What are the psychological consequences of seeing oneself as a vehicle hosting selfish genes that would eventually destroy the body? Does that make one see a pregnancy as the gene’s victory? Or the host’s free will? Can a “vehicle” even claim to have a free will or have reproductive desires been confiscated by these little selfish replicators?
There is something frightening in Dawkins’ theory as this approach somewhat disconnects us from our bodies. Is our anatomy managed by an independent agency with a different agenda? It brings to mind the anxiety illustrated by the concoction of science fiction and horror in Ridley Scott’s Alien, a film “about human loneliness amid the emptiness and amorality of creation.” (Andrew O’Hehir)
In his book On Film (2002) Stephen Malhall interprets the story of the alien that infiltrates the body only to grow its own parasitical offsprings, whose birth kills the host body, as an investigation “into the condition of sequeldom,” namely the limitations and possibilities internal to the inheritance of “a particular set of characters in a particular narrative universe”(5) “what-mythologically speaking-endows Ripley with her drive for survival is herresolute repression of her drive to reproduce; and in this respect, she exists in utter opposition to the alien’s incarnation of that drive. In other words, to become capable and worthy of vanquishing her opponent, she must sever the connection between femaleness, heterosexual intercourse and fertility- she must, in short, deny her body’s openness to maternity” (25).
Does the modern-day-myth of the Alien series conclude that self inflicted infertility equals victory over the harmful monsters who seized our bodies?
Slavoj Zizek writes about the internal parasite alien in Finney’s The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In this story a town is taken over by the aliens who penetrated and colonized human bodies, controlling them from within: although the aliens look and act exactly like humans, there is as a rule a tiny detail which betrays their true nature (a strange glimpse in their eyes; too much skin between their fingers or between their ears and heads). This detail, according to Zizek, is “the Lacanian objet petit a, a tiny feature whose presence magically transubstantiates its bearer into an alien. In contrast to Scott’s alien who is totally different from humans, the difference is here minimal, barely perceptible.”
This objet petit, could it now represent a mutation? A devilish selfish gene? Do carriers feel like their bodies have been snatched?
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