The various defenses of Splice, and why I hate them.
In case you've missed this going around:
makesomelove wrote an (all-caps!) review of the movie Splice. Warning: triggery. Because, goddamn. I was sort of "jeez, do we really need to have this in all-caps?" when I started reading the review, but by the end of it all my hair was on end and my face was all D: and I felt, quite strongly, that all-caps didn't even begin to cover the amount of HOLY SHIT WTF in my head. Then I read yuki-onna's review, which is thankfully not in all-caps but covers the same territory and is extremely thoughtful (and raises the question of warnings vs. spoilers again, although in the case of rape in movies I'm pretty much always going to have to say YES, YOU SHOULD SPECIFICALLY WARN ABOUT THIS) and one other review which sounded like it wanted to cover the same info, but was scared to flat-out mention it because ZOMG SPOILERS.
This isn't going to be about that; it's covered elsewhere by people who've actually seen the movie. This is about two reactions to the movie. (Warning: these may also be triggery.)
Several positive reviews have said something along the lines of IT REALLY MAKES YOU THINK. Maybe I'm missing some levels of subtlety that are only available in seeing the movie, rather than reading a review, but it doesn't really sound like it.
I'm getting that the theme of this movie is supposed to be that creating life is a scary-ass prospect, both naturally and via science. A perfectly valid theme, if somewhat timeworn and obvious to the point of "duh". Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley pretty much created the genres of sci-fi and horror with Frankenstein almost two hundred years ago, and people have been riffing on the exact same themes since then, so if you're going to take on the mother (PUN INTENDED) of all sci-fi/horror plots, son, you best bring something fresh to the table.
Apparently Vincenzo Natali decided that his "something fresh" would be:
1) The male and female scientist raise their part-human creation as if they're the creature's parents.
2) The male scientist would be sexually attracted to, and eventually have sex with, the part-human creature in question while it was presenting as female.
3) The part-human creation would CHANGE GENDERS.
4) The female scientist would then be raped by the part-human creature in question when it changed up and presented as male.
5) The female scientist would become pregnant with the part-human creature's terrible spawn.
After the initial OH MY GOD SWEET CHRISTMAS NOOOO reaction faded a little, my next reaction was to wonder what the hell Natali thought was new about any of that. Let's Play House With A Baby Substitute is a standard romantic comedy trope, which is odd for horror, but okay, we'll get back to that. Male scientist wants to fuck his creation? Yeah, that's been done before and doesn't really make you think; in sci-fi, it's kind of a given, if the creation is in any way female and hot. Changing genders has been done to death. Tentacle rape has been done so much, it has its own TVTrope. So does the pregnancy.
Then again, everything has been done before, so perhaps it's too much to require a filmmaker to come up with something new. The question then becomes: do these tropes illuminate the theme (creating life via science is a scary-ass prospect) in some new and interesting way that really makes you think? What does the theme, plus the tropes, become? Well, it looks like theme + tropes = If You Fuck With Science, Science Will Fuck You (One Way Or Another) (No, Really, Fuck Means So Many Things And We Did Them All).
Okay, fine, fine, still, all is not lost for thinking! I know it looks like Natali is just hitting the Horror Movies Trope Piñata with a stick and using everything that comes out, but we haven't looked at the Let's Play House With A Baby Substitute shtick! By using this in sci-fi/horror, maybe this old trope will gain new legs, we'll see something other than the usual deal where everyone devolves into the worst possible gender stereotypes. Mommy is a scientist, right? Clearly we're in for some non-stereotyped gender roles that will say something new!
Which, nope, not so much. Mommy and Daddy do exactly what mommies and daddies do, even with Mommy being more into the IT'S OUR BABY (SUBSTITUTE!) thing than Daddy. Nothing new. I thought that maybe we'd go someplace interesting with the female scientist's determination to enforce a stereotypical female gender role on the part-human creature (that's new! that's topical!), that maybe this would be where the And Terrible Things Result would kick in, but, no, that was painted as being, you know, just what mommies do-- well, good mommies, since the female scientist's mother, we are told, wouldn't let her have makeup or Barbies or anything made of sparkles and rainbows. And in spite of the fact that the male scientist is all paternal toward the part-human creature, he still wants to fuck it. ...Wait, no, stop the presses, THAT'S NEW. Disturbing as fuck, but new.
So as far as I can tell, Natali isn't questioning or subverting any of the tropes he's using. Even the only new thing, the pedophilia, may just have been an accidental result of throwing I Want To Fuck The Alien into the blender with Let's Play House With A Baby Substitute-- and I'd really like to believe that's true, because otherwise the thing Natali wants us to question is, "is it really so wrong to want to bang your adopted week-old inhuman child?", and honestly I'd prefer to live in a world where the unequivocal answer to that question is "YES, YOU SICK FUCK."
This movie doesn't question whether or not it's right to splice human DNA into other species' DNA; pretty much from the first moment of the film that's portrayed as a very bad idea that the rest of the world would frown on. It doesn't question or subvert any of the tropes it plays with. And it really, really, really doesn't question the gender roles, or the gender tropes, or the gendered violence. It just piles them on: women, even scientists, will treat their creations like babies; males will fuck anything that moves, even their sort-of-daughter or their mother; anything that switches genders on you is scary and will attack you in the WORST WAY POSSIBLE. (Anyone else reminded of the "if you let trans women use the women's bathroom, they will RAPE YOU because they still technically have penises!" bullshit?) And, because the movie isn't satisfied with covering the tropes that come from one gender of inhuman monster, it switches genders at the end of the movie just so the female scientist can get raped by her own creation.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that anyone who's going to say BUT IT REALLY MAKES YOU THINK can go get bent. This movie questions nothing, it subverts nothing, all it does is combine the most worn-out sci-fi/horror theme and, instead of saying something new about it, just throws in sex and gender roles in ways that don't do anything new or question your expectations, they just re-enforce what we see every day in our culture, telling the same old tales and the same old fucked-up conventional wisdom.
Natali missed a lot of chances to make this into something that was more than your usual horror flick. As a lot of people have said, he could have just stopped with the slugs at the beginning; that was freaky enough, and there could have been all sorts of topical questions explored, about biologically engineering our food/medical sources, and what sort of trade-off we'll take for advancements in medicine. He could have just gone with the weirdness of putting crusty old gender roles onto a brand new kind of being, and what that says about both mother and "daughter"-- I'd actually be kind of interested in that. He could have even gone with a weird-ass interspecies take on Lolita, which while not something I want to see would have still been new.
No matter what, though, he could have just NOT HAD THE RAPE. I keep thinking about this, trying to figure out why that's in there, and, nope, I got nothing. It's just in there to be terrifying, to be the WORST POSSIBLE THING that could result-- not from creating life, but from being female. And honestly, that's where I feel it must jump the tracks, thematically, because if the entire point of the movie is supposed to be that creating life is scary and can go horribly awry, that's one thing. The rape, though, seems to indicate that the secret theme of the movie is "if you are a woman and you fuck up at something, even science, you will be raped as punishment for your sins!" If Natali didn't want to say that, he shouldn't have used the goddamn rape. Period.
And you know what? I don't even care if it made people think, because it obviously wasn't making them think about anything that would even approach making it okay that they used a rape scene JUST FOR KICKS. Jesus Christ on a cracker, people.
Here's the other thing. In these reviews, and in several discussions of these reviews, somebody has come along to say, essentially, "Yeah, well, it's art! It's supposed to offend you, that's the whole point!"
Well, that's one kind of art, yes.
There will always be artists out there who believe this sort of thing with every once of their being, which is why we get stuff like the infamous Madonna made from human feces, or the kind of performance art that isn't deemed a success unless the audience leaves in disgust. It's not my thing, really, but I can kind of see the point of that: I think (apply large grain of salt here) that it's the extreme end of the artist-audience collaboration that we endlessly discuss in fanfic circles, where the audience's reactions are what makes the art. In this case, the visceral audience reaction is the entire point, it is the art. In the cases that the art=offense crowd likes, the visceral reaction is negative (really, really negative), but there are positive versions where point is to create a pure sense of delight, or joy. It's easy to forget the positive versions, though, because there is a noisy school of thought that only counts the negative stuff as art.
I'm very tired of that school of thought. I've seen it in every branch of artistic endeavor-- literature, music, theatre, you name it-- and it's always the same: people act as though negative emotions are so much harder to invoke than positive emotions, and so the only art that counts as art is the kind that pisses people off. That makes me laugh. It's just as easy to piss people off as to make them smile: the very basic buttons at the heart of humanity are large and easy to push. There's nothing inherently more artistic about infuriating people than pleasing them; that's just the ZOMG SELL-OUT reaction that runs through every artistic school of thought. People are more attracted to experiences where they will have positive emotions invoked, so people throw more money at that kind of thing, and the artists who are hammering on the negative emotional buttons don't have money thrown at them and so, lacking any kind of monetary measure of success, they claim that they're doing better art.
I'm not denying that there is a lot of good art made that makes people feel terrible; there is! There is also good art made that makes people feel awesome. There is also a lot of utterly stupid bullshit on both sides-- numbers-wise, probably more on the positive-emotion end of things than negative, because it's a more lucrative business, but I'm pretty sure that Sturgeon's Law still holds true here and, percentage-wise, there's no more good art on the negative end than the positive end.
Now, I'm a story girl. It doesn't matter if the story is written, acted, or even a progression in music or images, I just get happy from things that move and build up and have some kind of point to it that is derived from what went before. Other people are not story people; they don't have to have a progression or a point, they can just enjoy the immediate reaction they get from one thing, and then the next thing, and then the next. Also perfectly valid, and in a way I envy that; I feel that I miss a lot of the less complicated joys in life. And, again, one is not inherently better than the other, or takes more work than the other; there can be as much effort put into getting the composition of a single piercing image as put into crafting a logical progression.
There is another school of thought out there-- it matches up a great deal with the "negative is better!" school of thought, but I think it's a separate axis on the scatter-plot-- that values single images over progressions. There is more value placed in an author's ability to create a perfectly crafted phrase than to have any kind of coherence to their entire book; more value placed on the images in a movie than in having the movie make any kind of damn sense. You get this a lot with literature and with indy cinema, and again the same formula holds true: the level of smugness is the inverse of the level of monetary reward.
There's an axis of logic versus emotion, with "it doesn't matter if it makes sense if it makes you feel something!" on one end, and "amazing clockwork doesn't mean you have to feel something about it, just watch it go!" on the other. This is similar to images vs. progressions, but not on the same axis, since this goes even crazier when applied to art that follows a progression, instead of just creating something static, since emotional reactions follow a logic of their own. (Often both logical progressions and emotional progressions are expected to happen at the same time, particularly like in a book or movie, this can result in "if the emotions of the character make sense, then the plot makes sense!" stories, or, on the other end, "the plot only makes sense if these people are profoundly fucked up on every conceivable emotional level, or possibly from Mars" stories.) There's smugness on both ends of this spectrum, but I'd say that logic is more highly rated on the smugness scale, while emotion is more popular.
Another axis is the level of mental effort required of the audience. On the one end, there are popcorn movies, vacation novels, bubblegum pop music and pretty pictures-- things that don't require you to put much effort into enjoying them, things that don't challenge your notion of how the world works or make you have to work hard to have an enjoyable experience. On the other end of the spectrum, there's stuff that is so challenging it makes your brain bleed: abstract art, dense novels, the music of Phillip Glass, and Primer. Everything I've said about the other axes still holds true here.
Then there's an axis that measures spectacle, from the austere on one end to the MOAR IZ BETTAR guys at the other. Again, I've seen well-done examples of both (although oh my dear lord does Sturgeon's Law hold true), and the MOAR IZ BETTAR guys are more popular and make more money while the fans of a more austere approach think they're better.
I do not think that intelligence, or care, is inherent to any of the high-smugness zones of art (negative emotions, single images, austerity, lots of mental effort required of the audience), and frankly I think that there are a lot of artists who tend to think that when they're using the "low" end of the spectrum for some of these axes, they can get stupid and sloppy because that's the stuff that doesn't matter. Judging by the critical reaction to Splice, I think it's safe to say that critics think the same way.
I'm guessing that Splice is being called art because it's well-filmed, fairly austere, and brings some pretty severe negative emotions. Especially that last one, because, well, hey, every comics fan knows that if you want to do the worst thing EVAR! to a female character, you have another character rape her. There are a lot of writers and directors out there (largely, if not entirely, male) who feel that since art, real art, is negative, they need to get the very most shocking thing ever, and since murder is such old-hat with low shock value these days (and they can't be bothered to write well enough to overcome that), they should totally go with RAPE OUT OF FUCKING NOWHERE FOR NO REASON instead. This one gets even MORE negative emotion because of the gender-switch, and the blood relation thing, and of course the fact that most of this creature isn't HUMAN. And since it's very very negative-- not just "sad" negative (which would force the filmmaker to go through the trouble of having the audience give a shit about the characters), but negative in a shocking, transgressive way ("transgressive" will, nine times out of ten, involve sex), and since it's succeeded in making people disgusted and angry, that means it's really really real art!
Well, fuck that noise. It's all art, people. Some of it is good art, and some of it is bad, and a lot of the time your take on whether it's good or bad will depend entirely on where it falls on the multi-axis scatterpoint diagram of your personal taste. The questions of whether or not it is art, and whether or not it is good art, have fuck-all to do with the fact that it is engaging in some misogynistic bullshit, nor does it excuse the aforementioned misogynistic bullshit. You are throwing an excuse at it that has nothing to do with the problems that people have with the movie. Stop doing that.
Frankly, I've heard enough: I've heard that it doesn't entirely make sense, that the science is hinky, that it has iffy emotional logic, that it has a mean streak of misogynist tendencies, that it doesn't say anything new, and that it chooses a very gendered punishment for the female scientist in order to mine the most possible shock out of the audience. I'm out. If I want to be shocked and appalled by misogynist bullshit, I don't have to pay $8.50 plus the cost of popcorn and a drink, I can just stay home and read the news for free.
[Edited in another attempt at coherence.]
makesomelove wrote an (all-caps!) review of the movie Splice. Warning: triggery. Because, goddamn. I was sort of "jeez, do we really need to have this in all-caps?" when I started reading the review, but by the end of it all my hair was on end and my face was all D: and I felt, quite strongly, that all-caps didn't even begin to cover the amount of HOLY SHIT WTF in my head. Then I read yuki-onna's review, which is thankfully not in all-caps but covers the same territory and is extremely thoughtful (and raises the question of warnings vs. spoilers again, although in the case of rape in movies I'm pretty much always going to have to say YES, YOU SHOULD SPECIFICALLY WARN ABOUT THIS) and one other review which sounded like it wanted to cover the same info, but was scared to flat-out mention it because ZOMG SPOILERS.
This isn't going to be about that; it's covered elsewhere by people who've actually seen the movie. This is about two reactions to the movie. (Warning: these may also be triggery.)
Several positive reviews have said something along the lines of IT REALLY MAKES YOU THINK. Maybe I'm missing some levels of subtlety that are only available in seeing the movie, rather than reading a review, but it doesn't really sound like it.
I'm getting that the theme of this movie is supposed to be that creating life is a scary-ass prospect, both naturally and via science. A perfectly valid theme, if somewhat timeworn and obvious to the point of "duh". Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley pretty much created the genres of sci-fi and horror with Frankenstein almost two hundred years ago, and people have been riffing on the exact same themes since then, so if you're going to take on the mother (PUN INTENDED) of all sci-fi/horror plots, son, you best bring something fresh to the table.
Apparently Vincenzo Natali decided that his "something fresh" would be:
1) The male and female scientist raise their part-human creation as if they're the creature's parents.
2) The male scientist would be sexually attracted to, and eventually have sex with, the part-human creature in question while it was presenting as female.
3) The part-human creation would CHANGE GENDERS.
4) The female scientist would then be raped by the part-human creature in question when it changed up and presented as male.
5) The female scientist would become pregnant with the part-human creature's terrible spawn.
After the initial OH MY GOD SWEET CHRISTMAS NOOOO reaction faded a little, my next reaction was to wonder what the hell Natali thought was new about any of that. Let's Play House With A Baby Substitute is a standard romantic comedy trope, which is odd for horror, but okay, we'll get back to that. Male scientist wants to fuck his creation? Yeah, that's been done before and doesn't really make you think; in sci-fi, it's kind of a given, if the creation is in any way female and hot. Changing genders has been done to death. Tentacle rape has been done so much, it has its own TVTrope. So does the pregnancy.
Then again, everything has been done before, so perhaps it's too much to require a filmmaker to come up with something new. The question then becomes: do these tropes illuminate the theme (creating life via science is a scary-ass prospect) in some new and interesting way that really makes you think? What does the theme, plus the tropes, become? Well, it looks like theme + tropes = If You Fuck With Science, Science Will Fuck You (One Way Or Another) (No, Really, Fuck Means So Many Things And We Did Them All).
Okay, fine, fine, still, all is not lost for thinking! I know it looks like Natali is just hitting the Horror Movies Trope Piñata with a stick and using everything that comes out, but we haven't looked at the Let's Play House With A Baby Substitute shtick! By using this in sci-fi/horror, maybe this old trope will gain new legs, we'll see something other than the usual deal where everyone devolves into the worst possible gender stereotypes. Mommy is a scientist, right? Clearly we're in for some non-stereotyped gender roles that will say something new!
Which, nope, not so much. Mommy and Daddy do exactly what mommies and daddies do, even with Mommy being more into the IT'S OUR BABY (SUBSTITUTE!) thing than Daddy. Nothing new. I thought that maybe we'd go someplace interesting with the female scientist's determination to enforce a stereotypical female gender role on the part-human creature (that's new! that's topical!), that maybe this would be where the And Terrible Things Result would kick in, but, no, that was painted as being, you know, just what mommies do-- well, good mommies, since the female scientist's mother, we are told, wouldn't let her have makeup or Barbies or anything made of sparkles and rainbows. And in spite of the fact that the male scientist is all paternal toward the part-human creature, he still wants to fuck it. ...Wait, no, stop the presses, THAT'S NEW. Disturbing as fuck, but new.
So as far as I can tell, Natali isn't questioning or subverting any of the tropes he's using. Even the only new thing, the pedophilia, may just have been an accidental result of throwing I Want To Fuck The Alien into the blender with Let's Play House With A Baby Substitute-- and I'd really like to believe that's true, because otherwise the thing Natali wants us to question is, "is it really so wrong to want to bang your adopted week-old inhuman child?", and honestly I'd prefer to live in a world where the unequivocal answer to that question is "YES, YOU SICK FUCK."
This movie doesn't question whether or not it's right to splice human DNA into other species' DNA; pretty much from the first moment of the film that's portrayed as a very bad idea that the rest of the world would frown on. It doesn't question or subvert any of the tropes it plays with. And it really, really, really doesn't question the gender roles, or the gender tropes, or the gendered violence. It just piles them on: women, even scientists, will treat their creations like babies; males will fuck anything that moves, even their sort-of-daughter or their mother; anything that switches genders on you is scary and will attack you in the WORST WAY POSSIBLE. (Anyone else reminded of the "if you let trans women use the women's bathroom, they will RAPE YOU because they still technically have penises!" bullshit?) And, because the movie isn't satisfied with covering the tropes that come from one gender of inhuman monster, it switches genders at the end of the movie just so the female scientist can get raped by her own creation.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that anyone who's going to say BUT IT REALLY MAKES YOU THINK can go get bent. This movie questions nothing, it subverts nothing, all it does is combine the most worn-out sci-fi/horror theme and, instead of saying something new about it, just throws in sex and gender roles in ways that don't do anything new or question your expectations, they just re-enforce what we see every day in our culture, telling the same old tales and the same old fucked-up conventional wisdom.
Natali missed a lot of chances to make this into something that was more than your usual horror flick. As a lot of people have said, he could have just stopped with the slugs at the beginning; that was freaky enough, and there could have been all sorts of topical questions explored, about biologically engineering our food/medical sources, and what sort of trade-off we'll take for advancements in medicine. He could have just gone with the weirdness of putting crusty old gender roles onto a brand new kind of being, and what that says about both mother and "daughter"-- I'd actually be kind of interested in that. He could have even gone with a weird-ass interspecies take on Lolita, which while not something I want to see would have still been new.
No matter what, though, he could have just NOT HAD THE RAPE. I keep thinking about this, trying to figure out why that's in there, and, nope, I got nothing. It's just in there to be terrifying, to be the WORST POSSIBLE THING that could result-- not from creating life, but from being female. And honestly, that's where I feel it must jump the tracks, thematically, because if the entire point of the movie is supposed to be that creating life is scary and can go horribly awry, that's one thing. The rape, though, seems to indicate that the secret theme of the movie is "if you are a woman and you fuck up at something, even science, you will be raped as punishment for your sins!" If Natali didn't want to say that, he shouldn't have used the goddamn rape. Period.
And you know what? I don't even care if it made people think, because it obviously wasn't making them think about anything that would even approach making it okay that they used a rape scene JUST FOR KICKS. Jesus Christ on a cracker, people.
Here's the other thing. In these reviews, and in several discussions of these reviews, somebody has come along to say, essentially, "Yeah, well, it's art! It's supposed to offend you, that's the whole point!"
Well, that's one kind of art, yes.
There will always be artists out there who believe this sort of thing with every once of their being, which is why we get stuff like the infamous Madonna made from human feces, or the kind of performance art that isn't deemed a success unless the audience leaves in disgust. It's not my thing, really, but I can kind of see the point of that: I think (apply large grain of salt here) that it's the extreme end of the artist-audience collaboration that we endlessly discuss in fanfic circles, where the audience's reactions are what makes the art. In this case, the visceral audience reaction is the entire point, it is the art. In the cases that the art=offense crowd likes, the visceral reaction is negative (really, really negative), but there are positive versions where point is to create a pure sense of delight, or joy. It's easy to forget the positive versions, though, because there is a noisy school of thought that only counts the negative stuff as art.
I'm very tired of that school of thought. I've seen it in every branch of artistic endeavor-- literature, music, theatre, you name it-- and it's always the same: people act as though negative emotions are so much harder to invoke than positive emotions, and so the only art that counts as art is the kind that pisses people off. That makes me laugh. It's just as easy to piss people off as to make them smile: the very basic buttons at the heart of humanity are large and easy to push. There's nothing inherently more artistic about infuriating people than pleasing them; that's just the ZOMG SELL-OUT reaction that runs through every artistic school of thought. People are more attracted to experiences where they will have positive emotions invoked, so people throw more money at that kind of thing, and the artists who are hammering on the negative emotional buttons don't have money thrown at them and so, lacking any kind of monetary measure of success, they claim that they're doing better art.
I'm not denying that there is a lot of good art made that makes people feel terrible; there is! There is also good art made that makes people feel awesome. There is also a lot of utterly stupid bullshit on both sides-- numbers-wise, probably more on the positive-emotion end of things than negative, because it's a more lucrative business, but I'm pretty sure that Sturgeon's Law still holds true here and, percentage-wise, there's no more good art on the negative end than the positive end.
Now, I'm a story girl. It doesn't matter if the story is written, acted, or even a progression in music or images, I just get happy from things that move and build up and have some kind of point to it that is derived from what went before. Other people are not story people; they don't have to have a progression or a point, they can just enjoy the immediate reaction they get from one thing, and then the next thing, and then the next. Also perfectly valid, and in a way I envy that; I feel that I miss a lot of the less complicated joys in life. And, again, one is not inherently better than the other, or takes more work than the other; there can be as much effort put into getting the composition of a single piercing image as put into crafting a logical progression.
There is another school of thought out there-- it matches up a great deal with the "negative is better!" school of thought, but I think it's a separate axis on the scatter-plot-- that values single images over progressions. There is more value placed in an author's ability to create a perfectly crafted phrase than to have any kind of coherence to their entire book; more value placed on the images in a movie than in having the movie make any kind of damn sense. You get this a lot with literature and with indy cinema, and again the same formula holds true: the level of smugness is the inverse of the level of monetary reward.
There's an axis of logic versus emotion, with "it doesn't matter if it makes sense if it makes you feel something!" on one end, and "amazing clockwork doesn't mean you have to feel something about it, just watch it go!" on the other. This is similar to images vs. progressions, but not on the same axis, since this goes even crazier when applied to art that follows a progression, instead of just creating something static, since emotional reactions follow a logic of their own. (Often both logical progressions and emotional progressions are expected to happen at the same time, particularly like in a book or movie, this can result in "if the emotions of the character make sense, then the plot makes sense!" stories, or, on the other end, "the plot only makes sense if these people are profoundly fucked up on every conceivable emotional level, or possibly from Mars" stories.) There's smugness on both ends of this spectrum, but I'd say that logic is more highly rated on the smugness scale, while emotion is more popular.
Another axis is the level of mental effort required of the audience. On the one end, there are popcorn movies, vacation novels, bubblegum pop music and pretty pictures-- things that don't require you to put much effort into enjoying them, things that don't challenge your notion of how the world works or make you have to work hard to have an enjoyable experience. On the other end of the spectrum, there's stuff that is so challenging it makes your brain bleed: abstract art, dense novels, the music of Phillip Glass, and Primer. Everything I've said about the other axes still holds true here.
Then there's an axis that measures spectacle, from the austere on one end to the MOAR IZ BETTAR guys at the other. Again, I've seen well-done examples of both (although oh my dear lord does Sturgeon's Law hold true), and the MOAR IZ BETTAR guys are more popular and make more money while the fans of a more austere approach think they're better.
I do not think that intelligence, or care, is inherent to any of the high-smugness zones of art (negative emotions, single images, austerity, lots of mental effort required of the audience), and frankly I think that there are a lot of artists who tend to think that when they're using the "low" end of the spectrum for some of these axes, they can get stupid and sloppy because that's the stuff that doesn't matter. Judging by the critical reaction to Splice, I think it's safe to say that critics think the same way.
I'm guessing that Splice is being called art because it's well-filmed, fairly austere, and brings some pretty severe negative emotions. Especially that last one, because, well, hey, every comics fan knows that if you want to do the worst thing EVAR! to a female character, you have another character rape her. There are a lot of writers and directors out there (largely, if not entirely, male) who feel that since art, real art, is negative, they need to get the very most shocking thing ever, and since murder is such old-hat with low shock value these days (and they can't be bothered to write well enough to overcome that), they should totally go with RAPE OUT OF FUCKING NOWHERE FOR NO REASON instead. This one gets even MORE negative emotion because of the gender-switch, and the blood relation thing, and of course the fact that most of this creature isn't HUMAN. And since it's very very negative-- not just "sad" negative (which would force the filmmaker to go through the trouble of having the audience give a shit about the characters), but negative in a shocking, transgressive way ("transgressive" will, nine times out of ten, involve sex), and since it's succeeded in making people disgusted and angry, that means it's really really real art!
Well, fuck that noise. It's all art, people. Some of it is good art, and some of it is bad, and a lot of the time your take on whether it's good or bad will depend entirely on where it falls on the multi-axis scatterpoint diagram of your personal taste. The questions of whether or not it is art, and whether or not it is good art, have fuck-all to do with the fact that it is engaging in some misogynistic bullshit, nor does it excuse the aforementioned misogynistic bullshit. You are throwing an excuse at it that has nothing to do with the problems that people have with the movie. Stop doing that.
Frankly, I've heard enough: I've heard that it doesn't entirely make sense, that the science is hinky, that it has iffy emotional logic, that it has a mean streak of misogynist tendencies, that it doesn't say anything new, and that it chooses a very gendered punishment for the female scientist in order to mine the most possible shock out of the audience. I'm out. If I want to be shocked and appalled by misogynist bullshit, I don't have to pay $8.50 plus the cost of popcorn and a drink, I can just stay home and read the news for free.
[Edited in another attempt at coherence.]