125

HOST 3 (1) pp. 125138 Intellect Limited 2012

Horror Studies
Volume 3 Number 1
2012 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/host.3.1.125_1
Keywords
mad scientist
Splice
Frankenstein
science-fiction
corporation
genetic
Kimberly JacKson
Florida Gulf Coast University
Splice: The postmodern
Prometheus
absTracT
This article places Vincenzo Natalis 2010 film Splice in the tradition of modern
mad scientist narratives like Mary Shelleys Frankenstein and in the more contem-
porary tradition of science-fiction films that portray evil mega-corporations whose
products threaten to overrun humanity and to dislodge cherished notions of human
uniqueness. I argue that Splice offers a unique take on these established sub-genres,
substituting the corporation for the rogue scientist, and corporate personhood for
modern subjectivity. Unlike films like Blade Runner by Scott (1982), the Terminator
series by Cameron (1984, 1991), Mostow (2003), McG (2009) and Repo Men by
Sapochnik (2010), in Splice there is no human victory in the end; instead, humanity
must confront its evolution into a different type of being all together.
The theme of the evil mega-corporation whose exploits threaten to destroy
humanity has been a staple of science fiction films at least since Ridley
Scotts Alien (1979). Such films, which include the Alien series (Scott 1979;
Cameron 1986; Fincher 1992; Jeunet 1997), Blade Runner (Scott 1982), the
Terminator series (Cameron 1984, 1991; Mostow 2003; McG 2009), Robocop
(Verhoeven 1987), Total Recall (Verhoeven 1990), The Island (Bay 2005), District 9
(Blomkamp 2009), Avatar (Cameron 2009), Repo Men (Sapochnik 2010), and
Splice (Natali 2010), have generated some of the most important and complex
visions of the relationship between humans and techno-science. As bleak and
dystopic as the worlds portrayed in these films are, and as much as the identity
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1. Writer and director
Natali makes this
perfectly clear, as
he names his two
protagonists Clive
and Elsa, after Elsa
Lanchester and Colin
Clive, the co-stars of
James Whales 1935
film The Bride of
Frankenstein.
2. Marys Prometheus is
much more pessimistic
than that of her
husband, Percy, who,
in his Prometheus
Bound, makes his hero
the symbol of rebellion
against tyranny and
oppression.
of the natural human may be called into question, in almost all of them a
certain conception of the uniquely human is victorious in the end. At the ends
of Total Recall and Blade Runner, for example, Doug (Arnold Schwarzenegger)
may be dreaming and Decker (Harrison Ford) may be an android, but it is okay
because at least they have preserved their morality and their sympathetic rela-
tions to other human(oid) creatures. In The Island, Terminator Salvation and
Avatar, it is not the biological humans that are the films human heroes, but
rather the clones, robots and avatars. The essence of humanity is transposed
onto these non-human creatures; they are the ones who rebel against the
dehumanizing corporation and sustain through their struggles certain notions
of the uniquely human capacity for freedom, rationality, higher emotions and
morality that gained currency during the Enlightenment and that continue to
dominate our image of humanity. However, in the most recent of these films,
Vincenzo Natalis Splice, there is no human victory in the end. The representa-
tive of the Enlightenment human in the film is emphatically destroyed, as is the
patriarchal edifice on which he has always stood. In the end, a multi-gendered
inhuman corporate power reigns and threatens to recreate all of humanity in its
image. Splice issues in a new age of sci-fi horror, in which the face of humanity
will be irreparably altered.
a PosTmodern PromeTheus
Splice presents itself as a contemporary version of Frankenstein,
1
and indeed
it does share many narrative elements with its nineteenth-century predeces-
sor. In the film, two brilliant geneticists and lovers, Clive (Adrien Brody) and
Elsa (Sarah Polley), have been requisitioned by a pharmaceutical company
whose research division is known by the acronym N.E.R.D. to create animal
hybrids; the proteins from these creatures are to be harvested to improve the
health of farm animals and thus to stimulate production in the meat indus-
try. Clive and Elsa ignore the commands of their corporate supervisors, and
obvious ethical issues, and decide to go ahead and mix human DNA with the
hybrid animal DNA to create a humananimal hybrid whose proteins might
be able to cure human genetic disorders like Alzheimers and cancer. Like
Victor Frankenstein, however, Clives and Elsas true intent is not altruistic;
they seek the fame and glory that would come from being the first to produce
such a creature. Their ambition is already a perfect match for corporate greed,
despite the apparent refusal of the corporation to fund this aspect of the
project when the film begins.
In this context, Splice performs one more turn of the screw on the
Prometheus myth. A mythic symbol of the acquisition of technology through
superior intelligence, Prometheus, by giving humanity the divine gift of fire,
transformed the species, raising the human above the other struggling brutes,
but also giving it more power to destroy itself. Prometheus transgression
won him eternal punishment from Zeus, whose fire it was that he stole. Mary
Shelley may have had several reasons for subtitling her novel Frankenstein the
modern Prometheus,
2
but the one that fits this context is that, through the
use of modern technology and scientific knowledge, Victor, like Prometheus,
procures a secret that man was never meant to know, a secret that threatens
to alter and perhaps even destroy humanity all together. Splice could quite
fittingly be subtitled the postmodern Prometheus, but this epithet does not
apply to the mad scientists, Clive and Elsa. It may be the scientists knowledge
and labour that produce the humananimal hybrid, but it is the economic
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127
power of the corporation that funds and will distribute the product. In Natalis
version of the Prometheus myth, Zeus (N.E.R.D.) is thrilled that Prometheus
(Clive and Elsa) stole the fire, and he will make sure that he, Zeus, ultimately
profits from it. Clive and Elsa are Prometheus Bound from the very begin-
ning of their story; the corporation owns them, their ideas, their labour, and
its product. They are not free to distribute their ideas or their product to the
human public without the corporations sponsorship. It is ultimately Zeus
who gives humanity fire in this scenario, and for that reason fire does not
symbolize freedom from the condition of mere beast, but rather a more insidi-
ous form of control by the corporate gods. Moreover, what we find in Splice
is that the corporate gods do not answer to the tyrannous patriarch Zeus but
rather a monstrous Gaia-Tartarus hybrid.
Our first sign that the postmodern version of the Prometheus myth
involves a shift in gender comes with the successful birth of Clives and Elsas
humananimal hybrid creature. Unlike Frankensteins monster, this one is at
first gendered female, and she is not a hideous amalgam of dead body parts
but a disturbingly attractive woman with animal features and mannerisms.
Played by actress Delphine Chanac, the creature is hairless and possesses
hinged legs, hooved feet and a barbed tail. Elsa names her Dren, the anagram
of the corporations research title. While Elsa in particular is not disgusted
with her creation, as Frankenstein is, the problem Clive and Elsa face once
the creature exists is similar to the plight of Frankenstein. In each case, the
monstrous creation has too many human traits to be treated otherwise, but
it has too many monstrous traits to be assigned a place in the biologically
human category. A central question in each narrative is, what is the status
of such a being, given its origins and makeup, and how should it be treated?
This question is ultimately rendered moot in each case because of the threat
that the creature poses to humanity. In Frankenstein, this threat is seemingly
vanquished with the death of both Frankenstein and his creature. Splice does
not allow for such closure.
The deaTh of The faTher
While Splice received mixed reviews upon its release, those critics who
appreciated it agree that the reason it stands out from other sci-fi horror
films is not simply because of its bioethical themes but rather because
of its disturbing implications for the future of the human family. Lisa
Kennedy of The Denver Post writes that Natali is not simply pondering the
ethics of bioengineering thats rather tired but also looking at the moral
challenges of parenthood in a tweaked context. And because Natali plays with
questions but doesnt settle on answers Splice raises uncomfortable
gender notions it doesnt resolve.
For the first half of the film, the critical focus seems to be on Elsa, not
only on her obsessive monomania with regard to the experiment but also on
her perverse maternal relation to her experimental subject, Dren. It seems
that the viewing audience is supposed to identify with Clive, whose moral
stance with regard to the experiment and the creature is as uncertain as the
viewing audiences. Like Clive, the viewing audience is supposed to feel that
the experiment never should have taken place. Also like him, we are curious
to see its outcomes. However, once Dren is born, both Clive and the audi-
ence are perplexed as to whether she should even continue to live. When
Clive attempts to drown Dren when she is still a child, his agony matches the
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viewers, who can already see that the creature is likely to be dangerous the
older and stronger she gets, but the fact that it looks so much like a human
child gives us pause. Elsa, on the other hand, seems to care for Dren much
as one would care for a human child. She shields and protects Dren, coddles
and nurtures her, all in a laboratory setting where she is also studying her. So
while Elsa seems blinded by both ambition and emotion, Clive seems doubly
like the voice of reason. The film even suggests that Elsas perverse mater-
nal relation to Dren has to do with her own upbringing by an abusive and
neglectful mother.
The film thus overtly characterizes the creation of Dren and her subse-
quent destructiveness as a result of Elsas (female) psychological complex, a
complex that it seems will be repeated with the child Dren. The film contin-
ues in this vein, leading the audience to believe that Dren experiences some
version of the Electra complex, that she begins to covet Clive sexually and
begins to resent Elsa as her rival. Not only does Elsa have destructive psycho-
logical issues, but it seems she has also passed these on to her progeny, Dren.
However, the film soon shows the audience that this interpretation is incor-
rect. Dren may have a complex, but if she does, it is not an Electra complex,
because not only is Dren not totally human, but, as it turns out, she is also not
totally female.
Ironically, it is precisely when Dren seems most female that her sexual-
ity comes into question. In a scene that destroys all of the moral, psycho-
sexual, and social categories the film has set in place for the viewing audience,
Clive and Dren have sex, and Elsa walks in right in the middle of it. Michael
Ordoa of the Los Angeles Times offers a very accurate prediction of the audi-
ence reaction to this scene: Perhaps the films most interesting and nerve-
jangling component is the evolving dynamic among the childless couple and
their experiment-pet-baby-monster. The authenticity of that triangle is sure to
generate some of the most uncomfortable laughter youll hear at a movie this
year. The viewing audience of which I was a part when I first saw this film
uttered all sorts of expletives at this point. No one could believe it was happen-
ing. On so many levels, it seems wrong. It is incestuous, bestial and pedophilic
all at once, which of course is to see everything from Clives side and to forget
that Dren seemed very much to want it, a mistake based on the anthropo-
morphism that the viewing audience cannot help but adopt with regard to the
creature Dren and how she is portrayed in the first half of the film. Despite
her animality, the film asks us to see Dren as a female human child and to
apply the appropriate psycho-sexual formula to her. However, after she has
sex with Clive, all previous interpretations are blown to smithereens.
The sexual act itself is radically unsettling, but the aftermath is even worse.
It seems at first as if Dren sickens and dies. Clive and Elsa even bury her.
As it turns out, however, she was really going through a metamorphosis.
When it is complete, she emerges from her grave, this time in a male form.
This metamorphosis forces us to revise all previous interpretations of both
Drens character and Clives. At this point, the viewer begins to suspect that
it is not only Drens psycho-sexuality or her status as a human being that is at
issue, but also Clives, whose position the audience has identified as its own.
Once Clive begins to be seduced by Dren and finally has sex with her, the
audience can no longer identify with him, at least not consciously, for he has
broken the most primal of taboos. Elsas transgression the experiment itself
seems to pale in comparison to his. Throughout the first portion of the film,
the audience sympathizes with Clive because he is led to his misdeeds by Elsa,
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129
the overly ambitious female who leads her man into dangerous territory. It is
an age-old tale. In this sense, the creation of Dren seems to be a re-enactment
of the Fall. As it turns out, it is really more of a bookend. As Paul Virilio points
out in Ground Zero, the death of God at the hands of reason/science was the
end result of the Luciferian bargain struck up between Eve and the serpent
in the garden, the promise that Eve would be like God, that she would
become immortal and gain the knowledge reserved for the divine (2002: 9).
Both Virilios works and Natalis film suggest that techno-science has begun
to offer the fulfilment of that promise, the human without limits, which is,
of course, necessarily no longer human. It is thus fitting that Dren, with her
barbed tail and hooved feet, so closely resembles Lucifer. She is the result of a
Luciferian pact that has taken thousands of years to come to fruition.
That being said, it seems at first as if the film will attempt to re-stabilize the
moral order after the fateful union of Clive and Dren. Clives guilt, Elsas horror,
and the fact that it seems like Dren dies after the sex act, seem to offer such a
re-stabilization, but this is only momentary. When Dren is reborn as male, he
rapes his mother, Elsa, repeating both Clives transgression against the incest
taboo and Elsas transgression against the laws of nature. With regard to the
latter, earlier in the film, Elsa attempts to explain Drens origin to her by tell-
ing her, I am inside you. A part of me is in you. When Dren rapes Elsa, s/he
repeats, inside you. S/he then kills Clive, and Elsa in turn kills her/him. With
both Clive and Dren dead, it seems that things should go back to normal. The
monstrous progeny is dead, as is everyone who knew about its existence, except
Elsa. But Elsa will not give up her project. Moreover, Elsa is pregnant, and the
audience suspects that the child may have two fathers; we have seen her have
unprotected sex with Clive, but we have also seen her raped by Dren. In the end,
a pregnant Elsa sits at the table with the female corporate executive who had
initially forbade her from continuing her research. The two have struck a deal.
Elsa will create another Dren for the corporation. In the final scene, Elsa and
the female CEO stand silhouetted in the window of a skyscraper, Elsa with her
pregnant belly, and the female CEO behind her, much taller, her androgynous
silhouette looking strangely like the hairless monstrous Dren.
This final scene suggests that the future will involve a new family struc-
ture. Like Frankenstein, it does seem at first that Elsas goal is to be able to
create life without the use of a human womb, except the family that emerges
from her experiment will not be the motherless family of Frankenstein but a
fatherless one. Early in the film, when Clive mentions to Elsa the possibility
of their having a child, she responds that that will not happen until men can
carry the children themselves. Once Clive realizes that Elsa has used her own
DNA to create Dren, he believes Elsa has never wanted to have a child with
him, that she wants instead to create her own child without him and without
having to go through pregnancy. However, in the end we see that Elsa is quite
willing to carry Clives child. She has not disavowed pregnancy or biologi-
cal conception altogether, but it is clear that human pregnancy comes only
after technological conception. Rather than natural pregnancy coming before
technological pregnancy, the technological womb reflecting the natural one,
Elsas human pregnancy in the end becomes a projection of the technological
pregnancy that resulted in the birth of the humananimal hybrid previously.
This reverses and thus radically calls into question the natural/unnatural
dichotomy, as well as the priority of the natural human over the technologi-
cally produced hybrid. The human becomes a reflection of the techno-human
monster and not the other way around.
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In addition, this techno-human pregnancy seems to require the death of
the Father and all he represents. Not only does the father, Clive, break the
incest taboo in a sort of regressive techno-primitivism, he is also murdered
by the phallus of that same daughter with whom he broke the taboo. After
the male Dren rapes Elsa, Clive attacks him, and Dren plunges his tail into
Clives chest. The one who takes over the fathers position is the corporate
mother, an hermaphroditic creature like Dren, with her skyscraper, her finan-
cial power, and her technological womb. It was her prohibition that led to the
creation of Dren, and yet that assault on her authority does not kill her but
only serves to make her stronger. Just like Drens regenerative tail, one can cut
off her phallus, but it will just grow back again. The creation of Dren becomes
just another source of income for the corporation. It does not care about the
death of the three males at the hands of its creation (Clive, his brother, and
the male supervisor are all murdered by the male version of Dren). In fact,
one might say that Elsa, the other perverse mother, does not mourn them
either. Unlike Prometheus or Victor Frankenstein, one could not say for sure
that Elsa suffers for her transgression. She is raped by her creation and must
kill it, but one cannot help but think that she is triumphant in the end. After
all, all obstacles to the unfettered pursuit of her research have been removed.
One might think that she would be mourning the death of her lover, Clive,
but there are several reasons why his death might be a relief to her. It was his
pesky outdated moralisms that kept getting in her way; he tried to pressure
her into motherhood; and he betrayed her with her own creation. In the end,
she has exactly what she has wanted all along: permission to continue her
experiments using human DNA in the light of day with full corporate spon-
sorship, unimpeded by ethical questions that lag behind the steps already
taken, the lines already crossed.
Clive, and the modern human perspective that he represents, finds the
seamlessness with which Elsa combines science and motherhood very
disturbing, and I think the viewing audience does too. But perhaps this is a
backward-looking attitude, one not suited to the creatures we now are and
are able to create/become. We may not be ready to confront the reality that
the Elsacorporate motherDren triad represents, but that does not mean it
has not already to some extent replaced the old motherfatherchild triad
of the modern family. Clive is still bound to a certain tension, bred by the
Enlightenment, between the purity of reason and the equally human capacity
for sympathy and emotion. These two are the same for Elsa. It is not the case
that she has no feeling or passion for Dren. In fact, she emphatically exclaims
that she loves Dren, but this passion is not purely maternal. It is the passion
of both the mother and the (technologically enabled) creator in one. Dren is
both Elsas biological child and her scientific creation; two forms of concep-
tion are involved here, each with its own corresponding passion. This may
seem like a futuristic vision of motherhood, but in truth it is not far from our
current reality. With pregnancy becoming more and more of a technologically
mediated event, and the raising of children more and more of a technological
experiment (we immediately hook them up to video, audio, Internet, Skype,
etc.), todays mothers have more in common with Elsa than we might wish
to admit.
However we may cringe at Elsas relationship to Dren, there can be no
doubt that the end of the film asks us to consider the future that Dren repre-
sents as our own. As Donna Haraway noted over fifteen years ago, By the late
twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and
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fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs (2003: 8).
Like Dren, we are hybrid creatures, part human and part non-human. Dren
does not represent the takeover of the human by an alien species but the
transformation of the human into something else, a process that has already
begun. What we see when we look in the mirror that Dren holds up to us is
a beautiful monster, a multi-sexed creature with a totally different relation to
birth and death, but yet totally embodied. She is sensible, intuitive and concep-
tual, but not in any ways that we can interpret according to old Enlightenment
models of humanity and modern notions of the structure of human conscious-
ness and cognition. When we try to apply such models to a creature like Dren,
we find ourselves immediately in error. We find, as Clive does, that Drens
desires shatter the very structure of law/transgression upon which we base
our understanding of human desire. Drens coupling with Clive is radically
disruptive in two ways. On the one hand, as viewers we instinctively think
it is wrong, that a line (or more than one) has been crossed that ought never
to be crossed. But on the other hand, since we cannot identify exactly what
type of creature Dren is, we also cannot locate where the line is that has been
crossed. She is Clives child in name but not biologically, so it is technically
not incest. She seems to be a child, and yet she grows and learns at such an
accelerated rate that we cannot be sure what her age in human years would
be, so we cannot rightly call the act paedophilia. She is part animal, but seems
so human that one could not rightly call the act bestial. And so we are forced
to assess our initial judgment against Clive. Perhaps it is not the case that Clive
desires her because she is off-limits, but rather because she has no limits.
For example, death takes on a new meaning in the body of Dren. It is
not a limit but always a passage to something else, to a new way of being
embodied. Elsa and Clive believe Dren to be dead four separate times in the
film, and each time she is instead in a transition phase, metamorphosing into
something else. It starts from the time she emerges from the techno-womb
as an inert cocoon. From this first death, she becomes a human-like child.
When she appears to be about four or five, she gets a high fever. As they dip
her in cold water to bring her fever down, Clive attempts to drown her, only
to find that she begins to breathe with gills. After Clive has sex with her, Dren
appears so dead that they actually bury her, only to have her emerge from her
grave as a male. Finally, after his/her mother brains him/her at the end of the
film, we know that some part of Dren will live on in Elsas future experiments,
if not in the child she carries in her womb.
We see Dren cry and we see her laugh, but we have no way of gauging joy
or suffering in such a creature. Dren conceptualizes, but she does not speak,
in spite of the fact that she apparently has the capability. This is another indi-
cation that she refuses, or does not have to, enter the symbolic system that
structures human meaning and desire. Because she does not speak, she does
not give us much to go on in terms of interpreting her desires, her experience,
her intentions or her reasoning. Since we know that she can speak if she wants
to, it seems that she wilfully keeps herself a mystery. In so doing, she holds
onto her inhumanity as an equally important, if not more important, aspect
of her being. She refuses the humanity offered to her, which is most evident
in the scene in which Elsa brings back to her the cat that she had wanted to
keep earlier in the film. Elsa had taken it away from her because she did not
know if Dren might have some allergies she did not yet know about. When
she returns the cat, Dren stabs it with her barbed tail. At this point in the film,
the viewer is still in the process of anthropomorphizing Dren, and so the first
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3. The former exemplified
in the works of Jean-
Jacques Rousseau,
the latter in those of
Immanuel Kant.
interpretation of Drens act is that she is rebelling against Elsa because she
sees Elsa as a rival for Clives attentions. However, once this interpretation is
shattered, we have to go back to such scenes with a new lens. Her killing of
the cat, like her refusal to speak, is one more sign of her refusal to be known
and categorized. If she is rebelling against Elsa at this point, it is not against
Elsa the modern mother but rather Elsa the scientist-mother, the one whose
parenting is based not on the desire to procreate and raise but to produce
and study.
The family triad that is set up in the beginning of the film Clive (father),
Elsa (mother) and Dren (child) is quickly undone. Drens way of being
cannot allow for it. The end of the film suggests that the future has noth-
ing to do with Godthe Fathers nor man-the-patriarchs laws, nor about
the transgression of those laws. Both patriarchal figures are dead by the end
of the film, and the future lies in the hands of two perverse mothers. The first
is Elsa, whose foetus is probably a humanmonster hybrid. The second is the
female CEO, whose silhouette mirrors the figure of the monstrous Dren, who
is neither male nor female, neither human nor inhuman. Unlike the Fathers
paternal No, the monstrous female CEOs nos can easily turn into yeses, just
like the corporations progeny can turn from male to female. It is the corpora-
tion that owns the technological womb from which Dren was born, as well as
the research Elsa has done, and perhaps by the end even Elsas own womb.
All forms of conception have in this way been incorporated. In this regard,
Toronto Star film critic Peter Howells suggestion that parentage has broader
and scarier implications here than in monster movies of yore is a bit of an
understatement.
The corPoraTe moTher/monsTer
The violent disruption of the traditional family structure in Splice occupies
so much of the viewing audiences attention that what should be the more
disturbing implications of the film are somewhat veiled. Drens problem-
atic status foregrounds another issue that the film explores namely, the
changing face of corporate being, and the extension of that mode of being
into all aspects of human existence. A comparison to Frankenstein is help-
ful here to illuminate the difference between the modern struggle to contain
the paradoxes of human being under capitalism and the postmodern issue
that Splice portrays: the corporate takeover of humanity that constitutes
consumer culture.
In her article A troubled legacy: Mary Shelleys Frankenstein and the
Inheritance of Human Rights, Diana Reese (2006) argues that Frankensteins
monster embodies the paradoxes of Enlightenment thought and, more
importantly, the Rights of Man derived therefrom. The two major strains of
Enlightenment thought, the romantic and the rationalist,
3
while sharing many
of the same tenets, are at their core contradictory; the romantic privileges the
capacity for sympathy and pity in its definition of the human, and the rational-
ist privileges the capacity for pure rational judgement untainted by the claims
of the senses. Having to fit both of these models to be considered human,
Frankensteins monster faces a grave challenge. According to Reese, while he
is able to elicit sympathy and pity, his non-resemblance to the human makes
the romantic, who relies on the senses, unable to accept him as a human being
(2006: 5253). It is only in the rationalist conception of the human that the
monster can find a place, and then not as a human but as an other rational
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4. This is an accession
Kant is forced to make
if he is to maintain the
rational purity of the
moral imperative.
5. A phrase that Reese
borrows from Karl
Marxs Declaration of
the Rights of Man and
the Citizen.
being (2006: 5455).
4
As Reese argues, the problem with this positioning is
that he asks for this status in the name of the subjective and the empirical he
wants to be happy and he wants a mate so the nature of his request goes
against the objective purity of the rationalist human (2006: 57). Reese locates,
through Marxs analysis of the conflict of individual and general will, a similar
contradiction in the constitution of the Rights of Man. The Rights of (indi-
vidual, empirical) Man are not the same as the Rights of the (general, ideal)
citizen. While Frankensteins monster, as a rational male being, can claim the
latter, as a non-human he cannot claim the former. He thus embodies the
paradox of capitalist being. His individual interests cannot be recognized as
part of the general will. His demand that Victor create for him a female so that
he could become a species, a social group and not a lone individual, poses
too much of a threat to the unreal universality
5
of rights-bearers, and Victor
must refuse (2006: 65). And although he is gendered male, Reese sees in his
makers rejection of his petition for reproduction the abjection of the material
substrate of nineteenth-century capitalist society, peopled by all of those who
resembled human beings but who could not claim human rights (women,
children, slaves, servants, etc.) and upon whose existence the production and
reproduction of modern society nonetheless depended (2006: 58).
Dren would seemingly face many of the same problems that confront
Frankensteins creature. In spite of the fact that she has human parts, she
was not born, she does not resemble the human physically, and the crea-
tion of a species for her might spell the end of humanity. However, unlike
Frankensteins creature, Dren does not wish to be human; she does not ask
anything of her maker. Instead, she remains mute in the name of her inhu-
manity, embodying in a much more radical fashion the inhumanity of objec-
tively universal reason and its projects on the one hand and the inhumanity
of the empirical, embodied individual on the other hand, which in her case
is never repressed in an Oedipalizing process. Unlike Frankensteins crea-
ture, Dren does not represent the problematic status of the human individual
under patriarchal capitalism. Her similarity to the corporate CEO, the fact that
it is the corporation whose product she truly is, and the fact that both she
and the CEO are at least initially gendered female, suggests that she repre-
sents a multi-gendered corporate individuality, a melding of individual and
general will. While Dren is not human, she embodies the general will of the
corporation, as well as the power that goes along with that, and is thus not
subject to the same laws as Frankensteins creature. The corporation could
in fact be considered another manifestation of the monstrous other rational
being to which Enlightenment rationalism must extend its hand, one who,
unlike Frankensteins creature, can claim the rights of man and of the citi-
zen despite not being human. Like Dren, the corporation is a unified though
protean multiplicity and, at least in Splice, its form of power is no longer linked
to the patriarch but is actually patricidal. Unlike Frankensteins monster, Dren
will not be destroyed but will instead be reproduced and inserted into human
bodies. The existence of corporate individuality, embodied by Dren, does not
bode well for the future of humanity in general.
Elsas problematic maternity, linked with the death of the Father, is only
one stage in the process whereby the social is transformed into the corpo-
rate and the human is transformed into something else. The next stage is
the assumption of the maternal role by the corporation. The resemblance of
the corporate CEO to the hybrid monster, its own product, symbolizes the
genetic inheritance of the one from the other. Elsa may have contributed her
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Kimberly Jackson
134
6. Earlier in the film,
Clives and Elsaa
first hybrid animal
creations, Fred and
Ginger, turn on each
other and rip each
other apart once
Ginger metamorphoses
into a male.
DNA to the production of Dren, but it is the CEO who Dren most resembles.
Elsa becomes merely a wet-nurse in this scenario, and her version of repro-
duction without human womb is overtaken by the corporations still more
disturbing intent: to insert Dren DNA into various human beings, ostensibly
to extend human life, but really to extend the life of the corporation into the
bodies of its consumers. It is no longer, then, a question of general vs. indi-
vidual will; the individual will become the general in a process of incorpora-
tion that will connect the individual umbilically to the corporate mother. The
results of such a possible future are summed up in Elsas ending statement:
Whats the worst that can happen? The only thing that can happen when
proteins with such potential for metamorphosis and regeneration are inserted
into human beings is that humans become something other than human.
Further, both Elsa and the corporate mother know that when two male Drens
meet, they are liable to rip each other apart.
6
The future of humanity looks
bleak indeed.
a PosThuman fuTure
Splice is not the only film to figure the corporation as a perverse mother, but of
the ones that do, there are very few that follow the more radical implications
of this shift in power relations. Miguel Sapochniks 2010 film Repo Men, for
example, seems as if it will, but ultimately stops short. In Repo Men, a corpora-
tion aptly named The Union has developed the technology to create artificial
organs, as well as prosthetic devices to enhance hearing, vision, speed, etc.
While it seems that the corporations intent is a benevolent one, it charges
such exorbitant fees for the implants that no one who gets them can ultimately
afford to pay. Once they lose the ability to make payments, they have 96 days
before the repo men come after them to repossess their organs, which of
course kill them in the process. A huge percentage of the population, it seems,
has one or more of The Unions products inside them and are thus bodily
owned by the corporation. Very literally, no one can live without the corpora-
tions products, and The Union keeps track of its children through the use of
scanning devices that detect the presence of its organs in their bodies, in addi-
tion to registering whether they have made their payments on time and if not,
how much time they have left before they are repossessed. The drama turns
on when one of the repo men (Jude Law) receives an artificial heart, finds he
can no longer perform his function as repo man now that he himself has faced
death and has one of these artificial organs, and thus defaults on his loan. The
film allows you to believe at first that he finally escapes the corporation with
his organ, his life, and the life of the woman he loves, but we find out that in
fact his brain is attached to some machine that produces these lovely dreams of
freedom, when he himself is more enslaved to the corporation than ever.
Despite its pessimistic ending, Repo Men, like so many other sci-fi apocalypse
films, sustains the notions of humanity and free will developed in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. The future it envisions is bleak, but it is still peopled
with humans. Further, while the corporation may be implicitly female in body, it
is undoubtedly male in mind, its CEO played by Liev Schreiber. In fact, all of the
action of Repo Men, like the much older film Blade Runner (Scott 1982), involves
the struggles of male characters to come to terms with their identities in relation
to the corporate Father, on the one hand, and their artificial female counter-
parts on the other. The female leads in both films, Rachel (Sean Young) in Blade
Runner and Beth (Alice Braga) in Repo Men, are hybrid creatures whom the men
HOST_3.1_Jackson_125-138.indd 134 4/18/12 11:05:43 PM
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135
in each film have been taught to despise. Rachel is an android and Beths body
is enhanced in several ways by The Unions products. Decker (Harrison Ford)
of Blade Runner is trained to track down and kill androids and Remy to murder
Union children through repossession. The women in each case, though them-
selves partially inhuman, call upon the mens humanity to save them from the
inhuman corporation. Despite their status as manufactured beings, the women
possess all the essential traits of modern humanity and ultimately serve to
support the continuation of that human ideal.
The future that Splice envisions, in contrast, is an inhuman one, and
perhaps this is why the film must end at the threshold of this future. Drens
inhumanity is too radical to allow for a human victory. The female in Splice is
not reduced to an embodiment of otherness created by and always ultimately
under patriarchal rule. She does not serve as a vehicle for the re-establishment
of masculine identity nor the return of those human values associated with
modernity. Rather, her existence signals the end of such logics and the impos-
sibility of the narratives traditionally associated with them.
In his 2007 book The Infanticidal Logic of Evolution and Culture, A. Samuel
Kimball offers an explanation for why narratives like Splice are so rare. He
employs the term contraceptual to refer to everything that is repressed
in the birth of the concept. This logic of repression begins as far back as
Plato, who used biological conception as a metaphor for rational conception
in order to privilege what emerges as concept and as actuality as opposed
to what remains potential and amorphous and is thus seen as a threat to
the integrity of the concept. Kimball argues that these repressed potenti-
alities break out in cultural artifacts throughout literary history, and that
the tendency in such narratives is to destroy them in order to sustain the
conceptual against their contraceptual tendencies. This logic is itself infan-
ticidal because the creatures that are destroyed are human creations, like
Frankensteins monster and Dren. They are thus potentialities of the human
that threaten to supplant it.
As Kimball points out, there are very few narratives that allow for a truly
contraceptual, inhuman future. The one he finds exemplary is Jean-Pierre
Jeunets 1997 film Alien Resurrection. Like Splice, Alien Resurrection overtly links
the contraceptual future to the death of the Father, and to the unnatural female-
ness of the two artificial creatures that symbolize the being of the future:
Not only is it that Father is dead, as Call declares, but the future which
the figure of the father has guaranteed is all but over as well, no matter
how drawn out this ending will be. This is the future as human, as
narratable in terms of conception as conceivable. Ripley, Call, and Agent
Smith hail from a different kind of time inconceivable, contraceivable.
(Kimball 2007: 103)
The beings of the contraceptual future in both cases are explicitly linked to the
umbilical nature of the monstrous megacorporation that produces them. As
Kimball explains, in Alien Resurrection, Ripley has been replicated many times
as part of a corporate project initiated by United Systems Military. Ripley
discovers this in a disturbing scene in which she walks through a laboratory
filled with artificial wombs/tombs containing her own dead partial clones,
in addition to one on the operating table that begs to be killed. Ripley and
Call rebel against the corporation, destroying both Ripleys clones and the
monstrous aliens that embody a desire for destruction through replication,
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Kimberly Jackson
136
a desire that Splice explicitly links to the corporation itself, as well as to the
corporations progeny.
In the final scene of Alien Resurrection, a cloned Ripley (Sigourney Weaver)
and her android sidekick (Winona Ryder) stand poised between the humans
they are protecting and the non-human being they each embody. Kimball
writes,
Embodying a human-programmed, nonhuman otherness, they turn
their heads in unison and gaze out at the nuclear blast following the
space stations destruction. In this moment the film explicitly figures
Ripley and Call as mimetic doubles whose human appearance belies
their contraconceptive origins. Standing in for the humankind whose
futurity they have assured, Ripley and Call simultaneously stand in for
the alien species they have destroyed. Between them there will be no
heterosexual reproductive coupling. What they signify, therefore, is
an order of humanlike existence a future no longer conceivable in
conceptive terms. They bear in their respective persons the infanticidal-
cum-extinctive meaning of their survival, a survival that spells the end
of the human, the death of the aliens not withstanding.
(Kimball 2007: 102)
While both films hover at the threshold of this contraceivable future, Splice
perhaps goes further in challenging the possibility of that future having any
human remnant. While Ripley and Call serve at least partly as human protec-
tors, Dren does not care about her human parents or any moral code that
would require her to provide for their protection. At the same time, she cannot
be allied with the totally inhuman aliens from Resurrection. She is a human
product, she does have human DNA, and her human appearance suggests
that she represents not a future in which the human has been eliminated by
an alien takeover but one in which it has been transformed into another kind
of being. This transformation has already begun; we are already corporate
individuals, connected to the corporate mother through satellites and digital
cables and through the desires that she manufactures for us. In this sense,
Drens future is our future, and she is correct when she claims, in the only
words she ever utters, that she is inside you.
In the contraceptual future that Dren represents, production and repro-
duction are combined in such a way that the product becomes not just
something the corporation will use to assume more power and control
over its humans workers and consumers but which will radically alter its
human constituents to resemble the corporations own monstrous mode of
being. Consumers will literally be incorporated, perhaps the end and ulti-
mate goal of corporate logic. Everyone will be reborn as a part of corporate
individualism: one no longer reproduces, one replicates; one is no longer
sexed, one is multi-sexed; one is not an individual, one is a product. It will
be a brave new world in which no one will do without the refinements that
enslave them to the Queen Bee they will all be her children, and they will
make their payments on time or they will be eradicated. These refinements
will not make them ideal humans; instead, they will become shape-shifting
multiple beings who may rip each other apart. But since they can be repli-
cated, death will no longer be what it was. And since the corporation is itself
inhuman, what does it care for the human race? The future of the corpo-
ration does not depend on whether or not it is destructive of any or all of
HOST_3.1_Jackson_125-138.indd 136 4/18/12 11:05:43 PM
Splice
137
humanity. It is Dren who controls the future, and Dren does not care about
destruction, even her own, nor about ends or means or lack or values. This
is why her future remains open in the end, and why it is, in Kimballs terms,
contraceivable.
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suggesTed ciTaTion
Jackson, K. (2012), Splice: The postmodern Prometheus, Horror Studies 3: 1,
pp. 125138, doi: 10.1386/host.3.1.125_1
conTribuTor deTails
Kimberly Jackson is Associate Professor of English at Florida Gulf Coast
University. She has published pieces on nineteenth century Victorian Gothic
literature, as well as on contemporary sci-fi horror films like Gore Verbinskis
HOST_3.1_Jackson_125-138.indd 137 4/18/12 11:05:44 PM
Kimberly Jackson
138
The Ring (Lacefield, Ashgate, 2010; and Theory, Culture, and Society 26:5 [2009])
and William Malones Feardotcom (Post Script 30:1 [2010]). She is currently
working on a book project titled Gender, Violence, and Visual Technology in the
21st Century.
Contact: Department of Language and Literature, Florida Gulf Coast
University, 10501 FGCU Blvd. South, Fort Myers, FL 33965, USA.
E-mail: kjackson@fgcu.edu
HOST_3.1_Jackson_125-138.indd 138 4/18/12 11:05:44 PM
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Copyright of Horror Studies is the property of Intellect Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to
multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users
may print, download, or email articles for individual use.