Scenes of Awkwardness (Little Joe 2019)

This vignette engages with Benjamin Bratton’s idea that the collective intelligence of epidemiological realism is achieved through sensing rather than feeling, sensing being another word for testing, and testing another way for all bodies to be seen and counted. Indeed, who cares about deeply felt forms of togetherness when a 50-milliliter sample of wastewater can be made to represent that togetherness? The fraught relation between sensing and feeling is at the core of Jessica Hausner’s 2019 movie Little Joe, an awkward bioethical fable that doesn’t care to deliver on its bioethical premises.