David Cronenberg - Canada

David Cronenberg

David Cronenberg
1)Cronenberg began his career as a horror director
2)Eventually transitioned to other genres,
3) most notably science fiction.
4)Many of his films involve the development or evolution of the human body.
5)Cronenberg’s films make us rethink what it means to be human.
6) For example,
    Crash (1996)
    involves the merging of machine and human through the lens of erotic desire. Cronenberg's work is
    seen by many as pioneering the "body horror" genre which specifically focuses on the limits and
    transformative capabilities of the human body.

Videodrome's (1982)
1) Protagonist (James Woods) attains a new level a consciousness through his involvement
    with a show called Videodrome.
2) It is revealed in the film that the show is designed to give brain tumors to people who watch it.
3)The show’s content involves the torture and murder of anonymous victims,
4)and Wood’s character Max is eventually “brainwashed” by the Spectacular Optical Corporation.
5)The corporation does this by inserting a VHS tape into Max's torso.

Writer Gary Indiana describes Videodrome
1)In relation to some of the key features of body horror:
2)"Videodrome, prophetically for 1983 (and looking increasingly less like fiction),
3) shows us a world of technological hyperdevelopment in which people
    merge with their electronic media.
4) Like an autoimmune catastrophe, the boundary between our bodies
    and what’s outside them becomes indistinguishable.
5) Like the unwary users of the hallucinogen Chew-Z, who can never come down from their trip,
6) In Philip K. Dick’s psychedelic-era novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch,
7) anyone exposed to the Videodrome signal gets sucked into a never-ending hallucination
    controlled by someone else’s will.
8)Whoever it goes into goes into it: it can bend the subject’s perceptions so drastically that the body
   itself alters form;
9)its flesh melts into globs, sprouts machine parts, splits apart for use as a storage area.
10) You can even patch a video into the person’s brain by inserting a cassette in his stomach.
11) He can be programmed to kill, and he does.

Cronenberg’s films
1) insist that human nature is no longer “natural.”
2) People are wired together by media.
3) Their relation to the world, each other, and themselves has nothing of primal spontaneity or
     ingenuousness.
4) We are already so inextricably and invol­un­tarily “connected” that closer contact risks
    the total loss of identity by the contamination of other people’s thoughts, feelings, opinions, and
    personalities."

The following clip shows Max working to take down Videodrome.

Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1982):

Clip we saw in class Click Here