Body, Space, and Ontology in Duncan Jones' Moon and Mark Romanek's

18 Politics of Place • Technology • Issue 02 Politics of Place • Technology • Issue 02 19 Clonetrolling the Future: Body, Space, and Ontology in Duncan Jones’ Moon and Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go by Scott Sundvall 20 Politics of Place • Technology • Issue 02 Politics of Place • Technology • Issue 02 21 Introduction: A Science Fiction (That Is Not) Virilio’s “dromology”, etc.), or in related potential of cloning to produce a cinematic can be appropriated by a ruling class, fields of theoretical inquiry (Marshall representation of a (dubiously dubbed) and how such can be used for the spatial “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it McLuhan’s “global village”, Gregory Ulmer’s “dysoptian” future (what tragically could-be management of such “producing-bodies”, the is because Fiction is obliged to stick to “electracy”, Mark Hansen’s new philosophy as predicated upon what-already-is).3 The ethical and political dimensions of the film possibilities; Truth isn’t” — Mark Twain for new media, etc.), but in contemporary “dystopic” tenor of either film4, however, must be approached in a radical manner: the In the most radical sense, we can consider technological developments themselves. cannot be reduced to an attack on cloning complete rethinking of “our” very ontological 6 science fiction (or speculative fiction) as the Many of these technological developments technology itself—nor on technology in grounding. Nonetheless, in both films a representational harbouring of utopia and continue to expand and revise the any sense, most broadly conceived. Rather, political management of space, boundaries, dystopia, even and especially as “utopias previously understood boundaries of the the narrative of the films use (the potential and territorialization is what (re)produces and dystopias are histories of the present” human body: cochlear implants, prosthetic of) cloning, in conjunction with spatial such ontological questions / ruptures / (Gordin, Prakash, and Tilley 1). SF produces legs, artificial hearts, bionic limbs, even methods of control, to call into question dystopias: appropriation and control of utopias/dystopias in terms of the historical digital cameras implanted in the back power, class and, most importantly, “our” certain technologies (such as cloning) and 2 present insofar as it grounds one foot in the of heads. The development of cloning, ontological status itself. space can afford a categorical, ontological however, might arguably be the one most re-grounding of desired interest. actual present (what is) and another in the In this sense, both films function as “‘critical “conditions of possibility” (what could be) wrought with philosophical and political implication (and consequence). dystopia[s]’, which act as warnings, through an In other words, the ethical and political (Mannheim). As such, if we take Bernard ‘if this goes on’ principle” (Milner 109).5 Again, question of “what is a human right?” loses Stiegler’s claim of a modern technological In any event, the technological developments the “if this goes on” principle present in both its valency when one can reframe the redoubling seriously, as something which calling into question the legible status of the films does not concern cloning or technology ontological question of “what is a human?” is causing a phenomenological and “human” in general—cloning in particular, in general; it concerns the appropriation of If the answer to the latter is “the subject ontological disorientation, then the recent or at least most conspicuously—have such technologies in a particular way, and in question is not human”, as we find in re-emergence of SF as a popular and been addressed and/or represented in a by power structures already well-woven into both Moon and Never Let Me Go, then the commercially successful genre makes good long list of SF works over the past several our social and political fabric. By examining former question becomes meaningless. This 1 sense. We find evidence of this redoubling decades. Specifically, both Duncan Jones’ the manner in which cloning technologies is why we give ontological priority to the not just in various iterations of philosophy Moon and Mark Romanek’s Never Let of technology (Stiegler, Martin Heidegger’s Me Go use the philosophical and political question concerning technology, Paul 3 Jones’ Moon, which serves as his directorial debut, opened at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. Filmed in a little over a month on a $5 million budget, it met favorable reviews from critics. Romanek’s Never Let Me Go, based on Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel of the same name, 1 Bernard Stiegler’s Technics and Time volumes (particularly the first and second) note the emergence of meaningful “being” as inextricably operated on a $15 million budget and premiered at the Telluride Film Festival. It also received positive reviews. connected to the inauguration of technics, particularly language (which affords memory, punctuated temporality and spatial delimitation, 4 [N.B. Permission was not obtained from FOX for the reproduction of still images from Never Let Me Go; only images from Moon are history). As such, the proper ontological constitution of “being” is oriented by and with technics. Modern technological development, reproduced in this essay. –Ed.] however, has progressed at such a speed that “man” cannot “think” it as quickly as it emerges and moves, creating a rupture of sorts: an ontological and phenomenological “disorientation”. 5 Andrew Milner, who here is referring to Fredric Jameson’s two categories of dystopia, situates “critical dystopia” from “‘anti-utopia’, which declares utopia as impossible” (109). 2 Wafaa Bilal, a New York University Arts Professor, had a camera implanted on the back of his head as a performative gesture. It should further be noted that the above list says nothing of our everyday immersion in digital technologies: smart phones, laptops, face-to-face 6 For the purposes of this analysis, I use the term “producing-bodies” in a rather specific sense: the production of bodies (and body parts) communication interfaces and, recently, Google glasses, to name a few examples. by way of cloning; the use of these bodies (and body parts) to then (re)produce. 22 Politics of Place • Technology • Issue 02 Politics of Place • Technology • Issue 02 23 dystopic questions and warnings posed by Before departing into the films, in their more traditional—the “alien body” (119-141), entirely. Or, at least, we are concerned with both films, though both are nonetheless specificity, we might pause to consider the or the “android” (141). Granted, this might the SF representation of such. inflected by techno-spatial, political limitations of a fair cross-section of seminal largely be attributed to the fact that Jameson’s arrangements of power and discourse. In SF criticism and theory, at least for our concern rests more with the practical, political Keeping this in mind, Never Let Me Go this sense, we arrive at a “dystopia…[that] intents and purposes. Much of SF, and its dimensions of SF narratives, rather than unfolds as a revisionist history SF film: in is a utopia that has gone wrong; or a utopia correlating criticism and theory, operates questions of the ontological in and of itself. In 1952 certain medical developments have that functions only for a particular segment by way of metaphor and metonymy: Don any case, it does not provide sufficient critique enabled people to live well beyond 100 years of society” (Gordin, Prakash, and Tilley Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers of the instance in which the human confronts old. This comes at a great cost, though: the 1). In this sense, we will approach these as an expression of the Red Scare; Neill its otherwise-own-self as ontologically Other, fictional social field clones a small portion two films as representational shifts from Blomkamp’s District 9 as an alien-infused even if this concerns arrangements of class of the population, and these children clones the Foucaldian “disciplinary society” to a representation of xenophobia; Jean- and power, as it does in our two films of study. are raised in isolated boarding schools for Deleuzian “control society”, and not just Luc Godard’s Alphaville as a warning of the eventual donation of organs and body in the political sense of the management totalitarian governments, so on and so Scott Bukatman’s Terminal Identity offers a parts, until “completion” (death). While of subjects, but further in the ontological forth. This tendency towards hermeneutic more promising avenue for our pursuits: post- many such boarding schools exist, we sense of what constitutes a “subject” as decoding, however, does little more than modernity, and its representation in various find that our protagonists (Kathy, Tommy, such. Likewise, we will explore the emerging merely decode (this means that; this is like SF narratives, has radically rethought the and Ruth) attend one of the most unique— paradigm shift from an ethics and ontology that), and provides us with little recourse for relationship between technology and subject, Hailsham. Although Kathy and Tommy of “humanism” to that of “post-humanism”, the philosophically generative work called to such a degree that there no longer exists exchange signs of affection at an early age, as it concerns the films and beyond. for in Moon and Never Let Me Go. an essential separation between the two. Tommy eventually ends up dating Ruth. Bukatman’s work here, then, definitely lends The three nonetheless continue travelling Fredric Jameson’s comprehensive and itself less to a hermeneutic analysis, and more together after Hailsham, eventually split informative Archaeologies of the Future, to a generative heuristics. While the text thus up, reunite and, after Ruth “completes”, Out-There/In-Here: Extension and on the other hand, not only rethinks and does a rigorous job of detailing the emerging Tommy and Kathy enjoy a brief romantic Intensity, and the Spatial Logic of renews the possibility and potential of the “virtual subject”, we are not concerned with period.

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