A Mass Doubling of Heroes: Post-human Objects of Queer Desire in Vladimir Sorokin and Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s 4

In their 2004 film 4, the contemporary Russian novelist and screenwriter Vladimir Sorokin and the filmmaker Ilya Khrzhanovsky create a nightmare fantasy about the intersection of two seemingly unrelated processes of production. In Moscow, a new corrupt industry of processing chemically injected and possibly cloned pig meat and, in the countryside, a community of elderly women who create a series of eerie life-size dolls out of masticated bread dough. Both processes address anxieties about body boundaries being breached or invaded, with the national body becoming tainted or jammed up by what it ingests. The symbolic palette of 4 paints a picture of queer intimacy that knowingly embraces sterility, while also encoding gay male sex as emasculating and unclean. Within the film, the fear of death through feminisation is projected onto the portrayal of the economic changes that wreak havoc with individual autonomy.