Biopolitical Resistance is impossible – it’s the stuff of film.

This thesis explores the ways in which contemporary science fiction cinema represent the politicization of human biological life. The philosophical concept which discusses this issue is known as biopolitics and it underpins the theoretical framework of my thesis. The simplest definition of biopolitics is that authorities in power treat individuals and populations as biological entities in order to control, protect and regulate them. Biopolitics is an important concept because many contemporary global issues such as security, migration, health and biotechnology are biopolitical in nature. Three influential contemporary philosophers who have explored this concept are Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito. Relevant sections of the writings of these philosophers are interpreted in Chapter 1. In this thesis, I analyze four important blockbuster science fiction films: The Island, V for Vendetta, Children of Men and 28 Weeks Later using the arguments of these philosophers. The above mentioned films are selected because they each highlight a specific biopolitical issue: biotechnology (The Island), security and terrorism (V for Vendetta), migration and asylum seeking (Children of Men) and responses to pandemics (28 Weeks Later). The main argument of my thesis is centred on the questions of resistance raised by both the philosophers and the films. As I have explained in detail in the thesis, Foucault, Agamben and Esposito feel that biopolitics has become too pervasive in contemporary society and they question (to varying degrees) whether any form of active resistance is if at all possible. Foucault suggests that perhaps we have to promote new forms of subjectivity and based on my understanding of his arguments, this is the closest he reaches to raising the idea of the possibility of resistance. Agamben and Esposito claim that any active form of resistance to biopolitics should take into account the indistinguishable characteristic of biology and politics and must therefore question the biologization of politics as a starting point. However, the films represent resistance in different ways. In these films, resistance takes the form of overthrowing a regime, or an institution or the form of a scientific solution. The films do not take into account the pervasive nature of biopolitics as explained by the philosophers convey the idea that resistance is simple and will always be possible. Although these films identify with contemporary biopolitics and raise ethical questions about some of these practices, I feel that it is in their representations of resistance that the films fail in influencing audiences to realize the inherence of biopolitics in the contemporary world and how difficult it is to actually resist this form of power. These films do not question, unlike the philosophers, whether any active form of resistance to biopolitics lies in resisting the reduction of individuals to biological entities which are then politically managed. They also do not show how difficult it is to really resist biopolitics. Through this process, these films ultimately pacify audiences and function as a form of biopolitics themselves. These points will be illustrated in detail through the analyses of the four films in Chapter 2 (The Island), Chapter 3 (V for Vendetta), Chapter 4 (Children of Men) and Chapter 5 (28 Weeks Later)