The laboratory does not produce monsters; it produces flows that refuse to be captured by the family romance.
Vincenzo Natali's Splice (2009) stages a confrontation between two incompatible regimes of production: the molar apparatus of the Oedipal triangle (Mommy-Daddy-Me) and the molecular nomadism of the machinic phylum—a concept defined as matter-in-movement that discovers its own form through singularities rather than submitting to external imposition (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). The creature Dren, spliced from human and animal DNA by geneticists Clive Nicoli and Elsa Kast, appears at first glance to be the child in a perverse nuclear family, her final transformation into a male rapist-killer seemingly enacting the Freudian primal scene in reverse. Yet this reading, seductive in its narrative tidiness, is precisely the reterritorialization that the film's own molecular violence explodes. Dren is not a subject-in-formation struggling toward symbolic integration; she is a limit-proxy of decoded biotechnological flows, and her sex-reversal does not install her as the Father but annihilates the paternal function entirely, replacing the Sacred Law of the Phallus with the productive chaos of the Body-without-Organs.
I. The Domesticating Gaze
The film's opening sequences establish the laboratory as a site of striated space—a term used to describe environments organized by State-Science, where matter is measured, segmented, and subordinated to predetermined ends (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Clive and Elsa work for N.E.R.D. (Nucleic Exchange Research and Development), a pharmaceutical corporation that treats genetic material as programmable code, extracting proteins from hybrid organisms to synthesize medical products. The lab's sterile white surfaces, its grids of petri dishes, and its surveillance cameras all function as apparatuses of capture, attempting to impose form on the chaotic potentiality of life itself. When Elsa secretly introduces her own DNA into the experimental splice, she does not create Dren in the sense of authorial mastery; rather, she opens a line of flight within the corporate machine, a decoded flow that will eventually escape all attempts at containment.
Yet Elsa's initial response to Dren's rapid growth is to reterritorialize this flow within the most ancient of all State apparatuses: the family. She dresses Dren in children's clothing, teaches her to play with dolls, and imposes a gendered identity through the rituals of domesticity. The camera lingers on these moments of mothering—Elsa brushing Dren's hair, Elsa reading to her at night—framing them with soft lighting and shallow focus that mimic the visual grammar of family melodrama. This is not tenderness but capture: Elsa attempts to overcode Dren's biological multiplicity (avian wings, amphibian tail, mammalian torso, human face) with the signifiers of the nuclear family, forcing her into the role of daughter within an Oedipal triangle that has no biological or legal legitimacy. It has been argued that psychoanalysis performs a similar operation, reducing the productive machinery of desire to the narrow confines of Mommy-Daddy-Me, as if all libidinal investment could be traced back to the primal scene (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983). Elsa's domesticating gaze is the cinematic equivalent of this psychoanalytic reduction, an attempt to make Dren legible within the only narrative structure bourgeois subjectivity can recognize: the family romance.
Clive's response to Dren is more ambivalent, oscillating between scientific curiosity, paternal anxiety, and a repressed eroticism that will later explode into overt sexual violence. His initial horror at Dren's existence—he demands that Elsa terminate the experiment—positions him as the voice of the Symbolic Order, the Father who must enforce the Law against the Mother's transgressive desire. Yet his horror is not moral but ontological: Dren's hybrid body threatens the boundary between human and animal, subject and object, the categories that underwrite the entire edifice of humanist subjectivity. When Clive eventually capitulates and agrees to hide Dren in Elsa's deceased mother's farmhouse, he does not abandon his paternal function but relocates it to a new territorial assemblage. The barn becomes a makeshift family home, a smooth space temporarily carved out of the striated grid of corporate surveillance, yet still organized by the same Oedipal logic. Clive teaches Dren to spell her name, to recognize herself in a mirror, to understand the difference between inside (the barn) and outside (the world that would destroy her). These lessons are not acts of love but acts of subjectivation, attempts to produce in Dren the interiority required by the bourgeois subject—the sense of a unified self that can be held responsible, that can be guilty, that can be punished.
The film's visual language during this middle section reinforces the Oedipal frame through shot-reverse-shot patterns that mimic the structure of the family photograph. Elsa and Clive are frequently positioned on opposite sides of the frame with Dren between them, the three figures forming a triangular composition that echoes the Holy Family of Christian iconography. Yet this visual stability is constantly undermined by Dren's own movements, which refuse to respect the boundaries of the frame. Her wings twitch and unfold in moments of agitation, breaking the symmetry of the composition; her tail lashes out unpredictably, disrupting the spatial logic of the scene. These are not merely special effects but formal expressions of the molecular line of flight that Dren embodies, the decoded flow that cannot be fully captured by the molar apparatus of the family.
II. The Machinic Phylum
To understand Dren's ontological status, we must abandon the language of creation and parenthood entirely and turn instead to the concept of the machinic phylum. The phylum is defined as materiality, natural or artificial, and both simultaneously; it is matter in movement, in flux, in variation (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 409). Unlike the Aristotelian hylomorphic schema, which posits that form is imposed on passive matter from without, the machinic phylum discovers its own form through the singularities inherent in the matter itself. A blacksmith does not create a sword by forcing iron into a predetermined shape; rather, the blacksmith follows the grain of the metal, responding to its resistances and potentialities, allowing the form of the sword to emerge from the encounter between human labor and material flux. The machinic phylum is thus a process of becoming rather than a state of being, a continuous variation that refuses to settle into stable identity.
Dren is not a hybrid organism in the taxonomic sense—a stable species produced by the crossing of two parent species—but a machinic phylum in biological form. Her DNA is a patchwork of heterogeneous genetic sequences: human (Elsa's contribution), avian (for the wings), amphibian (for the tail and aquatic respiration), and mammalian (for the torso and limbs). These sequences do not blend into a harmonious whole but remain in a state of productive tension, each asserting its own morphogenetic logic. Dren's body is a site of continuous variation, her form shifting as different genetic programs activate and deactivate in response to environmental stimuli. Her rapid growth—from embryo to adolescent in a matter of weeks—is not a maturation in the developmental sense but a speed, an acceleration of biological time that outpaces the chronological time of the Oedipal narrative. She does not grow up in the sense of acquiring the psychic structures required by the Symbolic Order (the superego, the ego-ideal, the capacity for guilt); rather, she becomes-animal, becomes-machine, becomes-woman, becomes-man, in a series of metamorphoses that refuse to cohere into a unified subject.
The laboratory itself functions as a desiring-machine: not a metaphor for desire but the literal apparatus through which desire is produced and circulated (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983). The gene-splicing equipment, the incubators, the monitoring systems—all of these are technical machines that couple with Elsa's and Clive's bodies to form a larger assemblage of production. Elsa does not use the lab to create Dren; rather, Elsa-lab-Dren form a single machinic assemblage in which desire flows across the boundaries of human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic, subject and object. This is why the film's visual language shifts so dramatically when the action moves from the corporate lab to the barn. The corporate lab is filmed with harsh fluorescent lighting, static camera angles, and a color palette dominated by sterile whites and grays—all signifiers of striated space, of State-Science's attempt to impose order on the chaos of life. The barn, by contrast, is filmed with natural light, handheld camera movements, and a color palette of warm browns and greens—signifiers of smooth space, of a temporary escape from the grid of surveillance and control.
Yet the barn is not a utopian outside to the corporate machine; it is merely a different configuration of the same assemblage. Dren's growth accelerates in the barn not because she is free but because the barn provides a different set of environmental inputs—more space to move, more stimuli to respond to, more opportunities for her genetic programs to express themselves. The barn is a laboratory without walls, a site of experimentation that has escaped the direct control of N.E.R.D. but remains fully within the logic of capitalist production. Elsa and Clive continue to monitor Dren's development, to take samples of her tissue, to document her behaviors—all with the ultimate goal of extracting value from her body in the form of pharmaceutical products. The family romance that Elsa attempts to impose on this assemblage is thus a mystification, an ideological screen that obscures the real relations of production. Dren is not their daughter but their product, a commodity whose use-value (as a source of genetic material) and exchange-value (as a potential patent) are the only relations that matter within the capitalist axiomatic.
III. The Sex-Reversal
The film's climactic sequence—Dren's transformation from female to male, followed by the rape of Elsa and the murder of Clive—has been read by psychoanalytic critics as a literalization of the Oedipal myth: the son kills the father and possesses the mother, enacting the primal fantasy located at the origin of civilization itself (Freud, 1913/1950). Yet this reading is a profound misrecognition, a reterritorialization of the molecular violence that the film stages. Dren's sex-reversal is not a becoming-father but a deterritorialization of the sex-binary itself, a line of flight that escapes the Oedipal triangle entirely.
It is argued that sex is not a biological given but a molar aggregate, a statistical distribution imposed on the molecular multiplicity of n-sexes (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Every organism is composed of molecular particles that are themselves sexed in ways that do not correspond to the binary of male/female: hormones, enzymes, genetic sequences that activate and deactivate in complex patterns that exceed any simple dimorphism. The molar sexes (man/woman) are produced by the State apparatus as a means of organizing reproduction, of ensuring that bodies couple in ways that produce new workers, new soldiers, new subjects for the apparatus of capture. Dren's sex-reversal is a molecular event that refuses this molar organization. Her transformation is not triggered by a developmental program (puberty, sexual maturation) but by environmental stress: the death of her mother Elsa's cat, which Dren kills in a moment of predatory instinct. This death activates a genetic sequence that had been dormant, causing Dren's body to produce male sex hormones and to develop male genitalia. Yet this is not a choice in the sense of subjective agency, nor is it a mistake in the sense of biological malfunction. It is a singularity, a point at which the machinic phylum discovers a new form through the encounter between its own internal potentialities and the external forces acting upon it.
The rape of Elsa is the most controversial and disturbing sequence in the film, and it demands careful analysis. A psychoanalytic reading would interpret this act as the return of the repressed: Dren, having been denied sexual expression by the parental prohibition, now violently asserts his desire for the mother. Yet this reading imports a psychic interiority into Dren that the film itself refuses to grant. Dren does not desire Elsa in the sense of a lack that seeks fulfillment; rather, Dren's body produces a flow of sexual energy that seeks to couple with another body, any body that presents itself as a viable connection. The rape is not an expression of Oedipal desire but a machinic coupling, a violent plugging-in of one desiring-machine (Dren's newly male body) to another (Elsa's female body). The horror of the scene lies not in its psychological depth but in its affective intensity, in the way it forces the viewer to confront the non-human dimension of sexuality itself—sexuality as a flow of energy that precedes and exceeds the subject, that operates according to its own logic of connection and disconnection.
Elsa's response to the rape is equally complex. She does not scream or fight back with the intensity one might expect; instead, she submits with a kind of horrified passivity, as if recognizing in this moment the collapse of the entire Oedipal structure she had attempted to impose. The film's visual language reinforces this collapse through a series of rapid cuts and disorienting camera angles that fragment the space of the barn, breaking down the stable geometry of the family triangle. When Clive arrives and attempts to intervene, Dren kills him with a single blow, impaling him on a piece of farm equipment. This is not the son killing the father to take his place; it is the machinic phylum annihilating the paternal function entirely. Clive's death is not tragic in the Aristotelian sense—there is no catharsis, no restoration of order—but rather a flat, mechanical event, a body ceasing to function because it has been damaged beyond repair.
The final shot of Dren's male form, standing over Clive's corpse, is not a triumphant assertion of phallic power but a moment of pure immanence, a body that has exhausted its own line of flight and now stands at the limit of its own becoming. Dren does not become the father because the father, as a function of the Symbolic Order, has been destroyed. What remains is only the Body-without-Organs, the plane of consistency on which all organs, all functions, all identities are dissolved into pure intensity.
IV. The Corporate Reterritorialization
The film's epilogue stages a final reterritorialization that is even more insidious than the Oedipal capture attempted by Elsa and Clive. After Dren's death (killed by Elsa in self-defense), Elsa discovers that she is pregnant with Dren's child. The film's final scene shows Elsa in a corporate boardroom, negotiating with the executives of N.E.R.D. over the terms of her continued employment. The pregnancy is not presented as a personal trauma but as a corporate asset, a new source of genetic material that can be patented and commodified. The executives offer Elsa a substantial financial settlement in exchange for her cooperation, and she accepts with a cold, affectless expression that suggests she has fully internalized the logic of capitalist production.
This ending has been read by some critics as a restoration of the family, a return to the maternal function after the violent disruption of the Oedipal triangle. Yet this reading misses the film's most radical insight: the family itself is nothing more than a temporary configuration of the capitalist axiomatic, a way of organizing bodies and desires in the service of accumulation. Elsa's pregnancy does not restore the Oedipal triangle but reveals its true function as a machine for producing value. The child she carries is not a baby in the sentimental sense but a biological patent, a piece of intellectual property that will generate profits for N.E.R.D. for decades to come. The corporation does not need the family as an ideological formation (love, care, responsibility); it needs only the biological fact of reproduction, the capacity of bodies to generate new bodies that can be exploited.
It is argued that capitalism operates through a process of decoding and axiomatization: it strips away all traditional codes (kinship, religion, morality) and replaces them with the single axiom of value-production (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983). The family, in this schema, is not a natural or eternal structure but a historical formation that capitalism has decoded and re-axiomatized in the service of its own reproduction. Elsa's pregnancy is the final stage of this process: the family romance has been completely dissolved, and what remains is only the naked relation between capital and life itself. The film's final image—Elsa's hand resting on her pregnant belly, her face expressionless—is not a gesture of maternal love but a sign of her complete subsumption into the corporate machine.
V. The Failure of Symbolic Integration
One of the most striking formal features of Splice is Dren's refusal to speak. Throughout the film, she communicates through a series of chirps, clicks, and gestures that resemble animal vocalizations more than human language. Elsa and Clive attempt to teach her to speak, to write, to recognize herself in a mirror—all the classic tests of symbolic integration that psychoanalysis uses to mark the transition from the Imaginary to the Symbolic Order. Yet Dren never fully acquires language in the Lacanian sense; she remains outside the Symbolic, operating according to a different regime of communication called a minor language (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Lacan, 1977).
A minor language is not a dialect or a pidgin but a use of language that deterritorializes the major language from within, that makes it stutter and stammer, that forces it to express affects and intensities that exceed its grammatical structures. Kafka's German, Beckett's English, Godard's French—these are all examples of minor languages, ways of writing or speaking that refuse the transparency and universality claimed by the major language. Dren's chirps and clicks function as a minor language in relation to human speech: they communicate not through signification (the arbitrary link between signifier and signified) but through affect, through the direct transmission of intensities from one body to another. When Dren chirps in distress, Elsa does not need to decode the sound to understand its meaning; the sound itself produces an affective response in Elsa's body, a visceral recognition of pain or fear that bypasses the circuits of symbolic interpretation.
This refusal of language is not a failure in the developmental sense—Dren is not retarded or disabled—but a positive capacity, a line of flight that escapes the apparatus of linguistic capture. It has been argued that entry into the Symbolic Order is the condition of possibility for subjectivity itself, that without language there can be no I, no unified self that can be held responsible for its actions (Lacan, 1977). Yet Dren's existence outside the Symbolic does not make her a non-subject; rather, it makes her a different kind of subject, one that operates according to the logic of the Body-without-Organs rather than the logic of the ego. She does not have an unconscious in the Freudian sense (a repository of repressed desires that return in disguised form) but rather a molecular unconscious, a field of intensities and flows that are directly expressed in her actions without the mediation of representation.
The film's sound design reinforces this distinction through its use of diegetic and non-diegetic sound. Human speech in the film is always clearly diegetic, anchored to the bodies of the speakers and subject to the acoustic properties of the space (echo, reverberation, distance). Dren's vocalizations, by contrast, often blur the line between diegetic and non-diegetic sound, as if they are emanating not from her body but from the space itself, from the molecular field of intensities that surrounds her. This sonic deterritorialization mirrors the visual deterritorialization of her body, the way her wings and tail constantly break the frame, refusing to be contained by the rectangular geometry of the cinematic image.
VI. Distributed Responsibility
One of the most philosophically productive aspects of Splice is its refusal to locate moral responsibility in a single agent. The film does not present Elsa as a mad scientist whose hubris leads to disaster, nor does it present Clive as a voice of reason who is tragically ignored. Instead, it distributes responsibility across the entire assemblage of human and nonhuman actors: Elsa, Clive, the corporate executives, the lab equipment, the genetic sequences themselves. This distribution of responsibility aligns with the concept of the assemblage, defined as a multiplicity composed of heterogeneous elements that function together without any single element serving as the organizing center (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987).
Elsa's decision to splice her own DNA into the experiment is not presented as a moment of individual transgression but as the outcome of a complex set of forces: her ambition, her grief over her mother's death, her desire to prove herself in a male-dominated field, the pressure from N.E.R.D. to produce results, the technical affordances of the gene-splicing equipment. Each of these forces is itself an assemblage, composed of other forces that extend backward in time and outward in space. Elsa's ambition is shaped by the patriarchal structure of the scientific establishment, which rewards male scientists for risk-taking while punishing female scientists for the same behavior. Her grief is shaped by the bourgeois ideology of the family, which locates all emotional value in blood relations while devaluing other forms of kinship. The pressure from N.E.R.D. is shaped by the capitalist imperative to accumulate, to extract value from every possible source, to treat life itself as a resource to be exploited.
Clive's complicity is equally distributed. His initial opposition to the experiment is not a principled ethical stance but a fear of professional consequences, a concern that the experiment will jeopardize his career. When he eventually agrees to hide Dren, he does so not out of love for Elsa or compassion for Dren but out of a pragmatic calculation that the experiment might still yield valuable results. His sexual attraction to Dren is not a personal perversion but the outcome of the same patriarchal logic that structures his relationship with Elsa: the reduction of female bodies to objects of male desire, the conflation of care with possession. When Clive has sex with Dren in the barn, the film does not present this as a moment of individual moral failure but as the inevitable outcome of the entire assemblage: the isolation of the barn, the breakdown of the professional boundaries between scientist and subject, the activation of Dren's own sexual maturity, the absence of any external authority to enforce the prohibition.
The corporate executives of N.E.R.D. are perhaps the most culpable actors in the assemblage, yet they are also the most invisible. They appear only briefly in the film, as disembodied voices on conference calls or as shadowy figures in boardrooms, yet their decisions structure the entire field of action. It is N.E.R.D. that funds the research, that sets the deadlines, that demands results regardless of the ethical implications. It is N.E.R.D. that will ultimately profit from Dren's existence, extracting value from her body even after her death. Yet the film refuses to personalize this corporate evil, to locate it in a single villainous CEO or corrupt board member. Instead, it presents the corporation as an abstract machine, a set of rules and incentives that operate independently of any individual's intentions or desires.
This distributed model of responsibility has profound implications for how we think about accountability in the age of biotechnology. Traditional models of moral responsibility assume a clear causal chain: an agent makes a decision, the decision leads to an outcome, the agent is held responsible for the outcome. Yet in complex sociotechnical systems—genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, climate change—causality is distributed across multiple agents and timescales in ways that make it impossible to isolate a single responsible party. The concept of the assemblage provides a way of thinking about responsibility that does not require this kind of causal isolation (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Responsibility is not a property of individual agents but a function of the assemblage as a whole, a question of how different elements couple and decouple, how flows are channeled and blocked, how lines of flight are opened and closed.
VII. Conclusion
Splice ends not with resolution but with suspension: Elsa pregnant, Dren dead, the corporate machine continuing to extract value from the wreckage of the family romance. This suspension is not a narrative failure but a formal expression of the film's central insight: the Oedipal triangle cannot contain the molecular violence of the machinic phylum. Dren's sex-reversal, her rape of Elsa, her murder of Clive—these are not the enactment of a repressed Oedipal desire but the explosion of a decoded flow that annihilates the paternal function entirely. What remains after this explosion is not a new order but a field of pure immanence, the Body-without-Organs as a political horizon.
The Body-without-Organs is described as a limit, an asymptote that can be approached but never fully reached (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). It is not a state of being but a process of becoming, a continuous dismantling of the organism (the organized, hierarchical body) in favor of the body as a plane of intensities. Dren's body, in its final male form, is a Body-without-Organs: all organs present but none dominant, all functions active but none organized into a stable hierarchy. Her violence is not the expression of a will or an intention but the direct discharge of intensities that have no outlet within the striated space of the family or the corporation.
The film's political force lies in its refusal to moralize this violence, to recuperate it within a narrative of guilt and redemption. Dren is not a victim who deserves our sympathy, nor is she a monster who deserves our condemnation. She is a limit-proxy of the biotechnological assemblage, a body that reveals the violence inherent in all attempts to capture life within the apparatuses of State-Science and capitalist accumulation. Her existence poses a question that the film leaves unanswered: what forms of life, what modes of desire, what configurations of the body might be possible if we abandoned the Oedipal triangle entirely, if we refused the family romance and the corporate axiomatic, if we allowed the machinic phylum to discover its own forms without the imposition of molar identities?
This is not a utopian question but a pragmatic one, a question of experimentation and risk. The Body-without-Organs is not a goal to be achieved but a practice to be undertaken, a continuous process of dismantling the organism and discovering what the body can do. Splice stages this practice in its most extreme form, pushing the biotechnological assemblage to its limit and revealing the violence that erupts when decoded flows escape all attempts at capture. The film's final image—Elsa's hand on her pregnant belly, her face blank—is not a gesture of hope or despair but a sign of the work that remains: the work of thinking beyond the family, beyond the corporation, beyond the human itself.
References
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1983). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (R. Hurley, M. Seem, & H. R. Lane, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press.
Freud, S. (1950). Totem and taboo (J. Strachey, Trans.). W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1913)
Lacan, J. (1977). Écrits: A selection (A. Sheridan, Trans.). W. W. Norton.
Natali, V. (Director). (2009). Splice [Film]. Gaumont; Copperheart Entertainment.
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