Links all over the place this week!

Scientists are “normal” people, some children discover [geek feminism blog]

In Drawings of Scientists, seventh graders draw and describe their image of scientists before and after a visit to Fermilab.  Among girls (14 in total), 36% portrayed a female scientist in the “before” drawing, and 57% portrayed a female scientist in the “after” drawing.  Among boys (17 in total), 100% portrayed a male scientist in the “before” drawing, and 100% portrayed a male scientist in the “after” drawing

The Lab’s Gender Gap [gender across borders]

Christensen points out that women scientists often start their careers with slightly lower salaries, in more poorly equipped labs, with fewer graduate students, and appointments to less-prestigious committees. Women are more likely to take time off work to stay home with their children, and less likely to go on the job market to improve their salaries. They’re also less likely to win high-status prizes.

Splice is a sci-fi horrorish film that is in many ways a modern retelling of the story of Frankenstein.  What Splice does differently from most sci-fi horrorish films is to incorporate complex, intelligent female characters and examine (both directly and indirectly) female emotional and sexual development in an extreme situation.  Until it blows it at the end.

Also, I have never seen so many people stand up and exit the theater so quickly when the credits started rolling, but that might be a Utah thing (more on that later).  If anything, the strong reactions of my fellow theater-goers only made me more thoughtful about this unusual movie.

Here’s what you need to know: Clive and Elsa are a couple (literally) of scientists who have been working on splicing together DNA from different animals to create new species in the hopes of developing cures for livestock diseases.  They think it would be a good idea to take this to the next level – the human level – in order to find cures for human diseases, and pretty much just to test their theory about how awesome they are.  They’re told no, but they do it anyway.  What they end up creating is first a creepy slimy thing, which evolves into a cute rabbitish thing, and finally into a human chimera thing.  Although Clive was recently trying to talk Elsa into kids, she wasn’t interested.  Now she has become very attached to their creature, Dren, and he’s the one with serious second thoughts.  Spoilers ahead.

There are a few themes to examine here, including the development of the creature, the relationships between the creature and her creators, the choices of the creators, and the overall messages of the film (if we can figure them out). And yeah, there are a lot of scientific inconsistencies in the film and things that just didn’t quite make sense (like a creature with the ability to breathe underwater, fly, and shift sexes but no capacity for vocalized language), but I’m going to set all of that aside for the purposes of this review and just concentrate on the story.

Although Dren started out slimy and creepy and weird (which one could possibly argue for all babies), as she ages she continually develops more human looking features.  Elsa grows attached, particularly when Dren begins developing associations between objects and names as well as the ability to spell with Scrabble letters (but not to speak or write…). Meanwhile Clive consistently views Dren as an experiment (through the first half of the film anyway), and is unsure that they have done the right thing.  He intends to kill her soon after she is born, but is prevented by Elsa’s attachment.  He tries again when she is older and has become sick, but his attempts to drown her lead to the discovery of her aquatic lungs as well as her recovery.  Elsa convinces herself that he knew he was saving her all along, and refuses to acknowledge his fear and loathing for her beloved creation.

When Dren grows too big for the lab, they move her to a barn.  Here we begin to learn more about Elsa’s childhood, giving us some insight to her relationship with Dren as well as her treatment of the child.  It’s insinuated that Elsa was the victim of child-abuse by her mother, and was kept in a small dark room without much more than a mattress – a child hidden away and neglected.  Throughout Dren’s development, she is kept secret, hidden, and spends who knows how many hours a day alone in small observation labs, storage areas, and finally the locked barn.  She doesn’t receive the nurturing, attention, stimulation, or instruction that human children need for healthy development.  Despite her attachment to Dren, Elsa seems to forget that this creature is part human, not just part animal.  Dren finally makes a friend, a barn cat, which Elsa takes away from her as soon as she discovers it.  Her isolation is complete, and her perceived powerlessness begins to drive her to act out.  Which is pretty serious business once you start to get an idea of her adaptations (apparent super-strength, super-agility, super-speed, underwater-breathing, flight, and a poisonous stinger at the end of her tail).  Elsa catches on to this quickly, and in one of the most heartbreaking scenes of the film she ties Dren to a table, strips her, and cuts off her stinger without anesthetizing her once beloved pet.

By this point in the film, Dren has become a young woman.  Elsa has noticed and given her a makeover (a symbol of her budding womanhood, not the She’s All That type thing).  Clive has noticed and given her a dance lesson, which he ended abruptly after recognizing a little too much of Elsa in Dren (in fact, it was Elsa’s DNA that was spliced to make the creature – something she didn’t tell Clive at the time).  The dudes behind me in the theater noticed, too, commenting on her nice thighs.  My hunch is that this is where people start having strong reactions to the film – where they can’t understand what they are seeing or feeling and they begin to dislike it.  Strongly.  Dren is sexy.  She’s beautiful in a very Bratz-esque giant-eyed way.  She’s shapely, graceful, and vulnerable.  We see her womanly thighs as she dances.  We see her pubescent breasts as she cowers.  We see her fully exposed on Elsa’s operating table.  And we have been conditioned by the media industry to see all of this in a very sexual way.   But we saw Dren’s birth, we saw her as a hoppy little rabbit thing, we saw her as a sick child, and now we see her as a monster of some kind.  And none of that is supposed to be sexy.  Sounds a little bit like being 15 again.

But here the film begins to fall apart.  Clive is “seduced” by Dren – a painfully confusing scene for those dudes behind me – and caught in the act by Elsa.  If we look at this event considering Dren as a maturing creature, it makes sense.  She is essentially taking the next step in her personal development and the perpetuation of her new species – mating.  If we look at this event considering Clive as Dren’s creator and parent figure, this is a serious misuse of power and influence – it is the equivalent of incestuous sexual abuse.  How Elsa just gets over this and the film keeps going as though this was a minor event is beyond me.  Dren soon comes down with a mysterious illness, and thinking that she has died, the couple buries her behind the barn.  In fact, she is experiencing a sex-change and comes back violently, for what I suppose is reasonable revenge.  A fair amount of people die, and Dren, now fully male, rapes Elsa (a painful and in my opinion seriously unnecessary scene).  We learn that Elsa has become pregnant from this encounter and will keep the baby as her next step in the science experiment.

In my opinion, the film shot itself in the foot following Dren and Clive’s intimate encounter.  Here’s how I think it should have ended: Dren’s mystery illness is not a sex-change, but pregnancy.  Considering how rapidly her life-span seems to be progressing, and how short her gestation period was (she essentially grew as a fetus outside of the womb following her “birth”), she could pop out Dren, Jr. in a day or two.  She could even give birth to an army of little Dren’s at this rate, and as an entirely female species they could quickly begin shifting the balance of power in our little world.  This would mean that the ultimate climax of her evolution is to become a Queen Bee of sorts.  Instead, a film that said “women are smart, powerful, and can be focal points in a non-romantic film” up until the final fifteen minutes turned around and said “but the almighty penis is the ultimate evolutionary symbol of power and control.”

So why did everyone hate it?  Well, you know my theory on Dren’s sexual influence on the audience.  I also suspected that the sex-change was not a big hit with the conservative population out here and did nothing for the cause of transgender acceptance, which was irritating.  Furthermore, I find it hard to believe that there was anyone in that theater that thought that Elsa should keep her monster-rape-baby, but thinking about abortion as a reasonable solution would tend to make a lot of people out here pretty uncomfortable.  So I loitered a bit to hear what people’s complaints were after they evacuated the theater like a stink bomb just went off.

The consensus seemed to be that there were “a lot of f-words and sexual content.”

Check out this other great review over at i09.  And of course, the always insightful Roger Ebert.

SciFi originals are one of my weaknesses, and although they’re a little embarrassing from time to time, they are so fun that I am not ashamed to share with you another of my newest (Netflix Instant)  obsessions: Primeval.  The show is essentially about a merry band of scientists who are investigating anomalies in the space-time continuum which have allowed dinosaurs to slip through into the modern world (along with the occasional future monster).  I know what you’re thinking – AWESOME!  Even better is the rock score that accompanies the action scenes.

Fantastic, right?  But what is it doing on a feminist review site?  SciFi’s attention to female characters is often a double edged sword: female characters are intelligent, competent, and typically hold their own with the manfolk – just in less clothing.  Primeval is no exception to this rule.  There are three primary female characters in the series: Abby, Claudia Brown/Jenny Lewis, and Helen Cutter.  Let’s break them down across the seasons:

Abby Maitland – Abby is pretty much the coolest battler of monsters since Buffy,* although she would rather care for and protect most of the animals she comes across.  She is an intelligent zoologist and lizard specialist, and has mad self-defense skills which often result in her coming to the aid of the dudes in the show, including that cutie, Conner, standing behind her (yes, Alice fans, that is Andrew-Lee Potts of Hatter swoon).  However, she spends an inexplicable amount of time in her panties and tank top in season 1 under the pretenses that she must keep her apartment uncomfortably hot in order to keep her reptiles healthy.  Okay, I can buy that much, but I don’t know any woman who answers the door or entertains coworkers in such a getup.  Actress Hannah Spearitt apparently didn’t either, and although Abby still spends much of her time in form fitting gear, there is much less flesh in the following two seasons.

*Incidentally, Conner, Abby’s are-they/aren’t-they sometimes infatuation confesses early in season 1 that he understands that people can have feelings for people they hardly know, citing his love for Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Claudia Brown/Jenny Lewis – Claudia Brown is a government official working with the team.  She’s essentially doing damage control and trying to keep the dinosaur appearances out of the public eye (which seems impossible, but this is fiction after all).  She becomes the love interest of the team leader, Nick Cutter, just in time to be eliminated from history due to a change that occurs on the other side of an anomaly.  However, she is serendipitously reincarnated as PR manager Jenny Lewis in season 2.  Jenny takes longer to adjust to the Land of the Lost than Claudia did, refusing to believe what is going on and running about in short skirts, high heels, and all around unlikely dino-chasing attire.  However, as the team begins losing members and facing pressure from the government, Jenny shows her true colors stepping into leadership in the team and supporting the cause, even at the risk of her own career.

Helen Cutter – Helen is the primary antagonist of the series (badder if not bigger than the t-rex itself).  She was team leader Nick Cutter’s long lost wife at the beginning of the series, until it was revealed that Helen wasn’t dead – she had spent the last seven years traveling through anomalies conducting her own research.  She wants to control time and keep her findings to herself, even cutting out her own husband.  When she propositions him to come with her, he refuses, furious that she had abandoned him for so long.  She then reveals that she had been having an affair with her student and Nick’s right hand man Steven prior to her disappearance, and asks him to join her since Nick won’t.  Steven chooses his friend and his team over Helen, and from here on out her wrath knows no bounds.  She determines that humans are responsible for the destruction on the world and sets out on a mission to not only change the future, but eliminate the human race altogether by exterminating all pre-human primates.  Helen is happy to use her sex appeal to manipulate the men in her life (particularly Steven) and often wears Tomb Raider-esque gear that just doesn’t seem functional for a woman spending most of her time with dinosaurs.

Although each of these characters have their fair share of strengths and weaknesses, we are still seeing thin, attractive, white characters (male and female) throughout.  Not a lot of diversity when it comes to ability, sexual orientation, body shape, or ethnicity (unless the jump from British to Scottish counts).  They throw us a bone on this one in season 3 with Sarah Page, although that’s not to say she isn’t problematic, or that it’s a fully satisfying bone.

Sarah Page – Sarah joins the team at the beginning of season 3 as the team’s mythology specialist.  This is actually a cool and sensible addition to the team – many of the monsters in folklore and mythology seem to have a lot in common with dinosaurs and other creatures from earlier eras, in which case anomalies would provide a good explanation for cases like the Loch Ness Monster.  Sarah is recruited when an ancient Egyptian artifact opens an anomaly, releasing a wild crocodile that can walk on two legs.  Sarah is intelligent and helpful, but it seems like too great a coincidence that our exotic and mysterious new creature leads us to our exotic new teammate.  Although it is certainly not inconceivable that Sarah would specialize in mythology, it seems a little like “look, our diversity specialist brings diversity to the team!  Now we have diversity!”  But, it’s still probably better than nothing, and with lives on the line regularly due to the beasts and creatures involved, I’m sure there will be more opportunities to diversify the cast/team.

Despite it’s flaws, Primeval depicts women as equally intelligent, capable, adventuresome, and complex as their counterparts.  Not to mention that it’s just plain fun.  Also good news – it was recently renewed for two more seasons.  Season 4 begins shooting in March 2010.

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