W I N T E R 2011
the soma people use in Brave New World. They soon enough connect something like sexual exclusivity and personal love on their own, and that’s neither encouraged nor discouraged. Freed from social and biological necessity yet fully self‐conscious, they enjoy what we might regard as an unrealistically high level of sexual freedom. The donor‐clones’ sexual lives are unregulated, because there’s no need to regulate them for them to perform their social function. They show us, then, what human life might be like if we continue down to the end of the road of detaching sex from reproduction. It won’t be a world full of unobsessive enjoyment; jealousy and intimacy will re‐ main, but it will also be a melancholic world of displaced or undi‐ rected and misunderstood longing. Sex separated from reproduction remains haunted by death and the personal longings associated by reproduction. The clones in school are close to regular kids, having all the virtues and vices of highly self‐conscious and relational (and so polymor‐ phously erotic) persons. It seems, at first, that they’re very short on the various human longings for personal greatness or even political freedom, but the undirected anger—sometimes literally howling—of one of the boys shows that he knows he’s been deprived of a purpose to channel his spiritedness. He manages to take a kind of perverse pride—when half‐dead—in being a particularly hardy and so pro‐ ductive donor. The girls know they’ve been deprived of being and having chil‐ dren. They especially long for parents, and they sometimes obses‐ sively search for the persons on whom they were modeled—one girl pages through porn magazines looking for a woman with her body. They are haunted by the truth that they’ve been modeled on “trash” to be less than trash, even less than slaves (who, even in our South, couldn’t be used this way). They know they live in a world in which no one can care for them but themselves, but that doesn’t mean they live without personal love. The donor‐clones care about their “status” or personal significance in each others’ eyes, but they’re imperfectly yet genuinely resigned to the fact that they have no status—and so no recognition of who they really are—with anyone else. It’s not clear for most of the film why they’re educated not only to read but to create art and poetry in an environment where they can cultivate personal attachments as social beings. We eventually learn that this is the first and last school devoted to the ethical raising of 93