[For today's guest post we have a movie review, written by EP]
The timesink site known as TVTropes.org has a wonderfully even-handed page entitled Men are the Expendable Gender. It notes the different treatment and ‘noteworthiness’ of male and female deaths in movies, and how very few treat male and female experiences exactly the same. These practices are so sunk in moviemaking and life that I highly doubt that this will ever change no matter how much feminist influence in our society is reeled back. But every so often, a movie comes out that makes you sit up and say: “What? Did I just see equal treatment of different motivations that I just saw there?” Feels…weirdly invigorating, like the larger culture finally gets what we’ve been working for…wait, was that Joel Silver’s name in the producer’s credits?
And Splice is precisely that kind of movie. Spoilers are left, right, and center in this review, so if you haven’t seen it yet, do so immediately, then read my analysis. (Ideal audiences are young couples just starting out, but any parent of a child of any number of years, especially male parents, should see it, as it specifically affirms the value of masculine virtues in raising daughters.)
So, Splice. It’s being marketed on the sex angle (even the logo is reminiscent of that Species movie, which, as I recall, starred Gahndi as an evil scientist and Doctor Octopus as an amiable co-star. If you want to see them in pretty much exactly the same roles, just go watch Prince of Persia instead.) Moviebob loved it because it was a movie about genetic engineering that didn’t go for the “We must not tamper in GODS DOMAIN!” message. And, despite being a Christian of some years, I emphatically agree. God’s domain is what we have not mastered, and it is the glory of man to seek out a matter-within defined moral limits. The true message of Splice is “Adam’s sin was to let Eve do what she wanted.” This message is wrapped up in one of the most effectively disturbing movies ever made-that’s also occasionally very funny, heartwarming, and obliquely but firmly condemning of everything feminism does to women and men.
The true backstory of Splice is alluded to in asides throughout the movie. As near as I can figure out, an intelligent, fairly well-off feminist of the Andrea Dworkin variety left college sometime in the 60s. Being a near-lesbian feminist true believer, yet lacking neither skills nor functional beauty, she bought a farm in the remote part of the country, conceived a girl (with the suitably eugenic name of Elsa) by some drifting unnamed thug, and then proceeded to raise her to not need men, ever. The girl slept on a mattress on the floor, her room was kept as bare and Spartan as possible, any pets she became attached to were taken from her, she was forbidden makeup, and worst of all, she was raised entirely on feminist theory, pop sociology, and biology textbooks. Then she went to college. Unfortunately, she was beautiful. Doubly unfortunately, she was driven toward theoretical and experimental biology, traditionally a more male-heavy field, by her mother. Triply unfortunately, she was actually intelligent enough to hack it in the field until she was able to secure the alpha-among-his-peers played by Adrien Brody in a marriage meant for career success more than children. Thanks to the aforementioned unfortunates, her mother’s fanatical views were never criticized by the intelligent men she was surrounded with when brought up, but rather pushed under the hood by everyday mundane career focus.
And then Adrien Brody enters the picture, playing Clive, and demonstrating that a girl-of-your-beta-dreams who seemingly shares all your nerdly interests is still not the one you want when feminism still has a hold on her psyche. Clive is the eldest brother of a family of high-IQ people who had all the benefits of a good upbringing and a large family. He does biology because it’s something he loves, he can mouth the platitudes of the university without actually losing too much fem-cred due to his sigma status as smartest elder in the family and the founder of his own successful biotech company, and his game is good enough to get Elsa to quit talking feminism and focus on their shared research project, though not good enough to convince her to get off the birth control and give him a kid already. Couples therapy ensues, though at this point it’s only the low-level recommended ‘educational’ version for nice liberal rich types.
They create life. More accurately, they patch together a chimeric mammphibian super-slug that can biologically produce expensive proteins that would require far more time and expense if made by traditional chemical means. But it’s still pretty cool, because, hey, we created a new form of life! Give us a Nobel and let’s go on to humans before the Chinese try it or something! And all of a sudden Elsa grabs the feminist opportunity of her lifetime-secretly using her own DNA to create the Brave New human amalgam.
The resulting creature (called “Dren,”) is ugly-cute at first, ages at an accelerated rate, develops like an embryo outside the womb from a chicken-kangaroo thing into a lithe, sexy, she-lizardess, and packs a mean neurotoxic stinger on its tail. Dren also has features of all major animal classes that make occasional appearances when under stress, which will guarantee her as the prime subject for deviantart submissions in the foreseeable future. Every minor milestone of her life is met with asides on parenting actual children, and in the most honest depiction of real life parenting ever seen:
…dear God, puberty hits. Other things being equal, women are better parents than men for small children. A man would go crazy. For older kids, no.
It hits Elsa particularly hard when her creation all of a sudden starts paying more attention to and then pining for the only male she’s allowed to see: her husband. (Elsa’s knowledge of parenting stops at ‘stand in the corner’ and ‘I love you.’ For some strange reason, the second one is more effective when her husband says it.) The husband in this case is eventually shamefully drawn toward unnatural sexual relations with a woman who’s a younger, prettier, more animalistic, and less-tainted-by-feminism version of his current wife. I’m sure Welmer would note the Jungian undertones, though one might question whether Dren truly qualifies as his daughter, since he has no DNA in the business that he doesn’t inject personally. Thankfully, when his wife calls him on it, he fires right back and raises the stakes on exactly what his wife was trying to accomplish.
The final fourth of the movie simply proves that even when unwillingly having sex with the jerks they helped create, women don’t hate them enough to forfeit their children. And that the most horrifying thing that can personally happen to a woman is to end up turning into her mother, having learned nothing in her own life from the men she meets to break that cycle.
The pursuit of knowledge through science at any cost is often corrupt and destructive, but it is not the prime evil. Corporatism and Gekkonian officialism is often corrupt, but it is not the prime evil. Men themselves are responsible for much terror through callousness and fear of financial failure, but even they are not the prime evils. The true prime evil in the movie, that existed only to steal, kill, and destroy any hope of a non-Hollywood horror ending, was simply feminism, the philosophical abstraction created by many women and a few men, that cut women off from understanding the nature of man, the nature of themselves, and the nature of anything. Against this destructive soul poison not even the greatest of marriages with both parties possessing the finest of minds, bodies, ambition, funding, and social acumen could last. Nor could their offspring, whether natural or artificial.
Few movies are made as well as this one. Fewer science fiction movies that are rated R that actually deal with real child-raising issues and condemn feminism are made…ever, though with success that trend may change. It’s almost like a French film that grew up and married an American sensibility, trading away academic references to obscure authors for a modern sensibility, tighter plotting and a good special effects budget without losing the essential message. Good thing, too, since the last movie I saw by a French director was all about car chases and explosions, though that may have been an anomaly.
Hollywood is getting it. Support this movie and they’ll get it that much faster.
