Long Live the New Flesh

Most horror is about something coming to get you. Cronenberg's horror is about something becoming you. From the start his films located dread not in a monster outside the body but in the body itself — its capacity to mutate, to grow new organs, to betray its owner, to fuse with the machine. A man's stomach develops a slot for a videocassette in Videodrome; a scientist slowly, meticulously becomes an insect in The Fly; twin gynecologists share one disintegrating mind in Dead Ringers; car-crash survivors rebuild desire around the wound in Crash. This is "body horror," and Cronenberg is its inventor and its philosopher — but the label undersells what he is actually doing, which is treating the flesh as the last unmapped territory, the genuine frontier where the future arrives first.

His signature is a clinical calm laid over the unthinkable. He films transformation with the steady, unflinching gaze of a surgeon or a researcher — no hysteria, no flinching cut, the camera holding on the new organ or the opening wound with curiosity rather than disgust. That coolness is the argument. Cronenberg does not think the body's mutations are simply monstrous; he thinks they are coming, and that recoiling from them is a failure of nerve. "Long live the new flesh," the slogan from Videodrome, is uttered as a kind of dark annunciation — a recognition that the boundary between the human body and its technologies, its diseases, its desires, was always going to dissolve, and that the only honest response is to look closely.

And he was early — that is the uncanny thing about returning to him now. Videodrome imagined the screen entering the body and rewiring the brain decades before anyone carried that screen in their pocket; eXistenZ imagined game-pods plugged into the spine and a reality you could no longer verify, on the eve of the always-online world; The Fly reads, after the 1980s, as an unbearable allegory of disease consuming a body from inside. Cronenberg's flesh-horror keeps arriving on schedule, which means it was never horror in the ordinary sense. It was forecasting. He looked at the human body and saw, accurately, that it was about to stop being stable — that we would graft the machine onto it, edit it, mediate it, and have to become something else.

That is why his influence is less a matter of imitators copying a gross-out effect than of a whole sensibility he made available: the idea that the body is the site of the future, that the merger of flesh and technology is the central horror and the central fact of the coming century. When contemporary cinema films the body as something porous, programmable, invaded by its own tools, it is working in the territory Cronenberg mapped first. He turned the oldest thing we have — the meat we are made of — into science fiction. The new flesh he announced is, increasingly, just the flesh.

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The line: Videodrome → The Fly → Dead Ringers → Naked Lunch → Crash → eXistenZ → A History of Violence

This line crosses:

• The Screen That Thinks — Videodrome and eXistenZ are the body-horror version of the cinema of the brain: the screen not just thinking but entering the flesh and rewiring it, Pisters' neuro-image made literal and bleeding.
• The Director of the Unconscious — Cronenberg and Lynch are the twin North American visionaries of dread, one mapping the body's mutations, the other the mind's; the new flesh and the dream are the same frontier seen from two sides.

Read through: Cronenberg on Cronenberg (ed. Chris Rodley) · William Beard, The Artist as Monster: The Cinema of David Cronenberg.

A note on the argument: Cronenberg's body-horror and its themes are documented record. The framing of him as a forecaster — the new flesh as accurate prophecy of the flesh-technology merger rather than mere horror, the clinical calm as the argument — is this essay's reading.