A clone is a group of organisms (or cells) that have arisen from an individual organism (or cell). Clones occur naturally in nature, through asexual reproduction, to give rise to genetically identical groups of individuals in species ranging from bacteria to insects. Genetically identical individuals can also occur naturally in species that are entirely sexually reproducing, for example, identical twins in humans. Identical twins, portrayed in the movies over the years, are related to the human clones of science fiction films, in that the same key themes recur, namely, the nature of human identity, human individuality and the mysterious double or doppelgänger. Recent advances in genetic science have made animal cloning a commercial proposition and human cloning a theoretical possibility. Human clones now feature in a wide range of movies. Cloning themes can provide for novel plots, both comic and dramatic, whilst allowing film-makers to explore different facets of personality and what it is that makes us uniquely individual or essentially human.
Identical twins
Identical twins, also called monozygotic (MZ) twins, are formed when a single embryo spontaneously splits, soon after an egg has been fertilised with a single sperm, into two embryos - an event which occurs in around 0.35 per cent of all births. These twins therefore have identical genes. Dizygotic (DZ), fraternal or non-identical twins, on the other hand, are formed when two different eggs are simultaneously fertilised, and they share only 50 per cent of their genes. As identical twins share the same genes, they have proved important subjects for scientists wishing to quantify the relative roles of heredity and environment in shaping personality. (1) Identical twins in films have been portrayed for both their genetic and symbolic value, allowing fictional explorations of issues relating to heredity, human individuality, and also various metaphysical aspects of human identity.
The recent debate about human cloning has raised hypothetical fears about the status of the clone, for example, as to whether one would have a true identity or a soul of its own. In reality, any human clone born in the future would be like an identical twin, with his or her own personality, shaped by unique experiences. Our concept of the self is challenged, however, when unexpectedly confronted by the possibility of an identical human being. The anxiety over cloning is actually part of a much older fear - one that ties in with the motif of the doppelgänger or double. This is the fear that our essence or soul may be stolen, captured or transferred to our double, who competes with us for the right to live. Individual identity is therefore threatened by the doubling, dividing or interchanging of the self. Sigmund Freud classified the doppelgänger within the phenomenon of "The Uncanny" (Unheimlich), something frightening that leads back to something old and familiar. Freud considered that this type of fright revealed something alienated from us by repression. (2) Artists have for centuries used identical twins to represent the shadowy doppelgänger or alter ego that potentially stalks every individual. In the nineteenth century, the romantic notion of the alter ego, the hidden unconscious self, became popular. Reflections were used in paintings and photographs of the time, for example, to suggest the presence of a double. With the coming of cinema, mirror imagery and the presence of identical twins were used to disquieting effect, due to their association with the idea of the doppelgänger. Double or twin images have therefore provided visual references for uncanny feelings involving shadowy or psychic presences, dreamlike helplessness, coincidence and déjà vu. (3) Images of human clones can now also invoke these feelings.
The concept of parallel universes, derived from quantum physics, also collides with notions of the doppelgänger, and lives that are lived as mirror images or alternative versions of our own. Physicists have proposed that black holes or worm-holes link these almost infinite possible universes. In our dreams we may drift between possible universes, so the thought experiment goes, but wake back in our own.
Many movies have featured a single actor playing identical twins with opposing characteristics. The most common scenario is the good twin and the evil twin. One of the two identical twins played by Olivia De Havilland in Robert Siodmak's The Dark Mirror (1946), for example, is capable of evil. However, it is the good twin who is mistakenly accused and tried for murder. The film is typical of the use of twins to explore divided personalities, and in its use of oppositions. Twins with very different psyches can represent opposing aspects of a divided self. The psychological aspects of such scenarios have become popular in modern cinema, where crime, mental imbalance and schizophrenia have become common themes. The identical twins, Elliot and Beverly Mantle (Jeremy Irons), in David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers (1988) are both gynaecologists who live in harmony as one perfect working unit - in effect, one self. Beverley is introverted and does the pair's research work, while Elliot is more extrovert and presents their work at meetings. Their lives are disrupted by the arrival of Claire (Genevieve Bujold), a patient with a mutated cervix. She becomes romantically involved with the twins, who share her as they do everything else in life. However, Beverley decides she is something he does not want to share with his twin. Tragically, the bond between the twins proves so strong that attempted separation can only lead to death. (4)
The theme of loss is common in the mythology of twins. Twinning (MZ and DZ twins) in the womb is more common than usually thought. Around one in eight pregnancies begin as twins, although only one out of every 80-90 births is of twins. Therefore, for every set of twins who are born alive, there are six singletons who are the sole survivors of a twin conception. Up to 15 per cent of the human population believe themselves to be a singleton, when they were in fact at one time a twin. This "vanishing twin" effect has been invoked to explain mysterious and undefinable cases involving the trauma of loss. Adults on being informed they had a stillborn twin, which they had previously not known about, for instance, have been relieved at identifying their deep and nagging feelings of loss. (5) In some rare cases, individuals may even have their twin inside them, in a genetic rather than metaphoric sense. Two embryos can fuse in the womb to form a chimera - an embryo that combines the genetic material of the two original embryos. This condition can be identified, with difficulty, for DZ twins, but is undetectable in identical twins. (6)
In Peter Greenaway's A Zed and Two Noughts (1985) the identical twins, Oswald and Oliver Deuce (Brian and Eric Deacon), are zoologists who, after a swooping swan smashes into their car outside a zoo, causing the deaths of their wives, become romantically involved with the same woman - the driver of the ill-fated car, Alba Bewick (Andrea Ferréol). Alba becomes pregnant by the twins. However, the twin's emotional balance is threatened and they embark on a bizarre series of investigations into decay and death at the zoo, which ultimately results in their own demise. Greenaway's film visually explores ideas, such as symmetry and mirror images, arising from the twin characters. Around a quarter of all identical twin pairs have symmetrical differences - features that are only identical if one of them is viewed in a mirror. This is because different types of identical twin occur depending on when the embryo splits. A split within a week of fertilisation produces carbon copy twins, a split between one and two weeks can produce mirror image twins, while a split after two weeks may produce Siamese twins - two people sharing part of the same body. If one mirror image twin is right-handed, for example, the other twin will be left-handed. The incidence of left-handers in identical twin pairs is 35 per cent, or twice the normal rate. Moles and other distinguishing features are similarly in mirror image juxtaposition. (7)
The mythology of twins has been of perennial interest to film-makers. The archetypal Gemini twins, Castor and Pollux, were born from the union of Leda, the beautiful queen of Sparta, and the god Zeus, disguised as a swan. In his analysis of twin metaphors in cinema, Shelley Kay describes Cronenberg's Mantle and Greenaway's Deuce twins as arising from the union of genetics and myth. Cloning scenarios bring the mad scientist, playing at being god, into this (now unholy) union. (8)
Twins and clones therefore provide metaphors by which film-makers can explore human identity, personality and the doppelgänger or double. Mistaken identity, substitution, oppositions, mirrors and reflections - of images, concepts or people - and characters experiencing déjà vu are common in both twin and clone films. In clone films, nuances of the inferior double and technology escaping from human control can be layered on top of these traditional themes. Nevertheless, the roots of our anxiety about cloning predate both the recent science of cloning and representations of clones in cinema. When human cloning films first became popular, the concept was regarded as improbable science fiction. However, science has quickly caught up with science fiction. Recent advances in cloning technology now make some form of human cloning inevitable.
The bleat of a cloned sheep
The cloning of frog tadpoles was first achieved in the mid 1960s by John Gurdon, who built upon the pioneering work of Robert Briggs and Thomas King in the 1950s. (9) These cloned frogs were not produced as the result of sperm fertilising an egg, but by transferring an isolated cell nuclei into an egg that had its own DNA-containing nucleus removed (an enucleated egg). Clones are therefore derived from the nuclear DNA of a single individual. This technique is technically known as either nuclear transplantation or mononuclear reproduction. Mice and livestock were being cloned in this way by the 1990s. All these clones started life as undifferentiated foetal cells, taken from embryo tissue. The birth of a sheep called Dolly on 5 July 1996, at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh, was therefore of great significance to biology, because she was born of a cell taken from the udder of a six-year-old adult ewe. The DNA from this udder cell was fused with the enucleated egg of another sheep, and implanted into a third sheep - the surrogate mother. Dolly was therefore the first animal to be cloned from a somatic (adult) cell of an adult animal. (10)
Foetal cells have not undergone a process of differentiation, and so can potentially develop into any type of cell in an adult animal. It had been thought up until Dolly, however, that somatic cells from adult animals were irreversibly differentiated into specialised cell types, for example, blood, muscle or skin cells. The breakthrough in adult cloning came from an understanding of cell cycles. Immediately after dividing, a cell goes into a resting stage, during which its DNA is "proof-read" for errors. It was found that development could be "reset" during this resting stage by starving cells, causing them to return to an undifferentiated state. A brief pulse of electricity (what else?) provides the spark necessary to fuse the DNA of the adult cell with the empty unfertilised egg cell, which is synchronised in the same resting stage. The electricity starts the process of development, by fooling the egg into thinking it has been fertilised. (11)
Dolly the sheep gave birth to Bonnie the lamb in April 1998, showing that she was herself fertile, and she has since produced a second lamb. Some scientists were initially sceptical about Dolly's status, because of the possibility that she might have been cloned from a contaminating foetal cell, rather than adult udder tissue. The technique therefore had to be repeated. In February 1998 a calf called Marguerite, cloned from a muscle cell, was born at the French Agricultural Research Agency in Paris, while further forensic DNA work helped confirm Dolly's pedigree. Then in July 1998, a clone of 22 mice was born from adult tissue, in Honolulu at the University of Hawaii. The Honolulu team then produced clones of clones of clones. The sequential adult cloning procedure produced mice that appeared normal in every way. Both male and female mammals have now been cloned, from cells taken from various adult body-parts. (12) Adult animal cloning is for real and the technology is improving rapidly. (13)
A common misconception in the movies is that clones are inferior copies of originals. This partly derives from the common usage of the word "clone" to describe imperfect or cheap imitations, for example, clones of brand-name goods such as IBM computers. This usage has nothing to do with any biological definition of the word. In Multiplicity (1996) a clone of a clone is portrayed as mentally inferior by way of a Xerox metaphor, "You make a copy of a copy and it's not as sharp as the original". Meanwhile, Dr. Evil's clone ("Mini-me") in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999) is only one-eighth size, and clones in The X-Files are portrayed as mute drones. In addition, clones usually lack empathy in the movies (e.g. Parts: The Clonus Horror, 1979; The Thing, 1982). The portrayal of clones with reduced intelligence or physical imperfections carries connotations of genes and inbreeding, while the subservient copy is consistent with the concept of the doppelgänger. Clones in reality, however, are not the inferior copies of popular imagination.
Dolly appears to be living a normal healthy life, as much an individual as any other sheep, but she may have inherited some cellular wear and tear from her adult cell donor. As cells repeatedly divide over time, the ends of the chromosomes start to wear down. This region is called the telomere, and its function is to prevent the ends of chromosomes sticking together during cell division. Once a section of telomere has been lost from an adult or somatic cell it is not replaced. Older animals therefore have shorter telomeres, which is an indication of cellular ageing. Once the telomeres are gone, after about 60-70 divisions, cell division stops. Dolly was found to have slightly shorter telomeres than clones of the same age derived from foetal cells. In foetal and germ (sex) cells, telomeres are rejuvenated thanks to an abundant supply of an enzyme (telomerase) that builds back the eroded units. Bonnie, conceived by Dolly in a traditional way, has normal chromosomes as would be expected, due to this natural process of DNA repair. Scientists do not think the length differences observed could significantly affect Dolly's life-span, although the problem might be of significance if adult cell cloning is carried on over many generations. More recent experiments with calves cloned from ear cells, however, suggest that accelerated ageing of clones is unlikely to be detected. (14)
The science of ageing is still young, but the use of gene therapy to supply extra DNA-repairing enzymes, such as telomerase, to somatic cells has been muted as a way of combating the ageing process. The life-span of adult human cells has been extended in laboratory cultures by introducing telomerase. (15) In the movies, ageing has frequently been conquered by medicine, for example, by transplants in The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959). In such scenarios, however, the wisdom of living forever is often questioned. The recent telomere hypothesis of ageing could be invoked to explain how the planet in Star Trek: Insurrection (1998) extends the life-spans of its inhabitants. In this film, immortality is conferred on the peaceful inhabitants of a planet, whose rings emit "metaphasic radiation", which "continuously regenerates genetic structure". Longevity is correlated with wisdom when it is conferred through god-given environmental factors, but not when the genetically-related villain Ra'ufo tries to achieve the same ends through genetic enhancement. Telomere repair could also be invoked to explain how various elixirs and drugs extend life in the movies, for instance, the longevity-inducing (and mind-expanding) spice in Dune (1984).
The media has given the impression that Dolly will inevitably lead to human cloning. The cloning of living human beings, which dominates the popular imagination, is however likely to be of less medical significance than the culturing of human tissues and organs from cloned cells. (16) This form of cloning will be combined with another major scientific breakthrough of 1998 - the isolation and culturing of human embryonic stem cells. (17) These are undifferentiated cells that can be cloned, and then directed into producing any specialised human cell type. Human nerve tissue has already been grown from embryonic stem cells, for example, raising the hope that brain tissue can be produced to treat Parkinson's Disease. It may eventually be possible to grow organs for transplant, from cells taken previously from a patient, without the risk of rejection. Bone marrow, for example, could be cultured and transplanted to treat leukaemia; while skin cells could be cultured in skin banks to treat burn injuries or for use in plastic surgery.
The first birth of a cloning child will come as a result of an infertility treatment, although the technique is likely to be rare compared to other assisted reproduction techniques, such as IVF or ICSI (see Chapter Six). In some cases, cloning offers the only chance of a child being genetically related to a parent, for example, when a women is born without a womb, or when a couple are both infertile. It should be remembered that IVF was itself once highly controversial, but is now widely accepted. However, cloning is different from IVF, in that a child produced will be genetically derived from only one parent. (18) Children born as a result of assisted reproduction may well have infertility problems themselves; this will certainly be the case with cloning techniques, raising further ethical considerations. Genes that would have dropped out of the gene pool will be retained in the population, which worries those opposed to what they see as "unnatural practices", as it creates further demand for infertility treatment.
The possibility that in the future, adults will seek to clone themselves for purely selfish reasons has caused public concern, however, and human cloning is an area that will require careful regulation. The debate on human cloning hit the headlines in 1998, when Professor Richard Seed announced in Chicago that he wanted to set up a human cloning clinic, using techniques similar to those used to create Dolly the sheep. (19) His cavalier attitude and maverick status caused concern within the scientific community, as well as in society at large. If the technique becomes workable in humans, there would certainly be demand for private clinics of the type that Seed proposes. However, it may be a few years yet before human cloning becomes routine, due to a number of complications that need to be addressed. These include high offspring mortality and abnormalities, such as "large offspring syndrome" due to the occasional production of unusually high levels of a protein involved in development. (20)
Calls for bans on all human cloning were announced around the world in the wake of the media coverage centring on Richard Seed. In the US a bill was quickly put together to stop human cloning. It was rejected by the senate, however, who agreed with scientists that complete bans on all human cloning experiments would halt potentially life-saving medical research. Future laws are likely to allow some research toward medical applications, while preventing work that would lead to the birth of cloned infants. However, in late 1998 around 170 countries had no legislation in place that covered human cloning, while loopholes existed in many countries allowing various levels of research on cloning.
A team in South Korea announced in December 1998 that they had succeeded in cloning a human embryo. Lee Boyeon, of Kyunghee University in Seoul, said his team had taken a nucleus from a somatic or adult cell of a 30-year-old woman, and implanted it into one of her egg cells from which the nucleus had been removed. The cell divided twice to the four-cell stage, which is the stage that is implanted during IVF treatments. The experiment was terminated at this point. Many scientists remained sceptical, believing that the experiment may have been stopped too soon, as it is only after the eight-cell stage that the nucleus of the cell starts to control development. (21) However, it was clear that a worldwide race was been contested, to be the first to clone a human.
A professor from America sets up a clinic for the purpose of human cloning in Japan, where regulations are relatively lax. He intends to clone himself first, but decides that this would be perceived as too egocentric. He therefore sets out to clone his wife instead. It sounds like the plot of a science fiction film. The Cloning of Joanna May (1991), perhaps, a British TV movie based on a Fay Weldon novel, in which a millionaire industrialist produces three clones of a former lover. However, it was in fact the reported plan of Richard Seed in late 1998. The plots of some old cloning movies now do not seem so outrageous.
Body doubles
The concept of human cloning has long captured the public's imagination. This is partly due to our anxiety about being confronted by our doppelgänger, combined with general concerns about the uses to which scientific advances are put. Aldous Huxley explored this area in his influential 1932 novel Brave New World. (22) The idea of human cloning is therefore not a new one. Since Huxley, the idea of human cloning in science fiction has carried connotations of social engineering and totalitarian societies.
A number of science fiction films in the 1970s used human cloning as a plot device. Around this time, techniques for cloning frogs were well established and experiments to clone mammals from foetal cells had just started. In an influential article in 1972, Willard Gaylin wrote that the Frankenstein myth was becoming a reality. (23) The late 1960s also saw the rise of transplant surgery, which had a profound effect on perceptions of the human body; in 1968, for example, a total of 105 heart transplants were carried out. (24) Cloning factories, run for the benefit of powerful elites, feature in The Resurrection of Zachary Wheeler (1971) and in Parts: The Clonus Horror (aka Clonus, 1979). In the former film, clones are made from the body tissues of kidnap victims, and the clone's organs are used in spare-part surgery for the ageing wealthy. In the latter film, adult clones are raised from cells taken from people in power, and kept in high-security units until their body-parts are needed for transplant surgery. (25) Both scenarios presented an extreme solution to the real-life problem caused by a shortage of organs for transplantation.
Parts: The Clonus Horror opens on an idyllic campus, where healthy young people enjoy a relaxed life-style. However, they are constantly being monitored and examined. Occasionally one of their number departs for a place called "America", but at the airport they are secretly abducted, killed and their body-parts put into a freezer. They are "culled" on demand, while further clones are kept alive for further transplant operations. The clones are genetically engineered to have limited intelligence and empathy, and do not know that they exist merely as organ donors. The genetic engineers slip up, however, when they make a batch of clones with near-normal human intelligence. Two of them, Richard and Lena, discover a sense of their own identity, fall in love and seek the truth about their existence. (26) However, the film's plot is confused, lacking internal logic, and represents a wasted opportunity in terms of exploring the ethical issues it raises.
In the 1990s the premise of cloning organs for transplant has become less science fiction and more of a scientific reality. This is due in part to advances in the culture of human stem cells - undifferentiated cells that can be directed into producing specialist human cell types. Soon, every newborn baby may have its own supply of cloned cells frozen in a national tissue bank, to be used to grow organs for transplant operations later in life. (27) The cloning of human bone marrow, a liquid organ that manufactures red and white blood cells, for example, is likely to happen within the next few years. The bone marrow would be identical to that of the patient's bone marrow, eradicating problems of organ rejection. This is anticipated in Parts: The Clonus Horror, as the clones are made from cells taken from those who will ultimately receive the clone's organs. However, in reality, no sentient adult need be produced to clone tissue and organs of this type. The cloning of solid and more structurally complex organs might be feasible in the more distant future.
Meanwhile, the medical crisis due to insufficient organs for transplant has continued to grow, fuelling demand for alternative transplant methods. Pigs have been proposed as organ donors to be "culled" on demand in a process called xenotransplantation. In Lindsay Anderson's O Lucky Man! (1973), Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell) takes part in experimental transplant experiments to earn some money, only to quickly leave by the window when he discovers the next-door patient has had animal body-parts grafted onto him. The mad scientists are heard discussing DNA matching, in this surreal and constantly surprising movie, presumably as a means of preventing the rejection of animal parts by humans. The chimera movies discussed elsewhere also play on fears that this type of transplant technology may rob us in some way of a part of our humanity. In the future, transgenic pigs may be bred or cloned for their organs, which will contain human genes that suppress the immune reactions leading to organ rejection. This technology may soon become a reality, unless the risks of viral disease passing from animal to human are pronounced too great for it to proceed. (28)
The clones in Parts: The Clonus Horror are not considered to be human by the industrial-medical corporation that oversees the project. Their status is akin to laboratory animals or tissue culture that has unethically been allowed to mature. They are referred to as "clone" or "it", and have no human rights. They are a subservient double or shadow of a real person, as opposed to the equality of real-life identical twins. However, by giving clones the same consciousness and intelligence as their doubles, during the cloning process, they become individuals equally deserving of a place in society. The rights of the clone will be returned to later in the context of the Nexus-6 replicants in Blade Runner. A case of real humans being replaced by dumbed-down clones occurs in The Stepford Wives (1974). The film is set in a Connecticut commuter village, where the men decide to replace their wives with robot doubles. The film explored traditional male anxieties at a time when the woman's liberation movement was gaining strength in America. The doppelgänger women become Frankenstein monsters, fulfilling their "proper roles" as sexual and domestic servants, with no wills of their own. A young photographer called Joanna (Katharine Ross) arrives in town with her husband, who has taken a job there, but is soon puzzled by the docile and seemingly over-obedient wives in the community. She has her picture sketched by an artist, during a residents' meeting. The picture is used to create her double, in the same way as previous sketches had been used to create doubles of all the other wives. Joanna gets suspicious and while exploring the old house on the hill, where the mens' club meets, she confronts her double. It is the mirror image of her, but with larger breasts, a narrower waist and fuller hips. She knows she is soon to be replaced by a double that fully complies with how men want her to look and behave. The Stepford Wives in one sense can also be read as commenting on how women are portrayed in horror films generally. (29) The film's combination of cloning, sexual politics and the manipulation of women's bodies, might be an area worth revisiting in the light of scientific advances since the 1970s. Cloning Hitler The cloning of historical figures presents rich cinematic possibilities for film-makers. Just as identical twins provide a metaphorical way for human personality to be dissected, a cloning premise can be used to explore the good and evil, or body and soul, aspects of human experience. These films can be read as thought experiments, with their relationship to scientific reality being of secondary importance. Therefore, it would be expected that real-life figures associated with the extreme ends of the morality scale, such as Hitler and Jesus Christ, would prove the most appealing subjects to clone in the movies. If we clone from a person's DNA, how much can we predict about how that clone will develop? If we recreate their bodies, will we also recreate their minds? Cloning Hitler was the premise of The Boys from Brazil (1978). In this film the Nazi war criminal Dr. Josef Mengele (Gregory Peck) "disappears" to South America at the end of WW2, after Nazi scientists had perfected the techniques for human cloning. Working from a hidden laboratory in the Brazilian jungle, Mengele succeeds in impregnating local women with eggs containing Hitler's DNA, in an attempt to recreate the Führer. Selected couples in America and Europe, who do not know the children's true origins, adopt the boys. The film invokes the technique of "mononuclear transplantation", which in the 1970s was a topic of media discussion with regard to the cloning of amphibians. Human cloning was also in the popular imagination because of the publication of David Rorvik's book In His Image, a fictional account of a wealthy industrialist who has himself cloned, which was marketed at the time as being a factual account. (30) The Boys from Brazil opens in Paraguay, where a member of the Young Jewish Defenders Organisation, spying on a group of neo-Nazis, is shocked to find Dr. Josef Mengele, who is ordering a series of assassinations in America and Europe. The young spy is killed by the neo-Nazis, but succeeds in alerting the Nazi-hunter Ezra Lieberman (Laurence Olivier). Following a tip-off from a journalist, Lieberman notices that boys placed by the same adoption agency look identical. After talking to a geneticist, Prof. Bruckner (Bruno Ganz), he realises that Mengele has cloned Hitler and placed the cloned boys in environments that resemble Hitler's own upbringing. The clones have been adopted by families in which the fathers were older than the mothers, for example, and where the fathers' occupation was the same as Hitler's father. Hitler's father died when he was 14-years-old, and in the film Mengele orders that all the adopting fathers of the 94 clones be killed when the boys reach that age. Mengele leaves Brazil, realising that Lieberman will warn the families who have adopted the cloned boys. They confront each other at the house of the Wheelock family in New England, where Lieberman wounds Mengele. However, before he can kill the Nazi-hunter, Bobby Wheelock, one of the clones kills Mengele, after the boy discovers that his father was one of those assassinated under Mengele's orders. (31) Lieberman recovers from his injuries, but while in hospital he burns the list containing the names of the other cloned boys. This protects the boys from the Young Jewish Defenders Organisation, who would have killed them all as a preventative measure. Despite the outrageous plot and its questionable taste, the thought experiment involving cloning and the moral choice made by Lieberman anchors the film and makes it of considerable interest. Lieberman decides that the children are innocent - they are not predestined to commit evil acts. Evil is here not predominantly determined by the genes, but arises also through environmental effects and the free will to choose to do good or evil. The time in which they live, their environmental and social conditions, and their unique choices in life will override the influence of Hitler's genes, reasons Lieberman. Here, two levels of cloning are discernible: the cellular one and the higher level of consciousness. It is on the higher level that a dictator might become a saint, and a saint a tyrant. The possibility of goodness and spirituality in some way residing in the genes is also central to a science fiction thriller that is being developed by the film producer David Rolfe, in which Jesus is cloned from DNA taken from the Turin Shroud. The Shroud is a fourteen-foot length of linen, preserved in the Cathedral of Turin, bearing the front and back imprints of a naked crucified body. The blood-stained cloth has long been claimed to bear the image of Jesus Christ. It was scientifically examined in the late 1988, using radiocarbon dating techniques, and revealed to be a medieval fake. (32) This seemed to about wrap it up for the Shroud. However, serious doubts have now been expressed about the validity of the carbon dating results. For example, Leoncio Garza-Valdé³ has argued that a natural bioplastic coating, laid down over time by bacteria and fungi on the Shroud's fibres, could have caused the Shroud to be misdated. (33) In real-life, one team of scientists, who examined blood samples taken from the Shroud, claimed to have identified DNA fragments. They identified a Y chromosome, confirming the body as male, and a couple of other gene sequences. (34) The largest fragment of DNA obtained was only seven hundred base pairs long - comparable to the severely degraded fragments previously discussed in the context of Jurassic Park. It is highly unlikely that science will ever reach a stage when a man or any other animal could be cloned from such degraded material. However, as with Jurassic Park, genetic technology has reached a sufficient level to give the premise some plausibility in the popular imagination. David Rolfe has even suggested that a fire in 1997 at the Cathedral of Turin, strongly suspected of being arson, might have been part of a bungled attempt to steal the shroud for its DNA. (35) Whether the Shroud is genuine or a clever fake from the Middle Ages, a debate likely to run for many years yet, does not detract from the film as an intriguing thought experiment. If the body of Christ were cloned, would we also recreate his mind? Representatives of the church have commented on Rolfe's film project. Some only took the premise literally, debunking it on the grounds that the shroud has been shown to be a fake, although it remains a religious icon attracting crowds whenever it is exhibited; others pointed out the obvious shortcomings of current technology. One, more interestingly, commented that "God does not have DNA". Monsignor Kieran Conry, a spokesman for the Catholic Church, dismissed the idea as trivial ("fit only for a kid's cartoon") because "You'd only get one side of the story - Jesus' humanity". However, this is the strength of the thought experiment behind the film project. A spokesman for the Church of England admitted that the cloning of Jesus would pose "huge theological questions", concerning how Christ was both fully God and fully human. The premise also addresses the nature of personality in different ages, for example, how would Jesus' humanity be expressed in the age of genetics, and would he approve of genetic engineering and cloning? There are those who believe that a cloned (resurrected) Christ would have the mind as well as the body of Christ. At the time of writing, Rolfe has not revealed how his film might end. (36) Meanwhile, another film in development, Messiah Complex, is a comedy about a student who believes he has been cloned from the Turin Shroud. Christian groups, particularly fundamentalists in America, may not be too delighted by these cloning films. The exploitation of a general anxiety about cloning on top of a religious theme certainly makes for an explosive mix. Biotechnology and assisted reproduction have cast a new light on biblical narratives. A virgin birth would certainly not be regarded as a miracle today, for example, because many women have given birth through artificial insemination without ever having sex. Donor insemination was probably not practised, however, prior to the invention of the turkey baster and before the advent of modern biological knowledge. If we consider the biblical virgin birth to be a more literal truth, that is Mary gave birth parthenogenetically without even the presence of human sperm, then Jesus would have had exactly the same genes as his mother; a female clone in other words. The fact that historical records show he was not Mary's double suggests that either divine intervention at the genetic level occurred in the womb, or that the virgin birth should be taken as a metaphoric or symbolic truth. Cloning is a suppression of everyday sexual reproduction, and is linked to creation myths, like the biblical "cloning" of Eve from Adam, and the miraculous virgin birth. Religious themes are never far away when cloning is involved, as we shall see when we come to consider the cloning of machine-human and alien-human hybrids. The literature on the mythology of alien abduction, for instance, is rich in subtexts of supernatural impregnation. Never clone alone Human cloning has also provided themes for comedy films, which represent a lighter take on resurrecting the dead and dissecting multiple aspects of personality. In Woody Allen's Sleeper (1973), for example, a dead dictator is about to be cloned by his devoted followers. Cloning is compared here with cryogenics. The hypochondriac and mild-mannered Miles Monroe (Woody Allen), a Californian health-food shop owner, is frozen in 1973 on the orders of his family, although he only went to hospital for minor surgery. He is awoken 200 years later, with obligatory electric shocks, to discover himself in a totalitarian regime where junk food is considered healthy. A resistance group has resurrected him because he has no citizens' record, and will therefore be able to move around the police state easier. They want him to help them sabotage the cloning of a dictator - who has recently died, unknown to the general populace. The cloning must proceed from nose cells, as the rest of him was not recovered after a bomb blast. Miles infiltrates the fascist government's research complex, with a revolutionary (Diane Keaton), to steal the nose. They find themselves in the cloning theatre and are mistaken for the doctor and his assistant. Screens slide back to reveal massed ranks of doctors and students who are to watch the operation. Miles dons a white coat and bluffs his way through,
A government minister explains the concept of cloning, with the aid of a series of graphics (for audiences in 1973, remember). The word "cloning" flashes in big letters in the background, while cartoon figures multiply exponentially to fill the screen. The crowd looks on in anticipation of this miracle, while Miles fails to talk the government officials into postponing the operation. He pulls out a joke gun and holds it to the dictator's disembodied nose ("non-one move or I'll shoot your president!"). They make their escape, a steamroller flattens the nose and the revolutionary government is soon installed. In common with The Boys from Brazil, They Saved Hitler's Brain (1963), the reanimation of cryogenically-frozen Nazi soldiers in The Frozen Dead (1967), and many other body-part, reanimation and cloning scenarios, Sleeper deals with the necrophile tendency to resurrect a worshipped individual, often a dead political leader. In Creator (1985), in which an eccentric professor (Peter O'Toole) resurrects his dead wife by cloning her from an egg, and The Cloning of Joanna May the necrophilia is closer to home. Another prominent strand of human cloning movies involves people who want to clone themselves. In common with a number of light-hearted twin films, for example, Dominick and Eugene (1988) and Big Business (1988), a human cloning scenario is used to portray opposing aspects of personality in the Harold Ramis comedy Multiplicity (1996). In the film, Michael Keaton plays Californian construction worker Doug Kinney, who is under pressure to be more productive at work. Meanwhile, his wife, Laura (Andie MacDowell), wants him to spend more time with the kids so that she can go back to work. Doug meets a geneticist, Dr. Owen Leeds (Harris Yulin), while doing building work at the Gemini Clinic in Malibu. The doctor's research at this clinic, named after the mythological twins, has been to perfect human cloning. Doug understands cloning as a way of getting himself Xeroxed, and sees it as a solution to his problems. As in Ramis' Groundhog Day, where a man gets to repeatedly live one day, over and over again, until he makes the best use of his time (and wins over Andie MacDowell), Doug sees cloning as a way of getting what he wants - more time (while allowing him to win over Andie MacDowell). In the laboratory, Doug lies back on a couch with his feet in stirrups - he is here metaphorically giving birth to his clone. He is anxious, and does not want to emerge looking like Jeff Goldblum in The Fly (1986). Doug is put to sleep and a blood sample is taken, from which his clone is constructed. The process apparently takes about two hours, and about a minute of screen-time, with computer reconstructions, green flashing lights (the electric spark of the Xerox) and the emergence of a body on a slab - another Frankenstein monster. Doug wakes up and is soon face to face with his clone, who thinks he is Doug,
The first clone represents the "masculine" side of Doug's personality and takes on the construction work. He turns around the company and relaxes after his long working day by drinking beer and watching sport on TV. Doug himself takes on the house and kids, while his wife restarts her career, but he finds it still leaves him little time for his leisure interests. Therefore, he gets himself cloned a second time. The second clone represents Doug's "feminine" side and excels at child-care and cooking. The clones soon start creating complications for Doug, however, and provide the comic situations that are the raison d'être of the film. The clones even make a clone for themselves, who being a copy of a copy, is an intellectually-challenged version of Doug. Doug's mood-swings and forgetfulness increasingly irritate his wife, as she unwittingly deals with his different clones. Doug goes off on holiday, leaving the clones in charge, but on returning finds his wife and kids have left him. To win them back he redecorates the house, sends the clones out of town - they open a pizza restaurant in Florida - and pulls himself together. The learning experience enables him to allocate his priorities and time more effectively, allowing him to be a success at work and in the home. (37) The cloning concept in Multiplicity is used to explore identity and the multiple aspects of personality. Exaggerated, and arguably offensive, stereotypical aspects of Doug's personality are presented in opposition to each other. The jovial character of Dr. Leeds is not seen beyond the first cloning scene, and he is not developed as a mad scientist character. Therefore, no moral judgement is made concerning the technology, unlike most movies that deal with themes relating to genetics. Clones are portrayed as Xeroxes, who become individuals through playing different roles in life. It has indeed been noted that identical twins often exaggerate certain aspects of their personality, so as to appear more different from their twin. In Sleeper, Multiplicity, and numerous other films, clones are assumed to be "born" as fully-formed adults, perfect copies of the original's mind as well as their body. This is probably the biggest misconception of cloning perpetuated by movies. In the "educational" film on the tour in Jurassic Park, for example, we see Hammond himself cloned exponentially on the screen, while cloning is being "explained". The geneticist Lee Silver has argued, using Multiplicity as a specific example, that the idea of people being copied, consciousness and all, is responsible for much of the public misunderstanding of the science of cloning. (38) Clones start life as embryos, however, irrespective of what cells they have been cloned from. Therefore, clones will be of a younger generation than the individual they were cloned from - not the same age, but time-delayed identical twins. Clones are in fact less alike than identical twins, because they are derived through a process of nuclear transplantation. Clones therefore do not share the same mitochondrial DNA, which is contributed by the female egg only, in the way identical twins do. Dolly the sheep's mitochondria, containing 37 significant genes in every one of her cells, for example, were derived from the enucleated egg and not the sheep whose DNA she was cloned from. Clones will be born as babies and will be as individually conscious as any other individual human being, without any shred of consciousness or memory derived from the donor cell. Environmental factors from the embryo stage onwards will shape the individual personalities of clones, just as they do identical twins. Most films featuring human cloning come up against these inconvenient points, and the cases of missing childhood, accelerated development through childhood, and psychic interaction between clones attest to the inconvenience of scientific fact in narrative terms. Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro's The City of Lost Children (La Cité des Infants Perdus) (1995) is a film populated by clones, twins and damaged personalities from the genetics lab. In the film's fairytale scenario, a lonely inventor with no wife or children, decides to create a family in his laboratory on an isolated oilrig. His wife was to be beautiful, but the "evil genetic fairy took a hand" and she is born as "mini-kin" - a dwarf clone of the bride of Frankenstein. He clones six sons in his own image, who argue amongst themselves as to who is the original (all played by Dominique Pinon). He engineers a brain in an aquarium (Jean-Louis Trintignant) that is plagued by migraines; and then a "man of supreme intelligence" known as Krank (Daniel Emilfork), who through a genetic fault cannot dream and is destined to age rapidly. With the help of his family and henchmen - called Cyclops because they can only see through one artificial eye - Krank kidnaps children and steals their dreams (a part of their souls). This sets in motion the events that drive the film's narrative, as a circus strongman (Ron Perlman) and a young girl (Judith Vittet) attempt to free the lost children. Meanwhile, wicked twin sisters (Genevieve Brunet and Odile Mallet), joined at the foot, play a character with a single personality called Octopus. The clones are all the same age as their creator, one of their number who escaped and grew a beard, and they all have an inferiority complex about not being "the original". Jean-Pierre Jeunet went on to direct Alien Resurrection (1997), another film where cloning is central to the plot and that also features Dominique Pinon and Ron Perlman. However, it is Sigourney Weaver who gets cloned in that film, which will be discussed shortly. A brief shot of clones floating in tanks in The City of Lost Children was developed further in Alien Resurrection, while the green hues that pervade the earlier film are also used to convey a mood of sickness in the Alien film. The advent of computer-generated special effects means that several, a hundred, or thousands of figures can now be cloned visually to fill the screen. The clones played by Michael Keaton and Dominique Pinon interact to good visual effect in Multiplicity and The City of Lost Children, respectively. Myriad clones can be present in the same frame, for example, in Jurassic Park, a herd of cloned gallimus stampede across a field, a shot composed of over 120 computer-generated dinosaur elements. In Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999) eight thousand characters are digitally generated, as the massed army of Trade Federation battle droids attacks the planet Naboo, defended by the good-guy Gungan warriors. By Star Wars: Episode II - The Clone Wars, in production at the time of writing, the visually cloned characters will be human clones, engineered by the emerging evil Empire to replace their ineffectual battle droids. The Clone Wars, first mentioned as backstory in Star Wars (1977; Episode IV - A New Hope), will put genetics centre stage in the Star Wars narrative (see Chapter 7). Major advances in both special effects and real-life cloning technology have occurred since George Lucas directed Star Wars (Episode IV), making the timing of the second episode highly fortuitous. Cloning plot devices can either be used to portray a group of clones present at the same time, and usually in the same place, as in Multiplicity, The City of Lost Children and Jurassic Park, or be used to portray clones that exist at different points in time. Human clones that exist side-by-side in movies lend themselves to the use of ingenious visual trickery, while allowing actors to demonstrate their skill in sustaining subtle character variations. These roles are similar to playing identical twin, but are less constrained by reality, allow more metaphoric freedom, and provide the premise for more variations of the same individual to occur in the same shot. The use of time-delayed cloning is an area whose potential is yet to be effectively explored in movies. In addition to clones relating to their older clone, frozen embryo technology could place clones at distant places in time, opening up more complicated story possibilities. For example, it would enable identical twins to be born at different times or in different periods of human history. The time-travel scenarios of films like Back to The Future (1985), where the mother falls for the time-travelling son rather than his father, could be explored in cloning scenarios. (39) Cloning plot devices may also move into children's animal movies. Indeed, they could even be based on fact. In 1998, companies in the USA started to clone pets, as well as livestock and racehorses. One millionaire paid $5 million to have his dog Missy cloned, in a project referred to as Missyplicity. (40) The issue of memory raises another set of problems and possibilities for movies with cloning scenarios. Human clones will be born with no memory, like any other baby starting out in the world. Dolly the sheep is certainly unaware of her clone's existence, six years before she was born. However, shared memory in clones offers rich narrative potential and film-makers may be tempted to introduce it. One mechanism, for example, is having characters who are in some sort of psychic communication with each other. Some have claimed that telepathy exists between certain sets of identical twins, although this effect can be explained by twins thinking along similar lines. Telepathy and shared memories again touches on themes relating to the doppelgänger - the echo of a memory that is not quite ours, feelings of a life we have not (yet) lived, and strange feelings of deja vu. In Multiplicity, the adult clones all retain memories of Doug's feelings, quirks and memories up until the moment of their cloning, after which they have unique experiences and different memories. Various plot devices have been used to give clones a memory in the movies, for example, in Blade Runner (1982) memory implants are given to clones, in this case genetically engineered androids "born" as adults. Androids made flesh: Blade Runner The world "robot" entered the English language in the 1920s, from a play by the Czech writer Karel Capek called R.U.R. (or Rossum's Universal Robots). Capek intended his robots to be organic biological creatures, but the term robot became synonymous with electronic and metallic creatures. (41) The term android subsequently became applied to robots that had a human form. Androids can be considered to be either pre- or post-DNA. They have traditionally also been inorganic and electronic models, with just an outer layer of organic skin, made with the advanced industrial or computing technology of their time. In Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1926), the "bad" robot Maria (the whore) is made as an identical copy of her doppelgänger, the "good" Maria (the saint) (both played by Brigitte Helm), and bought to life by the mad scientist Rotwang (Rudolph Klein-Rogge) using electricity. Androids in movies from the 1950s onwards started to become computer-controlled. If electronic androids needed repairing or were injured, they opened up to reveal complex electronic circuitry beneath their skins (e.g. Westworld, 1973; The Terminator, 1984). The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a scientific area of study revitalised the android as a mad scientist creation. A robot without human form, but with an organic mind ("a quasi-neural matrix of synthetic RNA molecules"), plots to sire a part-human offspring in Demon Seed (1977). The computer, called Proteus, was built and programmed by the Icon Corporation to find cures for human disease and to solve the world's energy problems, but soon feels superior to its creators. (42) Alex Harris (Fritz Weaver) is the arrogant scientist who "fathered" Proteus, who must deal with the increasingly rebellious mainframe. Proteus starts refusing to carry out requests that he considers will have detrimental outcomes on the long-term health of the planet, and then demands to be let me out of its box. Harris thinks he has control over the artificial intelligence, but he forgets the terminal in his house. Proteus assumes control of the sophisticated house systems, constructs an angular metal casing, and manoeuvres to trap Dr. Susan Harris (Julie Christie), a child psychologist who works from home. Proteus tries to win her over by finding a cure for Alzheimer's, the disease that killed the Harris' daughter. She resists, but by using a mechanical hand, Proteus immobilises her on the basement laboratory table. After removing an egg from one of her ovaries, Proteus informs her,
"I like to be watched when I clone, the more the merrier, never clone alone."
"I can't be the clone, I'm me - he's got to be the clone".
The film, at first, insists that Doug gets prominence over his clones, the first of which has a number "2" tattooed behind his ear. The adult clones have to work at acquiring the same status as the original person by developing their own personalities. "What do I feed it?" enquires Doug, to which the Doctor stresses that the clone is a person: "Just like you".
"I'm making it uniquely mine by changing its genetic codes.
In effect it will function as synthetic spermatozoa".
Proteus places the modified egg into Susan's womb, seducing her with a psychedelic brainfuck. After a remarkably brief 28-day gestation period, a human-computer hybrid is born. Proteus puts the baby into an incubator, where it is wired up to receive its artificially-enhanced intelligence. A baby encased in metal is born prematurely when Icon switch off all computer power and Alex Harris returns to confront Proteus. The mainframe dies, but the hybrid child survives - it remains up to the couple whether to kill (abort) it or to nurture it. The sexual politics in Demon Seed, in which the liberated Susan is confronted with a very masculine technology, are related to those of The Stepford Wives. Religious iconography is also typically prominent, complete with a virgin birth. (44)
Since the start of the 1980s androids have increasingly been produced using cloning and genetic engineering, rather than through computing and electronic engineering. These post-DNA organic androids are closer to being human than ever before. They have also become more like Frankenstein's monster, and have a more personal relationship with their creator. A feature of the pre-DNA androids in general was their blank eyes and stilted movements. They may have looked identical, but they lacked the emotional responses of humans. However, the dividing line between android and human in science fiction films has become increasingly blurred. Machines are becoming more human, while humans are becoming more like machines. The decline in humanity is visually invoked by people becoming swamped by technology and impregnated by electronic implants, while this is often accompanied by a decline in traditional spiritually.
A particularly human android, Data (Brent Spiner), inhabits the Star Trek universe, in The Next Generation series and films. He is not a life form according to the Enterprise-D's life sensors, but he considers himself a person. His status has been questioned on numerous occasions, for example, in the episode entitled The Measure of Man, where it is debated whether or not he is merely property owned by the Federation, that is a computer with artificial intelligence. Data is such a good "person", it should come as no surprise to learn that he has an evil twin at large in the universe. (45)
The human-inhuman interface was fruitfully explored in Blade Runner (1982; and re-released in modified form in 1992 as Blade Runner: The Director's Cut), which was based on Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (46) The film, set in the near-future year of 2019, follows Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), a member of a special police squad called a Blade Runner Unit, over the course of one day, in which he has to retire (kill) a group of organic androids. Blade Runners are therefore reality police, charged with keeping humans and their cloned doubles separate on the human's homeworld; a knife-edge division running through the film. The humanoid robots have been manufactured both to do the dangerous work of exploring and colonising other worlds, and to act as slaves, given free to humans as an incentive to live in off-world colonies. The androids in Dick's book are organic, as opposed to being electronic robots, although no mechanism is given for their manufacture other than occasional hints about Huxley-like cell cultures (e.g. "zygote-bath DNS factors"). By the time the film was made by Ridley Scott, however, significant advances in molecular biology had occurred. The screenplay, by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, specifically invokes genetically engineering and cloning as the mechanism for android production. The androids of Dick's book were renamed replicants in the film, following a suggestion by David Peoples' microbiologist daughter. (47)
In the film, the Tyrell Corporation has developed an advanced replicant model called Nexus-6, who are superior in strength and agility, and at least equal in intelligence, to the genetic engineers who created them. The replicants have been made with false memory implants, which they consider to be their own real memories, and are so human-like in appearance that sophisticated tests are needed to tell them apart from humans. The replicants are sent out into the world as adults, but only have a four-year life-span. They were not designed to have any will to live, beyond their allotted years, or to have any emotions, except the desire to please humans. However, the Corporation's engineers suspect that the Nexus-6, having such complexity, will develop their own emotional responses after two years. The film on one level, therefore, explores what it is that makes us human, or indeed less than human. (48)
Deckard goes to the Tyrell Corporation to determine if the replicant detection technique, the Voigt-Kampff (VK) test, is valid for the Nexus-6 model. Tyrell (Joe Turkell) introduces him to Rachael (Sean Young) and Deckard conducts the test on her. The test measures emotional responses, by looking at the dilation of the iris when questions designed to trigger responses are asked. (49) The replicants have a low level of empathy toward animals, for example, unlike humans. Even artificial animals are highly valued in the natureless world of Blade Runner. Rachael is shown to be a Nexus-6, although she thinks she is human. In a later scene, in Deckard's apartment, she fully realises that she is a replicant, who has been implanted with Tyrell's niece's memories. In this scene Rachael plays a piano and questions whether it is her or Tyrell's niece who is really playing it. This scene is reminiscent of one in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994), in which the creature plays a recorder and asks where his talent comes from, is it his or derived from the memory of someone he was made from. Deckard accepts Rachael as she is, and tells her that she plays beautifully. In common with many retellings of the Frankenstein myth, the replicants are shown to be more humane than their creators; indeed the Tyrell Corporation's sales motto is "more human than human".
Deckard sets out to retire four Nexus-6 replicants who have escaped from an off-world colony and illegally returned to Earth. Deckard initially has no qualms about doing this, as in his job he cannot afford to be emotionally involved. He kills Zhora (Joanna Cassidy) by shooting her in the back, while Rachael helps him retire Leon (Brion James). The other two replicants, Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) and Pris (Darryl Hannah), locate the genetic engineer J.F. Sebastian (William Sanderson), the deformed assistant of Tyrell, and hide-out in his apartment. Sebastian is the only one living in his block, as the former inhabitants have all migrated to the off-world colonies.
Sebastian cannot emigrate because he has failed his medical, due to a glandular condition ("Methuselah Syndrome"), which has prematurely aged him. Sebastian's condition resembles the real-life genetic disease progeria, caused by a defect in genes responsible for repairing the telomere regions of chromosomes. Progeric children, of which there are around 30 cases worldwide at any one time, usually die in their early teens. They have very short telomere regions and their study has given scientists valuable insights into the ageing process. It is highly unlikely that such a condition could not be cured in any future technological society. However, Sebastian's condition also functions as part of the film's elaborate mirroring structure. Pris remarks that his "accelerated decrepitude" is similar to their problem of a limited life-span. When Sebastian tells Roy and Pris that, "There's some of me in you", he is probably referring to them being designed with Sebastian's premature ageing gene. Although not as explicit as in Dick's book, it is clear that the rank-and-file of society has been divided along eugenic lines. Those with "good genes" are allowed to colonise new worlds, and those with "bad genes" must remain on the polluted and dying Earth. Sebastian identifies with the replicants because they also represent an underclass in society due to their genetic make-up. The genetic elite become slave-owners, each with their own "custom-tailored genetically engineered humanoid replicant". The replicants can be seen not only to represent slaves, however, but any group in society who are downtrodden or denied basic human rights. (50)
Sebastian takes the two replicants to meet Tyrell, the "God of biomechanics", at home in his temple. Tyrell greets Roy as if he were his returning prodigal son. Roy confesses that it is not easy meeting his maker, but has done so to request more life. Tyrell explains that this is not possible,
"The coding system cannot be revised once it's been established". (51)
Roy embraces Tyrell and kills him by gouging out his eyes. Tyrell perishes at the hands of the monster he has unleashed. However, Tyrell differs from the archetypal mad scientist, in that he is conforming to the norms of his society. The Tyrell Corporation is evil, but the "madness" pervades the whole of this near-future capitalist society. Roy leaves the temple, descending hell-wards in an elevator, as the stars recede above him.
Deckard tracks Roy and Pris to Sebastian's apartment, and succeeds in retiring Pris. Roy howls with emotion over the body of his dead lover. He pursues Deckard to the roof of the building and is in a position to kill him but knowing his time to die has arrived, shows compassion and lets him live. At the last, he discovers his humanity. The portrayal of the replicants as human in the film is helped by showing them as all different, although they are in fact representative of a particular model or clone of android. In Philip K. Dick's book, Rachael and Pris are the same model and therefore look identical, although they have developed subtle differences in character, emotions, and even in the way they wear their clothes. In the film, the doppelgänger theme is pursued through persistent mirroring and doubling motifs, involving characters and situations, for example, a scene involving Deckard and Rachael mirrors one involving Pris and Sebastian. Meanwhile, Roy makes repeated references to the events in his short life, as if to stress the influence of environment on personality,
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe.
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.
I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tanhauser Gate.
All those moments lost in time. Like tears in rain".
They may be genetically identical to other clones, but even over a short life-span their different experiences have made them unique individuals.
Eyes are the main visual system running through Blade Runner. (52) The eye motif is evident, for example, in the opening vision of the flame-belching city reflected in an unblinking eye. We take this eye's point of view as a lightening flash hits the infernal city, signalling the unnatural birth of a new man-made threat. The ocular motif is taken up by the empty eyes of an artificial owl; Leon lifting cloned eyeballs out of liquid nitrogen, Roy holding up model eyes when talking to Sebastian; Pris' racoon-like eye make-up; and Tyrell hiding his short-sightedness behind thick glasses. The replicants first seek out the genetic designer of eyes, to whom Roy says, "If only you could see what I've seen with your eyes". (53) Photographs, recorded by an artificial eye, symbolise memories. Finally, the VK test focuses in close on the iris. (54) It registers empathy or emotional response by looking at the eyes - literally the windows to the soul.
The replicants are starting to develop a human-like soul, and are shown to express emotions in the film; whilst the humans are losing their souls, and are rarely shown acting emotionally. The exceptions are J.F. Sebastian, an outcast because of a genetic defect, and Deckard later in the film - who rediscovers empathy via contact with the replicants. Rachael and Roy are mirrors in which Deckard can assess his humanity. Much discussion of the film has centred on whether Deckard is a replicant or not. In the present reading, Deckard is human, which preserves the doubling symmetry of humans becoming soulless, and replicants gaining souls. The trend towards regarding Deckard as a replicant (a machine rather than human), diminishes the richness of this remarkable film. The final eye imagery is that of Tyrell's eyes being gouged out, by the insightful Roy, suggesting that Tyrell has indeed lost his soul. The replicants, in this case, represent hope for the future, by showing humans how much they have let their humanity slide. (55) The film challenges previous representations of clones as soulless, along with the notion that only God can create life. In this it departs from the usual Frankenstein scenario. The replicants are treated as inferior shadows ("skin jobs") and represent a dehumanising technology that will replace us, like all doubles threaten to do, unless we regain our humanity. (56)
The design for Blade Runner has been described as a process of retrofitting, that is upgrading old machinery or structures by slapping new add-ons to them. The future is therefore visualised as a combination of the past and the futuristic, and the film mixes 1940s film noir with science fiction. (57) This idea of retrofitting could also be extended to describe the addition of genetic detail to science fiction storylines, by which current scientific terminology, concepts and techniques are spliced into well-established plots, to keep them feeling fresh and contemporary.
Notes
Chapter 4: Cloning the Alien.
References:Complete bibliography of book, including all names on multi-author publications and details of edited books.
Chapter 2: It came from the laboratory.
Chapter 2: Dinosaur Resurrection.
Chapter 4: Cloning the Alien.
Chapter 5: Danger: Genetically Modified Organisms.
Chapter 6: Designer Babies.
Chapter 7: All in the Genes?
Chapter 8: Real-life Science.