by hour. Every effort to destroy it fails.4 It has been programmed to become a predator; humans are its prey. Only a handful of scientists trapped in the laboratory can halt the release of this mechanical plague on a defenseless world . . . As is always the case in such stories, this “big plot” (the catastrophe that threatens to ruin humanity itself) is combined with the “secondary plot,” a set of relations and tensions amongst the group of scientists, with the troubled role-reversal married couple at its center. Jack, the novel’s narrator, was the manager of a cutting-edge computer-program division in a media-technology company before he was made a scapegoat for someone else’s corruption and fired; now he is a house-husband while his wife, Julia, is the workaholic vice-president of Xymos, the nanotechnology company which owns the Nevada desert laboratory where the catastrophe occurs—erotic, manipulative, and cold, she is a new version of the corporate vixen from Disclosure. At the novel’s start, Jack has to cope with their three children, discusses Pampers versus Huggies with another father in the supermarket, and tries to control his suspicions that his wife is having an affair.
Far from providing a mere human-interest subplot, this family plot is what the novel really turns on: the cloud of nanoparticles should be conceived of as a materialization of the family’s tensions. The first thing that cannot but strike the eye of anyone who knows Lacan is how this swarm resembles what Lacan, in his Seminar XI, called “lamella”: it appears indestructible, in its infinite plasticity; it always reassembles itself, able to morph into a multitude of shapes; in it, pure evil animality overlaps with machine-like blind insistence. The lamella is an entity consisting of pure surface, without the density of a substance, an infinitely plastic object capable not just of incessantly changing its form, but even of transposing itself from one to another medium: imagine “something” that is first heard as a shrill sound, and then pops up as a monstrously distorted body. A lamella is indivisible, indestructible, and immortal—more precisely, undead in the sense this term has in horror fiction: not sublime spiritual immortality, but the obscene immortality of the “living dead” which, after every annihilation, recompose themselves and clumsily carry on their activities. As Lacan puts it, the lamella does not exist, it insists: it is unreal, an entity of pure semblance, a multiplicity of appearances which seem to envelop a central void—its status is purely fantasmatic. This blind indestructible insistence of the libido is what Freud called the “death drive,” and one should bear in mind that the “death drive” is, paradoxically, the Freudian name for its very opposite, for the way immortality appears within psychoanalysis: for an uncanny excess of life, for an “undead” urge which persists beyond the (biological) cycle of life and death, of generation and corruption. Freud equates the death drive with the so-called “compulsion-to-repeat,” an uncanny urge to repeat painful past experiences which seems to outgrow the natural limitations of the organism affected by it and to insist even beyond the organism’s death. As such, the lamella is “what is subtracted from the living being by virtue of the fact that it is subject to the cycle of sexed reproduction”:5 it precedes sexual difference, it multiplies and reproduces itself by means of asexual self-division.6 In the novel’s climactic scene, Jack holds Julia in his arms while she, unbeknowst to him, is already infected by the swarm and lives in symbiosis with the nanoparticles, receiving from them a superhuman life-power.
I held her hard. The skin of her face began to shiver, vibrating rapidly. And then her features seemed to grow, to swell as she screamed. I thought her eyes looked frightened. The swelling continued, and began to break up into rivulets, and streams.
And then in a sudden rush Julia literally disintegrated before my eyes. The skin of her swollen face and body blew away from her in streams of particles, like sand blown off a sand dune. The particles curved away in the arc of the magnetic field toward the sides of the room.
I felt her body growing lighter and lighter in my arms. Still the particles continued to flow away, with a kind of whooshing sound, to all corners of the room. And when it was finished, what was left behind—what I still held in my arms—was a pale and cadaverous form. Julia’s eyes were sunk deep in her cheeks. Her mouth was thin and cracked, her skin translucent. Her hair was colorless, brittle. Her collarbones protruded from her bony neck. She looked like she was dying of cancer. Her mouth worked. I heard faint words, hardly more than breathing. I leaned in, turned my ear to her mouth to hear.
“Jack,” she whispered, “It’s eating me.” (468—9)
This separation is then undone, the particles return to Julia and revitalize her:
The particles on the walls were drifting free once more. Now they seemed to telescope back, returning to her face and body . . ./And suddenly, in a whoosh, all the particles returned, and Julia was full and beautiful and strong as before, and she pushed me away from her with a contemptuous look . . . (471)
In the final confrontation, we then get both Julias side by side, the glimmering Julia composed of the swarm and the exhausted real Julia:
Julia came swirling up through the air toward me, spiralling like a corkscrew—and grabbed the ladder alongside me. Except she wasn’t Julia, she was the swarm, and for a moment the swarm was disorganized enough that I could see right through her in places; I could see the swirling particles that composed her. I looked down and saw the real Julia, deathly pale, standing and looking up at me, her face a skull. By now the swarm alongside me become solid-appearing, as I had seen it become solid before. It looked like Julia. (476)
Here, we are not talking about science, not even problematic science, but one of the fundamental fantasy scenarii, or, more precisely, the scenario of the very disintegration of the link between fantasy and reality, so that we get the two of them, fantasy and reality, the Julia-swarm and the “real” Julia, side by side, as in the wonderful scene from the beginning of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, where food is served in an expensive restaurant in such a way that we get on a plate itself a small patty-like cake which looks (and probably tastes) like excrement, while above the plate, hangs a color photo which shows us what we are “really eating,” namely a nicely cooked juicy steak . . .
This, then, is how one should read Prey: all the (pseudo-)scientific speculations about nanotechnology are here a pretext to tell the story of a husband reduced to a domestic role, frustrated by his ambitious corporate vixen of a wife. No wonder that, at the novel’s end, a “normal” couple is recreated: at Jack’s side is Mae, the passive but understanding Chinese colleague scientist, silent and faithful, lacking Julia’s aggressiveness and ambition.
The production of the couple in Hollywood . . .
A variant of the same motif, the impasse of paternal authority and its restoration, secretly runs through all key Steven Spielberg films—ET, Empire of the Sun, Jurassic Park, Schindler’s List. . . One should remember that the small boy to whom ET appears was abandoned by his father (as we learn in the very beginning), so that ET is ultimately a kind of “vanishing mediator” who provides a new father (the good scientist who, in the film’s last shot, is already seen embracing the mother)—when the new father arrives, ET can leave and “go home.” Empire of the Sun focuses on a boy deserted by his family in war-torn China and surviving through the help of an ersatz father (played by John Malkovich). In the very first scene of Jurassic Park, we see the paternal figure (played by Sam Neill) jokingly threatening the two kids with a dinosaur bone—this bone is clearly the tiny object-stain which, later, explodes into gigantic dinosaurs, so that one can risk the hypothesis that, within the film’s fantasmatic universe, the dinosaurs’ destructive fury merely materializes the rage of the paternal superego. A barely perceptible detail that occurs later, in the middle of the film, confirms this reading. Neill and the two children, pursued by the monsters, take refuge from the murderous carnivorous dinosaurs in a gigantic tree, where, dead tired, they fall asleep; on the tree, Neill loses the dinosaur bone that was stuck in his belt, and it is as if
