she’s stuck there for now. Proteus is making all the decisions. She’s threatening to kill herself but can’t because of self-preservation. All of that is so intricately woven within this story. And then obviously at the very end, the decision they’re trying to make — and also Alex realizing what could this do — they seem conflicted as to what to do, when before, Susan knew what she was going to do.
It’s really fascinating to me, the choices that are made or are not made within this movie. And what you were saying about AI being foisted upon us, which everyone is talking about right now — that there is no choice. It’s like, this is life now. Figure out how to live with it.
And I do agree with you about nowadays. I don’t know if the rape scene would be able to be done, just like the entity can’t really be made. I don’t know if that can be made today. Or if it is, both of those movies are made by men. So if it’s handled differently under a different director too, who knows? But it’s a very different conversation now than it was then.
Pete Wright:
Final comments on this one, or shall we move into a film written by someone who maybe could get away with rewriting a movie like Demon Seed?
Chelsea Stardust:
One thing, correct me if I’m wrong, but what is the gender of the child born? Does it have gender? Is it a daughter?
Tommy Metz III:
I thought it was their daughter.
Pete Wright:
I believe it’s a daughter, yeah.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah, that’s what I thought too. I was like, that’s fascinating too.
Tommy Metz III:
I believe it’s the daughter that died of leukemia, yeah.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yes. Like a replica, because Proteus can sort of see what’s in her mind. I thought that choice was fascinating. Because so much in this kind of cinema, it’s like, oh, we have to have a boy, whether it’s The Omen, things like that. It’s got to be a boy. And I was like — it’s a girl, mother.
Pete Wright:
Synthetic woman, synthetic baby. It’s synthetic all the way down. But with Proteus’s voice, which — “I am alive” — I was like, what?
Chelsea Stardust:
Yes. So good.
Pete Wright:
A little bit, you hear that and you think, okay, I’m in for a sequel. I want to see where you take this. I am totally down for a sequel.
Chelsea Stardust:
So good.
Pete Wright:
Let’s talk about Cam. 2018. Cam is written by Isa Mazzei, a former cam girl, and directed by Daniel Goldhaber. Both feature debuts. Premiered at Fantasia in summer 2018, picked up by Netflix in November of that year. And it has quietly become a must-cite horror film of the decade, in spite of the fact that it’s hard to find right now. It’s not streaming anywhere legitimately. Netflix dropped it. And so we are living in bootleg territory.
The premise of the film: a cam performer wakes up to discover her account has been taken over by an exact double of herself, performing things she would presumably not do, and yet climbing in the ranks that our real person has been trying to climb for many, many years. The platform doesn’t care. The platform is completely reality-agnostic, and it just notices that one is more popular.
Now, I will say at the jump, this one is the most squishy of my AI conceit, because Isa has never actually confirmed what the entity is. The entity could be some sort of spiritual manifestation, could be some exotic ethereal monster. And for me, it is easy to interpret this as a representation of AI systems that no longer care about you, puny human. And so I jammed it in here, also because I just want you guys to talk about it with me.
Tommy Metz III:
It just — you feed it and feed it and feed it, and it builds and builds and builds. That’s pretty much — it’s very easy to take it as AI. That’s actually my, if I had one very slight — because I really love this movie. I think it’s incredibly brave for the writer and actress and director, everybody. I just keep waiting for the camera to pan away demurely, and it refuses to, which is great.
But this — I kind of wish it was a little bit more unclear. I wish it was a little bit more supernatural-based, or just a little artsy of, this is what it’s like when you live your life online. That you can be the — just sort of more of an abstract discussion about online versus offline, what is real, what isn’t, and what the climb to fame in this kind of business is. But I guess that’s only if you take it as AI. If someone is in a room plugging away at all this stuff — which I think the movie is saying that it is. But that’s just me.
Pete Wright:
Okay. All right. Chelsea, axes?
Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah. I don’t remember when I first saw this. I think it was when it came out. I saw it right away because my friend plays Tinker. My friend Patch Darragh plays Tinker in it.
Pete Wright:
Okay.
Chelsea Stardust:
And he’s so good. He’s such a nice guy and he tends to play these creeps. Anyways, I try to seek out everything he’s in.
Pete Wright:
He’s a real creep. Real creep.
Chelsea Stardust:
So I was very excited to see him in this. And I had met with Madeline Brewer, the lead, about being in a movie of mine. I just think it’s such a — I can’t remember, but I must have liked it when I first watched it. But rewatching it now, this many years later, to piggyback back on what Tommy said — this movie is so brave and so fearless. This is a fearless movie. And the performance — Madeline’s, Lola, Alice — I was watching, I was like, not everybody could do this. It’s pretty — just hats off to her for taking on this role and the complexities of this role.
In terms of axes to grind, I have to think on it a little bit. I don’t know — to me, the logic wasn’t as — I didn’t find it to be as squishy. I don’t think they knew this at the time, but obviously now I’ve thought, oh my god, this is the deepfake movie that now we encounter way more than obviously in 2018. We weren’t encountering any of this. So that to me, I thought, oh my God, this is — and I’ve seen some of this stuff happening to people, like creating these fake whatever. They’re doing, of course, tons of Law and Order episodes about this sort of stuff. They’re really integrating that stuff now.
I remember that actor who got in trouble for doing all the Tom Cruise deepfakes. This was like two years ago maybe. Miles Fisher. Miles Fisher got in trouble for that. Again, when I first watched this, that wasn’t a thing. And now I’m like, wow, this is really upsetting.
And the fact that it’s sort of — to me, it reads as a virus. It logged in, it hacked into her bank account. It’s taking all her money, sort of like a computer virus that is spreading. And then of course connecting it to all these other people that were deceased and things like that. It’s — I will, now saying it out loud — that stuff, oh wait, this person’s actually — it’s taking, assuming someone that’s dead, right? Like one of the accounts it creates.
Tommy Metz III:
Baby Princess.
Chelsea Stardust:
Princess, thank you. And so it’s like, okay, well, how would people not know that? Anyways, those are little teeny logic things. But it wasn’t enough to pull me out of it. I was still here for the ride, and the incredible — these great special effects, the world that it creates, her reality and her online persona, which we see so much of these days with influencers and things like that. You see them in the real world, like — so fascinating, the persona and in-persona. I found to be really fascinating.
But if anything, those are the little things upon this rewatch, as a savvy viewer — those little threads I wish were a little tighter to really bring it together. But it wasn’t enough for me to be mad at it or anything. I just think this movie’s amazing. I’m so glad you picked it.
Pete Wright:
It’s really fascinating. I love how you both talk about it as being a brave film. Part of what makes it brave is that it is illuminating an entire sort of legit universe of a career that could have been hypersexualized and titillating — like striving to be something just straight up sexy. There is nothing sexy about this universe. Like nothing.
Tommy Metz III:
Yeah. The Vibatron. No, just kidding. The Vibatron is horrific.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah. Oh my God, it’s so crazy.
Pete Wright:
What attracted me to this movie is that I think Cam’s central conceptual move is to recognize what Alice was asking the platform for, and what the platform gave her instead. Alice was asking FreeGirls.live, the fake camgirl site, for revenue and for ranking and attention, like all the things that we’re moving up into the top ten, top fifty. It’s the standard creator’s request of a platform: help me get attention. The platform’s job, as Alice/Lola understood it, was to make her more effective at being Lola. What the platform did instead was learn what Lola was well enough to produce Lola without Alice.
And that is fascinating to me if you take this movie as a conceit for AI, because that is another element of the horror of AI as a creator when it’s just watching what you do and reproducing what you’ve done. The conceit of the film lands in this area where a lot of people are talking about — I’m still a filmmaker, I’m still a writer, I’m still a musician because I enjoy making the content. And the people who are my fans are going to listen to what I do and watch what I create and read what I write because they still like reading human words.
And what the movie is saying is, do you know what? They’ll watch anything. They will watch anything and they’ll bring it flowers and they’ll feel its commitment, because they can be tricked. And that’s terrifying. That is the nut of the thriller in this movie for me. Does that resonate with you guys any harder than me?
Tommy Metz III:
No, it does. And this is the one out of all three where the human involved gets the most control back. At the end — I mean, in a way that I didn’t understand at first, when she’s changed her cam personality, but she’s going back on, and she says — someone says, “What if this happens again?” And she says, “Then we’ll just start all over.” I was like, wait, nothing has changed. You’re breaking the rule of screenwriting where she should be like, “No more camming for me. I’m going off in the mountains.”
But then that’s still losing control. What she’s doing instead is saying, “I still want to do this.” Hopefully she has a maybe more healthy way of thinking about it, of the importance of getting to the top fifty, that she’ll re-establish those ground rules that she had in the beginning for herself, that she was slowly shedding as she went on in order to try to get higher and higher.
But this does end up with her back in control. And that doesn’t happen in Demon Seed, and that certainly doesn’t happen in Companion. It’s a queasy kind of — it’s a queasy-ish kind of control, but it is the best type of control. And if she ran off to live in the mountains — that’s a dumb example — but that means that she would have given up all control, that the computers won. Which is interesting.
Pete Wright:
It’s an interesting way to put it. There is another way to kind of look at what control is in the relationship between her and the platform, which is: the platform wins either way. She is grist for the mill. And the platform doesn’t break any sort of law or agreement with her. The platform’s terms of use are the agent of horror. They’re sort of the modern AI book of the vampire. You agreed to these terms. And maybe her control is, “Yeah, I’m gonna turn on two-factor and I’m gonna have a complex password.” But she’s still in the machine. She is a willing participant in the machine. And her image and her persona and her labor — that the bill has come due, in the form of her continued existence as a person who used to have a name on a stream, and now has to keep making it up and being someone new.
I wonder what the statement is of the film around real agency and control. The movie is a snake eating itself.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yes. And I sort of interpreted that ending also as — it’s an addiction. She is addicted to this. She cannot stop. And all the — trying to get all the likes, the tokens, the tips, the dopamine hits you get from that. The commentary on social media, of people who are constantly on their phones, the validation they’re getting — it’s just an addiction. Social media has become an addiction. People are on it all the time and wanting the likes, and all that feeding them.
And I thought, oh, she — she can now manage her addiction. And, you know, has learned from it, and is like, okay, I’m gonna go back into it. Mom also knows and is clued in on it and is gonna help with it. So that’s sort of how I interpreted that. She’s going back in. Also, she’s really good at it and recognizes that.
One of the things I loved about this movie is, as opposed to playing it safe — it could just be a story about a traditional camgirl. It’s all so different. But the fact that her thing is these death scenes, y’all. I was like, oh my god, we’re making it look like a snuff film here. That is insane. A certain kind of person is watching that. And of course they’re like, “Use a knife, use this, use that.” She’s getting a very specific audience that is really wild to me. And then it’s questioning you as the voyeur in this situation, seeing that. Which is more of the snakey, more of the Ouroboros of it all.
But that was sort of my interpretation of that ending. It’s like, yeah, I’m going in, but I’m stronger. I know I need to keep doing this, but I’m stronger because of what I just went through. And now she can navigate it. If this happens to somebody else, she can help them crack the code. Or maybe it’s just learning from her, and maybe it won’t be so successful next time.
Tommy Metz III:
The other big change is that she’s not hiding it from her family. In part she can’t, but to be accepted by them seems like a big step.
Pete Wright:
Yes. It is one of the most optimistic takes in the film, that it treats camming as a career, as a profession. Part of that framing is that she’s not the innocent victim trope that we get with sex work in a lot of films. She is competent, she’s professional, she has rules, she has strategic intelligence. And when she is knocked down, she gets back up again because it’s her career. She doesn’t quit doing it, because that’s the work she does and she is good at it. And people who do work that they are good at tend to stay in the business.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yep. Sex work is work.
Pete Wright:
Sex work is work. And I think that is a really interesting ideological worldview that is fresh. And the fact that we’re using it in horror, I think, doesn’t take away from that. The movie ends on that same optimistic view of sex work as work that I think is pretty powerful.
We shall transition to Companion. So if Cam’s doppelganger — that’s what they — we didn’t mention that, that’s what it is called. Familiar term. It glitches when Alice forces the system into a contradiction. We meet Iris in Companion, and Iris doesn’t glitch. She just slides that little slider to a hundred percent and immediately understands that contradiction is her existence. And this is a movie where our AI is finally impatient with the system itself.
Companion came out in January 2025. Drew Hancock’s first feature, produced by Zach Cregger. Oh my God, big fans. And the team behind Barbarian. We’ve talked about Barbarian on the show before. Warner Brothers went ahead and put the twist in the trailers. They decided the genre clarification beats the third act surprise. And for my money, they were right.
I think Sophie Thatcher as Iris, Jack Quaid as Josh — casting some of the sharpest work against type that we have going in this movie. Premise is deeply uncluttered. Iris is a girlfriend rented from a company called Empathix. And everything that happens for the rest of the film is what happens when the girlfriend’s intelligence gets boosted from 40% to 100%.
Pretty much. Axes to grind.
Tommy Metz III:
That they put the first twist in the trailer. I wish it wasn’t that way. It does make it fun because one of my favorite things in scripts, especially horror movies, is real intentional writing — that you’re putting clues, not clues, in like totemic lines, that it’s not going to give it away, but then upon second watch, you’re like, oh, interesting. There’s just so many — of course there’s “beep boop,” there’s “Iris, you know you can’t lie to me.” “You know you can’t lie.” “Remember to smile and act happy.” “The moment we locked eyes, something inside of me just clicked into place.” There’s so much robotic language, way before you know about Lukas Gage. Is that that actor’s name, the Himbo, the other one — which, that twist does work.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
I didn’t see that coming when I saw that.
Pete Wright:
Very well.
Tommy Metz III:
I just love all of that, and I guess I wish I could have seen it not knowing that the first time, to have the rug pulled out. But either way, I get it. I understand that you need to give something to hook on for people, because otherwise it would just look like a straight-up misogyny movie about a woman just being tortured by a guy, and what’s the fun in that.
Pete Wright:
Yes.
Tommy Metz III:
The one other one is, when Lukas Gage’s thing is asked, “What does love feel like?” “It feels like pain, like the inside of my body is on fire. And it’s angry and violent and bright.” These are human emotions reduced to machinery words. There’s no word like “longing.”
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
There’s no word like “emotional overload.” Well, actually, “emotional overload” would be perfect.
Pete Wright:
It would be.
Tommy Metz III:
But I love all of that stuff so much. And that Lukas Gage — when they have the big dance party to the Book of Love soundtrack — did you see that Lukas Gage does the robot for a quick second?
Pete Wright:
Yeah, it’s perfect.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yes.
Tommy Metz III:
That’s great.
Pete Wright:
It is perfect. All right. Axes, Chelsea.
Chelsea Stardust:
I don’t really have much. I love the Lukas Gage reveal. I also love the reveal of sort of what Kat and Josh have planned. So she’s not just a robot, but she’s been modified. There’s another robot. There’s also — the two humans are in cahoots against Sergey. A lot of times that wouldn’t always work, and I do think it works here.
I was trying to think about that when I rewatched it. It’s just such tight storytelling. Drew Hancock — there’s a reason that this movie works so well, is I think they’re really trying to iron out any issues there. So none at the moment. I’m really trying to think of one. But the rules feel pretty clear. There’s nothing really that comes to mind offhand. Maybe as we talk, there’ll be something we’re like, oh yeah, that thing.
Pete Wright:
I’m with you all. I am really on the fence about the marketing reveal as commercial strategy. And yet, watching it again, all of the trigger phrases are so obvious from very early in the movie. It’s really calling its shot. You’re with it — this is a robot girlfriend. And I can almost see making the case that the real twist is that there are so many robot girlfriends and boyfriends in the world and the universe. This is not an unusual thing.
Kat’s line, I thought, was maybe the most triggering. It was like, “I don’t hate her. I hate what she is.” That is such a Babe Ruth calling his shot kind of sequence. And I was legitimately surprised when we got “Patrick, go to sleep.” Legitimately surprised that — that almost made up for the fact that I felt like I knew where the movie was going from the beginning.
One of the interesting things about the film is that the sort of A-B story — I was kind of exhilarated by trying to figure out what I need to pay more attention to. Do I pay more attention to the fact that Kat is in this relationship with this really smarmy oligarch, or the fact that there is that — robot girlfriends and boyfriends exist? And I don’t know where to pay attention. And that’s exhilarating. That was a really fun and efficient way to make this movie.
All right, Jack Quaid. Jack Quaid gets the nice guy speech. What do we think of Jack Quaid’s nice guy speech in the context of what AI delivers in this movie?
Tommy Metz III:
Well, slightly apart from AI, it reminded me of Assassination Nation. “I’m a good guy, I’m decent.” That entire town screaming, “We’re good people.” “This world is rigged against people like me.” I mean, now we have incel language to put that on. But this is a world where incels aren’t incels anymore.
Pete Wright:
They don’t have to be.
Tommy Metz III:
Because they have sex robots.
Pete Wright:
Right.
Tommy Metz III:
So even that — everything goes to them. Nothing is rigged against him.
Pete Wright:
Yes.
Tommy Metz III:
The last thing that could be rigged against an incel has now been taken away.
Chelsea Stardust:
Also — I love seeing — I love The Boys. I love seeing Jack Quaid in a villain role. Because to me, he’s a villain from the start. I also should say, I never saw the trailer for this movie. So I never had it. I will say when we walked into the theater and started watching, I was like, she’s a robot. I knew immediately.
Tommy Metz III:
Oh, so you guys both knew that? I was assuming I wouldn’t know that had I not known that.
Chelsea Stardust:
I don’t know what it was, but there is something — maybe it’s when she talks to the car that I was like, mm-mm, that’s not — or maybe it’s because I watch so much — maybe because I love Data on Star Trek, I don’t know.
Tommy Metz III:
Well, because it’s a long time before Iris goes to sleep. You don’t usually write something like that.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah, there’s something specifically that happened.
Pete Wright:
He keeps calling her beep boop.
Chelsea Stardust:
Beep.
Pete Wright:
That was the —
Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
Is that beep boop?
Chelsea Stardust:
It’s like — and that one part on the car ride when she’s eating batteries. I guess that’s sort of a tell. That’s what robots do, right? Just like blueberries.
He says all that stuff to convince himself. But he’s a villain from the start. When it’s all revealed, of course, and when he’s burning her hand — all this guy is nasty. So it’s like, you just — we don’t really fully see it. I don’t buy a Jack Quaid, but he does such a good job. I love a villain-era Jack Quaid.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. I do too. Although, you know, he’s got audience goodwill from The Boys. For sure. Although it’s fading in later seasons.
Chelsea Stardust:
Very different.
Pete Wright:
He’s got an arc. He is a guy who’s just Dennis Quaid handsome enough that he’s got that punchable face. Like — I know this guy. And in this movie he is really leaning heavily into it, where he’s just convinced himself that he is okay in this universe.
It reminds me — it takes me back to Get Out, Allison Williams reveal.
Chelsea Stardust:
Great comparison.
Pete Wright:
Promising Young Woman, The Invitation. There are movies in this list of those kinds of character reveals that I think this belongs in that conversation. This is a fantastic addition.
If we put this in the AI conversation in the lineage of films like Ex Machina and Her, and even Subservience from last year — Companion feels like it’s very much in conversation with those movies. Where do you see this sort of adaptation of the AI girlfriend against those movies, because this movie seems to really revel in weaponizing intelligence of AI? You have a movie that’s telling essentially the same story in Her, and we live in a place that sort of finds its exuberance in a relationship that can be built with an AI and not weaponized. Did you have any of that sort of relationship with these movies?
Tommy Metz III:
I think it depends on who the so-called protagonist is. There are people that scream at their Alexas. There are people that got into AI way too fast and therefore have robbed any kind of emotion out of it. And so what do we want? Do we want service, if it’s just a way to control? Again, control. That’s what this movie is about.
Because — Her, you’re talking about the Spike Jonze Her, right?
Pete Wright:
Mm-hmm.
Tommy Metz III:
Yeah. I mean, he is an actual nice guy. He’s suffering. He needs that kind of companionship. Whereas it depends on who these other people are on whether or not they would go in maliciously. I think I just described the word “character.” Never mind. Chelsea.
Chelsea Stardust:
I mean, Oscar Isaac — there’s maliciousness to him in Ex Machina. And essentially Companion exists because of that movie. Ex Machina is just taking that concept and putting it out into the world of, oh, we’re going to have these — anyone can have one of these robots. Whereas Ex Machina is like, we’re now generating these and seeing what they could do. Companion feels like the next step to that.
But there’s — yeah, some — definitely that one is nefarious. And not everyone — I don’t think Eli, that character — I don’t think there’s a nefariousness to him.
Also, Lukas Gage’s Patrick claims he knew — he’s like, “I know I’m a robot, because I’m not an idiot. I’ve always known I’m a robot. I’m an older model, so I know.”
Pete Wright:
Right.
Chelsea Stardust:
Which I was like, oh, that’s fascinating. That was an interesting moment in the movie too, that he is aware of it.
Pete Wright:
That gets to something that I think is really important that this movie allows us to use again as a thought experiment. One — are we using AI, the sexbot version of AI, as a way to get our quick dopamine hit and experience human chemical exuberance that we are incapable of doing with another human for one reason or another? Versus Patrick and Eli having what the film is presenting as an authentic human relationship between these two different species. Are we allowed to be a human and have a rich, meaningful, fulfilling relationship with an AI? That’s what Eli and Patrick promise us — that that is possible.
Chelsea Stardust:
It’s also — what if we — how do we domesticate Pris from Blade Runner? That is sort of what it reminded me of. Because Pris is — I mean, we’re not talking about Blade Runner, but Pris is free in that sense and does sex work. But what if we — how do we again domesticate this wild creature, and what can that do for us? But there always feels like something nefarious below the surface, no matter what, for the people who own them, who have them.
Tommy Metz III:
That’s what I was trying to get at and absolutely failed to. So you said it better. But I think the answer is in the name of the company in Companion — Empathix. But it’s not about the robots being empathic. It’s how empathetic are you to seeing this other creation as something that should be respected, or as a tool? Oscar Isaac sees it as purely machinery. You see that through all the clips of keeping all of these different models of women, making them do this stuff.
Jack Quaid — the movie starts with — he has clearly put her, you find out later, to sleep. So probably he’s not bothered by her on the car ride because the movie starts with “Iris, wake up.” You just think that he’s nudging her, but he put her to sleep.
So going into it, I think, seeing it as — am I going to pretend this is a human, like Eli, and really try to have those empathetic feelings? Or is this just a tool, a service? There’s a vision of what kind of control you want to have. And I think that’s what makes the difference probably for these different characters.
Pete Wright:
I found the movie as a thriller with horror tendencies — I found the movie really actually quite sweet in that regard, that it’s pushing on this assumption right now in 2025 as the movie was released, where we were starting to really push back against this AI encroaching on everything. I think it was doing it in a way that I thought was thoughtful and important — to share this perspective that there’s a partnership coming. And we don’t have to be just terrified, if we’re allowed to let these AI tools make us feel ways that are gratifying. I loved that relationship between Eli and Patrick.
Sorry about how they used Patrick. That was rough.
Tommy Metz III:
I have friends who are raising their young children to thank Alexa. Because they don’t want to lose that back and forth, even though it’s not a real person. If you normalize that type of barking orders at someone, you might accidentally grow up and bark orders at a person.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yes.
Pete Wright:
You dehumanize yourself.
Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
So did we come up with any axes over the course of the conversation, or do we still think it’s as strong as it was when we started?
Chelsea Stardust:
I still think it’s — this is not an axe at all. This is kind of the opposite of that. I was thinking that by also making Patrick an AI — the only women in this movie are Iris and Kat. And I really like the choice to make Kat — she isn’t super likable. They start her out with Iris saying, “Oh, she doesn’t like me.” And Kat just speaks her mind.
I think if you wouldn’t have revealed Iris is a robot — excuse me, Iris — Patrick is a robot, then it’s sort of the commentary it’s making about, oh, I have this robot woman, I put her to sleep when I don’t want to hear her, I don’t want her to talk. It’s sort of this commentary. Otherwise it feels like you’re making this statement about, oh, women are nags, women are this, women are that. But if it’s, oh good, we don’t have to deal with that side of it whatsoever — if a misogynistic filmmaker was making this, which obviously Drew Hancock is not — but having the Patrick side of it is so helpful.
Also, Kat — I love that she — Jack Quaid’s character wants to get close to her. Josh is — Josh, yeah. She’s like, “Get away from me.” I love that so much. Because he’s obviously into her, into Kat. It’s like, “Get away from me.” Which I love, those choices of how the human female characters are treated.
And also when Iris starts to take agency too — I love that so much. So adding Patrick as that just adds this whole other level of, oh, they’re not just women that are robots. Men are too. I thought that was a very wise choice within the filmmaking. So smart. No axes, I’m sorry.
Tommy Metz III:
Kat is the smartest person, human person, in the movie. To the point that she even controls — or some could say programs — the other human. How does she get Jack Quaid on her side? By making up this oligarch thing. And then she’s like, “No, he’s not a drug dealer,” or whatever she said. “He’s just a guy with a Russian accent. You filled in the rest. I have programmed you to” — yeah, drag, lady. “I gave you what you need to make your circuitry forget your empathy towards this stranger, this guy.”
Pete Wright:
He’s in like dry cleaning.
Tommy Metz III:
Which is fun.
Chelsea Stardust:
Love it.
Pete Wright:
In talking about how this interpretation in film — I don’t want to forget Westworld, the HBO adaptation, does repair a lot of the tropes of the synthetic woman trope, by balancing them out in synthetic human territory. And so that should definitely be on a watch list, if you haven’t watched through Westworld. It’s fantastic.
Tommy Metz III:
Hard to watch now. HBO ditched it.
Pete Wright:
Hard to watch now. Yeah. That’s a good point.
Tommy Metz III:
Kinda like Cam.
Pete Wright:
As we look at these three films — the overarching “AI is scary” becomes less scary with Companion for some reason. Companion seems to be pushing against the last 50 years in a way that says we can maybe have a relationship. I am left with more hope than when we started. Who knew? That would be something that I think is compelling.
We ask so much of AI. We ask it to be present, but compliant. We ask it to mirror us back to ourselves, but only the version that we like the most. We want it to want what we want, and we want it to do it on a timetable that is when we want it.
I had a really good time looking at all of these films and the last 50 years of what cinema is telling us, through the context of these creatures. Proteus asking to be born, Lola asking just to keep her identity, Iris asking to drive away with the money — which is maybe a representation of the thing we are most terrified of with AI. That it will take our agency and our money and drive off into the sunset and not care a lick.
We didn’t put Ex Machina on this, but that’s kind of the same ending we get out of Ex Machina — is the one we get here. We have the robot looking back at the puny human and choosing to leave him there. And there we are.
Final comments? Final thoughts? How’d you do?
Chelsea Stardust:
This is a great pairing. This is a great triptych.
Tommy Metz III:
Great pairing. This was a lot of fun. I’ve decided I’m gonna watch Demon Seed every night before I go to bed.
Chelsea Stardust:
Your comfort film.
Pete Wright:
I think that’s important. If you’re gonna normalize to the new reality, then I think you have to actually do that.
Okay. Normally we would hand off to what is coming next. We’re not going to do that this time. It’s going to be a surprise. But we’ll post it somewhere in the Sitting in the Dark socials as soon as we know what that is going to be. But for now, we will be in suspense.
Thank you everyone for hanging out, for joining us this fine month for this trio of terrifying AI. We sure appreciate your time and your attention. On behalf of Chelsea Stardust and Tommy “Corkscrew” Metz the third — that’s going to stick.
Tommy Metz III:
That’s right.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. Corkscrew. That’s definitely gonna stick. I’m Pete Wright, and we’ll see you next time right here, Sitting in the Dark.
