In 2007, I contributed a number of articles (on roller derby, Little Lulu, She Ra: Princess of Power, and Carrie) to Girl Culture: An Encyclopedia. Just a few weeks ago, the companion to that volume, Boy Culture: An Encyclopedia was finally released, featuring articles from me on action figures, Hot Wheels, G.I. Joe, and skateboarding.
Encyclopedias, under the watchful eyes of Bubo the Bluetooth Owl
Anyhow, I just got my copies of Boy Culture and I think it looks pretty fun all cozied up to its predecessor. These are ambitious reference volumes, really targeted to academic and public libraries. I’m pretty glad to have been involved with the project, and to continue to contribute to the dialogue about youth culture.
I also want to give a big high-five to Ehrenspace, who wrote a large bulk of the music section for Boy Culture. (Seriously… he covers The Clash, The Cure, Led Zeppelin, Metallica, Nirvana, REM, Rush, The Who, and the history of reggae. That’s my fella!)
*Encyclopedia Brown reference!
Splice is some seriously awesome scifi/horror, but Sarah Polley’s mad scientist is the film’s real revelation.
Vincenzo Natali’s Splice is just about everything I was hoping for: a smart, scary, visceral, well-acted, and good-looking two hours of scifi/horror. That alone would qualify it for accolades, as it’s been kind of a depressing year for both scifi and horror so far. But what really makes me excited about the film is its odd equal opportunity nature. With Splice, we finally get a female mad scientist worth the screen time.
Let me back up for a minute and reiterate how much there is to love about the film, in general. It’s a thoughtful (not quite revolutionary, but still very smart) and provocative take on cloning and genetics. Splice is a story about a couple of hotshot supernerds (dig the Bride of Frankenstein reference with the names of our two main characters: Clive and Elsa) played by Sarah Polley and Adrien Brody, who secretly make themselves a gene-spliced, mutant test-tube baby. Bloody hijinks ensue. As a portrait of hip nerddom, it’s practically unmatched in genre film: our protagonists are self-assured, very ironic, and deeply cool young scientists. (Their car? An AMC Gremlin. I rest my case.) A big part of the fun of Splice is that it’s an alternately scary and hilarious film about new parents. (In this way, it reminds me quite a bit of Joshua, an under-appreciated little psychological horror gem about Manhattan parenting.) Splice taps into so much complicated energy about new parenting that, at times, the character drama overshadows the horror feature – which is saying an awful lot about the acting chops that Polley and Brody bring to the film, since they’re competing for attention with an amazing monster. I can’t help but mention that “Dren,” the mutant baby who starts off looking a little bit like a turkey but who ends up being an uncanny human-like (but definitely not human) creature, is played to perfection as a child by Abigail Chu and as an adult by Delphine Chanéac. Thanks in part to these performances, seamless visual effects, and some strong writing, the film blurs the line between anthropomorphic identification and compassion in ways that are very compelling, which makes the blood and mayhem (some of it fun, some of it very painful to watch) of the film that much more effective.
Splice doesn’t quite hit Cronenberg levels of unease, but you’ll feel plenty uneasy by the end. In fact, one of the strangest accomplishments of Splice is the parenting/psychosexual love triangle that it creates between Clive, Elsa, and Dren. (This film plays with all sorts of Freudian, gender, and family conventions, and just when the audience is about to point its collective finger at either Clive or Elsa and say, “Ok, that’s really effed up,” the other parent comes along and does something REALLY effed up.) I don’t want to say anymore, because I just don’t want to spoil a single moment of the film.
But what I found truly exciting about Splice was Elsa. She’s a driven, accomplished young scientist – and a deeply troubled woman with lots of unresolved issues about motherhood. Her relentless desire to achieve results is clearly grounded in her traumatic childhood, and her conflicting impulses about Dren are rooted in a need to control. The psychology of Elsa’s character breaks no new ground in cinema. In many ways, her profile is completely stereotypical. But here’s what’s marvelous: Elsa is a completely realized and powerful woman of science. We get a lot of Pandora’s boxes in scifi and horror, but they’re rarely made by Pandora herself. And this Pandora is brought to life by Sarah Polley, who is just a great great great actress. By the end of the film, we really see Elsa as pretty unhinged, and that’s exactly the point: she’s a mad woman scientist. And like all mad scientists, she must contend with the results of her scientific hubris. Now THAT is breaking some new ground in cinema.
Splice evokes gender in really interesting ways, too. It exploits our cultural anxiety about intersexed creatures (a long-standing horror convention is hybrid creatures, and sex/gender is a common embodiment of that hybridity) even as it raises issues about how Elsa and Clive “gender” Dren. Splice will be fodder for good feminist critique for a long time. So, yay.
(Despite the fact that I’m recommending Splice like crazy, I would totally understand if new or expecting parents would want to sit this one out. Yeah. Also, I want to give a trigger warning about the film, too.)
I’ve been away from the blog a lot lately. May was a tornado of client work that ended in a four-day, post-holiday week frenzy. My wrists were tired, my brain was tired, and I was tired. I feel so lucky that words are a large part of how I make my living. I like to use them in service. But sometimes I feel like I run out of them. So it was a big relief to board an overnight bus to Montreal last week, and take a week off to recharge.
View from Jardin Botanique, Montreal
ok
There’s very little I look forward to more than the long days of summer. I might be phototropic. The spring days are starting to warm up and stretch out, I have my first sunburn of the year, and I am jealous of E’s folding bike.
And it’s busy! I’m juggling web projects for clients, a big NEH grant, several resume and career clients, and taking a class. And there two articles badly in need of work and a few editors that I’m hoping are busy doing other things.
And there is news! I’m proud to be a part of Sharp Skirts, a new network for women entrepreneurs. I’m thrilled to help women build and sustain more successful and agile businesses – and to have the opportunity to learn from other amazing women.
I’m grateful for abundant work, and the chance to build and grow and help, and the sunshine. So I just wanted to share that, and give you a poem, too.
Jet
by Tony Hoagland
Sometimes I wish I were still out
on the back porch, drinking jet fuel
with the boys, getting louder and louder
as the empty cans drop out of our paws
like booster rockets falling back to Earth
and we soar up into the summer stars.
Summer. The big sky river rushes overhead,
bearing asteroids and mist, blind fish
and old space suits with skeletons inside.
On Earth, men celebrate their hairiness,
and it is good, a way of letting life
out of the box, uncapping the bottle
to let the effervescence gush
through the narrow, usually constricted neck.
And now the crickets plug in their appliances
in unison, and then the fireflies flash
dots and dashes in the grass, like punctuation
for the labyrinthine, untrue tales of sex
someone is telling in the dark, though
no one really hears. We gaze into the night
as if remembering the bright unbroken planet
we once came from,
to which we will never
be permitted to return.
We are amazed how hurt we are.
We would give anything for what we have.
Jet
by Tony Hoagland
Sometimes I wish I were still out
on the back porch, drinking jet fuel
with the boys, getting louder and louder
as the empty cans drop out of our paws
like booster rockets falling back to Earth
and we soar up into the summer stars.
Summer. The big sky river rushes overhead,
bearing asteroids and mist, blind fish
and old space suits with skeletons inside.
On Earth, men celebrate their hairiness,
and it is good, a way of letting life
out of the box, uncapping the bottle
to let the effervescence gush
through the narrow, usually constricted neck.
And now the crickets plug in their appliances
in unison, and then the fireflies flash
dots and dashes in the grass, like punctuation
for the labyrinthine, untrue tales of sex
someone is telling in the dark, though
no one really hears. We gaze into the night
as if remembering the bright unbroken planet
we once came from,
to which we will never
be permitted to return.
We are amazed how hurt we are.
We would give anything for what we have.
All of us at At Length are really proud of the fact that we’ve been online for a year now, and we’re having a celebration in Manhattan this weekend to mark the occasion…
Jonathan Farmer founded At Length in 2003 as a quarterly print publication featuring poetry and prose, and re-launched it in 2009 as an online-only, print-friendly venue with added music, photography, and art. At Length is about long creative work, which is an ambitious enterprise in an online space that privileges short content. But I don’t wring my hands about the state of our collective attention span, which everyone keeps telling me is getting shorter and shorter. I’m just glad to contribute to adding more long and meaningful work to the digital space, and cultivating the readership for it.
In honor of the occasion, I invite you, friends of tammytoes, to read or download one of our pieces, and spend a long time reading it. Enjoy and share! (And if you’re in NYC, come to the party!)
