Cinema is our most viable and enduring form of design fiction. More than any other medium, it lets us peer into possible futures projected from the raw materials of the recent past, simulate scenes based on new visions via science and technology, gauge our reactions, and adjust our plans accordingly. These visions are equipment for living in a future heretofore unseen. As the video artist Bill Viola puts it,
the implied goal of many of our efforts, including technological development, is the eradication of signal-to-noise ratio, which in the end is the ultimate transparent state where there is no perceived difference between the simulation and the reality, between ourselves and the other. We think of two lovers locked in a single ecstatic embrace. We think of futuristic descriptions of direct stimulation to the brain to evoke experiences and memories.[1]
When we think of the future, the images we conjure end up on the screen.
With only one adaptation, director David Cronenberg proved perhaps J.G. Ballard’s most effective cinematic interpreter. Roger Ebert said of his version of Crash, “it’s like a porno movie made by a computer: it downloads gigabytes of information about sex, it discovers our love affair with cars, and it combines them in a mistaken algorithm.”[2] These visions of intimate machines give both versions of Crash a sense of malign prophecy. Before Crash in 1996, an adaptation Ballard loved, Cronenberg had already established himself as the preeminent body-horror director with such films as The Brood (1979), Scanners, (1981), Videodrome (1983), The Fly (1986), Dead Ringers (1988), and Naked Lunch. (1991). Jessica Kiang writes of Crash, “Koteas’s Vaughan explains that his project is ‘the reshaping of the human body through technology,’ a pretty perfect summation of a recurring theme in the first half of Cronenberg’s career, best exemplified by his 1983 masterpiece, Videodrome.”[3]
In Videodrome, CIVIC-TV’s satellite dish operator, Harlan (played by Peter Dvorsky) pirates the signal of a plotless show of pure violence called “Videodrome” being beamed from bands in between. In search of unique programming for the station, Max Renn (played by James Woods) authorizes its rebroadcast. Renn soon finds that the footage is not faked and is PR for a socio-political movement weaponizing the signal for mind control. Professor Brian O’Blivion (played by Jack Creley) helped develop the signal to unify the minds of the viewers. Videodrome gave him a brain tumor and subsequent hallucinations. He sees the resultant state as a higher form of reality. As his daughter explains, “he saw it as part of the evolution of man as a technological animal. […] He became convinced that public life on television was more real than private life in the flesh. He wasn't afraid to let his body die.”[4] He tells Max, “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 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.”[5] It doesn’t take long for the reality in this film to devolve into a hallucinatory state itself. As the dialog of the last scene goes, “to become the new flesh you have to kill the old flesh. Don't be afraid. Don't be afraid to let your body die. […] Watch. I'll show you how. It's easy. Long live the new flesh. Long live the new flesh.”[6]
Videodrome is another example of the view of the body—and the brain inside it—as an antenna, picking up signals from television broadcasts and the airwaves themselves. As Warren Ellis once said, “if you believe that your thoughts originate inside your brain, do you also believe that television shows are made inside your television set?”[7] It seems relevant here also that Albert Einstein wrote the preface to Upton Sinclair’s aptly titled 1930 treatise on telepathy, Mental Radio, which he described as being “of high psychological interest.”[8] These are visions of escape through media, escape routes as media.
The character of Professor Brian O’Blivion was inspired by Marshall McLuhan, one of Cronenberg’s college professors at the University of Toronto.[9] McLuhan famously appeared in a fourth-wall-breaking scene in Annie Hall (1977), where Woody Allen introduces him, speaking directly to the camera. That wall is the contested barrier of Videodrome. McLuhan’s concerns about information overload and media reconfiguring our brains were not lost on Cronenberg, and Cronenberg’s own concerns about the technological manipulation of brains and bodies weren’t lost on his son either.
An expectedly large leap from body horror’s origins in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, Frankenstein, Brandon Cronenberg’s 2020 film, Possessor, nonetheless concerns itself with manipulating flesh for murderous ends. Tasya Vos (played by Andrea Riseborough) hijacks bodies via their brains in order to carry out assassinations unscathed. Through an advanced neurological interface, she takes over another’s body. Once the hit is in, she returns to her own by forcing the host to kill themselves. Like the Sunken Place in Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017), the cognitive contrivance in Possessor pushes one consciousness out of the way of another. Once in control of a new body in a new social context, the operative is able to perform heinous acts in their name—namely murder-suicides.
When Tasya returns from a mission, she has to recalibrate to the real world in her own body. One of the tests for this debriefing process involves a number of analog, personal totems. This tests the idea that the analog world is our native environment as humans, as we all slide into ever more-digital worlds. The first of Tasya’s totems in the test is her grandfather’s pipe. The second is a mounted butterfly. “This is an old souvenir,” she remembers. “I killed her one day when I was a child and... I felt guilty... I still feel guilty.”[10] As much as the butterfly and her memory of it serve to anchor her here, her guilt is the real anchor. Guilt is our private connection to others.
Even so, when one of her victims, Colin Tate (played by Christopher Abbott), manages to wrest control of his body from her, he calls her agency into question. Using his fragmented access to Taysa’s memories, Colin manages to find her home, infiltrates it, and berates her husband:
just think, one day your wife is cleaning the cat litter and she gets a worm in her, and that worm ends up in her brain. The next thing that happens is she gets an idea in there, too. And it's hard to say whether that idea is really hers or it's just the worm. And it makes her do certain things. Predator things. Eventually, you realize that she isn't the same person anymore. She's not the person that she used to be. It's gotta make you wonder whether you're really married to her or married to the worm.[11]
Verifying the source of a message or an idea is a struggle even outside of our heads. When they pop in unannounced, there’s no way to know where they came from. It makes it difficult to care about the sender.
At the end of the movie when Taysa encounters the dead butterfly again during recalibration, she says she no longer feels guilty for killing it.
Yale University professor Dr. José M.R. Delgado’s 1969 book, Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society, provides an intriguing precursor to Cronenberg’s film. In this book, Delgado outlines the methodology for Cronenberg’s fictional conceit. Delgado wrote, "by means of ESB (electrical stimulation of the brain) it is possible to control a variety of functions—a movement, a glandular secretion, or a specific mental manifestation, depending on the chosen target.”[12] While admitting that the brain is protected by layers of bone and membrane, he illustrates how easily it is accessed through the senses, drawing convenient comparisons between garage-door openers and two-way radios, and light waves and optical nerves. Direct brain interfaces through implants have existed since the 1930s when W.R. Hess wired a cat’s hypothalamus with electrodes. Hess was able to induce everything from urination and defecation to hunger, thirst, and extreme excitement.
Given the limited viability of such technology during the writing of Delgado’s book, he speculates the future of what he calls “stimoceivers,” writing, "it is reasonable to speculate that in the near future the stimoceiver may provide the essential link from man to computer to man, with reciprocal feedback between neurons and instruments which represents a new orientation for the medical control of neurophysiological functions.”[13] Though Delgado’s stimoceivers are becoming more and more viable, they still require the mind and the machine to adapt to each other.
The cover of Selfless, Godflesh’s 1994 record, is a picture of a human nerve cells growing on a microchip. It’s a picture of what’s called neuromorphic computing, a field of artificial intelligence that goes beyond using models of the human brain to physically harness its computing power, either by growing cells on chips or putting chips in brains. In August of 2020, Elon Musk debuted Tesla’s Neuralink brain implant, demonstrating the device on three unsuspecting pigs.[14] The small, coinlike device reads neural activity, and Musk hopes they will eventually write it as well, connecting brains and computers in a completely new way, mirroring neurons and computer chips. The Neuralink team hopes the devices will correct injuries, bypass pain, record and restore memories, and enable telepathy. As Ballard and the Cronenbergs warned us, one person’s mind-altering technology is another’s absolute nightmare. “In Godflesh,” Daniel Lukes writes, “the human is subsumed into the machine as an act of spiritual transubstantiation.”[15] Computer processors open another path out of the body.
ESCAPE PHILOSOPHY: Journeys Beyond the Human Body
The essay above is an excerpt from Chapter 3, “MACHINE: Mechanical Reproduction,” of my book Escape Philosophy: Journeys Beyond the Human Body, which is available as an open-access .pdf and beautiful paperback from punctum books. It’s really quite good, but don’t take my word for it…
“Too often philosophy gets bogged down in the tedious ‘working-through’ of contingency and finitude. Escape Philosophy takes a different approach, engaging with cultural forms of refusal, denial, and negation in all their glorious ambivalence.” —Eugene Thacker, author, In the Dust of This Planet
“Using Godflesh—the arch-wizards of industrial metal—as a framework for a deep philosophical inspection of the permeable human form reveals that all our critical theory should begin on the street where wasted teen musicians pummel their mind and instruments into culture-shifting fault lines. Godflesh are not just a ‘mirror’ of all the horrors and glories we can inflict on our bodies, but a blasted soundscape of our moans. Roy Christopher’s book is a thought-provoking and delightful crucible of film, music, and the best kind of speculative thought.” — Peter Bebergal, author, Season of the Witch
If you already have Escape Philosophy, or even if you do, and you want more of this kind of thing, check out Children of the New Flesh: The Early Work and Pervasive Influence of David Cronenberg, edited by David Leo Rice and Chris Kelso and published by the good people at 11:11 Press. It’s essential.
As always, thank you for reading,
-royc.
http://roychristopher.com
Notes:
[1] Bill Viola, Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House: Writings 1973–1994 (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1995).
[2] Roger Ebert, “‘Crash’ (1997),” RogerEbert.com, March 21, 1997, http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/crash-1997.
[3] Jessica Kiang, “‘Crash’: The Wreck of the Century,” The Criterion Collection, December 1, 2020, https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/7206-crash-the-wreck-of-the-century. She continues, “so, when Vaughan later retracts that statement, calling it ‘a crude sci-fi concept that floats on the surface and doesn’t threaten anybody,’ it’s hard not to see Cronenberg slyly denigrating his own back catalog, or at least marking in boldface the end of his ongoing engagement with it. Sure enough, with the exception of a watered-down workout in 1999’s eXistenZ, Crash does represent a move away from the gleefully visceral grotesqueries of his early career, toward the more refined psychological grotesqueries of his twenty-first-century output.”
[4] David Cronenberg, dir. and writer, Videodrome (Montreal: Alliance Communications, 1983).
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] From Ellis’s defunct newsletter, quoted in Steven Shaviro, “Swimming Pool,” The Pinocchio Theory, January 29, 2004, http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?m=200401.
[8] See Upton Sinclair, Mental Radio: Does It Work, and How? (Springfield: Charles C. Thomas, 1930), ix. Arthur Koestler called this a “symbolic act.” Arthur Koestler, The Roots of Coincidence: An Excursion into Parapsychology (New York: Vintage, 1972), 50.
[9] Ben Sherlock, “Long Live the New Flesh: 10 Behind the Scenes Facts about ‘Videodrome’,” Screen Rant, August 1, 2020, https://screenrant.com/videodrome-movie-behind-scenes-facts/.
[10] Brandon Cronenberg, dir. and writer, Possessor (Toronto: Rhombus Media, 2020).
[11] Ibid.
[12] José M.R. Delgado, Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 80.
[13] Ibid., 91.
[14] See Leah Crane, “Elon Musk Demonstrated a Neuralink Brain Implant in a Live Pig,” NewScientist, August 29, 2020, https://www.newscientist.com/article/2253274-elon-musk-demonstrated-a-neuralink-brain-implant-in-a-live-pig. See also Melissa Heikkilä, “Machines Can Read Your Brain. There’s Little That Can Stop Them,” Politico, August 31, 2021, https://www.politico.eu/article/machines-brain-neurotechnology-neuroscience-privacy-neurorights-protection.
[15] Daniel Lukes, “Black Metal Machine: Theorizing Industrial Black Metal,” in Helvete: A Journal of Black Metal Theory, Issue 1, edited by Amelia Ishmael, Zareen Price, Aspasia Stephanou, and Ben Woodard (Earth: punctum books, 2013), 79.