David Cronenberg

He started working in the early 70s and to begin with his films looked like simple exploitation horror. His first film was called Shivers and concerns an alien parasite that infests people’s bodies and turns them into sex maniacs. Cronenberg was known for incredibly gory sequences and for an obsession with sexuality and transgressive desire. For this reason he was known as the ‘King of Venereal Horror’. However, critics began to realise that his films explored deep psychological themes and he was eventually proclaimed as an artist.

Videodrome

Videodrome is a profound psycho-sexual thriller directed by David Cronenberg in released in 1983.  Max Renn (James Woods) is a programmer for a cable TV channel that specialises in soft-core pornography and hard-core violence. He’s looking for something ‘tough’, something that will ‘break through’. He discovers test transmissions of a programme called Videodrome, a show of unknown origin that consists of nothing but sexual torture and murder. Max wants Videodrome for business purposes, but he also desires it for pleasure because he has latent sadistic desires.

It transpires that the Videodrome signal induces hallucinations in the viewer. For example, Max hallucinates that he puts his head through the TV screen. This image suggests that the human subject is immersed in television. This is a metaphor for the pervasiveness of the media in our lives. The Videodrome hallucinations disorient the viewer and erase the boundaries between reality and fantasy. The film gives a demonstration of this effect because everything is seen from the viewpoint of Max, who is totally scrambled. We cannot tell whether we’re seeing reality or Max’s media-induced hallucination.

Videodrome depicts the media as a ubiquitous and identity-threatening force. The threat is that of information overload: the constant bombardment of information leaves us scrambled and our identities begin to disintegrate. This is made literal in the film: exposure to the Videodrome signal is fatal because it causes the viewer to develop a brain tumour.

Max encounters a media prophet called Brian O’Blivion. He’s a crazed intellectual who preaches that TV has displaced reality. O’Blivion argues that TV images are now so widespread and so penetrating that they can’t be distinguished from reality anymore. Human experience is becoming vicarious because people are living through television. He states that ‘Television is reality and reality is less than television’.  The character of Brian O’Blivion is a pastiche of Marshall McLuhan, a genuine media prophet. He also echoes the arguments of the postmodernist philosopher Jean Baudrillard, particularly his classic text Simulacra and Simulation. Baudrillard argued that TV has replaced reality. Our lives are now nothing more than parodies of what we see projected on the myriad screens that surround us; we compare everything we do to these idealised portrayals.

Brian O’Blivion invented the Videodrome signal, but he also became its first victim, because he contracted a brain tumour from it. However, he thinks that the growth in his brain is not a tumour, but a new organ of the brain that can receive and generate hallucinations. He believes that the new organ will allow us to live in a completely virtual world. He thinks this is the next stage of human evolution: we’re evolving to exist in a new media reality.

The film sees information overload as negative. In the confusion of images, desires and compulsions the self disintegrates. This reflects the loss of identity associated with postmodernism. O’Blivion personifies this process because he’s literally dead and only exists in the form of videotapes. O’Blivion no longer needs to exist because his essence has been captured by technology – he‘s able to disappear into the network and live on as a purely digital being.

The Fly

One of his best films is The Fly (1986). In this film, a scientist called Seth Brundle is working on a teleportation device. He develops two telepods. The first breaks down the person’s body into its constituent atoms and the second pod reassembles them. Brundle gets drunk one night and decides to use the machine before testing it, but he does not realise that a fly gets in the machine with him. The computer does not know there are two separate organisms in the pod, so it accidentally fuses Brundle with the fly. For the remainder of the film, Brundle undergoes a horrifying transformation as he mutates into a hybrid creature – half-man, half-fly.

The Fly is one of the strongest expressions of the abject you could ever ask for. Brundle’s transformation is truly disgusting. His extremities begin to fall off and he keeps them in the bathroom cabinet as a memorial to his humanity, which he refers to as the ‘Brundle Museum of Natural History’. The most disgusting scene is where he is trying to study his disease and films himself eating. He vomits digestive fluid in order to corrode the food before he eats it, in the way that a fly does. What makes it worse is he acts as if he is making a kid’s science show.

Some critics have seen The Fly as a metaphor for the AIDS pandemic, which was obviously a major concern in the 1980s. Brundle undergoes a devastating transformation that manifests itself as physical deterioration. There is a dream sequence in which his girlfriend goes into labour and gives birth to a maggot. This illustrates her fear that Brundle’s ‘disease’ might be contagious. In this sequence the obstetrician is played by Cronenberg himself, which is significant. It is a metaphor for creation – the artist creates new life. The dream sequence in particular can be seen as an AIDS metaphor because it explores the fear of being in a relationship with someone who has a sexually-transmitted disease.

Cronenberg is fascinated with the idea of physical degeneration witnessed by a healthy mind. The idea of watching one’s body decay and remaining fully conscious of it is the tragedy of many forms of disease, as well as the aging process. The Fly deals with the visceral horrors of the body. It examines a malign revolution of the flesh that drowns out the individual’s identity. It shows us the utter destruction of a human subject by forces of inconceivable otherness.

Crash

David Cronenberg’s film Crash (1996) was based on a novel by J.G. Ballard. This was an extremely controversial film which focuses on a subculture of people who have a sexual fetish associated with car crashes. The Daily Mail, in particular, was apoplectic with rage over the film (not than anyone would have noticed a difference).  Despite its provocative themes, however, the film has much to say about human experience in the late-modern era. 

The film centres on James and Catherine, a married couple who have a disconnected relationship. The couple engage in infidelities with a range of partners in the hope of achieving some limited form of stimulation.

James has a car crash and it releases a current of sexual desire, which fuses with a new fascination with cars, traffic and accidents. He encounters a character called Vaughan, who is the ringleader of a cult of car crash fetishists. The group watches car-crash footage as if it were pornography.  However, Vaughan activities are based on a definite programme and he describes his project as the reshaping of the human body through modern technology.  The characters actively invite car crashes and fetishize both the damaged metal and the physical injuries that result. In the car crash, body and machine fuse in a chaos of destruction; human blood mixes with leaking radiator fluid; flesh and metal interpenetrate.

This scenario has a legitimate satirical function.  The film suggests that in the late modern era technology dominates our lives and controls us. Every human need is answered by technology, which means that we are becoming desensitised. There is no real sensation anymore. The film depicts a harshly technologised landscape that stretches from horizon to horizon. The world is swamped by metallic movement due to ceaseless streams of automobiles. In this context, everyone is numb and alienated; they become zombies. Even the cinematography of the film is pristine and minimalistic; it has a polished, fetishistic purity. This gives a sense of living in a soulless automated world where the human body is almost an irrelevance.

The film argues that technology has become too distant from the body. The car crash is a way of reconnecting technology and the flesh. It forces together the hard, mineral surfaces of the car and the softness of the human body, the cold indifference of metal and the yearning of the flesh. The human body is reshaped by the jagged metal of the car-wreck in the form of wounds. At the same time, the car is deformed and becomes an analogue of the wounded human body. This is a marriage of technology and the body.

This relies on the concept of the abject. The piercing and breaking of the body reveals us as abject and alive. Vaughan is a crazed prophet. He’s covered in scars, so he looks like Frankenstein’s monster, all pieced together. He has a sickly pallor , greasy hands and dirty fingernails. He has strange hunched movements and is constantly chewy gum. Even his penis is described as ‘badly scarred.’  This makes him into a creature: he is totally abject. The car crash has revealed his abject nature and put him in contact with the body.

Through the fetish of the car crash, James is able to revitalise his jaded relationship with his wife. The logical conclusion is that James and Catherine kill each other in car crashes as an expression of mutual love. At the same time, car crashes represent the failure of technology and the crash de-technologises the car. It reforms cars into expressionistic sculptures of de-functionalised matter. The car crash reverses the thrust of technology. The car has died as a sacrificial deliverance of humanity from the tyranny of a soulless technoculture.