What is wrong with this picture? Cinema feeds our latest sci-fi fears

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This was published 2 years ago

What is wrong with this picture? Cinema feeds our latest sci-fi fears

By Stephanie Bunbury

What is really going on at the Wuhan Institute of Virology? How much American money went into China’s high-security laboratory and why wasn’t that link acknowledged when the United States challenged the laboratory to investigate the possibility that its research into bat viruses sprang a leak? It sounds like the premise for a movie. It probably already is.

Anxiety about science running rampant has been a staple of cinema since the robot in Metropolis first opened her blank mechanical eyes. Cue generations of mad professors, sinister institutes, machines that turn against their makers and unspeakable things grown in test tubes: things that we imagine going on behind high-security doors. Things that feel wrong, even if we don’t quite know what they are.

Metropolis (1927) fed our earliest fears about science going off the rails.

Metropolis (1927) fed our earliest fears about science going off the rails.

Making our fears manifest is one of the things cinema does best, of course. At the point where horror, science fiction and action flicks meet is a flourishing Petri dish of thrillers in which something nasty escapes and has to be contained within a two-hour timeframe. In The Andromeda Strain (1971), a satellite returns to Earth bearing an alien pathogen that crystallises human blood. In John Sturges’ The Satan Bug (1965), a bioweapon that could kill all life on Earth in months is stolen from a sealed laboratory. Unlike many of the more apocalyptic films of the Cold War era, it took only the loss of a couple of minor characters and a few hectic chases to set things right. A proper thriller demands that the world be set to rights – at least until the next time the boffins get out of hand.

The same thing happens in a comedy like Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989). Rick Moranis plays an inventor who accidentally puts his own and his neighbours’ children through his electromagnetic shrinkage machine and throws them out with the rubbish. The sky-high concept is in the title; you go in knowing it’s a joke. Likewise The Nutty Professor (1963), a variation on Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, in which bumbling Jerry Lewis devises a chemical compound that will turn him into a suave hipster and learns that it’s better to like yourself as you are. Silly old science nerds! You wouldn’t trust one to organise a sock drawer.

Even in these entertainments, however, there are hints and allusions to the baseline understanding that playing God is a dangerous game. That game, the terror of it and the moral questions it raises are as old as humanity; the myth of Prometheus, who gave fire to mortals and was duly punished by Zeus for overstepping the mark, hits all those notes. The fear of overstepping it again fed the persecution of Galileo. It is as integral to the anti-vaxxers’ propaganda as it is to the sober recognition of our responsibility for climate change. No surprise, then, that there is also a long line of films that foreground a sense that at some point, we have taken – or we could in a near future that looks very much like the present – a perilously wrong turn.

Little Joe examines the hazards of genetic modification.

Little Joe examines the hazards of genetic modification.

Jessica Hausner’s Little Joe, which is very much in this reflective mode, screened in Cannes in 2019. Hausner is Austrian and thus heir to the bleak pessimism of filmmakers such as Michael Haneke and Ulrich Seidl. Her best-known previous film, Lourdes (2009), was the provocative story of a woman whose miraculous cure at the Marian shrine gradually recedes, destroying the hope that used to sustain her. In Little Joe, she exchanges the sombre space of the Lourdes sanatorium for a brightly lit laboratory; its white cleanliness immediately suggests a sort of inhumanity.

“In most of my films, people wear uniforms because your clothes define your position in a social hierarchy,” she says. “And I think for rooms, it is a little bit the same. In my films, you look at a room and understand the feeling it is about.”

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Thanks to the bats of Wuhan, Little Joe is only now getting a release in Australia, but its theme looks remarkably prescient. The title refers to an artificially generated plant that emits a happiness-inducing pollen. “Now the film is finished, I do think of that: why is it such an important value in our society to be happy?” she says. “It’s like the desire for perfection.” All the plant requires is a modicum of water, chat and love. But it is a jealous plant, as gradually becomes clear. Along with the gift of bland euphoria, it compels its carers to love it above anything else. Or does it?

Emily Beecham plays a scientist whose life unravels when she takes a genetically modified plant home to meet her son in Little Joe.

Emily Beecham plays a scientist whose life unravels when she takes a genetically modified plant home to meet her son in Little Joe.

When plant scientist Alice (Emily Beecham, who won best actor in Cannes for her performance) defies lab rules to take one of the new plants home to her son – the original Joe – the plant puffs and fluffs under the boy’s care. At the same time, human Joe becomes hostile and disobedient. Is he just becoming a teenager, or is something else going on? Nobody can be sure, but the laboratory bosses want to press forward. Little Joe is due to be unveiled at a major plant show. Time is money.

Jessica Hausner’s Little Joe now looks remarkably prescient.

Jessica Hausner’s Little Joe now looks remarkably prescient. Credit: Getty Images

“I am a big horror fan,” says Hausner. “I always like those films where in the first half, they are saying someone has changed, like in Body Snatchers (Abel Ferrara, 1993) or recently in Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017). Normally, in the second half of those films you get all the explanations – seed pods from outer space or whatever – and then for me it gets less interesting. I was intrigued to make a more philosophical film out of it. I think it is a deeply philosophical question to ask yourself: who is that other person? I think this is also where the fear or the uncanny comes from – when something you think you know is suddenly not what you thought it was. Like, let’s say, we are very good friends but then one day you behave in a different way. Nobody would notice it, only me, but that is uncanny.”

The question of who we are – actually, what it means to be human – hangs like a veil over another film that has just arrived in Australia, Julie Delpy’s My Zoe. (Spoilers follow, but the film has been widely reviewed and Delpy herself is happy to discuss its themes.)

My Zoe is a strange film that appears to be about motherhood and the sundering of families. Delpy plays Isabelle, a geneticist in her 40s locked in endless, bitter and grimly realistic squabbles with her former husband (Richard Armitage) over custody of their daughter. These wrangles over pick-up times and nannies come to a dreadful halt, however, when the child suddenly falls fatally ill.

But Isabelle is a scientist, we are reminded; if there is a logical solution to a problem, she will pursue it. And, given that this is an unnamed future, she knows she can resort to a Russian clinic, an enigmatic doctor (Daniel Bruhl) and take an outside chance that she can make Zoe all over again. It is an ethical minefield, as well as a mothering one: what if Zoe’s clone doesn’t match up to the original? But Delpy waves away objections.

“I’m obsessed with not accepting our fate, because I feel like it’s the nature of women not to accept it because for so long, so many women died in childbirth or witnessed children die,” she says. “We were doomed to accept it … so for me it’s very important to see this character not accepting it. And this film will piss people off. I know it has. Some people will be offended by the idea of replicating someone. But in fact, if you think about it, not in terms of sci-fi but just science, it’s a twin. That is really what it is. But people are not ready to accept that, yet.”

She’s right: they’re not. Cloning has proved a fertile subject in science fiction, in parallel with artificial intelligence. Both raise questions – potentially profound ones – about individuality and whether a clone is fully human. In Never Let Me Go, adapted for the screen from Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel by writer Alex Garland, clones are bred for replacement organs, raised in a kind of orphanage where they are allowed a rudimentary education only thanks to some vigorous campaigning by well-wishers. It is a strange half-life but they bend to its yoke, watching their lifelong intimates dwindle as their organs are removed until they have too few to survive, stoked with the sort of fatalism that is Ishiguro’s special stock in trade.

Julie Delpy and Sophia Ally in My Zoe.

Julie Delpy and Sophia Ally in My Zoe.

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In Michael Bay’s The Island (2005), the clones bred in an isolated compound are unaware that they are facsimiles of rich investors until Lincoln Six Echo (Ewan McGregor) starts remembering events and places from a world he has never seen. After some conclusive brain-probing by spooky Dr Merrick (Sean Bean), he hits on the truth of his beginnings. That puts him in danger. Together with Jordan Two Delta (Scarlett Johansson), who is about to be whisked away from the compound for “a holiday” to extract her liver, they find their way to the real world. Here, they expose the cloning racket, staying just one step ahead of its enforcers in a series of high-speed chases. In other words, they find their way into a loud, overwrought Michael Bay film, but only after raising the question of what counts as fully human.

The real question, of course, is whether “fully human” is what counts in the first place. The misfiring replicants in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner are figures of tragedy, programmed with human memories and fears that include the dreadful knowledge of their own imminent obsolescence. Science here has not merely stumbled into disaster; cruelty is part of the plan. Anyway, is a machine that has feelings still a machine? And if it is, what kinds of feelings and priorities might an autonomous machine have? Anyone who has seen Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey still shudders at the memory of HAL the computer refusing the captain’s command to open his spaceship’s doors. HAL is making its own decisions, but in line with an agenda we don’t understand. “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave” could be the seven scariest words in cinema.

Daniel Bruhl’s character in My Zoe recalls the sci-fi doctors of David Cronenberg.

Daniel Bruhl’s character in My Zoe recalls the sci-fi doctors of David Cronenberg.

Obviously, many of our fears about science – including technology and Big Pharma, which loom much larger than runaway spaceships in our current pantheon of terrors – are irrational, but irrational fears demand to be explored at least as much as reasonable ones.

The idea that Bill Gates is looking to inject us all with electronic chips is clearly crazy, but the primal fear of the body being pierced and invaded is undeniable: witness films such as Alien and Invasion of the Body Snatchers or the so-called “body horror” films of David Cronenberg.

Cronenberg’s early films mark out the territory, in fact, for many of the films that succeed them, including Little Joe. In Shivers (1975), Rabid (1977) and Dead Ringers (1988), he cooks up his attacks of parasitic worms and displays of weird gynaecological instruments in a succession of mysterious scientific establishments headed by dubious doctors, sometimes played by the director himself.

Even the Russian clinic in My Zoe suggests Cronenberg’s chilly world, despite Delpy’s professed belief in its fictitious goals, while Daniel Bruhl’s driven, ethically blurry doctor is straight from the Cronenberg playbook. It’s as if Bruhl couldn’t help himself. Thanks to Cronenberg, the so-called Baron of Blood, we all know what a sci-fi doctor is supposed to be like.

Cronenberg’s most commercial sci-fi film was The Fly (1986), in which Jeff Goldblum’s nerdy Seth Brundle works out how to merge two living beings at a cellular level and turns himself into a giant fly. Playing God is once again shown to be a disaster; Brundlefly is sexually rapacious and brimming with revolting body fluids, the lonely victim of his own intellectual hubris. And yet, there is the last vestige of his humanity — the glimmer in those giant multi-faceted eyes; the scientist’s fascination with his own transformation. It certainly feels wrong – a zoonotic nightmare, about to be let loose on the world – but at least we know what it is.

My Zoe is in limited release; Little Joe opens on July 1.

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