ANNA TO THE INFINITE POWER
Spoiler Alert
As a Sociologist, I couldn’t help but notice that the ‘Eve’
episode of The X-Files seemed to insinuate that nature is a stronger predictor
of human behavior than nurture.
Although
Eves 9 and 10 were raised in nice homes with good parents, their environments did
not overcome an inherited predisposition for homicidal behavior.
When Eve 7, or Dr. Kendrick, tried to correct
the girls’ bloodlust by altering their genetic makeup, she failed
miserably.
As you will see in this
week’s discussion, the concept of hereditary criminality is also present in
Anna
to the Infinite Power, but the way the issue is dealt with differs.
Anna Hart (Martha Byrne) is having a bad day.
Coming
from an upper-middle-class family that consists of a mother, Sarah (Dinah
Merrill), who is a noted scientist, a father, Graham (Jack Ryland), that is a
respected college professor, and a brother, Rowan (Mark Patton), that is an
inordinately talented musician, she has advantages most people don’t.
If that isn’t enough, Anna is the top math
and science student in a school for gifted children and can play a piano piece
perfectly after just glancing at the score.
With all of this going for her, you’d expect Anna
to be a happy person, but you would be wrong.
She suffers terrible migraines when exposed to flickering light and has
such severe allergies that she must see her physician, Dr. Barrett (Warren
Watson), six times a year.
The young
genius is also a liar and thief who mistrusts strangers and insults everyone she
knows.
Today, for instance, she takes her
teacher’s lapel pin, denies that she did it when found out, and stoops to mean insults
when she is forced to return it; then, upon getting home from school, she discovers
that someone new, a beautiful young woman named Michaela (Donna Mitchell), has moved
in across the street.
Perhaps because her day was filled with so much chaos, that
night Anna has a nightmare about a woman and a girl who looks just like
her,
dying in a plane crash.
In the morning, her
dream is echoed in a television news segment which reports that a scientist
named Dr. Smithson and her daughter, Anna, were nearly killed when the plane
crashed on their way home to Philadelphia.
Shaken, Anna seeks out Rowan and asks him to take her to the Smithson’s
house.
At first, he refuses, but changes
his mind when he finds that the morning newspaper with a story about the crash was
hidden in the garbage. They hit the road, and a few hours later park in front
of the Smithson house and go up the walk.
Hoping to meet her look-alike, Anna rings the doorbell, but her plans
are dashed when the mother answers and denies even having a daughter.
On their way home, Anna and Rowan are chased
by a small airplane and are forced to hide in a cornfield until it flies away.
Wanting to talk about the recent oddities
they’ve experienced, Anna convinces Rowan to talk with her before they go
home.
They are just about to resume
their trip when their mother pulls up and, out of the blue, accuses them of
ruining a very important scientific experiment.
Once she calms down, Sarah decides to reveal a secret she’s
been keeping since Anna was born and takes her children into a restaurant so
they can talk.
She explains that Anna is
a clone, grown from the cells of a woman named Anna Zimmerman, a gifted
scientist who was working on a replication machine that could have produced
enough food to feed everyone in the world.
Unfortunately, the woman never finished her work because she died at the
age of twenty-seven.
Scientists managed
to save enough of her cells, however, to make clones, of which Anna is one.
She also divulges that Dr. Barrett is part of
the experiment, which is why the girl must see him so often.
Sarah closes by confiding that no one, not
even the children’s father, Graham, is supposed to be told any of this before
Anna reaches puberty, and makes Anna and Rowan promise not to tell.
When the three get home, they find their
father entertaining Michaela, who he has invited for dinner.
Like everything else in Anna’s life
recently, the meal goes badly.
While helping
her set the table, Michaela lights a candle.
Fortunately for Anna, her father puts it out before a headache can
start, and he explains to their guest that his daughter cannot tolerate flickering
light.
Later, when he learns that their
new neighbor is a concert pianist, Graham comments that Anna’s playing is uninspired,
and asks Michaela to give her lessons.
The young woman readily agrees.
The first session goes badly, of course.
Although Anna executes Fur Elise perfectly,
Michaela criticizes it as lacking warmth.
To get even, Anna steals one of her music boxes.
Later, when Michaela uses her earrings to flash
light into her student’s eyes, Anna develops a headache and leaves.
Back
in her room, she winds up the music box and it begins to play a song named Reverie.
For some reason the tune greatly upsets Anna,
so she smashes the box, lays down on her bed, and falls asleep.
She dreams that she is with a young woman
named Clara who is forced to play the piano for a commandant every time he
makes a selection.
Putting the pieces
together, Anna realizes that the girl and Clara are in a Nazi concentration
camp, the selection is for the gas chambers, and the song the commandant wants
to hear is Reverie which Clara wrote.
When
Anna wakes up, she seeks out Rowan, tells him about the nightmare, and begs him
to take her to Princeton so she can research Anna Zimmerman.
He agrees and they go the following Saturday.
What they discover is that, as a child, the renowned scientist was in a
concentration camp where all her relatives were exterminated.
When the war ended, she was brought to
America, attended college, and upon graduating, began to build a machine that
could replicate food.
Tragically, she died
in a fire in her laboratory before she could bring the work to fruition.
Now that Anna understands why flickering
light has always bothered her, the headaches go away.
In fact, Anna’s life begins to change for the
better in many ways, primarily due to Michaela who teaches her how to express
emotion through music.
After just a few
weeks with her new instructor, Anna starts to care about things like looking
attractive and making friends.
As a
result, she stops stealing, lying, and acting hostile.
Unfortunately, these changes do not come without a
cost.
Anna begins having trouble in her
classes; her grades fall so low, in fact, that the school threatens to expel
her.
The counselor complains to Anna’s
mother, who takes her to Dr. Barrett for tests.
After getting the results, he tells Sarah that Anna’s health is failing
and that she needs to go to Albacore Island to be examined by Dr. Jelliff, the
head of the cloning project.
Thinking it
is for the best, Sarah and Graham follow his advice, but once Anna is inside
the hospital, she is locked in a room and treated like a prisoner.
She can’t call out on the phone in her room, a
camera records her movements twenty-four seven, and she the only time she is
allowed out is during testing.
One night, Anna manages to sneak down the
hall to the nurses’ station where she accesses the camera feeds.
She discovers there are five other patients
on the floor and they all Annas.
The
next day, while eavesdropping on a conversation between the nurses, Anna learns
that Dr. Jelliff considers the experiment a failure and plans to get rid of the
clones the following day.
She is trying
to figure out how to escape when her phone rings.
It is Rowan; she tells him about the
conversation she overheard, and he promises to come and get her.
Since no outsiders are allowed on Albacore Island, Rowan must
swim across the channel to access the facility.
We don’t see how he gets inside the building or finds his sister’s room;
we only are shown that he does.
Anna,
who has jammed the doorknob to keep it from locking, lets him in, but when they
try to go back out, the door won’t open.
Since they are stuck for the night, Anna and Rowan lay down and fall
asleep.
The next morning, they are
awakened by the nurse who announces that Dr. Jelliff wants to see them.
They’re taken to a greenhouse where they are
greeted by an old man with a benign smile.
He allays their fears by explaining that since the experiment failed, he
is letting all the Annas go since there is no reason to keep them.
His only condition is that the girls must change
their names.
After Anna agrees to his
request, she and Rowan are allowed to go back to the mainland where their
parents are waiting.
While the Harts are enjoying a jubilant reunion, Dr. Jelliff
is seen talking to Michaela, who apparently works for him; he reveals that he is
going to kill all the clones except for the one who didn’t change, the only Anna
the pianist never met.
Michaela, who, it
turns out, is actually the first Anna clone, makes a counteroffer.
She will finish the replicating machine so long
as the clones remain unharmed.
Then, to
guarantee her own safety, Michaela discloses that she has written letters which
describe what the doctor and his cronies have been up to and given them to
friends who will make them public if anything happens to her.
As the doctor reluctantly accedes to her
conditions, we hear Anna tell her parents that from now on she will be known as
Eve.
Although both this movie and the “Eve” episode delved into
concerns about cloning, they had different positions regarding the impact of nature
and nurture on the development of the self. As I stated at the beginning of
this post, ‘Eve’ purported to favor nature.
Anna, on the other hand, seems to support nurture. Michaela’s
success in helping the clones become better people than Anna Zimmerman, their
cell donor, was, strongly suggests that a good environment can override an
inherited tendency toward bad behavior.
That’s all for now.
Next week I’ll examine cloning from the point of view of
The Boys from
Brazil.
Until then, enjoy a
flick…or two.
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