I Clone Bearing Memories

It probably shouldn't come as any surprise to anyone that I have a fondness for identifying tropes from TV shows and movies, and I enjoy reading about tropes that others have identified.  But although I also indulge in the inevitable smart-ass tone which attends the descriptions of such things, I usually have some appreciation for the dramatic, esthetic, and even sometimes financial, considerations behind the use of these devices.  Even as I smirk at the contrivance, I still understand why everyone who goes on a soul-searching road trip in a movie drives a classic convertible, (Unless it's a family trip.  Then they'll usually drive an old, lime green, station wagon or a comically impractical behemoth of an RV.)

There is however, one trope in particular which I'm completely mystified by.  I've noticed it in several movies in recent years, the idea of a clone having traces of memories from the original subject.  Now, bear in mind, I'm not talking about the old school, Gee Whiz Bang!, type of cloning here, the kind where the subject steps into a big silver contraption covered with dials and switches, and after a few seconds of banging hammers, popping springs, and slide whistles, they step out in a cloud of steam with their very own doppelganger.  As preposterous as such scenarios are, there's still a certain internal logic to the idea that the memories carry over.  Such cloning works on the principle of a copy machine, and if the machine makes a perfect replica of the body, then it figures that the mind would probably be copied as well.

No, I'm talking about the more modern variation, where the clone is grown in a lab from strands of hair or tissue samples.  Frequently...too frequently...in such stories there will be a "startling revelation" at some point that the clone somehow possesses fragments of memories from the original.  "Residual memories" they'll often call them, as though your memories could leave a residue in your fingernail clippings.  I'm not sure how even one screen writer could reach such an ignorant conclusion, and yet the idea pops up again and again as if it's transcribed from some underground Bible of Hollywood mythology.  I'm not sure if it's just a holdover from the old method, or the product of some kind of New Age mysticism about the endurance of the human spirit, but it makes about as much sense as thinking people have to be shrunk down before they can fit in my TV set.  Considering that we are all, in a sense, "cloned" from a combination of our parents' DNA, you'd have to wonder why all our dreams aren't troubled with memories of our own conception.

And yet the trope persists.  It has become nearly the fastest way of ruining a movie for me.  Well, it might not ruin the movie, but it does remove me from its reality.  Just as the film thinks it's laying this Earth-shattering twist on me, I'm just shaking my head in weary disbelief, sighing because it happened again.  And it pops up in quite a number of different ways, and it serves the story in different capacities.  I'm going to break these capacities down into the categories of character, plot, and theme, and provide an example of each. (Be warned: All these examples contain major spoilers of the movies in question!!)

CHARACTER

The creators of the film Alien Resurrection were faced with a bit of a problem.  How do you continue a franchise when your main heroine committed suicide by doing a back flip into a pool of molten metal in the previous movie?  They did what any self respecting film-makers would do when they had a cash cow that desperately needed milking.  They had her cloned by some shady government operatives in a plot to harvest the alien embryo that had been gestating inside of her before she died.  Now, we can try to just accept the notion that the alien's DNA was bound up with her own, just from having the embryo implanted in her chest.  Whatever, we'll roll with it.  But then there's a scene early on where the scientists are informing the top military guy in charge that the clone appears to have traces of Ripley's memories.  Dum-dum-dummmm. "Why does it have memories?", the military guy asks.

Why, indeed?  I would speculate that they did it for the sake of character continuity, and for the sake of the audience.  If Sigourney Weaver was going to reprise her role as Ripley, then they wanted to establish some connection to the character she had played in the past three films.  I'm not sure why they bothered though.  Ripley spends half the movie in a creepy daze; she barely has any dialogue, and she even has a strange affection for the aliens as part of her genetic bond with them...or something.  That couldn't be farther from the original character, who's defining attribute was pretty much her seething hatred of the aliens.  I cringe to think that they may have just included the cloning clause so that they could turn Ripley into a walking collection of clever sound bites for the movie trailer.

"So I hear you ran into these things before.  What'd you do?"

"I died."

Uggghhh.  Moving on.

PLOT

As a fan of the animated series, I found the live-action version of Aeon Flux to be a bit disappointing.  Like many film adaptations of TV shows which aren't helmed by the original creators and don't grow naturally out of the series' original run, Aeon Flux failed to capture the tone of the source material and only superficially built on the original concept.  The animated series featured a dark and grotesque dystopian future, a mechanized nightmare that felt inescapable.  The movie, on the other hand, featured a botanical paradise where the organic blended smoothly with the technology.  It had a somewhat appealing look, and some inventive ideas that would have been right at home in a video game, but it just wasn't the same.

But I digress.  The plot involves Aeon uncovering some tired conspiracy where they've been abducting people and cloning them and circulating the babies back into population.  It's kind of a human recycling program.  I'm not sure why this would come as a surprise to anyone as the human race had been sterile for centuries, but maybe I missed something.  At any rate, Aeon eventually discovers that those Random Flashes of Images (now there's a phrase that should be trademarked) are memories from a woman named Katherine who lived hundreds of years ago, memories which have piggy-backed on the DNA samples down through the ages to arrive in a bad movie.  Turns out this Katherine and the original of the main bad guy were married in some past pre-clone life, and...oh hell, let's just move on. 

THEME

Of the three movies discussed here, The Island is the only one to make a definite statement against cloning.  It tells the story of a society driven underground after a devastating plague.  They all eagerly wait for their name to be called in a lottery where they'll win a chance to go to "The Island", the last disease free place on Earth.  Or at least, that's what they want you to think.  Turns out the inhabitants of this underground complex are clones of people out in the real world, and the only place they go when they win the lottery is an operating room where they get their organs harvested.

The movie uses a couple of conceits to convey its anti-cloning message.  The head of the company tells his investors that the clones are kept in a persistent vegetative state, but he later confides in someone that they found the organs to be useless unless they came from living, conscious, active bodies.  This is what necessitates the society in the underground facility and the whole fiction of the Island and so on.  This comes off like a desperate contrivance to justify the plot, but it's probably the most realistic thing in the movie.  For the past few years, scientists have been trying to clone a meat substitute from cow DNA, which they call "smeat."  The problem is that this smeat has the consistency of gelatinous goo.  It doesn't have any muscle tone because it doesn't come off of a living, active cow.

Less realistic are the dreams of one of the clones, Lincoln Six Echo.  It turns out these Random Flashes of Images are memories from his counterpart in the real world.  I file this under theme, because I think they're trying to make some sort of statement about cloning and the soul and...I don't know.  But I'm afraid they also threw it in to explain why Lincoln is such a quick study in the fast-paced action scenes.  Turns out the real Tom Lincoln is a bit of a "petrohead."  This is a Michael Bay film after all, and we all know he's a bit of a "dickhead."  So yeah, things get a little muddled.  He even throws in one of those "I'm not a number; I'm a name; Kunta Kinte" sequences, but it's so mishandled that it lands like an incomprehensible dud.  It comes off as tacked on, and when you come right down to it, the "Lincoln" part of his name is just as much a matter of bureaucratic filing as the "Six Echo" part.  I guess you'd have to see the movie to know what I'm talking about.  But then, if you haven't seen the movie, then you shouldn't be reading this anyway.  Don't say I didn't warn you!!