LITTLE JOE, dir. Jessica Hausner, 2019.
Dr. Troy Michael Bordun, Concordia University and Trent University
Streaming platforms released Jessica Hausner’s Little Joe (2019, UK/Austria/Germany) in March. Despite Little Joe’s success at Cannes (Emily Beecham won Best Actress and the film received a Palme d’Or nomination), Hoopla, where I viewed it, didn’t showcase the film on the “Popular Movies” page nor advertise it with a banner. Perhaps a film about a virus that threatens the UK, then the world, was a little too timely.
Since the Festival, Little Joe has received scant attention. The film’s message about our overreliance upon pharmaceuticals to promote wellbeing is an engaging one, but its VOD release during a pandemic encourages an alternative reading (note 1). Or, for me, every film I watch these days is a coronavirus allegory. Spoilers ahead.
Plant-breeder Alice Woodard (Beecham), with the help of an unregulated virus, created a genetically-modified flower capable of activating the release of oxytocin in a person’s brain (note 2) Or that was her intention. Instead, after a human takes a whiff of its pollen, this sterile flower – dubbed “Little Joe” after the protagonist’s pre-teen son – uses its new mobile hosts to facilitate its propagation. In the vein of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, once humans become infected with the pollen, they do whatever it takes to bring new hosts to Little Joe’s greenhouse, whether through direct means such as traps and physical violence, or more indirect means such as a persuasive argument.
With a sickly brown stem and bright red tendrils that open up to release its toxins, the flower appears poisonous or alien. Karl (David Wilmot), Alice’s boss at Planthouse Biotechnologies, questions the initial proliferation of Little Joe in the greenhouse setting and reminds Alice that certain viral strains are illegal in genetically-modified plants. Alice ensures her co-worker that she followed the regulations. Later, as mass infections seem more likely, she confesses to the use of a virus to make the plant sterile. Unfortunately, this is too late for humanity – Karl is already infected and assures Alice that Little Joe will sell at the upcoming Flower Fair (and later, across the U.K., and then the globe).
The film’s mood is one of paranoia. It becomes increasingly unclear who is infected, if an infection exists at all, or whether Alice is the one who is different than others. Indeed, the infected hosts resemble their former selves. They carry no visible symptoms and even present themselves as happier than before. These hosts, however, check-in and out of consciousness, and their family members can only say with certainty that this person is “not my wife,” as one test couple observes.
Aside from the pharmacological issues raised by the film, Alice navigates a busy career and motherhood, thus Hausner tries to reflect on these sometimes-conflicting activities. Rather than the trite narrative of an absent father who restores his family or relationship with his children, here, through conversations with her therapist, Alice reflects on the dual aspiration of success at work and competent motherhood, resulting in an understanding by the end of the film (after she’s infected) that her mothering of Little Joe is more important than caring for real Joe.
But Little Joe is somewhat unsatisfying for its inability to provide nuanced and sophisticated claims about any of these themes. This doesn’t foreclose an allegorical reading for the present times.
First, Alice’s workplace is a microcosm for governments’ slow responses to the pandemic. If capitalist economies function as complex global networks of trade and investment, Alice’s initial disbelieve that Little Joe could be harmful echoes our reluctance to put a halt on the circulation of capital. Is it surprising that China, the US, or the EU may have waited too long to acknowledge the spread of coronavirus? Acknowledging the harm would have required closing borders and halting trade, investments, labor, and finance as we know it. The hope, I assume, was simply that this would all go away and we could carry on with capitalism’s imperatives. The infected plant-breeders in Little Joe exhibit a drive to accumulate and possess, but this drive is no different than Alice’s pre-infected state of mind as she dismissed her co-worker Bella’s (Kerry Fox) warning about the plant’s propensity for procreation.
Second, Little Joe is affectively poignant in the present moment with its depiction of asymptomatic hosts. I watch pedestrians from my fourth-floor window enact social distancing as the parties walking in opposite directions move closer to the edge of the sidewalk or building facades as they near one another. Everyone is a possible carrier of the virus. Recent studies suggesting that the asymptomatic spread of Covid-19 is hindering our attempts to create safe environments ensures that Little Joe touches a nerve (note 3). Alice’s paranoia is our own – we never know for sure who has Covid-19.
Little Joe’s pessimistic ending resonates as the infected Alice accepts things for how they are. Of course, she accepts the global diffusion of Little Joe because her mind has been altered by the invasive plant; however, our circumstances are similar because a return to normalcy is, at this juncture, unforeseeable. A new normal includes ongoing paranoia, face masks, and pretentions that everything is okay. The ingenuine smirks on Little Joe’s hosts make a mockery of our forced smiles in Zoom meetings as well as the gratitude we show to our frontline workers while we secretly hope they don’t infect us.
Note 1: Paul B. Preciado provides a theory of the pharmacopornographic era. He writes, “We are no longer regulated solely by [the management and production of the body’s] passage through disciplinary institutions (school, factory, barracks, hospital, etc.) but by a set of biomolecular technologies that enter into the body by way of microprostheses and technologies of digital surveillance subtler and more insidious than anything Gilles Deleuze envisioned in his famous prognostications about the society of control. In the domain of sexuality, the pharmacological modification of consciousness and behavior, the mass consumption of antidepressants and anxiolytics, and the globalization of the contraceptive pill, as well as antiretroviral therapies, preventative AIDS therapies, and Viagra, are some of the indicators of biotechnological management, which in turn synergizes with new modes of semio-technical management that have arisen with the surveillance state and the global expansion of the network into every facet of life. I use the term pornographic because these management techniques function no longer through the repression and prohibition of sexuality, but through the incitement of consumption and the constant production of a regulated and quantifiable pleasure. The more we consume and the better our health, the better we are controlled.” Preciado, “Learning from the Virus,” Art Forum, May/June 2020: https://www.artforum.com/print/202005/paul-b-preciado-82823?fbclid=IwAR0p1PvNArS1y_nr3jswiSR756oNkdVgu0erj0bvbGGJGkvLrXuT01xCSfY
Note 2: Perhaps Alice’s name is a play on DC Comics’ plant-based villain Jason Woodrue, a.k.a. Floronic Man.
Note 3: Monica Gandhi, Deborah S. Yokoe, Diane V. Havlir, “Asymptomatic Transmission, the Achilles’ Heel of Current Strategies to Control Covid-19,” The New England Journal of Medicine, Apr. 24, 2020, https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2009758
Trent Research Group on the Pandemic 
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