“I
don’t think natural selection, as Darwin understood it, is really at work any
more as far as human evolution is concerned. I think something more along the
lines of nuclear disaster is perhaps a natural part of our evolution. It may be
a strange philosophy, I’m not sure. But my instincts seem to suggest that we
were meant to tamper with everything – and have done – and that this will
reflect back on us and change us.”
-
David Cronenberg
This essay will analyse David
Cronenberg’s two films, Videodrome
(1983) and The Fly (1986), in relation
to the theoretical works of Jean Baudrillard’s “Simulacra and Simulation” and
Julia Kristeva’s “Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection”, accordingly. Nothing
better describes Cronenberg and his work in a nutshell than the quote above. Over
the past three decades Cronenberg’s works have firmly established him as an
auteur within the genre of body horror. His films serve as a social commentary
to issues regarding human nature and evolution within society. Cronenberg had
been known to deal with issues about human fears and anxieties particularly
concerning the body. The two films which I will analyse can be put into a
historical context as the 1980s was a turbulent time in American history; it is
these fears about bodily deterioration which I will discuss. The 1980s was an
important decade for the horror genre. Linda Badley writes, “As pornography’s
purpose is to arouse desire and stimulate pleasure, horror’s is to arouse and
exercise latent fear.” (Badley 1995: 11) Through the introduction of the body
horror genre, a shift in playing with human fears was now directed towards
current social issues. It was in the early-1960s first when horror began to
target the audience through the psychological. Rather than using supernatural
settings and characters, horror began to reallocate its focus through realism. Unlike
Cronenberg’s earlier work, the two films in question focus on the bodily
mutation of the masculine, rather than the feminine as he did in his earlier
films such as Rabid (1976) and The Brood (1979). In the two films,
Cronenberg literalizes several issues, including Marshall McLuhan’s “The Medium
is the Message” in Videodrome and in
bringing ‘the insides out’ in The Flyas Barbara Creed’s “Monstrous-Feminine” discusses.
Cronenberg’s vision and motivation behind Videodrome can be seen as an almost literal adaptation of Baudrillard’s and McLuhan’s post-modern theories; the idea that people are becoming so attached to television and modern technology that it is essentially becoming inseparable from reality. The world we live in today according to him is merely a simulation of what is real functioning through a system of symbols and signs, rather than reality. As Baudrillard states in his chapter “The Precession of Simulacra” “it is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory — precession of simulacra — that engenders the territory.” (in Fisher) He lists three stages of the simulacra – or as Plato described it ‘false copy’ – which can be related to a historical context: the premodern, modern (nineteenth century) and postmodern period. In the third stage, and the stage we currently live in, “representation precedes and determines the real; there is no longer any distinction between reality and representation, there is only the simulacrum.” (White & Walker: 125) In other words, our lives have become a simulation of reality seen through and dominated by various media messages. It is in this capitalist society controlled by media influence that has seen humans seek new pleasures, experiences and desires instead of true needs. The shift has seen reality no longer being sufficient, so what Baudrillard describes as the ‘hyperreality’ instead is needed. Marshall McLuhan suggests that while new technologies aid humans in making life easier, the medium of television and news extends our thoughts in the same manner. He saw the media as “any technology that ... creates extensions of the human body and senses” (McLuhan 1995: 239 in Munday 2003). McLuhan insisted that analysing the media’s content is pointless because the medium itself unconsciously subjects the message onto the viewer. This can be related in regard to Videodrome and Professor Brian O’Blivion’s – who in the film functions as a McLuhanesque figure – slogan “television is reality, and reality is less than television.” O’Blivion’s character himself functions only through what seems a series of endless video recordings, hence now literally being part of the medium. He no longer habits the outer core of the human form in flesh, but in technology. The main character which I will discuss in the following however, becomes the ‘new flesh’.
Videodrome plays with these ideas through its central character, Max Renn (James Woods), a soft-core pornography producer for a small cable network who seems to be unsatisfied with the current pornography market. His drive to expand the boundaries of the norm – and much due to his fixated nature – becomes an obsession once he encounters a violent and sadistic never-before seen genre of snuff films known as Videodrome. To Max, the highly violent films embody what the reasonably small cable station Channel 83 is missing. He makes his motives clear as to justify wanting to broadcast the show as simply professional – as he explains his video technician Harlan. However, throughout the film it becomes clear that Max’s own perversions in fact are his true motives. It turns out he becomes the lab rat of the corporation known as Spectacular Optical. The films cause Max to have a series of hallucinations blurring the distinction between the real and unreal, marking his body as an unfixed blend between technology and flesh; ‘the new flesh’. As Steven Shaviro states, “The body is not erased or evacuated; it is rather so suffused with video technology that it mutates into new forms, and is pushed to new thresholds of intense, masochistic sensation.” (Shaviro: 137-138) It is these sensations which Max tries to find; the ‘hyperreal’. It is no coincidence that Cronenberg has his protagonist as a pornography distributer, as it further outlines Max’s obsession with finding new forms of physical pleasure. Nicki Brand (Deborah Harry) furthermore introduces Max into a world of bodily pleasure where “bodily sensation [is] more vivid and therefore more “real”” (ibid: 138). The seeking of Baudrillard’s ‘hyperreal’ becomes a central theme between the two characters as their sexual fetishes eventually lead to their demise. Nicki becomes part of the Videodrome world, while Max must end his own life to become part of the next phase of evolution. Max’s hallucinations mark the beginning of a psychological and physiological breakdown which transforms his body into a series of different anatomical forms. Max discovers a large opening on his torso reminiscent of a vagina. The opening functions as a VCR which by insertion of a pulsating flesh cassette programs him to become an assassin for Videodrome. Max’s hand when searching for the gun he hid in his torso becomes a part of his body; or an extension if you will, playing with McLuhan’s ideas. It is with this gun, something which is part of himself, which he takes his life.
Cronenberg’s vision and motivation behind Videodrome can be seen as an almost literal adaptation of Baudrillard’s and McLuhan’s post-modern theories; the idea that people are becoming so attached to television and modern technology that it is essentially becoming inseparable from reality. The world we live in today according to him is merely a simulation of what is real functioning through a system of symbols and signs, rather than reality. As Baudrillard states in his chapter “The Precession of Simulacra” “it is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory — precession of simulacra — that engenders the territory.” (in Fisher) He lists three stages of the simulacra – or as Plato described it ‘false copy’ – which can be related to a historical context: the premodern, modern (nineteenth century) and postmodern period. In the third stage, and the stage we currently live in, “representation precedes and determines the real; there is no longer any distinction between reality and representation, there is only the simulacrum.” (White & Walker: 125) In other words, our lives have become a simulation of reality seen through and dominated by various media messages. It is in this capitalist society controlled by media influence that has seen humans seek new pleasures, experiences and desires instead of true needs. The shift has seen reality no longer being sufficient, so what Baudrillard describes as the ‘hyperreality’ instead is needed. Marshall McLuhan suggests that while new technologies aid humans in making life easier, the medium of television and news extends our thoughts in the same manner. He saw the media as “any technology that ... creates extensions of the human body and senses” (McLuhan 1995: 239 in Munday 2003). McLuhan insisted that analysing the media’s content is pointless because the medium itself unconsciously subjects the message onto the viewer. This can be related in regard to Videodrome and Professor Brian O’Blivion’s – who in the film functions as a McLuhanesque figure – slogan “television is reality, and reality is less than television.” O’Blivion’s character himself functions only through what seems a series of endless video recordings, hence now literally being part of the medium. He no longer habits the outer core of the human form in flesh, but in technology. The main character which I will discuss in the following however, becomes the ‘new flesh’.
Videodrome plays with these ideas through its central character, Max Renn (James Woods), a soft-core pornography producer for a small cable network who seems to be unsatisfied with the current pornography market. His drive to expand the boundaries of the norm – and much due to his fixated nature – becomes an obsession once he encounters a violent and sadistic never-before seen genre of snuff films known as Videodrome. To Max, the highly violent films embody what the reasonably small cable station Channel 83 is missing. He makes his motives clear as to justify wanting to broadcast the show as simply professional – as he explains his video technician Harlan. However, throughout the film it becomes clear that Max’s own perversions in fact are his true motives. It turns out he becomes the lab rat of the corporation known as Spectacular Optical. The films cause Max to have a series of hallucinations blurring the distinction between the real and unreal, marking his body as an unfixed blend between technology and flesh; ‘the new flesh’. As Steven Shaviro states, “The body is not erased or evacuated; it is rather so suffused with video technology that it mutates into new forms, and is pushed to new thresholds of intense, masochistic sensation.” (Shaviro: 137-138) It is these sensations which Max tries to find; the ‘hyperreal’. It is no coincidence that Cronenberg has his protagonist as a pornography distributer, as it further outlines Max’s obsession with finding new forms of physical pleasure. Nicki Brand (Deborah Harry) furthermore introduces Max into a world of bodily pleasure where “bodily sensation [is] more vivid and therefore more “real”” (ibid: 138). The seeking of Baudrillard’s ‘hyperreal’ becomes a central theme between the two characters as their sexual fetishes eventually lead to their demise. Nicki becomes part of the Videodrome world, while Max must end his own life to become part of the next phase of evolution. Max’s hallucinations mark the beginning of a psychological and physiological breakdown which transforms his body into a series of different anatomical forms. Max discovers a large opening on his torso reminiscent of a vagina. The opening functions as a VCR which by insertion of a pulsating flesh cassette programs him to become an assassin for Videodrome. Max’s hand when searching for the gun he hid in his torso becomes a part of his body; or an extension if you will, playing with McLuhan’s ideas. It is with this gun, something which is part of himself, which he takes his life.
The film then blurs the boundaries between the male and female, masculine and the feminine. As Badley states, “The discourses of horror are not separable from the discourses of gender. Horror expresses and diagnoses gender trouble” (Badley: 34). At the beginning of the film Max embodies certain qualities of hyper-masculinity; he is exceedingly egotistic and seemingly in ‘control’ and ‘power’ when he first meets Nicki on Rena King’s talk show. It is not until Nicki’s overt sexual fetishes equal and override his that his masculinity becomes threatened. As the film progresses Max’s active role as a male changes from active to passive, literally mutating his torso with a gaping vaginal gash. “Max’s transformation absurdly, hyperbolically literalizes the ideology that equates femininity with passivity, receptivity, and castration.” (Shaviro: 141-142) “Femininity is central to Cronenberg’s masculinity, precisely because of its interiority” (Williams in Aaron: 37). In other words, what Williams describes as a “gender-fuck” is at work (ibid: 38).The biological differences between male/female function as a hysteric, a recurring theme with Cronenberg. Max’s bodily transformation can be further contrasted with Barbara Creed’s theories of the ‘monstrous feminine’ by that the mutation he undergoes is one of horror. Creed argues that “the horror film exploits the abject nature of the womb by depicting the human, female and male, giving birth to the monstrous” (Creed: 49). In this sense, Max now embodies the female reproductive organ, thus becoming the female monster. Max when first discovering the slit penetrates himself with his gun as if his own sadistic masculine desires have come to life. In a later scene in the film, Harlan attempts a form of rape by trying to insert a video inside Max’s gash to program him, but gets his hand ‘chewed off’ in the process. The scene plays upon ancient folklore where a fear of male castration was present by the vagina dentata – ‘toothed vagina’. Freud in ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ described that teeth play a large part in dreams and usually have a sexual meaning (Creed: 117). “The ‘pulling’ of the tooth can refer to the act of ‘pulling’ the penis in masturbation, or a tooth being pulled out by someone else in a dream is as a rule to be interpreted by castration” (ibid.). K.A. Scherner used an example of a dream where a row of boys standing opposite each other on a bridge constantly attacking each other as if representing the opening and closing of a set of teeth. Freud argued that “the lower part of the body is frequently transposed with the upper … [referring] to the vagina and the rows of teeth which open and close to a phantasy about castrating teeth.” (ibid: 118) Cronenberg plays with this imagery, focusing closely on the mouth in particular. Nicki’s overtly powerful red lipstick has its connotation within the colour red representing menstrual blood. Her lips come to life on a TV screen which Max approaches, literally getting sucked into it by its pulsating seduction. It is within this hallucination state – or dream if you will – that Cronenberg literalizes Freud’s ideas.
In The Fly, Seth Brundle’s body transformation happens inside the walls of physical reality. The film does not so much play with the ideas of a ‘hyperreality’, but nonetheless explores man’s psychological deterioration affecting the physical. In the beginning of the film Seth is almost the binary opposition of Max. He is a likeable and sympathetic character and does not embody hyper-masculine traits nor are his interests bound in finding time to dress fashionably. In short, his main and only concern is his teleportation experiment; that is, until he meets Veronica Quaife (Geena Davis). Through the introduction of Veronica he learns to discover the ‘world of the flesh’ so to speak. Prior to him meeting Veronica, his teleportation pods can only teleport non-organic material. Through his sexual encounters with the opposite sex is it when he discovers the fault with his machine. Encountering the flesh up close is when he finds the solution to his predicament. It is also through Veronica that his personality changes and causes him to act irrationally when attempting to teleport himself, hence not noticing the fly in the telepod. Seth’s mutation begins by transforming his physical body as if he had been induced to a drug. He starts to inherit what he ‘lacked’ in the beginning of the film: hyper-masculinity, physical strength and a sexual drive. But his extreme high is short-lived and by the end of the film Seth is, just as Terrence Rafferty says, “dying of a randomly metastasizing suggestiveness… false euphoria of the drug addict… the night terrors of the cancer patient, and, finally the hopelessness and need of the AIDS victim” (Rafferty in Badley: 128). He slowly begins to lose his masculinity, literally deteriorating piece by piece. It can be argued that his transformation is one of a gender transformation. He is ready to give birth to something new, acknowledging his loss of masculinity by the “Brundle Museum of Natural History” he creates in his bathroom of lost body parts. Badley argues that “Brundlefly (Brundle/fly) is the male subject’s confrontation with the alien or “female” terrain of the body. He embodies the male hysteria of the 1980s.” (ibid.) The only piece left of his masculinity is the baby inside Veronica, whom he aggressively tries to prevent from getting an abortion. Seth becomes feminised in the way that he becomes to be the “gaze”, as Laura Mulvey argued. “Brundle is progressively… anatomized, layer by layer” (ibid: 129). Williams argues that as Seth’s organs and body parts begin to drop off – particularly the penis as she discovers is placed in the cabinet – “we presume they leave behind gaping holes” (in Aaron: 37). In this sense, Seth’s transformation becomes more feminine than masculine.
Seth’s bodily transformation can be
theoretically applied to the writings of Kristeva. Kristeva’s “Powers of
Horror: An Essay on Abjection” argues that “the mechanism of abjection centres
around objects that disrupt bodily continuity… such as excrement, sexual
fluids, scabs, dead skin cells, menstrual blood, mucus and pus” (Krzywinska in
Aaron: 195). It is all bodily rejections that are “culturally constructed as
disgusting, as is the apparatus of sexual reproduction in females and by
extension the female body in general” (Beard: 29). Veronica’s dream birth
sequence showcases the anxieties about the horrors of childbirth: the inside of
a woman coming to the outside in the form of a large maggot. But while the
birth scene in The Fly could be
applied to Creed’s theories about the monstrous feminine, Veronica in fact is
not monstrous, “he [Seth] is the
monster and it is his monstrosity that is innate” (ibid: 202). Seth embodies all the factors Kristeva mentions. All of the
mentioned natural bodily functions act as threats and therefore trigger
reactions. Threats about the inevitable decay of the body, what we know but
choose to ignore. There is no animal which better exemplifies abjection than
that of a fly. Seth transforms into an animal which feeds on faeces and dead
human flesh, transmits diseases such as typhoid fever, dysentery, cholera,
tuberculosis, anthrax and leprosy. His digestive system becomes one of a fly’s
and he no longer can digest solid foods, but instead uses his vomit to
transform solids into liquids. At the very end of his metamorphosis, he quite
literally turns inside-out, just as the baboon in his earlier experiment did: He
is neither man nor fly, but instead a monster of unnatural sort deformed and
ready to be saved. from his misery. Cronenberg does not spare the audience from
any details when Veronica blasts Brundlefly’s head to pieces, reminiscent of a
famous scene from his earlier film Scanners
(1981).
In
conclusion, Cronenberg has taken the body horror genre to new heights. While he
clearly is interested in the human body, his prime objective is to create
scare. In Videodrome he incorporates
Baudrillard’s and McLuhan’s theories extremely well in exposing not only anxieties
about rising technologies in the 1980s, but gender anxieties as well. In
relation to The Fly, Cronenberg’s key
concerns involve playing with the abject, everything that goes against taboo.
Williams best described what I see Cronenberg to having greatly contributed.
She writes “Contemporary horror has specialised in making
the inside visible, opening it up and bringing it out and pushing the spectacle
of interiority to the limit to find out what the limit is” (Williams in Aaron:
34). It is this limit that Cronenberg tries to find, to break boundaries. The
bodily transformations of both Max and Seth come not only as a result of
obsession but also from masculine heterosexual desires. Max and Seth begin as
very different characters with separate personalities, but end of through a
series of events with the same fate. It can be argued, certainly through a
feminist perspective, that Cronenberg’s earlier films incorporated the male
gaze upon the woman (i.e. Shivers
(1975)). However, in the two films analysed, Max and Seth certainly are those
whom are objectified. Their bodies literally transform from active to passive, from
masculine to feminine.
Bibliography
Book
Sources
Aaron, M. (ed.)
(1999) The Body’s Perilous Pleasures:
Dangerous Desires and Contemporary Culture. Edinburgh University Press.
Badley, L.
(1995) Film, Horror and the Body
Fantastic. Westport; London: Greenwood
Press.
Beard, W. (2006)
The Artist as Monster: The Cinema of
David Cronenberg. University of Toronto Press.
Creed, B. (1993)
The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism,
Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge.
Shaviro, S.
(1993) The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis;
London: University of Minnesota Press.
White, C. &
Walker, T. (2008) Tooning In: Essays on
Popular Culture and Education. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Online
Sources
Fisher, M. Flatline
Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theoery Fiction. Available
from: http://www.cinestatic.com/trans-mat/Fisher/FC2s8.htm
Munday, R. (2003) Marshall McLuhan declared that “the medium is the message.” What did he
mean and does this notion have any value? Available from: http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Students/ram0202.html
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