Tag: Women in Science

‘Europa Report’: For the Love of Sci-Fi

Europa Report Poster
Written by Amanda Rodriguez
Ecuadorian Sebastián Cordero’s Europa Report is a new kind of movie. The film centers around an unprecedented trip to one of Jupiter’s moons, Europa, based on evidence that the moon could perhaps support life. The movie does blend a documentary style with thriller, science fiction, and even horror genres in an interesting, gripping manner, but the narrative itself is differently constructed, which is what makes Europa Report such a unique pleasure to watch.  
Though not tremendously racially diverse (the male captain is Asian and one of the male mission control scientists is Black), the film treats its female characters not only as equals, but as elite scientists and essential components of perhaps the most important space exploration humans have ever undergone. 
We have three strong, smart, respected female characters. There’s Dr. Samantha Unger, portrayed by the talented Embeth Davidtz. Dr. Unger is the primary mission planner. Her on-the-ground/mission control perspective is the one that has the most narrative cohesiveness and authority. Europa One is her opus, and its success or failure along with the lives of its crew are her responsibility. 
Dr. Samantha Unger contemplates the loss of communication with Europa One.
Then there’s science officer Dr. Katya Petrovna played by Karolina Wydra. Dr. Petrovna has a background in marine biology, which is crucial considering the life that the crew seeks on Europa would be in the water beneath the moon’s ice-encrusted surface. She is not only excellent at her job, but she is compassionate, brave, and full of wonder as the first human being to set foot on Europa’s moon surface. That’s right, a woman takes the greatest leap in science and exploration for all mankind.
To ensure the success of the mission, Katya risks her life on the unstable icy and radiation-flooded surface to collect vital samples.
Lastly, there’s the ship’s pilot Rosa Dasque played by Anamaria Marinca. She is drawn to the glory of the mission: a true explorer, seeking out the unknown, desirous of stretching the boundaries of human knowledge and experience. She, too, is strong and self-sacrificing with an admirable rationality and sense of her place and scope within the universe. My favorite line in the movie is when Rosa says, “Compared to the breadth of knowledge yet to be known, what does your life actually matter?” Heavy shit, no?
In a way, Rosa is our Ripley on Europa One.
So, except for one scene in which Jim Corrigan (played by District 9‘s Sharlto Copley) sexistly jokes that the female crewmen weren’t allotted enough outfits and shoes, Europa Report takes its female characters quite seriously, giving their expertise, ideas, and opinions the respect they deserve, not only as women but as fellow explorers whose lives and knowledge are every bit as valuable as their male counterparts.
Europa One crew posing for its last picture all together.
This, however, isn’t where the film’s innovative approach ends. In fact, the non-issue of female worth and sexuality aboard this space vessel is actually a small part of the bigger picture that Europa Report is trying to foster. At first, I was surprised that the crew all gets along. Despite that we are given few personal details about the explorers, I still developed a sense of empathy towards them, but it’s important that our understanding of them develops almost entirely within the context of this mission. Though there is wonder, comradery, fear, loss, and chaos, this isn’t a story about human drama. The elements for that kind of drama are there, but they are intentionally underplayed. 
The point of the film is that this crew is doing something bigger than themselves, perhaps bigger than all of us. None of the crew ever forgets that, and we, as the audience, are never allowed to either. As they resign themselves to bad situations and make noble decisions, the film tells us that in the face of this  “cosmically astounding” experience and opportunity, they could do nothing else. It all comes back to Rosa’s words, “Compared to the breadth of knowledge yet to be known, what does your life actually matter?” The crew’s unity in its genuine quest for discovery simply for the sake of knowledge is inspiring, reminding us of the universe’s wonders beyond our human smallness and pettiness, beyond our current scope of understanding.
Katya’s breathtaking view of Jupiter from Europa’s moon surface.
I loved this movie. Europa Report‘s elegant cinematography and unique approach in the telling of a simple story are refreshing, intellectually interesting, and posit more about humanity than seems possible on the film’s surface. I can’t wait to watch it again.
***If your local theater isn’t showing Europa Report, it’s rentable on iTunes***

Women in Science Fiction Week: ‘Splice’: Womb Horror and the Mother Scientist
Guest post written by Mychael Blinde.
NSFW | Trigger warning for survivors of sexual assault
Warning: Spoilers abound!!
Splice explores gendered body horror at the locus of the womb, reveling in the horror of procreation. It touches on themes of bestiality, incest, and rape. It’s also a movie about being a mom.
Though it received somewhat lackluster reviews, I encourage anyone interested in feminism and film to give Vincenzo Natali’s sci-fi body horror film a try. Splice features female characters who are intelligent, emotionally complex, and incontrol. They’re not perfect, but they are three dimensional characters whose decisions drive the story. (One of them morphs into a male, but we’ll get to that.)
Splice asks a lot of questions about the terms and conditions of conception, gestation, birth,and motherhood, all without stabbing the viewer in the eye with reductive answers.
It also features some campy moments. Hipster scientists shout things like “It was the only way!” Academy Award winning actor Adrien Brody expresses his frustration by throwing down not just his jacket, but his scarf as well!
If you can stomach the juxtaposition of big thinky concepts and stilted clichéd dialogue, you will find Splice a thoroughly enjoyable mindfuck of a film.
Elsa Kast (Sarah Polley) and Clive Nicoli (Brody), long-term partners in romance and biochemistry, have developed a method to splice the DNA from various animals together to create hybrid creatures.
Viewers are actually birthed into the film from the perspective of Fred, the couple’s latest scientific endeavor, a male companion to their first hybrid, Ginger.
Splice
Elsa and Clive aspire to splice human DNA to develop cures for genetic diseases, but the pharmaceutical company funding their research puts a halt on all splicing until the duo can synthesize the medicinal protein necessary to create a commercially viable lifestock drug.
Newstead Pharma’s financial interests are represented by Joan Chorot (Simona Maicanescu), who insists Elsa and Clive begin “Phase Two: The product stage.”
Joan Chorot (Simona Maicanescu) in Splice
Joan doesn’t get a lot of screen time, but her brief appearances are a pleasure to watch. She’s articulate and always in control. It’s awesome to see a woman kicking ass in the role of the money-grubbing corporation, and Joan is a stellar example of how to do it right.
After their splicing research is shut down, Clive suggests they quit, but Elsa convinces Clive to proceed with the human splicing and to generate an embryo.
Clive Nicoli (Adrien Brody) and Elsa Kast (Sarah Polley) in Splice
In both the romantic and the professional relationship between Clive and Elsa (and this is a movie very much interested in the conflation of work and sex), Elsa is in charge.
Over and over, Elsa insists that they take the next step. She is the opposite of what I call the Male Protagonist’s Girlfriend — a  pretty lady bystander who supplements the male protagonist’s story arc.
Elsa and Clive also deviate from the typical representation of long-term monogamous heterosexual partners: it is he, not she, who desires to have a child:
Elsa: “You are talking about having a kid.”
Clive: “Is that so unreasonable?”
Elsa: “Yeah, because I’m the one who has to have it…”
Clive: “Come on. What’s the worst that can happen?”
Elsa: “How about after we crack male pregnancy?”

Meaningfully, this discussion is cut short by an alert sent from the machine housing the hybrid fetus. When they arrive at the lab, the embryo is all grown up and preparing to evacuate the biochemically engineered womb.
Though Elsa doesn’t gestate and birth the baby from her own body, the birth experience is physically traumatizing for her. She becomes trapped in the birth canal and is injected with poisonous serum. In a rare moment of control, Clive saves Elsa. But after the birth, Elsa again takes charge: she refuses to allow Clive to kill the female hybrid and insists that they raise her in the lab.
Weirdly, the couple begins to function less like scientists and more like normal parents: frustrated because the baby won’t eat, stressed out because it won’t stop crying. However, unlike most parents, their baby has a stinging whip tail, and they are forced to relegate their progeny to the laboratory’s basement to keep her existence a secret.
Elsa (Sarah Polley) in Splice
Elsa becomes more and more emotionally attached to the creature, and eventually names her Dren. Clive is worried about their secret being revealed and disturbed by Elsa’s displays of maternal affection. Nevertheless, he resigns himself to raising her, and Dren grows to be a young adult in a matter of months.
One night, Clive and Elsa realize they haven’t boned down lately. Clive doesn’t have any condoms, but Elsa says, “What’s the worst that could happen?” – suggesting that she’s decided she wouldn’t mind gestating a child, maybe? – and they have at. This is the first of three sex scenes in Splice.
Cinematically, their lovemaking is depicted as underwhelming. Neither Elsa nor Clive take off any clothing. Creepily, Dren watches.
Meanwhile, pressure is building at the pharmaceutical company.
Their presentation at the shareholders’ meeting goes disastrously wrong. Unbeknownst to Clive and Elsa, their specimen Ginger has changed into a male, and Ginger and Fred tear each other apart and splash guts and blood all over the audience. Not good PR.
In deep shit with the company, Clive and Elsa are forced to relocate Dren to Elsa’s deceased mother’s farm.
Here we learn the backstory of Elsa’s childhood; themes of feminism, motherhood, and family history come into play.
We learn that Elsa’s mother forbade Barbies and makeup. Elsa explains that “She said makeup debased women.” The word “feminist” is never used in Splice, but Elsa’s mother’s Barbie-banning and makeup-denying seem emblematic of a certain type of feminist parenting.
We also learn that Elsa’s mother raised her in substandard living conditions, relegating her to a ramshackle, barely furnished bedroom.
Initially I viewed this as a problematic conflation of being a feminist with being a neglectful person and bad mother. But it’s far more complicated than that.
Elsa expresses her love for Dren by giving her the very things her mother denied her.
Dren (Delphine Chanéac) and Elsa (Sarah Polley) in Splice
But the Barbie and the makeover don’t make Dren happy; in fact, the Barbie explicitly makes Dren sad. Looking into a mirror, she holds the doll’s long blonde tresses against her bald head and becomes upset.
Over the course of the film, Elsa locks Dren up in a lab, then a basement, and eventually her mother’s barn, and Dren resents her for it. Elsa seems unable to break the cycle of her own mother’s physical and emotional neglect.
Perhaps the idea is that makeup is not a substitute for ideal living quarters and engaged parenting. What matters isn’t whether or not you give your daughter a Barbie, but whether or not you lock her in a barn.
And it turns out, Dren really is Elsa’s genetic daughter. To his chagrin, Clive discovers Elsa used her own DNA to create Dren: “Why the fuck did you want to make her in the first place? Huh? For the betterment of mankind? You never wanted a normal child because you were afraid of losing control. But an experiment…”
He doesn’t finish the sentence, but it seems clear that Elsa is using science as a way to disassociate herself from motherhood while still being able to create and raise a child. Presumably we’re to understand that Elsa’s desire for complete control stems from her tragic upbringing: “Look at your family history,” Clive exhorts.
Elsa tries to convey her genetic connection to Dren by explaining to her: “You’re a part of me, and I’m a part of you. I’m inside you.” She strives to smooth over their mother-daughter animosity, but the two wind up in a physical altercation that results in Elsa knocking Dren unconscious, tying her up, stripping her naked, and removing her tail and stinger. This scene has undertones of both castration and rape. Elsa has become a monstrous mother scientist.
Clive is horrified by Elsa’s actions, but she informs him that she is going to use Dren’s amputated stinger to finally synthesize the protein and heads to the lab, where she succeeds.
Elsa (Sarah Polley) in Splice
She tells off her obnoxious supervisor: “When some real scientists get here, come take a look.”
While Elsa’s away, Dren seduces Clive. If Elsa’s sin is her obsessive need to control, Clive’s sin is his inclination to relinquish control.
This is the film’s second sex scene. Cinematically it is sensual, queer in a fantasy-mythical-creature sort of way, strange but beautiful. Ominously, Dren grows back her tail stinger. Then Clive notices Elsa has come back and is watching them. She storms out and he chases her. Back at their apartment, Clive and Elsa decide that they finally have to kill Dren.
But when they return to the barn, it turns out Dren is already dying. After she dies, Clive’s brother (who also works in the lab) and their supervisor show up. He announces he knows their secret and demands to see the human-spliced creature. Elsa informs him that Dren is dead, throws a shovel at him and says, “See for yourself.”
Except Dren is no longer buried behind the barn. Like Ginger, she has morphed into a male, and in the film’s climax, he kills everybody but Elsa.
Dren as male in Splice
A note on the gender transition: I am uncomfortable with the representation of Dren’s metamorphosis from female to male. It is predicated on the idea that transitioning from a female body to a male body is horrific, and it exploits trans individuals by sensationalizing the transitioning body as evil and freakish. It’s not trans positive. I understand that Splice’s story necessitates this metamorphosis and that Dren isn’t exactly a human, but let’s call out problematic shit when we see it.
Chasing women through the woods at night is a staple of slasher flicks, but this movie isn’t about slashing – it’s about splicing. Dren chases Elsa through the woods, but instead of slaughtering Elsa, Dren rapes her.
This is Splice’s third sex scene. Cinematically it is gut-wrenchingly horrifying, as any rape depicted onscreen needs to be in order to convey the awfulness that is sexual violation. Dren’s rape of Elsa is as disgusting and awful as Dren’s sex with Clive is beautiful and sensual.
When Elsa screams “What do you want?” Dren replies: “Inside…of…you.”
Clive stabs Dren with a branch (wielding the metaphorical phallus) as Dren orgasms, but Dren is not killed, and attacks Clive. Elsa pulls her pants back on and bashes Dren in the head with a big rock. This critically injurs Dren, who takes a moment to survey the situation – then stabs Clive with his tail. Elsa bashes Dren in the head again, killing Dren once and for all.
Elsa is the character who cut off Dren’s stinger and the one who deals Dren the death blow. And yet in his final moments, Dren chooses to kill Clive. Why?
Because inside of Elsa is a womb, the growing space for a new creature. And sure enough, in the film’s resolution we discover that Elsa is pregnant. Of the three sexual encounters that take place in this movie, the reproductively viable encounter is the rape. Elsa lives to be the final girl not because she wields a chainsaw, but because she wields womb. (And a big rock.)
Unlike Veronica of The Fly (“I want an abortion!”) or, more recently, Elizabeth of Prometheus (“Get it out of me!”), Elsa decides to gestate her monster progeny to term.
I appreciate both The Fly and Prometheus because each asks its audience to empathize with a woman who desperately needs an abortion. I also appreciate Splice for asking its viewers to honor Elsa’s decision not to abort. Joan makes it clear that Elsa has a choice: “Nobody would blame you if you didn’t do this. You could just put an end to it and walk away.” (Would that this were the standard response to women experiencing unwanted pregnancies!)
But Elsa does not to put an end to it. Why does she decide to bring it to term?
Sure, the company’s giving her a shitload of money for gestating Dren’s offspring. But throughout the film, Elsa has insisted on moving forward with human splicing experiments. Perhaps she sees this as a necessary extension of that research.
Or maybe this is another chance for Elsa to use science to mediate motherhood. Is the pregnancy Elsa’s punishment, or her redemption? We’ll never know. All she says is, “What’s the worst that could happen?”
The film closes with a shot of the two women, the film’s only surviving characters, looking out a window.
Mychael Blinde is not a scientist, but she is afraid to give birth. She is interested in representations of gender in popular culture and blogs at Vagina Dentwata.

Biopic and Documentary Week: Gorillas in the Mist

Gorillas in the Mist (1988)

This piece is from Monthly Contributor Carrie Nelson.

This post contains spoilers about the film Gorillas in the Mist.
For nearly 20 years, zoologist Dian Fossey lived and worked among the mountain gorillas in Africa. Her work as a researcher and animal rights activist is responsible for raising awareness about Africa’s gorilla population and the threat of their extinction. Gorillas in the Mist, a film directed by Michael Apted in 1988, follows Dian (Sigourney Weaver, in an Oscar-nominated role) as she works in the Congo and Rwanda to study the behavior of mountain gorillas and protect them from poaching. As the film was produced after Dian’s untimely death (she was murdered in 1985; to this day, the precise circumstances and perpetrators remain unknown), it is impossible to know how she would have responded to the film. However, based on what I understand about Dian’s real life, I believe she would appreciate the film. I believe she would see it as an honest portrayal of her life, and I also believe she would be happy to see that the film avoids common clichés that are typically found in mainstream films about the lives of women.
Over the course of the film, Dian experiences a radical transformation in gender presentation. At the beginning of her travels, she is incredibly conscious of her appearance. When she meets her mentor, Dr. Louis Leakey (Iain Cuthbertson) at the start of her mission, he explains that there isn’t room for all of the luggage she’s brought with her, to which she stubbornly replies, “Those cases contain my hairdryer, my makeup, my underwear and my brassieres. If they don’t go, Dr Leakey, I don’t go.” I thought this was a throwaway line, so I was surprised that there were several additional mentions of her interest in make-up, hair products and clothing soon after this exchange. I was frustrated with this focus on materialism, thinking that the writer was using these moments as shorthand to remind the audience that the protagonist is, indeed, a woman; I felt as if the filmmakers were saying, “Well, what woman wouldn’t want to bring her cosmetics to the jungle?”
But as the film goes on, the references to beauty cease, and it becomes clear that these lines are not comments on Dian’s gender identity but on the materialism that she gradually gives up as she becomes committed to living among the mountain gorillas. The lines about clothing and make-up eventually stop, and Dian lets go of the previous signifiers of her femininity. It isn’t that she becomes masculine, as Weaver’s character in the Alien series is often perceived – it’s that she no longer needs these material possessions and outward signifiers to feel comfortable in the world and convey her identity. Dian’s transformation is subtle, but it adds significant depth to her characterization as she becomes comfortable in her new surroundings.
A similar transformation occurs in Dian’s romantic life. When she moves to Africa, she leaves behind her fiancé, David. Over the course of the film, her mentions of him become fewer and fewer, until a passing remark reveals that they have ended their engagement. She does, however, meet photographer Bob Campbell (Bryan Brown). Bob is married, but his and Dian’s shared passion for studying the gorillas leads them to start a passionate love affair. His work as a photographer makes him travel frequently, but he always returns to visit Dian, until he finally reveals to her that he is divorcing his wife to marry her. Initially, Dian is thrilled with this proposal; though she is devoted to her career, she often expresses an interest in wanting a family. But ultimately, she chooses her career over Bob anyway. He is offered a job that would take her away from Africa and the mountain gorillas, and she tells him that if he accepts the job and leaves, he should never write or come back to her. It’s a tragic moment, as the film demonstrates how much Dian and Bob love each other, but it is ultimately a refreshing and honest one. Given how many films feature women sacrificing ambitions and goals in order to preserve romantic relationships, Dian’s lack of compromise is a welcome change of pace.
Fossey represented as maternal
The most fascinating and complex depiction of Dian’s gender identity, however, is her portrayal as a maternal figure. Dian never has children of her own, and her interactions with children in the film are troubling. At one point, she catches a young boy found among gorilla poachers, and in an attempt to uncover information about the poachers, she has his hands tied and dresses as a witch to scare him into talking. Dian is not above torturing children to get what she wants; it would seem, therefore, that she is not particularly maternal. However, this is not entirely accurate or fair. Rather than being maternal in a traditional sense, Dian channels that energy toward the gorillas. At one point, she saves baby Pucker from capture, and she takes care of her in her home until Pucker is healthy and taken away to a zoo. In the moments when she is seen taking care of the gorillas, particularly the young ones, it is clear that there is a certain maternal sensibility to Dian that remains constant throughout all of her other personal transformations. Though it is common to see women presented as mothers and caretakers in cinema, Dian’s role as one is untraditional. It may echo common tropes, but it remains a unique facet of her life and work.
Gorillas in the Mist does not always paint Dian Fossey in a positive light. It does, however, present her in a realistic one. She’s often portrayed as stubborn, unfriendly and even abusive; these traits, however, reflect the reality in which she lived. Dian did not have time to be feminine or nice or accommodating. She was too busy focusing on her work and dedicating her life to ensure the protection and well being of the mountain gorillas. Gorillas in the Mist constantly references the usual clichés of films about women – namely, an overwhelming focus on beauty, romance and children – but rather than reaffirming them, the film counters them. Dian’s characterization proves that there is no single way in which to be a woman and that, often times, it is women who step outside of the boxes of conventional femininity who are able to create the most radical change in the world.

Carrie Nelson is a Bitch Flicks monthly contributor. She is a Staff Writer for Gender Across Borders, an international feminist community and blog that she co-founded in 2009. She works as a grant writer for an LGBT nonprofit, and she is currently pursuing an MA in Media Studies at The New School.

It’s Ada Lovelace Day!

portrait of Ada Lovelace

In honor of the day, I watched the only movie I could find about her (or featuring her): Conceiving Ada.
Before I talk about the movie, first some basic information on Ada Lovelace Day, founded to celebrate Augusta Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace (AKA Ada Lovelace).
Who is Ada Lovelace?
She is often called the “World’s First Computer Programmer,” although she lived nearly 100 years before the first computer was built. Here is an excerpt from the Wikipedia page about her:

In 1842 Charles Babbage was invited to give a seminar at the University of Turin about his analytical engine. Luigi Menabrea, a young Italian engineer, and future prime minister of Italy, wrote up Babbage’s lecture in French, and this transcript was subsequently published in the Bibliothèque Universelle de Genève in October 1842.

Babbage asked the Countess of Lovelace to translate Menabrea’s paper into English, subsequently requesting that she augment the notes she had added to the translation. Lady Lovelace spent most of a year doing this. These notes, which are more extensive than Menabrea’s paper, were then published in The Ladies’ Diary and Taylor’s Scientific Memoirs under the initialism “AAL”.

In 1953, over one hundred years after her death, Lady Lovelace’s notes on Babbage’s Analytical Engine were republished. The engine has now been recognised as an early model for a computer and Lady Lovelace’s notes as a description of a computer and software.[27]

Her notes were labelled alphabetically from A to G. In note G, the Countess describes an algorithm for the analytical engine to compute Bernoulli numbers. It is considered the first algorithm ever specifically tailored for implementation on a computer, and for this reason she is often cited in to be the first computer programmer.[28] However the engine was never actually constructed to completion during Lovelace’s lifetime.

The computer language Ada, created on behalf of the United States Department of Defense, was named after Lovelace. The reference manual for the language was approved on 10 December 1980, and the Department of Defense Military Standard for the language, “MIL-STD-1815”, was given the number of the year of her birth. Since 1998, the British Computer Society has awarded a medal in her name[29] and in 2008 initiated an annual competition for women students of computer science.[30]

Ada Lovelace Day has been founded to commemorate her historic place in computing history, and to celebrate women in mathematics, science, engineering, and technology. You can learn more about Ada Lovelace and the project Ada Lovelace Day at the website Finding Ada.

Now, on to the movie!

Conceiving Ada (1997)
I debated even watching Conceiving Ada last night after reading reviews, some of which included the words “ridiculous” and “loony.” But, I figure so many woman-centered, woman-directed, and woman-written movies encounter much harsher criticism (especially an overtly feminist movie such as this), and the movie deserved a chance. Plus, it stars Tilda Swinton, for whom I have a borderline-unhealthy obsession, and was written and directed by Lynn Hershman Leeson, whose most recent film was !Women Art Revolution (which I just mentioned in a post yesterday, oddly enough).
The basic premise of the movie is that a genius DNA researcher Emmy Coer is developing a computer program that will allow her to travel back in time (not physically–just through the computer) to meet and communicate with her muse, 19th century math whiz Ada Byron King. There are troubles along the way to reaching her goal, and consequences to making contact that I don’t entirely understand. And, for some reason, there’s a lot of sex. A lot. Even Victorian-era sex.
I’ll just put the criticisms I have out front, and then get into why the movie is ultimately worth watching. Some of the acting is cringe-worthy, particularly that of main character Emmy’s (Francesca Faridany) boyfriend, and her OB-GYN. There are real moments in the movie that deserve the MST3K treatment, and one can’t help but joke that the movie’s vision of time travel via computer seems a whole lot like watching a movie (until the women actually communicate with one another). I’ll even admit to a fleeting comparison to The Room at a particularly awkward moment.
That said, this isn’t one of those “it’s so bad don’t even bother” movies. It’s actually a really interesting one that explores the bonds that did–and do–define female sexuality (even if we do see some unnecessary nudity), in Lovelace’s time and today. It explores motherhood, and the ways that having children both can empower and inhibit women. Finally, it’s a look at women in the field of technological science, and how maybe not a lot has changed since the 19th century.
Of course, the technology portrayed in the movie seems primitive after about 15 years, and the ability to time travel online to talk with long-dead historical figures is a fantasy. The movie was very carefully filmed, and Leeson claims that “Every scene was structured and shot using a DNA image as a model for actors’ placement andcamera movement.” The movie itself sits firmly in the science fiction/fantasy genre, and if you accept this and focus on what the movie is actually trying to say about memory, women in technology, and DNA, I think you’ll find it quite fascinating and challenging. I did.
Watch the trailer: