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The Clone Master (1978)




Two scientists are working secretly to clone humans for what they assume is a secret government project. They receive suitcases full of money from their 'contact' who is then killed by some sort of foreign criminal organization or mercenary spy group...who knows, it's never fully explained. The criminal who killed their 'secret contact' tries to replace him and get the scientists to start cloning humans as fast as possible because he thinks he can make a billion dollars.
Ralph Bellamy, one of the scientists, disappears.

The thing is, Art Hindle, our main character has already cloned himself... and he doesn't trust this new 'contact.' 

This had to have been a TV-movie pilot for a series that never happened, but is sort of weird enough to work somewhat as a movie by itself. The problem is that it takes a full hour before the fun begins. After an overly elaborate set-up, the clones awaken and Hindle has all these fully grown clones of himself walking around. The first hour never gets going fast enough, and by the time you're really bored with what's going on because there's so much setting up, (if you haven't turned it off or fast-forwarded) you begin to see the possibilities, only you know there's not enough time left to really get into them all. (Thus, the set-up has to be a pilot episode as we shall see...)

In this particular vision of cloning, they awake with the memories of the scientist who donated his own cells for the experiment, up to that moment when his cells were separated from him. They awake full grown, they can talk, they look just like him, they think like him, have all his memories and skills and knowledge, they are basically duplicate copies of him. They start to help eachother awaken the other clones, and since they are him, they're in on it and are fully supportive of what has been done. They start to realize that they are telepathically linked to the original scientist they are clones of. This is kind of interesting as they all help eachother out in investigating who this 'contact' really is and what he is up to.

Unfortunately, the movie quickly comes to a close before they really get into any interesting adventure and ultimately there isn't much of a resolution to this fake contact guy and he basically gets away with murder and nothing is ever done with him. He does explain who he is but you can only assume that whatever will happen to him will be carried on in a later series. They decide to burn the notes and evidence of the experiment and go their separate ways, yet all are still linked to the original through telepathy. The end implies that 'in future episodes' we would have seen what happens to them all and all those possibilities suggested and what would happen to the bad guy. 

I probably would have watched such a series after this set-up, but since there really is no resolution, the bad guy gets away and though they foil his plot, this whole thing really doesn't build up to much and is a long exploration in how such a secret project could have happened and what might happen (though only shown briefly) if a guy cloned himself a dozen times. 

One of his clones freaks out because he refuses to believe he's not the original since he has all the memories and knowledge of the original but this never goes anywhere. There are a couple minor plotting issues that don't make sense, but it's not tormenting to watch this, it is pretty interesting since it is all most unusual.

I still haven't figured out why clones were so fascinating to people in the 70s, and why all the hype. Perhaps because there was some media event, some kind of widely publicized situation that involved cloning and people freaked out. Perhaps it was the novelty of the idea, and having been told by the media that it might be possible very soon, science fiction writers began rushing to try to get out whatever they could while people had their attention focused on it. Perhaps it was the popularity of the novel "Boys From Brazil" and perhaps it was also because it was during a time when people would still get concerned about what crazy shit scientists might unleash on them and there would be congressional hearings about such things and back then, being on the cover of Time magazine actually meant something.

There were a lot of movies/TV shows about clones in the 70s for some strange reason, and then it just stopped in the 80s. Either because a human clone was never rolled out, or people were too busy distracted by the ever changing media landscape which began to include more television channels, cable, video games and then eventually computers, and the two-second attention span was born.

There was in the 70s in America, a cultural obsession with personal identity and individuality. The "Me Generation" was fully obsessed with itself and was commercially targeted with "Self Development" memes. I use the word 'meme' in an era before the internet because the "Self Improvement" obsessions of the 70s seemed to permeate everything and everybody was reading various self-help books and magazines, buying all kinds of stupid shit that was supposed to make you 'an individual' and it all seemed to just come from nowhere. People followed all sorts of weird ideas involving this 'self improvement' concept, and more and more just seemed to come out of the woodwork. This was the decade of 'self-discovery' and following the 60's breaking away from all kinds of cultural repression was taking its course. Somebody always had something going that they were into, and this variety of self-improvement fads would be mined and then dropped left and right. You'd see somebody into something for awhile, and as soon as they got tired of it and dropped it, somebody else would pick it up. This idea of clones perhaps became a kind of scary thing because it went against these ideas of individuality--even though it was all kind of phony because for all the individualism going around, there were plenty of 'clones' because it was all eventually commercialized. 

You'd start to see in the midst of all this 'individualism' people popping up who were nearly clones of other people you'd seen or met before, wearing the same clothes, following the same or similar self-improvement memes and believing in similar things--though it was always ever changing. They'd be clones 'temporarily' until it was no longer fashionable. The 'be somebody' premise was pretty weird because it was ultimately telling people not really to be individuals, but to select from a wider variety of pop-culture 'types' that nobody had really seen before, and whatever made them 'more successful' became more important than any sort of 'individualism' or 'self discovery.' People would adopt a 'cloned personality' or at least try their best to fake it to 'fit in' or 'be successful' or put on one of these 'new' personalities that was advertised in magazines and television shows that others would 'recognize' as that type which would attract them.  Previously a more homogenized style and sensibility was in place, men wore ties, women wore dresses, people only had certain haircuts and glasses styles, and after the dawn of this 'new individuality' you could go to the mall and see a wide variety of different styles, but stay long enough and you'll start to see these 'clones' were subscribing to one particular specific fad or sets of stereotypes and it would be pretty frightening. Complete duplicated people could be seen wearing the exact same outfits and weird clothing styles, and you could depend on them having similar personal tastes and following certain 'self improvement' fashions and specific fake personalities. Perhaps there were always fashion clones, but now it was just 'weirder' and more diverse.

Having duplicates of yourself was a frightening thing of course (as it probably should be), and aside from assholes messing around with genetics (which they did anyway) there were all kinds of implications that could mean all sorts of strange things. In "Boys From Brazil" little Hitler clones were running around (who worse than cloned Nazis could be scarier? The epitome of anti-individualism). 

Being self-obsessed in the 70s was the cultural norm, and for many, clones were the ultimate symbol of degrading oneself by being 'the same.' People now wanted to be 'different' and even if 'different' meant that you were simply the same as other 'new types' you still saw yourself as breaking free of the tired, oppressive 'down home' conservative 1950s reality where everybody was scared to be anything but 'the same.'  Meanwhile, in the 'real world' assholes were actually working on cloning...cloning animals, genetically engineering plants, cloning everything--including human beings, so even while people were contemplating such sci-fi ideas and feigning concern, it was still going on anyway. The 1970s gave birth and re-birthed all kinds of 'futuristic utopian ideas' that even while they were becoming more self-obsessed consumers of 'variety' they were also buying into a myriad of crazy 'self improvement' philosophies all claiming to bring about a 'new world.' ("Be the change you want to see in the world" really just ended up being "feign concern while you pursue your ultimate fantasies")  Bookshelves were full of trendy paperbacks selling new hip weird ideas like 'pyramid power,' 'psycho-cybernetics,' 'scientology,' 'est,' 'esp,' 'macrobiotics,' all kinds of pop-psychology and pop-religious ideas were everywhere. Loose clothing, bellbottoms and medallions were not the defining feature of 'hippies' but these new 70s utopians. It was almost as if everybody just assumed it really was all going to look like "Logan's Run" pretty soon...

There were utopian fads in the past of course, and the 70s wasn't exactly unique in it's utopianism, but it did get the weirdest.  It almost seemed like 'the future' was rushing up on the 70s fast, and there was lots of it going around in culture all over the place--until the 80s. Until it somehow got really dark all of the sudden and either reality sank in, or greed took over, I'm not really sure. Either way, most of the weirdest 70s utopianism just vanished. The 1950s was "back in style" and so was Noir and Art Deco, and conservatism. One of the strangest things about it is that one would go out into the world, especially in the cities and see this 1970s utopianism all over the place, and you didn't know where it came from then, and you didn't know where it went when it left. Chairs, tables, art in city parks, weird doors and civic projects, the design of storefronts and parking lot lights, you name it. Shit was weird and stylish back then, and then it all vanished. I can only assume the real reason was that "it wasn't profitable" and this is why it absolutely disappeared in the 80s. 

Back then you might have imagined that clones would be arriving in the 1990s--human clones, that everything would be computerized and utopia would be all over the place. Instead, a dystopia arrived...everything is computerized, but not the way you imagined it. Nobody was investing in any utopian architecture or art or anything anymore, they were investing in anything that made them money. The illusion or delusion of that 70s utopia never came, and nobody asked any questions as to where it went either, it was like some strange breeze from another dimension came into everyone's life, and then blew away without a trace.

The Clone Master is yet another part of this breeze, and though we might say we should be grateful that our 'future' didn't end up including this, or clones, but there's nothing barring the dystopia we now are left with from bringing clones into the mix. The resistance to the illusionary utopia of the 70s was always telling us it was a hoax, but the question remains, if it was a hoax, and a phony dream, who was selling it to us on such a wide scale and why? In my personal opinion is that the major reasons it all vanished was that for one, it simply stopped representing where people were really going, which was now entirely based on greed, and the utopianism failed to include "the organic," where people were overconfident in their plastic artificiality, they perhaps looked forward to a completely synthesized world, but that novelty soon wore off when it became obviously unhealthy. The "hippies" experimentation with the weird didn't bring us a 'new age' but it did make that phrase a hugely successful commercial enterprise. 



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