The Only Good Man is a Dead Man: Queering Ideological Feminism in Splice

Abstract

In the movie Splice, two young rebellious scientists at Newstead Pharmaceutics, Elsa Kant and Clive Nicoli, have an overt agenda to develop medical treatments for diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Showing hubris, and ignoring legal and ethical boundaries, one of the scientists, Elsa, introduces human DNA into their experiment. The resulting creature, whom she and her complicit research partner and lover, Clive, name Dren (Nerd backwards), is a female hybrid of animal, insect, fish, and human genes, and an unexpected sequential hermaphrodite who changes from female to male. I explore misandry, ideological feminism, and more progressive attitudes towards males largely from The will to change: Men, masculinity, and love (2004), by controversial American social activist bell hooks, according to three dominant leitmotifs in Splice: (i) nerdism and the ineffectual, emotionally dead male scientist; (ii) the deviant man and the benign woman and, finally; (iii) the murdering, rapist hermaphrodite/man. In this way, I unveil Splice as a deceptively transgressive, cinematographic art form that actually reinstates misandric norms regarding gender, sexualities, and socio-economic trends and roles for men in particular.