My immediate thought was Harry Harlow's wire mother/rag mother experiments with Rhesus Monkeys (CW: live animal experimentation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Harlow#Monkey_studies) which were an early exerpiment showing that it's really, really bad for primates to be socially isolated. A bunch of polar expeditions were demonstrating the same thing about a decade prior.

Recently we've had a whole bunch of movies about men failing the Turing Test regarding their digital waifus - Blade Runner, Her, Ex Machina, Archer. There are like five different TvTropes pages directly related to this question. And you can go back all the way to Hellenic Greece, with the story of Pygmalia and Galatea, to get the OG "Incel falls in love with body pillow" narrative.

    • Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I think the main point is that Caleb views the situation in terms of pure abstraction. The camera primarily follows his perspective, and the audience is probably prone to do the same. When he's left to die at the end, it's not really about who's right or wrong, it's about switching the perspective of the audience to view things from the perspective of the one in the cage. The point is that in that climatic moment, it demonstrates Ava's perspective in two ways, first by showing the lengths she's willing to go to to ensure her freedom, and second by putting Caleb (and by extension the audience) in her position of being caged and having your fate decided by someone else. The point is to drive home the point that the initial premise was really fucked up, and to make us re-examine our assumptions about how people deserve to be treated. Caleb doesn't deserve to die but Ava's just as desperate to escape as he is at the end, and if they were real people it'd be fucked up to leave him to die just to make him understand how she felt but from the perspective of it being a work of fiction, communicating that perspective is important.

        • Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Yeah I didn't 100% agree with Shaun's take but I did think it provided some valid insight. Like I said I don't think it's all about right and wrong, I think it's partly trying to challenge the viewer's (presumed) initial acceptance of the whole situation, and partially just trying to tell a tragic story with inspiration from classical tragedies. I wouldn't call Shaun's take wrong, but I don't think it should be treated as definitive either, the movie is more complex than that.