The Sixth Day

written in 2000

THE 6TH DAY: the individual in the age of mechanical reproduction

"If all your senses tell you you have a hot chick on your lap, then you have a hot chick on your lap."
-Hank Morgan, defending his virtual girlfriend to his best friend, Adam Gibson

Cross Ray Bradbury with Philip K. Dick, add a bit of J.G. Ballard, replace intelligent reasoning with lots of big explosions and pop-science, and you get The 6th Day. Adam Gibson(Arnold Schwarzenegger) is very much a Philip K. Dick character, living his life as always has, until one day, suddenly, his life is dramatically altered as he finds himself fighting against unknown forces. One cannot help but be reminded of Dick's Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, in which the main character loses all marks of his identity as his past is erased and learns that he has never existed, as he frantically scrambles to put his life back together.

In The 6th Day, Gibson's past is not erased, but rather duplicated. In order to cover up the murder and consequent cloning of Dr. Drucker, head of Replacement Laboratories, his personal guards decide to clone the dead pilot who was also killed by the same activist. They believe the pilot is Adam Gibson, so they clone him, yet it is his friend Hank Morgan who is dead, because he was doing Adam a birthday favor by taking Adam's shift. By the time Drucker's men realize their mistake, they have one too many Adams on their hands who must be killed in order to keep their illegal human cloning activities secret.

Adam is portrayed as a clean-cut, honest family man who has a happy suburban life, and a job that he enjoys (while his friend Hank is implied to be more of a loser). Adam is old-fashioned, he believes that when you die you die, and that's it; he does not look pleased about the fact that nacho bananas exist (thanks to the bioengineering of Replacement Technologies), nor does he initially want to get a RePet to replace Oliver, the family dog.

The 6th Day begins a brief semi-fictitious history of cloning, starting with God's creation of Man on the sixth day, mentioning Dolly, the first successfully cloned sheep, the Human Genome Project, and ending with the failed human cloning experiment and the subsequent ban on any further development in that area. We are witnessing "the near future, sooner than (we) think," where human cloning, after an unsuccessful effort, has been banned, but genetically modified foods and cloned pets ('RePets') are a part of everyday life. "What kind of banana do you want?" asks Clara, Adam's daughter, "Nacho or regular?" right before she announces that she wants a SimPal.

Bots and Dolls

Sindy the SimPal, an emotive doll, is not too far removed from MIT's Kismet, only with skin. It has humanoid features that hide a metal frame, and incessantly repeats her wish to be your friend, evoking the 'unheimlich' Freud was talking about. The filmmakers capitalize on the creepiness/annoyance factor of the doll, of course: she 'dies' by having her head blown off by one of the assasins, and as it (the head) lies on the pavement, we hear her voice say: "I have a boo-boo."

Sindy has no aspirations for becoming human; the sole purpose of her existence is to entertain. On the other hand, the clones assume the lives of their previous DNA and memory donors, and illegally 'pass off' as humans, while the law classifies them as sub-humans to be terminated if found out. The first clone we are introduced to, Johnny Phoenix, is a football star for the Roadrunners, owned by Replacement Technologies. Johnny gets a fatal injury during a game, and is promptly and secretly replaced.

Of course, the original Phoenix has been dead for a few years already. His data, stored in Replacement Technologies, however, allows a clone to be created in just a few hours, complete with memories of the dead one up to the moment of death (even though the recorded version of his memory predates his death). Like his name suggests, Johnny rises from his own ruins, strong and brand-new. Or not quite exactly, because the film reveals that the evil Drucker (Gates's long-lost twin?) codes congenital diseases into the DNA of the clones to ensure their compliance, and to get rid of them if they are a disaster. With planned obsolescence built-in, clones can only live up to five years (similarly, the androids in Blade Runner, another Philip K. Dick creation, have to be taken out before they got their own minds, memories and emotions, before there is any risk of non-compliance). The science of genetic engineering, it seems, has been perfected to such a degree in the "near future, sooner than (we) think," errors only occur if they are introduced by hand.

The film has several logical flaws (see above), but also a lot of interesting details constructing the future in which Adam and his family live. Hank's virtual girlfriend is a cross between William Gibson's Idoru, as she flickers as a non-embodied holographic image, and a Playboy centerfold acting out a fifties housewife. "I taped your favorite sports shows for you Hank," she coos as he comes in, "Can we watch them together?" In Idoru, William Gibson's virtual idol has a personality, one that evolves and grows more complex over time. She is not merely a construct engineered to fulfill male fantasies, but very much a woman with emotions, ideas and perceptions. On the other hand, the virtual girlfriend in The 6th Day is a puppet, an bot that is only there to serve, and has no desires or ideas of her own. (In Bots, Andrew Leonard defines a bot as "a supposedly intelligent software program that is autonomous, is endowed with personality, and usually, but not always, performs a service.") The virtual girlfriend's function is to be pretty, compliant, sexy, and to keep company. In that sense, she can be regarded as a pet in humanoid form, yet not in flesh, due to bans on human cloning.

Welcome to the Future

The near future we see in the film is all about better living through circuitry. Adam Gibson (Schwarzenegger) is a pilot for a company that organizes extreme snowboarding tours, with a loving wife and daughter. He reorders his milk when the touchscreen on his refrigerator warns that they're running low, does his shopping at a mall whose ceiling is decorated by a holo-aquarium with colorful fish, as ads flash through. His best friend Hank cannot stop talking about his virtual girlfriend who is always in a good mood, sexy, attentive to his every need, never complains, and whom he can shut off with the flick of a hand.

Adam, however, is not sure if this is necessarily better living. He is uncomfortable with the virtual girlfriend, and is strongly opposed to cloning the family pet, Oliver, that has to be put to sleep, even if it is to spare his daughter's feelings: "It's the natural process of life; she has to learn someday!" And though he flies a helicopter that can be remote-controlled with sophisticated technology, on land, he drives a late 50s Chevy, complete with tailfins, which would be more than six decades old in the "near future, sooner than (we) think."

The future presented in The 6th Day is ambiguous: it can be read both as dystopian or utopian, depending on your disgust or indifference towards bioengineering and modification. We find out that the world's salmon supply has dwindled to next to nothing, but thanks to Replacement Technologies, there are all kinds of bioengineered food, all the better to feed the world's hungry population with. Replacement Technologies is also the proud owner of RePet, cloning family pets that die, so you never have to miss them. They are also responsible for a lot of organ transplants, human tissue grown from monkeys, "helping humans live longer, healthier lives."

On the other hand, there is the implied existence of a strict, if not oppressive, government that decides what's good for its citizens. The way Adam's wife talks about smoking a cigar in the garage, we realize it is illegal. Likewise, drug testing at work, which can be considered an invasion of privacy, has become an common occurence, so much so that Adam shrugs when he finds out that they're being tested that day. Their dog Oliver is put to sleep at the vet because the law states that any animal with a viral infection must be terminated.

This aspect of the film is problematic, since it draws a parallel between cigarette bans and cloning bans. It seems to imply that the government is a nostalgic, old-fashioned, timid entity that does not allow humanity to do as it pleases, and thereby takes out all the fun and excitement from living, standing in the way of the promise of immortality. The oppressive government, The 6th Day says, is paternalistic and limiting, has fascist tendencies, so who are they to say that human cloning is not beneficial, and poses a threat? After all, the average moviegoer is supposed to think, the government banned cigarettes in public places in the late twentieth century, and in the film it apparently led to the outlawing of tobacco altogether-what next, a ban on human cloning?

Ultimately, the film succeeds, whether it means to or not, in breaking your resistance against human cloning, and at $ 1.5 million a pop, it sure ain't cheap. According to the 6th Day, cloning is 100% successful (well, 100% percent unless Arnold Schwarzenegger is wreaking havoc in your lab as youÕre trying to get your clone done before you die for good). All clones pick up seamlessly where their previous version left off, with no loss of memory leading up to the moment of death. Personally, at some point I stopped caring whether if the original Adam or the clone Adam lived (or neither, for that matter). But the creators of The 6th Day realized that was a problem, the indifference towards choosing between a clone or human, so they threw in The 6th Day Law. Therefore, if the clone, but not the real Adam lives, as soon as he is found out by the authorities, he will be killed as he does not have basic human rights. And, we are told, there is a way to tell them apart-through the tiny dot inside the clone's eyelid! I'll keep that in mind on my next visit to the optometrician. Who knows, I might end up having to kill her if she finds out too much.

© 2000 Melis Alemdar. Comments? Email me.

/End The Sixth Day Review