Long Live the New Flesh

David Cronenberg's Somatic Dialectic from Shivers to eXistenZ

By Douglas Mann

"Man is an animal that thinks too much,

an over-rational animal that's lost touch

with its body and its instincts."

Dr. Hobbes in Shivers

"Long Live the New Flesh!"

Max Renn in Videodrome

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Copyright © Douglas Mann 2014

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Table of Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1. Monsters Unchained: Cronenberg’s Gothic Horror Stories

Chapter 2. The Id Unchained: The New Gothicism of the Body as a Site of Psychopathological Rebellion

Chapter 3. Technological Transformations: Cronenberg’s Science Fictional Impulse

Chapter 4. Postmodern Simulations: The Body Vanishes (And Then Returns)

Postscript on the New Flesh in A Dangerous Method and Cosmopolis.

Appendix: Cronenberg’s Films as Embodiments of the Somatic Dialectic

A David Cronenberg Filmography

Bibliography

Prologue

Two things are certain from a careful viewing of David Cronenberg’s cinematic corpus from Shivers to eXistenZ: that the films which he wrote and directed show a remarkable consistency of vision, and that the human body is the central focus of his work. In his cinema we see it invaded by parasites, rabid, the victim of a television-induced hallucination-causing tumour, transformed into a man-fly, and scarred by car crashes. But how does he theorize this body? My central thesis here is that we need a dialectical structure consisting of four interlocking theoretical pictures to fully understand the way that the human body is presented in his films.

Governing the operations of this dialectic are two themes that keep cropping up in Cronenberg's films: his explorations of Cartesian dualism[1] and his view of bodily mutation as a potentially positive thing, linked to his suspicion that the story of human physical evolution is far from over. Cronenberg makes clear his interest in both the human body and his fascination with the duality of mind and body in his many interviews. He told Stephen Chesley in 1975, shortly after the release of his first commercial feature Shivers, that all his films have a  have a strong physical consciousness, and that “the whole dichotomy of mind and body and the importance of physical existence is really uppermost in my conception of film” (25). Later, he told Chris Rodley that part “of my cinematic voyage has been to try and discover the connection between the physical and the spiritual: what we are physically; what is the essence of physical life and existence,” and that many...

“…of the peaks of philosophical thought revolve around the impossible duality of mind and body. Whether the mind aspect is expressed as soul or spirit, it's still the old Cartesian absolute split between the two. There seems to be a point at which they should fuse and it should be apparent to everyone. But it’s not.” (1997: 128-9, 78)

His films can be seen as a series of thought experiments dealing with scenarios where technological or psychological interventions have upset the traditional givens of this dualism. In Shivers, Rabid, and The Fly, a technologically mutated body produces psychological mutations; in The Brood, Scanners, Videodrome, and eXistenZ, altered states in the mind produce new and bizarre somatic states. There is a continual interplay between body and mind in his films, a flip-flop of the body being controlled by a radically distorted Cartesian thinking thing, then of the mind being horrifically altered by bodily mutations.[2] The scientific mind, separated from nature, presided over by too ambitious doctors and technologists, produces the mutations that drive the typical Cronenberg plot to its usual chaotic or grisly telos.

In Mark Kermode’s mind, the radical, shocking edge of Cronenberg’s “cinema of change” comes from his refusal to characterize a mutation as negative (11). As Heraclitus said, we can’t step in the same river twice. Change is unavoidable:

“Together, his films constitute a perversely polemical body of work which has grown in strange and wondrous ways while retaining an immutable thematic heart. The rebellion of the body; the unconscious redefinition of the self; the shock of the flesh - each of these themes has been employed by Cronenberg to address his recurrent central thesis: the acceptance and celebration of mutation.”

This mutation might be beneficent or cancerous or both: in fact, the tension between these two possibilities is left largely unresolved by Cronenberg. Witness the sex-crazed zombies unleashed in Shivers by Dr. Hobbes’ parasites: Cronenberg has insisted in several interviews that despite the breakdown in social order that results from the waves of lust that wash over the inhabitants of Montreal’s fictitious Starliner Towers, the effects of the parasite-induced mutations are in fact liberating.[3] But Cronenberg does seem to be making a larger cultural/metaphysical point. As he suggested to Chris Rodley (145), “to whatever degree we center our reality - and our understanding of reality - in our bodies, we are surrendering that sense of reality to our bodies’ ephemerality.” The mutability of the body under the regime of modern medicine, science, and technology is thus matched to an onto-cultural ephemerality of the human race in the present age, an ephemerality that is fairly rigorously explored by Cronenberg’s somatic dialectic.[4]

This dialectic is built on a pragmatist view of the value of theory. As Cronenberg himself said in a 1980 interview:

“All the phenomena explained by Freud in terms of sex someone like, say, Marshall McLuhan could see as problems of communication. My feeling is that every theory - Freudian, Marxist, feminist, what have you - gives you part of the truth, yes, but that none of them gives you all the truth.” (Chute 38)

So Cronenberg is a theoretical bricoleur, picking up the bits and pieces of theory that he needs for the project at hand. We can find further evidence that this bricolage is intentional on Cronenberg’s part in an interview with Susan Ayscough (1983: 17) where he tells her that “You put a lot into a film, and it’s very complex. There are many levels: visual images, and thought, and sound, and emotion as well as many other levels. You hope that people will respond on many levels.” Indeed, this sense of pragmatic bricolage is central to my argument for the progression of the somatic dialectic in his works: as we move from the body as site of Gothic horror to the body as the site of psychopathological rebellion, then on to technological transformations, and finally to the body as a postmodern simulacrum, we are moving from a crude “horror film” interpretation of his works to a Freudian interpretation, then on to a McLuhanesque one, then finally on to a postmodern finale. So Cronenberg’s films are doubly dialectical, both in terms of the multiple pictures he gives of Cartesian mind/body dualisms and somatic mutations he shows us in his films, and in terms of the theoretical models at work beneath the surface of these pictures.

To get a sense of this dialectic’s history, we can see it contained in embryonic form in his earliest works Shivers and Rabid. But it only becomes clear in its full-blown form in his later films, especially Crash and eXistenZ. This short book will thus be a look back from eXistenZ at Cronenberg’s cinematic corpus as a meditation on the human body in flux. I will look closely at ten of his films, dividing them into three groups: his Pathological-Gothic Triad (Shiver, Rabid and The Brood), his Techno-Fantasy Triad (Scanners, Videodrome, and The Fly), and his Postmodern Group (Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch, Crash, and eXistenZ).[5]  I now turn to the first level of theorizing the body, as the site for Gothic horror stories, as exemplified best in his Pathological-Gothic triad, but also in such later films as The Fly and Dead Ringers.

Chapter 1. Monsters Unchained: Cronenberg’s Gothic Horror Stories

We can imagine the dialectic bursting onto our theoretical screens with images from a classic black-and-white Frankenstein film clip of the monster stumbling over a blasted heath, accompanied by ominous chords on a church organ.[6]  On the most primitive level, Cronenberg’s films can be seen as tales of Gothic horror. Under this interpretation, the human body is theorized as a site for a war between human intentions (i.e. technological interventions), or what we can conveniently collect under the title “Culture,” and Nature, with Nature triumphing in the end over human hubris by forcefully reminding the characters of the Gothic drama of the obvious: that human beings are mortal, that human life is fragile. The revulsion highlighted under this level of interpretation has its origins in the early nineteenth century’s fears about science and the industrial revolution’s first incursions into the human body, and the monsters that would be unchained by these incursions.

As Cronenberg said to Stephen Chesley early in his career (1975: 23), the “true subject of horror films is death and anticipation of death, and that leads to the question of man as body as opposed to man as spirit.” This linking of death and the body to his own unique version of the horror genre is made clearer by Cronenberg in comments he made to Chris Rodley where he distances himself from the “psychological” horror and science fiction cinematic traditions:

“The phrase ‘biological horror’ - often attached to my work - really refers to the fact that my films are very body-conscious. They’re very conscious of physical existence as a living organism, rather than other horror films or science-fiction films which are very technologically orientated, or concerned with the supernatural, and in that sense are very disembodied.” (58)

This sense of a bodily-conscious biological horror is especially clear in his early so-called “exploitation” films - Shivers (1975), Rabid (1976), and The Brood (1979), which we can group together (for reasons that will become clearer later on) as his “Pathological-Gothic Triad.”  Here we see the body as Monstrously Mutated, infected with parasites, rabid, oozing blood, sprouting a penal spike, or giving birth to a maleficent brood of deformed children. Later, Cronenberg returns to the Gothic in The Fly (1986), where the audience must endure Seth Brundle’s horrifying mutation into Brundlefly, half insect, half man. We can also see it, in somewhat attenuated form, in what is probably Cronenberg’s most subtle work, Dead Ringers (1988), where the Gothic is invoked in the Mantle twins’ probings of the patients of their gynaecological practice, and, in the denouement, of each other through drugs. This is the level of interpretation favoured by Robin Wood, who castigated Cronenberg’s early work as reactionary horror films that exploited sexual disgust to titillate the audience.[7] It is the level of interpretation that earned him the nickname “The Baron of Blood.”

This level of interpretation is even given some early intertextual support by the trailers of Shivers and Rabid originally designed to lure audiences to these film, trailers that are affixed to the end of the video re-releases of these two pictures. They highlight the more lurid, disgusting, and bloody moments from each film. The former informs us that Shivers contains evil and horror that will make you scream and squirm. The latter, after showcasing the more violent bits of the film, growls “you can’t trust anyone!” because “one moment they’re normal, the next RABID!,” asking us to “pray it won’t happen to you!”. In fact, the original poster for Rabid featured the lifeless corpse of one of the film’s minor characters, Judy Glasberg, a victim of Rabid Rose’s deadly embrace, lying frozen in a basement locker, mouth agape, a look of horror in her eyes.

Surprisingly or not, Cronenberg’s horror stories match well the atmosphere and psychology of such classic Gothic novels as The Castle of Otranto, Vathek, Frankenstein, Melmoth the Wanderer, and She (and also some modern Gothic, such as Lawrence Norfolk’s Lemprière’s Dictionary, to which I shall return later). If we read Mary Shelley’s modus operandi for Frankenstein, we could ask ourselves whether it could not have functioned equally as well as an introduction to at least Cronenberg’s earlier screenplays. She wanted to write a story “...which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror - one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart” (vii). Indeed, Cronenberg’s films, especially his earliest ones, do aim to curdle our blood and quicken our heart beats, employing monster-protagonists much as Shelley herself did in Frankenstein. But these monsters are set within a wider narrative atmosphere, one which we can loosely call the Gothic.

What is the Gothic? For Maggie Kilgour:

“The gothic is thus a nightmare vision of a modern world made up of detached individuals, which has dissolved into predatory and demonic relations which cannot be reconciled into a healthy social order. It shows the easy slide of the modern Cartesian mind from autonomy and independence into solipsism and obsession, depicting the atomistic individual as fragmented, and alienated from others and ultimately from himself.” (1995: 12)[8]

Despite this gloomy picture, she also sees the Gothic’s attack on modern fragmentation as suggesting the hope of recovering a lost organic unity, since it tries to use its “necromantic powers” to raise the past (15).  Robert Miles concurs, adding that the Gothic partakes of a primitivist vision wherein a return to nature is undesirable and impossible, for “society, like man, has fallen. But beneath the corrupting veneer of artifice, there are instincts of nature, our true self, and these we can cultivate” (50). We see this collapse of the Cartesian rational ego, this slide into solipsism and obsession, these “instincts of nature,” in Shivers, where the tenants infected by the parasites roam about indiscriminately seeking sexual couplings with whoever (or whatever) comes their way; in Rabid, with the infected characters going into foaming and fuming rages, biting whomever they can latch onto; and in The Fly, as Seth begins to take on insect-like qualities, including rather sloppy eating habits. So on the most basic level, Cronenberg’s Gothic triad (and some of his later films also) feature a “nightmare world” where the control of the human thing by the Cartesian ego has broken down, resulting in “predatory and demonic relations” between the inhabitants of this world - they’ve lost control of their body and its most basic drives, with monstrous results.

Cronenberg’s Gothic tales also use a traditional device of the horror genre: as in classic Gothic tales like Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, a castle dominates the narrative as a physical and psychological presence, and architecture “becomes the embodiment of fate” (Clery in Walpole: xv). Of course, Cronenberg dispenses with the more old-fashioned castles wherein a Karloff or Lugosi might have felt more at home, substituting such starkly modernist versions as the bleak and soulless Starliner Towers in Shivers, the Keloid Clinic in Rabid, the Somafree Institute of Psychoplasmics’ hilltop chalet in The Brood, or the headquarters of ConSec in Scanners. These places are largely cold, functional, and rational, highlighting a contrast between the environment where each film’s events take place and the messy things that take place in and around them. He varies this theme a bit in The Fly, reducing the castle there to Seth’s sparse loft, and in Naked Lunch, where the castle becomes the rather claustrophobic looking Middle-Eastern Gothic of the Interzone. Yet the most literally Gothic place is the church where eXistenZ begins and ends, a holy shrine where game players enter a monstrous virtual world.

These are the home fields where the mad scientists play havoc with the natural order of things, with the delicate balance between mind and body, culture and chaos. Cronenberg’s mutating and monstrous bodies, at least for a large part of each film, are confined within the spaces of these structures, adding to the Gothic terror of these monstrous mutations the feeling that the protagonist(s) have nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. This sense of confinement, in fact, can be said to be essential to at least part of a Gothic narrative: after all, if one can simply walk out into the bright sunshine, escaping from the horrors of the piece, then how horrible can the situation really be? In fact, Cronenberg seems at least dimly aware of this fact with the television commercial for Starliner Towers he includes at the beginning of Shivers, which lauds its pool, golf course, shops, medical clinic, etc., working on the assumption that the tenants will never have to leave their “island paradise.” The ad informs us that the Starliner Towers are brought to us by Starco, a division of the ominous sounding “General Structures Inc.” One can take these “general structures” to be a metaphor for either the physical structures that confine the tenants to their dull and conformist way of life, or of the psychic structures that repress their basic drives, both of which collapse once Dr. Hobbes’ parasites release the tenants’ from the structures that would normally confine and repress their more “bestial” energies.

Presiding over the alteration of these general structures by medical or technological intervention are Cronenberg’s mad (or at least severely misguided) scientists. Of course, the mad scientist has a long and rich history in the Gothic genre, one where science is mixed with magic, or at minimum with inquiries into things that science has no business “meddling” with. In William Beckford’s Vathek, an Eastern Gothic tale of the lascivious and cruel Sultan Vathek, the Sultan’s mother Carathis has truck with the infernal powers in her researches, her tower housing a collection of venomous serpents, rhino horns, woods of a subtile and penetrating odour, and “a thousand other horrible rarities,” guarded by fifty female negresses “mute and blind of the right eye,” formed from the “presentiment, that she might one day, enjoy some intercourse with the infernal powers: to whom she had ever been passionately attached, and to whose taste she was no stranger” (31). Yet she is no mere black magician, nor her strange collections a heap of meaningless nick-nacks; later in the book Vathek, about to leave on a trip, informs his underling Morakanabad to treat his mother well, and to “take care to supply whatever her experiments may demand: for, you well know, that our tower abounds in materials for the advancement of science” (37).

So the Gothic scientist pursues researches into strange and infernal regions. Yet these researches often have a noble (if impossible to attain) goal, as evidenced by Dr. Frankenstein’s raison d’être in Shelley’s classic picture of the Gothic scientist:

“It was the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn; and whether it was the outward substance of things, or the inner spirit of nature and the mysterious soul of man that occupied me, my enquiries were directed to the metaphysical, or in its highest sense, the physical secrets of the world.” (19)

This sense of illegitimate researches, of meddling with infernal powers, of seeking for “metaphysical” secrets, can be seen in the scientists and doctors in Cronenberg’s films that initiate the somatic mutations, with monstrous results. The archetype is Dr. Emil Hobbes in Shivers, who creates parasites that free their hosts from sexual repressions. In Rabid the Gothic scientist reappears in the form of Dr. Dan Keloid, whose experimental skin grafts create Rabid Rose (played by porn star Marilyn Chambers), who subsequently roams country and town in search of victims from whom to drain the blood essential to her well being. In The Brood we meet Dr. Hal Raglan (played with relish by Oliver Reed), whose fringe psychiatry (“Psychoplasmics”) allows disturbed patients to manifest their rage in a variety of somatic mutations or progeny. The mad scientist continually reappears in Cronenberg’s films after the Gothic triad: Dr. Paul Ruth (Patrick McGoohan) in Scanners uses a pain killer invented for pregnant women to create a race of telepaths (the scanners); Seth Brundle in The Fly mimics Carathis’ meddling with infernal powers in his own tower, in this case a warehouse loft jammed full not of venomous serpents and subtile woods, but of computers and telepods; the Mantle twins (both played by Jeremy Irons) in Dead Ringers, with their only mildly bizarre gynaecological investigations; the renegade traffic-control expert Vaughan in Crash, whose researches involve the collection of detailed photographs of crash victims and an experimental melding of human sexuality with the machine, specifically, the automobile; and Allegra Geller or Yevgeny Nourish in eXistenZ, one of whom has created a virtual reality game that throws its players into a world where they surrender their selves to game urges and lose their appetite for the real.

Of course, no tale of Gothic horror would be complete without some sort of monster. In Vathek, the monster comes in the person of the “other,” the infidel Giaour who visits the sultan to torment him with grandiose promises. After Vathek questions him:

“The man, or rather monster, instead of making a reply, thrice rubbed his forehead, which, as well as his body, was blacker than ebony; four times clapped his paunch, the projection of which was enormous; opened wide his huge eyes, which glowed like firebrands; began to laugh with a hideous noise, and discovered his long amber-coloured teeth, streaked with green.” (Beckford 1993: 6)

Yet perhaps the classic Gothic monster is Frankenstein’s creation itself, who wanders the mountains of Switzerland and the Arctic wastes scarce half made up, a hideous patchwork of human bits and pieces. The history of horror films is replete with many more monsters: vampires, werewolves, creatures from a black lagoon, giant ants, and aliens. There are monsters a-plenty in Cronenberg’s films too. In Shivers, the parasites slowly turn everyone in the Starliner Towers into monsters. Early in the film, we witness Nick Tudor, perhaps the ur-victim of Dr. Hobbes’ test subject Annabelle, laying in bed massaging the frisky parasite swimming in his abdomen, encouraging it with a “c’mon boy... you and me are gonna be friends.” Of course, it is even more monstrous that the parasites can enter their hosts at their least suspecting and most vulnerable moments, for example when one slithers up into Betts’ (Barbara Steele) vagina while she bathes. This appears to later have “monstrous” results when Betts seduces Janine Tudor (Nick’s distraught wife): as they kiss, we see a parasite crawling up Bett’s throat and then down Janine’s in slow motion. This “monstrous” love-making is echoed writ large at the end of Shivers, when the putative hero Dr. Roger St. Luc, who has managed to escape infection up to this point, is corralled in the pool room by a pack of lust-crazed zombies - he’s given a parasite-kiss by the formerly loyal Nurse Forsythe, to whom he seems to surrender with an “et tu, then falls Dr. St. Luc”.

Cronenberg’s own Frankenstein is perhaps Rose in Rabid, her good looks and sweet manner disguising the monstrous appendage and appetites that result from Dr. Keloid’s well-meaning but flawed attempt at reconstructive surgery in the wake of a motorcycle accident. She develops a red gelatinous penis/spike in her armpit, hidden in a recessed “hole” until she strikes. She can no longer keep down normal food: her only means of sustenance is human blood sucked through the penis/spike (she experiments with cow blood, but with unpleasant results). As a result, she roams the roads and countryside around the Keloid clinic, and then later the city of Montreal, in search of blood, in many cases using the promise of sex to get close to her victims. The victims, after a brief incubation period, become rabid, their skin turning pale, foaming at the mouth, overcome by an insane urge to attack, bite, and thereby infect whomever they come into contact with.

There are strong suggestions of vampirism in Rabid. In addition, Rose’s condition is made doubly monstrous by her being only periodically aware (until late in the film) of the ramifications of her mutated status and the actions that result from it. She confesses early on to Dr. Keloid “I’m crazy and I’m a monster,” but the good doctor assures her that it can be fixed - she then takes the opportunity of a hug to drink from the doctor’s bloodstream. Much later, Rose’s boyfriend Hart confronts her with her Typhoid Mary status:

Rose: “It’s not my fault”.

Hart: “It’s you... you carry the plague, you killed hundreds of people!”

Rose: “I’m still me, I’m still Rose!”

Hart: “You’re not Rose”.

On the outside she’s a pleasant, attractive woman, the same woman that rode with Hart on the back of his motorbike before the accident that brought them to the Keloid Clinic. But hidden within is a monster, a monster unleashed by the physical mutation that was a side-effect of Keloid’s meddling with the human body by means of his experimental skin graft. Of course, the casting of porn star Marilyn Chambers in the lead role is symbolic of all this: formerly the Ivory Soap girl, she turned in later life to having hardcore sex for anonymous viewers in the pre-video age of pornography.

Cronenberg’s early films have led some commentators to see in his monsters misogynist or homophobic creative intentions. David Sanjek, discussing Shivers in the light of his first four films, notes that they all feature women who have been labelled as “monsters” due to some male action: witness the sexually rapacious women in Shivers, Rose in Rabid, Nola Carveth in The Brood, and Kim Obrist in Scanners (1996: 57-8).[9] He goes on to condemn the lesbian kiss between Betts and Janine as proof that if a lesbian relationship exists in Dr. Hobbes’ (Cronenberg’s?) world, it would be initiated violently, and only between two “monstrous” women, concluding in the end that it appears that many of Cronenberg’s films “construct narratives whose story-lines exist on the basis of the victimization of women who are made the objects of male power” (67, 70).

Andrew Parker focuses on Rabid instead, linking monstrosity, the media reaction to the AIDS crisis, and national and sexual difference. He comments that “...Cronenberg has consistently been drawn into the same monstrous terrain where sexuality grafts itself onto nation, the same terrain the mass media have exploited since the advent of the AIDS crisis” (1993: 210). Parker sees in Rabid a remarkable anticipation of all the fears, all the “murderous details,” that would come to dominate the American media’s reaction to the AIDS epidemic, notably how sex is linked with death in the syringe/penis that Rose extrudes from her armpit when hungry for blood (216). Oddly, he parallels the sexual difference between straights and gays to the instabilities within Canada’s borders, suggesting that Montreal (the site of Rabid) has a singular, sexualized role in Anglo-Canadian imagery. His youthful travels north of the border have convinced him that Québec is an Anglo-Canadian metaphor for lustful desires and inner subversion, for homosexuality (213, 222).[10]

The central problem with both Sanjek’s and Parker’s critique, besides their basic exegetical errors and limited sympathies, lies in their being stuck in the first stage of Cronenberg’s dialectic. They both concentrate on the monstrous body in his films, on the centrality of the horrific in his tales.  In so far as Cronenberg is just a teller of Gothic tales, he might be legitimately accused of at least misogyny (although this is a complex issue even at this level), and on a very limited reading of his films, of homophobia too. But there is more going on in his films than either Sanjek or Parker realize, as we shall soon see.

Forging ahead, we find yet more evidence of the monstrously mutated body in The Brood (1979), Cronenberg’s Gothic tale of psychiatry gone wrong. In it we meet Dr. Hal Raglan, whose science of “Psychoplasmics” (in a bizzare parody of Freudian psychoanalysis) insists that by somatizing one’s inner demons, one’s rage, one can overcome them. Unfortunately, those following his therapeutic techniques cannot get rid of the monstrous mutations that result from the Psychoplasmics regimen. Early in the film we meet Mike, whose externalized rage causes welts to cover much of his body; later, we meet Jan Hartog, whose treatment by Raglan has given him cancerous growth on his throat. But the real monsters in this film are the “brood” themselves, a gang of malformed murderous children running amok in suburban Toronto. We discover their physiological details after one of them dies and is given an autopsy by the city coroner: it has no irises or retinas, sees only in black and white, has a thick and inflexible tongue, no teeth, and a collapsed fleshy sac between its shoulder blades, like the yolk sac of certain fish. This “gas tank” was once full of nutrient material, but is now empty. Finally, we find out that they lack sexual organs, and (even more provocatively, according to the coroner) have no navel. This indicates their true monstrosity: they were never really born, at least as we understand birth.

The monstrous circumstances of their birth are revealed in true horror-film fashion in the final scene, when we find out that the brood are the immaculately conceived offspring of Nola Carveth’s unconscious rage against her parents, husband, daughter, and others. Frank (her husband, and the frustrated hero of the piece, played by Art Hindle) finds Nola in a bunkhouse near the Psychoplasmics chalet, squatting on the floor - after a brief discussion, she reveals her bloated stomach, with a multi-coloured sac growing from her navel area. She kisses and sucks on the sac, blood drips out, she rips it open, and out pops another little monster, another “child of her rage,” as Raglan calls it.  In the end, after the brood is defeated by Raglan and Frank, we see a closeup of Nola and Frank’s daughter Candy in the front seat of the Carveth’s car: she too has a pair of psychosomatic welts on her arm. We can almost imagine the traditional horror film schlock here: “the end, or is it?,” with promises of more chills and thrills in the non-existent sequel.

As final evidence of the importance of the monstrously mutated body in Cronenberg’s films, we come to The Fly. In an early test of the telepods he hopes will allow him to avoid car sickness and, incidentally, revolutionize modern transportation, Seth Brundle tries them out on a test subject, a baboon. The result is a quivering mass of exposed flesh: it seems that his computer has turned the baboon “inside out.”  But the real horror is set in motion later when, in a drunken fit of bravado to impress the temporarily absent science reporter Veronica, he teleports himself. A fly buzzes into the teleportation chamber as he closes the door; the confused computer combines the genetic sequences of Seth and the fly into one being, a being Seth later christens “Brundlefly.”

The transformation isn’t instantaneous - it takes place over several weeks. He slowly loses his human characteristics (his fingernails, hair, smooth skin) while acquiring fly-like traits (thick hair, sticky ooze from his fingers, super-strength). Seth scientifically chronicles his transformation on videotape, storing his discarded body parts as “archaeological artefacts of a bygone era” in his medicine cabinet which he nicknames the “Brundle Museum of Natural History.” The horrific quality of Seth’s transformation is doubled when be becomes fully aware that he has a “disease” with a purpose, to turn him into something else - Brundlefly. The external and psychological Gothic meld here: Seth realizes with horror that not only is his body mutating into something non-human, but that his mind, his formerly sacrosanct Cartesian ego, is changing in ways that will cause him to make strange new demands on that body and on the people around him. The tragic quality of Seth’s plight is clear in his “insect politics” speech to Veronica:

“You have to leave now and never come back here. Have you ever heard of insect politics? Neither have I. Insects don’t have politics. They’re very brutal. No compassion. No compromise. We can’t trust the insect. I’d like to become the first insect politician. You see, I’d like to, but, I’m afraid... I’m saying I’m an insect who dreamt he was a man and loved it. But now the dream is over - the insect is awake... I’m saying, I’ll hurt you if you stay.”

In the finale, the then barely recognizable Seth pleads with Veronica to help him be human again by agreeing to a telepod-aided fusion of Brundlefly, herself, and her unborn child (by Seth) into one body in a bizarre parody of the Christian trinity. He suggests that this will be the “ultimate family,” three in one. Naturally, Veronica resists, accidentally tearing off the remnants of Seth’s human jaw. Brundlefly then sprouts insect parts, as his face and flesh melt away, and the bugman within emerges. Once the monster has emerged in toto, there is only one narrative recourse left to the Gothic storyteller: its death.[11]

An important but less obvious theme that illustrates Cronenberg’s Gothic intentions is the psychological horror evident in some of his films, what we might call the “internal Gothic.” This is where the monstrosity exists within. Psychological horror can be found early in Cronenberg’s work in Shivers, where, once infected, the characters are ruled by an insatiable lust, a monstrous appetite. Copulation (and the infection of others) is their only thought. They are impelled by dark forces beyond their control.

We find a parallel horror in H. Rider Haggard’s She, where its chaste narrator Holly describes the mixture of wonder and revulsion he feels when first laying eyes on Ayesha, the mysterious long-lived African queen:

“I have heard of the beauty of celestial beings, now I saw it; only this beauty, with all its awful loveliness and purity, was evil - or rather, at the time, it impressed me as evil... It lay rather, if it can be said to have had any abiding home, in an imperial grace, in a godlike stamp of softened power, which shone upon that radiant countenance like a living halo. Never before had I guessed what beauty made sublime could be - and yet, the sublimity was a dark one - the glory was not all of heaven - but none the less glorious... Drawn by some magnetic force which I could not resist, I let my eyes rest upon her shining orbs, and felt a current pass from them to me that bewildered and half blinded me.”  (Haggard 1976: 163)

The powerful repressions that keep his id in its proper Victorian-era place are let loose by the overpowering beauty of She, as Holly is drawn by the “magnetic force” of Eros down into his body and its drives. He is infected by his own brand of parasite. Later, he curses this lust as tied to an inner treachery:

“Curses on the fatal curiosity that is ever prompting man to draw the veil from woman, and curses on the natural impulse which begets it! It is the cause of half - ay, and more than half - of our misfortunes. Why cannot man rest content to live alone and be happy, and let the women live alone and be happy also?” (167)

This is the same inner treachery that overcomes the tenants of the Starliner Towers in Shivers as their lusts stage an all-too-successful coup d’état against the government of their rational egos, seizing control of the ruling powers of the self.

We see a further variation on this inner treachery in Rabid. Here the internal horror comes in two forms: Rose’s own horror at being the unknown source of a plague, and the virulent rabies that turns its victims into violent, mindless sub-humans. After the epidemic is well underway, Claude Lapointe, an official of the Québec Bureau of Health, appears on television to explain how the disease works: he announces that it has a six- to eight-hour incubation period, that it results in sweat, shakes, foaming at the mouth, violence, and the urge to bite others; finally comes a coma, then death. He provides the “official” narrative, in precise language, of the progress of this internal horror. Rose’s dilemma is quite different, though: she is immune to the disease itself, but must continue to feed on the blood of others (and thereby infect them) if she’s to stay alive. Her appetite for blood makes her a monster within, her body’s needs subverting her will.

We find a parallel sense of internal horror in Charles Maturin’s eighteenth-century novel Melmoth the Wanderer, a collection of Gothic tales united by the occasional appearance of the apparently immortal, evil-eyed Melmoth. One of the stories centers on the goings-on in a Spanish monastery. When one of the monks falls in love with a female novice disguised as a boy, the Superior discovers their clandestine meetings, and orders a sadistic brother (who is in the monastery to escape a criminal charge) to lure them into a gloomy underground vault where they are imprisoned and the door nailed shut. When their hunger leads one of them to half-heartedly attempt cannibalism, the criminal monk muses over how dire straits can make any of us cast aside all of our finer notions and emotions:

“One physical want, one severe and abrupt lesson from the tintless and shrivelled lips of necessity, is worth all the logic of the empty wretches who have presumed to prate it, from Zeno down to Burgersdicius... A trivial and ordinary want, whose claims at another time they would have regarded as a vulgar interruption of their spiritualised intercourse, not only, by its natural operation, sundered it for ever, but, before it ceased, converted that intercourse into a source of torment and hostility inconceivable, except among cannibals.” (Maturin 1989: 213)

This surrender of love and friendship to raw hunger is the same surrender that Rose makes in Rabid, as she preys on her erstwhile benefactor Dr. Keloid, on her best friend Mindy, and on anyone else who happens to be present when she needs nourishment. She manages to resist feeding on her boyfriend Hart, but just barely. Her horror is like Seth’s in The Fly: she knows what’s happening to her body, and how this affects her actions, and how these actions hurt others, but there’s nothing she can do about it.

In The Fly there is an interesting dream-sequence where Cronenberg himself makes an appearance, playing a gynecologist delivering Veronica’s baby. This sequence comes right after she tells her somewhat annoying former lover Stathis Borans (John Getz) that she’s pregnant with Seth’s baby, and has even more of an “internal Gothic” feel to it due to the fact that it is not initially announced as a dream, but seems to be a continuation of the “real” story. Cronenberg encourages Ronnie to push harder to help the baby come out; when it does, the doctor and nurses are shocked to discover a squirming, bloody giant larva, thus confirming her worst fears about the invasion of her body by Seth’s mutated genetic material. In this case we can imagine Cronenberg as “delivering,” both gynecologically and cinematographically, a little Gothic horror from inside of Ronnie’s body (or, figuratively speaking, from inside our unconscious minds).

Dead Ringers (1988) also uses a dream sequence to illustrate an internal somatic horror. The film centers on the “fabulous” Mantle twins, Elliot and Beverly (both played by Jeremy Irons), successful gynecologists in Toronto. They become involved with an actress, Claire Niveau (Genvieve Bujold), without her at first realizing that there are in fact two of them. The twins’ lives and psyches are inextricably intertwined: they are extensions of one another. The less frivolous and more effeminate Beverly falls in love with Claire, but cannot break the tie that binds him to his brother. He dreams one night that they are lying naked in bed beside each other, linked by a fleshy mass (there are allusions to Siamese twins throughout the film). Claire appears, and begins to gnaw through the mass, telling Bev that she’ll separate them. Bev awakes screaming in horror at the prospect of isolation from his brother, and, one presumes, at the horror of the traditional intimacy of the heterosexual union promised by Claire’s love.

There are yet more Gothic elements in Cronenberg’s picture of the human body in Dead Ringers. Early on, Elliot Mantle muses that he thought there should be beauty contests for the insides of human bodies, and standards of beauty for the entire body, inside and out. Later we see doctors and nurses in a inexplicably dark operating theatre cloaked in long red gowns, suggestive of priestly attire. Later still, after Beverly starts to go mad, he insists an artist (Anders Wolleck, played by Stephen Lack) fashion bizarre gynecological instruments that look more like medieval implements of torture than modern precision surgical tools. He calls these “Gynecological Instruments for Working on Mutant Women.” He explains the need for these instruments to his brother in an insane ramble about his female patients:  “They look all right on the outside, but their insides are deformed. Well I had to deal with it somehow! Radical technology was required.” And to frame it all, the opening credits, in black, red, and white, feature old engravings of odd-looking medical instruments, an eviscerated woman, twin fetuses in the womb, internal organs, and Siamese twins. The background of the film is starkly modern, but its spirit pre-modern, almost medieval. All in all, Dead Ringers establishes a clear thematic link between modern medical science, Gothic horror, and the human body as the site of both.

We can turn to the conclusion of William Beckford’s Vathek, after the demise of the Sultan and his mother, to hear the Gothic moral of the story of using the body as site for unholy science and a “voluptuous unrestrained appetite”:

“Such was, and such should be, the punishment of unrestrained passions and atrocious deeds! Such shall be, the chastisement of that blind curiosity, which would transgress those bounds the wisdom of the Creator has prescribed to human knowledge; and such the dreadful disappointment of that restless ambition, which, aiming at discoveries reserved for beings of a supernatural order, perceives not, through its infatuated pride, that the condition of man upon earth is to be - humble and ignorant.” (120)

This is the same moral that we might draw from Cronenberg’s cinema seen purely and simply as tales of Gothic horror.

Chapter 2. The Id Unchained: The New Gothicism of the Body as a Site of Psychopathological Rebellion

Closely tied to the body as a site for Gothic horror is a sort of New Gothicism of psychopathological sexuality and aggression, a Gothicism of the late machine age. Under this level our unconscious psychical discontents are let loose, disrupting civilization at least on a local level. These discontents are psychopathological in the sense that in their full expression - in the form of sex and violence unchained to socially acceptable forms - they are pathologies, diseases that our normally repressive society cannot tolerate and seeks to purge from the social body. This level of interpretation exists in an unstable equilibrium both with the previous level and with the next one, the body as technologically transformed - indeed, as Cronenberg’s filmatic opus declares, it has to be technologically transformed in the first place for these pathologies to be released.

Once again we must return to Cronenberg’s first commercial feature film, Shivers, for the foundation of this level of interpretation. Unlike his seventeenth-century predecessor and namesake, Cronenberg’s Dr. Hobbes decides that the problem with our society is that it has become too civilized, advanced too far beyond the nastiness and brutishness of the state of nature. The general structure in place at the start of the film is indicated by the TV pseudo-commercial for the Starliner Towers Cronenberg inserts to get things rolling: rational, pristine, worry-free order. Indeed, these apartment buildings present us with the aspiration to a dehumanized perfection, for they are a “citadel of twentieth-century Cartesian order” (Beard 1983: 18). They are also a comment on the emotional limitations of an overly urbanized and containerized North American society as a whole. Hobbes has decided (as we hear from his colleague Rollo Linksy, played by Joe Silver) that “Man is an animal that thinks too much. An over-rational animal that’s lost touch with its body and its instincts.”  Hence he created the parasite that would free us from this excess of rationality, one that Rollo informs us was a “combination of aphrodisiac and venereal disease that will hopefully turn the world into one beautiful, mindless orgy.” Unfortunately, his test subject and lover Annabelle got out of control, and he took it upon himself to terminate both the experiment and Annabelle in a grisly scene early in Shivers that helped to establish Cronenberg right from the beginning of his career as a purveyor of “tasteless” horror films.

Later, in Naked Lunch, based very loosely on William S. Burroughs’ pornographic fantasy novel of he same name, Cronenberg revisits the over-rationality of our civilization through Bill Lee, the Burroughs stand-in whose experiments with drugs lead him to the alternate reality of the Interzone. The second scene of the film is set in a New York City café in 1953, where Bill’s friends Hank and Martin (loosely based on Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg) are discussing writing. They solicit Bill’s opinion on the subject, and he replies: “Exterminate all rational thought. That is the conclusion I have come to.” But this excessive rationality exists not only in the minds of those seeking release from it, but also in the physical environments with which Cronenberg surrounds his characters. As John Harkness (1983: 24) points out, the buildings and cityscapes Cronenberg uses as backdrops are “tautly Apollonian” malls, subways, and high-rises. Since their high-tech beauty are “logical monuments to clarity and order,” the “eruptions of madness and disease in these regions is much more shocking.” We can see examples of these monuments to clarity and order in the Starliner Towers, in the Keloid Clinic, in the ConSec headquarters, and in Max Renn’s television studio. All in all, Cronenberg’s characters start as prisoners in their self-made iron cages of rationality, both within and without.

By their very nature Cronenberg’s quite body-conscious and striking earlier films exposed themselves to political attacks from various quarters. These attacks came from the shocked bourgeois ashamed that such things could be seen in public, from feminists angry at Cronenberg’s apparently negative portrayal of women, and at sexual libertarians upset with his apparent feeling of revulsion for sexuality. Cronenberg has answered these charges with an aesthetic of gore for gore’s sake: “The appeal of horror is beyond politics. It’s accessible to political criticism, but the appeal is very direct - right into the viscera, before it gets to the brain” (Rodley 1997: 60). He seems to be claiming that he has unchained the id, and washes his hands of any responsibility for the unpleasant political consequences of its being let loose on the screen.

The most famous case in point of a politically motivated attack on Cronenberg came in the September of 1975 issue Saturday Night from the pen of Robert Fulford (writing under the pseudonym of “Marshall Delaney”). Playing the appropriately shocked bourgeois, Fulford wrote a scathing review of Shivers entitled “You Should Know How Bad This Film Is. After All, You Paid for It.” He used his review to attack the then liberal funding policies of the Canadian Film Development Corporation, which helped to bankroll Shivers, arguing for an elitist definition of Canadian national cinema. Shivers, he said:

“...is an atrocity, a disgrace to everyone connected to it - including the taxpayers. The question it raises is an old one now...: should we subsidize junk (or worse than junk) in order to create an ‘industry’ that will also, possibly, produce indigenous and valuable feature films?”  (Quoted in Morris 1994: 69)

Cronenberg wasn’t too fazed by what producer André Link called in his reply in Cinema Canada “Delaney’s Dreary Denigration.” He snapped back with a letter to the Globe and Mail wherein we get an early hint of his interest in psychoanalysis:

“Delaney’s reaction seemed perfectly legitimate: that he found the film repellent... Delaney’s response was fine! I liked it. It was silly but it’s too bad he couldn’t have had that reaction and understood that it was a valid thing for a film to do to someone, rather than denying it and pushing it away... He doesn’t understand catharsis, and that’s what the film can do: it’s a release of inner tension to get involved with a film like that and have it end the way its does. That was partly my aim, both publicly and personally...”  (Quoted in Chesley 1975: 23-4)

In this tussle over the legitimacy of Shivers as a piece of cinematic art Cronenberg enunciates an thematic intention that is all too clear to any recent viewer of the film, whether they approve of its politics or not: that it aims at inducing a cathartic effect in the viewer with its picture of a sexuality unchained to social repressions.

The key that unlocks both the central theme of the film Shivers and thereby illustrates the importance of the body as a site for psychopathological rebellion in Cronenberg’s work involves a scene between Dr. Roger St. Luc and Nurse Forsythe in the basement of the Starliner Towers. Earlier, as St. Luc sits staring at medical reports, Forsythe casually strips naked right in front of him. He hardly notices. We can take this as evidence that Dr. Hobbes was indeed right that at least some of us have become “over-rational animals.” But like everyone else in the building, Nurse Forsythe becomes infected with the parasite, luring the unsuspecting Roger into her arms to deliver the following speech:

“Roger, I had a very disturbing dream last night. In this dream, I found myself making love to a strange man. Only I’m having trouble, you see, because he’s old and dying and he smells bad and I find him repulsive... But then he tells me that everything is erotic, that everything is sexual. You know what I mean? He tells me that even old flesh is erotic flesh. That desire is the love of two alien kinds of creatures for each other. That even dying is an act of eroticism. That talking is sexual. That breathing is sexual. That even to physically exist is sexual. And I believe... and we make love beautifully.”

Cronenberg seems to be saying that this feeling of omnisexuality, this feeling that even existence itself is sexual, is indeed an accurate feeling, yet a feeling we repress when moving from savage and barbaric social forms to civilization. But it’s always there, lurking in the id, in the collective primitive unconscious of the race. When these repressions are stripped away, we civilized men and women chafe against the bars of our cages, like Nietzsche’s beast of prey, or like the characters in Shivers.

The parasites in Shivers act as unleashers of a pure sexual will. Not only is this will much more intense than that experienced by the repressed, but also less discriminating in the sexual objects it cathects onto. As Nurse Forsythe informs us, everything is erotic. Cronenberg breaks pretty well all the taboos in his depiction of the wide variety of sexual couplings in the film: a white man pouncing on a naked black woman in a corridor; a father erotically kissing his daughter Erika, and offering her to the harried St. Luc; the famous lesbian kiss between Betts and Janine; the hint of gay male sexuality in the person of two men in bathing trunks frolicking through the building, asking Roger if he wants to go to a party; and last but not least, the hint of sadomasochism and bestiality in the form of a pair of twin girls St. Luc encounters in a stairwell: they’re being held on leashes, and bark like dogs.

Indeed, there is strong evidence that Cronenberg allies himself (perhaps with his tongue partially in his cheek) with the parasites, with the venereal disease. We see this in visual clues in his films and in interviews, thus refuting the attack on him from Robin Wood that his films are “reactionary” portrayals of sexual disgust. In Shivers there’s a sign on the doctor’s wall that informs his patients that “Sex is the invention of a clever venereal disease.” This may appear to point towards some degree of revulsion for sexuality. Yet Cronenberg clarifies this point to Chris Rodley:

“Venereal disease is very pro-sex, because no sex, no venereal disease. I know that some people think this is disgusting stuff, but in Shivers I was saying ‘I love sex, but I love sex as a venereal disease. I am syphilis. I am enthusiastic about it in a very different way from you, and I’m going to make a movie about it.’” (1997: 151)

Mary Campbell (1984) presents an intriguing interpretation of where Cronenberg derived his picture of the horrifying consequences of unchaining Eros from. She argues that, consciously or not, Cronenberg “has drawn on the structure and world view of the ancient science of alchemy to produce his modern opus of dread” (308). Her analysis shows how the technological tinkering of the scientists and doctors in his films from Shivers to Scanners wind up linking the reproductive process to disease and catastrophe, despite their best intentions to transform the dross matter of everyday bodies into something more powerfully healthy, sexual or productive. She concludes:

“Cronenberg’s films, in linking reproduction, transformation, and disease so tightly, present a supremely alienated view of our biological life: it is a conspiracy to exist, assured of success because it is symbiotic with our individual emotional hungers for love and for children. Even the high priests of abstraction - scientists in their antiseptic labs - are ultimately henchmen of the ravening Life Force and its pure urge to multiply.” (318)[12]

We get more evidence of this ravening Life Force in other films. In Rabid, Rose’s penis/syringe drives her to seek out sexual partners from whom she can drink her fill of blood, giving a whole new meaning to the phrase “letting your little head do the thinking.” Yet for Rose the unchaining of Eros is more of a prelude to her unchaining of that other giant of the unconscious, Thanatos. We see her seduce Lloyd Walsh in the Keloid Clinic immediately after her rude awakening from the skin-graft surgery, puncturing him at the appropriate moment; she corners and feeds on another patient at the clinic, Judy Glasberg, in the swimming pool, Cronenberg once again flirting with lesbian overtones; later comes an unfortunate truck driver who offers her a lift into the city; and later still comes a patron of a Montreal porn theatre, who she ironically informs (remembering that Marilyn Chambers was a notorious porn actress in the seventies) “I really like seeing these movies, but men always bother me,” just before the coup de grâce. Unlike Shivers, Rabid offers the viewer a picture of a character, Rose, torn between the life and death instincts, of a body where the twin pathologies of Eros and Thanatos in extremis do battle. This is further complicated by the fact that most of her victims are seeking casual sex before being infected, suggesting that Cronenberg had some prescience about the coming AIDS crisis.

In Videodrome, the theme of Eros unchained is made more explicit. Early in the film we encounter Max Renn, the manager Civic TV, in a meeting with his cohorts Raphael and Moses. They’re reviewing the soft porn film Samurai Dreams, which features a geisha pleasuring herself with an ornately carved dong. Moses approves of Oriental sex as “natural,” but Max isn’t happy. “It’s soft,” he says. Instead, he’s “looking for something that’ll break through... something tough.”

Max gets what he’s looking for when he meets Nicki Brand and, coincidentally, is zapped with the Videodrome signal, which we later discover has been engineered to create a hallucination-inducing tumour in the watcher’s brain. Nicki, a talk show host who deals with emotional and sexual distress (played by Debbie Harry of the rock band Blondie), introduces Max to a world of kinky sex heavily modulated by the Videodrome signal’s bizarre hallucinations. In their first encounter she asks Max for some porn to help get her “in the mood.” Max plays his Videodrome tape, and this does the trick - she asks him to cut her with a pocket knife while she fantasizes about being a “contestant” on the Videodrome torture and mayhem show. Instead he inserts a pin in her ear while kissing her, the blood trickling down her lobe. In another encounter, Max burns Nicki’s breast with a cigarette, “branding” her in a way that Freud’s primal horde would, no doubt, have appreciated. Once again Eros and Thanatos are unchained, and all mixed up, by a technological intervention into the human body initiated by unseen (at least for the time being) and malevolent mad scientists.

Even in his later films, we find strong evidence that the unleashing of an unrepressed sexuality is a central thematic concern to Cronenberg. Naked Lunch is obviously concerned with such a theme. Cronenberg goes so far as to create creatures that symbolize this unleashed Eros: early on in his drug-induced Interzone fantasy, Bill Lee meets a “mugwump,” a greyish reptilian creature which sports a row of chism-squirting penal growths on its head, and who Kiki, a young gay man in the bar, declares is “an expert in sexual ambivalence.” The film literally bristles with psychoanalytic metaphors - e.g. the lust-bug that emerges when Bill and Joan Frost have sex, Tom Frost’s unconscious speaking directly to Bill while his lips move to the beat of other words entirely, and typewriters mutating into amorous insects - and with portrayals and symbolizations of “perverse” sexual acts.

Crash follows suit in its treatment of psychopathological sexuality. The film is drenched in sex. It starts, in fact, with three consecutive sex scenes, first between Catherine (Debra Kara Unger) and an anonymous man in an airport hanger, secondly between her husband James Ballard (James Spader) and a young Asian woman on the set of a TV commercial he is directing, and thirdly between Catherine and James on the balcony of their high-rise apartment. The sex in Crash is presented as either mechanical and emotionless, as in these early encounters, or as dehumanised and bestial, like the impulsive couplings in Shivers. Indeed, both Cronenberg himself and commentators such as William Beard (2001: 383) have suggested that the mood of Crash is very much a return to the stark, bleak and uncompromising aura of his early films like Shivers.

As I’ll discuss in greater detail in chapter three, Crash flirts with the theoretically minded viewer’s critical faculty: it announces its central theme at different junctures, through Vaughan, as either psychopathological sexuality or the technological transformation of the human body. In a key moment midway through the film when James and Vaughan are driving at night, Vaughan tells James that the car crash can be seen as a liberating event:

Vaughan: It’s the future, Ballard, and you’re already part of it. For the first time, a benevolent psychopathology beckons towards us. For example, the car crash is a fertilizing rather than a destructive event - a liberation of sexual energy that mediates the sexuality of those who have died with an intensity impossible in any other form. To fully understand that, and to live that... that is my project.

James: What about the reshaping of the human body by modern technology? I thought that was your project?

Vaughan: A crude sci-fi concept that floats on the surface and doesn’t threaten anybody. I use it to test the resilience of my potential partners in psychopathology. (Screenplay 42)

Leaving aside the confusion caused by this duality of interpretation, the former is definitely one of its central themes: we see this time and time again in the auto-erotic scenes with which Cronenberg challenges the viewer. A case in point is a scene halfway through the film where we see James and his wife Catherine in bed. As James fucks her from behind, Catherine queries him concerning the number of women that Vaughan has had in his car, the smell of his semen, whether James would like to insert his own penis into Vaughan’s anus, and related issues. As they fuck a strange psychosexual bond with the absent mad scientist Vaughan is forged by Catherine and James’s fantasies, all linked to his love of the automobile and of the car crash.

Lastly, in eXistenZ, Cronenberg’s ode to the thrills and dangers of virtual reality in the computer age, the main characters give in to sexual and aggressive “game urges” that probably reflect their own hidden urges. While playing a version of eXistenZ, Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and Ted Pikul (Jude Law) start to make out in a corridor behind a virtual computer game store, their “game characters” having taken over their actions.[13] Later, while having lunch in the Chinese Restaurant, Ted tells Allegra that he feels the urge to kill someone, to which she replies that since he won’t be able to stop himself, he might as well enjoy it. He chooses the Chinese waiter, shooting him in the face.

As Freud announces in his Civilization and its Discontents (1961: 69), “...the meaning of the evolution of civilization is no longer obscure to us. It must present the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species.” So it shouldn’t come as a surprise, given his admiration for Freudian psychology, that just as Cronenberg made psychopathological sexuality the centerpiece of Shivers, Naked Lunch, and Crash, that he allows the death instinct to take center stage in Rabid and The Brood. As already mentioned, Rabid presents a curious mixture of the two primal instincts: Rose is led by her hunger for human blood to attack a number of victims, who in turn become rabid and violently assault all and sundry, although she uses her victims’ sexual urges to bring them within striking distance of her penis/syringe. She is a sexual aggressor, a ravenous vampire who spreads a plague that turns the infected into wild beasts with no control over their aggressive urges. Her victims (and their victims in turn), unlike Rose herself, present the eruption of pure Thanatos, blind, hungry rage untamed by social restraints.

In The Brood, with Nola Carveth’s physicalization of her pathological anger into her hissing, seething brood, we find Cronenberg putting pathological anger on display. They are the physical representatives of her murderous id, furious at her mother for a history of abuse suggested to the viewer through flashbacks, at her father for his being an alcoholic weakling, at her husband Frank for no longer loving her and wanting custody of their daughter Candy, and at Candy’s school teacher Ruth Mayer for the beginnings of a romantic interest in Frank. Nola sends out this brood to deal with each one of them, all but Frank meeting a grisly demise at their hands. She even becomes angry with Dr. Raglan, her spiritual father, but he manages to forestall the inevitable until the final scene of the film when the brood assault him en masse. As Raglan informs a sceptical Frank just before the good doctor sacrifices himself to Nola’s anger as manifested in the brood: “They’re her children Frank, more exactly they’re the children of her rage. They’re motivated only by her anger, whether that anger is conscious or subconscious.”

Raglan’s therapy Psychoplasmics is pure catharsis: he tells his patients to somatize their inner rages into physical symptoms. “Show me your anger. Then I can understand it!” he tells his patient Mike in the opening scene of the film, which takes place in an auditorium where Raglan is demonstrating the power of his Psychoplasmics therapy. Mike replies, struggling with his repressed rage at his father, “This is me daddy. This is what you do to me inside”: we see his body covered with ugly welts, the outer manifestations of the shape of his unconscious rage. Later, with Raglan role-playing the various villains in Nola’s life, Nola tells Raglan/Mother about her anger at her being beaten as a child. Flipping back into his role as psychiatrist, Raglan repeats his mantra: “Show me your anger Nola. Show it to me. Go all the way through it. Go all the way through it to the end. Right to the end,” almost shaking this anger out of her. Once again, thanks to the miracle of somatic catharsis, Nola’s anger is brought into the light of day and thereby temporarily dissipated. Cronenberg’s twist comes when we discovery that this apparent dissipation of her repressed rage has travelled down a Gothic highway, a road ending in the manufacture of her monstrous brood.

Given that one of Cronenberg’s central concerns is the display of sex, anger, and violence for cathartic purposes, it should come as no surprise that he buys into Freud’s repression hypothesis concerning the nature of contemporary civilization. “Catharsis is the basis of all art,” he tells Chris Rodley (73). “This is particularly true of horror films, because horror is so close to what’s primal.” One of the functions of art, especially the type of films that Cronenberg makes, is to put on display on the cinema screen our hidden drives so that we can find some small release from their being bottled up within our psyches and bodies. In Civilization and its Discontents (1961: 62), Freud argues for this hypothesis, saying that since civilization imposes great sacrifices on human sexuality and aggressivity, it’s hard for us to be happy: we’ve traded our happiness for our security.[14] He concludes that the desire for a powerful ego uninhibited by social repressions is hostile to civilization. These repressions lead to psychic deformations: “We must therefore not forget to include the influence of civilization among the determinants of neurosis. It is easy, as we can see, for a barbarian to be healthy; for a civilized man the task is hard.” (1969: 42)  It can easily be argued that a key element in Cronenberg’s somatic dialectic is his depictions of the rise and fall of these momentarily healthy barbarians, of characters temporarily liberated from a repression of their basic drives and set loose on the world.

Once again, we can return to Shivers to see Cronenberg’s initial experiment with the lid of repression being yanked off of a small slice of civilization, and the Pandora’s box of uninhibited sex and aggression that is thus opened. As Chris Rodley (40) puts it, in Shivers we seem to see the end of the unconscious.  “There it seems to be, thrown up on the screen in all its truly perverse and initially repulsive splendour, unmasked and unashamed”; the film went beyond one’s worse fears of “repressed forces, desires and twisted sexual fantasies.” Shivers can be seen as a horror-film version of Marcuse and the Frankfurt school’s utopia of a fully liberated Eros. Naturally, the picture that Cronenberg paints of the tenants of the Starliner Towers roaming the corridors to satisfy their now unrepressed lusts is a highly ambiguous one, despite the filmmaker's protestations that he empathizes with the infected characters. Eros unchained is not a little bit monstrous.

Cronenberg makes explicit his support for the Freudian Weltanschauung and the hostility of art to social repression in his interviews. He tells Rodley (158) that “If art is anti-repression, then art and civilization are not meant for each other. You don’t have to be a Freudian to see that. The pressure in the unconscious, the voltage, is to be heard, to express. It’s irrepressible. It will come out some way.” Cronenberg’s language here, which hints at hydraulic lines and valves, at electric current and resistances, is pure Freudian. In the interview that accompanied the video re-release of Rabid, he reiterates this point. He tells the unseen interviewer that he sees his films as subversive, as appeals to the unconscious. Further, he says that if the Freudian formula that civilization is repression is right, that anything that appeals to the unconscious, such as art, “is automatically subversive of civilization at a certain level.”

There is even evidence of the other side of the coin, of repression fully in place and thereby impotent to act, in Cronenberg’s films. Michael Pray makes the interesting point that the archetypal male protagonist in his films, contrary to feminist expectations (given the received wisdom of Cronenberg’s misogyny), is a disengaged, passive, ultimately fragile outsider (1992: 10). His ego is defended by the thinnest of shells, easily shattered by powerful forces within (e.g. somatic mutations in Videodrome and  The Fly) or without (e.g. Nola’s rage and its progeny in The Brood, Claire Niveau’s implied threat to separate the Mantle twins in Dead Ringers). A case in point is Rose’s boyfriend in Rabid, Hart Read (played by Frank Moore). Hart spends most the film in a futile attempt to save Rose from the effects of the plague that she carries. In one scene, Hart is talking to Rose on the telephone: she tells him that she’s just fed on a male victim, and locked herself in an apartment to observe the results. As they talk the victim of her fatal caress becomes rabid: Hart realizes he can’t get to them in time to save Rose, so he pounds the phone on the floor in impotent rage. Time and time again, Cronenberg’s male protagonists, from Hart to Roger St. Luc to Max Renn to Bill Lee, ally with the repressive psychic forces trying to contain the psychopathological rebellions at the center of each drama, and each time their efforts are defeated by these rebel forces.

Yet more evidence can be found for the repression hypothesis in Cronenberg’s films. In Videodrome Max appears on the Rena King show to explain how the diet of sex and violence Civic TV dishes up to the television public serves a socially positive role of allowing people to satisfy their fantasies and frustrations. All the soft porn that Civic TV offers the public is cast in a positive light: it’s just a matter of releasing our repressions from the cages established by our superegos. Max defends his view against Rena’s traditional moralism that television promotes a climate of violence and sexual malaise, and against his fellow guest Nicki Brand’s view that we live in an over-stimulated society where we gorge ourselves on a diet of tactile, emotional, and sexual titillation (although it quickly becomes evident that Nicki revels in this excess of stimulation herself). One can certainly see as one of the main themes of Videodrome how the mysterious tumour-inducing signal leads to a fantastic unchaining of Max’s inner demons, although Cronenberg leaves it unclear whether his activities under this regime of liberation are real or hallucinated.

In Dead Ringers, we get one of the first Cronenbergian treatments of repressed male homosexuality. Elliot Mantle, the more aggressive, womanizing and archetypically male of the Mantle twins, is hinted to feel a strong incestuous homosexual desire for his brother Beverly, and uses women as a medium to channel that desire. This is strikingly portrayed in the scene where Elliot and his girlfriend Cary (Heidi von Palleske) are slow dancing. Cary invites Beverly to dance, which he does; Elliot hugs them affectionately from behind. He offers his brother a real menage à trois upstairs to follow this implied one, but Beverly rejects the idea, collapsing on the floor immediately afterward.

Naked Lunch, Cronenberg’s homage to writing and weird sex, has scenes that are truly fantastic, featuring an André Bretonesque jamboree of images. In one of these the central character, part-time writer and full-time bug exterminator Bill Lee (Peter Weller), seduces Joan Frost by groping her from behind as she writes erotica on an Arabic typewriter, a “Mujahadeen.” He’s been ordered to do so by his cockroach “controller,” no doubt a projection of his id.[15] Its keyboard opens up into vaginal flesh, its “wings” inflate into breasts, and a writhing penis emerges out of the back of the machine. As they make love on the floor, the typewriter completes its metamorphosis into a slimy lust-bug, which then pounces on them. It’s main torso is a shiny bum, with feelers protruding on the sides, and a devil’s tail forking out its rear end. It’s not much of a leap to imagine this lust-creature as Cronenberg’s visual manifestation of the id: it has no face or brain, no means of reasoning or communication, just the means of giving and receiving sexual pleasure. It’s pure naughtiness. Fadela, the Frosts’ lesbian housekeeper, intervenes - she whips this “evil and insane thing” out of the apartment. She represents a harsh and punishing superego, always on guard against the id’s attempts to slither unchecked out of the unconscious. The lust-bug scuttles over the edge of the balcony and falls to the ground, becoming once again the Mujahadeen with its workings smashed on the pavement, revealing the hallucinatory nature of the whole incident.

Earlier in the film we witness a more didactic illustration of the Freudian theory that repressed unconscious drives seep into everyday words and actions. Tom Frost (Ian Holm) is talking to Bill Lee about the merits of various brands of typewriters. At a certain point the words we hear coming out of Tom’s mouth fall out of synch with his lip movements: we hear him tell Bill that he’s been trying to kill his wife Joan for years, but not on the level of conscious intention, which would, of course, be monstrous. When Bill objects that it must be conscious, since they are discussing it, Tom asks him to look at his lips, which he points out are saying something else. Here Cronenberg is laying out Freud’s theory of the psychopathology of everyday life by means of the technical trick of overdubbing Tom’s unconscious dialogue on top of his more banal quotidian chit-chat (although, as with everything else in Naked Lunch, we must assume this to be part of Bill’s drug-induced fantasy). Tom’s basic drives come to the surface in so powerful a form here as to trump the voice of his ego.

Naked Lunch also plays with gender and homosexuality, in the spirit of Burroughs’ original work. Burroughs’ real life at the time he wrote Naked Lunch in the 1950s was mired in drug addiction and remorse for the accidental shooting and killing of his wife Joan layered on top of homosexual desires that he took as repellant and unacceptable (Beard 2001: 304). Cronenberg wonderfully shifts this psycho-sexual struggle from Burroughs’ personal biography to Bill Lee’s fictional existence in the film. The whole Interzone, Lee’s drug-induced Middle Eastern fantasy realm, is saturated with unrestrained and exotic sexuality. On the most basic level, the giant talking bugs and mugwumps Lee hallucinates symbolize a monstrous homosexuality that he can only in part acknowledge. The characters he meets there - Yves Cloquet, Kiki, Hans, Dr. Benway, and perhaps Tom and Joan Frost - are all either gay or bisexual. Lee is able to open himself up the possibility of releasing his repressive controls over his own homosexual desires by having the bug-writer his Clark-Nova typewriter turns into inform him that he is an undercover agent for a secret organization, and that homosexuality is the agent’s best cover. Later, over a drink with Yves (Julian Sands), Lee tells an invented story of how be became aware of his pathological sexuality in the best Mickey Spillane-style tough guy prose starting with the line, “I shall never forget the unspeakable horror that froze the lymph in my glands when the baneful word seared my reeling brain - I was a homosexual!,” and ending with the sad demise of his friend Bobo, the wise old drag queen.

Later, when Bill and Kiki visit Cloquet’s house, and Cloquet invites Kiki to see his parrots in a separate room, Bill wanders off to shoot up. When he returns, he sees Cloquet transformed into a giant centipede mounting the innocent young Kiki from behind, his claws plunged hook-like into Kiki’s bleeding head. This is the strongest picture of a predatory homosexuality in the film, and it suitably shocks Bill Lee, though the parrots seem indifferent to events.

In the penultimate scene in Naked Lunch, Bill comes upon the mugwump dispensary full of drug addicts “milking” chism from mugwumps suspended from the ceiling of a dark room surrounded by Romanesque columns. It is a sad and desperate place; Hans is there, totally hooked on the chism. Fadela is directing the operation, while a beaten and subdued Joan Frost follows her around, writing over and over “all is lost” into a notebook. When Bill approaches Fadela, she rips off her clothes, exposing her breasts; then she also rips off her face and breasts, which it turns out were a mere prosthesis, revealing none other than Dr. Benway (Roy Scheider) beneath. The repressive lesbian has transformed into the cigar-chomping drug kingpin. With this scene we see that neither gender nor sexuality are stable things in Cronenberg’s cinema.

On a broader level, Cronenberg sprinkles hints throughout his films that Freud’s psychoanalytic picture of the family drama is the key to understanding our repressed psychic drives. In Rabid, we meet Judy Glasberg at the Keloid Clinic, who has come for a nose job. She carries with her a book on Freud by Ernest Jones, commenting on her coming operation “I’m terrified to find out what it really means.”

The Brood is one extended meditation on psychotherapy. Hal Raglan is a sort of Freud on speed, demanding a physicalization of his patient’s psychological problems where the cure is often worse than the disease. The shape of Nola’s own rage, her brood, take revenge on an abusive mother, an inert father, and a wayward husband who aims to take her real daughter away from her. The sins of her parents are visited back upon them by Nola’s hateful unconscious. To underline this theme, when Frank Carveth and the police visit the garret apartment where Nola and her daughter Candy lived for nine months before taking up with the Somafree Institute, we see pictures of famous psychoanalysts on the wall - Freud, Jung, R. D. Laing, and Raglan himself, a veritable psychoanalytic hall of fame.

Thirdly, Scanners surprises us with a family drama in depth - we discover at the end of the film that Cameron Vale, the “good” scanner, is in fact the brother of Darryl Revok, the head of the power-mad evil scanners. And to make things even cosier, Dr. Ruth is their father, having created them both in the biological  sense and as scanners, since he invented the painkiller Ephemerol that when given to pregnant women accidentally caused their unborn children to become scanners. We get another brother-based family drama in Dead Ringers, except this time the tie that binds the brothers is not excessive anger, but too much affection, with an absent father and a dead mother who is the object of Oedipal love for the twins.

Lastly, Naked Lunch can be seen as one gigantic drug therapy session for Bill Lee, with the film based on a book whose writing was, no doubt, therapeutic for Burroughs himself. We can extend this metaphor to eXistenZ, where the therapy isn’t brought on by drugs this time, but a computer-generated virtual reality on which at least Allegra has become dependent. For both Bill Lee and Allegra Geller, it’s very difficult to get off the psychoanalytic couch of the alternate realities they lose themselves in.

Many, but not all, of Cronenberg’s films focus on the psychopathological rebellion of the body against the mind, though in a few cases the opposite is true. In Shivers, Rabid, The Fly, Videodrome, Naked Lunch, and Dead Ringers, physical changes bring about mental ones; in The Brood and Scanners, the process operates in reverse. Crash and eXistenZ are more ambiguous: in Crash the characters’ new attitudes towards automotive technology certainly changes their bodies; yet at the same time the wounds and freshly-minted orifices they received in car crashes are partly responsible for opening up the possibility of a psychopathological sexuality in the first place. Lastly, eXistenZ seems to be about how virtual reality changes our perceptions and feelings about our bodies, yet since those bodies are purely virtual (except for the last scene), it’s difficult to categorize the film as a case of minds revolting against bodies. It’s more about how bodies disappear under the influence of VR.

In any case, Cronenberg’s psychopathologies are brought about by rebellions and revolutions of various stripes. Interestingly enough Williams S. Burroughs foreshadows all  of this in Naked Lunch, where he describes an entity called the “Human Virus” that lives off a human host, seeking drugs, sex or power, but which eventually dehumanizes its host, making it the slave to physical or psychological needs, a lower form of life (Morris 77). This theme of a rebellious flesh is made clear in a scene in The Brood we meet Jan Hartog (Robert A. Silverman, a Cronenberg regular), a former patient of Raglan’s. He has developed cancerous growths on his throat thanks to Raglan’s Psychoplamics therapy that are spreading to the rest of his body. He tells Frank “I have a small revolution on my hands, and I’m not putting it down very successfully.”

As we’ve already seen, the parasites in Shivers act as agents provocateurs in fomenting a rebellion in the bodies of the residents of the Starliners Towers; Rose’s deadly embrace in Rabid brings with it a viral infection that turns her victims into ravenous animals; while the Videodrome signal causes Max Renn’s body to mutate into a new flesh which is initially at the beck and call of Barry Convex and his new corporate masters, instituting a rather radical corporeal change in regime. Indeed, Cronenberg himself uses this political metaphor for bodily revolts in an interview to Mondo2000:

“I don’t think that the flesh is necessarily treacherous, evil, bad. It is cantankerous, and it is independent. The idea of independence is the key. It really is like colonialism. The colonies suddenly decide that they can and should exist with their own personality and should detach from the control of the mother country. At first the colony is seen as being treacherous. It’s a betrayal. Ultimately, it can be seen as the separation of a partner that could be very valuable as an equal rather than as something you dominate. I think that the flesh in my films is like that.”

Layered on top of this rebelliousness of the body is a certain biological determinism in his films - the flesh will have its way. Cronenberg told Chris Rodley (144) that twins research tends to support this biological determinism: “Freedom of choice rests of the premise of freedom from physical and material restrictions. But the twins research suggests a fair amount of biological predestination.”  We get this coming out in Dead Ringers as a whole, with the Mantle brothers’ almost pathetic mutual dependence, but specifically in the remark that Elliot makes to Beverly concerning their sharing of sexual secrets: “You haven’t had any experience ‘til I’ve had it too. You haven’t fucked Claire Niveau ‘til you tell me about it.” Of course, Elliot goes beyond just being told about it, sharing Claire with his brother sexually too. We see this biological determinism in Cronenberg’s other films too, notably Shivers, Rabid, Scanners, The Fly, and in its own way Crash.

The last issue to be dealt with in this chapter is the extent to which Cronenberg’s view of the way the body relates to its environment is a specifically Canadian cultural motif. Speaking of the marriage of technology and sex in Crash, Cronenberg told Rodley (10) that the characters in the film approach the crash as a “fertilising” event, like the diseases in his earlier films: “In Crash I’m saying that if some harsh reality envelops you, rather than be crushed, destroyed, or diminished by it, embrace it fully. Develop it and take it even further than it wanted to go itself. See if that’s not a creative endeavour.” We see lots of harsh realities in his films - the parasites in Shivers, scanners, strange mutations caused by rogue television signal, a man/fly hybrid, not to mention the auto-erotics of Crash. And confrontation with harsh realities is part of the Canadian ethos, part of our garrison mentality.

An important text for helping us to understand Cronenberg’s Canadian cultural pedigree is George Grant’s essay “In Defence of North America,” from his 1969 book Technology and Empire. Grant agrees with Northrop Frye’s picture of the settlement of Canada as the planting of a series of well-defended urban garrisons in the middle of a vast, threatening, indifferent nature, leading for Frye to a garrison mentality. As Grant (17) puts it, “There can be nothing immemorial for us except the environment as object. Even our cities have been encampments on the road to economic mastery.” We see lots of evidence of these encampments in Cronenberg’s work: the Starliner Towers in Shivers, ConSec headquarters in Scanners, the urban landscape seen in Videodrome, and most strikingly the freeways and high-rises in Crash, which was filmed within a few miles of Cronenberg’s Toronto home. Even in his adaptation of Steven King’s The Dead Zone, we see a snow-encrusted town on a frozen lake that is supposedly a quaint New England village, but is in reality Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. The hero Johnny Smith’s (Christopher Walken) inner life is equally frosty - his paranormal ability to have visions of a person’s future by touching them alienates him from most of the human race. He garrisons himself against this unwanted intimacy by retreating from life, love and celebrity, moving to another town to teach developmentally challenged children.

Grant ties this inner frostiness to the Protestant morality of the early Scottish and English settlers in Canada (excluding Québec, of course). In their Christianity our physical nature didn’t matter:

“What did the body matter; it was an instrument brought into submission so that it could serve this restless righteousness... When one contemplates the conquest of nature one must remember that that conquest had to include our own bodies. Calvinism provided the determined and organised men and women who could rule the mastered world. The punishment they inflicted on non-human nature, they had first inflicted on themselves.” (“Defence,” 23-24)

This sense of the need to master the body, and of how this mastery can all too easily fail, is in evidence in pretty well all of Cronenberg’s films, right from the Shivers sex mania to the game urges of the characters in eXistenZ. In fact, this drive to bodily mastery is often treated by Cronenberg as a distinctly male problem - witness Max Renn’s struggles with his loss of control over both his cognitive life and his changing physical makeup in Videodrome, Seth Brundle’s attempt to use his teleportation device as a sort of high tech Viagra in The Fly, Bill Lee’s unwanted slide into homosexuality in Naked Lunch, and Vaughan’s projection of an aggressively male persona onto his filthy old Lincoln in Crash. For Grant, the Canadian Protestant conquest of the body as part of their conquest of the land was heroic (25). For Cronenberg, these garrisons are already in place, with red-coated soldiers of Reason manning the ramparts, awaiting the inevitable rebellions of irrationality.

William Beard argues forcefully that the psychological regime of self-repression, restraint, and control as a response to solitude and a dangerous environment we see in Cronenberg’s characters necessitates an acute alienation from nature and their bodies (1994: 125). For Beard, disasters in Cronenberg’s world come from...

“. . . the mistaken belief that nature is knowable, that nature is not the enemy, that rationality can be naturalized or nature rationalized. In this respect, Cronenberg is true to the Canadian model: nature is the enemy of consciousness; it is unknowable, unconquerable. Nature is death.” (127).

This cuts off his characters from external nature, which is pictured either wintry and bleak, as in The Brood and The Dead Zone, or is non-existent, as in The Fly or Crash. It also cuts them off from their internal desiring and irrational natures, only to have that nature re-emerge as a psychopathological rebellion once the mad scientist of the piece has worked his magic on the human body. The philosopher’s stone that works this magic are the black arts of dangerous new technologies. This builds us a bridge from the New Gothicism of psychopathological rebellion to Cronenberg’s science fictional impulse, the subject of the next chapter.

Chapter 3. Technological Transformations: Cronenberg’s Science Fictional Impulse

Under this level of interpretation the body is theorized as the site for technological transformation. This is the “science fictional” reading of Cronenberg’s corpus. Here the struggle becomes one of Nature vs. Technology, one where the possibility of some form of technology-aided emergent evolution is suggested. The key films for this level of the dialectic are those of his “Techno-Fantasy Triad,” Scanners, Videodrome, and The Fly, although all of Cronenberg’s films share this impulse to some degree, right up to Crash and eXistenZ.

Videodrome makes it clear that Cronenberg intends his viewers to leap from his second to third levels of interpretation when Bianca O’Blivion (Sonja Smits) tells our hero Max Renn at her Cathode Ray Mission that his talk about sex, violence, imagination and catharsis on the Rena King talk show were “some very superficial things.” Instead, she suggests a technological solution to the problems faced by modern human beings - more television.

Meditations on technological transformation of the body moves Cronenberg from the horror to the science-fiction genre. Going overboard somewhat, Bart Testa (1995) argues that Cronenberg is (for the most part) best seen as purely a science-fiction director, especially given the fact that his stories add Explanation to the traditional horror-story structure of the Onset of the monster, its Discovery, a Confirmation of its existence, and the final Confrontation with the monster (44-46). The Explanation is the key to separating science fiction from horror: the monsters in the latter genre are often age-old terrors like vampires and werewolves, whereas those in the former are either the products of a fresh human technology, or from another world, and thus have to be “explained.”

Science fiction monsters usually start as an enigma to the human characters in the film or story. The characters in Them! might ask, “Why are the ants twenty feet tall and angry?”; those in The War of the Worlds might be curious about the red-hot glowing things buried in craters all across the country; while those in Alien might wonder why they’re having stomach cramps. Scientists and government officials usually provide the explanation of these unusual events. In Cronenberg’s films we get an interesting twist on the traditional structure of science fiction: the same characters both cause and explain events. Testa points out convincingly that the explanation for the origin of the monster-protagonist is the technological manufacture of the body, and that the “new flesh” rhetoric in Cronenberg’s later films constructs an infinitely malleable body (48).  Further, Cronenberg’s whole mise-en-scène inherits Frye’s “garrison mentality” or edge consciousness - Canadians build abstract spaces as “an expressly technological construction of environment, not a space of comfort but an aggressively defensive border against Nature.” (49) Cronenberg’s new flesh is always the product of some technological innovation that attempts to pierce this border of consciousness to get at the lost beast within.

In his first four features, Cronenberg has doctors introduce techniques of technological transformation before the films start - Dr. Hobbes’ parasites, Dr. Keloid’s morphogenetically neutral skin grafts, Dr. Raglan’s radical psychotheraphy, Dr. Ruth’s Ephemerol.  The source and effects of these technological transformations become evident as the plots of these films move forward, as many of the main characters develop horrific science-fiction bodies. In Videodrome and The Fly, we see the black science envelop the central, very male characters before our eyes. In Crash and eXistenz, Cronenberg extends this science to a more diverse group of characters, using a strong female lead in the latter film for the first time since Rabid.

Scanners, in a way Cronenberg’s most commercial film, shows us how the supposedly benign use of the pain-killing drug Ephermerol by pregnant women in the 1950s (an obvious reference to Thalidomide and the deformations it caused) led to the creation of a race of telepaths who could move physical matter with their minds - the scanners. Once the cause of the birth of scanners became evident twenty or more years after the fact, the ConSec corporation tries to convert them into intelligence operatives or a military weapon. On the other hand, Darryl Revok and his group of renegade scanners use a ConSec lab to put into effect the Ripe Program, which involves the deliberate administration of the drug to pregnant women to create a new batch of scanners as part of a plot to take over the world. The drug’s creator, the well-meaning Dr. Paul Ruth, calls this an “insane crusade,” yet admits that Revok’s murder of unfriendly scanners represented a loss to mankind of “the most spectacular human beings that ever walked the face of the planet.” He hoped the scanners could bring a “glory and a brilliance to our society that has never been seen before,” illustrating his almost absurd hubris about the capacity for the technological transformation that his drug brought about to change the world.

The mood of the film echoes George Grant’s view of technology. He says of we North Americans that we “took our science pragmatically,” and moved deeply into a technological society while keeping our optimism and innocence (37). Yet our liberal horizons have faded in a “winter of nihilism,” as a pure will to technology has helped to create the “most realised technological society which has yet been; one which is, moreover, the chief imperial centre from which technique is spread around the world” (40). We see this winter of nihilism, this pure will to technology applied to the human body in both Scanners and The Fly, though in the latter it is motivated not by the desire for money and power, but by a more garden-variety type of lust.

In The Fly, Seth Brundle tells Tawney, a woman he picks up in a bar for some casual sex, that he builds bodies by taking them apart and putting them back together. Seth is all bravado at this point, drunk with the physical endurance he thinks he has gained purely from the teleportation experience (which he first used to impress Veronica, his main love interest in the film). His body has been technologically transformed, yet not in the way that he at first thinks. Even before his body is spliced with that of the housefly we see evidence of the technological transformation to come: after sex with Veronica, we see a computer chip wedged in his bare back.  He has in effect turned his teleportation device into a gene splicer, since it can fuse two or more organisms into one being. Cronenberg may have had some prescient fears about genetic research here - Dolly the sheep was only about fifteen years in the future, and a teleportation device is in effect a science-fiction version of a cloning machine. We get the ultimately grisly picture of such a splicing at the end of the film when Stathis Borans’ attack on Brundlefly interrupts the latter’s attempt to fuse with Veronica. The teleportation takes place, and Brundlefly (now quite horrific) is fused with part of one of the telepods, a chunk of metal extruding from his back. This is a sort of backwards reference to the computer chip wedged in Seth’s back, and a reminder that for Cronenberg the technological transformation of the body always has at least bleak, if not deadly, consequences. Seth is Icarus, or Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein, reaching too high in his attempt to reshape the human body, his wings melting in the sun.

Dead Ringers, the first Cronenberg film to entirely exclude the paranormal and science-fiction monsters from the screen, tells the story of the Mantle twins’ use of gynecological technology to “fix” their female patients - or in reality, to deal with their own deeply held neuroses. I’ve already mentioned Beverly’s “Gynaecological Instruments Working on Mutant Women,” which he has the artist Anders Wolleck fashion for him. Beverly’s insane preoccupation with repairing “mutant” women was fostered initially by Claire Niveau’s deformed uterus and inability to have children. Later, after Beverly has descended deeper into paranoia and begins strange and pointless operations, he tells Elliot that his female patients are getting stranger and stranger, looking “all right on the outside” while being deformed within. Referring to his new instruments, he says to his brother: “Well I had to deal with it somehow! Radical technology was required!” Sadly, this first attempt by Beverly to use a “radical technology” to work out his neurotic relationship with women gives way more and more for both twins to a second technological fix for their troubled connection to women and each other, a cornucopia of drugs that leads eventually to murder and suicide for the pair.

Cronenberg’s very next film, Naked Lunch, returns to the technology of drugs as an enabling device for both the creative process of writing and for Bill Lee’s attempt to reconcile himself with his latent homosexuality. But there is another technology in the film that rattles and clatters and even chatters throughout it - the typewriter. As William Beard (316-317) points out, Naked Lunch’s typewriters are “ways of disavowing and masquerading projects of sexualized science.”  They channel the unconscious, taking on various psycho-sexual roles for the Lee and the other characters to explore, from the Clark-Nova’s gruff masculinity and hidden homosexuality to the Mujahadeen’s exotic Arabic sensuality.  They sexualize the science of writing, while at the same time turning the various sexualities explored in the film into scientific experiments.

Yet the most complex picture of technological transformation of the body comes in Crash. The background of the film is the alienation, ennui and emotional bleakness felt by the typical middle-class urbanite in North America as represented in extreme form by James Ballard and his wife Catherine. We first see them together on the balcony of their concrete and steel high-rise apartment, the background painted in cool blues and greys (as are the opening credits), with a massive freeway below them. Organic nature has retreated to parks and potted plants, replaced by the scream of jets overhead, the constant hum of electricity around us, the endless rumble of traffic on the streets outside and below us. In this condition both the author J. G. Ballard and his faithful filmic adapter Cronenberg show us one way out, one way to reclaim our lost wild natures: the eroticization of the automobile, the sexualization of the car crash. James’ mentor in this effort is Vaughan, who at first hints that his “project” is “something we’re all intimately involved in: the reshaping of the human body by modern technology” (Screenplay 35).[16]

Yet the beginning of James’ technological transformation comes when he has sex with Helen Remington (Holly Hunter), whose husband he killed in a car accident. Ballard’s novel describes the marriage of flesh and technology time and time again in the perverse poetics of a new sort of passion. Here is his description of James and Helen’s coupling, similar in spirit to Cronenberg’s depiction of it in the film:

“The passenger compartment enclosed us like a machine generated from our sexual act an homunculus of blood, semen and engine coolant. . . In each sexual act we recapitulated her husband’s death, re-seeding the image of his body in her vagina in terms of the hundred perspectives of our mouths and thighs, nipples and tongues within the metal and vinyl compartment of the car.” (Ballard 81, 83)

As Ballard makes clear in the novel, and Cronenberg hints in the film, the James character is both puzzled and overwhelmed by the complexity of the traffic patterns he sees around him on the roads, and by implication the massive role played by technology in our lives. His solution to this puzzle is at first alienation and withdrawal; however, after his accident and meeting with Vaughan, he seeks to solve the puzzle by marrying flesh and technology.

This is made even more literal in his encounters with Gabrielle, the crash victim who gets around with the help of mechanical prostheses. She is already half machine:

“The crushed body of the sports car had turned her into a creature of free and perverse sexuality, releasing within its twisted bulkheads and leaking engine coolant all the deviant possibilities of her sex. Her crippled thighs and wasted calf muscles were models for fascinating perversities.” (Ballard 99, 100)

James imagines her in various sex acts involving complex tools, pulleys and trestles, with her developing a sexual expertise “that would be an exact analogue of the other skills created by the multiplying technologies of the twentieth century” (100). He sees her wounds and gashes as templates for new genital organs that were only in the embryonic stage of their evolution, dreaming of new accidents and new orifices related to the complex technologies of the future (177, 179). Of course, we don’t get this level of complexity of description in the film, though when James finally has sex with Gabrielle he does indeed use what Cronenberg’s screenplay calls a “neo-sex organ,” a deep vaginal slit on the side of her leg. The sex is clumsy, as the couple has to manoeuver themselves around the intricate mechanics of Gabrielle’s modified dashboard and wheel, not to mention her braces.

Yet the key sex scene in at least the film is that between Vaughan and Catherine in the back seat of Vaughan’s Lincoln as James drives them through a car wash. Ballard’s James says that a glow covered them...

“. . . like two semi-metallic human beings of the distant future making love in a chromium bower... I wanted to adjust the contours of her breasts and hips to the roofline of the car, celebrating in this sexual act the marriage of their bodies with this benign technology.” (Ballard, 162)

In the film this sex act cements the cultish relationship between James and Catherine as a couple and the rest of Vaughan’s group. Vaughan is aggressive, animalistic - he is clearly most at home in his “benign technology.” After they finish, Catherine wipes Vaughan’s semen on the car seat in front of her in a ritualistic, symbolic act.[17] Later, we see James in a car graveyard getting into a wreck. Vaughan slithers awake in his Lincoln, which is parked nearby, and smashes twice into the wreck. It’s no surprise this scene takes place immediately after one where James and Vaughan have sex, once again in his Lincoln.

Cronenberg clarifies the role of sex in Crash in an interview at Cannes in 1996 where he said that sex began as a biological fact, but has changed now that we don’t need it to procreate: “Sex has become a human invention, an art form, a form of technology no longer having a biological basis” (Jacobson 1996). This leaves us able to transform sex using whatever technological means we have at hand, including the automobile. In Crash most of the sex is rear-entry.  Some commentators (e.g. Beard 2001) have seen this as evidence of a cycle of sadism and masochism connected to a complex misogyny in the film. Yet there is a more obvious explanation, one based on Cronenberg’s concern with the remoulding of the human body by modern technology. The rear-entry sex exactly parallels two fairly obvious themes of the film: the alienation felt by James and Catherine toward their bourgeois ultra-urban existence, leading to a refusal to look the Other in the face and feel some intimacy toward them; and even more fundamentally, the crashing of Vaughan, James and other aggressive drivers into the rear bumpers of their victims. The latter is usually pictured as a series of speeding-ups, crashes, and backing-offs, a series of penetrations and withdrawals. The most striking example of this comes in the final scene in the film, where James is driving Vaughan’s resurrected Lincoln (Vaughan had died in an earlier crash after pursuing James and Catherine’s car). James takes on Vaughan’s persona, playing cat and mouse with Catherine’s Miata sports car, bumping her from behind several times. Eventually she skids off the side of the road and down a hill, her body thrown from the car. James stops his car, runs to her side, and after checking out the crashed car and ascertaining that Catherine is relatively undamaged, has rear-entry sex with her.

In the simplest terms, sex in Crash is just like a car crash. It absorbs and transforms its aggression and pain into a new type of coupling, a marriage of flesh and technology, to use J. G. Ballard’s own expression.

Lastly, we get another glimpse at the remoulding of the human body with technology in eXistenZ. Early in the film Allegra Geller, the game-pod goddess, tries to convince her fellow traveller Ted Pikul to transform his body into a virtual state by having a bioport installed at the base of his spine, thus allowing him to plug into and play eXistenZ. She tells him, “once you’re ported, there’s no end to the games you can play.” Later Ted is “ported” by Gas (Willem Dafoe), a bounty-hunting gas station attendant, who purposely gives him a defective port to infect Geller’s game; they kill Gas, then visit Kari Vinokur in his faux ski lodge, who repairs Ted’s port. Finally (or so we think) Allegra and Ted can visit the virtual world of eXistenZ together. She’s clearly excited by the prospect, licking her fingers and massaging Ted’s bioport (a small hole in his back) in a sexually provocative gesture, commenting that it “wants action.” Ted objects that the owner of the excited bioport doesn’t want action, but allows her to insert the UmbyCord and start up the game anyway. Ironically, Allegra takes off her boots and socks and lays on the bed to play a game which for her has replaced sex, stroking her biopod to start the simulation. The bioport is a typical Cronenbergian technologically transformed organ, akin to Rose’s penal spike in Rabid or Max Renn’s hallucinated vaginal slit in his belly in Videodrome - it is a visual metaphor for the way that the technologically transformed body is at the same time the site of a transformed sexuality, linking the second and third levels of the somatic dialectic.

The more subtle form of technological transformation in Cronenberg’s films takes place not in the direct sense, as in Crash or eXistenZ, but by means of drugs’ slow alteration of the human nervous system. We’ve seen the long-term effects of bad drugs already in Scanners. Yet Cronenberg’s true paeans to drugs are Dead Ringers and Naked Lunch, which perhaps not coincidentally appeared in succession. In Dead Ringers, Claire Niveau, who Beverly Mantle is in love with, pops amphetamines to escape from her “psychosexual pain.” She gets Beverly to prescribe her drugs, which frustrates Elliot, even though he gives Beverly “Nagasaki” pills to enhance the couple’s sex life. She is the trigger for the brothers’ chemically-induced Gothic internal transformations.

Later in the film Beverly starts to compulsively take drugs, descending into a world of paranoid delusion. Elliot feels the need to play catch-up, starting to become a drug addict himself, explaining to his girlfriend Cary that he and his brother are perceived as one person, that “whatever’s in his bloodstream goes directly into mine.” “Beverly and I just have to get synchronized,” and he uses drugs to do so. Once again, this attempt at synchronization has a Gothic tinge to it - the Mantles are trying to use the technology of drugs to transcend their physical separation, to become one being. Indeed, the only fantastic element in the whole film is Beverly’s dream of he and Elliot laying in bed, linked by a fleshy mass that Claire gnaws at the separate them. This nightmare explains the point of the Mantle’s descent into drug addiction clearly enough - a morbid fear of separation.

In Naked Lunch, Bill Lee’s own fears have to do with how his writing career is connected to the accidental killing of Joan Lee, his wife, and with his latent homosexuality. The role of drugs in the film is again fairly clear: they help Bill create his Interzone fantasy where he can explore both his writing and his homosexuality. Drugs transform Bill into a writer, as they no doubt did the real William S. Burroughs. In the tragic-comic finale Bill drives out of the Interzone on an ancient Bombardier snow-car with Joan Frost sleeping in the back. On arriving at the border check point for the fictional land of Annexia, two Soviet-style guards stop him and ask for his papers and his profession. Bill replies that he’s a writer. After questioning this answer, Bill shows the guards his “writing device” (a pen). Still not satisfied, they ask Bill to write something - he wakes Joan up, and they reprise the “William Tell” routine, with Bill shooting her in the head. The border guard is happy - “welcome to Annexia” he tells Bill Lee. This replaying of the real-world event of Burroughs killing his wife and then taking up writing underlines the way that drugs act as agents of technological transformation which turn Bill Lee from a bug exterminator into a creative person. Like most of Cronenberg’s technologies, they both imprison and liberate.

A third major theme here, after the direct imprinting of technology on the body and the transformations caused by drugs, is the way that Cronenberg’s characters have their bodies extended in space and time by technological media. On this level, Cronenberg shows his McLuhanism, his sense that modern technology, especially modern media, extend the human body - or, as McLuhan himself would say, the human central nervous system. McLuhan took these extensions as very real things, and Cronenberg’s films try to establish this reality for his characters. The most stunning visual metaphor for this is the scene in Videodrome where James Woods’ character presses his face in the mammaric bulges of his mutating TV screen. Also, there’s the use of Ephemerol in Scanners, Vale’s scan of the computer in the same film, and of course the melding of car technology and human flesh in Crash.

McLuhan thought (1967: 26, 41) that “All media are extensions of some human faculty - psychic or physical,” and that electric circuitry specifically are extensions of the central nervous system. They change the ratios between our senses, thus changing us. With electric technology, humanity has extended outside ourselves a live model of our central nervous system; but to do so we must engage in a suicidal auto-amputation, as if the central nervous system “could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism” (1964: 53). Just as the electronic age extends our sensory apparatus, it cuts part of this apparatus off: we drive instead of walking, use the Internet instead of reading books, talk on our cell phones instead of in person. McLuhan took the idea that new media alter the ways that human beings relate to space and time from Harold Innis, his predecessor in communications theory at the University of Toronto. Innis tied the modes of communication within ancient empires and modern societies to their forms of political and economic organization, just as Cronenberg relates new technologies to the way that the human mind and body relate to each other politically.

These ideas are explored fairly explicitly in Scanners. Dr. Ruth tells Cameron Vale, the scanner he’s trying to rehabilitate early in the film, that telepathy “is the direct linking of two nervous systems separated by space,” an apt description both of the scanners’ powers and of modern electronic means of communication seen from a McLuhanesque point of view. Later in the film, after Ruth tells Cameron Vale about the Ripe program and Darryl Revok’s evil plans, he suggests that Vale scan the ConSec computer since it has a nervous system just like a human being does. So Vale calls the ConSec computer’s modem from a telephone booth at a gas station and interfaces directly with the computer - we see his psychic energy zoom along the phone lines into a pulsing circuit board, as his brain joins with the computer’s in a strikingly literal picture of McLuhan’s notion of media as extensions of the central nervous system. In fact Cronenberg shows us an image of the two brains melting into one during Vale’s link with the computer. In the end Vale causes the ConSec computer to blow up, while the phone melts in his hand.

Yet Cronenberg’s true ode to McLuhan and the Toronto School of communications theory[18] is Videodrome. The media prophet we first see on a television screen on the Rena King Show, Brian O’Blivion, is a painfully obvious fictionalized version of Marshall McLuhan, right down to the hint of alliteration and Celtic prefix in his name. In fact, O’Blivion and his daughter Bianca are Max Renn’s guides to the “video world made flesh,” the New Flesh that the Videodrome tumour makes possible. Bianca O’Blivion is the keeper of her father’s flame, preserving him in video form by maintaining a massive collection of video tapes of his musings after he has shuffled off the mortal coil in bodily terms. She then helps him to appear as a video persona on chat shows even though he is physically dead. Another part of Bianca’s mission is to patch the derelicts and homeless people of the neighbourhood near her Cathode Ray Mission into the “world’s mixing board.” She feeds them a diet of TV instead of alcohol or drugs, perhaps to cool their nervous systems down in McLuhanesque terms.

Yet the most direct displays of McLuhanisms come in Max Renn’s story. In what could be an imitation of McLuhan’s own ironic misquoting of his famous mantra, for Max the Videodrome signal has allowed the medium, namely TV, to become his massage. He starts to hallucinate after being given a few doses of the Videodrome signal by his disloyal video pirate employee Harlan. He suggests that Videodrome, which at first seems like an endless succession of pointless torture and murder, is just an underground show from Malaysia bounced off a satellite. Bianca sends him a video cassette of her father’s musings, which pulsates and breathes when Max removes it from the envelope it was delivered in. When Max plays it we get what is probably the key speech in the film, one vibrating with pure McLuhanisms, followed by a personal warning to Max about the dangers of the Videodrome signal:

“The battle for the mind of North America will be fought in the video arena, the Videodrome. The television screen is the retina of the mind’s eye. Therefore the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore television is reality, and reality is less than television... [His voice becomes more “real,” as Max’s hallucination starts]. You’ll have to learn to live in a very strange new world. Max, I’m so glad your came to me. I’ve been through it all myself you see. Your reality is already half video hallucination. If you’re not careful it will become total hallucination. You’ll have to learn to live in a very strange new world [A torturer in a hood enters and begins to strap O’Blivion down]. I had a brain tumour. And I had visions. I believed the visions caused the tumour, and not the reverse. I could feel the visions coalesce and become flesh, uncontrollable flesh. But when they removed the tumour it was called Videodrome. I was the [as he is being strangled by the torturer]... I... I was Videodrome’s first victim!”

Here Cronenberg is shifting from a Cartesian mind/body dualism to the McLuhanesque metaphor of media becoming part of the “physical structure of the brain.” This shift leaves us in doubt throughout most of the second half of the film as to whether events as we see them are real, or simulated images in Max’s physically altered brain. Cronenberg returns to this playing with illusion and reality brought on by the technological transformation of the body in eXistenZ, which in many ways does for the computer what Videodrome did for television.

After watching Brian O’Blivion’s video demise, we see that the torturer is in fact Nicki Brand. Max’s TV set starts to bulge and pulsate, veins forming on its vinyl surface. Nicki appears on the screen, inviting Max into the video world with a breathy “Come to me. . . come to Nicki.” The screen is filled with Nicki’s lips, which bulge outwards - when Max pushes his face into the screen as we hear panting sexual sounds as the bisected bulge takes the shape of a pair of bounteous breasts. Later we see the TV screen take on the image of bleeding flesh, and in the finale explode, spewing out a collection of bloody organs. And then there’s Max’s pistol, which early on in his hallucinations fuses with his hand into a flesh-gun, later sprouting spikes that penetrate his hand and arm, plugging the pistol into his central nervous system after he has been “programmed” by Barry Convex and Spectacular Optical to become an assassin.

This is all in keeping with how McLuhan saw technology as transforming our bodies. The effects of technology don’t occur in opinions and concepts, but int the way they “alter sense ratios of patterns of perception steadily and without resistance” (1964: 33). He saw new inventions and other technologies as both extensions and self-amputations of our physical bodies, which demand new ratios and equilibriums among the other organs and extensions of the body (54). Thus it goes in Videodrome and in most of Cronenberg’s other films: Max is subjected to the Videodrome signal, which causes him to develop a brain tumour which hallucinates such extensions to his body as the belly slit and the flesh gun.

McLuhan saw the way that technologies cause our bodies to mutate as having a clearly sexual side:

“Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology. Man becomes, at it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man’s love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth.” (1964: 55-56)

This not surprisingly is the theoretical background to Crash. The driver is modified by the automotive technology he or she uses to move through space. Ballard and Cronenberg’s innovation comes in telling a story of how drivers in fact become the sex organs of this technology, melding with the chrome, plastic, and steel of the car in a series of sex acts. Of course, the car reciprocates by annihilating distance, not to mention acting as a steel cacoon for its occupants’ perverse sexuality. The numerous sexual encounters I described in Chapter 2 give us enough evidence that Cronenberg intended this reciprocal relationship as a key theme of the film. Yet the best case for the car being an extension of the human body in Crash involves Vaughan’s relationship to his Lincoln. The scene where he slithers awake in his rusty old car with a junkyard in the background shows us that Vaughan truly is a part of his technology, the sex organs of his Lincoln. This deep identification of a man with his technological extension is pure McLuhan.

Our last evidence of McLuhanite technological transformation of the human body in Cronenberg’s films can be discovered in eXistenZ. The virtual reality games pictured in the film are extensions of the mind and its fantasies of power, sex, and adventure. When Ted Pikul asks Allegra and Kari Vinokur how the virtual-reality producing biopods work while they are sojourning in Kari’s ski lodge, Allegra tells him that they plug directly into a person’s central nervous system, using it as a power source. This hearkens back to Scanners: a technological transformation has altered the human body to such an extent that the mind can produce a powerful alternate reality (though in the case of eXistenZ, the very idea of reality is blurred). Further, Allegra sees herself as the mother of her biopod: she tells Ted Pikul in a motel room where they’re supposedly hiding out from Realist assassins that her “baby” had taken a huge hit and that she could be crying out for help. The pod is her child both literally, as the container of the VR software she’s written, and figuratively, as the purveyor of an alternate reality that she cannot attain as an isolated real-world individual.

A fourth theme connected to the role of technological transformations in Cronenberg’s films is the somewhat muted one of the how leaps in evolution create new and unexpected bodily forms. Cronenberg seems to be an enthusiastic admirer of the notion of “emergent evolution,” at least early in his career. This is the idea that biological novelties emerge after leaps in evolution, and that these events can’t always be predicted, just calmly observed (Morris 24). He made it clear to Chris Rodley (41) that he understood emergent evolution as the process where “certain unpredictable peaks emerge from the natural flow of things and carry you forward to another stage.” Indeed, as early as his micro-budgeted experimental film Crimes of the Future (1970), we hear the following musings over the decline and fall of a former friend from the film’s protagonist Adrian Tripod:

“He was once a fierce sensualist, but he has now become a pure metaphysician. His body has begun to create puzzling organs, each one very complex, very perfect, unique, yet seemingly without function. As each is surgically removed, it is quickly replaced by another equally mysterious... His body, he insists, is a galaxy, and these creatures are solar systems... His nurse says that his disease is possibly a form of creative cancer.”

Pretty well all of Cronenberg’s films show us at least one such burst of evolutionary change, one such creative cancer. The parasites in Shivers and Rose’s spike in Rabid are obvious candidates, though the latter is hard to see as a positive development in any sense. Scanners gives us a more sanguine picture of emergent evolution: the conquest of the physical world by the mental thanks to the strange mutations caused by Ephemerol. Yet even here the evolutionary shift is not all sweetness and light. This is made clear in the early scene where Cameron Vale sits in the food court of a shopping mall dressed in a shabby trenchcoat: he is overwhelmed by the tower of babble that is the combined thoughts of the people sitting around him. Beard (1983: 43) sees the film as exploring what would happen if the barriers of mental and corporeal self-containment broke down and we were engulfed by the thoughts of others, possibly leading to madness. Certainly, the capacity to overhear the thoughts of others would be no blessing if one were never able to turn them off.

Videodrome is an even stronger paean to the joys and sorrows of emergent evolution. Bianca O’Blivion, the chaste herald of the coming video age, makes this clear to Max Renn when he visits her in the Cathode Ray Mission. She describes her father’s creation of Videodrome as “the next phase in the evolution of man as a technological animal.” Once again McLuhan’s metaphor of the how new media extend our mind and body, recombining and transforming their elements, is taken quite literally by Cronenberg.

Yet it’s the apparent changes in Max’s body itself that give us the clearest picture of this evolutionary process. There is, of course, the famous vaginal slit that opens up in his belly as he sits on the couch in his apartment. He places a pistol into it, and it disappears. It later re-emerges as a flesh-covered phallic pistol, welded organically to Max’s hand. There is certainly some gender-bending going on here: the ultra-masculine Max is compelled to develop a female sex organ which later produces a death-dealing male gun/organ. However, the vagina is also a symbol of submission and weakness for Max, as when Barry Convex thrusts a videotape into it to “program” Max to serve Spectacular Optical and kill Bianca. He’s fucking Max both sexually and with his mind, his will, at the same time. In this one horror-show image Cronenberg combines metaphors for excessive male aggression, fear of female sexuality, and overweening corporate power.

Cronenberg continues his explorations of creative technological cancers in Crash. He makes the connection between emergent evolution and the role of physical mutations and the blurring of sexual distinctions in his films clear when discussing Crash with Chris Rodley (1997: 82):

“We’re free to develop different kinds of organs that would give pleasure, and that have nothing to do with sex. The distinction between male and female would diminish, and perhaps we would become less polarized and more integrated creatures... Sheer force of will would allow you to change your physical self.”

The leap of faith to new physical forms Cronenberg asks us to make here is perhaps more transcendent than the sort of thing we see in Crimes of the Future or Shivers, yet is a leap of faith all the same.

This is all eerily reminiscent of a movement in pop literature that parallels Cronenberg’s filmic work both chronologically and thematically: cyberpunk. Veronica Hollinger (1990: 35) defines cyberpunk as “hard science fiction which recognizes the paradigm-shattering role of technology in post-industrial society.” Its chief architects, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, show us technology-drenched futures that are simultaneously dark and shining, grim and brilliant, where human bodies are subject to endless shaping and reshaping. The notion that human beings have some sort of “physical essence” wanes, as machines more and more define our mixed essences.  Hollinger argues (42) that the postmodern condition forces us to revise science-fiction’s original trope of technological anxiety, to deconstruct the machine/human opposition “and begin to ask new questions about the ways in which we and our technologies ‘interface’ to produce what has become a mutual evolution.” Cronenberg clearly evokes a cyberpunk sensibility, though he is less concerned with machine evolution than with biology in his earlier work. Yet whether the progenitor of the mutual evolution is medical or machine science, it is without doubt a technological evolution for Cronenberg.

We see a cyberpunk femme fatale par excellence in the character of Gabrielle in Crash. She has been injured in one or several car crashes, and wears a mechanical contraption to support her right leg. William Beard describes her with relish:

“Part biker sex-girl (with a black leather bodice that outrageously cuts out a zippered hole around one breast), part cyberpunk robot-of-desire (Metropolis flashes briefly to mind), part sword-and-sorcery dominatrix in fishnet stockings, Gabrielle consecrates every aspect of her crash-created difference into a style statement, and what the style says is ‘sex’ - kinky, fetishistic, s&m, porno-fantasy sex. . .  She is the poster girl for crash-erotics, complete with a large nouvelle-vagina scar-orifice on the back of her thigh, actually penetrated sexually by James and demonstrating its impeccably Cronenbergian heritage by recalling the strange new sex organs of Rabid and Videodrome.” (Beard 2001: 413)

Yet Gabrielle’s cyberpunk pedigree is only the most visible of that held by the various characters in Vaughan’s circle. Vaughan himself is covered with scars from car accidents; James, Catherine and Helen Remington all enter his magic circle by allying their sexual desires with the sometimes dangerous technology of the automobile. Gabrielle is the cyberpunk ethos made flesh, while the remainder are less corporeal in their embracing of the new physical forms made possible by auto-eroticism. Yet they all embrace the emergent evolution of new forms of sexuality based on car crashes championed by Vaughan.

A final example of Cronenberg’s exploration of emergent evolution is his picture of our mutations into virtual beings in eXistenZ. Allegra, Ted, and the other players (if indeed they are players) of the virtual reality games in the film are shown as losing interest in their physical bodies. Ted feels schizophrenic, out of touch with his body while playing; Allegra makes it clear that she’s willing to sacrifice a sizable chunk of her life to the calling of game design, and that she only feels fulfilled in her time off while playing such games. Indeed, she clearly prefers playing even to sex, a point made clear in the one scene where her and Ted make out in the storeroom behind D’Arcy Nader’s Game Emporium: she accepts the encounter as a game character playing a game, not as a flesh-and-blood woman. Even if the game world of eXistenZ has only a bizarre logic, as is made clear in the Trout Farm, Allegra prefers it to the mundane existence of her physical being in the “real” world. Her chief preoccupation, at least until the end of the film when her project is put into question, is to use virtual reality games to escape from the physical, to emerge into a new sort of technologically-inspired being. More on this in the chapter to come.

Cronenberg also deals with some reactions to technological transformation in his later work. One example is the scene in Crash where Vaughan has a tattoo of a steering wheel burnt into his chest. He tells the tattooist that the tattoo is not meant to be medical, but prophetic, and thus should be “ragged and dirty.” The fact that the tattoo is a steering wheel seems to indicate some sort of personal prophecy for Vaughan, yet he insists that the prophecy he has in mind is both personal and global at the same time. Cronenberg seems to be saying that we moderns all have the image of automobile burned into our hides.

In an online interview (Emerson 1996) Cronenberg remarked that in this scene, which is not in Ballard’s novel, he was appealing to kids’ use of tattooing, scarification, and piercing as a way of reinventing their sexuality. He sees these things as ways of saying that the human body can have a human will imposed upon it. Mark Kingwell deals with the same issue at some length in his 1996 book Dreams of Millennium. He argues that tattooing, piercing, and allied practises attempts “get the body back, to reclaim the messy physical organism from the virtuality of current technology” (182). Kingwell sees the extreme body awareness of some fringe youth cultures as a reaction to what McLuhan called the “discarnate effect” of technology, the way machines divorce us from our bodies. When flesh is rendered virtual, the body becomes a “natural site of cultural resistance, perhaps the last meaningful place to resist electronic encroachment” (182).  Body mutilation can thus be seen as a political act, as a rejection of our civilization’s norms, of the increasing mechanization of the world:

“The pierced or tattooed body takes us away from the cyber and back to the simply material: the flesh as site of pleasure and pain, pleasure and pain as means to truth. And that truth is simple: I am material.” (183) . . .  “To decorate the body becomes, in this view, a way of snatching authenticity from the clutches of a ‘rational’ and ‘scientific’ culture that would increasingly destroy the self.” (212)

Cronenberg tips his hat in Crash to this way of thinking, to all those who desire a return to the musty physicality of the flesh, who want to turn their backs on the New Flesh and return to the Old. Yet just as he’s doing this he shows us how technology can aid in a leap into undiscovered somatic countries, into a transcendence of the Old Flesh that would become so apparent in eXistenz (although it has already been enthusiastically if somewhat roughly sketched in Videodrome). So perhaps Cronenberg sees the technological transformation of the body as our cultural fate, whatever Luddite efforts are made by scarifiers and tattooists to turn back the clock on the process.

When speaking of the technological transformation of the body as the science-fiction element in Cronenberg’s work, the last stage is our drama comes in the moments in his films when characters transcend the flesh, throw off the somatic chains which imprison their spirits. These moments happen in pretty well all of his films from Scanners on, usually representing the denouement of the hero of the piece. In Scanners, we see Cameron Vale visit the rustic studio of Benjamin Pierce (Robert Silverman), a scanner sculptor who staves off madness by means of his art. He has produced a gigantic white head that he and Vale enter and use as the site of a tete-à-tete (Vale is trying to track down the evil scanner Darryl Revok). This is fairly clearly a metaphor for a Cartesian mind/body split - Pierce has been forced to make his distorted mind into something physical to come to grips with it, but also to hide in it. This is turned into a moot issue when Revok’s assassins arrive immediately afterwards and kill Pierce, who has prophetically left the protection of his giant white head.

Yet it’s not until the end of the movie that we see the clearest case of somatic transcendence. Revok tells Vale that they are brothers, the sons of Dr. Ruth, forming the central characters of the film into a tight little Freudian triangle. He goes on to reveal his plan to use an army of scanners to take over the world, a plan to which Vale strongly objects. Vale and Revok then use their telepathic and telekinetic powers to stage a psychic battle royale, veins popping, heads bulging, blood dripping. In the end Vale appears to die. Yet we hear his voice coming from Revok’s mouth telling Kim Obrist that “we’ve won”: he has switched bodies with Darryl Revok in a supreme act of Cartesian transcendence.

In Videodrome, Max Renn acts as the center of efforts to transcend the body. Of course, the very term “New Flesh” comes from this film, and in this sense can be seen as the bridge between Cronenberg’s science-fiction and postmodern impulses (note that the parasites in Shivers, Rose’s spike in Rabid, and the malformed children in The Brood are all quite physical in form, unlike some of the creative cancers in the later films). Max arrives at the Cathode Ray Mission after having been programmed by Barry Convex to assassinate Bianca O’Blivion. After a cat-and-mouse chase, Bianca manages to lure Max to watch a television showing Nicki Brand being tortured. It morphs into a hand wielding a flesh-gun, which shoots Max three times, thus “reprogramming” him to act as a vessel for the video word flesh, for Brian O’Blivion’s message. “Long live the New Flesh!” he shouts.

The final scene offers a more permanent resolution of the mind/body dichotomy which Max has been struggling with throughout the film. In it he casts off the veil of the Old Flesh, embracing the New once and for all. It takes place in a room on a rusty condemned ship in the harbour. Max sits on an old mattress, watching (or hallucinating) a television set on which Nicki beckons him to finish the process of technologically transforming his body:

“Your body has already done a lot of changing, but that’s only the beginning, the beginning of the new flesh. You have to go all the way now, total transformation. . . To become the New Flesh you first have to kill the Old Flesh. Don’t be afraid... don’t be afraid to let your body die. Just come to me Max. Come to Nicki. Watch, I’ll show you how. It’s easy.”

We then see Max commit suicide with his flesh/gun on the television screen, then for real with a pistol to his head. As William Beard suggests (1983: 65), this apotheosis represents a sort of unification of opposites, with Nicki as flesh merging with Bianca as pure spirit in Max’s final state of being - the flesh made video word, a somatic shift from flesh and blood to images encoded on magnetic tape.

A key moment in The Fly continues this theme of somatic transcendence. Seth Brundle is trying to talk Veronica into using his teleporter to arrive at the heightened mental and physical state he attributes entirely to his own use of the device. Veronica suspects something has gone amiss, which indeed it has - Seth has started his transformation into Brundlefly. He rambles that Ronnie is afraid to “to dive into the plasma pool” as he has, afraid to be destroyed and created anew, and accuses her of thinking that his new-found energy is thanks to her having awakened a new sexual flesh in him by sleeping with him. For Seth, Ronnie knows only:

“. . . society’s straight line about the flesh. You can’t penetrate beyond society’s sick, gray fear of the flesh. Drink deep or taste not the plasma spring. See what I’m saying? I’m not just talking about sex and penetration. I’m talking about penetration beyond the veil of the flesh. Deep penetrating dive into the plasma pool!” (The Fly)

Diving into the plasma pool is yet another Cronenbergian metaphor for somatic transcendence. What is this plasma pool Seth is rambling about? What does his device do? It disassembles the molecules of a body in one telepod, turns them into computer code, then reassembles them in the second telepod. In a quite literal sense it is a transcendence machine, a New Flesh Generator. As we’ll see in the next chapter, it’s also a simulacrum generator: it creates an exact copy (perhaps with a bit of fly mixed in) of whatever it’s transporting. The implication is that if it could create one such simulacrum, it could create many copies of a body, shaking the uniqueness of the experience of transcending the body, photocopying body and soul for a few dollars worth of electricity a shot. Yet without making this rather obvious inference, Seth’s machine does allow for a sort of flicker of transcendence before reincarnating a body’s plasmatic pattern into a slightly shifted place.

Finally, since pretty well the whole of eXistenZ is about transcending the flesh, I’ll leave the bulk of my discussion of this theme in the film until the final chapter, noting just one key scene here. After Allegra and Ted flee from the chaos at the game-testing session in the church they wind up at a generic-looking Country Gas Station minded by the generically named attendant Gas (a dead give away that we are already in some sort of simulation). Gas (Willem Dafoe) is aloof at first, but falls down on his knees in worshipful adoration once he recognizes the game-pod goddess Allegra Geller. He agrees to install a bioport in Ted’s back, ushering him into his workshop. He explains to Ted that he was a long-time fan of virtual reality games, one of his favourites being ArtGod, where “Thou, the player, art God.” He jokes about God as artist and mechanic as he prepares to inject the bioport into Ted. Ted becomes paranoid about Gas’s lack of skill in such matters, grabbing a wrench to fend Gas off just as Allegra enters the workshop. She upbraids him for his fear of being ported and entering the world of virtual reality: “...this is the cage of your own making, which keeps you trapped and pacing about in the smallest possible space forever. Break out of your cage Pikul, break out now.” This scene uncannily echoes those in Videodrome and The Fly discussed above where a central character hesitates to cross the final threshold between the old and new flesh, to transcend the body.[19] In each case they must be seduced to cross this threshold by a temptress, although it only works in the two cases where the temptress is female - Videodrome and eXistenZ. This is in keeping with Joseph Campbell’s identification of temptation with siren-like women in his picture of the hero’s journey in mythology. Be that as it may, in each of these three films the champion of somatic transcendence argues with skeptics that they are caught in the cage of their own bodies, whether the bars of this cage are made out of personal fears or a too conservative social morality.

Yet in the end Cronenberg’s somatic dialectic isn’t stable. Instead, it swirls and weaves back and forth between its four elements, especially in his mature films. Remember the scene in Crash where James and Vaughan discuss the point of the latter’s pseudo-scientific investigations. James asks, “What about the reshaping of the human body by modern technology? I thought that was your project?” Vaughan replies, “A crude sci-fi concept that floats on the surface and doesn’t threaten anybody. I use it to test the resilience of my potential partners in psychopathology” (Screenplay 42). Yet as we’ll see in the following chapter, the technological transformation of the body in Cronenberg’s films not only feeds back into explorations of psychopathological sex and violence, but also feeds forward into a postmodern cultural landscape where the body vanishes, then returns as a simulacrum, as a virtual reality. This is Cronenberg’s wild card, one that nicely completes the fourth corner of his dialectical square, a corner less frequently visited in interviews and criticism of his work.

Chapter 4. Postmodern Simulations: The Body Vanishes (And Then Returns)

The final stage of David Cronenberg’s somatic dialectic, and probably the most problematic one (as it’s not clearly enunciated in his many interviews and in the clues given by his characters in the dialogue he’s written for them), is the body as a postmodern simulation. Nevertheless, one can see clear hints of Jean Baudrillard’s notion that we live in a culture that celebrates the desert of the real through its many media- and computer-created simulacra in Cronenberg’s films, especially in Videodrome, Crash and eXistenZ. Under the sign of this element of the somatic dialectic, the body as flesh disappears, only to return as a “new flesh” that is at best only a simulation of real physical flesh. As we’ve seen, James Woods’ character in Videodrome shouts “long live the New Flesh!” just before shooting himself, heralding the vanishing of his body into the nether world of a non-corporeal video existence, into oblivion (like the creator of the Videodrome signal itself, the aptly named Brian O’Blivion). In the most extreme case - in eXistenZ - the body has been turned into what Arthur Kroker calls “data trash,” pure computer code that has lost touch with the well springs of organic life. Under this element the body is transformed to the vanishing point of non-corporeality by modern technology, only to return later under some new guise.

Many of the main metaphors of postmodern cultural theory crop up in Cronenberg’s later films - the rise of the simulacrum and the decline of the real in our media-driven culture, the reproduction or disappearance of the self, the flatness of affect found in postmodern art (including film), the seizing of power by corporatism, and the commodification of a libidinal body of pleasures by late capitalism. A useful roadmap guiding us past the main signposts of postmodern culture is given by J. G. Ballard himself in his 1995 introduction to the new edition of Crash:

“Thermonuclear weapons systems and soft-drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudo-events, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century - sex and paranoia ... Options multiply around us, and we live in an almost infantile world where any demand, any possibility, whether for life-styles, travel, sexual roles and identities, can be satisfied instantly ... We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind - mass-merchandizing, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the pre-empting of any original response to experience by the television screen ... The most prudent and effective method of dealing with the world around us is to assume that it is a complete fiction - conversely the one small node of reality left to us is inside our own heads.” (quoted in Beard 2001: 385)

All of the themes announced by Balllard - the overlit society of the spectacle, the omnipresence of sex and paranoia, the fictions of advertising and mass politics, the power of television - find their ways into Cronenberg’s work in the 1980s and 1990s. Indeed, in some cases they compete with psychopathology and Cartesian mind/body splitting as the central theme in these films. As we journey through this final chapter I’ll discuss how these themes and how hints of theorists such as Kroker, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Jameson, and Eagleton can be found in a careful viewing of Cronenberg’s films.

To begin our discussion, let’s ask the obvious question: what is the postmodern condition? For Lyotard, postmodern culture has grown incredulous towards its meta-narratives, its big stories. Christianity, liberal progress and Marxism are seen as dubious tales, if not downright lies. Further, this condition is one where knowledge has become the principal force of production, and where banks of data are seen more and more as nature for the postmodern individual (Lyotard 1979: 14, 84). The body has shifted from the organic realm of Romanticism through the mechanical realm of Industrialism into the digital realm of the cathode ray tube, the computer and DNA code. Jean Baudrillard (1984) sees us as having entered an age of simulation, the Third Order of Simulacra, where all that’s solid, in terms of signs representing real things, melts into air, where we wander through a desert of the real lit up by neon motel signs and glowing TV tubes announcing our desires before we know them ourselves.[20] Not surprisingly, postmodern theorists worry that under such cultural conditions the body itself is in danger of vanishing. Arthur and Marilouise Kroker (1987: iii) argue that the natural body has disappeared, becoming a “fantastic simulacra of body rhetorics” surrounded by panic mythologies. For Cronenberg too, the natural body has disappeared, being consumed by both the technological transformations outlined in the previous chapter and by the fantastic simulations of our overly mediated age.

Cronenberg announces his own Order of the Body as Simulacrum in a dramatic fashion in the third scene in Scanners. Here we see Louis del Grande as a scanner doing a demonstration in a theater in the Consec building. He asks for volunteers to be scanned. Darryl Revok volunteers, a telekinetic battle ensues, and del Grande’s head explodes in a gruesome fashion.

Yet Scanners offers only hints of the body as a simulacrum. Videodrome explores this theme in much greater depth. We’ve already heard Brian O’Blivion’s prophecy that in the video age the content of the television screen will emerge as raw experience for its watchers. In other words, TV is reality, and reality submerges into television (see Chapter 3 for O’Blivion’s monologue on this issue). We’ve also seen how Max Renn plunges his head into the bulging and pulsating television-screen-made-flesh, a striking visual metaphor for the absorption of the body by the virtual image. The end of the film gives us even more evidence that Cronenberg plays with the idea of the body vanishing thanks to modern technology: Max is asked by the video image of Nicki to embrace a shaky version of Pascal’s Wager, killing the Old Flesh to transcend it and embrace the New, presumably to join her and O’Blivion in the world of televisual simulacra. He shoots himself, repeating once again the mantra “long live the New Flesh!”

We witness another Cartesian attempt to rise above the body in The Fly when Seth Brundle pleads with Ronnie to pierce the veil of the flesh, to dive into the plasma pool and overcome “society’s sick, gray fear of the flesh.” This impulse is driven by Seth’s heightened lust and physical endurance, both product of his slow metamorphosis into Brundlefly, a mere simulacrum of his old self. Cronenberg, commenting on M Butterfly to Chris Rodley, adds another postmodern element to his somatic dialectic when he notes that we can transform into something totally “other” either culturally or sexually, and that female sexuality is created by men:

“The idea is that the sexuality of each of us is an agreed-upon fantasy that we both create for each other. It’s kind of sweet in some ways and kind of scary in others, because it means in a way there’s no reality of sexuality; there’s no such thing as absolute maleness or absolute femaleness.” (Rodley, 182, 184)

Talking to Rodley in 1999, Cronenberg goes one step further and associates his existentialism with the notion that all reality is virtual, the ultimate postmodernist metaphysic: “As a card-carrying existentialist I think all reality is virtual. It’s all invented. It’s collaborative, so you need friends to help you create a reality. But it’s not about what is real and what isn’t” (quoted in Grant 2000: 17).

All of this is very much in keeping with postmodern or poststructuralist thinking on the nature of language and reality. Baudrillard speaks of living in a desert of the real caused by the explosion of media-created simulations. Alphonso Lingus sees modern culture as creating a postindustrial body of pleasures heavily mutated by tides of simulacra (221), while the leftist British critic Terry Eagleton bemoans the loss of the “bourgeois-humanist subject” to these tides and to consumer capitalism:

“As postmodernist culture attests, the contemporary subject may be less the strenuous monadic agent of an earlier phase of capitalist ideology than a dispersed, decentred network of libidinal attachments, emptied of ethical substance and psychical interiority, the ephemeral function of this or that act of consumption, media experience, sexual relationship, trend or fashion. The ‘unified subject’ looms up in this light as more and more of a shibboleth or straw target, a hangover from an older liberal epoch of capitalism, before technology and consumerism scattered our bodies to the winds as so many bits and pieces of reified technique, appetite, mechanical operations or reflex of desire.” (71)

Whatever the cause of this loss (although Eagleton’s description certainly seems apt), Cronenberg is at best ambiguous about the fading away of the unified subject. His characters seem to revel in the absorption of their selves, which is to say some fractured pairing of mind and body, into the technology and media through which they express their basic impulses. Crash is a case in point. The film opens with a trio of seemingly meaningless sexual encounters. Especially important here is the dispassionate nature of many of the sexual pairings in the film, notably the first one between James and Catherine (described by Cronenberg on p. 5 of the screenplay as “disconnected, passionless, as though it would disappear if they noticed it”). Instead of being a primal Dionysian celebration of life, the sex in Crash is for the most part cool, mechanical, and distant, at least until awakened by Vaughan and his car crash cult. It is Eagleton’s “mechanical operations or reflex of desire.”

The characters in the film have lost their passion, and need to be imprinted by the savage technology of the automobile to wake up to the reality of their sensual lives and thus selves. James, Catherine and Vaughan are all pursuing Seth Brundle’s project of piercing the veil of the flesh to get back to the lost reality of the primal self, in this case by means of auto-eroticism. William Beard judiciously points out that James Spader and Deborah Kara Unger were well cast to play the roles of James and Catherine Ballard. He compares Spader to a Greek mythological hero, and sees Unger as a living sex-doll with a “lacquered insentient beauty, a sex-object and sex-subject of fabulous technical refinement” (389, 396-7). Even post-Vaughan the couple oozes this technological perfection, although it becomes a little rougher around the edges. Their bodies suggest a sort of technological high art, able to produce endless simulations of pleasure, but empty of real depth. In a word, they represent quintessential postmodern bodies.

Another theme connected with the body as simulacrum has to do with the plugging of the self into a growing network of pleasure-producing virtual realities. Baudrillard says that the slogan of our current culture should be “take your desire for reality!”, for the confusion of the principles of reality and desire is less dangerous than the contagion of hyperreality (1984: 268). Yet this near simultaneity of desire and satisfaction is not without a price. Lyotard (1979: 31) tells us that our selves are becoming more and more mere nodes on global information-producing and guarding networks. And that was back in 1979, when the World Wide Web was still but a gleam in the eyes of a few excited computer programmers. By 1999 the child had been born and learned to walk about all on its own. Cronenberg’s ode to this child, to the age of the personal computer, is eXistenZ.

The film is all about the simultaneous distortion and heightening of reality by computer simulations. To understand the film, we must first make some attempt to sort out its narrative structure, which I’ve only alluded to so far. This structure reveals itself only after several viewings, and even then isn’t entirely clear. Here it is, in chart form, the numbers representing increasingly virtual levels of reality:

The film starts out in a church where Allegra Geller is supposedly hosting a test group of her new virtual reality game eXistenZ, which the players plug into biopods to access. Noel Dicter, a poet and we assume an opponent of virtual reality, rushes to the stage to assassinate Allegra, shouting “Death to the Demonness Allegra Geller!” One man is killed, Allegra is wounded. Ted Pikul, a security guard, drags her out of the church. They flee to the countryside in Ted’s car, winding up in a motel room where Allegra tries to convince Ted to play her new game eXistenZ.

We realize only at the end of the film, when all the main characters we’ve seen so far awaken on the stage of a grey church as members of another game test group, that everything that’s happened up to that point was part of one or more virtual reality games. The “real” game designer is Yevgeny Nourish, the “real game” is called tranCendenZ, which the players connect to via more conventional looking blue plastic headsets instead of biodpods. The whole film takes on a new meaning once we realize that what we took for real events were in fact all just game events.  Level 1 of reality, what most of us call everyday reality, exists only in the last few minutes of the film. Indeed, even this level is put into question by the final line of eXistenZ, when the man who appeared in Level 4 as the Chinese waiter encounters Allegra and Ted in the exit door after they’ve assassinated Yevgeny. He asks them, “Hey, tell me the truth... are we still in the game?”

Returning to our story in Level 2, tranCendenZ, Allegra convinces Ted that he should get “ported” so that he can plug into a biopod and play eXistenZ with her. Off they go to the Country Gas Station where they meet Gas, who installs an infected bioport in Ted and then tries to kill Allegra for the bounty on her head. Later, after dispatching Gas, the couple drives to another generic-looking country locale, the Ski Club. Ted asks if they’re going skiing, to which Allegra relies, “Come on Pikul, no one actually physically skies any more.” This is another clear hint that they are indeed in some sort of virtual reality where the Cartesian leap from body to pure mind has taken place. Their pineal glands have shut down and the characters have unplugged from organic reality, reversing the procedure of unplugging from the computer-generated world seen in that other virtual reality film from 1999, The Matrix.

At the ski lodge they meet Kari Vinokur (Ian Holm), who gives them shelter, and supposedly repairs Allegra’s “sick” biopod and Ted’s botched bioport. Allegra and Ted repair to a bedroom in the lodge where she convinces him to plug into the biopod and finally play eXistenZ (we assume that the game was interrupted by the assassination attempt in the opening scene). He bolts up as they enter the game world of eXistenZ, which I’ll call Level 3 of reality in the film. They find themselves in a café/game store run by D’Arcy Nader (Robert Silverman). Their hair and clothes are just a bit more perfect, more model-like. They peruse some of Nader’s game accessories, including some Micro-Pods made by Cortical Systematics that will propel them into their fourth and final level of reality. That there is such a fourth level is hinted at by the presence of a large garish sign in Nader’s shop advertising the computer game “Chinese Restaurant.” It features a cutout picture of a sinister Chinese waiter wielding a large chopper, and asks “Will you Make it out Alive?” We later meet the waiter in person, suggesting that he is only a computer character in Level 3.

Allegra and Ted pop the micropods into their bioports, then begin to feel more and more disconnected from their bodies. Ted says at this point, “I’m very worried about my body... where are our real bodies? Are they all right?” After Allegra reassures him that they’re fine, Ted remarks that he feels vulnerable and disembodied. This is yet another hint that Cronenberg feels that more and more our bodies are becoming simulacra under the influence of our virtual culture. As the micropod game possesses their wills and they become game characters, they begin to have sex. This is cut short by Ted awakening in the grimy factory at the Trout Farm, the beginning of what I’ll call Level 4 of reality (or, more accurately, of hyperreality).

After processing a few grotesque-looking mutated amphibians on an assembly line where he works with Yevgeny Nourish (the factory worker, not the game designer), Ted and Allegra go to lunch at the Chinese Restaurant recommended by Yevgeny. In the most amusing scene in the film, Ted insists that the reluctant waiter - now a real character, and no longer just a cardboard cutout - delivers “the special.” Allegra convinces the waiter that since it’s her birthday, a special occasion, the special would indeed be appropriate, and the waiter agrees and leaves to retrieve it for them. The rest of the people at the table leave, obviously fearful of the culinary excellence of this delicacy. Ted becomes angry with the way the game is going, wanting to pause it: “I’m feeling a little disconnected from my real life, kinda losing touch with the texture of it, you know what I mean? I mean, I actually think there’s an element of psychosis involved here.” He stands up, yelling “eXistenZ is paused!”, thus pausing the game.

In a brief scene back in Level 2, tranCendenZ, Ted and Allegra awake in their ski lodge bedroom. Ted notes that his real life “feels completely unreal,” Allegra adding that reality is safe but boring. Ted’s not even sure this is reality, and says that Allegra is beginning to feel like a game character. They return to Level 4 and their lunch at the Chinese Restaurant (I’ll deal with the remainder of this scene in a few pages).

After lunch they return to the Trout Farm, having to pass through a security check to enter the establishment. Ted no longer wants to be in the virtual world of eXistenZ, telling Allegra: “We’re both stumbling around together in this unformed world whose rules and objectives are largely  unknown, seemingly indecipherable or even possibly non-existent, always on the verge of being killed by forces that we don’t understand.” In the world of the computer-generated simulacrum, reality is a jumble without firm rules. After Allegra, following a terrible urge, ports into an infected biopod and begins to convulse, Ted cuts her free. Yevgeny appears with a blow torch and burns the diseased pod, setting part of the factory on fire. Just then the barriers between Levels 2, 3 and 4 break down: Ted and Allegra are back in the ski lodge (Level 2), but it’s now on fire (Level 4). A few moments later, Hugo Carlaw, the Game Emporium clerk and Realist terrorist from Level 3, bursts into the ski lodge room with a submachine gun, announcing that the uprising has begun. Ted is confused at this point, asking Allegra how a game character can exist in “reality,” which we learn at the end of the film was yet another game, tranCendenZ. All hell breaks lose. The trio run outside, and Hugo is shot by the newly arrived Kari Vinokur, who it turns out is a Cortical Systematics spy. Allegra shoots Kari. Ted objects that he might have been a real person; she explains that he’s only a game character. Finally, Ted pulls a gun on Allegra, announcing himself as an assassin. But before he can eliminate Allegra, she pushes on a plunger which detonates a small explosive device she had used to plug up the bioport in Ted’s back, telling him at the time that it was a “sporicidal resonator” whose purpose was to save him from infection. She asks with adolescent glee “Have I won? Have I won the game?” We see church pews in the field, as the scene morphs to the test group in the grey church.

If you’re a bit confused by the above narrative, or by its film equivalent, it shouldn’t come as surprise. The distortion of reality seen in most of the film, and the lack of clear causal connections between the game players’ / characters’ actions and any comprehensible and consistent goals in its second half, is no doubt intentional on Cronenberg’s part. Indeed, when the game players wake up from playing tranCendenZ, Hugo comments that there were so many twists and turns at the end that they were difficult to absorb; Kari, now speaking in a perfectly understandable English accent, complains that his game character’s accent was so thick he couldn’t understand it himself. All of this is a comment by Cronenberg on the fact that when we allow our somatic realities to be absorbed by virtual simulacra, things do indeed become disjointed and confusing.

So all of eXistenz is about the way that virtual reality can turn our bodies into simulacra, into simulations of reality. We lose touch with organic reality. Yet we also lose touch with ours selves, and not just in a physical sense. This is the second major postmodern theme Cronenberg deals with in his films of the 1980s and 1990s. Roland Barthes introduced the very postmodern idea of the death of the author as the ground for meaning in literature; Michel Foucault, at the end of The Order of Things, even talked about the death of man, of the humanist subject. Cronenberg uses Scanners to present this idea of the disappearance of the self in its most brutal form: the mind control of one person by another. In a scene half way through the movie, Cameron Vale visits a safe house where the “good” scanners are holding a sort of seance/love in. They chant “one soul.... so frightening to lose yourself/will to the group self/will.” Their loss of self is benign, almost joyful. Yet outside we see Darryl Revok using his powers to compel two goons to enter the house and attack the good scanners, killing three of them, then being set ablaze themselves by the survivors. Several times we see scanners use their powers to force ordinary humans to do things against their will, the ultimate loss of self. This is the ultimate horror of the film, the submerging of one’s will under that of another, stronger person.

A more subtle picture of the loss of self can be seen in the identity-switching between Beverly and Elliot Mantle in Dead Ringers. Throughout the film they take delight in playing each other’s roles in various situations. During their college days at Harvard, a senior doctor praises the fabulous Mantle twins for having invented the Mantle Retractor in a ceremony that Elliot attends but Beverly doesn’t. Elliot tells his brother later, “you should have been there”; Bev replies, “I was.” In the present day, Beverly hints to a sculptor he’s visiting that his central nervous system is entwined with his twin brother’s. They switch patients without telling them, attend hearings and ceremonies as each other, and even take turns sleeping with the actress Claire Niveau, at least until she figures out that they are indeed two people with distinct psychological traits. Finally, they attempt to use a collection of pharmaceuticals to fuse their confused identities even further. Elliot tells Bev the story of the “original” Siamese twins, Chang and Ing: after Chang died of a stroke, and Ing woke up and saw his dead brother, he died of fright. The story is repeated at the end of the film when a drugged-out Beverly is “operating” on his equally comatose brother. He says he is separating Siamese twins, and in a metaphorical sense, he is. They banter back and forth, referring to each other as Chang and Ing. Beverly starts to cry; when Elliot asks why, Beverly says that “separation a terrible thing,” just before gutting his brother. Once again, the horror of lost identity is apparent, though in this case the fusion of identities already exists early in the film. In fact, the Mantle brothers are cinematic reproductions of the same actor, Jeremy Irons, simulacra created by trick photography. So one self is made into two by the camera, and then reduced back to one by the film’s narrative. In Dead Ringers the personal identities of the Mantle brothers are pictured as highly unstable, in true postmodern fashion.

In Videodrome, we see Max Renn lose control over his own actions when he’s programmed first by Barry Convex, then later by Bianca O’Blivion. By the middle of the film his self has melted into the manufactured realty of the Videodrome signal. And needless to say, in The Fly, Seth Brundle’s identity becomes more and more bug-like as the film progresses.  Yet once again we must turn to eXistenZ for the most pervasive account of the postmodern self. At the start of the eXistenZ game proper (my Level 3), Ted is amazed at the smooth transition to virtual reality. He remarks, “That was beautiful... I feel just like me.” Like himself, but somehow not himself, the very definition of Baudrillard’s third order simulacrum. Yet the loss of self is most strongly seen in eXistenZ in the way that game characters take over the selves of the players. When Ted yells at an inquisitive D’Arcy Nader that it’s none of his business why they’re in his store a few minutes after his and Allegra’s transition to Level 3, he realizes that this is entirely out of character for him. Allegra explains that his game character has started to take over, and that some things “have to be said to advance the plot and establish the characters.” Meanwhile, D’Arcy appears to have gone into a trance - he’s in a game loop, which he only comes out of once the proper line of game dialogue is repeated. After they install the minipods into each other bioports, Ted licks Allegra’s port hole, which she objects to. Ted explains “that wasn’t me, it was my game character.” They make out, once again following the urgings of their game characters.

So the message here is clear enough - in our mediated-saturated, computer-driven cultural climate, our true selves more and more take on the quality of game characters, of artificially produced fragments of mass-produced virtual sounds, images and software. This is hinted at during the scene set in the Trout Farm’s production line: Ted wraps up some mutant frog parts in paper and writes “LA” on the surface, Baudrillard’s city of fantastic simulcra pulsating out from the Hollywood dream machine. Returning to the scene set in the Chinese restaurant from where we left off a few pages ago, the waiter returns to Ted and Allegra’s table with the special, a disgusting looking plate full of cooked mutant amphibians and reptiles. Allegra says she is no longer hungry, to which the waiter replies “a shame, mutant reptiles offer new and previously unimagined taste sensations.” But Ted is compelled by a game urge to eat the special, picking out the bones of the various animals he consumes and assembling a bone gun similar to the one we saw in the opening scene of the movie. He is taken over by urge to kill the waiter. Allegra tells him that he won’t be able to resist, so he may as well enjoy himself...

Ted: “Free will is obviously not a big factor in this little world of ours.”

Allegra: “It’s like real life. It’s just enough to make it interesting.”

Despite his overt politeness, Ted shoots he waiter twice, killing him.

The overall picture of the self we get in eXistenZ is that one can easily get lost in the game characters and their associated urges we find in the virtual realities of the computer age. Indeed, we really can’t distinguish the game characters from the “real” players until the end of the film, and even then it’s not entirely clear. Whether Cronenberg is targeting a generation of kids raised in front of Playstation, Sega and Nintendo game systems as aimless drifters in hyperreal worlds is hard to say, though it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that he is indeed telling a cautionary tale about the dangers of getting lost in such worlds. And in the years after the film evidence of these dangers became all to real: in October 2002 a 24-year-old South Korean man named Kim died after playing computer games for 86 hours non-stop in an Internet café in Kwangju without proper meals or sleep. In the same year a Korean teenager shot his friend in the face with a homemade shotgun after she beat him in a computer game; a 17-year-old Hong Konger suffered heart failure after playing Diablo II instead of sleeping for weeks; while Thai police believe that a young girl committed suicide after getting stuck on a level of Bomberman. In 2005, South Korean Lee Seung Seop died after a fifty-hour marathon session on Starcraft. [21] Not so virtual reality, it would seem. Yet whether his warnings are meant to be taken literally or figuratively, virtual reality does offer Cronenberg a fresh medium upon which to paint his pessimistic picture of the disappearing self under postmodernity, which he does so with relish in eXistenZ.

The third theme connected to the vanishing body in our postmodern interpretation of Cronenberg’s films is that of reproductions. Baudrillard argues in “The Precession of Simulcra” that in our age society seeks to re-establish reality through an orgy of overproduction (269). Its endless reproductions of consumer products try to bind the consumer to the society of the spectacle, knowing that at its heart is a sadly listless reality show of our a bleak everyday life that is in constant danger of collapsing into pure hyperreality. Cronenberg has his characters comment on the giant reproduction machines of our culture in several points in his films. In Videodrome, Barry Convex says that his corporation Global Optical will use the Videodrome signal as a giant hallucination machine. No scarcity of information here, but the endless (controlled) reproduction of illusions. In The Fly Seth’s telepods are in effect atomic photocopiers, simulacra machines that can reproduce the body and the epiphenomenal thinking thing that supposedly directs it actions. When he teleports for the first time he mockingly asks his baboon, parodying a popular TV ad for audio tape, “Am I somehow different? Is it live or is it Memorex?” Indeed, if these telepods can reproduce a person once, why not twice, or a hundred times, with even greater clarity than the highest quality audio tape recording? Could we tell the “real” Seth from his ninety-nine simulations? As Jennifer Wicke notes, the telepods are also reproduction chambers in the more traditional sense, telewombs of sexual, social and representational reproduction that mimic childbirth (306). Lastly, in eXistenZ, just as game software is endlessly reproducible, and thus the virtual reality it generates, the characters in it are also reproducible, being no more than lines of code available in a convenient variety of storage media.

A fourth, more pervasive theme to do with the postmodern paradigm in Cronenberg’s films is the corporatist hold on the body. Under consumer society, we are in danger of being programmed into becoming buying and using and selling automata, unthinking machine-like beings unable to understand the unhealthy mix of good and evil that is modern capitalism. In The Meditations, Descartes looks out his window, wondering whether a passerby wearing a cloak is a man or an automata - how could one know without further proof? Under late capitalism, we can ask the same question when we look out our cultural windows at the crowds milling about in suburban shopping malls wearing the same brand-name clothes, sporting the same hair styles, returning home in the same sports utility vehicles: are we seeing men and women, or machines? In his postmodern Gothic horror novel Lemprière’s Dictionary, Lawrence Norfolk describes machine-men who have had their bodies gutted by a mysterious cartel of the super-rich called the Cabbala and replaced by springs, levers and other mechanical devices that render them compliant to the cartel’s will. In fact, even the Cabbala themselves, who are presented as engineering the French Revolution, are automata. Capitalism has changed them from men into machines. In one scene a character stares into the eyes of one of the cartel’s robotic servants: “He could gaze into the Indian’s eyes and see the original man interpenetrated by the created machine with its gears and tiny winches, its self-governing extensors and sensors, its blank inaction a neutrality which could not be human: the peace of the Zero State” (Norfolk 352). The novel creates a sense of the uncanny surrounding these robotic simulations of human life who still have their own personal memories, but whose actions are controlled by the cartel. What would it be like to know you’re an individual, but not be able to act on that individuality?

Under a corporatist culture, the body in danger of becoming a simulation of the marketplace, reprogrammed by an image-driven media. We are all in danger of entering a state approximating that seen in Norfolk’s postmodern Gothic tale. Cronenberg echoes this fear of the body being turned into a corporatist automata at several points in his films. Reflecting on how his interest in the human body connects to economic life, he tells Chris Rodley:

“That’s what fascinates me about institutions. An institution is really like an organism, a multi-celled animal in which the people are the cells. The very word ‘corporation’ means body. An incorporation of people into one body... They live and die their own lives, and yet the overall flow of the existence of the body as an individual seems to be consistent.” (29)

As early as Scanners, we see Dr. Ruth selling himself and his wonder drug Ephemerol to Consec corporation. In effect, he has sold out his own family: he gave the drug to his pregnant wife, turning his offspring into scanners. Yet it’s Videodrome that presents the most compelling narrative of the corporatist hold on the body. Barry Convex describes his company Spectacular Optical to Max Renn as “an enthusiastic corporate citizen” whose tongue-in-cheek motto is “Keeping an Eye on the World.” He says they make cheap glasses for the Third World and missile guidance systems for NATO, not to mention the Videodrome signal.

Max discovers that his handy right-hand man Harlan is actually a spy for Spectacular Optical whose mission is to allow them to take over Max’s television station. When Max accuses Harlan and Convex of murdering Brian O’Blivion, the original creator of the Videodrome signal, Harlan justifies his actions in neo-fascist terms that would have made both Mussolini and Frederick Taylor proud:

“North America’s getting soft patron and the rest of the world is getting tough. Very very tough. We’re entering savage new times. And we’re going to have to be pure and erect and strong if we’re going to survive them. And you and this cesspool you call a television station and your people who wallow around in it, your viewers, you’re rotting us away from the inside. We intend to stop that rot.”

When Max offers some resistance to their plan to turn Civic TV into the first public broadcaster to play the Videodrome signal, Convex produces a pulsing videocassette which he rams into Max’s belly slit. He tells him, “I want you to open up Max. Open up to me. I’ve got something I want to play for you,” programming him like one of Lawrence Norfolk’s automata as a mechanical slave doing Spectacular Optical’s bidding. He is sent off to kill Bianca O’Blivion.

When Max and Harlan meet after Max’s failed assassination of Bianca, Harlan says to him, “You’ve been very useful to us Max. We’d like to keep using you til you’re all gone...” This is the very model of the way corporate capitalism uses both the individual consumer and our natural environment to market and sell products. Unfortunately for Harlan, Max has been reprogrammed by Bianca, and kills Harlan in a surreal way: when Harlan tries to stick another videocassette into Max’s belly slit, his hand emerges stuck to a German potato masher grenade, which then explodes. This point about the corporate hold on the self is driven home further in the following scene when Max goes to a trade show for Spectacular Optical’s new line of products, the Medici Line. The show is presented as an ersatz Renaissance masque. This theme is enhanced by two quotes from Lorenzo di Medici, the Florentine prince who was Machiavelli’s patron: “Love comes in at the eye” and “The eye is the window of the soul.” Machiavelli’s picture of the ruthless Renaissance prince is perfectly appropriate here: Barry Convex is indeed such a prince, Spectacular Optical the city-state he lords over. And he is prepared to sacrifice some of his citizens in order to achieve his objective - as Machiavelli himself made clear in The Prince, the end justifies the means.

The danger of corporatism is further explored in The Fly, though perhaps more subtly. Adam Knee sees in Seth’s story the intrusion of technology into the most intimate spheres of life created by our increasing social entanglement with corporations (32). Seth Brundle is portrayed as an enthusiastic but somewhat naive servant of the corporation which has funded his research - Bartok Industries. He tells Ronnie during her first visit to his loft laboratory that the money for his research comes from Bartok, and that they leave him alone since they know they’ll wind up owning it all anyways. So Seth acknowledges that his teleportation technology will become corporate property. This is probably regardless of how his experiments have changed him inside, turned him into an experimental subject against his better intentions (like Max Renn after being programmed by Videodrome).

Lawrence Norfolk brings up this image of changing inside several times in Lemprière’s Dictionary. After the agents of the Cabbala have infused the bodies of their mechanical slaves with wheels and pinions and gears, they do indeed change inside. Norfolk compares this mechanization of an individual with a parallel one going on throughout all of Europe, the spreading of a “vast automation” that follows the creeping of metal through flesh and wire through veins (353). Not only have we changed inside, but so has our entire culture, our civilization. Another image from Lemprière’s Dictionary relevant to our case is that of being stuffed with gold. This happens to a woman the Cabbala’s agents murder by pouring molten gold down her throat. Later in the book, the Cabbala is described as stuffing the corpse of eighteenth-century France with gold to help it breathe again, though with a different rhythm than before (Norfolk 543). Our culture too has been stuffed with the gold of mass consumption, changing it inside.

John Ralston Saul causes this image to take flesh in The Unconscious Civilization, his critique of corporatism. He defines corporatism as a surrender of our individual legitimacy and our sense of the public good to corporate bodies, whether these be business corporations, government ministries or university disciplines (2). Knowledge is bought and sold in such a society, while public language degenerates into either rhetoric, propaganda or arcane dialects. Our whole culture bears the imprint of corporate ownership of not only manufactured objects, but also of things much closer to our self-definitions. Cronenberg shows us this imprinting of corporatism upon our bodies in a quite literal sense in Crash. In the second scene in the film, when James crashes into Helen Remington’s car, Helen’s husband’s body hurls through James’ windshield; he notices the corporate imprint of his triton hood ornament on the dead man’s hand. Later in the film Vaughan choose to imprint himself with the tattoo of a steering wheel on his chest. Overall, the characters in Crash chose to internalize the technology of the automobile as part of their sexual self-definitions, a technology which is first and foremost a corporate creation.

In eXistenZ, we see the characters play out several battles involving corporate enemies. In Level 2 of reality, Allegra Geller and Antenna Research are attacked by an assassin representing an unnamed enemy of virtual reality. In Levels 3 and 4 the representatives of Cortical Systematics (including Kari Vinokur) battle it out with the Realist underground (Hugo Carlaw and maybe Yevgeny Nourish). At the end of the film, in Level 1 of reality, Allegra and Ted Pikul attack the representatives of PIlgrimmage, Yevgeny and Merle. The whole film is structured around struggles between corporate bodies where the loyalty of individual characters is murky at best. Further, Allegra argues that she is happy to have devoted five of her most passionate years to the creation of her game eXistenZ, to have devoted her mind and body to the creation of corporate property. She sees herself as the mother of her biopod and of the game stored in it, referring to it as her “baby,” despite the fact that her baby is destined to be a mass-produced product whose purpose is to earn a profit by deforming reality. In this case, the imprint of corporate technology is more on the mind than the body. Yet we shouldn’t be too surprised at this, since Cronenberg has shifted back and forth between bodily deformations creating mental ones and vice versa throughout his career.

A fifth, minor theme connected to Cronenberg’s exploration of the postmodern body has to do with the narcissistic desire to use the body as the site of libidinal satisfaction. There are hints of Christopher Lasch’s culture of narcissism, itself the product of consumer capitalism, strewn throughout Cronenberg’s mature films. In The Fly, Seth Brundle makes this narcissism clear in his rant to Veronica in a fast food restaurant spoken over his saturating of a cup of coffee with sugar. He describes the process of being taken apart atom by atom and being put together again as “purifying,” like putting coffee through a filter. It will allow him to realize his personal potential, to achieve his life’s work and finally attain his vaunted real self: “I just don’t think I’ve ever given me a chance to be me” he says. Seth rambles on that teleportation is inherently purging, making a man feel like a king, like a millions bucks. All of this is quite independent of Ronnie’s feelings on the subject - she’s only there to absorb his newfound wisdom. Jennifer Wicke sees this speech as...

“…a verbal catalog of every promise held out by the ‘Me Decade’... Every desperate cliché of overweening egotism and the culture of narcissism spills out... Seth unwittingly becomes a spokesman for a corporate ethos he otherwise knows nothing about, translating the surcharge of insect energy he is beginning to feel into the momentary discourse of the monstrous ‘me’.” (308)

This theme of narcissism is picked in Crash, where the menageries of sexual couplings in the film are for the most part simple matters of individual satisfaction, and nothing more. Both pre- and post-Vaughan, James and Catherine’s marriage is one of convenience: they have sex with whomever, whenever and wherever they want. In eXistenZ, we’ve already seen how Allegra is entirely committed to the creation of her game system, whatever the cost to herself and others. Why? So she can satisfy an almost pathetic need to jack into a virtual game world and live out her fantasies away from the humdrum boredom of everyday life. Her need is like that of a junkie hooked on the crack cocaine of a computer-generated alternate reality. All of this is set against the background of an economy of mass consumption - the cars of Crash and the computer games of eXistenZ are products available to the consuming masses, not arcane remedies like the morphologically neutral skin grafts of Rabid or the psychoplasmic therapy of The Brood

The sixth and last variation on the general theme of the vanishing postmodern body we see in Cronenberg’s films has to do with the commodification of the body and the depthless culture that it’s part of. Frederick Jameson describes postmodern art and popular culture as showing a certain flatness, a lack of affect, a lack of depth. The world is in danger of becoming a glossy skin, “a rush of filmic images without depth” (9, 34). Terry Eagleton echoes this sentiment, arguing that the commodified artefacts of postmodern culture show us “depthless, styleless, dehistoricized, decathected surfaces” where the dream of authenticity is dead. The commodity is given a new status, a new aesthetic allure as an art object in itself (61, 62). This theme is played out brilliantly in Crash. As we’ve already seen, the sex in this film is wedded to car bodies and crashes, and is flat and emotionless. Body and machine merge, but without any meaningful inner life. Whatever mild pornographic rush we feel from the film becomes the boredom of a pallid commodity by its midway point: it’s hardly the source of much titillation. Indeed, the sex in the film at times it seems almost classical in its coolness and formalism, as in the scene immediately after the car wash encounter set in the Ballard’s apartment where we see James and Catherine lying naked in bed together. The film’s look is one of detachment, coolness, and high polish, like that of an automobile fender. This stands in contrast with the rather outrageous sexual content of the film, the endless copulations unconnected to any emotional meaning. Yet perhaps this is exactly Cronenberg’s point: when sex is used to sell products on a mass scale, it becomes a commodity itself, a technology whose aim is to grease the wheels of mass consumption. We can consume it dispassionately, appreciating the bodies of our sexual partners as we would a the precision-engineered high performance engine or the well crafted upholstery of an expensive leather car seat.

Yet in the end for Cronenberg, the body returns. Set in dialectical struggle with the postmodern transcendence of the body is a nostalgia for good old-fashioned flesh. The postmodern impulse in Cronenberg succumbs to Nature as both an inner and an outer force. In The Fly, Ronnie awakens Seth to the reality of the flesh, which she says “just makes you crazy.” Seth tells Ronnie before being changed inside by the teleporation process that computers don’t know the flesh, they can’t interpret the poetry of steak: they can at best offer a reproduction or translation of it. That’s why the steak he teleports doesn’t taste like steak any more - something is lost in the translation. Similarly, all virtual constructions of the flesh are at best loose translations of the real flesh - they can never capture its poetry. This poetry always returns to haunt the technologicized body with visionary dreams - that’s why so many contemporary urbanites feel the biophilic urge to renew their connection with the natural world, to “get away from it all” on a periodic (if not permanent) basis. In his later films Cronenberg makes this biophilia, this nostalgia for the flesh, a counterpoint to the technologically transformed or simulated body.

In the end of Crash we see another instance of the romantic nostalgia for the flesh: after James pushes Catherine’s car down an embankment, causing it to flip over and throw her out, he kisses and fondles her, telling her tenderly “Maybe the next one.” They have sex. This finale suggests a fusing of sex and death, a return to physical mortality away from the overlit technological brilliance of the eternally young bodies of mass media and advertising. Jameson might be right that multinational capitalism has colonized the last precapitalist enclaves, Nature and the Unconscious, that once offered effective footholds for critical theory (49). Yet for Cronenberg these enclaves are still fertile ground from which to stage a counter-revolution against the worldwide hard machine of technology and the still developing soft machine of virtual reality. eXistenZ shows us some strong evidence of this counter-revolution. At the start of the film Noel Dichter attempts to assassinate Allegra with a gun made out of bones which shoots teeth. The bone gun returns later, when Ted assembles it in the Chinese restaurant. These bone-guns can evade the panoptic surveillance of the hard machines of corporate culture. The game of eXistenZ itself is stored in a biopod, not a machine; the biopods themselves are represented as being manufactured from the parts of mutant amphibians in the Trout Farm. The special that Allegra and Ted order in the Chinese restaurant is equally fleshy, as is the kitchen where it’s prepared. There is flesh everywhere in virtual world of eXistenZ. This isn’t surprising, as real game designers put their greatest efforts into sculpting the bodies of their human characters, usually populating their virtual worlds with muscular supermen and buxom yet athletic women. And it is no great secret that the healthiest flow of traffic on the Internet is in and out of porn sites. The flesh cannot be denied, even in a technological culture on a death drive toward its own environmental oblivion.

Back in eXistenZ, we see the almost pathetic reality of such generic locations as the country gas station, the motel, and the ski lodge, sad simulacra of their real-world equivalents. These are hardly places where we’d want to stay for any length of time. Yet it’s at the end of the film where we get the clearest picture of the return of the flesh. The game test group awakes on the stage of the grey church, with Yevgeny revealed as the great game artist, not Allegra. After a brief discussion amongst the test group, Ted picks up his big white dog (which we’ve already seen munching on the bone gun in the game eXistenZ) from its minder, and Allegra and Ted corner Yevgeny. It turns out that the somewhat shaggy mutt is indeed a Trojan Dog unwisely let into the fortress of virtual reality. Ted confronts Yevgeny, asking him “Don’t you think that the world’s greatest game artist ought to be punished for the most effective deforming of reality?” Ted and Allegra pull off a phoney swatch of white fur from their dog, revealing a holster with two pistols which they draw out and use to shoot Yevgeny and his assistant Merle. Cronenberg leaves the reality of even this final scene somewhat in doubt, as when the assassins leave, the Chinese waiter asks, “are we still in the game?”  The dialectic between the levels of reality in the film never really ends. Yet this is as close to our somatic ground zero as we get in eXistenZ, so we have to assume that the realists have probably won their battle against virtual reality and the postmodern body, and that Cronenberg is at least partly sympathetic to their cause.

So Cronenberg’s somatic dialectic is a dynamic, inherently unstable one. It bobs and weaves and ducks in and out of corners, side passages, and alleyways, remaining true to one of its four elements for only a few scenes in any given film. And this is as it should be. For Cronenberg to pin himself down to being the director of only Gothic creature features, or Freudian horror stories, or science-fiction movies, or even  postmodern speculations on the nature of the self would make him considerably less interesting than in fact he is. The shade of Hegel presides over his work, impelling him to a continual dialectical development of the cinematic art based on his own unique, bizarre vision of the body and its place in modern culture. Just as Francis Fukuyama says that the end of history will be a sad time without the great ideological struggles of the past, the end of Cronenberg’s filmic exploration of his somatic dialectic would also be a sad time, a night where all the cats are equally grey.

Postscript on the New Flesh in A Dangerous Method and Cosmopolis.

Though without any horror or sci-fi trappings, Cronenberg’s recent films flash hints of his fascination with Cartesian dualism and the revolt of the “New Flesh” against the guardians of scientific rationality. We can see three of his post-eXistenZ films – Spider, A History of Violence, and A Dangerous Method – as his Freudian Trilogy, as a triad of stories dealing with various forms of repression. In Spider, Dennis Cleg represses his Oedipal love for his mother by creating a false memory of his father killing her then marrying a prostitute. In A History of Violence, Viggo Mortensen’s Tom Stall has to deliberately repress both his instinct for and history of violence to protect his family, though these repressions return in a monstrous form when his small town is visited by his former mob associates. A Dangerous Method deals overtly with sexual repression, asking in effect if monogamy is a natural human state. Ironically, in it Mortensen returns as the intellectual architect of the theory of unconscious drives and explorer of the neuroses caused by repression, Sigmund Freud.

Although he didn’t write A Dangerous Method, the film is very much concerned with how the body – especially through a sexuality that touches on the psychopathological – can rebel against the mind, and whether science – in this case, psychoanalysis – should defend that mind against such a rebellion. The method of the title is, of course, Freudian psychoanalysis. Its danger comes from the fact that when its practitioners use it to probe the minds of people like the vivacious and energetic Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), it will unlock sexual feelings in both doctor and patient. So the question becomes, what do we do with such feelings? Repress them, as Freud suggests in the film? Or act on them without hesitation, as Otto Gross (Vincent Cassell) does? Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) is caught in the middle of this debate.

Indeed, A Dangerous Method is structured by a series of triangles. First and most trivial is the romantic triangle of Jung, the expressive dark-haired Spielrein and the cool blue-eyed, blonde-haired Emma Jung (Sarah Gadon), a woman from a wealthy Swiss family who dutifully gives Jung offspring while suffering in silence during his affairs. Second is the triangle mentioned above between the somewhat harsh father-figure Freud, a scientific rationalist who during the time frame of the film insists on the primacy of sexual causes for neuroses; his rebellious intellectual “son” Jung, the Swiss bourgeois who wants to open psychoanalysis to religion and mythology; and in a more minor role Gross, a bohemian libertine who insists that the therapist’s role is to destroy repression and give people back their freedom. After Gross works through his hatred of his father under Jung’s care, and then has sex with a nurse, he escapes over the clinic’s wall and disappears. Interestingly, Freud once compared the mind to a walled city defending itself against external threats, only to find that instinctual threats are already within its gates. Gross is thus a sort of Id-figure who troubles Jung for a while, then flies away, leaving emotional chaos behind.

The key issue in A Dangerous Method is whether a science of the mind should encourage or discourage an unrestrained sexual impulse, the “New Flesh” of the nascent twentieth century. Would this New Flesh be healthy, as Otto Gross thinks and Jung wonders, or dangerous, as Freud seems to suggest at times in the film? Can civilization function if both doctors and patients embrace the sexual flesh?

Sabina’s own sexuality is clearly pathological. Early on she tells Jung of a dream of a slimy mollusk moving over her back that represents the sexual excitement she feels whenever she recalls her father spanking her as a naked child. Later, we see Jung actually spanking Sabina during their bouts of love-making, thus his partial acceptance of the idea that sexual repression is unhealthy and should be dispensed with. The drug-addicted Otto Gross brags about the various children he’s had with both his wife and his mistresses to a somewhat shocked Jung, telling him to “never repress anything.” This helps to free Jung from his commitment to monogamy, leading him to his affair with Sabina.

The Freud-Jung-Gross triangle morphs into a third one involving the two pioneers of psychotherapy and Sabina Spielrein after she graduates from the medical academy in Zürich and becomes a doctor in her own right, engaging both Freud and Jung in debates over the role of the sexual instinct in human psychic health. In 1910 she tells Jung that sex is a sort of fusion, and that true sexuality might demand a “destruction of the ego.” Two years later she tells Freud in Vienna that he’s wrong to see sexuality as a destructive force. It can be creative of a new (fused) being, but must overcome the resistance of the ego because of the “self-annihilating nature of the sexual act.” Indeed, the movie suggests that Sabina’s “discovery” through her analysis and affair with Jung of the ultimate value of a heroic fusion of opposites – man and woman, doctor and patient, Jew and Aryan – was in its own way a significant one, leading both Freud and Jung to rethink some of their more rigid assumptions, notably leading Freud to postulate the existence of a death instinct in 1920.

With A Dangerous Method, we’re back to Cronenberg’s mad scientists of the seventies, to Dr. Hobbes and Dr. Keloid, to Brian O’Blivion’s creation of the Videodrome signal, to Seth Brundle’s enthusiasm over his new powers as the fused being Brundlefly. But it’s Sabina, not Freud or Jung, who is the Cronenbergian hero here, with Jung as her slightly mad scientist mentor/creator. Jung creates the conditions for her new, unrepressed flesh to flourish through his “dangerous method,” though it’s Sabina who experiences most directly its effects. She’s a turn-of-the-century Rabid Rose or Max Renn who wants to create the fused being SabinaJung to the strains of a Wagerian opera.

A fourth triangle only hinted at in A Dangerous Method is that between fascists, liberal Europeans and Jews, with Jung once again in the middle. Howard Shore’s musical score for the film is dominated by Wagnerian motifs from Siegfried; indeed, Spielrein confesses to Jung her admiration for the opera Das Rheingold on a Swiss lake with the magnificent Alps in the distance, while the pair later use a gramophone recording of Die Walküre as a form of music therapy for their patients. Leaving aside the German composer’s notorious anti-Semitism, Wagner’s music also hints at the mysticism and race consciousness that Jung’s psychology was more open to than Freud’s. In an extended scene set in 1912 Spielrein and Freud discuss the validity of Jung’s embrace of mystical ideas. Freud sees this as trading one delusion – organized religion – for another.  He tells her that her idea of a mystical union with a blonde Siegfried figure is inevitably doomed. “Put not your trust in Aryans. We’re Jews, my dear Miss Spielrein. And Jews, we will always be.” The Nazis would later prove Freud right. Wagner’s evocation of the Siegfried myth in his music, which excited Jung as a primal archetype, was only a few steps away from the National Socialist myth of the superiority of the Aryan race.

The end of the film seems to suggest in part that the psychopathogical rebellion of the New Flesh is doomed to failure, echoing Cronenberg’s customary pessimism about the possibilities of psychic liberation. We see simple white text on a black screen describing the future lives of our protagonists: the “liberated” Gross dies of starvation in Germany in 1919; Spielrein and her two daughters were murdered by an SS death squad in Russia in 1942; the more careful Freud was forced by the Nazis to leave Vienna in the thirties, dying in London in 1939; while the sober Swiss psychologist Jung lived a long life, surviving until 1961. Unlocking the unconscious mind and letting loose the new sexual flesh at the same time let loose the dark beast Thanatos, a death instinct that plunged Europe into two world wars. So perhaps Cronenberg is saying that Freud’s belief that repression is the foundation of civilization was at the same time a defence mechanism for European Jews against anti-Semitic pogroms.

Cosmopolis, for which Cronenberg wrote a screenplay in six days based on Don DeLillo’s novel of the same name, we see a glorious return to the cerebral, cool, somewhat stilted style of his films of the 1980s and 1990s. If A Dangerous Method was about psychopathological sexuality, Cosmopolis is about the body disappearing into postmodern simulations, with some hints of technological transformations thrown in for good measure.  It centers on the anti-hero’s journey of currency trader and billionaire Eric Packer through the streets of the “cosmopolis” of modern capitalism, New York City (though much of it was filmed in Toronto, including the opening scene at Union Station). This journey is one from the pristine world of the ultra-wealthy ruling class of the new capitalism to the messy and grimy world of the working-class neighbourhood where Packer grew up. It is a casting off of the very New Flesh that gave him an obscene degree of wealth and power at the age of 28.

Packer is played by Robert Pattinson, a perfect choice given his prior claim to fame as the moody vampire Edward Cullen in the Twilight series. Packer is another pale and powerful vampire, but this time he’s a metaphorical one – he sucks capital out of the global financial markets by having visions of the future rise and fall of currencies. His rolling office is a huge white limousine well stocked with technology, information and vodka, where he sits like a new age James T. Kirk on his captain’s chair while the world plies him with financial data and sexual pleasure. Packer’s limo, as he tells his wife over lunch, has been “Prousted,” lined with cork and armour plating, to protect it against the noise of the real world outside it. Yet that noise still gets in, which he tells his wife “energises” him.

Eric Packer is a liminal figure, with a foot in two worlds. His journey across Manhattan is at the same time an inner journey from the New to the Old Flesh. The New Flesh that gave Packer so much wealth is the disembodied and disconnected world of currency trading, which is focussed on predicting the future of information, not the value of physical goods produced by industry. Packer has bet his entire empire on being able to predict of the future value of the Chinese yuan, which he is certain will fall.

The disembodied world of cyber capital is represented most purely by Eric’s wife of 22 days Elise Shifrin, played as an icy Hitchcockian blonde by Sarah Gadon (in effect reprising her role as Emma Jung from A Dangerous Method). Eric and Elise meet in a taxi, have breakfast and lunch together, run into each other at a bookstore, meeting for the last time in the evening for an after-theatre drink. Despite being a married couple, Elsie resolutely refuses Eric’s forthright desire for sex. Further, she even seems indifferent to eating, having nothing for breakfast, while staring at an unappealing duck consommé at a lunch counter as Eric wolfs down a hearty sandwich. When Eric’s financial empire dissolves, she announces the end of their short marriage, scoffing at the idea that his newfound poverty will somehow “free” him.

The polar opposite of Elise is Benno Levin aka Richard Sheets (Paul Giamatti), who used to trade the Malaysian baht for Packer Capital before losing his job (one presumes) to a faster computer program. He has decided to kill Eric in order to “count for something” in his life. He’s a dishevelled, unemployed 41-year-old who lives in a run-down building in the “bad part” of town in an apartment crammed full of technological relics such as CRT computer monitors. Just as Elise represents the New Flesh of cyber capital, Benno represents the Old Flesh of industrial capitalism. He tells Eric that the reason he can’t get a job is due to the fact that he smells. When Packer tells him his frustration is based on the fact that he has no role, Benno moans in Situationist style that he is “helpless in their system,” and doesn’t want to be a “helpless robot soldier.” His desire to kill Eric is thus a sort of existential affirmation that his life matters within the heartless spectacle that is cyber capitalism.

Cosmopolis is packed with more political and cultural theory than any of Cronenberg’s other films. The ruling thinkers here are Marx and McLuhan. Flipping Marx’s famous slogan on its head, the protestors and an electronic billboard seen half way through the film chant “a spectre is haunting the world – the spectre of capitalism”.  The spectre of communism is long gone, replaced by a cyber capitalism that seems to have “cosmological” guarantees. We get subtle hints of this disappearance. Packer tells his chief of theory Vija Kinksy that he once bought a Tupelov 160, but had to park it in an Arizona desert storage facility while waiting for replacement parts. This was the last strategic bomber built for the Soviet Union, and the world’s largest combat aircraft, which spent much of its service life out of action due to defective or obsolete systems. The symbolism is obvious. More subtle is the fact that many of Packer’s employees have eastern European names – Toval, Danko, Kinksy, Petrescu, Levin – hinting that many old communists have now become servants of capitalism.

We get strongly McLuhanesque tropes from the first two visitors to Packer’s limo. We see hints of McLuhan first from Packer’s start-up partner and chief of cyber security Shiner, played with considerable pathos by Jay Baruchel. He tells Packer “I love information. Eric, this is our sweetness and light… People eat and sleep in the shadow of what we do.” Shiner, an old-style dot.com hacker who made good, echoes Matthew Arnold’s definition of culture as a higher order of being. The medium that best defines his own culture are the bits and bytes that flow through computer networks, though his old pal Eric doubts whether he’s strong enough to keep Packer Capital’s systems safe from hostile attacks. Happier and more confident is Packer’s systems analyst Michael Chin, a young man constantly glued to his computer tablet who feels “located totally nowhere,” sharing with him what Manuel Castells calls the “space of flows.” In a key moment Packer tells Michael that the only thing worthy of his professional intellectual commitment is a study of the “interaction between technology and capital,” the foundational epistemological question of digital capitalism. Packer knows that the cyber capitalist makes money not from making things, but by manipulating information. He is Max Renn after being uploaded into Videodrome.

There are also hints of the ideas of Jean Baudrillard, David Harvey, Manuel Castells and Franco Berardi in the screenplay. In most of the film Packer is trapped within in the hyperreal cabin of his limousine with his security chief Torval (Kevin Durand) playing the role of a firewall between his cyber world and the world of the angry protestors in the streets around him. He lives in a moving desert of the real. At the same time, Packer, Shiner and Chin all live in Castell’s space of flows, linking them to global information systems so that Eric’s office can be everywhere and nowhere at the same time (he jokes about this when Shiner asks him why he’s not in his office).

We see Castells’ notion of timeless time, and more generally Harvey’s idea of the ramped up space-time compression of modern capitalism, clearly expressed by the lengthy speech of Packer’s chief of theory Vija Kinksy. For her, the wealth of cyber capitalism exists “for its own sake,” having lost its “narrative quality.” No longer does it tell a story about how effectively industry produces things. Instead, value exists only on the glowing screens of cyber capital, which Vija finds so “radiant and seductive.” She goes on to echo Harvey fairly explicitly, talking about how once money “made time” as the clock accelerated with the rise of capitalism:

“People stopped thinking about eternity and they began to concentrate on hours. Measurable hours, man-hours, using labour more efficiently. It’s cyber capital that creates the future... Because time is a corporate asset now. It belongs to the free market system. The present is harder to find. It is being sucked out of the world to make way for the future of uncontrolled markets and huge investment potential.”

Yet Vija is aware of the dark side of the neo-liberal vision of a world with no spatial or temporal barriers to the flow of capital. She tells Packer that the protestors outside his limo realize cyber capital “will send people to the gutter to wretch and die,” hence their anger. The great flaw of human rationality is that it doesn’t see “the horror and death at the end of the schemes that it builds.” In the “making of” documentary Citizens of Cosmopolis, we see Cronenberg use a walkie-talkie to tell an assistant blocking the bookstore scene to make sure that copies of Joseph Stalin’s works are centered in Packer’s point of view, hinting at this “horror and death.” Yet in the end Kinksy admits she doesn’t understand the creed of the new culture: that people will be “absorbed in streams of information.”

Packer’s chief of finance Jane Melman (Emily Hampshire) has earlier hinted at the divide between industrial and cyber capitalism when she tells Eric that currencies like the yuan don’t “chart” the way that technology stocks do, which have “real patterns” and “predictable components.” Just as Marx’s capitalism created the spectre of communism as its dialectical opposite, the modern industrial welfare state of the late twentieth century created cyber capitalism, part of what Castells calls “network society,” as its own poltergeist. Italian Marxist Franco Berardi riffs on Castells when he describes the current economic system as a “semio-capitalism” where communications and emotions, not physical products, create value. Jane’s chat with Packer during his prostrate exam echoes Beradi’s idea of a capitalism driven by semantics when she tells him about how the “whole country” is trying to interpret the meaning of not only the grammar and syntax of a “misconstrued comment” about the economy by the Chinese finance minister, but also the meaning of his pause, his very breathing. “So the whole economy convulses because the man took a breath,” Jane sarcastically concludes.

Reversing the journey from real bodies to pure minds seen in Scanners, Videodrome and eXistenZ, in Cosmopolis Eric Packer journeys from the digital splendour of the world of cyber capitalism to the messy and smelly world of the old working class. He thus flips the young Cronenberg on his head, just as the young Marx flipped Hegel on his idealist head, casting off the New Flesh for the old embodied self.

There are signposts for this process scattered throughout his journey: his insistence on eating a hearty breakfast and lunch with is wife, his sexual encounters with Didi Fancher (his art consultant) and Kendra Hays (a security guard), his acceptance of the defacement of his pristine limousine by the Occupy-like protestors, his removal of his jacket and tie, his visit to a rave (with music by Metric), and his attack by the “pastry assassin” André Petruscu (he doesn’t bother cleaning himself up). When he shoots his now chummy chief of security Torval with his own voice-activated cyber gun in the head, he’s symbolically cutting off his ties to the “beserkly wealthy” and largely safe world of cyber capitalism. The final scene, with Benno holding another cyber pistol to Eric’s head ready to shoot, echoes the final scene of Videodrome, where Max Renn kills the Old Flesh by shooting himself in the head. Though polar opposites, in neither case are we sure that the transformation will work.

Appendix: Cronenberg’s Films as Embodiments of the Somatic Dialectic

This list includes only feature films that Cronenberg both directed and scripted up to 1999, the period in which he investigated the New Flesh. It excludes his youthful experiments Stereo and Crimes of the Future, which nevertheless follow his central thematic concerns very closely; Fast Company, his homage to car racing; and The Dead Zone, M Butterfly, Spider, A History of Violence, Eastern Promises and A Dangerous Method, none of which he wrote (but again which reflect these somatic themes to some degree, especially Cartesian dualism in The Dead Zone and pathological sexuality in M Butterfly). I’ve bolded the dominant themes in each film.

A. The Pathological-Gothic Triad

Shivers AKA They Came From Within AKA The Parasite Murders (1975) - Gothic horror, psychopathological sex and aggression, technological transformation

Rabid (1976) - Gothic horror, psychopathological aggression and sex, technological transformation

The Brood (1979) - Gothic horror, psychopathological aggression (and reproduction), technological transformation

B. The Techno-Fantasy Triad

Scanners (1980) - Gothic horror, psychopathological aggression, technological transformation, postmodern simulations

Videodrome (1982) - Gothic horror, psychopathological sex and aggression, technological transformation, postmodern simulations

The Fly (1986 - co-written with Charles Edward Pogue) - Gothic horror, psychopathological sex, technological transformation, postmodern simulations

C. The Postmodern Group

Dead Ringers (1988 - co-written with Norman Snider) - Gothic horror, psychopathological sex, technological transformation

Naked Lunch (1991) - Gothic horror, psychopathological sex, technological transformation

Crash (1996) - Technological transformation, pyschopathological sex, postmodern simulations

eXistenZ (1999) - Technological transformation, pyschopathological sex, postmodern simulations

A David Cronenberg Filmography (excluding his television work and shorts)

Stereo (1969, 65 minutes)

Written, Produced, Directed, and Filmed by David Cronenberg for Emergent Films.

An early experimental film, in black and white.

Cast: Ronald Mlodzik, Iain Ewing, Jack Messinger, Clara Mayer, Paul Mulholland, Arlene Mlodzik, Glenn McCauley.

Synposis: The future. Seven young people have volunteered for an experimental program devised by the Canadian Academy for Erotic Inquiry: they have surgery that removes their power of speech but increases their telepathic ability. The program is intended to investigate the theories of parapsychologist Luther Stringfellow, and is observed by an unseen group of scientists on television monitors. The group’s “polymorphous perversity” is enhanced by aphrodisiacs. In the end there is violence and two suicides when members of the group are isolated from each other. The film highlights such typically Cronenbergian concerns as the social repression of sexuality and Cartesian dualism, set in his usual cool and clinical cinematic style.

Crimes of the Future (1970, 65 minutes)

Written, Produced, Directed and Filmed by David Cronenberg for Emergent Films.

Another early experimental film, this time in colour.

Cast: Ronald Mlodzik (Arian Tripod), John Lidolt, Tania Zolty, Jack Messinger, Iain Ewing, Rafe Macpherson, Willem Poolman, Donald Owen, Norman Snider, Stephen Czernecki.

Synopsis: The setting is again the future. Millions of post-pubertal women have died from the cosmetics-induced Rouge’s Malady (Antoine Rouge discovered the disease). Adrian Tripod, Rouge’s disciple, wanders from place to place in a bleak modernist cityscape trying to understand the cataclysm. In his wanderings he encounters an old friend at the Institute of Neo-Venereal Disease whose body is strangely mutating, and the Oceanic Podiatry Group, a band of pedophiles who want to impregnate a young girl brought prematurely to puberty. The film deals with many of Cronenberg’s traditional themes: perverse sexuality, repression, black science, and the unconscious. Ironically, “Crimes of the Future” is an alternative title for Cronenberg’s much later eXistenZ.

Shivers AKA The Parasite Murders AKA They Came from Within (1975, 87 minutes)

Written and Directed by David Cronenberg.

Produced by Ivan Reitman, André Link, and John Dunning for Cinepix, with CFDC assistance. Budget: about $180,000.

Cinematography by Robert Saad. Music by Ivan Reitman.

Special effects and makeup by Joe Blasco.

Filmed on Nuns’ Island, Montréal, Québec.

Cast: Paul Hampton as Dr. Roger St. Luc, the resident M.D. at Starliner Towers.

Lynn Lowry as Nurse Forsythe, Dr. St. Luc’s assistant.

Joe Silver as Rollo Linsky, a medical researcher, and Roger’s friend.

Alan Migicovsky as Nick Tudor, a tenant.

Susan Petrie as Janine Tudor, Nick’s wife.

Barbara Steele as Betts, another tenant.

Ronald Mlodzik as Merrick, the apartments’ manager.

Fred Doederlein as Dr. Emil Hobbes, a medical researcher, and the inventor of the parasites. We see him only see in flashbacks.

Barry Baldero as Detective Heller, a police investigator.

Synopsis: Dr. Hobbes has invented a slug-like parasite that will free human beings from their sexual repressions and their excessive rationality by acting as a super-aphrodisiac. But it gets out of control, infecting slowly but surely the tenants of the Starliner Towers. Nick Tudor and Betts are early victims; Janine Tudor soon follows. Dr. Roger St. Luc and Nurse Forsythe try to figure out what’s going on while fighting off the attacks of the infected characters, but the Nurse is claimed by the parasites, proclaiming to the doctor the universal rule of Eros. In the end the whole building is infected; St. Luc is the last to go, caught in the swimming pool by a zombie horde. The last scenes feature the horde driving out of the basement parking lot to infect all of Montréal.

Rabid (1976, 91 minutes)

Written and Directed by David Cronenberg.

Produced by John Dunning for Cinepix, with indirect CFDC participation. Executive Producers: Ivan Reitman and André Link. Budget: $530,000.

Cinematography by Rene Verzier. Music by Ivan Reitman.

Filmed in and around Montréal, Québec.

Cast: Marilyn Chambers as Rose, a motorcycle accident victim and the carrier of the rabid plague.

Frank Moore as Hart Read, her confused boyfriend.

Joe Silver as Dr. Murray Cypher, a friend of Hart’s.

Howard Ryshpan as Dr. Daniel Keloid, head of the Keloid Clinic, and a researcher in experimental reconstructive surgery.

Patricia Gage as Dr. Roxanne Keloid, who works at the Keloid Clinic with her husband.

Susan Roman as Mindy Kent, Rose’s best friend.

J. Roger Periard as Lloyd Walsh, a patient at the Clinic.

Terry Schonblum as Judy Glasberg, another patient at the Clinic.

Victor Désy as Claude Lapointe, an official with the Québec Bureau of Health.

Synopsis: Rose and Hart get into a motorcycle; Rose is badly hurt. Dr. Dan Keloid repairs her external damage with a “morphogenetically neutral skin graft,” which has the curious side-effect of her growing a penis/spike recessed in her armpit. She finds that she now requires human blood to survive, so she roams about the clinic, then later the countryside, looking for victims to feed on, luring them close to her with a need to be comforted or a sexual come-on. After she has vampirically sucked the blood of her victims they develop a virulent form of rabies, violently attacking and biting whoever they meet. By the time Rose leaves the clinic in Montreal, the ultra-rabies she initiated has become a full-scale epidemic, and martial law is declared. Hart tracks her down in the city, but she realizes only too late that she’s the cause of the epidemic, dying at the hands of one of her victims.

Fast Company (1979, 91 minutes)

Directed by David Cronenberg.

Written by Cronenberg, Phil Savath and Courtney Smith from an original story by Alan Treen.

Produced by Michael Lebowitz, Peter O’Brian and Courtney Smith for Quadrant Films. Executive Producer: David M. Perlmutter. Budget: $1.2 million.

Cinematography by Mark Irwin. Music by Fred Mollin.

Filmed in Calgary and Edmonton, Alberta.

Cast: William Smith as Lonnie Johnson, a drag racer.

John Saxon as Phil Adamson, the corrupt manager of the Fastco racing team.

Nicholas Campbell as Billy Brooker, another drag racer, and Lonnie’s team mate.

Claudia Jennings as Sammy, Billy’s girlfriend.

Cedrick Smith as Gary Black, an independent racer.

George Buza as Meatball, Black’s mechanic.

Judy Foster as Candy.

Robert Haley as P.J.

David Graham as Stoner.

Don Franks as “Elder.”

Synopsis: Lonnie Johnson and Billy Brooker, members of a drag-racing team, fight the corporate machinations of Phil Adamson in this action film set in Alberta.

The Brood (1979, 91 minutes)

Written and Directed by David Cronenberg.

Produced by Claude Héroux for Les Productions Mutuelles and Elgin International Productions. Executive Producers: Victor Solnicki and Pierre David. Budget: $1.4 million.

Cinematography by Mark Irwin. Music by Howard Shore.

Filmed in and around Toronto, Ontario.

Cast: Samantha Eggar as Nola Carveth, the mother of the “brood.”

Art Hindle as Frank Carveth, her perplexed husband.

Oliver Reed as Dr. Hal Raglan, the head of the Somafree Institute of Psychoplasmics, and the author of The Shape of Rage.

Henry Beckman as Barton Kelly, Nola’s father.

Nuala Fitzgerald as Julianna Kelly, Nola’s mother.

Cindy Hinds as Candice Carveth, Frank and Nola’s daughter.

Robert Silverman as Jan Hartog, a disgruntled ex-patient of Dr. Raglan.

Gary McKeehan as Mike Trellan, a current patient of Dr. Raglan.

Susan Hogan as Ruth Mayer, Candice’s school teacher.

Nicholas Campbell as Chris, Dr. Raglan’s assistant.

Michael Magee as Inspector Mrazek.

Larry Solway as Frank’s lawyer.

Reiner Shwartz as Dr. Birkin, a police doctor.

Joseph Shaw as Dr. Desborough, a coroner.

Synopsis: The film opens with Dr. Hal Raglan using his “Psychoplasmics” therapy on Mike by helping him turn his inner rage into bodily mutations, thereby expelling it. Raglan’s star patient is Nola Carveth, who has been hidden away at Raglan’s Somafree Institute of Psychoplasmics. Frank Carveth tries to prevent the Carveth’s daughter Candice from visiting her mother when he suspects Nola of physically abusing their daughter. Meanwhile, monstrous looking midgets kill Nola’s parents, who have been separated for years and who, it is hinted, abused Nola as a child. When Candy’s school teacher Ruth shows some affection for Frank, the monstrous midgets kill her too. One of the midgets is found “burned out”; the coroner discovers it has no sexual organs or navel, but has a nutrient sac between its shoulders that functions as an organic gas tank. Frank goes to Somafree to confront Nola and Raglan and to rescue Candy; Raglan confesses that the midgets are, in fact, the children of Nola’s rage - a brood she has given birth to thanks to Psychoplasmics. They ally to end the brood’s reign of terror. Raglan is killed, but Frank strangles Nola, thus depriving their brood of their raison d’être and saving Candy from their clutches.

Scanners (1980, 103 minutes)

Written and Directed by David Cronenberg.

Produced by Claude Héroux for Filmplan International. Executive Producers: Pierre David and Victor Solnicki. Budget: $4.1 million.

Cinematography by Mark Irwin. Music by Howard Shore.

Filmed in Montréal, Québec.

Cast: Stephen Lack as Cameron Vale, a scanner.

Jennifer O’Neill as Kim Obrist, a well-intentioned scanner.

Patrick McGoohan as Dr. Paul Ruth, the creator of Ephemerol and thus of scanners.

Michael Ironside as Darryl Revok, a power-mad scanner.

Lawrence Dane as Braedon Keller, ConSec’s crooked security chief.

Robert Silverman as Benjamin Pierce, an eccentric scanner/artist.

Adam Ludwig as Arno Crostic, an art gallery owner.

Mavor Moore as Trevellyan, the head of ConSec.

Louis del Grande as the scanner whose head explodes.

Fred Doederlein as yoga master Dieter Tautz.

Synposis: In the immediate post-war period Dr. Paul Ruth created Ephemerol, a tranquillizer for pregnant women. But it had the unfortunate side-effect of inducing telekinetic and telepathic powers in the children of the women who took it, powers these “scanners” can only partially control, powers which made them anti-social outcasts. Cameron Vale is one such outcast - he’s recruited by Ruth, and given a drug that allows him to control his psychic powers as part of ConSec’s attempt to develop scanning as a intelligence and military weapon. But a group of evil scanners led by Darryl Revok (and aided by Braedon Keller, ConSec’s security chief), whose aim is to control all scanners and thus (one assumes) achieve world domination, disrupt Ruth’s program, killing all the peace-loving scanners they can find. Ruth sends Vale and Kim Obrist to track Revok down; after dispatching some of Revok’s flunkies, he discovers that ConSec and Revok are producing a fresh batch of Ephemerol to create a new generation of scanners. In the finale, Revok and Vale - who it turns out are brothers, their father being none other than Dr. Ruth himself - face-off telepathically: Vale’s body burns up and explodes, but not before he switches minds with Revok.

Videodrome (1983, 89 minutes)

Written and Directed by David Cronenberg.

Produced by Claude Heroux for Filmplan II International. Executive Producers: Pierre David and Victor Solnicki. Budget: $6 million.

Cinematography by Mark Irwin. Music by Howard Shore.

Filmed in Toronto, Ontario.

Cast: James Woods as Max Renn, head of Civic TV, an independent television station which specializes in soft porn.

Deborah Harry as Nicki Brand, a kinky radio talk-show host.

Jack Creley as Brian O’Blivion, a media prophet.

Sonja Smits as Bianca O’Blivion, Brian’s daughter and the keeper of his flame.

Peter Dvorsky as Harlan, Max’s technological wizard.

Les Carlson as Barry Convex, the head of Spectacular Optical.

Julie Khaner as Bridey James, Max’s assistant.

Lynne Gorman as Masha, a peddler of “artistic” films.

Reiner Shwartz as Moses, a manager at Civic TV.

David Bolt as Raphael, another manager at Civic TV.

Lally Cadeau as Rena King, a TV talk-show host.

David Tsubouchi as a Japanese porn merchant.

Synposis: Max Renn is the head of Civic TV, an independent station (modeled on Toronto’s CITY TV) which specializes in soft porn. Max is looking for something “harder” with which to enliven his nightly schedule, and thinks that he’s found it in Videodrome, a show his technological wizard Harlan has supposedly pirated off a satellite. It’s dedicated to torture and murder, and has no plot or dialogue. As he watches tapes of it at home he becomes addicted, and when he becomes involved with kinky radio personality Nicki Brand, he begins to have bizarre hallucinations, usually of a violent or sexual nature. He discovers from Bianca O’Blivion and from tapes left behind by her dead father, media prophet Brian O’Blivion (obviously modelled on Marshall McLuhan), that encoded within Videodrome is a signal that causes a brain tumour to develop. This tumour is causing Max’s hallucinations. He also discovers that Barry Convex, in league with Harlan, intends to use Videodrome to brainwash a corrupt North America. They send a “programmed” Max to kill Bianca. But she reprograms him, and sends him off to kill Convex and Harlan, which he appears to do (by this time we can’t be sure whether the whole narrative isn’t just another of Max’s hallucinations). In the final scene Max is convinced by a video version of Nicki to cast off the “old flesh” and embrace the new - he shoots himself, repeating Bianca’s mantra “Long Live the New Flesh!”

The Dead Zone (1983, 103 minutes)

Directed by David Cronenberg.

Written by Jeffrey Boam based on a book by Stephen King.

Produced by Debra Hill for Lorimar Productions. Executive Producer: Dino De Laurentiis. Budget: $10 million.

Cinematography by Mark Irwin. Music by Michael Kamen.

Filmed in Toronto, Niagara-on-the-Lake, and elsewhere in Southern Ontario.

Cast: Christopher Walken as Johnny Smith, a schoolteacher and coma victim.

Brooke Adams as Sarah Bracknell, Johnny’s one-time girlfriend.

Martin Sheen as Greg Stillson, an ambitious and somewhat messianic politician.

Geza Kovacs as Sonny Elliman, Stillson’s right-hand man.

Sean Sullivan as Herb Smith, Johnny’s father.

Jackie Burroughs as Vera Smith, Johnny’s mother.

Herbert Lom as Dr. Sam Weizak, head of the Weizak Clinic.

Tom Skerritt as Sherriff Bannerman.

Anthony Zerbe as Roger Stuart, a wealthy local businessman.

Simon Craig as Chris Stuart, Roger’s young son.

Nicholas Campbell as Frank Dodd, a policeman and serial killer.

Colleen Dewhurst as Henrietta Dodd, Frank’s mother.

Roberta Weiss as Alma Frechette, a young girl, and one of Dodd’s victims.

Peter Dvorsky as Clement Dardis, a television reporter.

Les Carlson as Brenner, a local newspaperman who opposes Stillson’s election.

Ken Pogue as the Vice President in one of Johnny’s visions.

Synopsis:  Johnny and Sarah are set to marry in a small town in New England when Johnny is thrown into a coma as a result of a car accident. When he awakes in Dr. Sam Weizak’s clinic five years have passed, and Sarah is married with a young child. Johnny is weak, his muscles severely atrophied, but he soon realizes that he has developed the power of second sight: he “sees” his nurse’s daughter caught in a burning house (she’s saved) and Weizak’s childhood escape from the Nazis. After a partial recovery he helps Sheriff Bannerman to solve a serial killer case (the killer turns out to be Bannerman’s deputy Frank Dodd), getting shot by the killer’s mother in the process. He gets physically weaker as his psychic powers develop. After leaving town he becomes a private tutor. He has a vision of his young student Chris drowning while playing hockey on a thin-iced pond. His warning saves Chris (but not his team-mates): he realizes that his vision had a “dead zone,” an empty spot, in it that proves he can change the events in his visions. When he shakes the hand of the unscrupulous senatorial candidate Greg Stillson, he has a vision of President Stillson ordering a nuclear Armageddon. Johnny goes to a rally with his hunting rifle, intending to assassinate Stillson. He misses, and is shot by Stillson’s aide Sonny; but when Stillson holds up Sarah’s child as a shield, he’s exposed as a coward. In a final dying vision Johnny sees Stillson kill himself in disgrace.

The Fly (1986, 96 minutes)

Directed by David Cronenberg.

Written by Charles Edward Pogue and Cronenberg from a story by George Langelaan.

Produced by Stuart Cornfeld for Brooksfilms. Budget: $10 million.

Cinematography by Mark Irwin. Music by Howard Shore.

The Fly created and designed by Chris Walas Inc.

Filmed in Toronto, Ontario, and in the Kleinburg studios near the city.

Cast: Jeff Golblum as Seth Brundle, a scientist experimenting with teleportation.

Geena Davis as Veronica Quaife, a reporter for the science magazine Particle.

John Getz as Stathis Borans, Particle’s editor, and Veronica’s ex-lover.

Joy Boushel as Tawney, a barfly.

George Chuvalo as Marky, a tough guy.

Les Carlson as Dr. Cheevers, Veronica’s doctor.

David Cronenberg as a gynecologist.

Synposis: Seth Brundle, a brilliant but misanthropic scientist, has perfected a teleportation device which disassembles matter then reassembles it elsewhere. Veronica, a science writer with Particle magazine, becomes interested in Seth’s project, but Seth convinces her to keep the whole thing quiet in exchange for a scoop once his telepods have been successfully tested. They become lovers. But Veronica’s ex-boyfriend Stathis Borans, the editor of Particle, begins to meddle in their relationship, making Seth jealous. To prove his mettle to Ronnie one night Seth, while tipsy, teleports himself. But the computer genetically splices Seth with a housefly that was in the chamber at the moment of teleportation. Seth begins to mutate into Brundlefly, at first strong and sexually voracious, later feeble and grotesque. He slowly loses his human qualities, both the physical and the emotional, as he becomes more and more insect-like. Ronnie, who is pregnant with Seth’s baby, goes to an abortion clinic, but Brundlefly spirits her away back to the lab, planning to fuse with her in the telepods. Stathis rushes to save her; he struggles with Brundlefly, shooting up the telepod cables as the transport is starting, causing Brundlefly to fuse with one of the telepods. A sobbing Ronnie puts Brundlefly-pod out of its misery with Stathis’ shotgun.

Dead Ringers (1988, 115 minutes)

Directed by David Cronenberg.

Written by Cronenberg and Norman Snider based on the book Twins by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland.

Produced by Cronenberg and Marc Boyman for Mantle II Clinic Ltd. and Morgan Creek Productions (with the cooperation of Telefilm Canada). Executive Producers: Carol Baum and Sylvio Tabet. Budget: about $13 million.

Cinematography by Peter Suschitzky. Music by Howard Shore.

Filmed in Toronto, Ontario.

Cast: Jeremy Irons as Elliot and Beverly Mantle, identical twins, prosperous gynecologists living in Toronto.

Geneviève Bujold as Claire Niveau, an actress currently filming in the city.

Heidi von Palleske as Cary, one of Elliot’s girlfriends.

Barbara Gordon as Danuta, the Mantles’ receptionist.

Shirley Douglas as Laura, a friend of Claire’s.

Stephen Lack as Anders Wolleck, an sculptor who works in metals.

Nick Nicholls as Leo, Claire’s agent.

Synopsis: Beverly and Elliot Mantle are identical twin gynecologists working in Toronto. Elliot is a brilliant researcher, Beverly an expert surgeon and practitioner. They make a habit of taking each other’s places when convenient, even sleeping with the same women. They both become involved with Claire Niveau, a patient. When she threatens to emotionally separate them, Beverly becomes addicted to drugs and fantasizes that his female patients have mutated interiors, even designing and having built a set of bizarre instruments for operating on these “mutant women,” Elliot, trying to help Beverly, follows him down the path of drug addiction, in the end both of them dying in a brotherly Liebestod.

Naked Lunch (1991, 115 minutes)

Directed by David Cronenberg.

Written by Cronenberg based on William S. Burroughs’ book of the same name.

Produced by Jeremy Thomas for the Recorded Picture Company, with the participation of Telefilm Canada and the Ontario FDC. Co-Producer: Gabriella Martinelli. Budget: $17 million U.S.

Cinematography by Peter Suschitzky. Music by Howard Shore.

Creatures created and designed by Chris Walas Inc.

Filmed in warehouse sets in Toronto.

Cast: Peter Weller as Bill Lee, a writer and exterminator.

Judy Davis as both Joan Lee, Bill’s wife, and Joan Frost, a writer living in the Interzone.

Ian Holm as Tom Frost, Joan’s husband, another writer living in the Interzone.

Julian Sands as Yves Cloquet, a gay libertine living in the Interzone.

Roy Scheider as Dr. Benway, a specialist in bug powders.

Monique Mercure as Fadela, the Frosts’ sadistic housekeeper.

Nicholas Campbell as Hank, a writer friend of Bill’s.

Michael Zelniker as Martin, another writer friend of Bill’s.

Robert A. Silverman as Hans, a German entrepreneur in the Interzone.

Joseph Scorsiani as Kiki, a handsome young lad.

Peter Boretski as the voice of the creatures.

Synopsis: Bill Lee is an exterminator in New York City in 1953. His wife is a junkie hooked on the bug powder he works with. Bill is arrested and put in a cell with a giant beetle that tries to recruit him to some sort of strange intelligence organization. He returns home, and accidentally shoots Joan while doing their “William Tell” routine. The rest of the film is one gigantic, drug-induced hallucination: Bill meets the lizard-like mugwumps, goes to the Interzone (supposedly a haven for society’s rejects on the North African coast), becomes an operative for his typewriter which from time to time turns into a talking bug, and meets various odd people, including the expatriate American writers Tom and Joan Frost (he has sex with Joan), Hans (a German writer), Kiki (a young homosexual), and Yves Cloquet. The bug informs him that an agent’s best cover is homosexuality, which he flirts with. In the end it turns out that the “reports” he’s been writing on his bugwriter are in fact elements of a novel called Naked Lunch, which his writer friends Hank and Martin attempt to assemble while Bill languishes in the Interzone.

M Butterfly (1993, 102 minutes)

Directed by David Cronenberg.

Written by David Henry Hwang based on his play of the same name.

Produced by Gabriella Martinelli for Geffen Pictures. Executive Producers: David Hwang and Philip Sandhaus.

Cinematography by Peter Suschitzky. Music by Howard Shore.

Filmed in China, Budapest, France, and Toronto, Canada.

Cast: Jeremy Irons as René Gallimard, an official with the French Embassy in China.

John Lone as Song Liling, an opera singer.

Barbara Sukowa as Jeanne Gallimard, René’s wife.

Ian Richardson as Ambassador Toulon.

Synopsis: It’s 1964. René Gallimard, an official with the French Embassy in China, falls for the opera singer Song Liling. She is, in fact, a spy for the Chinese government, pumping René for information about American troop movements in Vietnam. Song fakes a pregnancy and leaves Beijing, returning during the Cultural Revolution, which claims her for a re-education camp. René, previously promoted to Vice Counsel, is stripped of his rank and sent back to Paris, where he works as a diplomatic courier. Song reappears in France, and convinces René to give her access to his diplomatic pouches. René is arrested and tried for espionage; Song is extradited back to China, but not before she exposes the fact that she is in fact a man, and that the whole “affair” with René had been a farce. René slits his own throat in prison while doing his own version of Madame Butterfly.

Crash (1996, 100 minutes)

Directed by David Cronenberg.

Written by Cronenberg based on J. G. Ballard’s book of the same name.

Produced by Jeremy Thomas, Robert Lantos, Stephanie Reichel and Marilyn Stonehouse for Fine Line Features and Alliance Communications.

Cinematography by Peter Suschitzky. Music by Howard Shore.

Filmed in Toronto, Ontario.

Cast: James Spader as James Ballard, a TV director.

Elias Koteas as Vaughan, a renegade scientist and traffic expert.

Deborah Kara Unger as Catherine Ballard, James’ wife.

Holly Hunter as Dr. Helen Remington, a crash victim.

Rosanna Arquette as Gabrielle, a partially crippled crash victim.

Peter MacNeil as Colin Seagrave, Vaughan’s stunt driver.

Cheryl Swarts as Vera Seagrave, Colin’s wife.

Synposis: James and Catherine Ballard have sex with multiple partners then share their experiences with each other to make their own love-making more exciting. James crashes into Helen Remington’s car, killing her husband. While recovering he meets Vaughan, a renegade scientist who is studying accident victims and restaging famous crashes. James, Catherine, and Helen all join Vaughan’s circle, which also includes the crippled but sexually provocative Gabrielle. The group have sex with each other in their cars while pursuing Vaughan’s dark vision of a psychopathological sexuality of the future, a future where human beings and their technology are fully integrated. James and Catherine become more and more fascinated with Vaughan’s perverse persona, each of them having sex with him in the back seat of his black Lincoln. Vaughan eventually commits suicide by crashing his car into a bus; James claims his wrecked car from the police pound, has it repaired, and takes Vaughan’s place as an adventurer in the realm of auto-eroticism.

eXistenZ (1999, 97 minutes)

Written and Directed by David Cronenberg.

Produced by Cronenberg, Andras Hamori and Robert Lantos for Alliance Atlantis and Serendipity Point Films.

Cinematography by Peter Suschitzky. Music by Howard Shore.

Filmed in Toronto, Ontario.

Cast: Jennifer Jason Leigh as Allegra Geller, the world’s greatest game designer.

Jude Law as Ted Pikul, a security guard and Allegra’s fellow adventurer.

Willem Dafoe as Gas, a car mechanic.

Ian Holm as Kari Vinokur, a ski lodge owner and biopod repairman.

Don McKellar as Yevgeny Nourish, a worker in the virtual Trout Farm and designer of transCendenZ.

Sarah Polley as Merle, Yegeny’s assistant.

Calum Keith Rennie as Hugo Carlaw, a video game store clerk and Realist guerilla.

Robert A. Silverman as D’Arcy Nader, owner of a video game store.

Synopsis: The film is an exploration of the nature of reality and how it can be distorted by technology. It starts with a test group of people plugging into biopods that contain a new virtual reality game called eXistenZ. As soon as they do this, a “Realist” terrorist attempts to assassinate the game’s supposed designer Allegra Geller. She and her company’s security guard Ted Pikul escape into the country, on the run from her enemies. Allegra feels a strong urge to play eXistenZ, which she finally does once her damaged biopod has been repaired by Kari Vinokur. They wake up in a game emporium run by D’Arcy Nader, who sells them mini-biopods which they port into. This initiates a game within a game where they visit a bizarre Trout Farm that manufactures biopods and a Chinese Restaurant that serves a repulsive looking “special” lunch. A subplot features a group of “Realist” terrorists fighting against one of the virtual reality game companies. The barriers between the micro-pod game, eXistenZ, and “reality” break down as game characters cross over into non-game events, and all the characters kill each other, leaving only Allegra standing. Finally, we learn that everything that has happened in the film up to its last few minutes was part of a third game, transCendenZ, designed by Yevgeny Nourish. Ted and Allegra assassinate Yegeny for deforming reality, leaving us uncertain whether or not this too is just a game.

Cronenberg’s Work After eXistenZ

Cronenberg’s later films dispense with the mixture of science fiction and horror that was his trademark for the last quarter of the twentieth century. His style in these later films is still grim and sparse, and they are still very body conscious, exploring the effects of insanity, sex and violence. Even though Cronenberg wrote none of them himself (except the screenplay of Cosmopolis), they contain hints of the revolt of the New Flesh that dominated his work before 2000.

Spider (2002, 98 minutes)

Directed by David Cronenberg.

Written by Paul McGrath based on his own novel.

Produced by Catherine Bailey, David Cronenberg and Samuel Hadida.

Cinematography by Peter Suschitzky. Music by Howard Shore.

Filmed in various locations in London, England.

Cast: Ralph Fiennes as Dennis “Spider” Cleg, a schizophrenic man in search of his own past.

Miranda Richardson as Dennis’ mother and as Yvonne, the proprietor of a halfway house.

Gabriel Byrne as Bill Cleg, Dennis’ mother.

John Neville as Terrence, a resident at the halfway house.

Bradley Hall as the young Spider/Dennis.

Lynn Redgrave as Mrs. Wilkinson.

Synopsis: A schizophrenic man named Dennis Cleg, nicknamed Spider by his mother because of the webs he created with strings in his bedroom, has just been released from an insane asylum after a twenty-year stay. He now lives in a halfway house with other such former mental patients, and wanders the streets of London scribbling meaningless gibberish in his notebooks as he becomes reacquainted with the working-class neighbourhood he grew up in. Spider is haunted by flashbacks from his youth, which seem to tell the story of how his father cheated on his mother, killed her (burying her body beside a garden shed), then took up with a prostitute he met at a bar. In the end we discover that Spider’s memories are very unreliable, and that there was only one Mrs. Cleg, his invention of the murder probably caused by his witnessing of a “primal scene” and subsequent failure to get over his Oedipal love for his mother. The film is dark, wet, grimy and slow-moving, without any of the overt horror or science fiction elements of Cronenberg’s earlier films.

A History of Violence (2005, 96 minutes)

Directed by David Cronenberg.

Written by Josh Olson based on the graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke.

Produced by Chris Bender and J. C. Spink.

Cinematography by Peter Suschitzky. Music by Howard Shore.

Filmed in Millbrook, Tottenham, Uxbridge, King City and Toronto, Ontario.

Cast: Viggo Mortensen as Tom Stall, ostensibly a peaceful family man running a small town restaurant in Millbrook, Indiana, who is in fact Joey Cusack, a former gangster.

Maria Bello as Edie Stall, Tom’s wife, who is oblivious to his criminal past.

Ed Harris as Carl Fogarty, a gangster who tries to draw Tom back into a life of crime.

William Hurt as Richie Cusack, a mob boss and Tom’s brother.

Stephen McHattie as Leland Jones, a petty thug and armed robber.

Peter MacNeill as Millbrook’s sheriff Sam Carney.

Ashton Holmes as Jack Stall, Tom’s son.

Heidi Hayes as Sarah Stall, Tom’s daughter.

Synposis: Tom Stall runs a family diner in Millbrook, Indiana (really Millbrook, Ontario). He becomes a local hero when he defends his diner against two armed robbers, killing both of them swiftly, saving his customers in the process. As his fame spreads across the country he is visited by the physically scarred Philadelphia gangster Carl Fogarty, who threatens Tom and his family, kidnapping him son. In another violent confrontation Tom kills several gangsters, saving his family, while being severely wounded himself. His teenage son Jack saves Tom by shooting Fogarty in the back. With his family learning the truth and becoming alienated from him, Tom is forced by further threats to return to Philadelphia to confront his long-lost brother Richie, who orders his hoods to strangle him. But Tom gets the best of them, killing both Richie and his thugs, thus seemingly erasing his “history of violence.” Yet in a typically Cronenbergian downbeat ending, when he returns home he’s greeted cooly by his family, who have been lied to for many years and recently threatened with death. As Cronenberg himself has noted, this film is at least in part about the role of violence in the Darwinian struggle for survival.

Eastern Promises (2007, 100 minutes)

Directed by David Cronenberg.

Written by Steven Knight.

Produced by Paul Webster and Robert Lantos.

Cinematography by Peter Suschitzky. Music by Howard Shore.

Filmed in London, England.

Cast: Viggo Mortensen as Nikolai Luzhin, a driver and disposer of dead bodies for the Russian mob in London.

Naomi Watts as Anna Khitrova, an English nurse of Russian descent who works as a midwife in Trafalgar Hospital, London.

Armin Mueller-Stahl as Semyon, a restaurant owner and the head of a Russian crime family in London that operates according to the vory v zakone (“thieves in law”) code.

Vincent Cassell as Kirill, Semyon’s son, a drunkard with repressed sexual feelings for Nikolai.

Sinéad Cusack as Helen, Anna’s well-meaning mother.

Jerzy Skolimowski as Stepan, Anna’s uncle, who hates and fears the Russian Mafia.

Sarah-Jeanne Labrosse as Tatiana, a pregnant heroin-addicted prostitute

Mina E. Mina as Azim, a barber of ill repute.

Synopsis: The film opens with the arrival at Trafalgar Hospital of Tatiana, a pregnant 14-year-old drug-addicted prostitute. She’s badly haemorrhaging and ready to give birth, dying soon after doing so. Anna, a nurse at the hospital, takes pity on her and her now-motherless child, taking Tatiana’s Russian diary home for her uncle Stepan to translate in order to track down her relatives. The diary pulls Anna into the world of the vory v zakone, the Russian Mafia, which runs prostitution and drug rings in England. The head of the crime family who raped and abused Tatiana, Semyon, tries to cajole Anna into giving him the incriminating diary, which leads her to meet Nikolai, the family’s taciturn driver, and Semyon’s son Kirill. Kirill is an unstable, heavy-drinking loudmouth who has a repressed sexual attraction to Nikolai. When Kirill rashly orders the murder of a rival Chechen gangster, the victim’s family wants revenge. To save his son Semyon pretends to welcome Nikolai into the family, branding him with vory tattoos, but betrays him by sending him to a meeting with two Chechen assassins, pretending that Nikolai is Kirill. After a dramatic and bloody fight in a bath house during which Nikolai is entirely nude, he kills the Chechens. His loyalty to Semyon ended, he uses his knowledge of the diary to implicate him in Tatiana’s rape, leaving the incompetent Kirill as the de facto head of the Russian mob in London. In the end Nikolai is revealed to be an agent of the Russian Federal Security Bureau working in cooperation with Scotland Yard while at the same time being the power behind Kirill’s throne in the local Russian Mafia.

A Dangerous Method (2011, 99 minutes)

Directed by David Cronenberg.

Written by Christopher Hampton, based on his own play The Talking Cure, itself based on John Kerr’s book A Most Dangerous Method.

Produced by Jeremy Thomas and Tiana Alexandra.

Cinematography by Peter Suschitzky. Music by Howard Shore.

Filmed in Vienna, Austria and various locations in Germany.

Cast: Viggo Mortensen as Sigmund Freud, the founder of modern psychoanalysis.

Michael Fassbender as the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, a younger rival of Freud who questions his focus on sexuality.

Keira Knightley as Sabina Spielrein, a patient of Jung’s who becomes his lover.

Sarah Gadon as Emma Jung, Carl’s dutiful wife.

Vincent Cassell as Otto Gross, a renegade Austrian psychoanalyst who starts as a disciple of Freud.

Synopsis: The film opens with Sabina Spielrein, a young Russian Jew suffering from hysteria, being admitted to Carl Jung’s clinic in Switzerland in 1904. Jung uses the “dangerous method” of talk therapy invented by his mentor and later rival Sigmund Freud to treat and eventually sure Sabina. Over time they fall in love, and have an affair that lasts several years. In the meantime, Jung butts intellectual heads with Freud over several key issues in psychoanalysis: the primacy of sexuality (which Freud calls the “libido”), the role of religion and mythology in curing a patient, and whether Freud is right that the analyst must avoid any sexual involvement with his patients. Such involvement finds its champion in Otto Gross, once an acolyte of Freud’s, who visits Jung in 1908 to cure his drug addiction and hatred of his father. Gross argues that therapists should preach the idea that we should “never repress anything,” telling Jung that having sex with patients is actually a positive thing. Over time Freud and Jung grow apart as Sabina morphs into an intellectual force in her own right. She later meets Freud, and argues with him that sexuality can be a creative force, even if love destroys the ego in the act of sexual union. This hints at Freud’s creation of the death drive after World War I when faced with the obvious fact that human beings enjoy killing each other and the less obvious fact some instinct in our mind other than the libido represses our sexual drive. Indeed, in 1913 the filmic Jung describes a prophetic dream of the blood of thousands washing over Europe like a tidal wave. The film ends with Freud, Jung and Spielrein split apart, the final shot showing Jung looking sadly at an empty lake, as if seeing the cataclysm to come.

Cosmopolis (2012, 109 minutes)

Directed by David Cronenberg.

Written by David Cronenberg.

Produced by David Cronenberg, Paulo Branco, Renee Tab and Martin Katz.

Cinematography by Peter Suschitzky. Music by Howard Shore and Metric.

Filmed in Toronto and New York.

Cast (in order of appearance): Robert Pattinson as Eric Packer, a currency speculator and assets manager, and symbol of cyber capitalism.

Kevin Durand as Torval, Packer’s chief of security.

Jay Baruchel as Shiner, Packer’s head of technology, cyber security and startup partner.

Sarah Gadon as Elise Packer (formerly Elise Shifrin), his frosty, emotionally distant wife.

Philip Nozuka as Michael Chin, Packer’s impossibly young systems analyst.

Juliette Binoche as Didi Fancher, Packer’s art consultant and occasional lover.

Emily Hampshire as Jane Melman, an avid jogger and Packer’s head of finance.

Samantha Morton as Vija Kinsky, Packer’s chief of theory.

Patricia McKenzie as Kendra Hays, Packer’s bodyguard and afternoon fling.

Gouchy Boy as Kosmo Thomas, a rap entrepreneur.

K’Naan as Brutha Fez, a dead Sufi rapper whose funeral impedes Packer’s progress.

Mathieu Amalric as André Petrescu, the “pastry assassin.”

Paul Giamatti as Benno Levin, a disgruntled former employee who wants to kill Packer.

Synopsis: In present-day Manhattan, 28-year-old billionaire currency speculator Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson) decides he needs a haircut, so he spends the day slowly moving through the dense New York traffic caused by the visit of the US President, anti-capitalist demonstrations and a rapper’s funeral in his well appointed stretch limousine. On the way there he meets his frosty wife Elise several times, consults with various employees (having sex with two of them), and presides over the decline and fall of his financial empire due to an unwise speculation on the Chinese yuan. His chief of theory Vija Kinksy explains to him that he’s at the center of cyber capitalism, the spectre that is haunting the world, where information and time are the key commodities. The dispossessed outside are angry that this purely rational construct will leave them behind. At first Eric seems perfectly insulated from the world outside his limo and thus from the consequences of his currency trades. However, as time passes, this external world becomes increasingly chaotic, as protestors spray paint and smash his limo, adopting the rat as their symbol. He obsesses about his morality (he gets a medical check up every day), but clearly revels in the world of the flesh, escaping from the world of capitalist simulacra with sexual pleasure, a hearty breakfast and lunch, physical self-abuse, and the spectacle of the 99% banging on his protective enclosure. He winds up in the neighbourhood where he grew up, where he shoots his chief of security Torval for no particular reason before getting a partial haircut from the same barber he went to as a child. He’s shot at by a would-be assassin named Benno Levin, whose grimy apartment he tracks down. Levin is really Richard Sheets, a former currency trader at Packer Capital. He wants to kill Packer to give his life meaning, which he feels has disappeared under cyber capitalism. The pair debate whether such an act will really fulfill Levin’s life. In the final scene Levin raises his pistol as a tear rolls down Packer’s face. Will he shoot? We never find out.

Maps to the Stars (2014, 111 minutes)

Directed by David Cronenberg.

Written by Bruce Wagner.

Produced by Saïd Ben Saïd, Martin Katz and Michel Merkt.

Cinematography by Peter Suschitzky. Music by Howard Shore.

Filmed in Toronto and Los Angeles.

Cast: Julianne Moore as Havana Segrand, a fading Hollywood star who lives in the shadow of her dead mother.

Sarah Gadon as Clarice Taggart, a dead movie star who appears to her daughter Havana from time to time as a ghost.

John Cusack as Dr. Stafford Weiss, a slick TV psychologist, and Benjie and Agatha’s father.

Olivia Williams as Cristina Weiss, the family matriarch, who carefully manages Benjie’s career.

Mia Wasikowska as Agatha Weiss, Havana’s new assistant, and a recent inmate of an asylum with pyromania as a hobby.

Evan Bird as Benjie Weiss, a Bieber-style teen idol with too much money and fame for his own good.

Robert Pattinson as Jerome Fontana, a limo driver and aspiring screenwriter.

Synopsis: A satire chronicling the rise to fame and fortune of the Weiss family alongside the decline of Havana Segrand, who lives in the shadow of her beautiful but dead mother Clarice Taggart. A satire of Hollywood, where actors have existential meaning only when being written about in papers and online, even though their cinematic images are in effect immortal.

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Crash Press Release for Cannes Festival, 1996.

[1]Or, more accurately, interactionism, i.e. the notion that the mind and body are composed of separate substances which interact with each other, although existing separately.

[2]As David Chute (1980: 36) notes of Cronenberg’s early films, typically, “his cancerous monsters or parasites are born directly from the flesh itself. But it’s the mind, as represented by his dour medical technocrats, that sires these horrors.” The interplay is at times, as in Videodrome, difficult to sort out.

[3]See in this respect the articles by Chute and Harkness listed in the bibliography.

[4]Indeed, although Cronenberg seems interested in focusing more on the body than the mind, on a deeper level his films aim at a therapeutic re-fusing of mind and body. As he told Chris Rodley (1997: 90), “A complete film-maker should be able to appeal to all facets of human existence, the sensual as well as the cerebral. If you do get this mixture together properly, you have a perfect example of healing the Cartesian schism. You have something that appeals to the intellect and to the viscera.”

[5]See the Appendix for details. I’ll exclude Cronenberg’s early experimental films Stereo and Crimes of the Future, even though they also exemplify Cronenberg’s somatic dialectic very well; Fast Company, a film about car racing that is does not fit in very well with the rest of his works; and The Dead Zone and M Butterfly, which, although they deal with some of the themes I’ll touch on here (especially the mind/body split in The Dead Zone, and the mutability of the human body and of sexuality in M Butterfly), were not written by Cronenberg. Yet these two latter films, especially The Dead Zone, are very “Cronenbergian” both in their emotionally bleak tone and their stories about how the mind can transform the body’s impulses. I will also exclude his post-2000 films Spider, A History of Violence, Eastern Promises, A Dangerous Method and Cosmopolis as non-horror/science fiction films that Cronenberg didn’t write himself (although he ... ), though all share his earlier stark style and emotional coolness.

[6]Indeed, Cronenberg seems to be parodying this interpretation of his works early on in The Fly. The central character of the film, Seth Brundle, is a slightly mad scientist played by Jeff Goldblum. After he lures the beautiful science reporter Veronica (played by Geena Davis) to his laboratory/loft apartment after a cocktail party, he plays a few ominous notes on his piano, warning her (after she’s seen his telepods) that “It’s too late - you’ve already seen them. Can’t let you leave here alive.”

[7]Wood called them “reactionary” because he sees the traditional role of the monster in horror films as a symbol of the “return of the repressed” come back to haunt a too-controlled capitalist culture. Cronenberg’s monsters throw into question the desirability of throwing off our surplus repression, and are thus in Wood’s eyes reactionary.

Cronenberg has answered Wood a number of times. He told Susan Ayscough in 1983 that Wood interpreted Shivers on the most mundane and least interesting level, implying that he misses the film’s more interesting level of the body’s psychopathological rebellion. I’ll discuss this level of interpretation of his early films in the next chapter.

[8]Stephen Bruhm notes that pain occupies a central place in Gothic fiction, for it gives the characters therein a degree of “ontological confirmation”; it effects “a return of the body to a pre-Cartesian body - where mind and body are inseparable - at the same time as it pits the mind firmly against the body” (1994: 9). Once again the link to Cronenberg’s films is obvious: the monstrously mutated body, e.g. of Rose in Rabid or of Seth in The Fly, experiences strange urgings and pain that ontologically confirms the falseness of the Cartesian split, while at the same time pitting the mind, with its last vestiges of traditional morality, against the body’s newly discovered desires. We see this when Rose, in her lust for blood, preys on her best friend Mindy “against her will,”and when Seth warns Veronica that he’s fast becoming an insect, and that when he does, he’ll hurt her.

[9]This is bad exegesis right from the beginning: everyone in Shivers is sexually rapacious, while Kim Obrist is not the only (or even the central) scanner in Scanners, and is nomore“monstrous” than her male counterparts.

[10]This is a laughably bad interpretation of both Canadian culture and of Cronenberg’s theoretical intentions. Perhaps untutored American critics of Canadian cultural politics should follow Wittgenstein’s suggestion at the end of the Tractatus: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.” Yet this isn’t to say that Quebec and English Canada are not culturally distinct places.

[11]Richard Corliss, reviewing Dead Ringers in Time, says of The Fly that it is Cronenberg’s masterwork, where one man wages a heroic, doomed struggle against physical and moral degeneration; “The catalogue of punishments seems medieval - Savonarola meets Bosch - even as it taps baby boomers’s fears of decaying vitality and eviscerated dreams. For Cronenberg the body is a haunted house whose rumblings trigger lust, mystery and excruciating pain in the poor tenant. The property is condemned.” Once again, critics find the Gothic element in Cronenberg the easiest to intuitively grasp, in Corliss’ case with a bit of social commentary added.

[12]Unfortunately, Campbell shies away from Cronenberg’s enthusiasm for unrepressed sexuality, suggesting that “In Cronenberg’s world sexuality, like technology, is a destructive enthusiasm, an agent no longer of Eros but of Thanatos.” She links this to the classic horror genre theme of mechanistic biological imperialism, where human beings through which it operates becomes puppets robbed of self-direction and individual identity (310). This is certainly a classic horror theme, and on the most basic level a Cronenberg theme too (see the previous chapter in this respect). But I think that Cronenberg would reply that our unconscious drives are still our drives, just as much “us” as our rationality. If there’s any biological imperialism going on here, it’s one of the id conquering the ego, of the body and its drives invading the mind’s pristine order.

[13]I’ll sort out the complex structure of the levels of reality and hyperreality seen in the film in Chapter 4. Suffice it to say that the events described here are almost certainly virtual.

[14]In An Outline of Psychoanalysis, he states the hypothesis in purely sexual terms: “And at this point we may anticipate the thesis that many of the highly valued assets of our civilization were acquired at the cost of sexuality and by the restriction of sexual motive forces.” (1969: 58).

[15]Cronenberg has told Angela Baldassarre (1992) that he wanted each typewriter in Naked Lunch to become its owner’s unconscious: they could push it around, it would push back, and they could have arguments with it.

[16]Of course, he later repudiates this as a mere “surface” interest, as we saw in Chapter 2.

[17]Cronenberg shows us much less semen than Ballard does in the novel, once again using his trademark visual restraint.

[18]This is my own coinage - it’s a rough and ready description of Innis and McLuhan, and of latter-day theorists influenced at least in part by the school’s founding fathers, including Arthur Kroker, Heather Menzies, and Mark Kingwell.

[19]I’m using the term “final threshold” here both in its generic sense and in reference to a late stage in Joseph Campbell’s model of the hero’s journey in The Hero With a Thousand Faces (New York: Pantheon Books, 1949) and elsewhere.

[20]Baudrillard sees three orders as preceding this third one: a Symbolic Order, where signs like the cross stood for something real; the First Order, where copies of real things were seen as counterfeits; and the Second Order, that of industrialism, where a single prototype was mass produced as many identical copies.

[21] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_addiction, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/2499957.stm,  http://starcraft.wikia.com/wiki/Lee_Seung_Seop.