David Cronenberg

*Academic Book Review* Killer Tapes… is a fascinating book with rigourous theoretical content and effective challenges to entrenched modes of thinking about movie spectatorship. Benson-Allott outlines a new phenomenology of spectatorship, but this reader is left with important questions regarding certain denials of intent  and limits in surveying the postcinematic landscape and in defining a postcinematic movie culture. In this sense, Killer Tapes… finds its ideal readership in those who are eager to further Benson-Allott’s own ideas and help to scope-out the full field of postcinematic movie culture.

The art film Naked Lunch (1991) may have marked a turn away from the horror genre for David Cronenberg, but it also features both monsters and monstrosity. Protagonist Bill Lee wanders passively through a surreal landscape populated with fantastical creatures feeding him orders that correspond to the impulses he does not recognize within himself. By Cronenberg’s own description, these monsters are projections, excusing and externalizing Lee’s internal, unacknowledged anxieties. Since these monsters are embodied outside himself, Lee never has to confront his
internal conflicts as such. Engaging with writings on horror and monsters by Julia Kristeva, Noël Carroll, and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, this essay uses Naked Lunch to develop a Cronenbergian theory of monstrosity. Monsters objectify the abject, but in doing so evade the sources of abjection. Cronenberg, a filmmaker constantly exploring abjection and monstrosity, for the first time in his filmography articulates this problematic relationship between them explicitly in Naked Lunch.

This essay investigates the marked disappearance of body horror elements in David Cronenberg’s films since A History of Violence (2005). While the absence of body horror’s conventional iconography is undeniable in Cronenberg’s recent cinema, the essay contests that this disappearance signals a departure from his longstanding investment in the politics and spectacular possibilities of flesh. By developing Jacques Derrida’s discussion of contemporary capital punishment’s ‘anesthesial logic’ in The Death Penalty Vol. 1, I contend that Cronenberg’s apparently fleshless cinema functions anesthetically whereby his avoidance of the shocking iconography that characterizes his archive does not signal its complete erasure. Rather than eradication, anesthetics redirect the anticipated avenues of synesthetic transmission and perception; in Cronenberg’s cinema, they generate a virtual encounter with the 'fleshiness' distinguishing the Cronenbergian signature. The essay begins its discussion of ‘Cronenberg’s anesthetics’ through an analysis of the short video, The Nest (2014), and then proceeds to identify how this mode of concealment functions throughout his films since 2005.

W latach 80. XX wieku ciągłe usprawnianie możliwości warsztatowych kina korespondowało z nowymi tendencjami w horrorze i próbami redefinicji zjawiska odbioru filmowego według kategorii badań kognitywnych. Autorzy nurtu body horror zaproponowali specyficzny mechanizm odkrywania świata przedstawionego. Narracja cielesnego filmu grozy wymagała od widza niemal detektywistycznego zaangażowania w dochodzenie przyczyny zdarzeń, a jednocześnie konsekwentnie zbliżała odbiorcę do widowiskowych obrazów destrukcji ciała. Balansując pomiędzy tym, co ukryte i tym, co wystawione na pokaz, horror fizycznych doznań okazał się nośnikiem hybrydycznych historii, w których kontrapunktem dla drastycznej dosłowności uczyniono zniuansowane studium potworności. Spektakle grozy reżyserowane między innymi przez Johna Carpentera i Davida Cronenberga, burząc podstawowe schematy kategorialne, oprócz lęku towarzyszącego niedopowiedzeniom, budziły też fizjologiczny wstręt, będący rezultatem ujawnienia cielesnej obrzydliwości. Za sprawą mechanicznych efektów specjalnych, maszyna projekcyjna kina, będąca aparaturą oddziaływania psychicznego, zaczęła też pełnić funkcję stymulatora fizycznych doznań.

Norman McLaren œuvre dans le domaine onirique de l’animation. David Cronenberg est maître du genre de l’horreur intérieure. Que peuvent donc partager ces deux cinéastes canadiens aux univers si distincts? Chacun a construit une relation à long terme avec un compositeur – respectivement Maurice Blackburn et Howard Shore. D’un duo à l’autre, le musicien occupe une place centrale au sein de la création collective; sa musique se révèle comme une composante fondamentale. Quels processus créatifs lui permettent de se déployer?
Ce livre fait la lumière sur les mécanismes collaboratifs et la pensée de ces duos. Plus généralement, il établit une poïétique de la création musico-filmique, décrit et comprend les processus créateurs filmique et musical qui déterminent la composition d’une musique de film et, plus encore, une musicalité de tout le complexe audiovisuel. Du cinéma d’animation expérimental (A Phantasy) au long-métrage de fiction (Crash, A Dangerous Method) en passant par le documentaire engagé (Jour après jour), l’auteure offre un portrait inédit de pratiques musico-filmiques novatrices tout en proposant de nouvelles approches analytiques pour la musique de film.

This article focuses on David Cronenberg’s representation of monstrosity as a form of knowledge, particularly when connected with sexuality. After a discussion of Robin Wood’s harsh criticism of Cronenberg’s works on this respect, the essay elects “The Fly” as a case study, analyzing its development from Kurt Neumann’s 1958 version to Cronenberg’s one, passing through Pogues’ first screenplay.

A slightly updated encyclopedia entry on Cronenberg with an overview of major/recurring themes + filmography, including early short films:

David Cronenberg is a Canadian auteur filmmaker who made his name with intelligent, innovative and graphic horror films. His work explores human fears and desires not commonly expressed in cinema, such as disease, aging, mental illness, and sexual fetishism. Cronenberg approaches the human condition through the unconscious and physical processes of the thinking animal, with an extreme existentialism that celebrates the body (in all its disgusting glory) while admitting the horror of the individual consciousness trapped within ever decaying flesh. These themes are present in Cronenberg’s early genre work, and he continues to explore them through the adaptation of postmodern literature.

Cronenberg was born in Toronto in 1943. He majored in biochemistry at the University of Toronto, before switching to English. Cronenberg began making films at university, abandoning literary ambitions, and these juvenilia contain key themes that he would later develop. Transfer (1966) is a dialogue between a psychiatrist and patient in a Surrealist and Nouvelle Vague setting, while From the Drain (1967) is about two soldiers in a mental hospital bath. One is disconcerted by the plughole, and a vine-like tendril eventually snakes up from the drain and strangles him. From the Drain feels like Beckett, but with a money shot. Stereo (1969) is framed as an experiment by ‘Dr. Luther Stringfellow’ filmed by ‘The Canadian Academy of Erotic Enquiry.’ A group of volunteers are given telepathic capabilities (a device later developed in Scanners), and encouraged to explore these through sexual experimentation, the theory being that sexually bonded telepathic groups will replace the ‘obsolescent family unit.’ One subject has her identity annexed by a secondary personality, and as the telepaths become stronger the scientists lose control. Crimes of the Future (1970), also contains a mad scientist in absentia. The dermatologist Antoine Rouge has disappeared after a pandemic caused by his cosmetics wipes out all adult women. Adrian Tripod, director of the House of Skin Clinic, is searching for him. Anticipating later projects such as The Brood and Videodrome, Tripod meets a man whose body mimics childbirth by growing new organs, while the new world is carved up by the sinister corporations Metaphysical Import-Export and the Oceanic Podiatry Group. Rouge is eventually discovered reincarnated as a little girl. It sounds better than it is, but the themes of these early process pieces – absentee scientists/father figures, physical and psychological transformation, mutation, sexually transmitted disease, and things coming out of drainpipes – all recur in Cronenberg’s later work.

The New Flesh: Videodrome, Scopophilia, and Gendered Positionality

From the genesis of cinema, there have been anxieties about the potential power of fixing images on screen and what philosophies those images convey; directly confronting these anxieties, David Cronenberg’s 1983 Videodrome exists at a crossroad between technological and bodily horror, challenging  notions of “appropriate” subject matter, foregrounding concerns over the dangers inherent in the male gaze, and exploring spectacle and scopophilia in an era of shifting modes of viewership resulting from the advent of video. Concerned with the functions of masculine viewing practices and female objectification, Cronenberg’s film is a metafilmic exploration of the apparatus of cinematic reproduction and the advent of the video medium. Cronenberg explores themes of permeability, penetration, and objectification; following protagonist Max Renn’s subjugation into a penetrated, feminized figure, he is unable to orient himself in this destabilized heteronormative paradigm, thus exploding the sadomasochistic and scopophilic spectrums and making way for a new liminality that confronts both gendered positionality and cinematic structures of representation. This presentation will explore the ways in which Videodrome situates itself in the center of this nexus; concerned with the cultural creation, reproduction, and propagation of violent and pornographic material, Cronenberg explores the transmission of spectacle and, with Renn’s declaration of “Death to Videodrome! Long live the new flesh!,” the audience is left to reckon with the inescapability of developing technology and the resultant cultural transformations.

In 1981 Gilles Deleuze read in Francis Bacon's paintings a 'zone of the indiscernible' between man and animal. Bacon's figures spasm through their wounded architectures, screams erupting as destabilised bodies attempt to escape their figurations. This paper develops this zone of the indiscernible to explore how human flesh has become a medium for representations of the end. In David Cronenberg's Videodrome [1983], a dark psychological conspiracy places the flesh under suspicion of suggestible media-corruption, as Max Renn transcends to abstracted data by orgiastically abandoning the old flesh.

Against the knowing futurism of Videodrome, this paper compares Charles Burns' Black Hole comic-book series [1995-2005], which uses the grotesque contagious corruption of teenage flesh as a dark analogy for growing up and loss of innocence in the haunted spaces of late 20th century  Americana. Overtly Freudian, the rich contrasts of Burns' work introduces the becoming-monstrous and the eruption of contagion which racks modern American anxieties about the ending of the human, most familiar in recent zombie narratives. Taking a parallel track, in both accounts beastly becomings are played out on the flesh to mark internal turmoil whilst offering two directions for a contemporary bestiary of our culture. Whilst Burns offers a pessimistic Quietism and submission to the mysterious disease, Cronenberg's narrative alternatively calls to end the old flesh and embrace the possibilities of cybertechnology. Baudrillardian pessimism is spliced with 'biopunk' subcultures alongside Eugene Thacker's theoretical forays into life as the 'unthinkable' (2010, 2011) to finally ascertain why anxieties over life, technology and the end continue to play on a corrupted flesh. Does power embody itself through a zombified life, or will the skin continue to subvert and revolt against human (and posthuman) machinations?

In this thesis, I will explore the effects of capitalism on human nature, in particular on whether we have free will or not, as portrayed in David Cronenberg films. In the first half I will make an introduction to determinism and relate the debate between compatibilism and incompatibilism. Then I will deal with the question of whether there is a human nature, and if there is whether it is fixed or not, historical or ahistorical, based on a basic comparison of Sartre, Marx and Freud on this issue. I will give Sartre’s defense of free will and Marx’s historical account of human nature. In the second half, I will describe Freud’s deterministic human nature concept and analyze Cronenberg’s main characters who think they have free will while they are living in fully determined worlds regarding these issues. Are they in self-deception
(if incompatibilism is right) or not (if compatibilism is right)? Using Marcuse’s arguments I will argue that they are in self- deception and this is a feature of how capitalism shapes individual psychodynamics. At the end of the thesis I will explore Marcuse's optimism about the future as based on compatibilism compared with Cronenberg's pessimism that is based on his incompatibilist ideas. I will try to see whether an alternative society is possible in which technology is used as a means for emancipation. Here I will compare and relate Marcuse’s, Haraway’s and Wilde’s arguments on the emancipator potentials of technology.

Ce mémoire de recherche en Master 2, sous la direction de Philippe Dubois et présenté à l'Université Paris-3 en 2012, étudie l'esthétique du personnage cinématographique dans le cinéma contemporain. À travers l'analyse filmique, il essaye d'actualiser les notions de "personnage" et de "sujet", et propose de comprendre les inquiétudes identitaires du personnage/sujet contemporain à partir de deux catégories plastiques: la dissociation et l'explosion.

It has traditionally been the female body the one which has been subjected to pleasures of the male gaze, preferably relying that body on teenagers or immoral figures that have been longer representing both the spectator and the murderer who ‘penetrates’ her with the phallic object par excellence, the knife and others. However, during the 1980s we could attend some examples shifting from this traditional point of view to another one: the male body being highly altered, opened, and transformed: images of the boundaries of the human body being trespassed and the flesh being rotten. The narratives that displayed these premises were conceptualized as the ‘horror body’ or alternatively ‘biological horror’, a concept of horror not only subverting the body but also the conventions of the genre. Through the analysis of two key examples of the decade, The Fly (David Cronenberg, UK, Canada and USA 1986) and Tetsuo: The Iron Man (Shinya Tsukamoto, Japan 1989) we will define the horror body on screen, how it works and how it is played in order to make explicit our most hidden fears.

Trata-se de discutir a maneira com que as representações do corpo no cinema de David Cronenberg indicam uma dissociação importante entre gozo e prazer. Tal dissociação deve ser avaliada em sua dimensão propriamente política, abrindo com isso outra dimensão para aquilo que normalmente entendemos por "crítica do fetichismo".

"Cybercultural Ecologies examines the interpenetrating relationships between nature, virtuality, and narrative. Operating at the interface between ecocriticism and cyberculture, its approach is narrative-based and thematic, focusing on texts (literary, cinematic, and new media) which depict varying conceptions of technology, virtuality, and their effects. Understanding these effects is ecologically crucial, because technovirtual interfaces profoundly alter one’s experience of nature, corporeality, and relationships. Even the most basic sense of what counts as an environment in the first place depends on the interfaces one uses.

The Introduction examines the ambiguities surrounding the terms of its own investigation: cyberculture, ecology, interface, nature, virtuality. Drawing from Jacques Derrida and Marshall McLuhan, it responds to the “interface anxiety” evinced by environmental writers and ecocritics by arguing that nostalgia for an “authentic,” supplement-free mode of “contact” is itself a pastoral fiction.

Chapter I examines virtuality’s relationship with nature in both virtual reality and mixed reality paradigms, beginning with nineteenth-century decadence and aestheticism — Huysmans’ A Rebours (1884) and Morris’ News from Nowhere (1890)—before moving to Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999), Gibson’s Spook Country (2007), and Vinge’s Synthetic Serendipity (2004).

Chapter II questions the attempt to evade virtuality and machinery in order to reclaim “unmediated contact” through the “natural” body in Forster’s “The Machine Stops” (1909) and Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928).

Chapter III looks at the liberation offered by the virtual body, as well as its liabilities, in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759), Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000).

Chapter IV scrutinizes the authenticity of virtual relationships in Bioy Casares’ The Invention of Morel (1940) and Herzog’s Grizzly Man (2005).

Chapter V inquires into how a virtual sense of place is evoked in Dickens’ mid-nineteenth century railway sketches and in 21st-century digital interactive narratives.

The Conclusion examines the film Avatar (2009) and explores the possibilities (and problems) that arise in attempting to make audiences “see” with ecological vision through the lenses of virtuality."

Možda politikama monstruoznog u najvećoj meri kontrapunkt predstavlja politika insekta kakvu zamišlja Kronenberg u filmu Muva (The Fly, 1986). Politika insekta mogla bi da se prikaže kao način da se ucrtaju stranac i nepoznato u polje diskurzivne reprezentacije i da se, prema tome, uključi (ma koliko delimično) opasna i prevrednujuća pratnja čoveku (sve ono i svi oni/one koji ne pripadaju, koji se ne računaju) koju ovakva politika nudi. Kao poseban dokaz evolucione rezilijentnosti i, plinijevski shvaćene, “žive” fabrike, insekti spajaju prostore otpada, apokaliptične prikaze najezde pred konačni slom, parazitizam koji ugrožava ljudsko telo, ali i jedinu mogućnost da ekosistem funkcioniše i da preživljavanje, odnosno, opstanak, bude moguć.

1. Multiculturalism and Its Monsters
2. Fleshed Out: On Meat and Excess
3. Performing the (Non)Human
4. Bodies, Boundaries, and the Death Drive
5. Desiring Bodies and the Vicissitudes of Transgression
6. The Pornography of Bare Life
7. Queer Epidemics

This paper examines the mode of existence of realism under postmodernity. It is argued that contemporary realism faces two major challenges at the turn of the twenty-first century: the virtualization of experience due to information  technologies and the ostensibly infinite plurality of dialogized postmodern cultures. Classic postmodernist theory contests the capacity of the realist aesthetic to render justice to the virtualized and dialogized contemporary social field. This paper suggests on the contrary that postmodernist indeterminism may be counterbalanced by an equally legitimate approach based on cognitive trust in the minimal coherence of the lifeworld. This argument is developed on the basis of examples drawn from contemporary literature (William Gibson, Philip K. Dick,  Zadie Smith, Maxine Hong Kingston, Don DeLillo) and film (Ridley Scott, Cronenberg, Jarmusch, Cholodenko).

Günümüzde teknolojinin ilerleme hızı, geçmiş dönemlere ait birçok kavramı ve olguyu dönüşüme uğratmıştır. Bu nedenle, bu kavram ve olguların yeniden tanımlanması kaçınılmaz hale gelmiştir. İletişim ve medya ile etkileşime girdiği birçok disiplin de, teknolojinin ilerleme hızıyla birlikte gelişmekte, değişmekte, dönüşüme uğramaktadır. Bu durum da, her geçen gün yeni türeyen veya eskiden var olan olguları, yeni bakış açılarıyla değerlendirmeyi zorunlu hale getirmektedir. Bu çalışmada, doğrudan teknolojiye bağlı bir alan olarak “VR film” kavramı ele alınmıştır. Jean Baudrillard’ın Simülakrlar ve Simülasyon çalışmasından yola çıkılarak, David Cronenberg’in teknolojik olarak geleneksel sinemaya özgü iki boyutlu Existenz (1999) filmi, “geleneksel iki boyutlu sinema ve VR film” ilişkisi üzerinden değerlendirilmiştir.

ABSTRACT
Today, the speed of the advancement of technology has transformed many concepts and phenomena belonging to the previous periods. Therefore, the redefinition of these concepts and facts has become inevitable. Many disciplines in which it interacts with communication and media are developing, changing and transforming along with the pace of technology's progress. This situation makes it compulsory to evaluate the newly derived or old existing cases with new perspectives.
In this study, the concept of “VR film” as a field directly connected with technology is discussed. Based on Jean Baudrillard's study Simulacras and Simulation, David Cronenberg's two-dimensional film Existenz (1999), which is technologically peculiar to traditional cinema, is evaluated through the relationship between “traditional two- dimensional cinema and VR film”

Die Idee des »neuen Fleischs« durchkreuzt herkömmliche Grenzziehungen, welche die Domänen Natur und Technik klar voneinander unterscheiden. Was sagen uns die gleichermaßen verstörenden wieverführerischen Körperbilder in den Filmen David Cronenbergs über die Bewertung vonKulturtechnologien?Bettina Papenburg fokussiert in diesem Buch auf den grotesken Körperund eröffnet darüber einen frischen Blick auf Cronenbergs geladeneVisualisierungen von Körpermetaphern. Im Mittelpunkt der close readingsausgewählter Sequenzen aus den Filmen »The Brood«, »Crimes of theFuture«, »Videodrome«, »eXistenZ« und »Crash« stehen Darstellungen vonFragmentierung, Heterogenität und Exzess, sowie von Unschärfen undÜbergängen innerhalb unseres Kategoriensystems.

Using the theories of Irigaray and Cyberculture, this article examines how science fiction film often seeks to reinstate the superiority of a gender politics grounded in the body.  Focusing on Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, the article discusses the way in which the film explores the notion of our perceived ability to transcend gender in the much fêted realm of cyberspace.  The article maintains that Allegra’s alignment with the world of cyberspace and multiplicity, and Pikul’s association with the phallocentric rubric of our material world, allows Cronenberg to mock phallocentricism.  However, the article argues that Cronenberg’s film also elicits an ambiguity in his approximation of the ‘freedoms’ of cyberspace and that the desire to transcend gender is riddled with uncertainty.  Through reinstatement of essentialist tropes, Cronenberg ultimately confirms the negative transposition of gender-norms in which we are haunted by the spectre of gender and corporeality, bolstering science fiction cinema’s conservative approach to gender.

This paper inspects David Cronenberg’s 1975 film Shivers through philosophical concept
of desiring-production by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The paper explores the connection and
goes on to propose that a new, hybrid and subversive, type of undead is born somewhere in-between
during the process of desiring-production at work in Shivers. The paper then explains the subversive
hybridization as one of the typical perceptions of the Zombie and the Vampire cultural phenomena.

В статье рассматриваются деструктивные тенденции современной культуры в контексте общества потребления, развития компьютерных технологий и виртуализации жизни, а также медикализации культуры, и репрезентация данных тенденций в современном кинематографе.


Destructive tendencies of modern culture and their representation in the cinematography

The article explores the destructive tendencies of modern culture in the context of the consumer society, development of computer technologies and the virtualization of life and medicalization of culture, and the representation of these trends in modern cinematography.

From the “psychoplasmic” offspring in The Brood (1979) to the tattooed encodings in Eastern Promises (2007), David Cronenberg presents a compelling vision of embodiment, which challenges traditional accounts of personal identity and obliges us to ask how human beings persist through different times, places, and bodily states while retaining their sameness. Traditionally, the response to this question has emphasised the importance of cognitive memory in securing the continuity of consciousness. But what has been underplayed in this debate is the question of how the body can both reinforce and disrupt the grounds for our personal identity. Accordingly, by turning the notoriously “body conscious” work of Cronenberg, especially his seminal The Fly (1986), I intend to pursue the relation between identity and embodiment in the following way.
First, by augmenting John Locke’s account of personal identity with a specific appeal to the body, I will explore how Cronenberg’s treatment of embodiment as a site of independent experience challenges the idea we have that cognitive memory is the guarantor of personal identity. Cronenberg’s treatment of the “New Flesh” posits an account of the body that undermines the Cartesian and Lockean account of personal identity as being centred on the mind. In its place, I will argue that Cronenberg shows us how the body establishes a personality independently of the mind.
Second, through focusing explicitly on body memory, I will explore how we, as embodied subjects, relate to our bodies in a Cronenbergian world. Approaching this relation between memory and embodiment via the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, I will argue that memory is at the heart of Cronenberg’s vision of body horror. I will conclude by suggesting that far from generating unity, Cronenberg’s vision of embodiment and identity is diseased (often literally) by a memory that cannot be assimilated by cognition. The result of this failure to assimilate body memory, is that memory itself occupies the role of the monster within.

Taking the animal and the machine as two ontological others of the human, this paper looks into how they “are added to” and “replace” the humanist others based on race, gender, class, etc. in contemporary cinema. This “supplement” urges us to reframe identity politics and cultural studies in a larger “polis” emerging between and encompassing both the human world, which becomes ever more globally homogenized, and its radical environment, natural or technological. The topic is a global cinematic phenomenon that even local films directly embody. The animal is captured on the boundaries between “the symbolic” and “the real,” between “the actual” and “the virtual” in the artistic works of Werner Herzog, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Peter Greenaway. The machine convolutes the issues of informatics, embodiment, and cyborgism, often through SF fantasy that pervades Hollywood blockbusters and Japanimation. The rare amalgam of animal–machine receives further attention in David Cronenberg's films, and becoming-animal/-machine in Avatar empowers the human in the posthuman sense of biopower that transforms the body and registers it on a larger network. From this perspective, discourses on the animal (zooesis) and technology (technesis) work together to bring a new political potential. Animality and technology no longer form a naïve dichotomy of nature vs. civilization but combine in ways of making more visible the new condition of life. It unfolds in a cinematic “zone,” an ephemeral “clearing” for “bare life” within the globalized world. This zone exists in the exceptional state of temporary potential to de-/repoliticize any humanistic politics.

David Cronenberg is arguably one of the world’s most acclaimed cult directors, his films renowned for their depictions of body horror and transgressive outsiders. But some years ago he found himself enduring a run of critically acclaimed flops, with each successive failure making it harder and harder to finance his next project.

Cronenberg responded with A History of Violence (2005), his first Hollywood studio feature since the 1980s. The cult director adapted an obscure graphic novel, yet created perhaps the most mainstream film of his career. A History of Violence may also be his most subversive film, both celebrating and deconstructing the American dream.

This paper will offer a case study of the adaptation, comparing the graphic novel by Judge Dredd creator John Wagner and artist Vince Locke with Josh Olson’s screenplay. It will examine the cinematic genres and cultural touchstones invoked by the filmmakers, and consider how these enriched a spare, seemingly uncomplicated mainstream thriller.

The paper will go beyond the film to examine critical responses, and how they were coloured by attitudes to American foreign policy at the time. Finally, it will look at Cronenberg’s role in the cinematic paratexts that preceded and accompanied A History of Violence, debating the importance of his cult cache to the film’s reception.

Durante los años noventa el género de ciencia ficción experimenta un notable incremento de películas que versan sobre la realidad virtual. La ambientación de estos filmes, que siguen el influyente modelo de distopía nocturna instituido por Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), presenta hasta el final de la década grandes semejanzas entre sí. Sin embargo David Cronenberg romperá en eXistenZ (1999) con las premisas visuales anteriores. Este artículo analiza sus escenarios señalando la principal novedad introducida por eXistenZ: la recreación de la estética de los videojuegos como elemento esencial del film.

[THIS PAPER IS IN ITALIAN LANGUAGE]

Edgar Morin nello studio seminale sul divismo Le Star teorizza una liturgia stellare: «Eroicizzate, divinizzate, le star sono più che oggetti d’ammirazione: sono soggetti di culto. Si crea attorno a loro un abbozzo di religione». Lo star system ha ormai cambiato forma senza perdere tuttavia alcuni attributi liturgici. Gli spazi di costruzione e fruizione del divismo contemporaneo sembrano infatti estendersi ed allargarsi nello spazio potenzialmente infinito dei nuovi mezzi di comunicazione.
Il saggio vuole esplorare le dinamiche di edificazione della figura divistica di Robert Pattinson grazie alla fandom della saga di Twilight e l’alterazione di questo processo avviato con l’interpretazione in Cosmopolis di David Cronenberg. Pattinson ha prestato il volto al vampiro seriale pop Edward Cullen e allo speculatore vampiresco Eric Packer: attraverso lo studio delle differenti performance è possibile registrare l’evoluzione/involuzione da corpo di massa a corpo d’autore del giovane divo.

In this essay I argue that the science fiction films of David Cronenberg from Shivers (1975) to Dead Ringers (1988) describe the evolution of a system from a state of order to a state of chaos. Such systems might be societal, for example, Starliner Towers in Shivers or the family in The Brood (1978). A system might be biological, such as the human body in The Fly (1986). A system might be stylistic, such as the development of mise-en-scène in Dead Ringers (1988) from an ordered state to a disordered one. Alternatively a system might be formal, such as the development of narrative from a state that corresponds to the organisation of “classical” narrative demonstrating spatial, temporal and causal order, to a state of confusion where the spectator is unable to engage in the same process of fabula construction due to the increasing chaos of the narrative. I explore the breakdown of narrative order in Videodrome (1982), and describe an asymmetrical narrative schema that can be applied to Cronenberg’s other films.

Spectacular Posthumanism examines the ways in which VFX imagery fantasizes about digital disembodiment while simultaneously reasserting the importance of the lived body. Analyzing a wide range of case studies-including the films of David Cronenberg and Stanley Kubrick, image technologies such as performance capture and crowd simulation, Game of Thrones, Terminator: Genisys, Planet Earth, and 300-Ayers builds on Miriam Hansen's concept of “vernacular modernism” to argue that the “vernacular posthumanism” of these media objects has a phenomenological impact on viewers. As classical Hollywood cinema initiated viewers into the experience of modernism, so too does the VFX image initiate viewers into digital, posthuman modes of thinking and being. Ayers's innovative close-reading of popular, mass-market media objects reveals the complex ways that these popular media struggle to make sense of humanity's place within the contemporary world.

Spectacular Posthumanism argues that special and visual effects images produce a digital, posthuman vernacular, one which generates competing fantasies about the utopian and dystopian potential of a nonhuman future. As humanity grapples with such heady issues as catastrophic climate change, threats of anonymous cyber warfare, an increasing reliance on autonomous computing systems, genetic manipulation of both humans and nonhumans, and the promise of technologically enhanced bodies, the anxieties related to these issues register in popular culture. Through the process of compositing humans and nonhumans into a seemingly seamless whole, digital images visualize a utopian fantasy in which flesh and information might easily coexist and cohabitate with each other. These images, however, also exhibit the dystopic anxieties that develop around this fantasy. Relevant to our contemporary moment, Spectacular Posthumanism both diagnoses and offers a critique of this fantasy, arguing that this posthuman imagination overlooks the importance of embodiment and lived experience.

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In Franz Kafka’s most famous work, The Metamorphosis, the protagonist, Gregor Samsa finds himself changed into a bug, but more importantly, he struggles to hold onto what semblance of his human self is left. While still dipping into a full immersion with his metamorphosed side throughout the text, his final moments depict Samsa trying to exert what humanistic qualities he has left. This is analogous to the struggle Seth Brundle faces in David Cronenberg’s film, The Fly, wherein he splices his genes with a fly by accident, creating the horrific abomination known as, “Brundlefly.” With a focus on the final moments of Brundlefly’s life in Cronenberg’s film, The Fly, contrasted with Samsa’s final moments in Kafka’s book, The Metamorphosis, I will explore the humanistic side of the two victimized protagonists. In this essay, I argue that it is not the animal side of the protagonists that is either celebrated or rejected, but that it is the humanistic side of the transformed individual that is admired but ultimately rejected. Further, alongside the scholarship of Walter Benjamin, I argue that shame operates in both of the works I will be navigating through as both a motivator and paralyzer for the protagonists.