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David Cronenberg, our foremost theoretician of viral horror, polymorphous perversity, and lIuncontroliableflesh,II hasbroughtJ.G. Ballard'swhiplashingsci-finovel,Crash,to the screen. Thereis, as Ballardwouldsay, a certain nightmare geometry to the conjunction.'

Crash is about the posthuman psychology and pathological sexuality of characters seduced by what Ballardcalls IIthat brutal, erotic and overlit realm that beckons more and more persuasively to us from the margins ofthe technological landscape. II It is a genre unto itselLauto eroticism in the literal sense, written in a style thatis as obsessively repetitive as the thrum of tires on concrete and as antiseptic as a textbook description ofcraniofacial trauma in head-on collisions.

In many ways, it's about our increasing alienation from our own bodies and other people at a time whenour interaction with the world around us consists, increasingly, of headfirst immersion in machines withscreens or human contact squeezed through wires, whether they're connected to phones, fax machines, ornetworked computers. Crash's terminally numb narrator, autobiographically named James Ballard, is joltedout of hispostmodernautismby a collision, litheonly real experienceI had beenthroughfor years.IIVaughan, a car-crash fetishist he meets through his accident, embodies the sped-up, out-oF-control psychologyof the late 20th century. Representing the Final, fateful collision of autonomous technology and the humanpsyche, Vaughan masturbates to carefully orchestrated crashes at the Road Research laboratory, savorsslow:m.otion films of test collisions as oneiric pornography, and dreams of dying, at the moment of orgasm, ina spectacular accident with Elizabeth Taylor's limousine.

likewise, Cronenberg's perversely brilliant bio-horror constitutes an extended meditation on the mind/body0.. .1 I r .0.1. I 1111__ . . I II I I. I.. I I I .1 .,

Amind/body/machine,II as Scott Bukatman points out in theessay collection Alien Zone. The filmmaker, who has won-dered if IIwe are just beginning a very important phase of ourevolutionll-a sort of unnatural selection catalyzed by technol-ogy-is lIalways talking about Mcluhan, II according to MartinScorsese in Chris Rodley's 1986 documentary on Cronenberg,Long Live the New Flesh. In a sense, Cronenberg isMcluhan's dark twin, theorizing electronic media and mechan-ical devices less as Mcluhanesque lIextensions of manll thanas agents of a morphogenesis that is not always pretty to lookat. In nearly all of his films, the dichotomy between mind andbody-the age-old conundrum at the heart of the human condi-tion-is exacerbated by the ever-more-technologicallandscapewe live in. As the roboticist Hans Moravec notes in MindChildren: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence, IIln thepresent condition we are uncomfortable halfbreeds, part biolo-

n J gy, part culture, with many of our biological traits out of stepwith th", inv",ntinn nf nllr minds II

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 anear-future plague culture straight out of Beauty Myth author Naomi Wolf's worstnightmares: postpubertal women are dying from a disease induced by cosmetics; menare sprouting bizarre new organs in an evolutionary response to the disappearanceof 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 havea smallrevolutionon my handsand I'm not puttingit down verysuccessfully.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'Blivionspeaks 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

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Convincedthat IIpubliclife on televisionwas morereal thanprivate life in the flesh,II O'Blivion designed amutagenic TV signal. Covertly transmitted in a sadomasochistic snuff program called Videodrome, the signalstimulates the production of lIa new outgrowth of the human brain which will produce and control hallucinationto the point that it will change human realityll IO'Blivion). The professor believes that the tumors induced bythe 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-

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sette; his TVheaves and moans in concupiscent ecstacy, itsscreen bulging toward his waiting lips.Surrendering to the postmodern madness of a world in

which distinctions between this and that side of the TVscreenare no longer meaningful, Renn killshimself-or, as thetechnophilic Heaven's Gate cultistswho recently committedsuicide would have it, abandoned his "vehicle." His handmorphs into a gun made of molten, marbled flesh Ireality?video hallucination? both?1and he blows his head off with theposthumanist rallying cry, "Longlive the new flesh!" In aneerie premonition of the flyingsaucer theology of theHeaven's Gate cultists, Renn takes his own life so that he maybe born again as disembodied simulacrum-what O'Blivion'sdaughter 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 arewitnessing the "demise of feeling and emotion." True to hername, Nicki Brand, the deadpan, affectless media personalityin 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 beendeadened by the nonstop shock treatment of postmodern cul-ture, distanced by the multiplyinglayers of electronic media-

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tion between herself and embodied experience. Onlyextreme pain can bring her back to her physical body; cell bycell, 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 predictablesite of their head-on collision. LongtimeBallardians will missthe astringent wit of the novel's deadpan narration, its apho-ristic one-liners I"Theworld was beginning to flower into

I wounds"!, the deviant beauty of its surreal imagery I"Thepas-senger compartment enclosed us like a machine generatingfrom our sexual act an homunculus of blood, semen, andengine coolant"l. LongtimeCronenbergians will missScanners' tangled web of conspiracy, Dead Ringers' psychot-ic break with reality, The Fly's mutagenic technologies anduncontrollable flesh. Strangely, the movie lacks the book'ssexual frisson, exuding a lunar cool that detractors will likento Joop! cologne ads and devotees will compare to the moon-lit tableaux of the Surrealist painter land Ballard passionl PaulDelvaux. Even so, it's a filmthat must be seen lat least twice,according to Cronenberg!, an indispensable road map to thelate-night highways of the millennial mind.

RAGESEPTEMBER1997 .

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 CrashAN APPROPRIATE METAPHOR FOR OUR AGE OF AERIAL

DISASTERS, ALIEN ABDUCTIONS, AND MAD BOMBINGS?

David Cronenberg: Well, it's tempting to look at whatevertimes one lives in as being in crisis, but I think we're always inextreme times; I have a built-in resistance to seeing these things asleading us somewhere. I see a wonderful, inbuilt need in thehuman 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 onethesethings is the nature of sexuality, which I really think is changing-changing in a way that we Inot 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?

DC:Right.One can anticipate a time imaybenot too far in the future,when you wontt need humans at al to reproducehumans,where theDNAcould be reproducedsyntheticallyand youtll havesyntheticspernandeggs. The questionthen becomes, "What is sex?" It has never, for humans,been a simpleter of reproduction. In fact, there have been culturesthat didn't even connect sexwith reproductionNow, we're at a point where we consciouslyseesex being cut free from its biological imperatives,demanding to be redefined, reinvented-a very existential development that forces us to take respobility for deciding what sexwill be. It's a very powerful force, still very much inbuilt in us, but it nolonger 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 technocal developmentswhich have caused this. I don't think it's justa 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'tBrave New World warning that sex will be controlled for genetic breeding purposes; I just think thathe natural course of things there will be less haphazard, natural child-creating and more controlledchild-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? FOLLOWINGThe Bell Curve, THERE SEEMBE A STEALTHOPERATION UNDERWAYTO REHABILITATEEUGENICS ANDSOCIAL 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 massenergy devoted to that craziness; I'm just saying that it's notinevitable that one thing leads to the other. What I'm saying isnow 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

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who gets to spread his genetic material because he canget babes with his Mercedes? He doesn't have to bestrong; in fact, he can be quite weak. In other words,who is the fittest? All the eugenicistsflash back to somebizarre Victorian version of what Darwinian "fitness"would be in a human being. But in our society, it mightbe an NBA player: he's strong, he's got a lot ofmoney...

M D: OR BILL GATES.

DC: And between the two, where are you? We can nolonger say that Arnold Schwarzenegger is the evolution-ary ideal. What person are you going to hold up assomeone whose genetic material should dominate? Youcanlt. Eugenicists who talk about the racial stuff areonly exposing the very tiniest tip of the iceberg in thatdiscussion, because who says intellectual superiority isnecessarily the most desirable thing? It goes on and on.

M D: I THINK YOUR COMMENTS ON SEXUALITY GO TO THE

HEART OF Crash. WHICH WRESTLES WITH THE QUESTION OF

THE HUMAN CONDITION IN THE MEDIA-BOMBARDED LAND-

SCAPE OF THE LATE 20TH CENTURY. IN HIS INTRODUCTION

TO THE FRENCH EDITION OF Crash, BALLARD CALLS IT "A

WARNING AGAINST THAT BRUTAL, EROTIC AND OVER LIT REALM

THAT BECKONS MORE AND MORE PERSUASIVELY TO US FROM

THE MARGINS OF THE TECHNOLOGICAL LANDSCAPE." AND

YET THE BOOK ITSELF FEELS AS IF IT WERE WRITTEN BY A

ROBOT HISTORIAN; rr's A CAUTIONARY TALE ABOUT THE

DEATH OF AFFECT [EMOTION] WRITTEN IN AN UTTERLY

AFFECTLESS STYLE.

DC: I was onstagewith Ballard at the ICA [InstituteofContemporary Art] in london, where we had a conver-sation, and he said he did the book first and then after-wards he set in the rationale, which made me feel goodbecausethat's how it feelsto me. The impulseto makethe movie, and the processof making the movie, comesbefore the critical analysis. Not that I'm not interestedinanalysis, but the two don't come from the same place;itls a different part of the brain that does thosetwothings.Another thing that I asked him about, relative to his

introduction to the Frenchedition, was his discussionofthe book as technoporn. He calls it "the first porno-graphic novel based on technology."

M D: RIGHT. HE BEMOANS THE DEATH OF AFFECT AND

THEN, IN LITERALLY THE NEXT SENTENCE, SAYS THAT ITS

DEMISE OPENS THE FLOODGATES OF THE UNCONSCIOUS TO

OUR MOST DELICIOUSLY DISEASED FANTASIES. WE GO FROM

FREUD'S PESSIMISM TO A DE SADEAN PLEASURE DUNGEON IN

THE SPACE OF A SENTENCE. IT STRIKES A DISSONANCE. AT

LEAST TO MY EAR.

DC: Yeah, I disagreed with him about those things, orrather thought that they needed some clarification, andI 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-theanalysis in the French introduction-is adequate, andthat makes perfect sense to me, because as an artistI'm going to say that my movie has nothing to do with

pornography if I'm being attacked for being a pornogra-pher. But later, I might say, "Well, it does have someconnections with pornography, but I felt they were toosubtle to be mentioned at the time, for political reasons."

Bertolucci said that Crash was a religious masterpiece,because he felt the characters were like little Christs, sac-rificing themselves on our behalf so we can watch butnot have to do it. There's some truth, there, because ina way I'm saying, "Okay, let these people do what theydo; don't make a moral judgment, don't restrict them,just see where it takes us." I see them as being forcedby their own inner impulses to reinvent the old forms ofthings which they feel are not working. That includessexuality, but it also includes emotion-the ways emotionis expressed, social interaction, even language. Maybethis involves the death of affect, to which one might say,"Well, maybe affect is not that great; maybe that's thebad part of human nature."

M D: ONE MIGHT SAY THAT, BUT DO YOU?

DC: No, I don't. I say that these people have not beenable to express their emotions in the forms that are avail-able to them because what they're trying to express isimpossible in the language that exists, which is veryWittgensteinian. So, to a small degree, I'm reinventingfilm language in order to allow my characters to expressthings to themselves in their own emotional language. Isee Crash as an existential romance. That simply meansthat maybe affect-which is to say, what we consideremotion and the way in which it is expressed-needs tofind new avenues, new forms in order to express thethings that we need to express these days, things whichcannot be expressed using the old cliches abou! love orsexuality or family or whatever. Wetre feehngsome things that haventt been feltbefore, be(ause the (omplexities of lifeare qUite different than they werebefore. It's what Mcluhan was talking about: wekeep driving and looking into the rear-view mirror.

M D: AN APPROPRIATE METAPHOR FOR Crash.DC: The weird thing about Crash is that at first it's a

complete turn-off, and then gradually you find yourselfbeing turned on by things you never thought you'd beturned on by, in language that you never imaginedyou'd be turned on by. That's the art of it. Somehow,you're getting the pure experience, from the narrator'spoint of view, of this strange eroticism. It's disturbing,just because it's so abnormal and perhaps even dehu-manized, although no one but a human could think thesethoughts.

I tried to do the same thing in the movie by creating a4.

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style that was sensual in some ways,and having very attractive people inthe film, because I knew that, concep-tually, many people would resist it.So to balance that, I tried to make itsomewhat sensual and textural with-

out making it deliriously luscious, youknow. I tried to do the same thingcinematically that I felt Ballard wasdoing 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'remaking a movie. You go on your intu-ition in creating a world which youhave to say to yourself Iknowing it tobe a lie) is a hermetically sealed worldthat you will then take the audienceinto. I certainly find people having for-mal problems with the movie, notunderstanding how to deal with thestructure of it. It looks like it mightwork like, you know, Fatal Affraction-you've got this attractive, upper-middle-class couple who don't have to worryabout money, they're having affairs-but then it doesn't work out any wayyou could imagine. They get com-pletely confused and disconnect. In away, the very structure of Crash is asmuch a problem as the whole questionof affect.

M D : WHAT'S YOUR RESPONSE TO THAT?

DC: My response is that you just haveto let go of all that stuff. I've foundthat, for many people, it becomes adifferent movie the second time theysee it. The first time, especially ifyou're familiar with the book, you'reconstantly analyzing your reactions,

comparing the film and thenovel. You've really got tolet go and let the movie bewhat it is. Of courseyou're going to want todiscussit vis-a-visthe book,but it is its own thing.,.

MarkDery(markdery@well.com) is a

cultural critic whose bylinehas appeared in RollingStone, the New York Times,

Wired, and the Village Voice.He is the author of EscapeVelocity: Cyberculture at the

End of the Century, a critiqueof fringe computer culture(http://www.well.com/user/markderyl). He also edited theessay collection Flame Wars:The Discourse of

Cyberculture, and is currentlyat work on The PyrotechnicInsanitarium, a book about

madness and mayhem in mil-lennial America (GrovePress, 1998).

RAGESEPTEMBER1997 .