Sin graft: plain lazy, not playing God in science fiction
Critical theory and science fiction films about genetic engineering really shouldn’t have anything in common, but they do. One is essentially the art of assimilating an available body of knowledge, framing the context and then consciously discarding it. The hope that sticking yourself out in the leftfield will provoke others into debate that, by the process of comparative logic, will encourage them to edge closer to the response you’d actually like from them. The other is about what happens if you do stuff that you currently don’t do now but – if there were significant leaps in technology or lapses in morals – just might.
The similarity isn’t that both are about hypothetical issues. Imagination and spurious possibility is what the world is based on, just look at the derivatives market if you want an example of how a system based on trading things that aren’t actually there makes people actual, real money.
Vincenzo Natali’s Splice is to all box office purposes an SF film about genetic engineering. The plot focuses on Elsa and Clive, a couple pursuing dazzling careers as biochemists in a pharmaceutical unit. Their avant-garde approach, mutating genes to grow entirely new species and proteins that – they hope – can save the world, is combined with youth and good looks. Which obviously means they’re on the cover of Wired and their lab resembles a home for thrash punks who secretly loved science, grew up and put on a white coat (complete with DIY badge accessories). Of course, focusing on making new and as yet non-existant creatures means that you’re not focused on your own gene replication through procreation. A lack of children is probably why Elsa is so keen to bring a human-animal gene splice into the world as part of a secret experiment conducted at the back of the lab. It’s at this point where the plot is predictably pushed from joy in challenging boundaries to a harrowing semi-horror SF.
There are no end of film summaries around which will tell you what happens in it. You could even watch it. But to summarise, the key plot points in Splice are: genetic mutation, using your own genetic material to create a winged amphibious omnivore, colluding with your partner to raise a winged amphibious omnivore which you then seduce, de-humanising your child-pet by removing its sting, gender mutuation, inter-special rape and death.
That it’s a fairly issue-rich film isn’t the issue because, in the abstract, most films are. But while you’re invited to judge Splice using some very convenient conventions, is isn’t an allegory for playing God. It’s about the inherent dangers of an idle world and the inherent danger of wanting to Get Things Done without Being Arsed to actually, really, do them.
From Frankenstein to GM foods to Dolly the Sheep, the notion of human experimentation, genomes and discoveries are by their nature subject to consideration about creation, its limits and the ethics about changing practices which pose as much challenge as they do benefit. Adopting a polemical viewpoint is very simple in this scenario: by doing something that wouldn’t occur in nature you are playing God and that is wrong. Or equally: by denying others the opportunity to benefit from these wonderful discoveries you are potentially killing others that could survive which makes you a murderer. Unfortunately, polemical arguments are quite difficult to win given the evidence that aeroplanes, cars and chocolate bars weren’t grown from the ground and there are still continents were swathes of the population are being denied anti-retrovirals – people make things as much as they destroy stuff. This is neither good or bad – it happens. As a digression, another shoddy analysis of Splice would be that it is in fact a film about parenting and that, denied our biological imperative to reproduce, our (in this case it’s Elsa who initiates, so therefore it MUST be about women in the workplace, right?) thwarted desires will always manifest themselves in a need to nurture and pass on our traits in some form. The fact that Dren (the amphi-omni-winged mutant child of Clive and Elsa) sleeps with and murders/attempts to murder her parents is therefore a pseudo-Fredian tale about the damage our projected desires do to our children.
Except it clearly isn’t a film about God or children or even bad science. It’s a film about being bone idle and the consequences of being at once ambitious and sloppy. Elsa and Clive have the opportunity to make a meaningful difference in the work that they do. They are funded by a pharmaceutical company who, while they are a commercial enterprise, have been happy to fund massive amounts of R&D and want a return on their investment for their shareholders. This is just venture capitalism or the world of work; rich companies or people with money give it to people who are talented but don’t have any and the people who receive the money do things to justify that investment. Except Elsa and Clive have a problem with doing what their benefactors want and in Elsa’s words ‘don’t want to waste five years’ doing work that they don’t see as meaningful or rather, work that will get them on more magazine covers. So they could make a difference but choose not to, ploughing ahead with what they want to do because they’re impatient.
So they’re keen and ambitious – what’s wrong with that when they so evidently want to make a difference and possibly save lives? Sure, that’s laudable. When it’s accompanied by careful thought and a sound rationale as to why you’re actions will do this and some consideration of the risks and opportunity costs involved. Health and Safety assessments wouldn’t make Splice riveting, but it’s precisely because the decision to firstly splice genes to make Dren followed by implanting her embryo are made in hasty, half-whispered conversations or domestic squabbles that it all goes wrong, not the appropriation of any demi-god status. Demi-gods don’t stand behind locked doors shouting at their partners ‘this is what’s known in couples therapy as emotional hijacking’ as their significant other implants an embryo in a machine. And while I’m no biochemist, I’m pretty sure that all of the medical and scientific professionals I know are pretty amused by their portrayal as rock-loving renegades. I mean, they have good haircuts and commendable taste in pop culture, it’s just that when they go to work it’s about, well, work until clocking out time. Not like the Splice lab where junior techs listen to hair metal and piss about with pipettes while Clive’s brother fails to spot that one of the N.E.R.D creations has actually changed gender.
It’s Gavin, Clive’s brother, who compounds the terminal laziness that defines Dren’s existence. The character is faced with the knowledge that he should be more than curious about the project that his brother and brother’s girlfriend have undertaken in the lab: their attention is diverted from achieving the goals that will save the lab from being axed, they are spending less and less time on core activities and not picking up on significant developments such as hormonal changes in their mutants in the public domain. Yet he remains complicit, not quiet about his suspicions. Even when he eventually finds out about Dren when he enters the basement where she’s been stashed and is nearly maimed by her he continues to be compliant and mute. It is only when it’s far too late, when Dren is both strong, winged and homicidal that Gavin drags in external backup because he ‘feels like they have to know’. Of course, it’s too late for intervention or him and his death is more an allegory about the dangers of procrastination than a lesson in playing God and its effect on innocent people.
The point? The things we make are destructive and turn out badly not because we’re evil for messing with the fundamentals of life in the first place but because we do it for the wrong reasons, we have no idea what we’re doing or we’re in such a hurry to assess the outcome that we don’t check things like the content or whether or creation has wings and will kill us in the end. Applied Splice is reading ‘How to change your life in 60 seconds’, liposuction as a first-resort and factoring in at least one year for exam re-takes into a medium-term study plan. But if the thought that valuing results without the requisite preparation and effort is too, well, draining, then just sack it off and keeping surfing the net. Start, here with a reasons why Splice can’t happen because the ‘Science’ isn’t believable (they haven’t read Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science, clearly). Or this one that focuses on all the complex, new and difficult moral and philosophical questions that Spliced raises with comparisons to all the other films like it.
