Summary
One of the biggest questions surrounding 2009’sSpliceis whether Dren’s personality would be different if she were treated with nurturing care. The 15-year-old sci-fi horror flick has seen a resurgence in popularity recently, as it was added to Max’s streaming platform and quickly became a trending title. Viewers have seen it as aperfect pairing with 1931’sFrankensteinand become especially interested in the hybrid creature known as Dren, who was genetically created by the film’s main characters, Elsa and Clive (played by Sarah Polley and Adrien Brody.)
During the film’s progression,Dren becomes increasingly aggressive, even to the point of becoming a killer and using her pheromones to seduce Clive inSplice’s most controversial scene. The two protagonists treat Dren in completely different ways from the moment she is born, and onecan’t help but wonder if her personality would have turned in a different direction when looking at the age-old nature vs. nurture debate. Although Dren’s character is killed in the final act of the film, the ending is left ambiguous and teasesaSplicesequel that never happened.
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Dren’s Violent Tendencies Were A Result of Her Upbringing In Splice
Clive Treated Her Like An Experiment And Elsa Was Unfit For Parenting
While some of Dren’s violent tendencies can be attributed to her genetics, many of them were the result of the treatment she received from both Elsa and Clive. From the moment she is born, Clive treats Dren as an experiment, regardless of her human DNA and personality.He’s afraid of her, possessive, and has no qualms with the prospect of destroying herif necessary. In fact, it’s never really clear whether Clive was intending to drown Dren when the couple learned she had amphibious DNA and developed gills to breathe underwater.
Conversely, Elsa treats Dren as her own child as soon as she starts showing humanistic personality traits. Unfortunately for Dren,Elsa had a rough childhood with an uncaring motherand begins to exhibit abusive tendencies towards Dren as soon as Dren starts to rebel. By the end of the movie, Elsa has flipped to treating Dren as an experiment, and Clive has developed empathy for her situation. Being that Dren has the mindset of a child, this angers her. Dren becomes hostile towards Elsa and sexually attracted to Clive in a controversial scene that the director refused to cut.
Even though nature vs. nurture comes into play for some of Dren’s aggressive actions, she very well could have become violent anyway. There comes a point when Elsa and Clive think Dren has died, but in reality,she’s transitioning from her female form into a male form, which is inherently more aggressive. The audience is shown this with the experiments of Fred and Ginger, two creatures that Elsa and Clive created for medical purposes earlier in the film and tried to breed. Instead of breeding, Ginger transitions into a male, and the two kill one another in a bloody outburst.
Director Vincenzo Natali was inspired by the real-life Vacanti mouse experiment when makingSplice. The experiment took place in Massachusetts and involved a mouse that was genetically altered to grow an ear-shaped disc from its body for medical research.
Dren’s transition into a male form was the result of a similar DNA that she shared with Fred and Ginger. She changes, immediately kills two other men, becomes hostile towards Clive, and attempts to breed with Elsa. The only major difference between Dren and Ginger is that, because of Dren’s human DNA, her actions seem a lot less like natural instincts and more intentional.
However, because of the naturally violent instincts of the male DNA in Dren,her aggression was probably inevitable. The same can be said when humans attempt to domesticate naturally aggressive creatures, like large, predatory cats. Either way,Splicecreates an interesting debate around Dren that can be seen from both sides.
Splice
Cast
Produced by Guillermo del Toro, Splice stars Adrian Brody and Sarah Polley as a young scientist couple who, after introducing human DNA into their work with genetic splicing, create a human-animal hybrid being called Dren, who becomes like the couple’s child. Initially positive that they can raise Dren as their daughter, the couple soon finds out that Dren’s nature is far more sinister than it seems.
