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.)
There’s just not enough time or bandwidth for me to share everything I’m excited about, but I really do want to sound my excitable yawp about Cory Doctorow, who just launched his new YA novel For the Win. Doctorow releases free downloads of all of his books, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. He’s a great champion of re-thinking the ways that we use (and abuse) copyright, and for re-imagining the way that writers and creators can operate in an evolving media landscape. I’ve only had a few subway moments to spend with For the Win, but I’d recommend that anyone interested in how/why an author would give away his books for free on the internet should download the book and read Doctorow’s introduction.
Plagiarism, copyright, borrowing, and texts: these are all topics that have fascinated me since college. I was particularly moved by an essay Kathy Acker wrote for the MMLA about copyright nearly fifteen years ago, in which she reiterates the importance of friendship and community in the work of creation. Based in part on my work on Acker (and my appreciation for her methods) I planned to write my dissertation on plagiarism/borrowing across a broad and surprising swath of American authors. Instead, a decade after I left grad school, I find myself an author as well as a reader, grappling with these issues and their intersection with technology. Needless to say, I have taken a great interest in Doctorow’s creative and business models.
Of course, you can always purchase Doctorow’s books, and he hopes that you will! If you’re content with the electronic version, but would like to still generate a sale for him, you can put the book into the hands of teachers and librarians who would like to provide the book for their kids. Donate a copy of For the Win here.
Besides all this high falutin’ copyright talk, I’m excited for this book because I simply adore good YA sci-fi. I inhaled this stuff as a kid. It opened up my brain to all kinds of creative possibilities, and it opened up my heart to books. These books turned me into a reader. And while I’ve definitely read my share of Very Important Books in my life, and I’m glad to be part of challenging book clubs as an adult, nothing can replace the singular, joyful escape of curling up with an action-packed sci-fi story. (So, yes, I am counting the days until Mockingjay, the final book of Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games series is released…)
I’m in the midst a pretty crazy week. Deadlines galore! Not sure if there’s time for actual writing, but I always have time to share delightful stuff. Like Tron Dog.
Tron Dog by Julia Segal - juliasegal.tumblr.com
The link.
This Slate article about Omni magazine reminded me of just how influential that publication was to me as a kid. Along with this 1982 book, The Kids’ Whole Future Catalog, which I used to read and read and re-read, Omni inspired my pre-tween dreams about the future, and helped to offset my anxieties about nuclear war. (I grew up in the shadow of NORAD and Cheyenne Mountain, so I spent a pretty unhealthy chunk of time calculating my survival odds after seeing The Day After on television.) Robots, space vacations, and technological solutions to poverty and inequality: these were the subjects of my dreams about 2010. It’s a year laden with so much sci-fi meaning. This is the year we’re supposed to make contact, yo.
Being a few days away from 2010 feels all sorts of mixed up. Our dreams of the future from twenty years ago just seem really silly now, even as I think many of us are actually pretty disappointed (if not because we don’t have robot housecleaners than because we still – unbelievably – haven’t prioritized finding and implementing solutions to things like poverty and climate change). And yet, this ever-increasing digital world we are living in feels pretty dang amazing. So, at the end of this year, I’m thinking a lot about past-future hopes, present disappointments, and the magic of my lived reality.
Compounding all of this is a general feeling of elation that we’re leaving behind the aughts, or the zips, or the zeroes, or whatever we want to call this last decade. Yes, I know that the new decade won’t officially start until 2011. But I don’t really want to slog through another year of the 2000s. Most people I know don’t really want to, either. (Some of my friends have, in fact, declared the 2000s The Worst Decade Ever, although I don’t feel entitled to make that judgement.) The catalog of horrors feels almost endless: Bush, 9-11, evangelicalism, torture, class divisions, the worsening state of public education, wars on two fronts, the swelling of the prison population, natural disasters exacerbated by climate issues… Blarg, blarg, blarg, and BLARG. When I stood on the National Mall and watched Barack Obama deliver his inaugural speech at the beginning of this year, I experienced as much relief as I did hope. Finally, it seemed, someone had the courage to tell us that there are no good and fast answers to our problems, but that it is our job to undertake the difficult task of making meaningful change, anyway. That commitment is what really gives me hope, after all.
So as much as I don’t have dreams anymore about my life on Saturn (yes, it has rings, so it MUST be the best planet), I also don’t have any illusions that life in this new decade will be that much easier or better. As Buckaroo Banzai, that pivotal figure from the world of early 1980s cult sci-fi said, “No matter where you go, there you are.”
So here we are. And it feels good to hit the reset button (even symbolically) and start a new decade (even if it’s not really) and get started with the hard work of reinventing our present and re-imagining our future. I’m elated about this! And I hope you are, too. So let’s make and achieve some big goals, and let’s do some real good in the universe.
Happy New Year, readers and friends!
- Books
- December 20th, 2009
I’m lucky to have two great book clubs in my life that prompt me to read a couple of novels every month. (Even though I love to read, I get busy and brainfried and often find myself diving for a DVD before a book at the end of a long day. So I’m grateful for a happy accountability to book club discussions.) I find equal pleasure in Good Books and airy treasures that remind me why I fell in love with reading in the first place. It’s so good, this reading. So in the the spirit of all the (slightly obnoxious but addictive) year-end listmaking, I thought I would make a few notes about what I loved reading this year.
Without a doubt, the best new(ish) book I read this year was Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen. It’s rather an understatement to say that I was impressed and moved by this novel, which is a meditation on time, identity and love, all wrapped up in meteorology, and written by a woman of about my age. (And that summary doesn’t really do justice to the novel. Please just read it.) I experienced a similar intellectual reaction to I am Not Sidney Poitier by Percival Everett. These two books practically had me hopping around my apartment with hooray to talk about them.
I added a bunch of novels to my “I Can’t Believe It’s Taken Me So Long To Read This Incredible Thing” list: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon; Watership Down by Richard Adams (okay, so it doesn’t quite qualify as “incredible,” but it did make me think big thoughts about rabbits, John Hurt, and Bunnies & Burrows all Spring); and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. I was especially taken with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, not just because it’s one of the best coming-of-age stories I’ve ever read, but also because I live in Williamsburg and it was delightful to re-imagine my familiar blocks in Smith’s turn-of-the-century story.
In the sci-fi universe, I finally got around to reading Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which made me give a cosmic, jovial punch in the arm to hard science fiction. I normally steer clear of you, classic hard sci-fi, but this novel was a surprisingly charming and humane representative. It was a year of re-reading in sci-fi, too. I took a second look at Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, appreciating all the more how it anticipated so much of our modern social media world, and I spent a few good days re-visiting The Female Man by Joanna Russ. I read and wrote about The Female Man in my teens, and finishing the book for the first time was the moment when I decided (even though I’d been deciding all along) that I was a feminist (in fact, that I had to be a feminist). Reading it twenty years later, it’s not quite as revolutionary, but it has become more revelatory for me. In the new weird universe, Brian Francis Slattery’s Liberation killed me with awesome both times I read it this year.
I spent a fair bit of time with short stories this year, too. Belle Boggs’ “Homecoming“ was a stand-out among contemporary selections. Shirley Jackson’s “The Summer People” is a rad, economical little story that reminded me 1.) of why I should never stay on in a vacation town after Labor Day, and 2.) why Shirley Jackson does creepyawesome like no other author. And I think that E. M. Forster’s 1909 story “The Machine Stops“ actually flabbergasted me with its vision about the role of technology in the future (despite its dystopian-as-all-heck outlook, it’s fairly spot-on in a lot of ways about the way we are living our lives right now).
And (of course, of course) there are more! But I’m really interested in what you’ve read this past year, and what you think I should be reading in the next.
Please comment or drop me a line with some suggestions, dear readers!
Oh, and I’ve included a bonus book club PowerPoint presentation after the jump, too, if you’re interested… ok
