Orphan Black

Description

This book presents a groundbreaking exploration of the hit television series Orphan Black and the questions it raises for performance and technology, gender and reproduction and biopolitics and community. 



Contributors come from a range of backgrounds and explore the digital innovations and technical interactions between human and machine that allow the show to challenge conventional notions of performance and identity, address family themes, and Orphan Black’s own textual genealogy within the contexts of science, reproductive technology and the politics of gender, and extend their inquiry to the broader question of community in a "posthuman" world of biopolitical power. Mobilizing philosophy, history of science and literary theory, scholars analyze the ways in which Orphan Black depicts resistance to the many forms of power that attempt to capture, monitor and shape life today.

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Andrea Goulet and Robert A. Rushing

Part One: Performance/Technology/Gender

Gesture in Orphan Black

David F. Bell

Playing with TechnoDollies: The TV Actress and Other Technologies

Christopher Grobe

Animating Cloning: Special Effects and Mediated Bodies in Orphan Black and Jurassic Park

Simon Porzak

Watching While (Face) Blind: Clone Layering and Prosopagnosia

Sharrona Pearl

Part Two: Reproduction/Biopolitics/Community

Game of Clones: Orphan Black’s Family Romance

John C. Stout

Orphan Black and the Ideology of DNA

Hilary Neroni

Being Together: Immunity and Community in Orphan Black

Jessica Tanner

The Dancing Women: Decoding Biopolitical Fantasy

Robert A. Rushing

The Replicant’s ‘Réplique’: Motherhood and the Posthuman Family as Resistance in Orphan Black

Andrea Goulet

Afterword: Reflections on the Show, and Interviews with Cast, Crew and Creators

Lili Loofbourow

Appendix: Orphan Black Episodes 203

References 207

Notes on Contributors 217

Index

Sujets

• Cinéma
• Cinéma
• Cinéma
• Cinema
• Film
• Reproduction
• ART
• Digital
• Electronic
• Technologie
• Identity
• General
• Anarchy
• Community
• Technology
• Video
• General officer
• Digital Innovations
• Motherhood

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 15 janvier 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781783209231
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2018 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2018 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2018 Intellect Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Cover designer: Aleksandra Szumlas
Indexer: Max Alvarez
Production manager: Naomi Curston
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-922-4
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-924-8
ePUB ISBN: 978-1-78320-923-1
Printed and bound by Hobbs, UK.
Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction
Andrea Goulet and Robert A. Rushing
Part One: Performance/Technology/Gender
Gesture in Orphan Black
David F. Bell
Playing with TechnoDollies: The TV Actress and Other Technologies
Christopher Grobe
Animating Cloning: Special Effects and Mediated Bodies in Orphan Black and Jurassic Park
Simon Porzak
Watching While (Face) Blind: Clone Layering and Prosopagnosia
Sharrona Pearl
Part Two: Reproduction/Biopolitics/Community
Game of Clones: Orphan Black ’s Family Romance
John C. Stout
Orphan Black and the Ideology of DNA
Hilary Neroni
Being Together: Immunity and Community in Orphan Black
Jessica Tanner
The Dancing Women: Decoding Biopolitical Fantasy
Robert A. Rushing
The Replicant’s ‘ Réplique ’: Motherhood and the Posthuman Family as Resistance in Orphan Black
Andrea Goulet
Afterword: Reflections on the Show, and Interviews with Cast, Crew and Creators
Lili Loofbourow
Appendix: Orphan Black Episodes
References
Notes on Contributors
Index
Acknowledgements

My thanks go first to my co-editor Rob Rushing, and to our shared diasporic UIUC community of colleagues and friends; I feel incredibly lucky to have begun my career in such an enriching intellectual environment. I am also grateful to the support I have received at the University of Pennsylvania, from individuals in my department as well as colleagues involved with the Mellon-funded Humanities + Urbanism + Design interdisciplinary faculty programme. Rob and I both appreciate the professionalism of the editorial staff at Intellect Books and would like also to thank the external readers of our manuscript for their expert advice. And finally, a note of gratitude to my family – Jed, Jonah and Maya – for their patience with someone who tries to embody the best bits (without too much of the craziness) of Alison, Sarah, etc. Clone Club, this volume is dedicated to you!
A.G.
I’d like to thank the very large community of family (especially Lilya and Sasha), friends, colleagues and students – sestras , all – who have joined me in watching and thinking about Orphan Black . I’ve twice had the good fortune to teach the show, once to graduate students in a seminar on film, television and biopolitics, and once to undergraduates as part of the University of Illinois Campus Honors Program. Both times I managed to make quite a few ‘converts’ to the show (Helena will do that to people), but as with all good students, I learned more than I taught. This is even more true of our fantastic contributors, whose delightful work I’d like to acknowledge here, as well. And, of course, I’d like to particularly thank my co-editor Andrea, who suggested this project in the first place, and who led the way to a panel at the American Comparative Literature Association’s annual conference. This is our second collaboration in the last fifteen years – may it not be our last!
R.R.
Introduction

Andrea Goulet and Robert A. Rushing
O rphan Black begins with a twist. Anglo-Canadian punk-rocker and occasional con artist Sarah Manning is waiting on a train platform when she notices a well-dressed woman behaving suspiciously. She watches as the woman paces nervously, removes her high-heeled pumps, and places her purse against a pillar in the middle of the platform. When Sarah realizes that the woman is about to leap in front of an oncoming express train, it’s too late to stop her. In the moment before the woman leaps, the two make eye contact for the first time, revealing something apparently impossible: this stranger has Sarah’s own face. Over the next episodes, Sarah flees her former life as a petty criminal and her incompetent drug-dealing boyfriend by taking on the identity of her previously unknown twin, Beth Childs, a well-off policewoman with a hunky boyfriend named Paul.
This twist may be surprising, but it is hardly unprecedented for contemporary television viewers. Just two years before Orphan Black premiered, the series Ringer (2011–12) had featured Sarah Michelle Gellar as Bridget, a recovering drug addict and former stripper with a twin whose mysterious suicide allows Bridget to insert herself into her sister’s wealthy and upstanding life. The shared premise of the two shows requires a certain degree of what we might call ‘meta-acting’, or acting about acting, since the actor (Maslany, Gellar) must play not only two separate characters, but also one character acting as the other. Of course, the premise also gratifies a fantasy about class mobility for young women: it is not an accident that both shows centre on the sister who is down and out (and single) moving into a life of comparative wealth, social status and romantic-sexual satisfaction. Even so, Ringer met with only middling reviews (although Gellar was generally praised for her portrayal of the twins) and was cancelled twice, while Orphan Black earned a steadily growing reputation and a good deal of popular press coverage, culminating in Tatiana Maslany’s Emmy win for Best Actress at the end of the show’s fourth season. The reasons for Orphan Black ’s success and Ringer ’s failure are no doubt legion, but it is worth noting that although Orphan Black begins with the same premise, it immediately multiplies it: yes, Sarah Manning discovers that she has a twin sister, Beth Childs, but she soon – and surprisingly – meets another ‘twin’, the German Katja Obinger; then the Canadian soccer mom Alison Hendrix; the Bay Area scientist Cosima Niehaus; the mad Ukrainian assassin Helena; the list goes on. If, on the one hand, the show exacerbates the ‘twin sister’ premise, it also deforms it. Unlike in Ringer , Orphan Black ’s clone sisters are not merely somewhat different – they are radically different in appearance, personality, beliefs. Orphan Black weighed in early and often on the nature versus nurture debate, always taking the side of the environment’s role in shaping the individual, emphasizing two ideas from Darwin’s The Origin of Species that also appeared as episode titles in the first season: ‘Variation Under Nature’ and ‘Endless Forms Most Beautiful’ (see Neroni in this volume on Orphan Black ’s opposition to the ideology of DNA as our ‘true self’).
As a result of this emphasis on expressive diversity, Orphan Black rapidly turned into a playground for virtuoso performances about performance. Tatiana Maslany’s individual creations were such complete individuals that it was often difficult to remember that they were played by the same actress (see Pearl’s and Bell’s essays in this volume). Many of the clones are called on, at various times, to impersonate the others, requiring a kind of second-order virtuosity from Maslany, who must play a role on top of a role; these ‘clone swaps’ are successful, but not perfectly so, since some of the traits of the clone who is impersonating her sister should remain. It is, if you like, a deliberately slightly awkward performance. And this kind of performance can be varied, multiplied. Indeed, in the fourth episode of the first season (‘Effects of External Conditions’), there is a sequence in which Helena poses as Sarah posing as Beth, and these ‘clone swaps’ quickly became a favourite with viewers. 1 Indeed, everyone on the show imitates, performs: Cosima briefly impersonates Dr Leekie in 2.3 (throughout this volume we will refer to episodes thusly, by season number and episode number; an appendix at the end of the volume lists all of the episodes and gives important information such as director, screenwriter and original air date); Felix pretends to be straight in 3.8; Mark poses as Rudy in 3.10; Donnie pretends to be Felix’s gay partner in 4.4; Siobhan Sadler (better known to viewers as ‘Mrs S’ poses as a psychologist in 5.4 and so on. (The uninitiated shouldn't worry: these characters will be introduced in detail later.)
There is another layer of performance at work in the show, this time technical, and apparent in the scenes in which the clone sisters interact with each other. In the past, such doubling of actors relied largely on split screen technology, which required that the actor gives two performances that remained also physically separate. (Such scenes often have a forced artificiality to them.) But as two of this volume’s contributors (Grobe and Porzak) discuss in some detail, Maslany has also mastered a different, third-order kind of performance, in which she acts with a body double and special technology that repeats camera movements identically take after take, allowing the footage to be put together later digitally so as to create a scene in which Maslany appears in multiple character roles, each interacting with the others in complex and highly realistic ways. The finale of Season 2, for example, famously concludes with a ‘clone dance party’ in which all four of the principal clone sisters as well as Felix (Sarah’s foster brother) and Kira (Sarah’s young daughter) meet in Felix’s apartment and dance together. All the bodies and objects interact with each other, showcasing not only each clone’s absolutely individual style of dancing but also Maslany