Vincenzo Natalie directs "Splice", a science-fiction horror film which reverses the gender roles of Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein". Some context: Shelley's novel revolved around a male scientist who creates "new life"; a monster out of discarded human limbs. As he is incestuously attracted to a female relative, the scientist views both sexuality and lust as something perverse and abhorrent. As a result, his monstrous creation becomes a means of creating life, of sublimating sexual desires, without female mediation. He creates "without woman". Unfortunately the monster, itself denied a sexual partner, grows violent. It demands that the scientist create it a bride. The scientist refuses. Resentful, the monster kills the scientist's lover. The novel then ends with both man and monster alone and resentful.
Shelley's novel makes the usual points about the dangers of science, of man "playing god", of transhumanism, of transgressing limits and "nautral orders", but also sees science as a masculinist pursuit which is obsessed with taming a "feminized" Nature which it deems wild, lawless and contemptible. Man wants to remodel Nature, create without Nature and deny his own corporeality. The novel's big point, though, is that technology, creation and maybe even evolution (Darwin would become renowned almost a century after Shelley's book was published), tend to merely reproduce that which existed before. They are mutable but also essentially inflexible.
Natalie's "Splice" stars Sarah Polley and Adrien Brody as Elsa and Clive, two genetic engineers. They're named after Elsa Lanchester and Colin Clive, actors from James Whale's "Bride of Frankenstein". Elsa, like the male scientist in Shelley's novel, finds heteronormative sexuality abhorrent. She was abused by her mother, doesn't want kids, doesn't want to be pregnant, doesn't want to be "changed" by pregnancy, and is distrustful of sexual intimacy. She wants full control of her own body. Pregnancy, she thinks, is akin to a parasitic invasion. It's also a form of gender inequality: women bear the brunt of pregnancy. As such, Elsa seeks motherhood outside her own womb. She and Clive grow a worm-like creature in a laboratory, their own Frankenstein's monster. This creature is a trans-genetic organism that includes both human DNA and animal DNA.
So the film reverses "Frankenstein". Here it is a female scientist playing God and seeking life via a prosthetic womb. Elsa's "child" then begins to grow up. She names it Dren, which is "nerd" spelt backwards. In other words, the monster is merely a "spliced" or rearranged version of Elsa, herself a nerd. Elsa then begins to replicate the maternal and nurturing instincts of her own mother. She raises Dren as her mother raised her, replicating mistakes/actions which replicate in Dren certain behaviours.
The film then plays with the gender mutability of Dren. Is Dren male? Is Dren female? Does Dren's gender depend on Elsa's nurturing techniques (she dresses it in pink clothes etc)? Is Elsa imposing her will upon Dren's sex?
Eventually Elsa and Clive lock Dren – now an exotic, erotic humanoid - in a barn and attempt to raise it in isolation. Isolated, the creature becomes increasingly masculinized, and seems to outright shift its sex from male to female. This leads to Elsa castrating Dren (cutting off its tail stinger). At this point, Clive grows sexually, incestuously attracted to a now feminine Dren. He transfers his desires for his own wife onto the monster. Clive and Dren then have sex, an act which is melodramatically intruded upon by Elsa. This is where "Splice" then departs from "Frankenstein", for Dren then murders Clive and rapes Elsa. "Inside," Dren mummers, as it penetrates Elsa, returning to Elsa precisely the monster of pregnancy, of insemination, which she sought to escape.
Elsa, unlike Shelley's scientist, seems to create a monster which embodies both female and male sexual impulses. Dren is both male and female, but neither male nor female. It lusts for, and has intercourse with, its father and its mother, its surrogate bride and groom. At the root of these impulses, though, is a desire to return to the womb; to be inside, and so a drive and desire to negate its own existence (Dren's favourite word, "tedious", is an anagram for "outside"). In the end, both Natalie and Shelley's scientists see nature and sexuality as epitomising a certain inescapable human order. Man is always corporeal, always bound to the body, and the limitations of the flesh tend toward reproduction, replication and splicing, and cannot be easily transcended.
This pessimism then informs another subplot in the film. Elsa and Clive – two hipster bohemian scientists - want to do "good work", but are repeatedly hounded by corporate, Big Pharma types who "put profit first". These corporate hounds push Elsa to create hybrid organisms which are to be used to secrete marketable pharmaceuticals. When they learn that Elsa has been raped and impregnated, they then essentially pay Elsa for her body, which now contains "essential biochemicals". Significantly, the leaders of this Big Pharma organisation are female and the company itself is called N.E.R.D. Capital, like the spliced monsters, replicates itself regardless of changes in power relations, gender relations or social hierarchies. Capital's rule is inescapable, but paradoxically, social changes are unstoppable.
In a similarly pessimistic light, it is Elsa's "desire for control" which directly fuels Dren's violence, and so results in Elsa losing all control. Ordering forces, then, seems to proportionately fuel a certain lawlessness.
"Splice" is well shot, well acted, but reeks of B-movie conventions and at times feels like a low rent, early Cronenberg movie. It's not disturbing enough, not erotic enough, features poor dialogue and is simultaneously not trashy enough to be great pulp SF and not classy enough to be great high-brow SF. Like Dren, it's a little bit mixed up.
7.9/10 - Worth one viewing.
Shelley's novel makes the usual points about the dangers of science, of man "playing god", of transhumanism, of transgressing limits and "nautral orders", but also sees science as a masculinist pursuit which is obsessed with taming a "feminized" Nature which it deems wild, lawless and contemptible. Man wants to remodel Nature, create without Nature and deny his own corporeality. The novel's big point, though, is that technology, creation and maybe even evolution (Darwin would become renowned almost a century after Shelley's book was published), tend to merely reproduce that which existed before. They are mutable but also essentially inflexible.
Natalie's "Splice" stars Sarah Polley and Adrien Brody as Elsa and Clive, two genetic engineers. They're named after Elsa Lanchester and Colin Clive, actors from James Whale's "Bride of Frankenstein". Elsa, like the male scientist in Shelley's novel, finds heteronormative sexuality abhorrent. She was abused by her mother, doesn't want kids, doesn't want to be pregnant, doesn't want to be "changed" by pregnancy, and is distrustful of sexual intimacy. She wants full control of her own body. Pregnancy, she thinks, is akin to a parasitic invasion. It's also a form of gender inequality: women bear the brunt of pregnancy. As such, Elsa seeks motherhood outside her own womb. She and Clive grow a worm-like creature in a laboratory, their own Frankenstein's monster. This creature is a trans-genetic organism that includes both human DNA and animal DNA.
So the film reverses "Frankenstein". Here it is a female scientist playing God and seeking life via a prosthetic womb. Elsa's "child" then begins to grow up. She names it Dren, which is "nerd" spelt backwards. In other words, the monster is merely a "spliced" or rearranged version of Elsa, herself a nerd. Elsa then begins to replicate the maternal and nurturing instincts of her own mother. She raises Dren as her mother raised her, replicating mistakes/actions which replicate in Dren certain behaviours.
The film then plays with the gender mutability of Dren. Is Dren male? Is Dren female? Does Dren's gender depend on Elsa's nurturing techniques (she dresses it in pink clothes etc)? Is Elsa imposing her will upon Dren's sex?
Eventually Elsa and Clive lock Dren – now an exotic, erotic humanoid - in a barn and attempt to raise it in isolation. Isolated, the creature becomes increasingly masculinized, and seems to outright shift its sex from male to female. This leads to Elsa castrating Dren (cutting off its tail stinger). At this point, Clive grows sexually, incestuously attracted to a now feminine Dren. He transfers his desires for his own wife onto the monster. Clive and Dren then have sex, an act which is melodramatically intruded upon by Elsa. This is where "Splice" then departs from "Frankenstein", for Dren then murders Clive and rapes Elsa. "Inside," Dren mummers, as it penetrates Elsa, returning to Elsa precisely the monster of pregnancy, of insemination, which she sought to escape.
Elsa, unlike Shelley's scientist, seems to create a monster which embodies both female and male sexual impulses. Dren is both male and female, but neither male nor female. It lusts for, and has intercourse with, its father and its mother, its surrogate bride and groom. At the root of these impulses, though, is a desire to return to the womb; to be inside, and so a drive and desire to negate its own existence (Dren's favourite word, "tedious", is an anagram for "outside"). In the end, both Natalie and Shelley's scientists see nature and sexuality as epitomising a certain inescapable human order. Man is always corporeal, always bound to the body, and the limitations of the flesh tend toward reproduction, replication and splicing, and cannot be easily transcended.
This pessimism then informs another subplot in the film. Elsa and Clive – two hipster bohemian scientists - want to do "good work", but are repeatedly hounded by corporate, Big Pharma types who "put profit first". These corporate hounds push Elsa to create hybrid organisms which are to be used to secrete marketable pharmaceuticals. When they learn that Elsa has been raped and impregnated, they then essentially pay Elsa for her body, which now contains "essential biochemicals". Significantly, the leaders of this Big Pharma organisation are female and the company itself is called N.E.R.D. Capital, like the spliced monsters, replicates itself regardless of changes in power relations, gender relations or social hierarchies. Capital's rule is inescapable, but paradoxically, social changes are unstoppable.
In a similarly pessimistic light, it is Elsa's "desire for control" which directly fuels Dren's violence, and so results in Elsa losing all control. Ordering forces, then, seems to proportionately fuel a certain lawlessness.
"Splice" is well shot, well acted, but reeks of B-movie conventions and at times feels like a low rent, early Cronenberg movie. It's not disturbing enough, not erotic enough, features poor dialogue and is simultaneously not trashy enough to be great pulp SF and not classy enough to be great high-brow SF. Like Dren, it's a little bit mixed up.
7.9/10 - Worth one viewing.