The brutal final act of Hansel and Gretel, for example, in which the children push the “devouring mother” into a burning pit, is about “total happiness” and the right to “look upon the outcome of things as friendly.”31 In the modern fairy tale Ex Macshina, the outcome is not exactly friendly, but Ava may be offering us her own brand of radical theory: the proposition that existing, however isolated and provisional, may be the only mode of survival in the enchantment of objecthood.
