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A peer-reviewed electronic journal published by the Institute for Ethics and ISSN 1541-0099 21(2) – December 2010 |
Film review: Splice
Sky
Marsen, Victoria University, New Zealand
sky_marsen@yahoo.com
Journal of Evolution and Technology - Vol. 21 Issue 2 – December 2010 - pgs 63-65
If confronted
with a totally different being, would we try to understand how it differs from
us, or how it resembles us? To what extent is our desire to learn how
biological life works motivated by personal or social factors? What are the
implications of seeing the elements of life as commodities? These are some
questions raised by Splice (dir.
Vincenzo Natali 2010), an intriguing
and well-crafted film concerned with artificially produced hybrid life (a
warning that this review contains “spoilers”).
The story is in
many ways a family drama, cast against the background of genetic research and
the financial interests that such research carries for large pharmaceutical
corporations. Clive Nicoli (Adrien
Brody) and Elsa Kast (Sarah Polley)
are geneticists, researching new ways of using cell and DNA technology to
develop medical treatments for diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.
Besides being research collaborators they are also a married couple, allowing
for themes of sexuality and procreation to be crafted into the narrative. In
their ambitious attempts to create a new animal hybrid gene, they break
protocol and add some human DNA into their gene-mix. The experiment is
surprisingly successful and produces a live creature, a female hybrid, composed
of human, animal, insect, fish, and bird genes (played by Abigail Chu as a
child and Delphine Chaneac
as an adult – both performances enhanced by computer generated graphics). This
creature not only grows very rapidly, suggesting a short life span, but also
seems to have inherited top quality genes from her diverse ancestors,
exhibiting intelligence and capacity to learn. She can represent objects
through drawing, but she does not master language. However, she is able to
recognize alphabet letters by association: in fact, the name she is given, Dren, is an anagram of “nerd,” a word she spells with
letter blocks, imitating the print on Elsa’s T-shirt.
Anxious about
the repercussions of their transgression, Elsa and Clive hide Dren in Elsa’s family farm, and the central part of the
film unfolds around the emotional reactions that Dren’s
behavior triggers in the couple. The living conditions resemble a nuclear family
arrangement. The couple treat Dren
half way between a pet and a child, and like many pet owners (as well as many
parents), they react affectionately when their “pet” mimics them and acts in
familiar ways, but are not so pleased when it defies their expectations and
acts unpredictably. Dren is not treated either as an
experiment – objectively following a transparent procedure – or as a fellow sentient
being, empathically. Instead, she is used as a canvas that reflects whatever
human insecurities and prejudices are projected on it. The fact that Dren is a completely unfamiliar being prevents her creators
from behaving in their normal way, and brings out their hidden fears and
doubts, especially in the case of Elsa, who has a more troubled history. “You can’t
always get what you want,” Elsa tells Dren, which is
an odd reprimand to give the world’s greatest genetic discovery, and indicates
that Elsa’s perception of reality is marred by her past.
Frank Herbert
has said that the function of good science fiction is to question assumptions,
and Splice certainly fits the bill.
In fact, the film focuses on the role of assumptions in our interactions with
the world, and shows how assumptions can mislead, often dangerously. Much of
the conflict between Dren and her creators lies in
the latter’s fixed ideas about how things work – ideas that Dren
repeatedly challenges. For instance, the scientists initially believe that the
creature will require specific nutritional components, only to find that she
actually has a sweet tooth. Later, when she has a choking attack they think she
is suffocating, but it turns out that she has amphibian lungs and needs water.
Later still, when she seemingly lies dying, they sit by her bedside and grieve,
but soon discover that she is a sequential hermaphrodite and is actually
changing sex.
Interestingly,
at no time do the two scientists attempt to understand how Dren
thinks and how she experiences the world on her own terms. From a narrative
perspective, this is achieved by consistently presenting events from Clive’s or
Elsa’s point of view. Although Dren is neither animal
nor human, she is seen alternatively as one or the other by the two scientists,
and we follow their cue. For example, her face shows what could be taken to be
basic human emotions, such as happiness, sadness, fear and surprise, but this
is an inference – we never know how Dren really
feels; we only know what feelings we attribute to her. The film does not attempt to speculate on Dren’s psychology, and this is appropriate because any such
speculation would diverge from the film’s main aim, which is to explore the
responses of two humans who are thrust into an intimate relationship with an
alien creature. Significantly, when the male Dren
utters his first phrase, he is soon after dispatched and the film ends. This is
a strategic move, because exploring Dren as a
linguistic being would entail changing the angle and concerns of the narrative,
and going into areas that lie beyond its scope.
The film
creatively blends themes that trace their origin to prototypical science
fiction stories. For example, the theme “scientist creates being that he cannot
handle” is familiar from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
(1818), and the theme “intelligent people carry emotional baggage that
prevents them from achieving great things” is almost a staple of the popular
imagination, with variations ranging from Stanislaw Lem’s
Solaris (1961) to Michael Crichton’s Sphere (1987). Splice, however, makes some interesting improvisations to these
themes, which highlight its originality and relevance to current times. In
addition to its provocative exploration of interpersonal and human-alien
relationships, the film underlines the practicality and competitiveness of much
medical research. “What’s the point if you can’t publish?” says Clive at the
beginning of the film, when considering the option of doing research just for
the sake of learning. Then at the end of the film, the director of the
pharmaceutical company exclaims, “We’ll be filing patents for years,” referring
to Dren’s genetic material. Thus the narrative is framed
by socio-economic factors, which drive many of the characters’ actions
throughout the story. It aptly reminds us that idealistic concerns are anchored
in social realities.
Vincenzo Natali has directed other films that deal with the interpersonal
dimensions of philosophical issues. In the existentialist Cube (1997) the characters are trapped in a maze whose purpose and
structure they do not understand, and while using logic and mathematics to
escape they also have to deal with their own obsessions and irrationalities. In
Cypher (2002), the protagonist
attempts to define himself solely through his actions, bypassing memory. Furthermore,
Splice was produced by Guillermo Del
Toro, the director of Blade II (2002)
and Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), who is
known for his predilection for narratives that pit themes of personal trauma
against impersonal, socio-historical forces. The film’s status
as an independent, low-budget production works in its favor, shielding the
director from the temptation to comply with science-fictional cinematic
clichés, such as elaborate, high-tech special effects and over-populated,
prop-loaded action scenes. Instead, the film’s value rests on the ideas
that underpin its narrative and on the symbolism of its images, especially the image
of Dren.
Dren is
an “Animal Plus” (to adapt the transhumanist term “Human
Plus”). She is also a mythical construct, and every part of her constitution
has symbolic value. Her facial characteristics are mainly humanoid, which
allows for expression, and invites the viewer to identify with her and attempt
to understand her emotions. Although she
is a biped, she has the hind legs of a quadruped, evoking the numerous
human-animal hybrids that exist in world mythology, such as centaurs, fauns and
adlet. She also has the symbol of animality
par excellence, a tail, which is
equipped with an additional marker of non-human power – a poisonous sting.
Finally her wings, besides giving her ornamental and aesthetic appeal, signal
the archetypal image of the angel.
Dren’s
characteristics evoke both vulnerability and danger, and lead her creators
(and, by extension, us, since we see from their point of view) to interpret her
behavior in terms of these traits. Inherently, however, she remains a mystery,
a manifestation of life that cannot attain an identity since she is the only
one of her kind. In a daring narrative move, Dren also
changes sex – as indeed happens with some marine life, such as mollusks and crustaceans
(Kazancıoğlu and Alonzo
2009). This makes any attempt to prescribe her identity in human or social
terms even more elusive, since gender is a defining element of the human, from
both biological and social perspectives.
Natali was
working on the idea of Splice for ten
years, which gave him ample time to ponder the important scientific
developments in genetic research that have taken place since the late 1990s. In
many ways, the film was released at an appropriate time, soon after the
decoding of the human genome and progress in self replicating cells,
developments which are re-defining the distinction between the physical
constitution of an individual and the biology of a species (see, for example,
Gerstein et al 2007). Splice speculates
on these scientific developments by staging them in a socio-familial context. A
core message of the film is that our understanding of biological life may well
be motivated by a sincere desire to learn something new, but it is also
inevitably filtered through our experience of society and our own personal past.
References
Crichton,
M. 1987. Sphere.
New York: Random House.
Gerstein,
M.B. et al. 2007. What is a gene post-ENCODE? History and updated definition.
Genome Research 17:.
669-81. Available at
http://www.genome.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/gr.6339607
Kazancıoğlu, E. and Alonzo, S. H. 2009. Costs of changing sex do not explain why sequential hermaphroditism
is rare. American Naturalist 173, no.
3 (March):,327-36.
Lem, S. 1970. Solaris. Trans. J. Kilmartin
and Steve Cox. New York: Faber and Faber. First
published 1961.
Shelley, M. 1985. Frankenstein. London: Penguin. First published 1818.