All three of Brandon Cronenberg’s films to date have combined elements of science fiction and body horror and have thus naturally drawn comparisons with the work of his illustrious father, David Cronenberg, one of the great masters of body horror with science fictional elements. Infinity Pool (2023), however, is a step forward in complexity and sophistication for the films of the younger Cronenberg—and in ways that place it within the generic context of the New Weird, rather than conventional science fiction and body horror. The filmengages in dialogues with a wide variety of cinematic predecessors, offering readers a variety of contexts within which to interpret the film, yet ultimately superseding all of those interpretations in interesting ways. Indeed, much of what makes Infinity Pool such an interesting film has to do with its subversive dialogues with a number of different traditions in horror film, often with reference to science fiction as well. It features modern Western characters who travel to a remote, seemingly backward setting and encounter dangers that evoke the traditions of both folk horror and dystopian fiction. Yet the central conceit of Infinity Pool places it in dialogue with the tradition of uncanny Doppelgänger horror, as well as science fiction cloning narratives, though the dynamic way this film combines science fiction and horror might actually place it more in the realm of the weird, or the “abcanny,” as defined by New Weird maven China Miéville. Ultimately, the film’s most powerful message seems to involve a critique of the ruthless behavior of its privileged, wealthy characters, which places the film in dialogue with a number of such critiques in both horror and science fiction film. This film, though, is particularly aware that its vision of wealth and privilege is set within the globalized world of neoliberal capitalism. By dialectically rejecting the binary premises of the various genres in which it seems on the verge of participating, the film suggests that these premises derive from a kind of thinking that no longer applies in the global world system of late neoliberal capitalism. In addition, this dismantling of binary oppositions collapses a fundamental basis of Western logic, again pointing to the New Weird, with its alternative logic, as the most useful generic characterization of this film.
Horror, Science Fiction, and Binary Thinking
Though filmed mostly in Croatia (with some scenes shot in Hungary), Infinity Pool is set in the vaguely characterized fictional country of “Li Tolqa,” the ill-defined location of which contributes to the sense that the film takes place in a globalized world in which all parts of the world are interconnected. In fact, many aspects of Infinity Pool serve to remind us of the globalized, post–Cold War nature of the world in which it is set (and in which it was made). For example, Infinity Pool is a Canadian film shot in Croatia and Hungary, with funding from all three of those countries. Meanwhile, the four most important characters of the film are British, Swiss, and American, played by actors who are British, French, Swedish, and Australian (with a number of Canadian and European actors appearing as well).
The film begins by immediately centering as its point-of-view characters an American couple who have come to a Li Tolqan resort on vacation. James Foster (Alexander Skarsgård) is an unsuccessful novelist whose only published novel appeared six years earlier to little fanfare. He has apparently come to Li Tolqa looking for inspiration for his writing, though he is perhaps also seeking a boost to his own sagging sense of self. His wife, Em Foster (Cleopatra Coleman), is the daughter of the wealthy publisher who published James’ novel. Very near the beginning of Infinity Pool, the Fosters walk from their hotel room down to the pool for a poolside breakfast. As they proceed, discordant music plays and the camera moves in a disorienting fashion, punctuated by several cuts, as the picture on the screen ultimately goes through a full 360-degree rotation. The film thus announces to us early on that strange things are likely to be afoot. We also get views (at odd angles) of several different parts of the resort and its surroundings, which are quite difficult to parse, partly because the surroundings seem so rundown and impoverished in comparison with the resort itself. Other disorienting shots (odd camera angles and movements, slow motion, jarring music, psychedelic hallucinations) will periodically reinforce the film’s sense of strangeness as well, for both characters and audience. As James looks out over the surrounding countryside while they sit at breakfast, he asks simply, “Where are we?”
Where are we, indeed: much of the experience of watching Infinity Pool is one of attempting to orient oneself within the world of the film and trying to figure out just what kind of world this is, much as is typically the case with science fiction. However, as the scene just described indicates, this film also seems designed to defeat this effort and to create an atmosphere that is intentionally disorienting—much in the way that is typically associated with horror, though it should also be noted that Roger Luckhurst has suggested disorientation as a key characteristic of weird fiction (Luckhurst 2017). Disorientation is, indeed, a key strategy of Infinity Pool, including the continual creation, then undermining, of expectations. This strategy includes its refusal to stay within the bounds of any given genre. But this play with genre goes beyond simply including elements of multiple genres in a single film. In fact, Infinity Pool moves toward a dialectical resolution of the opposition among its various generic strands, moving toward a generic synthesis that most resembles the works of the New Weird. Indeed, the film dialectically overcomes binary thinking in general, which in itself can be highly disorienting to those accustomed to this comfortable way of thinking.
One of the foundational characterizations of the horror genre—influential especially for later gender-oriented critics such as Carol Clover and Barbara Creed, but also for numerous others—is Robin Wood’s classic notion of horror as fundamentally built on a binary opposition between the normal and the monstrous. Initially developed back in the 1970s, Wood’s conception of horror is closely linked to the concept of “the Other,” which “represents that which bourgeois ideology cannot recognize or accept but must deal with” (Wood 2003, 65). Wood then proceeds to outline various categories of Others, which generally have to do with differences based on gender, ethnicity, class, culture, ideology, or age, though for Wood the most basic category of Other is simply other people in general, given that the dynamics of capitalism encourage us to regard all other people as foreign to us in some way (66–67). In horror films, these others tend toward the monstrous. Thus, for Wood, the “basic formula for the horror film” is “normality is threatened by the Monster,” though he also notes that the nature of the Monster (and of the kind of threat it poses to normality) changes “from period to period as society’s basic fears clothe themselves in fashionable or immediately accessible garments” (71). Of course, somewhat in the mode of the “abject” as theorized by Julia Kristeva (1982), this monstrous Other has been made the binary opposite of the “normal” by official ideology, so that the horror genre potentially challenges that ideology by questioning the binary opposition between the normal and the monstrous.
Infinity Pool subverts this way of thinking about horror by continually disrupting any attempt to make a simple distinction between the monstrous and the normal, partly because, ultimately, in the global system of neoliberal capitalism, the normal is monstrous. Meanwhile, Cronenberg’s film also challenges conventional ways of thinking about science fiction by disrupting the usual process of identifying the differences between the fictional world of the film and the real world of the viewer. Much modern criticism of science fiction, especially that of Marxist critics such as Fredric Jameson, has drawn upon Darko Suvin’s characterization of science fiction (also back in the 1970s) as the “literature of cognitive estrangement,” a designation that depends upon a binary opposition between the fictional world of the text and the real world of the text’s audience. The difference between these two worlds places the audience in an unfamiliar setting, generally because of well-defined and understandable sources, or novums, typically technological innovations.
In terms of science fiction, the only real novum of Infinity Pool is the Li Tolqan doubling technology, which allows wealthy tourists in Li Tolqa who have committed capital crimes to pay to have doubles created and executed in their stead. Despite the lack of specific details, it is clear that the doubling technique used in Li Tolqa is technological, rather than magical, though one character does suggest that the Li Tolqans are able to produce more perfect doubles than anywhere else in the world because of their “poetic flair,” as opposed to the overly literal techniques that might be attempted in the West. But this technology does not lead to a fundamental difference between the world of the film and the world of the text. Instead, it creates opportunities for the rich to escape consequences in ways that look all too familiar from the perspective of our world.
For Suvin, science fiction also has considerable utopian potential in that it can encourage the audience to interrogate the opposition between the world of the text and the world of the audience and to ask the politically charged question of whether the real world actually has to be the way it is. Infinity Pool, though, presents us with a bizarre fictional world that ultimately differs very little from our own real world, which makes a strong critical statement about our neoliberal world, even as it fails to offer utopian alternatives. The fictional world of the field and the real world in which we all live are related dialectically, rather than in terms of an estranging difference; the film asks its viewers to look simultaneously for differences and similarities between the fictional world and the real world, much as Freedman sees the fiction of Miéville as driven by a “dialectical synthesis of fantasy and realism” (8).
Ultimately, perhaps the most important way this film undermines binary oppositions is through its overcoming of the binary opposition between science fiction (as a genre of the rational) and horror (as a genre often associated with the irrational). Importantly, though, this central opposition is undermined in a particularly dialectical way: motifs from science fiction and horror are not simply placed in the film side-by-side without interaction, as in the kinds of pastiche constructions often associated with postmodernism. Instead, though Infinity Pool certainly lacks the sophistication and the overflowing abundance of the novels of Miéville, it does resemble Miéville’s work—perhaps most directly recalling The City and the City (2009)—in the way it assembles diverse elements and puts them into dialectical confrontation with one another[1]. Of course, Miéville’s work also contains a strong utopian dimension that presents alternatives to the essentially dystopian conditions it describes. Infinity Pool does not contain such strong utopian energies, though it should also be noted that most of the utopian projects in Miéville—such as the all-out workers’ revolution in Iron Council (2004)—ultimately fail in the moment, even if they generate hope for a better future[2]. In Miéville’s case, of course, this dialectical confrontation between genres is a key part of what makes his fiction perhaps the single greatest example of the phenomenon of the New Weird, and the comparison with Miéville suggests that Infinity pool might best be read as a New Weird film as well, calling attention to the fact that the combination of genres within the film produces energies unavailable to either horror or science fiction separately.
Indeed, while it is true that the designation “New Weird” has generally been applied mostly to fiction by authors such as Miéville, M. John Harrison, and Jeff VanderMeer, it is also the case that the sensibilities associated with this genre can clearly arise in film as well. In his introduction to the anthology that solidified the notion of the New Weird as a genuine cultural phenomenon, VanderMeer himself suggests that the New Weird can be defined as
a type of urban, secondary-world fiction that subverts the romanticized ideas about place found in traditional fantasy, largely by choosing realistic, complex real-world models as the jumping off point for creation of settings that may combine elements of both science fiction and fantasy. New Weird has a visceral, in-the-moment quality that often uses elements of surreal or transgressive horror for its tone, style, and effects. (VanderMeer 2008, xvi)
It would be hard to come up with a better capsule description of Infinity Pool, even though VanderMeer here is talking about fiction (with a special emphasis on the work of Miéville). Moreover, several other recent films have seemed to meet VanderMeer’s description here, including Alex Garland’s Annihilation (2018), an adaptation of VanderMeer’s own 2014 novel of that title. Garland’s Men (2022) also has many of the characteristics of the New Weird, as do Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth (2021) and (interestingly) David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future (2022). Reading Infinity Pool within the context of the New Weird would thus place the film in a burgeoning movement within science fiction horror films in the early years of the 2020s.
One aspect of Infinity Pool that VanderMeer’s definition above does not explicitly capture is the basic weirdness that derives from the breakdown of Aristotelian logic in the film, which is structured around a series of binary oppositions, not just between science fiction and horror, but also through the creation of a series of expectations that the film is about to become an example of a recognizable type of horror or science fiction film that is traditionally based on such oppositions. Initially, the film seems to be based on traditional geopolitical binaries, as unwitting Westerners travel to an exotic foreign location, only to be endangered by savagery and depredation at the hands of the locals. This basic cultural opposition is then pushed aside and undermined altogether by the introduction of the Li Tolqan doubling tradition, which suggests that we might be dealing with something similar to science fictional cloning narratives or (more likely) horror narratives featuring Doppelgängers. This possibility is then also quickly set aside with the sudden emergence of the outlaw tourist gang as the true monsters of the film in its second half. However, this gang dismantles the opposition between the rich and ordinary people that drives many films about wealthy villains because, within the terms of the neoliberal world in which these characters live, they are ordinary people.
The Geopolitical Other: Us vs. Them
The beginning of Infinity Pool seems to place James and Em as the “normal” characters in opposition to the strangeness of Li Tolqa, which initially seems collectively to function as the film’s monstrous Other. This atmosphere of strangeness is, to an extent, enhanced by the strangely unspecific, vaguely Kafkaesque nature of Li Tolqa as a setting, which takes on added allegorical resonance from the fact that it does not correspond very closely to any real-world location. Still, given the overall atmosphere of this film, it initially seems natural to read Li Tolqa as a primitive place that can be highly dangerous to unsuspecting outsiders like James and Em. For example, we learn early on that the events of the film are occurring during the time leading into the Li Tolqan rainy season, a sort of liminal period that the Li Tolqans call “Umbramaq,” which translates to “The Summoning,” a term that surely sounds ominous indeed to anyone who has ever seen a horror film. This period involves a number of elements of traditional Li Toqan culture, including the wearing of the grotesque face masks that the locals call “ekki masks,” the appearance of which reinforces the notion that there might be something very rotten in the state of Li Tolqa. Both these masks and the notion of “The Summoning” are introduced within the first few minutes of the film, setting up an expectation that we might be about to see a kind of folk horror film in which the film’s Western tourists will be endangered by the Li Tolqan locals and their primitive customs.
The tourists of the film certainly seem to regard the Li Tolqans as primitive Others— aberrant, backward, and inferior, marginal to the global capitalist system of which the world of the tourists is at the center. This attitude tends to feed audience expectations concerning the nature of this film. Indeed, the haughty tourists regard the Li Tolqans through a full array of colonialist/Orientalist stereotypes, as when they are at one point described as being “like baboons,” echoing a classic racist stereotype, despite the fact that the Li Tolqans are white[3]. Meanwhile, expectations concerning Li Tolqan backwardness and savagery are only strengthened by the initial revelations about the Li Tolqan legal system, in which ceremonial executions seem to serve almost as a form of human sacrifice.
On the other hand, the revelation of the doubling tradition suddenly complicates the colonialist view of Li Tolqan backwardness by suggesting that the Li Tolqans might have developed cloning technologies considerably more advanced than anything available in the West, even if those technologies might serve a rather dubious purpose. Then, as the film proceeds, it quickly becomes clear that it is the foreign tourists who are the dangerous savages in this film. It is even they, not the Li Tolqans, who wear those ekki masks in the course of committing horrifying and violent acts. Moreover, they wear these masks in an attack on the luxurious mansion of a rich Li Tolqan, reminding us that, no matter how poor Li Tolqa might appear to be, no matter how rundown its overall infrastructure, the dominance of neoliberal capitalism means that there are still Li Tolqans who are quite wealthy, further confusing distinctions between Li Tolqa and the West, while maintaining economic distinctions between the rich and poor.
As Eric Kohn details, Cronenberg was originally inspired to make this film by a vacation he took years earlier to the Dominican Republic, where he felt that he was insulated from the poverty of the real country while staying in a posh resort that was “surrounded by barbed wire fence that was loosely disguised by dried palm leaves” (Kohn 2023). However, it seems notable that Cronenberg decided to depict Li Tolqa, not as a conventional “third world” setting in the mode of the Dominican Republic, but as a setting with a vague, but clear, Eastern European air, a perception that is probably enhanced by the fact that the film was shot in Croatia[4]. Meanwhile, this association figures Li Tolqa as a reminder of the historical victory of the capitalist West in the Cold War, a victory that, with the removal of the counterbalancing Other of Soviet-style communism, opened the way for neoliberal capitalism to spread across the globe with impunity, much as the tourist gang of Infinity Pool acts without restraint in Li Tolqa.
That colonialist and Orientalist stereotypes might be applied to Eastern Europe is no surprise and taps into a long tradition. At the very beginning of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), we are presented with an entry from Jonathan Harker’s journal that describes his trip from England to Transylvania (in central Romania) to meet with the mysterious Count Dracula, for whom Harker, a recently qualified solicitor, hopes to facilitate the acquisition by Dracula of some property in England. Strange and sinister things are afoot in Dracula’s castle, of course, and Harker immediately signals us to expect this eventuality by noting that he is traveling from the safe, modern environs of London (with, as Joseph Conrad’s Marlow would note in Heart of Darkness only a couple of years later, “a policeman on every corner”) to the darkness and mystery of the East. Crossing the Danube in Budapest, Harker notes, “The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East,” as if these were two different worlds (1).
Harker needed to say no more, of course, because Stoker’s British readers would have been well acquainted with an already well-established tradition of colonialist discourse largely built, as Edward Said most famously pointed out, along the lines of a polar opposition between the rational, civilized West and the exotic, primitive East. The influence of Stoker’s novel—and perhaps even more of its various manifestations in film—would ensure that this sort of coding would be built into the ideology of modern horror films, with the Balkans featuring as a source of inscrutable Oriental evil in such films as Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People (1942), which relies upon its audiences to understand suspicions of Serbia as a source of supernatural threat.
This long legacy of the colonialist stereotyping of Eastern Europe—which includes a long British legacy (later adopted by the U.S., especially after the Russian Revolution)—of depictions of Russians as primitive and uncivilized[5]—would form an important part of the exaggerated rhetoric of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” that was central to Western Cold War propaganda. Noting the nineteenth-century legacy of depicting the Russians as both Oriental and medieval, Booker suggests that, “given the long history of British Russophobia, one begins to wonder just how much of the Cold War—presumably a clear ideological opposition between capitalism and communism—was conditioned by an older historical confrontation in which the Russians represented all that was primitive and barbaric about feudal-aristocratic Europe, while the British bore the banner of bourgeois progress and enlightenment” (Booker 1997, 180)[6]. In any case, there is a direct historical link between the Orientalist rhetoric of empire and the American rhetoric of Cold-War anti-Communism. William Pietz thus describes the rhetoric of the Cold War as a sort of “substitute for the language of colonialism” and notes, in particular, how many Western stereotypes of the Soviets seem to have been almost direct reinscriptions of the attitudes toward the East that Said describes in Orientalism (Pietz 1988, 55). Of course, the Orientalist stereotypes described by Said were applied primarily to Islam and the Middle East, and it is no accident that this sort of stereotyping, when applied to Eastern Europe, had a special charge when applied to the Balkans and the rest of the corner of Eastern Europe that was once under Ottoman rule (as Harker also reminds us at the beginning of Dracula).
Crucial to Said’s discussion of Orientalism is his critique of the binary nature of Oreientalist thinking, which he sees as a crucial ideological underpinning for colonialism. As characterized by Said, perhaps the ultimate in geopolitical binary oppositions is the Orientalist vision of the Middle East as the polar opposite of the West in almost every way (Said 1979). However, Booker and Daraiseh (2019) argue that the globalization of capital and culture in recent decades has collapsed even this opposition, leading to a new era of “consumerist Orientalism” in which Western stereotypes about the Middle East operate in fundamentally new ways, making the relationship between East and West far more complex than binary opposition.
Nevertheless, stereotypes of the Oriental savagery of Eastern Europe have continued well beyond the end of the Cold War, an event that, in fact, opened up new possibilities for narratives about Americans and other Westerners traveling into Eastern Europe, thereby finding new opportunities to encounter exotic horrors. Perhaps the best-known example of this phenomenon in horror film is Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005), in which two America college students traveling in Europe visit Slovakia, only to encounter unimaginably depraved violence at the hands of rich torture tourists, who pay large sums to have total freedom to torture and kill victims kidnapped for that purpose by the locals. Hostel was a major commercial success, leading to a sequel, Hostel: Part II (2007) and becoming a founding work of the emergent torture porn subgenre of horror. Widely criticized for his depiction of Slovakia in Hostel, Roth claimed that the film was meant as a commentary on the cluelessness of Americans with respect to large parts of the world, including Eastern Europe. However, it is fairly clear that audience expectations of Eastern European savagery were crucial to the success of the film.
Such expectations are also crucial to the British film Severance (2006), which directly touches on global capitalism, depicting a corporate outing in Hungary, meant to promote teamwork among privileged British and Canadian employees of a Western firm. This outing then turns deadly when the employees are attacked by vicious locals, as are the young French characters who travel to Croatia for a rock-climbing vacation in the French film Vertige (High Lane,2009). Similarly, the French film Ils (Them, 2006) features a French couple who move to Romania only to be terrorized (and, ultimately, murdered) by a gang of malicious local children. Meanwhile, the long legacy of depictions of Romania as a source of supernatural evil continues in The Nun (2018), another extremely popular recent horror film set in Eastern Europe. This film, set in 1952 in a medieval monastery in Romania, features the evil demon Valak, who attacks the nuns in the monastery, ultimately possessing one of the investigators sent by the Vatican to check out the situation, thus making its way back to the West and triggering the evil that haunts the Conjuring franchise, to which it thus serves as a prequel.
All of these films depend on stereotypical expectations of Eastern European savagery. However, among recent horror films set in Eastern Europe, perhaps the one that most anticipates Infinity Pool is Craig Zobel’s Blumhouse film The Hunt (2020), which is set in a Croatia that is presented as a sort of backward, lawless land where rich woke Americans can literally get away with murder as they hunt and kill handpicked Trumpist “deplorables” for sport. Whether The Hunt reinforces anti-woke conspiracy theories or whether it spoofs them is debatable, but it is no accident that an Eastern European setting such as Croatia was chosen for the film’s action, even though it is easy to convince the “woke” characters in the film, influenced by their own stereotypical expectations, that the backward land around them is “fucking Arkansas” (while the film was actually shot in Louisiana). The Hunt thus draws in significant ways on Orientalist stereotypes about the Balkans, even as these stereotypes are undermined by the fact that the real villains of the film are Americans. In Infinity Pool, these stereotypes are further eroded, as the depravity of the tourists undermines any notion of a stark contrast between Western civilization and Eastern savagery.
Said insists that Europeans enthusiastically endorsed Orientalist stereotypes about the East because those stereotypes helped them to feel better about themselves. Within the discourse of Orientalism, concludes Said, “the Orient is irrational, depraved (fallen), childlike, ‘different’: thus the European is rational, virtuous, mature, ‘normal’” (40). Images of cultural otherness proliferate throughout Infinity Pool, but all of them are pure performance, in a seeming effort to recreate the reassuring binary cultural oppositions of earlier eras. Indeed, the resort in the film panders to its patrons by creating just such oppositions for their entertainment and amusement.
For example, one of the weirdest images in Infinity Pool occurs in a brief moment in which James walks through the hotel lobby and passes by a group of men dressed as stage Hasidic Jews, fitted out with sidecurls, white stoles, giant square streimels, and bizarre fake Pinocchio noses, all meant to be part (a sign in the lobby suggests) of a performance that evening of “Passover Jewish Voguing.” Given Cronenberg’s own Jewish heritage, the moment seems a significant one, even though it passes quickly and without comment and is easy to miss. Still, it is a clearly offensive case of cultural appropriation (somewhat in the same spirit as blackface) meant to amuse the tourists at the resort of which the hotel is a part, indicating the extent to which the tourists, in a case of the consumerist orientalism described by Booker and Daraiseh, are entertained by the appropriation and commodification of other cultures. This same phenomenon is repeated several times in the film, as when the resort at one point puts on a somewhat ridiculous “Bollywood” dance show or when the Fosters are surprised to find a Chinese restaurant inside their resort. But, again, these moments are not simply tossed into the film in a mode of postmodern pastiche. They interact with other elements of the film to remind us that the breakdown of polar geopolitical oppositions under neoliberalism does not lead to equality and acceptance for all. Neoliberalism continues to be informed by some of the same prejudices that drove colonialism and the Cold War; in fact, some of these prejudices have become even more virulent, feeding developments such as the rise of White Nationalism, whose proponents seem almost desperate to restore the binary oppositions that once made them feel comfortably superior to non-white peoples.
The Individual Other: Li Tolqan Doubles as Doppelgangers
When the tourist gang invades the home of that rich Li Tolqan, this caper is presented essentially as a prank, though it quickly becomes deadly serious when a gun battle erupts during the home invasion, leading to multiple casualties. This event then leads to the arrest of the entire tourist gang, after which Cronenberg teases us with another bit of indirection as he shows them all about to be executed, then shifts perspective to let us see that it is (presumably) a gang of doubles that is being graphically slaughtered instead. This bit of momentary indecision, however, might be more significant than it first appears, because it potentially poses a fundamentally disturbing question: how do we know these are the doubles that are being executed—and not the doubles that are looking on from the sidelines before returning to the world as impostors? This aspect of the doubles points to another way this film challenges conventional binary oppositions, in this case undermining the fundamental opposition between self and other in a way that is central to the tradition of the Doppelgänger.
That technological doubling, or cloning, is possible has been obvious since we gained a better understanding of the workings of DNA in the 1950s, and any number of cloning narratives have appeared since that time. However, cloning films have often straddled the boundary between science fiction and horror by emphasizing the potentially horrifying consequences of cloning technology—usually for the clones themselves. The very title of one of the first cloning films, Parts: The Clonus Horror (1979), indicates this phenomenon clearly. Here, as well as in The Island (2005) and Never Let Me Go (both Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel and its 2010 film adaptation), clones are grown strictly to serve as spare parts for their wealthy originals, taking the motif into the realm of horror. Clones are abused in other films as well, with the motif becoming more and more popular in the early years of the twenty-first century[7]. In the films Moon (2009) and Oblivion (2013), clones are generated to perform dangerous or unpleasant jobs (without realizing that they are clones). In Jordan Peele’s Us (2019), doubles are created as part of a nefarious project for behavioral control of the general population, leading to a violent revolt on the part of the doubles[8]. And the films The Prestige (2006, based on a 1995 novel by Christopher Priest) and All That We Destroy (2019) anticipate Infinity Pool even more directly in that they involve clones that are created specifically to be killed as parts of specific projects.
In the case of Infinity Pool the “poetic” doubling technology is simply too eerie and inexplicable to create genuine cognitive estrangement of the type described by Suvin. In fact, these doubles act more in the tradition of the German Doppelgänger, a motif long associated with horror. As Dimitris Vardoulakis outlines, the Doppelgänger motif in horror is an old one that goes all the way back to the Romantics and to early Gothic literature. E.T.A. Hoffmann’s 1814–1815 novel The Devil’s Elixirs and his 1816 story “The Sandman” are key early examples of German Romantic narratives that feature the motif. Hoffmann was also an important influence on later Doppelgânger narratives, such as Edgar Allan Poe’s story “William Wilson” (1839) and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1846 novel The Double.[9] The motif then became especially well known after it played an important role in Sigmund Freud’s famous discussion of the uncanny in his 1919 essay “Die Unheimliche” (“The Uncanny”). For Freud, the uncanny is something that is particularly disturbing because it locates strangeness within the familiar, suggesting that even things we thought were safely comfortable and well understood might turn out to be sources of threat. Another way to describe Freud’s uncanny,is that it is frightening and unsettling because it upsets normal modes of binary Aristotelian logic; in the case of the Doppelgänger, it upsets an important basis for the stable bourgeois subject—the ability to distinguish clearly between Self and Other.
Given this history, it should come as no surprise that the Doppelgänger motif has long been prominent in horror films, beginning with silent German Expressionist classics such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), the latter of which moves beyond the Gothic, pointing toward potential science fictional uses with its motif of a robot double. Since that time, the doublingmotif has seen extensive applications in both horror and science fiction, often becoming a key element of films that straddle the boundary between these two genres. For example, the 1956 science fiction classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers (as well as its similarly titled 1978 remake) clearly spills into horror with its notion of humans being replaced by alien doubles, thereby tapping into some of the deepest sources of Cold War paranoia with its disruption of the polar logic upon which Cold War thinking was so fundamentally based. Since 1956, any number of alien invasion films have drawn upon this motif, with John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) being particularly effective at creating horror from the notion of a shape-shifting alien that might stand in for any one of the human characters at any time.
Horror films with no scientific (or science fictional) basis for the existence of the doubles have continued to be created also. Important horror films such as Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession (1981) have made important use of Doppelgängers, though the doubles here and in many other such films—Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan (2010) and Denise Villeneuve’s Enemy (2013) are notable recent examples—can be recuperated as psychological manifestations.Sometimes, though, the doubling motif has been given supernatural intonations, as in the case of Justin P. Lange’s 2022 Blumhouse film The Visitor. This film features a mysterious personage (the “Visitor” of the title), who is found appearing in photographs at grim moments in history, alongside such figures as Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein. As it turns out, the Visitor is a figure of supernatural threat, essentially the precursor to the Antichrist. When Maxwell Braun (Thomas Francis Murphy), a character who has been researching this phenomenon, meets protagonist Robert Burrows (Finn Jones) for the first time, he realizes that Burrows is, in fact, a dead ringer for (and, presumably, the latest incarnation of) the Visitor, as he had suspected. “My, my,” says Braun, in obvious reference to Freud. “It really is uncanny, isn’t it?”
In some ways, the doubles of Infinity Pool are the ultimate Others, given that they are manufactured purely for purposes of the supreme exploitation. However, their victimized status would make it very difficult to view them as the “monsters” in opposition to the “normal” tourists. Yet it is also very difficult to argue that the doubles represent the “normal” in opposition to the monstrosity of the tourists, partly because their very existence is so unsettling and outside the norm. Here we would appear to be in the realm of Freud’s uncanny, which centrally involves a sudden inability to distinguish between the normal and the strange. However, the particular combination of genres and forces that energize this film makes it less reminiscent of the Gothic, in which the uncanny is such a key effect, and more like the New Weird fiction of writers such as Miéville. In this sense, we might suggest that Miéville’s own coinage of the term “abcanny” as a Weird alternative to the Gothic uncanny offers a better notation for the indescribable effect (and affect) induced by these doubles. The Gothic uncanny is unsettling because it renders us suddenly unable to distinguish between the normal and the not normal in a specific case; the Weird abcanny, though, is even more fundamentally unsettling because the distinction between the normal and not normal is collapsed altogether. If the meaning of the uncanny remains undecideable, then the “essential antimeaningness at the core of the abcanny” is opposed to the very notion of meaning (Miéville 2012, 382).
Infinity Pool overtly questions whether the doubles are actually Other to the tourists at all. If it is really true (as the film stipulates) that the doubles are absolutely identical to the originals (even including acquired characteristics and the memories of the original), then the distinction between original and double ceases to have meaning, and the doubles cannot effectively serve as the Other to the monstrous tourists. Importantly, James is shown to be unconscious during part of the process of the creation of his double, and presumably everyone else who is doubled is also unconscious for a time. This fact raises the possibility that he (or any of the originals) might have been switched with his double during the process, as one of the tourist gang even suggests to him (though apparently just as a way of teasing and taunting him). Moreover, James is not alone in this sense, and the film leaves open the possibility that the Li Tolqan authorities might routinely (or perhaps even universally) make this switch.
The film does not overtly follow up on the suggestion that James might have been switched with his clone. It also does not follow up on the obvious possibility that these clones might turn out to be the film’s monstrous others after all and that they might pull off some sort of clone revolt, replacing the tourists and returning to the Western world to wreak havoc (possibly with the complicity of the Li Tolqan authorities). Indeed, the clones function purely as victims in this film, even when they move beyond the official execution ceremonies. In one key scene, the tourists pretend to have kidnapped Detective Thresh (Thomas Kretschmann), the police official who had originally investigated James’ case; they then present him, hooded, for James to torment and physically abuse in retribution.
In another of the film’s many red herrings, this motif raises the possibility that Thresh might be the villain of the film, a possibility that is no doubt reinforced by Kretschmann’s somewhat menacing presence. He did, after all, play Dracula in the film Dracula 3D (2012). In addition, in this film, with its resonances of oppressive politics, Kretschmann’s German accent also makes a contribution, immediately making him suspect in this context thanks to the legacy of Nazism. This connection, meanwhile, is reinforced by the fact that the Li Tolqan state police wear uniforms that are highly reminiscent of those worn by the notorious Ustaše, the Croatian ultra-nationalist pro-German group that terrorized the Balkans during World War II. Such vague associations between Li Tolqa and Nazism (which resonate with the scene involving the clearly anti-semitic “Passover Jewish Voguing”) add to the film’s atmosphere of menace.
As it turns out, however, Thresh seems to do his job in a professional manner, his distaste for the rich tourists entirely justified. Meanwhile, the kidnapped “Thresh” is also a case of misdirection, because, as James proceeds to brutalize the man, the tourists remove the hood to reveal that the abused man is actually another double of James[10]. Disturbed by this dark prank, James revolts against the tourists and retrieves his hidden passport. He then heads for the airport, only to have the airport bus forcibly stopped by the gang of tourists, led by Gabi Bauer (Mia Goth), a British woman tourist who had been instrumental in seducing James into the circle of the group. James flees into the woods, only to be shot and wounded by Gabi. Then, later, Gabi and the others capture James and urge him to kill his double (presumably the same one that they had earlier used as a stand-in for the detective, though that isn’t entirely clear), which they have humiliated into behaving like a dog. James resists but eventually kills the double. Then Gabi offers him her breast, smearing it with the double’s blood (which is, in a sense, James’ blood, as well). In a sort of obscene parody of the nursing scene at the end of The Grapes of Wrath (1939), James begins to suckle at the bloody breast. However, whereas Steinbeck’s Rose of Sharon offers her breast milk to save a starving man in a gesture of solidarity that shows the kindness and generosity of the poor, Gabi clearly offers her own (milkless) breast as a declaration of her victory over James and a sign of the cruelty and sterility of the rich. It is James’ final submission, his ego having now been utterly shattered, essentially sending him back to pre-Mirror Stage infancy. It should come as no surprise, then, that James afterward finds himself unable to leave Li Tolqa and to return to his former life, as do the other tourists.
This notion that the doubles in Infinity Pool are in every sense identical to the originals raises all sorts of fundamental questions about the nature of human identity. One might argue, of course, that there is a difference in that only the original has experienced the narrative continuity of identity over time that many philosophers have seen as a crucial defining element of selfhood. For example, Paul Ricoeur sees narrative as the critical link between subjectivity and history. To Ricoeur, we confront history by constructing it in narrative form, but in the process of constituting these narratives we also constitute ourselves:
What justifies our taking the subject of an action, so designated by his, her, or its proper name, as the same throughout a life that stretches from birth to death? The answer has to be narrative. To answer the question “Who?” as Hannah Arendt has so forcefully put it, is to tell the story of a life. The story told tells about the action of the “who.” And the identity of this “who” therefore itself must be a narrative identity. (Ricoeur 1988, 246)
It is important to recognize that the “identity” cited by Ricoeur here does not imply a sameness over time, but merely a narrative connectedness. Thus, narrative identity “can include change, mutability, within the cohesion of a lifetime” (246). But Infinity Pool raises the question of what this narrative continuity really entails. One only lives in the present, so that narrative continuity at any moment resides in a memory of the past and an anticipation of the future. If one, like the doubles of the film, remembers having lived a narrative from birth to the present (and can anticipate living in the future), how is that really distinguishable from having lived that experience, especially as these doubles go beyond ordinary cloning (which is purely genetic) and include the consequences of experience? Not only do the doubles have all the memories of the originals (which a conventional clone would certainly not have), but presumably they also bear other marks of experience, such as learned skills, physical scars, and so on.
In addition, questions of just what constitutes the continuity of identity over time are in a sense set aside in the postmodern era of neoliberal capitalism if the narrative continuity of identity in this era has already been shattered. In one of the early elaborations of his eventual theorization of postmodernism as the “cultural logic of late capitalism,” Jameson draws upon the work of Jacques Lacan to argue that, amid the increasing complexity and fragmentation of experience in the postmodern world, the individual subject experiences a loss of narrative continuity that causes him or her to experience the world somewhat in the manner of a schizophrenic patient. The schizophrenic, Jameson says,
is condemned to live in a perpetual present with which the various moments of his or her past have little connection and for which there is no conceivable future on the horizon. In other words, schizophrenic experience is an experience of isolated, disconnected, discontinuous material signifiers which fail to link into a coherent sequence. The schizophrenic does not know personal identity in our sense, since our feeling of identity depends on our sense of the persistence of the “I” and the “me” over time. (Jameson 1983, 137)
Jameson, of course, is here speaking metaphorically and clearly does not intend to suggest that living in the harried and confusing world of late capitalism makes everyone medically schizophrenic, though the shattering of James’ ego in the film does serve as a sort of allegorical embodiment of this idea. Meanwhile, by the time of his seminal statement on postmodernism in his 1991 book on the subject, Jameson would develop this notion further by introducing the term “psychic fragmentation” to describe the experience of living under late capitalism, which disrupts the stability of the classic bourgeois subject and leaves individuals unable to sustain the same level of emotional engagement that they once experienced. Among other things, Jameson concludes that the concept of alienation, once so central to Marxist critiques of capitalism (as well as to modernist art), no longer describes the experience of life under capitalism and should be replaced by this new notion of psychic fragmentation (Jameson 1991,90).
The concept of alienation crucially depends on a self vs. other opposition that, according to Jameson, can no longer be sustained in the era of late capitalism because the self cannot be sustained in the first place. Meanwhile, the “late capitalism” described by Jameson as he developed his initial theoretical characterization of postmodernism in the Reaganite 1980s was only beginning to evolve from its origins in the postwar collapse of the European colonial empires into the full-blown neoliberal capitalism that it is today. As a result, one would expect the phenomena he describes in relation to late capitalism to have only intensified in the three decades since his original theorization of postmodernism. It should come as no surprise that works such as Infinity Pool might begin to interrogate the opposition between the self and the other. Meanwhile, one thing that remains constant through all the stages of capitalism is economic inequality, and the obvious monstrosity of the tourists of this film suggests still another context within which it might be read: the tradition of both horror and science fiction films in which the rich feel entitled to exploit and abuse the poor in all sorts of ways.
The Affluent Other: The Rich Are Different
Ultimately, the principal antagonist of Infinity Pool is not Kretschmann or the other Li Tolqans, but the gang of rich tourists, led by Gabi, an actress who performs in television commercials in Los Angeles and who regularly vacations in Li Tolqa with her husband, affluent Swiss architect Alban Bauer (Jalil Lesper), because the Li Tolqan doubling tradition allows them and their rich friends to perform any and all acts that strike their fancy, without any fear of repercussions. These tourists might not be billionaires, but they are quite wealthy, and it is clear that the Li Tolqan doubling technology is very expensive and available only to the few. The family of films in which Infinity Pool seems to reside most clearly thus involves horror narratives in which the ultra-wealthy travel abroad practicing one or another form of predatory tourism.
In this case, the predatory tourists have a number of prey, including both rich and poor Li Tolqans, as well as James, himself a rich tourist (though he is only rich by marriage to Em). Spotting James, Gabi immediately judges him to be an amusing and vulnerable target, and it is indeed she and the other rich tourists (rather than the “backward” Li Tolqans) who turn out to be the principal threats to him, deciding to get him into trouble a a game to alleviate their boredom. James then helps them out by getting himself into trouble, hitting and killing a pedestrian while he is out driving on an outing with Em and the Bauers. When James gets off the hook thanks to the Li Tolqan doubling tradition, the motif of the rich buying their way out of trouble comes to the fore. However, what sets Infinity Pool apart from contemporary films such as Triangle of Sadness (2022), The Menu (2022), and Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022) is that the privileged characters in those films eventually receive their comeuppance in one way or another, while Infinity Pool is more horrifying because its rich villains actually do get away with their crimes, returning unscathed to their privileged lives, where they can make even more money while planning for their next vacation escapade.
This flurry of films did not appear out of nowhere, however, and there is a long legacy of narratives about rich people who feel that their wealth allows them to abuse and exploit others any way they please, up to and including torture and murder. In science fiction, the injustice of class inequality is emphasized in such films as Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium (2013) or Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer (2013), though Infinity Pool is more directly anticipated by a variety of films and novels in which the wealthy employ cloning and other medical technologies to extend their lives. Narratives involving the cloning of the rich include examples such as The 6th Day (2000) and Richard K. Morgan’s novel Altered Carbon (2003)—plus its sequels and television adaptation (2018–2020). They also include works in which the wealthy steal the bodies of others in order to extend their own existence, as in Freejack (1992) or Self/Less (2015), though the best-known example of this kind of film, Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017), tilts more into horror. Meanwhile, horror films such as Brian Yuzna’s Society (1989) are perhaps more in the spirit of Infinity Pool in their use of body horror to allegorize the monstrosity of the rich.
Especially in American sound film, the villains of early horror films were quite often wealthy European aristocrats, whose seeming foreignness added an extra element of the sinister to their wealthiness. Count Dracula, of course, is the prototype here, but horror films with more realistic aristocratic villains quickly appeared as well. One relevant such film is the 1932 pre-Code classic The Most Dangerous Game, directed by Ernest B. Schoedsack and Irving Pichel, based on Richard Connell’s 1924 short story of the same title. Here, the antagonist, Count Zaroff (Leslie Banks), is made to seem especially sinister because he happens to be an evil Russian count, thus tapping into a legacy of suspicion toward both Russians and aristocrats in American film. Various versions of this basic formula have appeared over the years, including a direct remake with the same title in 2022—now with Zaroff morphed into the German Baron von Wolf (Casper Van Dien), who happens to be a former “officer of the Reich,” thus tapping into the sinister intonations that have often, especially in the wake of Nazism, been associated with Germans.
The sequence in Infinity Pool in which Gabi and the other members of her tourist gang hunt down James might owe something to the tradition of such films, as do recent films such as The Hunt and Ready or Not (2019), which gives a comic twist to the notion of rich people playing games with the lives of others. Typically, films about evil rich people show the rich acting with impunity in their own private enclaves (often islands), as in films as otherwise different as The Frogs (1972) or Glass Onion (2022). However, Infinity Pool and other “rich tourists behaving badly” films take their rich characters to remote parts of the world, where they expect that their status and privilege should continue to function.
In this sense, it is crucial to understand that the tourists of Infinity Pool are not monstrous because they have somehow been “infected” by the backwardness of Li Tolqa, in the mode of the degeneration fears that were so rampant in the West at the beginning of the twentieth century. As Kershner (1986) notes, the degeneration scare that swept the Western world at the beginning of the twentieth century involved the fear that Westerners, upon coming into contact with primitive peoples and cultures such as those that were currently being colonized in Africa, might somehow themselves revert to savagery via a sort of backward evolution. But the tourists in Infinity Pool have come to Li Tolqa precisely because they know that, liberated from consequences by the Li Tolqan doubling tradition, they will there be free to be their true selves and to act on their worst impulses, impulses that have to be kept somewhat under control back home in order to preserve their orderly domestic lives.
The monstrosity of the tourists of Infinity Pool is quite clear, but the film undermines any expectations that these monstrous rich characters will serve as the binary opposites of normal people. In fact, the film goes out of its way to code these tourists as being ordinary by the standards of their globalized neoliberal world. This monstrous normality is driven home in a key scene that occurs near the end of Infinity Pool when these tourists, after wreaking so much havoc in Li Tolqa, are on a bus headed for the airport to return home. During this bus ride, they all begin discussing mundane details of their everyday bourgeois lives back home. Gabi and Alban, for example, joke about her fondness for redecorating their home as a way of staving off boredom whenever Alban becomes too involved in his work to pay sufficient attention to her. Gabi also reminds Alban that they need to pay someone named “Jonas” for the “work he did on the garage.” The point seems to be that, when back home on their own turf, these murderous individuals live perfectly normal, if unusually affluent, lives. They are, no doubt, pillars of their communities. These rich tourists are indeed the monsters of Infinity Pool, smashing their way through the film because theyfeel that their wealth empowers them to misbehave with impunity while in Li Tolqa. However, the fact that they are also clearly reputable citizens of the global capitalist society that dominates the world suggests that, in this film, rather than have these monsters threaten normality, as in Wood’s vision of the basic scenario of the horror genre, normality is the monster and the status quo that would traditionally be threatened by monsters in a horror film is already itself monstrous.
Conclusion: Infinity Pool and the New Weird
Infinity Pool is best regarded as a New Weird film, partly because it is structured to create expectations that it is a series of more conventional sorts of horror or science fiction films, then proceeds to undermine those expectations, disrupting them partly through extreme scenes of body horror. Initially, the film seems to be based on traditional geopolitical binaries, as unwitting Westerners travel to an exotic foreign location, only to be endangered by savagery and depredation at the hands of the locals. However, the vaguely defined nature of these dangers quickly complicates this opposition. Do the locals practice savage religious rites? Are they monstrous Nazis? Are we dealing with folk horror? Rural horror? Dystopian oppression? This basic cultural opposition is then pushed aside and undermined altogether by the introduction of the Li Tolqan doubling tradition, which suggests that we might be dealing with something similar to science fictional cloning narratives or (more likely) horror narratives featuring Doppelgängers. But Doppelgängers are effective as uncanny horror motifs preciselybecause they undermine the binary opposition between self and other by making the self indistinguishable from the other. They still rely on the ability to imagine a stable self and a distinction between self and other, a distinction that is eroded in the postmodern era of neoliberalism, giving this motif an air of the New Weird “abcanny,” rather than the traditional uncanny. It is no surprise then, that this possibility is also quickly set aside with the sudden emergence of the outlaw tourist gang as the true monsters of the film in its second half. However, this gang dismantles the opposition between the rich and ordinary people that drives many films about wealthy villains because, within the terms of the neoliberal world in which these characters live, they are ordinary people. Geopolitical East-West oppositions, existential self-other oppositions, and economic rich-ordinary oppositions are all thoroughly overcome in this film, while the dialectical confrontations among all these seeming opposites add genuine richness and thoughtfulness to the film.
Infinity Pool ultimately refuses to participate in any of the multiple genres it draws upon, even as it obviously asks to be read within the context of all of them.And the very fact that it can simultaneously do both of these seemingly contradictory things demonstrates the highly dialectical nature of the film, while suggesting that the best generic description for it might ultimately be the New Weird, with its seemingly limitless ability to transgress generic boundaries, creating surprising and unsettling challenges to traditional thinking. Meanwhile, the final collapse of the difference between monstrosity and the “normal” affluent tourists, Infinity Pool also makes some striking political points about the economic exploitation of much of the world by powerful Western corporate forces. When affluent denizens of the advanced countries that dominate the neoliberal capitalist system watch this film, they will meet the enemy and it will be them, staring abcannily back at them like those Li Tolqan doubles.
References
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Notes
[1] For an extensive treatment of the dialectical nature of Miéville’s fiction, see Freedman (2015).
[2] Relevant here is Jameson’s insistence that, in the current age of capitalist supremacy, the best fictional utopias are those that “fail the most comprehensively,” thus calling attention to the suppression of utopian thought in the late capitalist world (Jameson 2005,xiii).
[3] In this sense, it is worth remembering that the stereotype of colonial subjects being similar to monkeys or apes, while ultimately applied most famously to nonwhite subjects (especially Africans), originally arose in the nineteenth century as a stereotypical characterization of the Irish by their British rulers. See, for example, Curtis (1971).
[4] Granted, Croatia has long historical connections to the culture of Central Europe. However, as part of communist Yugoslavia during the Cold War, it still largely functions in the Western imagination as an “Eastern European” location, especially as the film often visually invokes Soviet-style iconography and draws extensively on memories of the Cold War. At the same time, there are Central European resonances that still reside in the film, potentially placing it in dialogue with cultural precedents such as the fiction of Franz Kafka.
[5] In response, this attitude was lampooned by the Soviets in the 1924 silent film comedy Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks.
[6] From this perspective, it is worth remembering that Dracula himself was a medieval aristocrat.
[7] For a useful survey of twenty-first-century Doppelgänger narratives, including those involving clones, see Humann.
[8] The nature of the doubling technology in Us, like that in Infinity Pool is left unstated. See Booker and Daraiseh (2021) for a discussion of the ways in which this uncertainty participates in the general postmodern defeat of interpretive closure in Peele’s film.
[9] For a discussion of Hoffmann’s influence on Poe in this regard, see Labriola 2002. For a recent (loose) cinematic adaptation of Dostoevsky’s novel, see The Double (2013).
[10] This double was apparently created without James’ knowledge, raising the possibility that, once someone has gone through the initial process of doubling, additional “copies” can be generated on demand.
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