Copycats
Attack of the clones.

By Kimberly Chun

MAYBE KINKOS HAD its finger on the cultural pulse all along, with its brightly lit, cookie-cutter ambience where you can fire off thousands of copies for pennies at any time of day or night. The horror, the horror. In an age when everything seems disposable, everything can be copied, pasted, and reproduced en masse, and big-box stores keep rolling out ever handier paper shredders, it shouldn't be a surprise that terror should start to come in multiple copies. To blatantly cop Walter Benjamin's title, you might call it horror in the age of mechanical reproduction.

After all, we're already afraid someone will get hold of our names, social security numbers, bank account passwords, and therefore, identities. We're not even going to go into the waxy sequel buildup, but it makes a perverse kind of sense that in Solaris, the ultimate evil, the dirtiest deed, an entire planet can inflict on a poor astro-psychologist is to replicate his dead wife ad infinitum. Director Steven Soderbergh plays the climax for maximum horror when the shrink wakes to see three versions of his domestic goddess orbiting his bunk in what might have seemed like the lead-in to some miserably tone-deaf "take my wife, please" joke.

Adaptation toyed with copies too: the terror of copying or translating a book, The Orchid Thief, into a screenplay and then presumably into a film, as well as the horrific implosion of multiple levels of reality; two versions, one tortured, the other complacent, of a writer, both portrayed by Nicolas Cage; and at least two or three versions of a romantic obsession. At the heart of the survival-of-the-fittest-copy exercise about the frustration of "reproduction," writer's block, and creative constipation: orchids and their everyday genetic replication or cloning. It doesn't take a major leap to imagine an Adaptation sequel following screenwriter-protagonist Charles Kaufman as he genetically sutures the orchid "hall of clones" in Susan Orlean's Orchid Thief to the secret replicate army of Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones to get a hybrid blockbuster with both brains and brawn.

Maybe the proliferation of clones springs from a desire for authenticity, some essential post-postmodern core that can't be reproduced into triviality. Maybe we dread waking to find ourselves face to face with our cloned selves, complete with "improvements" such as a good attitude or a nice new human ear planted on the back. Meanwhile The Ring proposes a quick fix: duplication as a way to stave off the deadly wrath of the demonic girl-artist who just wants to spread her bad short student films hither and yon. Piracy issues be damned, you just can't beat that kind of distribution.