What do cinematic fictions of human clones tell us about ourselves and our relations with others? What does this proliferation of the self say about biological and cinematic reproduction? These are my dissertation’s driving questions, which engages with film-philosophy, feminist science studies, and posthuman theory to investigate four films in which the protagonist encounters her/himself in the form of a clone: Moon (Jones, 2009), Alien: Resurrection (Jeunet, 1997), The 6th Day (Spottiswoode, 2000) and Annihilation (Garland, 2018). Cloning and cinema emerged as co-conspirators, as both ‘technologies of reproduction’ problematize notions of artificial replication, while destabilizing normative conceptions of a stable self. My main argument hinges on the idea that clonal subjecthood encompasses a paradigmatic relation of the self versus the more conventional syntagmatic relation of the self. Conceptually, cloning’s paradigmatic relations overthrow the self’s intuitive syntagmatic relation, as it smears conventional subjectivity out to a point where we no longer can constitute this self as unified and unique. My introduction draws on the evolution of cloning and cinema to form a working definition of what cinematic clones are. Each film is treated as a thought experiment that opens up discourses on how we can understand our human selves in our highly technologized world, while problematizing hegemonic conceptions of how the relation between mind and body operates. In chapter one, Moon’s prolonged, ongoing clonal encounter serves as a benchmark for what is at stake in conceptualizing cinematic clones. Drawing on Landsberg’s ‘prosthetic memory’ (1995), Hume’s “On Personal Identity” (1740), and Battaglia’s ‘replication problematic’ (2001), I argue that these clones share a ‘continuous consciousness’. In this paradigmatic relation, the clones are different spatio-temporal dimensions of one another, each one implying and supplementing the other, connoting the idea of ‘the multiple are one’. I also analyze the clones through ‘the unattained but attainable self’ as reworked by Cavell (2004), fostering what I call a ‘remarriage of the self’. Chapter two shifts us from a continuous consciousness to a ‘continuous corporeality’. I place the questions of gendered embodiment, biological reproduction, and female hybridity that Alien: Resurrection raises into conversation with Stacey’s idea of cloning as ‘the relations of excessive sameness’ (2010), Mulhall’s reading of the Alien Quadrilogy (2016), Kristeva’s abject (1982), Creed’s Monstrous-Feminine (1993) and Braidotti’s metamorphosing monstrous (2002). During this clonal encounter, which I read as a reversal of the Lacanian mirror stage, an absorption of the cloned embodiments occurs, connoting the paradigmatic relation of ‘the one is multiple’. The 6th Day illuminates how the self’s syntagmatic relation might be altered by cloning, while cultivating a problematic denial of the other self. Cloning is presented as a method for escaping death: when you die, you get cloned, you continue to live on as your ‘syntax of existence’ is prolonged. Stacey’s reworking of Benjamin’s notion of ‘aura’ into the concept of ‘bio-aura’ (2010) forms this chapter’s most prominent interlocutor, while I also engage with Hauskeller’s ‘postmortality’ (2015) and Sobchak’s SF reworking of Foucault’s similitude versus resemblance. Lastly, Annihilation’s ‘refractive’ clonal encounter provides a prism for tracing how the clone is posthuman. Braidotti’s ‘difference as the principle of not-One’ (2013), Haraway’s concept of ‘kin and kinship’ (2015), Barad’s ‘diffraction’ and ‘the agential cut’ (2008), and Batchelor’s Chromophobia (2000) are this chapter’s most important interlocutors. The way this film’s refractive clonal figures are visualized through its striking color-scapes, challenges us to reorient our humanist thinking, as it synthesizes an allegorical critique of our anthropocentric biases. The prescience of cinematic clones lies in how these figures reconfigure a relation of sameness with alterity, a bodily kinship that extends the self into the other, by acknowledging continuities between persons, while cinema opens up avenues of empathizing with this clonal otherness.
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