Embodied Genetics in Science-Fiction, Big-Budget to Low-Budget: from Jeunet’s Alien: Resurrection (1997) to Piccinini’s Workshop (2011)

The article uses and revises to some extent Vivian Sobchack’s categorization of (basically) American science-fiction output as “optimistic big-budget,” “wondrous middle-ground” and “pessimistic low-budget” seen as such in relation to what Sobchack calls the “double view” of alien beings in filmic diegesis (Screening Space, 2001). The argument is advanced that based on how diegetic encounters are constructed between “genetically classical” human agents and beings only partially “genetically classical” and/or human (due to genetic diseases, mutations, splicing, and cloning), we may differentiate between various methods of visualization (nicknamed “the museum,” “the lookalike,” and “incest”) that are correlated to Sobchack’s mentioned categories, while also displaying changes in tone. Possibilities of revision appear thanks to the later timeframe (the late 1990s/2000s) and the different national-canonical belongings (American, Icelandic-German- Danish, Hungarian-German, Canadian-French-American, and Australian) that characterize filmic and artistic examples chosen for analysis as compared to Sobchack’s work in Screening Space.1