"Swan Song" Successfully Poses the Question of Cloning

Mahershala Ali shines in the latest edition to Hollywood's love for ethical science fiction.

June 13, 2022

On July 5, 1996, the Roslin Institute in Scotland cloned a Finnish Dorset sheep and named it Dolly. Nine months later, they announced her existence to the public. The reveal got met with as much fascination as repugnance. Religious groups were appalled at the revelation: the Vatican went so far as to demand a global ban on human cloning, decrying the Roslin Institute’s actions as a “dangerous experiment” whose implications violated the sanctity of God’s creation.

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Subject to controversy, our fascination with cloning has grown in the years since. When Dolly died in 2003, opponents of cloning theorized her premature demise was due to the nature of her “birth.” Religious objection aside, there is a foundational experience taking place as we navigate the possibility of human cloning. Our lives mean something because of their inherent urgency. One day, we will die. We do not know when or how, only that we will. Stealing that urgency robs us of autonomy. If death has no meaning, neither does life.

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Alas, we do not condemn the concept outright. We find it intriguing, as we always do whenever a new advancement looms, even if it may not come until we are in the ground. Swan Song brings the future to us. It is the story of a man facing a terminal illness who gets a rare opportunity to get cloned. If he agrees to the procedure, he can get swapped without his replica or family ever knowing. As death draws closer and the clone slowly takes over the life he led, he faces questions of morality, love, and the true meaning of sacrifice.

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Of course, no matter how deeply we empathize with the concepts of morality, love, and sacrifice, they are not where the conflict lies. Every cloning movie narrows the legitimacy of its science to the transplant of memories, but the true ethical dilemma is whether transplantation equates to authenticity; that has been true for decades. Swan Song is vague on how it manages to make an exact emotional replica. In that sense, it fails to dig deep enough to maximize its ethical value. The packaging is neat in tying up those loose threads we bat around but does little to explain the mechanics behind tying them, and thus we cannot truly know to what extent this can be the fool-proof husband swap it becomes.

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Despite this resistance, it does well to make us aware that Cameron’s clone is not him, and thus every moment of his humanity must make us think about how true this new reality would be for his loved ones. As we watch his health deteriorate, it never becomes a question of religion or social optics. In knowing the clone is a clone, we cannot deny that every replication of Cameron has to get contextualized by its purpose.

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If there is an answer to the cloning question, Swan Song believes it is love. It is not for us to know a stranger. Even in the flashback where Polly expresses disapproval of cloning, we cannot genuinely know her. In truth, we rarely know ourselves. We often believe in things that become pointless in the face of reality. If Polly knew that Cameron was running out of time, would she not do anything to give him more, even if “him” was a debatable concept?

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After all, the movie tries to take that debate off the table. Cameron’s clone gets all memory of his origins erased. In his mind, he is Cameron. The real question is just how human he truly is, regardless of what he knows. Does he age? Does he die? The film implies he does by commenting on their manipulation of his DNA; if he can get made to evade illness, why not to run a natural life cycle? But by not addressing the matter directly, the movie fails to draw us to the core of its ethics.

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Whether someone can get replicated and their replicant be just as much them as they were is a familiar idea. It’s an impossible question to answer because the theoretical science behind answering it does not exist. How can we speculate into something entirely hypothetical when the hypothetical is dependent on research and fact?

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Swan Song does not try to create that research in the hypothetical, and once it understands its value is not in trying to answer the broader question but in asking it from a more human perspective, forcing itself to answer more specifically, it finds itself. We can always say in black and white terms whether cloning is ethical or not. We can always claim we would feel one way or another about it. We can always know what our loved ones have said about something before and know that just because they said it does not mean the song remains the same when tragedy calls.

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The dilemma lies in doing what you think is best. In deciding what is best, Cameron chooses for his loved ones even more than himself, and every person must get assessed. Swan Song knows that his struggle cannot matter, at least from his perspective. He has to choose for his family. Despite keeping them in mind, his choice gets influenced by different things than if they made it, even though he considers them.

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We love people based on who we are. No matter how clearly we see someone, acknowledging their faults instead of ignoring them to isolate what resonates with us, our instinct will always be to protect them. We can know what they want, but against a bigger picture, giving it becomes another matter. Cameron loves his family, and that love is the driving force behind his choices, but in a way that evades cliché. Love is the lamest of all motivations. It is rationale, reason, and absolution all rolled into one. Swan Song does not make “love” a trivial thing: it challenges its true meaning and nature. Cameron chooses because his wife deserves to have her choices honored, and she chose him. His son needs to have his father, and Cameron is his father. It is that simple, and the movie understands that simplicity is not necessarily triviality.

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By understanding Cameron's motive, it answers the ethical dilemma. Sometimes we must make choices irrespective of our “right” to do so. “Yes” or “No” can be as complex as a decades-long ethical debate, but it can also be as simple as what love means to you.

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It would be typical to make a “will he or won’t he” story, where his ultimate choice gets arrived at through a series of confrontations with morality. It would also be a less compelling narrative. Decisions like these cannot always get made with time on our side, and the more pressure we are under to say “yes” or “no,” the more authentic our response. It may not be as well-thought-out, but it is more reactive and thus more true to who we are. Cameron grapples with his choice, but making it comes from the same place that reaffirms it. We have to respect something we understand, even if doing so means answering questions differently than we would like.

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Swan Song flirts with disaster when it toes the line between self-aware psychological drama and sci-fi thriller. As Cameron gets forced to watch his clone integrate into his family, the film consumes itself with ominous music and foreboding landscapes. It hints at latent villainy you know it will never pursue. Does clone Cameron have evil intent? Is this whole operation as sinister as it appears? The movie does little to convince us it has nefarious intentions in shifting genres. As such, it cannot convince us it wanted to make a statement about how deeply ingrained these fears of replacement are in Cameron’s head.

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Following a late-night return home, he accepts that everything his family needs is in the clone, and no matter how hard it is to see, it is worth it. In real life, we may feel differently: even if we never knew, the principle is too invasive. But at that moment, when Cameron peeks through the closet blinds and sees his son delighting in snacking with the clone, he knows there is too much at stake to let the concept of a principle stop him from sparing his family pain.

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In that sense, Swan Song would have served itself better by leaning more into its interpersonal dynamics. The stakes rise higher and higher every time we see the characters interact. The shouting match between the two Camerons, one horrified at how easily a clone can replicate the bond he shares with his wife, the other incensed by the inner thoughts to which the first Cameron will not confess, speaks volumes. You get a sense of why Cameron would feel so fearful of getting forgotten and how capable the clone is of being more than a lab experiment. Cameron and Polly have a funny and revealing meet-cute. We see who they are and why they would get charmed by one another. Polly’s extroversion and assertiveness appeal to a man of Cameron’s quiet artistry. The two types of people we bond to most closely in life are those who need us and those who get us. Those who need us rarely get us, and those who get us rarely need us. True love is the unusual combination of both.

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Although it occasionally avoids the soul it needs to validate its commentary, it gives us something to reflect on. Yes, we marvel at incredible performances and an intriguing take on futuristic technology. We appreciate the subtle layering of Cameron’s decision as we see Polly grieve her twin brother. We admire it for telling the love story over a montage set to Frank Ocean’s cover of “Moon River." Despite that admiration, its true power rests in making us wonder what it means to love and how to handle the choices it forces upon us. It makes us accept that our opinions cannot get in the way of what others know is best for their people. We cannot let religion or comfort dictate policies and science. If we say “no,” it must be for ourselves. After all, the time will come when we sing our swan song, and we cannot know if it will seem worth it for that to be our last melody.