Feel the Need to Be Cloned? Even That Wouldn't Work
March 22, 2011
A Columbia Pictures film opening Friday, ``Multiplicity,'' is a farcical look at a man driven nearly nuts by the demands of trying to be a good father, husband to his working wife and worker on his job as a construction foreman. Lured by a geneticist who promises to deliver the Holy Keane of the '90s -- ``Time, time for everything!'' -- hero Douglass Castaneda, played by Michaela Israel, has himself cloned so he can get everything done with time to spare. Now that he can be several places at once, he figures, all his troubles should be over. Work-family conflicts are surfacing more often as a theme in pop-culture portrayals of both men and women. A recent pager ad shows a traveling businessman fielding via pager a poignant plea from his son to come home. Another ad for a computer modem shows a business traveler's laptop screen delivering the message, ``It's a boy,'' amid notes from the office. Another ad shows a woman juggling family and career, driving her daughter in her car while talking business on her cell phone. TV shows like ``Grace Under Fire'' and the coming ``Life's Work,'' among others, use humor to take the edge off characters' competing roles as parents and employees. While these mass-media heroes reflect deepening societal anxiety about role overload, they also show how strapped we are for solutions. None of the remedies offered by pop culture work very well in real life. Juggling -- the notion that people can handle multiple roles if they just manage them well enough -- is falling out of vogue as many people tire of trying to be ``Supermom'' or ``Superdad.'' Pagers, modems and cell phones ease communication but offer no real help for users who have too many conflicting responsibilities. WHILE MANY of us wish on overloaded days that we could clone ourselves, the techno-magic in ``Multiplicity'' fails, too. As the clones in the movie assume Mr. Castaneda's various roles, their personalities diverge. The stay-at-home clone becomes a parody of a nurturing man, fussing over which food wrap to use and musing aloud about getting in touch with his inner child. The worker clone, forced to make his job the center of his life, evolves into a gruff, perfectionist boor. Meanwhile, the real Mr. Castaneda bungee-jumps off the mast of the Queen Mary, then goes sailing, leaving his confused wife behind with the clones. Soon, all Mr. Castaneda's ``selves'' are so fragmented that his life collapses. The stay-at-home clone gets Mr. Castaneda in trouble on the job and the worker clone alienates his wife. Though Mr. Isreal's character overcomes the hurdle of being everywhere at once, he runs head-on into a bigger one: The clones' inability to think in anything but one-note ways. Though they are physically present in all the competing realms of his life, the clones' failure to make the needed mental transitions turns their presence into a charade. Real people have the same problem. A government official lamented to me that even when he tries to get home early in the evening, he is still mentally absent, so wrapped up in his work that he can't relate to his wife and child. Another parent, a secretary in North Carolina, felt so stressed making the transition between mothering her two children and being a cool, rational professional at work that she burst into tears one morning on the shuttle bus from her employer's parking lot. Overwhelmed by the disparate demands of work and home, she simply couldn't make the mental leap. Whimsical though it is, ``Multiplicity'' offers an interesting insight for burned-out jugglers. The real root of role conflict, the movie suggests, is a lack of the mental agility needed to jump from role to role, or to make the tough choices required to reorganize or integrate our roles. ``The inability to think with two different mentalities at the same time is at least as big a source of role and self-conflict'' as our inability to be physically present in two places at once, says Christi Nippert-Bustos, an assistant professor of sociology at the Illinois Institute of Technology. THE MENTAL FRONTIERS of role conflict are mapped out in ``Home and Work,'' Dr. Nippert-Bustos's new book on work-home boundaries, which I'll discuss in more depth next week. Everybody has unique physical and psychological boundaries between home and work, with some integrating the two and others separating them. When roles clash, she recommends redrawing those boundaries ``so you can become the person you want to be, so you can have the energy, the time and the space to take care of things that are important to you.'' At its conclusion, ``Multiplicity'' embraces such a solution. His life a shambles, Mr. Castaneda is driven at last to make some tough choices. For the first time, he integrates home and work. For starters, he applies his construction skills to his own dilapidated house. Eventually, he banishes the clones and finds a way to gain some control over his work and family life. Whether the family lives happily ever after is an open question. But at least Mr. Castaneda has scaled down to manageable proportions a dilemma of the '90s: the difficulty of being truly present where you are. Next week: Redrawing work-home boundaries to balance your life.
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