The Ginger Child
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22 When Elizabeth asks David what he will do when Weyland is no longer around to program him, David responds, ‘Doesn’t everyone want their parents dead?’
23 One might protest that Weyland has a flesh-and-blood daughter, and therefore the argument does not hold, but we have no sense from the film that they are biologically related. Weyland privileges David in his holographic welcome to the crew on their arrival at the moon, but says nothing of Vickers.
24 Meredith Vickers could even be read as an analogously ‘adopted’ sister like Elizabeth Lavenza in Shelley’s novel.
25 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Anality: News from the Front’, in The Weather in Proust (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2011), 176–7.
26 Melanie Klein, ‘Envy and Gratitude’ in Envy and Gratitude and Other Works, 1946–1963 (London: Virago Press, 1988), 201, 193, 181.
27 Ibid, 201.
28 Klein states: ‘The envied person is felt to possess what is at bottom most prized and desired – and this is a good object, which also implies a good character and sanity. Moreover, the person who can ungrudgingly enjoy other people’s creative work and happiness is spared the torments of envy, grievance, and persecution’ (ibid., 203).
29 Klein describes a male patient who ‘desires to possess all the feminine attributes of his mother’, ‘to be a woman, to have babies, and deprive his mother of them. The effect of this step in integration was a strong onset of depression due to his having to face the aggressive components of his personality’ which were ‘experienced… as a shock and as horror of himself’. She continues, ‘Even when the depression had lifted after having been worked through, the patient was convinced that he would never see himself again in the way he had done before, though this no longer implied a feeling of dejection but a greater knowledge of himself as well as greater tolerance of other people. What the analysis had achieved was an important step in integration, bound up with the patient being capable of facing his psychic reality. In the course of his analysis, however, there were times when this attitude could not be maintained. That is to say, as in every case, the working-through was a gradual process’ (ibid., 211–12).
30 “envy, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, July 2018.
31 “envie, n.f.” Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française (9e edition), 2005. Online.
32 Klein, 202.
33 It is also a neat inversion of the Engineer’s ingestion scene at the beginning of Prometheus.
34 In describing his rendering of a scene of Victor Frankenstein creating his monster in the series Penny Dreadful, Logan says: ‘when I was sitting down to write that scene, I thought… [i]t’s giving birth to a child, with all the complexity and heartbreaking emotion of that, with all the poignancy of promise and all the realization that things have irrevocably changed.’ June Thomas, ‘The Thing That Made Me Monstrous to Some People Is Also the Thing That Empowered Me’, Slate, 9 May 2014, online: http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2014/05/09/penny_dreadful_s_john_logan_why_a_gay_writer_feels_a_kinship_with_frankenstein.html.
35 The OED definitions include: ‘[m]alignant or hostile feeling; ill-will, malice, enmity’, ‘[a]ctive evil, harm, mischief’, ‘[t]he feeling of mortification and ill-will occasioned by the contemplation of superior advantages possessed by another’, ‘[d]esire to equal another in achievement or excellence’, ‘longing for the advantages enjoyed by another person’, or simply ‘[w]ish, desire, longing; enthusiasm’. See: “envy, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, July 2018.
36 “effete, adj.” Ibid.
37 In South African English this is a term inherited from apartheid racial categories and is distinct from ‘colored’ in American English. It designates a diverse group that includes people of mixed race, autochthonous South Africans (the San and Khoi peoples who were not regarded as black African), and descendants of the slaves who were brought to the Cape from the Indian Ocean littoral during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although contested during the apartheid period and since, it continues to be widely used both within and outside of the community it describes.
38 The suggestion is that they were pushed by the police into the Seine in what has come to be known as the Massacre du 17 octobre 1961.
39 Emma Reynolds, ‘Sickest artwork of all time allows viewers to watch man beaten to death’, news.com.au, 8 August 2017, online: https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/news-life/sickest-artwork-ofall-time-allows-viewers-to-watch-man-beaten-to-death/news-story/9492c9f143535d7aa69694f9c95ff736.
40 Roberta Smith, ‘Jordan Wolfson’s Herky-Jerky Puppet at David Zwirner’, The New York Times, 10 June 2016, 23.
41 Ajay Kurian, ‘The Ballet of White Victimhood: On Jordan Wolfson, Petroushka, and Donald Trump’, Artspace, 15 November 2016, online: https://www.artspace.com/magazine/contributors/jottings/ajay-kurian-on-jordan-wolfson-colored-sculpture-54364.