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409 Das Hund If it were not for Structuralism, we might have noticed already that Freud’s famous pronouncement that we do not find our love objects but only re-find them is at least as melancholic as it would be Oedipal (or symbolic). But ambivalence accepts this as law of desire. While the diagnostic handbooks decree that zoophilia always substitutes for a missing human connection (which is presumably a blocked outlet that can be open to treatment), we can also say, in reverse, that every beloved animal—every pet—is, without the synthesis of ambivalence but as melancholic chain operation or compulsion, a RePet. This cloning industry in the foreground of the film The 6th Day (2000), which is downgraded with plot points to strategic diversion but then proves to be the true bottom line, raises commodification to the powers of allegory also in keeping with P. K. Dick’s undercover brilliance in ad copy and marketing over skills. It all begins with our not wanting to let the other go. But then there are those who don’t want to go themselves: these are the dangerous ones, while the former are forever going through a change of heart. Dr. Weir invented the successful procedure for cloning humans in order to give his marriage for the sake of all others a new lease on life and wife. His business partner, Drucker, applies cloning to his own risk-free life or death. What the doctor only discovers over his wife’s clone’s expired body is that Drucker has also programmed via congenital defects that fatal disease will cut short everyone celebrating a comeback. Thus those who prove unreliable, disloyal, et cetera die anyway, while the chosen can be brought back again for a fuller brush with fate. When the wife’s clone starts dying after four more years, she implores her husband to let her go this time: she’s not afraid. Dr. Weir follows her lead and declares that he 410 Das Hund will never again bring someone back as clone. But it’s too late: Drucker applies the cure-all. He kills Dr. Weir so he can bring him and his wife back without the new fears and resolutions. According to the logic of the film, this is possible because Dr. Weir and his wife were longstanding test subjects with archives of symcordings (pictures taken of the mind), which were made at various moments. Because you are cloned with or through your symcording, your renewed memory (or sentient life) picks up where the symcording left off. Thus Drucker can choose a mind picture from a period prior to the wife’s determination to die. The shades of mourning need no longer fall upon the couple’s once and future memories. The recent past would have been, to this end, completely elided. But it’s too late for the cure-all, too late for Drucker, too. Arnie and his clone tricked Drucker with the symcording evidence: one didn’t look at the other as they advanced on cloning headquarters. With the imprint of the other out of sight, it’s out of the mind picture being read as narrative of only one Arnie to deal with. But with two Arnies as insiders, the whole apparatus of replacement and reanimation begins to break down. Arnie, home a clone, can flex the momentum of alternate presents and disrupt Drucker’s equation between elimination and cloning. In the shoot-out Drucker is mortally wounded. But as he proceeds to provide his own cloning replacement, he finds he can go only so far: he clones himself only incompletely, either as not yet fully born or as zombie. In either case, the next in the Drucker line begins taking off the former Drucker’s clothes to complete the transfer. Can’t he wait until the first guy’s dead? But the former Drucker gets to die embracing himself, the clone who slimed him. The evil masterminding in the movie’s replication plot is restricted to Drucker’s attempt to keep cloned life on a short lease. But when everything is over and fixable, Arnie’s clone doesn’t want to know about his deadline: “we all have to die some day.” This was Mrs. Weir’s message in the bottled up affect of her husband. But up to the point of Drucker’s subcontracting out the renewal of living to Death, we, too, learn to accept the message of cloning on the...

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