Here on the outside : Mobility, nation and catastrophe in Michael Winterbottom's Code 46

Baker, Brian (2015) Here on the outside : Mobility, nation and catastrophe in Michael Winterbottom's Code 46. Science Fiction Studies, 42 (1). pp. 115-131. ISSN 0091-7729

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Abstract

In Michael Winterbottom’s Code 46 (2003), recurrent motifs of global mobility and securitisation encode contemporary anxieties about mobility, migration and terrorism through motifs of genetic, biological or viral disruptions of national and bodily boundaries. These can certainly be located in terms of the 9/11 and 7/7 events, but also in terms of Anglo-American overseas involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, in the consequences of these actions for indigenous and US/UK populations, and the ethical and ideological distortions they produce. This article uses the work of Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault in the field of bio-politics and bio-power to analyse Code 46 in terms of its representations of subjectivity, inclusion and exclusion, and systems of regulatory control. Like other contemporary sf and horror films that focus upon bio-politics, Code 46 presents a world of globalised mobility striated by class, gender and ethnic difference.