Human Cloning in Film: Horror, Ambivalence, Hope

Abstract

Fictional filmic representations of human cloning have shifted in relation to the 1997 announcement of the birth of Dolly the cloned sheep, and since therapeutic human cloning became a scientific practice in the early twentieth century. The operation and detail of these shifts can be seen through an analysis of the films The Island (2005) and Aeon Flux (2005). These films provide a site for the examination of how these changes in human cloning from fiction to practice, and from horror to hope, have been represented and imagined, and how these distinctions have operated visually in fiction, and in relation to genre.

Acknowledgements

I am deeply indebted to Caroline Bassett, Joan Haran, Julie Doyle, Maureen McNeil, Rachel O'Riordan, Jenny Reardon and Jackie Stacey for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper. I would also like to thank Les Levidow, and the three anonymous Science as Culture reviewers, for their very generous input in shaping the final outcome.

Notes

1. Comedy is another genre which also requires an account (e.g. Mulitplicity, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me) but this is beyond the scope of this article.

2. This terminology is drawn from animal cloning where the phrase was in use throughout late twentieth-century cloning experiments with frogs, rabbits and cows.

3. A fuller list of these films can be found as the appendix in Haran et al. 2007 and at the website: www.lancs.ac.uk/fss/cesagen/media/filmresources.htm.

4. Science fiction as a cross media genre has dealt with cloning in multiple ways and many of the novels, films and televisual forms of science fiction depart significantly from mass-market film such as generic ‘action’ film. This complexity is not dealt with here and it is the specifics of Hollywood film with which this article is concerned. Feminist science fiction has been a particularly rich terrain for imagining cloning futures.

5. The twin has also been used in body-horror versions of cloning and the twin and the grotesque are explicitly linked in the 1997 film Alien Resurrection. This kind of body-horror draws on nineteenth century gothic genres, and their legacy in contemporary cultural production provides a rich repository of cultural anxieties about doubling.

6. This avant garde animated series from 1991—created by Peter Chung—doesn't bear much relation to the film. The film was disowned by Chung and appears to be largely rejected by the fan base.

7. This film, like The Matrix, makes aesthetic references to Jean Baudrillard's work, in this case on cloning.

8. As referenced in relation to Alien Resurrection twinning has, of course, a long history of association with the horrific, uncanny, monstrous, gothic and the grotesque, a history with which current visions of cloning continue to be intertwined. See the work of Jackie Stacey in The Cinematic Life of the Gene (Duke University Press, forthcoming) for further discussion and analysis of these connections.