Hollywood's Hideous Progeny

The New York Sun, July 22, 2005

In this time of Dolly, stem cells, and decoded genomes, it should be no surprise that Hollywood has sent in the clones. "The Island," the new genes-and-screams blockbuster that opens this week, may be trite, slight, and none too bright, but the appearance of a big-budget movie premised, however feebly, on the medical promise and moral contradictions of human cloning, is yet another reminder that Xeroxed people are now icons of social, scientific, and cultural unease.

In just the last few months, Kazuo Ishiguro has published the clammy and claustrophobic "Never Let Me Go," a novel that covers very similar ground to "The Island," and Joyce Carol Oates has done pretty much the same in the latest Atlantic Monthly, with "BD 11 1 86," a short story so unsubtle that Dick and Jane, by comparison, look profound: "But you, Danny, your body will survive for decades. As a body donor, you're one of the elite." Poor Danny. Poor readers.

The only real surprise has been how little Hollywood has done with cloning so far. To be sure, clones have played parts in movies, but films that concern their, um, issues are few and far between. That's strange. It's been more than 70 years since Universal Pictures' "Frankenstein" tapped so effectively, and lucratively, into humanity's fear of its own ingenuity, a fear that has since fueled countless films of science gone bad, mad, or both, and made more than a few moviemakers very, very rich. Horror stories about cloning ought to fit nicely into this genre, and what's more, given the fascination of the subject matter, raise its collective IQ.

That hasn't happened. To be fair, "Blade Runner" was an intelligent examination of what cloning could mean, but that's a movie more than two decades old. Mostly we've been given low-budget disasters, such as 1979's "Parts: The Clonus Horror" or big-budget disasters like Schwarzenegger's forgettable "The Sixth Day," and now "The Island." With politicians busy stoking up anxiety over this topic, it's only a matter of time before "The Island" becomes an archipelago. To discover what future movies about cloning will be like, just take a look at what has gone before.

To start with, to boost their scientific credibility, there will almost certainly be a microscope moment when human cells are shown dividing, or forming, or whatever it is they do after the cloning process has begun (see the recent "Godsend," for one) and, to the same end, expect to hear so much meaningless medico-technical babble that the only reasonable assumption is that the late "Bones" McCoy (or, presumably, his clone) is somewhere in the vicinity.

It goes without saying that at least one character will be accused of playing God (as one does in "The Island") and, just to ram home the message that we're talking serious stuff here, there's a good chance that the plot will include someone called Adam (as it does in both "Godsend" and "The Sixth Day") and that Adam will turn out to be a clone (ditto). Likewise, the movie's title may well refer to either the deity ("Godsend") or to His big book ("The Sixth Day"). Those able to sit through "Embryo" (an honorary cloning movie which merits inclusion in this survey - or, indeed any survey - on a number of grounds, not least a naked Barbara Carrera and a surreally entertaining dogfight) can see the religious imagery crowned by shots of Michelangelo's depiction of the Creation.

God matters, because the central conceit of such movies has been, and will be, that, in artificially creating life, man is trespassing on God's domain. At the moment that Victor Frankenstein brings life to his creation, he shouts (this is in the movie; Mary Shelley's Frankenstein would never have been so gauche) that he knows "how it feels to be God." And the moment he says that, we know that he's finished. Frankenstein's saga derives much of its tragic force from the way it follows the rules of an ancient taboo, a taboo that Shelley's book, her "hideous progeny," did much to reinforce: There are some things that are not for man to discover. Ignore that fact and disaster will follow. Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden, Icarus fell from the sky, and Frankenstein caused the destruction of those he loved.

So it is that, in the movies, human cloning is generally portrayed as a bad thing, and its consequences usually malign, even if the clones themselves may not be (hate the cloning, love the clone). But what is it about cloning that is so sinful? In an age when many no longer have any religious beliefs, simply asserting that the creation of life is the monopoly of a god is not enough. Shelley, an atheist, faced this problem by making her Victor realize that his experiment was so unnatural that he came to reject its results. Even so, Frankenstein's repudiation of his creature at the moment of its creation ("the beauty of the dream vanished ... and disgust filled my heart") seems as much aesthetic as moral, and is not entirely convincing. The problems for the modern filmmaker are even trickier: In an age of IVF, who is to say what is, or what is not, natural?

Hollywood has dealt with this intellectual challenge the old-fashioned way: by avoiding it. Usually ("The Sixth Day," "The Island") the people responsible for the cloning are portrayed as so vile, and their methods so vicious, or otherwise flawed ("Godsend"), that deeper questions can be dropped in favor of facile controversy, easy indignation, and junk science jabbering, and don't even get me started on the "Boys From Brazil." Can we all agree now that cloning Adolf Hitler is a really, really, bad idea?

But look carefully behind the ridiculous premises and flimsy plots of some of these movies, and it is possible to get a sense of why human cloning causes quite so much alarm. Narcissistic creatures that we are, it's all about us. Despite the fact that we share our planet with 6 billion others, the notion that homo sapiens generally, and ourselves individually, could be mass-produced appears to be an affront to our sense of self and species. Predictably enough, therefore, a number of movies (even the light-hearted "Multiplicity") include scenes in which clones confront their "parents," or vice versa, and either party (or both) ends up wondering who he or she "really" is - which, if anyone actually stopped to think about it, is something completely unaffected by the existence of a genetic duplicate.

More realistic, perhaps, is another fear that can be discerned beneath the surface of these movies, the fear that the clones aren't monsters, but that we, however, may be. "Blade Runner" is preoccupied by the question of whether clones are truly human (it concludes that they are), but most other movies seem to regard this as beyond dispute. Clones are like you and me (and you and me, and you and me). And they should be treated accordingly. Our dread is that we cannot be trusted to do so. In film after film, clones are abused, exploited, and treated as disposable objects by mankind. The real issue then becomes not their humanity, but ours.

And that's an entirely different question.