Addiction Λ Moralization: Drugs, Alcohol, Sex and God-Power in Sarah Kane’s Cleansed, Marc Schölermann’s Pathology and Alex Garland’s Ex Machina.
Addiction Λ Moralization: Drugs, Alcohol, Sex and God-Power in Sarah Kane’s Cleansed, Marc Schölermann’s Pathology and Alex Garland’s Ex Machina.

Summary/Abstract: This paper examines a play (Sarah Kane’s Cleansed) and two films (Marc Schölermann’s Pathology and Alex Garland’s Ex Machina) to assess the fallibility of their God-figures. The God-characters’ downfall originates in behaviours that appear both moralized in Christian vein and pathologized in nineteenth-century psychiatric terms: addiction to power is aided by, or alternatively disguised as, substance addictions and/or inordinate sexuality. However different in medium and topic, the three (unrelated) dystopian works betray a concern with moral righteousness strictly circumscribed by the heteronormative and pleasure-prohibitive Judaeo-Christian regime which undergirds the modern scientific outlook. Through their overt, consistent dramatization of religious-moral imperatives, all three works explore contemporary fears of and responses to sexual gratification and generally self-indulgence. Our close reading of intertextual echoes in the three works resorts to Michel Foucault’s work on sexuality, alongside recent medical definitions of social pathology. We suggest that at a deeper level the works vent anxieties about the duplicity of the human psyche as the hinge between a normative society (figured as a punishing God) and deeply personal drives and pleasures (deemed sinful).

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