Chicago, sometime in 1997: I stand waiting for a friend outside a theater showing David Cronenberg’s adaptation of the JG Ballard novel Crash. As I see a trickle of audience members make their way through the glass doors, I notice faces mildly contorted and dead-eyed, expressions more in keeping with some lingering psychic shock than the usual reactions to the frigid “lake effect” wind. Most of them are conspicuously speechless, lacking the usual hyper-garrulous behavior of modern people once they’re able to resume talking after a couple hours of compelled silence. Eventually one 30-something, clean-cut man with hands shoved into his peacoat pockets (indistinguishable from the rest of his Lincoln Park brethren) will step outside, unaccompanied, and proclaim to anyone within hearing radius “that was the most disgusting piece of shit I have ever seen”.
This wouldn’t be the first nor last film to garner this kind of reaction: I’d later enjoy even more visceral reactions to a Viennese festival screening of Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day, and can sympathize with the poor Italian journalist who allegedly fainted during the gruesome “fish hook” sequence in Kim Ki-Duk’s The Isle. Yet I feel the queasiness resulting from early Crash screenings derived from something other than vivid, emetic “gross-out” sequences: coming too close to actually experienced reality rather than one of being confronted with monstrous “exceptions” to that reality. As Ballard would describe it in conversation with Cronenberg himself:
In Crash there is no distance: the characters are you in the audience, and there’s no way you can escape. When I wrote Crash twenty-three years ago, people interviewed me at the time thinking, ‘What is this book?’ And I said I wanted to write a book where the reader had nowhere to hide, and I think the filmgoer watching David’s film has nowhere to hide. The people on screen are the people in the audience.1
Such an approach has understandably had its share of detractors; it is just far easier to present speculative scenarios showing “hubris clobbered by nemesis” (a famous description of the science fiction genre by Brian Aldiss). Audiences can walk away from such an experience with adequate closure and the comfortable reassurance that they would never fall victim to such hubristic flights of fanaticism, yearning for the impossible, or whatever other human shortcoming undoes the poor bastard opposing Nemesis. This is not exactly the case with the signature works associated with David Cronenberg - Scanners, Videodrome, The Fly, Dead Ringers, among others. Though these works are hardly un-entertaining, they regularly block off the routes allowing for escape from the self, furthermore posing questions as to the stability and of such a thing as a “true self”: who, or what, is your body? All of the colorful neologisms that Cronenberg’s work managed to seed in film critics’ lexicons - “body horror,” “bio-mechanical,” etc. - point back to this cinematic conflict of the self with its own creations, a process which in the Cronenberg oeuvre never leads to a uniform reaction by the mutated, but to varying degrees of acceptance and rejection, ecstasy and abjection…that it is sometimes both opposing reactions within the same character brings his stories much closer to what we experience in non-simulated reality.
Besides this, or in addition to it, Cronenberg’s authorial uniqueness has been a product of his ability to perceive the often troubling continuities between current ongoing developments, speculative futures and ancient impulses of biological features that we mistakenly feel that we’ve “evolved out of”. In doing so, he draws from the same well that has vitalized science-fiction and horror since at least the time of Mary Shelley, while outfitting this vision in an aesthetics that recalls the decadent poets’ acknowledgement of beauty in decomposition processes (see for example Baudelaire’s Une Charogne, in which a “carcasse superbe” is likened to a blossoming flower). There is little of the supernatural here, but instead a characteristically un-romanticized, existential approach, and one which - according to the editors of the new Children of the New Flesh - “refuses to offer criticism or warning […] remains steadfast in [its] commitment to observing what is, rather than what he or anyone else believes should be”.
The book just mentioned, edited by Chris Kelso & David Leo Rice with a brood of additional contributors, is an ambitious review of Cronenberg’s aesthetic legacy (his “body of work,” natch). More than this, it is a meditation on creative influence and how Cronenberg’s own innovations represent the (not always pleasant) mutation process that attends new iterations of existing creative ideas. Building on the contention that Cronenberg’s works are not already perfected “conversation enders” but rather open-ended “conversations starters” lending themselves to dynamic acts of appropriation and expansion, the editors have marshaled a number of talents from the literary and film communities to share critical essays, interviews, short stories, poems and film treatments. With this mixed bag of materials, it admirably sets itself up for a challenge by aiming its sights not on the signature works already mentioned, but on Cronenberg’s early work, which only a fraction of the director’s audience would have had a chance to see prior to these films being made available as bonus features on 21st century re-releases of the director’s canonical work. (Note that the excellent Cronenberg on Cronenberg volume, which this one takes a few pull quotes from, should still remain be the starting point for total neophytes).
As artists’ influences are generally easier to spot while still in their formative stages, the discussions of long-forgotten (even to Cronenberg himself) shorts like Transfer and From the Drain cast creative debts to luminaries like Samuel Beckett in a starker relief than what we can see in his more mature offerings. We also see how his first feature-length attempts (Stereo and the 1970 version of Crimes of the Future) prove the durability of certain key themes when they are transposed to entirely different chronological eras, settings and players. The former’s theme of an artificially-induced telepathy would be given an action-adventure story arc in 1981’s classic Scanners, while the latter’s passing reference to a “creative cancer” became the monstrous core of an identically named, but far more epic undertaking that appears over 50 years later. Odd entries like 1976’s The Lie Chair - a short directed, but not scripted, by Cronenberg for the TV anthology series Peep Show - are exceptions, yet the running commentary provided on these films argues for them as exceptions proving the rule, namely that Cronenberg’s careful study of the mutation process allows him to attempt stylistic aberrations with his personal imprint still noticeably intact.
I have to say that I approach documents like this with a degree of anticipation, but with nerves steeled to withstand the shock of a total letdown. The thematic intersection of eroticism, techno-science and ‘the uncanny’ is grafted onto Cronenberg’s best works with a surgical skill that can pull confessional revelations and intriguing derivative works from its observers (which is, if course, one of the main thrusts of this book). This same work can also get waved around like a bloody totem for poseurs who choose not to get beyond its superficial aspects, and who think the point of it all is (like their own forays into art), some banal exercise in upsetting the desensitized, complacent public. So, if nothing else, a defense of these films’ more sublime qualities deserves the labor that the contributors to Children… have put into it.
Interestingly, this book looks to have been assembled mostly at the time that 2022’s Crimes of the Future was released. In my opinion this is one of Cronenberg’s best films overall, a stunningly effective recapitulation of the themes mentioned above (during one of the sequences in which the main characters are performing live, we even see vintage CRT television screens blaring the slogan “BODY IS REALITY,” a knowing reprise of the “television is reality” axiom from Videodrome). As someone whose major interests include the question of what constitutes “art”, and the chaotic fluctuations in our understanding of it and need for it, the newer “Crimes…” is the film I had wanted to see Cronenberg make for decades: previous entries in his filmography had touched on the idea of raising other areas of human inquiry to an “art form” (see e.g. the surgical instruments as ‘sculpture’ in Dead Ringers) and this film in turn synthesized fragments of the explorations of Orlan, Stelarc, Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose, John Duncan, and perhaps others still. Our culture is gradually shedding its idea of art as an activity that can exist autonomously, i.e. free from those other areas of inquiry, and “Crimes…”, with its clever motif of artistically-designed tumescent growths being removed by organic machinery, potently visualizes what may be required of artists in a near-future where the disappearance of pain breeds a new underground of seekers after authenticity.
Against the background of Cronenberg releasing a film that might be a fitting swan song, the original material in this book has to make a very steep uphill climb in order to look like the inheritors of the mantle. Children… is structured in such a way that, after each introduction and critical discussion of an individual “early work,” an original chunk of “new flesh” is then offered for our examination. This ranges from a sort of experimental fan fiction, with existing Cronenberg characters being named, to a brief set of erotic horror verses by Elle Nash. Maybe the most memorable of these pieces is “Re: Queen of Ashes” by co-editor Rice, a mind-bending fiction not far removed in tone from Thomas Ligotti’s best work, and featuring an insidiously powerful artist, Petra Mance, whose work (“nation-sized installation pieces”) acts as a “metaphor for a reality that can only be known through metaphor”. Featuring a sort of sentient static which resolves itself into brutal imagery, it’s at once the piece most clearly indebted to Cronenberg and the best annexation of new territory to this realm of willed mutation, with its porous borders altering the phenomenological concept of the self.
Overall these pieces can be summed up with the memetic, tragicomic pronouncement of Comrade Dyatlov in Chernobyl, as he witnesses maxed-out dosimeter levels of 3.6 roentgen and determines them to be “not great, not terrible.” Some may suffer more than they in fact deserve on first reading, because too much psychic energy can be focused on teasing out what aspects of each vignette “relate to” the early Cronenberg piece that they are being paired with. In that respect, the flow of this book would be improved by placing all of these in their own section, though I can also understand the ordering logic as being intended to evoke some sort of disruptive transmission or parasitic organic process.
The interviews section is more conventional, though it does offer some surprises such as resisting the urge to hagiography: Throat Sprockets author Tim Lucas, for example, limits the director’s “lasting influence” to his cinematic work only up to and including Dead Ringers, and critiques the film of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch for compromising with an audience that “knew nothing of Burroughs.” This section also offers up some genuinely fascinating insights as to Cronenberg’s working methods, such as the conversation with Patrick McGrath (author of the 1990 novel Spider that forms the basis for the film of the same name): in this case, it’s revealed how Cronenberg refused any type of voiceover to help guide viewers through the thought processes of the schizoid lead character played by Ralph Fiennes, an addition-by-reduction decision that shows a respect for viewers’ own faculties of interpretation and co-creation.
The editors’ closing opinions on “what this all means in 2022”, unfortunately, undermine the rest of the book’s celebrations of radical hybridization, by reminding us that they may themselves be operating within a clearly defined, closed circuit of progressive / transgressive intellectuals with fairly homogeneous worldviews. In this sense, they occasionally betray a commitment to narratives whose staleness still hasn’t penetrated the echo chambers of aspiring and established public intellectuals. For example, there’s an apparent belief that the 1980s, deftly critiqued by Cronenberg’s classics of that decade, represented a backlash to the (as they claim) “communitarian dream of the greater good” of the 1960s. I would submit that the material excesses of the 1980s were not a cynical refutation of earlier “idealism” as is often noted, but an acceleration of the narcissistic, self-deluded attitudes of the elites who could afford to receive draft deferments, recreationally fry their minds on LSD, and later take credit for having ended the Vietnam War rather than having actually hindered the progress of the more serious anti-war movement.
This is nothing new, and the fact that it isn’t deepens the sense of disappointment. The book’s cast, respected as they are in their own fields, largely stick within the bounds of discourse that identifies them, well before you read their capsule bios in the book’s “end credits”. Therefore I think a more valuable future exercise would be the solicitation of thoughts on Cronenberg from individuals outside the literary and cinematic realms (and the academe set up to dissect them). What about musicians? Someone like John Zorn, a cineaste with dozens of film scores behind him and a catalog of thematic obsessions that sometimes mirror Cronenberg’s, might have some input worth hearing. Or how about commentary from social media “content moderators” who spend their work days sifting through a real-world Videodrome of illicit pornography, sadistic violence and pathological obsession? What about A.I. developers, researchers into neuropharmacology, etc.?
Perhaps there could even a sampling of material from 4chan posters, who regularly delight in posting gifs of the “exploding head” sequence from Scanners when attempting to portray themselves as the masters of hallucinatory “too online” discourse rather than its victims. After all, the book’s contributors remind us on a few occasions that we are being whipped into a state of constant agitation, which seeds conspiracy theories and ever-proliferating social division (when not contradicting this point with the claim that “today’s mass communication systems are intended as sedation” closing us in a “naive realism”).
Maybe the greatest howler in the book comes via a claim in the closing benediction from the editors (“Farewell from the Children of the New Flesh”): “superficially, we want for nothing in 2022, yet the basic joys elude us”. OK, who is the “we” in this scenario who “wants for nothing”? This may come as news to, say, the nearly two thirds of Americans living paycheck to paycheck, if we just limit our inquiry to the epicenter of the mediated world that the “Children” study, and do not touch open more desperate scenarios, e.g. increased starvation death in the “developing world” following the post-Covid disruption of supply chains for food aid.
Meanwhile, if we look elsewhere to the military conflicts that could have civilization-ending impact (Russia/Ukraine, Israel/Palestine) we do indeed see massively “Cronenbergian” wars in the basic sense of media being a weapon that transforms the battle-scape and vice versa. Yet these are hardly conflicts that prove a world in which, as the authors contend, “humanity may have reached the end of the road as humanity”. Hyperreal though they may be in a strategic sense, these conflicts will still proceed while motivated by familiar tribal hatreds and will be decided by damages done to the “old” flesh.
Ultimately, all these flaws aside, Children… succeeds in renewing curiosity about the paterfamilias of “body horror” and, in turn, pointing to the many ways in which that curiosity may crystallize into recognizable creative products. Julia Doucournau’s 2021 film Titane is only one of the most visible of these, having parlayed a post-Cronenberg aesthetic into a Palme d’Or victory at the Cannes Film Festival. Things get more interesting still as we step further away from the Anglosphere, particularly when viewing some of the 21st century cinematic work from South Korea: the 2012 omnibus film Doomsday Book [a.k.a "Report on the Destruction of Mankind”] features such elements as an A.I. attaining “enlightenment” and a food-borne virus which gives rise to cannibalistic zombies. Park Chan-Wook’s I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK, from 2006, even makes a fairly unprecedented, and surprisingly entertaining, gambit by situating Cronenenbergian themes (i.e. psychiatric delusions of flesh-machine symbiosis) within a “rom-com” context.
As the editors note early on about The Fly, it takes the transformation of the main character (Seth Brundle) into a fly in order to determine what a “human” is. If an aesthetic can go from pioneering Canadian horror to Korean romantic comedy, then maybe we too can find ourselves by first losing ourselves. Long live the new flesh indeed.
Quoted in Ballard, J.G., Sellars, S. & O’Hara, D. (2012). Extreme Metaphors: Collected Interviews. London: Fourth Estate.