David Cronenberg’s corporeal surrealism is contingent on the intersection of human sexuality and the object of the non-human ‘other’. Proposing questions of sex, bodily autonomy, and technology in a way I define as posthuman.

According to Rosi Braidotti’s Posthuman Critical Theory, the post-human is not wholly advanced, as it works to encapsulate the contradictions of our age. In this essay, I argue that Cronenberg juxtaposes fetish (both real and fictional), violently permuted with technology, to explore post-human potentialities. Both interrogating our attraction to sex and violence and titillating it, this duality is at the forefront of Cronenberg’s science-fiction concerns. I will draw on theories of what it means to be ‘post-human’, configuring these ideas alongside those of Cronenberg’s ‘new sex’ in order to interrogate how these desires speak to the surreal post-humanism of the Anthropocene epoch.

VIDEODROME’S ‘NEW FLESH’

Cronenberg’s 1983 film Videodrome is the director’s self-mediation on sex and violence in cinema. Here, as well as in his other works from the early decades of his career, Cronenberg marries lowbrow genre tropes (porn, horror, sci-fi) to highbrow philosophical contemplation to fetishize the possibilities of the body within a post-human world. Donna Haraway claims that “The boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.” This notion is suggested in the film’s self-reflexive voyeurism.

Max Renn, president of a sensationalist TV station named CIVIC-TV, is on the lookout for ever more lurid programming. This search eventually leads him to discover Videodrome, an in-world broadcast in which a series of unnamed people are tortured and killed with no plot. Max becomes obsessed with the show, unaware of the fact that they are snuff films, and is determined to air it on CIVIC. We watch these tapes alongside Max and, later, his love interest Nicki Brand, who claims they turn her on. Just as Max and Nicki become voyeurs to Videodrome, we are replicating the same act; the audience is made complicit in Max’s fetish for excessive sexual violence.

The sexual violence of Videodrome manifests in Max’s personal life through his relationship with Nicki. Initially, Nicki’s barely concealed masochism makes him visibly uncomfortable, as she burns her left breast with a cigarette and reveals slashes on her shoulder before imploring him to add yet another. Eventually this trepidation wears off and they engage in needle play. Images of “softcore pornography and hardcore violence” permeate the early parts of the film before the science-fiction elements take the reins. Unlike postmodern theory, the post-human regrounds concepts of subjectivity.

Max’s subjectivity is foregrounded most pertinently in the intense hallucinations he experiences after Nicki leaves to audition for Videodrome. Nicki begins to manifest exclusively through Max’s visions, most often through television sets. She seduces Max, enticing him to kiss the screen before her lips suck his head into the television. Later, he visualises himself and Nicki in the red-and-black, dungeon-like set of Videodrome. She appears and hands over a whip. Max looks away momentarily and when he looks back, she is within the television set once again, goading him: “What are you waiting for, lover? Let’s perform. Let’s open those neural floodgates.” He whips the television as Nicki moans, and the body becomes the site of convergence: a non-human sexual organ, at once literally acting and being acted upon.

BIOTECHNOLOGICAL TRANSGRESSIONS

The latest film in his oeuvre, and a return to body horror after two decades, Crimes of the Future (2022) is decidedly darker. In Videodrome, media was the transgressive figure and the body followed suit. In Crimes of the Future, the body itself is the site of transgression. In this unspecified future, most humans can no longer feel pain, nor is there fear of infection.

In Hayles’s definition, post-humanism concedes that:

“The very illusion of control bespeaks a fundamental ignorance about the nature of the emergent processes through which consciousness, the organism, and the environment are constituted. Mastery through the exercise of autonomous will is merely the story consciousness tells itself to explain the results that actually come about through chaotic dynamics and emergent structures.”

The illusion of control is omnipresent in Crimes of the Future as, once again, we become voyeurs to the uncomfortable yet stimulating transgressions of bodily existence. Performance artist Saul Tenser suffers from ‘Accelerated Evolutionary Syndrome’, a condition in which his body randomly grows new organs. The future Cronenberg envisions here is one liberated from disease and pain but still mired by bureaucracy. Saul and his partner Caprice visit the National Organ Registry, a new, top-secret governmental department created to document new organs and enforce legal restrictions on human evolution. It is staffed by investigators Whippet and Timlin, who both harbour admiration for their work.

Saul’s act, performed alongside Caprice, an ex-surgeon, is live organ-removal surgery, enabled by a converted biomechanical autopsy machine and performed in front of a crowd. For both participants and many watching, this act is above sex. One visual participant is Timlin, who approaches the couple after a show, expressing particular interest in Saul. She leans into him before proclaiming, “Surgery is the new sex.” This “unholy marriage of science and desire” allows these people to feel completely in control, but ultimately traps them in a tired, anthropocentric view of reality. Despite advancements in biotechnology, environmental decay looms ever-present.

In this way, Cronenberg recognises that the post-human is not “an intrinsically liberatory or progressive category,” but rather a “careful negotiation in order to constitute new assemblages or transversal alliances between human and nonhuman agents, while accounting for the ubiquity of technological mediation.” This plurality of meanings and signifiers is most aligned across both films in the growths and manipulations of Max and Saul’s bodies. In Videodrome there is talk of an “outgrowth of the brain” that will “change human reality”, a new organ forced by viewing the programme. In Crimes of the Future, Saul’s condition is described nebulously as a “creative cancer”.

Max’s hallucinations become more real, and he experiences a forced cavity in his stomach that absorbs his gun and is later used to force a VHS tape inside as a programming mechanism. Saul mirrors this experience by not only allowing himself to be regularly sliced open to remove his new organs, but eventually installing a zipper on his stomach for easy access. When Saul arrives home after surgery, Caprice enthusiastically performs oral sex on this new organ. For Max, the stomach becomes a site of violence and involuntary action; for Saul, it is a voluntary site of both sexual and artistic pleasure.

The surreal body horror enables a posthuman philosophical introspection on the ever-changing relationship between our environment and our bodies. These concerns are further explored through the creation of fetishes, pleasures, and various possibilities of bio-technological advancement. Instigating deliberation on the limits of human sexuality and the titillation of violence, whilst implicating the spectator in the voyeuristic nature of Cronenberg’s narratives, he chooses not to ignore the darker side of human desire. For better or worse, he presents “a new form of sexuality for a new species of man, an emergent genetic biochemistry for a most innovative and creative form of life.”

Read Adele’s essay in print now in UNDERWORLD 001: SEXXXI+SURREAL!