David Cronenberg, our foremost theoretician of viral horror, polymorphous perversity, and lIuncontroliable

flesh,II hasbroughtJ.G. Ballard'swhiplashingsci-finovel, Crash,to the screen. Thereis, as Ballardwould

say, a certain nightmare geometry to the conjunction.'
Crash is about the posthuman psychology and pathological sexuality of characters seduced by what Ballard
calls IIthat brutal, erotic and overlit realm that beckons more and more persuasively to us from the margins of
the technological landscape. II It is a genre unto itselLauto eroticism in the literal sense, written in a style that
is as obsessively repetitive as the thrum of tires on concrete and as antiseptic as a textbook description of
craniofacial trauma in head-on collisions.
In many ways, it's about our increasing alienation from our own bodies and other people at a time when
our interaction with the world around us consists, increasingly, of headfirst immersion in machines with
screens or human contact squeezed through wires, whether they're connected to phones, fax machines, or
networked computers. Crash's terminally numb narrator, autobiographically named James Ballard, is jolted
out of his postmodernautismby a collision, litheonly real experienceI had beenthroughfor years.II
Vaughan, a car-crash fetishist he meets through his accident, embodies the sped-up, out-oF-control psychology
of the late 20th century. Representing the Final, fateful collision of autonomous technology and the human
psyche, Vaughan masturbates to carefully orchestrated crashes at the Road Research laboratory, savors
slow:m.otion films of test collisions as oneiric pornography, and dreams of dying, at the moment of orgasm, in
a spectacular accident with Elizabeth Taylor's limousine.
likewise,
0.. .1
Cronenberg's
rI .0.1.
perversely
I
brilliant
1111_
_
bio-horror
.
constitutes
. I II I
an extended meditation
I. I.. I I I
on
.1
the
.,
mind/body

mind/body/machine, II as Scott Bukatman points out in the

A n essay collection Alien Zone. The filmmaker, who has won-
dered if IIwe are just beginning a very important phase of our
I n t e r v i e w evolutionll-a sort of unnatural selection catalyzed by technol-
ogy-is lIalways talking about Mcluhan, II according to Martin
A b o u t s e x Scorsese in Chris Rodley's 1986 documentary on Cronenberg,
Long Live the New Flesh. In a sense, Cronenberg is
Mcluhan's dark twin, theorizing electronic media and mechan-
ical devices less as Mcluhanesque lIextensions of manll than
a n d D e a t h as agents of a morphogenesis that is not always pretty to look
at. In nearly all of his films, the dichotomy between mind and
body-the age-old conundrum at the heart of the human condi-
tion-is exacerbated by the ever-more-technologicallandscape
we live in. As the roboticist Hans Moravec notes in Mind
i n t h e
Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence, IIln the
present condition we are uncomfortable halfbreeds, part biolo-
P o S t h u m a n J with th", inv",ntinn
gy, part nf nllr
culture, with many of our
minds II biological traits out of step
A 9 e Often, Cronenberg uses human sexuality, morphed and
. mutated by our increasingly cybernetic psychology, as a mag-
nifying glass to examine Bukatman's mind/body/machine trichotomy. His little-
known early movie, Crimes of the Future 11970, now available on video), imagines a
" 1i near-future plague culture straight out of Beauty Myth author Naomi Wolf's worst
nightmares: postpubertal women are dying from a disease induced by cosmetics; men
are sprouting bizarre new organs in an evolutionary response to the disappearance
of potential mates; and pedophilia is beginning to look like the last, best hope for
$-p-eciessurvival.
In The Brood 11979), the mutagenic technology in question is a cultish form of psy-
chotherapy called Psychoplasmics, a tongue-in-cheek sendup of Primal Scream thera-
py in which a Dr. Raglan teaches his patients to bring their neuroses and psychoses to
the surface-literally, in the form of gut-wrenching stigmata. The results are not always promising, as a dis-
traught graduate of the program reveals. lilt's a form of cancer of the lymphatic system,II he explains, expos-
ing grotesque tumors on his chest. IIRaglan encouraged my body to revolt against me and it did. Now I have
a smallrevolutionon my handsand I'm not puttingit down very successfully.
II
In Videodrome 11982), the filmmaker's masterpiece,' the agent of evolutionary mutation is the welter of disem-
bodied electronic fictions that constitutes our media reality. The IImedia prophetll Professor Brian O'Blivion
speaks to all of us when he tells the movie's protagonist, Max Renn, IIYour reality is already half video halluci-
nation; if you're not careful, it will become total hallucination. You'll have to learn to live in a very strange
Irl~
Convincedthat IIpubliclife on televisionwas morereal than private life in the flesh,II O'Blivion designed a
mutagenic TV signal. Covertly transmitted in a sadomasochistic snuff program called Videodrome, the signal
stimulates the production of lIa new outgrowth of the human brain which will produce and control hallucination
to the point that it will change human realityll IO'Blivion). The professor believes that the tumors induced by
the Videodrome signal will trigger the next stage in the coevolution of humanity and technology.
Meanwhile, Renn-the jaded owner of a porn channel who is attempting to track down the source of the mys-
terious signal-has already been mutated by Videodrome, and is suffering from bizarre, techno-sexual halluci-
nations Vaughan would envy: a vaginal slit gapes in his belly, moistly awaiting the insertion of a videocas-

sette; his TVheaves and moans in concupiscent ecstacy, its
screen bulging toward his waiting lips.
Surrendering to the postmodern madness of a world in
which distinctions between this and that side of the TVscreen
are no longer meaningful, Renn killshimself-or, as the
technophilic Heaven's Gate cultistswho recently committed
suicide would have it, abandoned his "vehicle." His hand
morphs into a gun made of molten, marbled flesh Ireality?
video hallucination? both?1 and he blows his head off with the
posthumanist rallying cry, "Longlive the new flesh!" In an
eerie premonition of the flying saucer theology of the
Heaven's Gate cultists, Renn takes his own life so that he may
be born again as disembodied simulacrum-what O'Blivion's
daughter calls "the video word made flesh."
Watching Videodrome, we cannot help but think of Ballard's
chilling observation, in his introduction to Crash, that we are
witnessing the "demise of feeling and emotion." True to her
name, Nicki Brand, the deadpan, affectless media personality
in Videodrome, derives sadomasochistic pleasure from sear-
ing her bare flesh with a cigarette. "We live in overstimulat-
ed times," she asserts; like Crash's narrator, she has been
deadened by the nonstop shock treatment of postmodern cul-
ture, distanced by the multiplyinglayers of electronic media-
r 9
tion between herself and embodied experience. Only
extreme pain can bring her back to her physical body; cell by
cell, she is being replaced by the new flesh, the video flesh-
as are we all, in cyberculture.
Obviously, Cronenberg and Ballard travel the same psycho-
geography, and. Crash Ithe screen versionl is the predictable
site of their head-on collision. LongtimeBallardians will miss
the astringent wit of the novel's deadpan narration, its apho-
ristic one-liners I"The world was beginning to flower into
I wounds"!, the deviant beauty of its surreal imagery I"The pas-
senger compartment enclosed us like a machine generating
from our sexual act an homunculus of blood, semen, and
engine coolant"l. LongtimeCronenbergians will miss
Scanners' tangled web of conspiracy, Dead Ringers' psychot-
ic break with reality, The Fly's mutagenic technologies and
uncontrollable flesh. Strangely, the movie lacks the book's
sexual frisson, exuding a lunar cool that detractors will liken
to Joop! cologne ads and devotees will compare to the moon-
lit tableaux of the Surrealist painter land Ballard passionl Paul
Delvaux. Even so, it's a filmthat must be seen lat least twice,
according to Cronenberg!, an indispensable road map to the
late-night highways of the millennial mind.
RAGESEPTEMBER
1997 .
 MARK DERY: IN HIS INTRODUCTION TO THE FRENCH EDITION OF Crash,
BALLARD CALLS THE NOVEL "AN EXTREME METAPHOR FOR AN EXTREME
SITUATION, A KIT OF DESPERATE MEASURES ONLY FOR USE IN EXTREME
CRISES." Is Crash AN APPROPRIATE METAPHOR FOR OUR AGE OF AERIAL

DISASTERS, ALIEN ABDUCTIONS, AND MAD BOMBINGS?

David Cronenberg: Well, it's tempting to look at whatever

times one lives in as being in crisis, but I think we're always in
extreme times; I have a built-in resistance to seeing these things as
leading us somewhere. I see a wonderful, inbuilt need in the
human mind to analyze and extrapolate them so that we can antici-
pate future developments, but I have this tendency to say,
"Well, my historical reading suggeststhat Nietzsche was basically talking about the samething in (

ferent guise," and so on.

M D:
" SOMEONE LIKE YOURSELF WHO CLEARLY HAS A SENSE OF HISTORICAL CONTEXT IS LESS LIKELY TO WA

UP EVERY MORNING FEELING THAT THE MILLENNIUM IS UPON US.

DC:Yeah. ButI do sensethat someof the things that I deal with in Crash, at a 25-year remove fr<
when Ballard was writing the novel, are significantly different from what has gone before, and one
thesethings is the nature of sexuality, which I really think is changing-changing in a way that we I
not seen before. The fact that we can now reproduce without sex is a huge moment in human histor
M D: You MEAN THROUGH CLONING, IN-VITRO FERTILIZATION?
T
DC:Right.One can anticipate a time maybe not too far in the future, ;

when you wontt need humans at ali to reproducehumans,where the

!.

DNAcould be reproducedsyntheticallyand youtll have syntheticspern I

andeggs. The question then becomes, "What is sex?" It has never, for humans, been a simple
ter of reproduction. In fact, there have been culturesthat didn't even connect sex with reproduction 'J
,
Now, we're at a point where we consciouslysee sex being cut free from its biological imperatives, I
demanding to be redefined, reinvented-a very existential development that forces us to take respo
bility for deciding what sex will be. It's a very powerful force, still very much inbuilt in us, but it no t
longer has the purpose that it had before. And whereas sex has always been used in various ways, ...
from weaponry to performance art, it's now demanding to be profoundly redefined, and it's techno ". J
cal developmentswhich have caused this. I don't think it's just a conceptual change; I think eventu(
it'll be a very functional difference.
M D: WHAT, EXACTLY, DO YOU MEAN BY THAT?
DC: Well, I think that more and more people will use sex less and less for reproduction. This isn't
Brave New World warning that sex will be controlled for genetic breeding purposes; I just think tha
the natural course of things there will be less haphazard, natural child-creating and more controlled
child-creating, which will make it more obvious that sex has become a new thing.
M D: SHOULD WE BE SO QUICK TO DISMISS HUXLEY'SWARNING? FOLLOWING The Bell Curve, THERE SEEM
BE A STEALTHOPERATION UNDERWAYTO REHABILITATEEUGENICS AND SOCIAL DARWINISM:CHRISTOPHER BR.
A SELF-STYLED "SCIENTIFIC RACIST" WHO LECTURES AT EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY, RECENTLY SUGGESTED THAT
GLE MOTHERS SHOULD MATEWITHHIGH-IQ MALESTO IMPROVE THE G
POOL. SO rr's NOT ENTIRELYALARMIST...
DC: Oh, I would never suggest that there won't be large mass
energy devoted to that craziness; I'm just saying that it's not
inevitable that one thing leads to the other. What I'm saying is
now that we have seized control over our own evolution, natur<
selection in the definitive Darwinian sense does not exist with
human beings. I mean, is it the guy who makes enough money jI

. '"

t
~

,
.

CD RAGE SEPTEMBER 1997

.
..
~-.,~
..
 DC: Yeah, I disagreed with him about those things, or
rather thought that they needed some clarification, and
I found it very edifying to hear him say he wasn't think-
ing these things when he wrote the book.
He absolutely loves the film. He feels that the movie
begins where the book ends, which I think is very inter-
esting. I don't think Ballard's analysis of his novel-the
analysis in the French introduction-is adequate, and
that makes perfect sense to me, because as an artist
who gets to spread his genetic material because he can I'm going to say that my movie has nothing to do with
get babes with his Mercedes? He doesn't have to be pornography if I'm being attacked for being a pornogra-
strong; in fact, he can be quite weak. In other words, pher. But later, I might say, "Well, it does have some
who is the fittest? All the eugenicistsflash back to some connections with pornography, but I felt they were too
bizarre Victorian version of what Darwinian "fitness" subtle to be mentioned at the time, for political reasons."
would be in a human being. But in our society, it might Bertolucci said that Crash was a religious masterpiece,
be an NBA player: he's strong, he's got a lot of because he felt the characters were like little Christs, sac-
money... rificing themselves on our behalf so we can watch but
M D: OR BILL GATES. not have to do it. There's some truth, there, because in
DC: And between the two, where are you? We can no a way I'm saying, "Okay, let these people do what they
longer say that Arnold Schwarzenegger is the evolution- do; don't make a moral judgment, don't restrict them,
ary ideal. What person are you going to hold up as just see where it takes us." I see them as being forced
someone whose genetic material should dominate? You by their own inner impulses to reinvent the old forms of
canlt. Eugenicists who talk about the racial stuff are things which they feel are not working. That includes
only exposing the very tiniest tip of the iceberg in that sexuality, but it also includes emotion-the ways emotion
discussion, because who says intellectual superiority is is expressed, social interaction, even language. Maybe
necessarily the most desirable thing? It goes on and on. this involves the death of affect, to which one might say,
M D: I THINK YOUR COMMENTS ON SEXUALITY GO TO THE "Well, maybe affect is not that great; maybe that's the
HEART OF Crash. WHICH WRESTLES WITH THE QUESTION OF bad part of human nature."
THE HUMAN CONDITION IN THE MEDIA-BOMBARDED LAND- M D: ONE MIGHT SAY THAT, BUT DO YOU?
SCAPE OF THE LATE 20TH CENTURY. IN HIS INTRODUCTION DC: No, I don't. I say that these people have not been
TO THE FRENCH EDITION OF Crash, BALLARD CALLS IT "A able to express their emotions in the forms that are avail-
WARNING AGAINST THAT BRUTAL, EROTIC AND OVER LIT REALM able to them because what they're trying to express is
THAT BECKONS MORE AND MORE PERSUASIVELY TO US FROM impossible in the language that exists, which is very
THE MARGINS OF THE TECHNOLOGICAL LANDSCAPE." AND Wittgensteinian. So, to a small degree, I'm reinventing
YET THE BOOK ITSELF FEELS AS IF IT WERE WRITTEN BY A film language in order to allow my characters to express
ROBOT HISTORIAN; rr's A CAUTIONARY TALE ABOUT THE things to themselves in their own emotional language. I
DEATH OF AFFECT [EMOTION] WRITTEN IN AN UTTERLY see Crash as an existential romance. That simply means
AFFECTLESS STYLE. that maybe affect-which is to say, what we consider
DC: I was onstage with Ballard at the ICA [Instituteof emotion and the way in which it is expressed-needs to
Contemporary Art] in london, where we had a conver- find new avenues, new forms in order to express the
sation, and he said he did the book first and then after- things that we need to express these days, things which
wards he set in the rationale, which made me feel good cannot be expressed using the old cliches abou! love or
becausethat's how it feelsto me. The impulseto make sexuality or family or whatever. Wetre feehng
the movie, and the processof making the movie, comes some things that haventt been felt
before the critical analysis. Not that I'm not interestedin before, be(ause the (omplexities of life
analysis, but the two don't come from the same place; are qUite different than they were
itls a different part of the brain that does thosetwo before. It's what Mcluhan was talking about: we
things. keep driving and looking into the rear-view mirror.
Another thing that I asked him about, relative to his M D: AN APPROPRIATE METAPHOR FOR Crash.
introduction to the Frenchedition, was his discussionof DC: The weird thing about Crash is that at first it's a
the book as technoporn. He calls it "the first porno- complete turn-off, and then gradually you find yourself
graphic novel based on technology." being turned on by things you never thought you'd be
M D: RIGHT. HE BEMOANS THE DEATH OF AFFECT AND turned on by, in language that you never imagined
THEN, IN LITERALLY THE NEXT SENTENCE, SAYS THAT ITS you'd be turned on by. That's the art of it. Somehow,
DEMISE OPENS THE FLOODGATES OF THE UNCONSCIOUS TO you're getting the pure experience, from the narrator's
OUR MOST DELICIOUSLY DISEASED FANTASIES. WE GO FROM point of view, of this strange eroticism. It's disturbing,
FREUD'S PESSIMISM TO A DE SADEAN PLEASURE DUNGEON IN just because it's so abnormal and perhaps even dehu-
THE SPACE OF A SENTENCE. IT STRIKES A DISSONANCE. AT manized, although no one but a human could think these
LEAST TO MY EAR. thoughts.
I tried to do the same thing in the movie by creating a
4.
 style that was sensual in some ways,
and having very attractive people in
the film, because I knew that, concep-
tually, many people would resist it.
So to balance that, I tried to make it
somewhat sensual and textural with-
out making it deliriously luscious, you
know. I tried to do the same thing
cinematically that I felt Ballard was
doing literarily.
M D: WAS IT DIFFICULT TO MAKE A MOVIE
ABOUT FLATTENED AFFECT THAT DIDN'T

SEEM, WELL, FLAT-A MOVIE ABOUT

DESENSITIZED CHARACTERS THAT REMAINED
DRAMATICALLY COMPELLING AND PSYCHO-
LOGICALLY ENGAGING?

DC: Never worried about it. That's

absolute death, creatively, if you're
making a movie. You go on your intu-

;
J ition in creating a world which you
have to say to yourself Iknowing it to
be a lie) is a hermetically sealed world
:0. that you will then take the audience
,. 1:" into. I certainly find people having for-
mal problems with the movie, not

ti j ,1t
understanding how to deal with the
structure of it. It looks like it might
work like, you know, Fatal Affraction-
comparing the film and the
novel. You've really got to
'f {f..¥f
you've got this attractive, upper-middle- let go and let the movie be
"
what it is. Of course
~ ,i~
" --:~ t class couple who don't have to worry
about money, they're having affairs-
but then it doesn't work out any way
you're going to want to
discussit vis-a-visthe book,
you could imagine. They get com- but it is its own thing.,.
pletely confused and disconnect. In a
way, the very structure of Crash is as
much a problem as the whole question MarkDery
of affect. (markdery@well.com) is a
M D : WHAT'S YOUR RESPONSE TO THAT? cultural critic whose byline
DC: My response is that you just have has appeared in Rolling
to let go of all that stuff. I've found Stone, the New York Times,

,j
,., .
,.
'. .
'. that, for many people, it becomes a
different movie the second time they
see it. The first time, especially if
Wired, and the Village Voice.
He is the author of Escape
Velocity: Cyberculture at the
you're familiar with the book, you're End of the Century, a critique
constantly analyzing your reactions, of fringe computer culture
(http://www.well.com/user/ma
rkderyl). He also edited the
essay collection Flame Wars:
The Discourse of
Cyberculture, and is currently
at work on The Pyrotechnic
Insanitarium, a book about
madness and mayhem in mil-
lennial America (Grove
Press, 1998).

RAGESEPTEMBER
1997 .