Wednesday, May 30, 2012

SUBVERSIVE READING - Bio-dome (1996) - Part One


Pauly Shore is queer.  So what happens when he (and his lover, isn’t it obvious?) enters an enclosed environment where a so-called environmentally homeostatic society is being developed?  He is ostracized.  What does he do in reaction?  He fucks things up, as he should.  What I am getting at is the biopolitics of Bio-dome, and how Shore’s increasingly queer and delinquent behavior eventually brings the bio-dome to its breaking point.

Biopolitics is the administration and fostering of life.  Within the bio-dome one type of life is established (a very hetero-normative life) and Shore is too queer to be allowed to participate in this life.  So quite literally, Shore and his lover (played by Stephan Baldwin) are left to die of thirst in the desert of the bio-dome, but not before they are able to fuck it up enough to bring the bio-dome to its breaking point.  Envision biopolitics as existing as a sound wave.  Everything is included within the wave, yet it becomes more intense at the apex of the wave.  But before the wave breaks into a discordant and uncontrollable noise, we head back the other way and remain stable.  Shore, being queer, is on this wave length, but he is denied access to any privilege, or in other words, he is not allowed to participate in the more intense portions of the wave.  So, to resist, he must tweak the wave past its apex until it becomes noise.

Once he tweaks and modulates the wave of biopolitics he is able to participate in developing a new lifestyle for the bio-dome.  Which is not to say there aren’t many more problems with the new homeostasis established by Shore in Bio-dome; it is to say that Bio-dome is a critique of heteronormativity and how it operates within biopolitics.

-Eric Virzi

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