The Cinematic Life of the Gene (review)

In The Cinematic Life of the Gene, Jackie Stacey explores what she terms 'the genetic imaginary' as expressed in cinema - that is, the set of anxieties accompanying the increased geneticisation of the human body. For Stacey, such anxieties emerge from the mutability of the body its geneticisation makes possible; embodiment is no longer fixed through visual mechanisms, but becomes the manifestation of the invisible gene, and can be constructed through artificial combinations and recombinations wholly separate from prior human experience. Simultaneously, cinema expresses similar mutability; while film initially captured at least the moment when actors and camera came together to produce an image, the increased digitalisation of film eliminates even that degree of stability. Both the body and the cinema, then, have come to be figurable solely as expressions of data, subject to manipulation and artificiality. This intersecting moment of cinema and genetics offers Stacey a means to explore the cultural expressions of the anxiety about such transformations so often revealed in sf and horror films.

Stacey's book addresses a wide array of sf films that treat genetics in some fashion, focusing sustained attention on Alien: Resurrection (Jeunet US 1997), Species (Donaldson US 1995), Gattaca (Niccol US 1997), Code 46 (Winterbot-tomc UK 2003), Teknolust (Hershman-Leeson US/Germany/UK 2002) and Genetic Admiration (Leeming Canada 2005). She takes glancing looks at about sixty additional films, selected to centre on what she sees as 'the decade of the clone', loosely configured as encompassing the mid-1990s through the mid-2000s. Stacey argues the discourse on genetics reaches a critical moment during this decade, opening with the cloning of Dolly the sheep in 1996, moving through ongoing debates over stem-cell research and peaking with the completion of a major phase of the Human Genome project around 2003, when issues surrounding genetics and 'genomics' (more population-based studies of genetics) came to fill popular, political and scientific debates alike. Structurally, her argument moves back and forth between short theoretical chapters that lay out the cultural issues she sees at play and detailed discussions of specific films that exemplify these concerns.

Her theoretical chapters may be where readers and scholars will find Stacey's work most productive. She moves from the concern with genetics as reconfiguring sexuality and kinship structures, through issues of impersonation associated with cloning and ends with the ways in which the reproducibility of the body engages with economics, particularly corporate capitalism. To establish the theoretical groundwork for her exploration, Stacey considers a wide array of scholars, demonstrating how their discussions - only occasionally addressing genetic issues directly - are applicable to the genetic imaginary she describes. She opens with Baudrillard, explaining that he sees cloning as expressing a desire for sameness that ultimately unmakes nature and culture alike; as she puts it, 'these anxieties about the proliferation of undesirable forms of sexual and reproductive sameness are driven by a heterosexual imperative which seeks to locate reproduction unequivocally within the supposedly biological regimes of sexual difference' (32). Looking at Alien: Resurrection through this filter, she focuses on the deviance of the cloned Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), who is part alien and part human, cast alongside a cyborg (Winona Ryder) who bears uncanny resemblance to Ripley and is not revealed as an artificial life form until late in the film. By exploring moments of homoerotic attraction between the two women, and by ending with the most biologically deviant characters as the sole survivors, the film encodes the threat such posthuman reproduction presents to normative modes of humanity.

Having explored the threat of such artificial reproduction (which she also interrogates in Species), Stacey turns to a different theoretical construct, looking at an array of theorists, including Lacan and Mary Ann Doane, to consider how 'the clone undermines the conventional teleology of original and copy' (96). Cloning as what she terms 'biomimicry' destabilises our sense of ourselves as singular or unique, and at the same time engages us with a kind of literalised narcissism by offering an image of ourselves...