Art and performance collective Guerilla Zoo are mounting a season celebrating the work of Alejandro Jodorowsky during November in London.

Events include The Gorilla, a new Jodorowsky play starring his son Brontis, an exhibition of work from the Panic Movement, an exhibition of works by Jodorowsky and Pascale Montandon, and of course, screenings of Jodorowsky’s incomparable surrealist alchemical films.

Tickets are now on sale for the exciting-looking Equinox Festival, to be held from June 12th-14th at Conway Hall in London.

Performers include Comus, John Zorn, Aethenor, Z’ev and Arktau Eos; speakers include Ralph Metzner, Erik Davis, Stephen Grasso, David Beth, James Curcio, Philip Farber, Carl Abrahamsson and Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule; films include The Holy Mountain, Divine Horsemen and The Mindscape of Alan Moore.

Seems likely to be an essential gathering.

I rented the documentary DIG! on the strength of it being something about The Dandy Warhols. The Dandys really didn’t make a good first impression back when I surfed into the insufferable video for ‘Not If You Were The Last Junkie On Earth’. I already thought their name was a bit naff; this video seemed to show them as self-conscious posers with catchy riffs. When their Stones pastiche ‘Bohemian Like You’ came to me via a mobile phone advert, their reputation in my world seemed sealed – down in the depths with the toxic waste.

But… I’d seen some people with blatantly good taste mentioning them in glowing terms. When I borrowed 13 Tales from Urban Bohemia from Golders Green library, I was shocked to be totally floored, by four tracks at least. The rest were kind of OK, but ‘Godless’, ‘Mohammed’, and especially ‘Nietzsche’ and ‘Sleep’ were soaring wonders.

Anyway, I never followed that surprise up, but I was curious about a documentary with them in it. And some band called The Brian Jonestown Massacre. If I’d heard of them before, it hadn’t registered (striking name notwithstanding), and I certainly didn’t have a clue about them or their music.

In the end, DIG! is a good yarn, and a fascinating look at the perils of the music industry. Regarding Anton Newcombe, the BJM’s main man, it’s hard not to come away from the film with an acute impression of his personal demons. His personal statement about the film makes it clear that the director took more than a few liberties with editing in order to construct a more sensational narrative.

It was edifying to hear from friends who have spent time with him that in their experience he’s a pretty cool guy. But all this weighing of evidence about the personality of someone you haven’t even met is redundant. It’s the thin end of the wedge that keeps the door open to celebrity gossip and other culture-killing shite. More than anything, DIG! left me with a burning desire to check out the BJM’s music.

I grabbed their recent 2-CD retrospective Tepid Peppermint Wonderland, and I’ve not really listened to anyone else since. The first warm week of the spring has been transfigured by the BJM’s wild-eyed, dronadelic genius into the most sustained and richly textured musical high I’ve experienced since I discovered Lungfish a couple of years ago. Prolific, effervescent, and ceaselessly creative, the band have constructed a body of work that demands enormous respect. It’s a rare kind of retro, ones that looks back to go forward, the sort of impassioned dip into the past that fired the imaginations of Renaissance magi as they discovered their own vision of antiquity. It’s almost as if Newcombe has envisioned an alternate timeline where the modern music industry never really happened, and the seminal leaps forward of the sixties carried on without concern for radio-friendly production values and shifting product.

In DIG!, his antipathy to the industry is cast as pointless self-destruction. I wasn’t there, I don’t know how it happened. It’s so tempting to feel like I do know something, having seen some film footage. But in the end it’s more than enough to be fiercely philosophical about it with Anton. The quiet, unlikely hero of the film seemed to me to be the A&R guy Adam Shore, who, in brokering the deal for the BJM’s only major label album, instead of funnelling the cash into renting a big studio, bought Anton a full home studio for keeps. Anton keeps bucking the industry, always producing music whose depth and effortless fertility shows DIG‘s conceit of portraying him and Courtney as musical equals whose differing paths are determined by differing psychological health to be the simplistic falsehood that is obviously is. The Dandys have done some great stuff, but comparison with BJM’s work is an exercise in futility.

‘All Around You (Intro)’ opens the BJM’s supremely psychedelic opus Their Satanic Majesties’ Second Request. “The hippie prophet vibe is in full effect,” notes the BJM’s brilliant former bassist, Matt Hollywood. Beckoning you into his head-trip, the maniacally cackling Newcombe proclaims, “Here comes the best part… We’re giving it to you absolutely free!”

Now, with the advent of widespread broadband, this is much more than an inspirational expression. What seems to be the entire back catalogue of this contemporary gem of a band is available to download, for free. My jaw’s still on the floor from discovering this last night. This guy’s serious about his music in a way that makes the machinations of the media machine seem hopelessly flimsy.

Obviously, I heartily recommend you head over to start downloading. I’ve not listened thoroughly to everything, but Their Satanic Majesties’ Second Request is a great place to start, as is Give It Back (a magnificent album, recorded in a week on borrowed studio time). If you feel like holding a CD, Tepid Peppermint Wonderland is a great overall introduction; not to mention DIG!, despite its faults.

The Brian Jonestown Massacre fucking rule.

I’m just back from my first visit to the Cube Microplex Cinema here in Bristol. It’s criminal that it’s taken me so long to visit – it’s a great little venue, with warmth and atmosphere. As it was, I couldn’t have chosen a better personal premiere.

It’s always a treat to go to see something that you’re pretty sure is going to be enjoyable, at least, but something about which you know next to nothing. Darren Aronofksy’s The Fountain had somehow managed to elude my radar until Cat asked me if I wanted to go and see it the other day. So I don’t want to spoil anything for you. I’m more and more conscious of hyping films these days, more and more aware of how damaging and skewing it can be. But sometimes you’ve just got to recommend something.

The Fountain is a love story, but resolutely non-sappy without being boring or tortured. It layers narratives distanced by time in a way that teases you into trying to piece together the “real” narrative. As long as you keep your metaphorical multiplicity to hand, these attempts will lead you deeper into the film rather than further from it; it makes sense in some linear ways without losing the resonance of its layering.

Its special effects are stunning. Virtually no CGI was used, and the astonishing outer space sequences were created by photographing chemical reactions under a microscope (which works wonderfully technically, as well as poetically). Both Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz are brilliant in the lead roles.

Most fascinating to me was the use of Mayan myth and cosmology; creative and yet accurate, blending Christian myths about the New World with Mayan understanding of death in a hugely compelling way.

It’s a fable about the literalist quests of Christianity and science, and “a love poem to death”, as someone called it; an alchemical rapture on celluloid.

Go see.

I’ve just posted a new review, of John Gray’s brief study, Al Qaeda and What It Means to be Modern. The title seems to have been moulded a little by publishing opportunism; fair enough. The meat of the matter is the delusions that modern political currents, such as Marxism and free-market economics, have inherited from Christianity. Essential reading.

I picked it up in a nice little second-hand bookshop in Cromer, on the Norfolk coast, while attending the wonderful Cwm To The Valley festival.

In other news…

Do check out Jason Godesky’s review of The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram—looks like a must-read to me.

While in London with a few hours to kill, I moseyed down to the Prince Charles cinema to see what could be seen for three pounds. The film waiting for me turned out to be the slow, charming drama-documentary, The Cave of the Yellow Dog. Observations of daily life for a Mongolian herding family are threaded through a minimal plot to great effect. An absorbing, delightful, and somewhat melancholy experience.

Beyond that, I’m immersed in getting the first Dreamflesh journal to the printers, and ploughing through the perpetually inventive and moving series Six Feet Under on DVD.

Meanwhile, in Yorkshire, some good friends of mine, and about 600 others, have been trying to raise awareness about climate change by protesting at the huge Drax power station. I wonder about the effectiveness of the tactic of trying to shut the power station down. It’s obviously symbolic, the station being the biggest single carbon emissions culprit in the UK. But even though this is the first anti-climate change direct action event, public awareness of the issue is already relatively widespread. Public and political action in response to the issue is very much “too little too late” at the moment. But in the media war that the protest is fighting, some of the effect is lost when people are clued up enough to say to themselves, “Well, just shutting a power station down for a day isn’t going to change anything is it?” Of course, this misses the symbolic impact of the event. As the Independent quotes from protestors show, none of the people involved see the action in itself as anything but a limited dent in the generally passive, mediated cultural attitude to this gargantuan issue. As ever, the protestors will most likely be dismissed—by the establishment and the neo-greens alike—as ineffective, antagonistic nuisances. But the issue has been raised, and many will have a basic human response to seeing other humans doing something about it. And this will inspire action, even as the source of inspiration is dismissed.

My own most intense experience of creativity was making two short films at college. The artistic construction of meaning in narrative works—using “devices” such as coincidence, visual and linguistic associations, and chance encounters—is taken in the study of such works to be wholly the conscious craft of the artist. Certainly that was the dogma of the degree course I undertook, reflecting rationalist Marxism-driven literary criticism everywhere. And certainly, it’s a good place to start when faced with the complex mysticism of late capitalist image-making, advertising and unconscious propaganda. But my experience of making my first film, in association with my accompanying reading of William Burroughs and my psychedelic experiences, convinced me that something else is at work. The conscious construction of meaning in art, if undertaken with a modicum of sensitivity and enthusiasm, seems to generate a kind of momentum of signification, where your own intended meanings become autonomous, copulating and generating offspring that complexify the whole process beyond anything under your control—often beyond anything within your capabilities.

The intensity of this experience, together with the density of synchronicities that I found surrounding the making of the film in my personal life, decisively shaped my second film. The central idea in this was that the aforementioned “devices” used by narrative artists to shape meaning in their works do not originate in human creativity. Rather, their use in art is a form of realism, if one admits the fact that reality itself uses them in its interactions with our conscious awareness.

Looking up from Wilson’s book at one point, my usual view of the heaving ocean was interrupted by the huge form of a ferry pulling in to harbour at Methana. Something about its sudden appearance, the ferry, the writing on its side, triggered a memory, a memory of a syncronicity. It was something to do with the ferry port in Holyhead, when I was there recently with Jim on our way to move his things to his new home in Dublin (the location, of course, of the “action” of Finnegans Wake). But I just couldn’t place it. I carried on reading.

A few pages later, Wilson starts talking about the traces of the Italian Hermetic philosopher Giordano Bruno in Joyce’s book. He mentions that in Joyce’s day, Dublin had a bookshop called Brown and Nolan, oddly echoing Bruno’s self-given title “Bruno of Nola” (the suburb of Naples where he came from).

All at once it hit me. Around the time we moved out of our flat in London, I had been reading Frances Yates’ Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. Having grown up in England in the 1970s with the godawful Nolan Sisters parading their songs around on TV all the time, I had been amused by the way Yates frequently referred to Bruno as “the Nolan”. I’d been chuckling to myself about this as I came out of the Holyhead ferryport terminal building to return to our van when my path had been suddenly crossed by a huge freight truck bearing the company’s name in large letters: NOLAN.

Some kind of wormhole of frivolous meaning had suddenly opened between the harbour of Methana and Holyhead ferryport, pulled into being by my reading Coincidance. Actually, the word “meaning” in these contexts is often misleading. There are probably levels of actual personal meaning that could be dredged out of this web of associations using dream logic; but in the end the real significance of it all is held in the way Wilson spells the title of his book. It’s a playful interaction, with rhythms, patterns and rhymes that act as channels for emotion and thought and pleasure. It’s a dance. And as Alan Watts said, “The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance.”

A slight aside, my favourite bit in the essay I was reading:

As Joyce’s eye-sight failed, his prose became even more ear-oriented, and Brancusi portrayed him in 1932 as a spiral, symbolizing the inner ear; Joyce’s father, seeing this sketch reproduced in a Dublin newspaper, said drily, “Jim has changed a great deal since moving to Paris.”

I saw Richard Linklater’s excellent, provocative Waking Life last night. The film gets points straight away for giving practical, accurate, still relatively little-known tips on lucid dreaming (John Christensen is hilarious in this little scene). And of course, I’m fascinated by any film that furthers and expands our culture’s capacity to represent and communicate the dynamics and textures of dreaming itself. Bob Sabiston‘s wonderful animation techniques should serve Linklater’s upcoming Philip K. Dick adaptation, A Scanner Darkly, very well.

Art, classically, is meant to transcend its time. But, when I get specifically interested in how film manages to capture the slippery nuances and atmosphere of dreaming (which is often), there’s a certain technological aspect that’s hard to avoid. Films such as Waking Life and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind excite me because technical developments seem to be increasingly successfully married to artistic flair in the effort to depict various dream states and quirks. There is also, I think, a two-way traffic between dreams and technology. Technology exteriorises mental constructs, which in turn create new breeds of metaphor that are ably digested by our dream-generating processes. An incredibly frequent "device" in my dreams is of flipping back and forth between watching a film of something and actually being there. I wonder how this dynamic was experienced by pre-film dreamers? My guess is there was probably some sort of correlate, but that the quality of this dynamic has been evolved in the process of developing film technology.

I’m not entirely sure whether it’s just "special effects" that are starting to enable the depiction of certain dream processes; I suspect it’s a combination of this, and an increasing interest in dreams, a will to share this odd other half of our lives. It’s always a wonderful feeling to experience art that gives you a sense of connection by expressing things you’ve thought or felt that don’t seem to have been expressed elsewhere. I find this particularly potent when characteristics from dreams are represented accurately. It’s very visceral, surprising and affirmative. The bit in The Holy Mountain, where the protagonist jumps on the fish hook and is hauled to the top of the tower, where Jodorowsky’s alchemist plays his chakras like psychosomatic percussion—the whole dynamic of the interaction between these two characters as they meet flummoxed me with its resonance with some scenes from my dreams. Jodorowsky’s training in mime, of course, and his potent lack of concern with appearing silly, evoked dreamtime logic better than many misapplied uses of special effects. There’s the character in Eternal Sunshine at the book shop desk who, aside from blurring a little, just won’t turn round. That’s familiar. And there’s the brilliant scene where Joel takes the piss out of Clementine’s idea for "waking up" for being too simplistic, only to find that it works—who hasn’t explored lucid dreams and had that shock of the power of simple, direct actions?

The bit in Waking Life that made me feel like someone else has been there was the pinball-playing guy’s description of meeting a psychic in a dream, and being really cynical about them. Then he suddenly found himself rising up in the air, and was like, "Whoah! I believe you!"

With philosophical ideas, especially trippy ones about ontology, seeping more and more into the mainstream, boundaries are dissolving, and people are insecure. Some people seem to dive in, wide-eyed, and the net is full of their speculations on The Matrix. Equally, many react against these cultural artefacts of growing philosophical awareness, dismissing them and their believers, usually with the phrase "half-baked" somewhere in the mix. Both seem to think that films are supposed to present some kind of coherent philosophical position; they only disagree on whether something has succeeded or failed. I think films, like dreams, are more about possibilities than truth, and wrote a post on IMDb in a probably vain attempt to counter the mostly half-baked criticisms of half-bakedness.

a review by Gyrus

• Released: 2001

I steered well clear of this when I saw the trailer at the cinema. A pretty people vehicle trying to be hip and edgy? No thanks. I wasn’t aware that it was a Hollywood remake of a European original (Abre los ojos, 1997)—and let’s face it, that would hardly have been encouragement if I had known.

So when I finally, still with a vague grudge, got round to checking it out on video, my sneer appeared quickly as it opened to the strains of Radiohead. Not only was this slick young film trying to stretch its avant-pop credibility, so was this slick young character, David Aames (Tom Cruise). Still, at least since Born On The Fourth Of July, most definitely since Magnolia, Cruise has proved himself to be more than meets the eye, so I persisted…

Now, unexpected surprises are always the most potent, so this film formed a mini obsession for me in the week or two that followed seeing it for the first time. My initial cynicism turned out to be mostly a case of misplaced judgement, believing too soon that the film operated at no greater level than that of its shallow, irritatingly blasé protagonist. At the start of the film, David Aames—a brash, womanising inheritor of a massive media empire—is insufferable. If you’ve no patience for such a character, or your empathy is limited to people who "really" suffer (i.e. people without money), you’ll not go far with this film—save yourself the bother and leave it be.

The crux of the film is a savage car crash, where Aames’ on-and-off friend/lover Julie Gianni (Cameron Diaz in a great performance) commits suicide in a jealous rage with him in the passenger seat. Julie dies, Aames lives on, with a disfigured arm and face, and unbearable neurological pain. My admiration for Cruise rocketed here. Nowhere in the publicity for the film had this twist been hinted at, as far as I’d seen. That poster, just Cruise’s moody face against the sky, probably lured no end of people into the film on its own. I can’t help but imagine Cruise and director Cameron Crowe delighting at the prospect, knowing how they were going to undermine such expectations.

As Aame’s relationship with archetypal dream-woman Sofia Serrano (Penélope Cruz) progresses—after being crushed out of shape just after its initiation by the car crash—things get stranger and stranger. Reality descends into a jittery, fragmented maze of confusion as a masked Aames pores over his recent past with a therapist (Kurt Russell). Confusion between Sofia and Julie—and Sofia’s name—underline a tremendous debt to Philip K. Dick (it does seem grossly odd that Tom Cruise ends up as Dick’s biggest and best champion in Hollywood, but so be it).

The mind-bending finale may leave you feeling cheated, unless you’ve loved the rest of the film enough to swallow your pride—in which case you’ll watch it all again and feel enriched.

The Shallowness of Depth

Highly curious after seeing this captivating film, I browsed the web to find other reviews, and unsurprisingly found a great split in opinion. The unafraid-to-be-low-brow sites such as Ain’t It Cool News loved it. Most edifying, I found, were the left-of-centre mainstream reviews.

Take Salon.com. With zero sense for hidden Gnostic depths, the reviewer ridicules the scene where Sofia playfully passes her hand through a hologram of John Coltrane at a party. Even more fascinating is the reviewer’s loathing for Penélope Cruz, "with her rubberized lips and ‘Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful’ hair." The thrust of it all is: this film is trying to be "deep", and it fails miserably because the two leading actors are pretty.

And over at The Guardian, we’re told that "the big deal is that Tom’s gorgeous chops are ruined in a car wreck, so he’s sobbing in front of the bathroom mirror and gazing in horror at his (not that yucky) scars and deformities." Hmmmm. Never mind the crippling pain, Tom—cheer up!

All this tells my bullshit detector that these reviewers are guilty of the very thing they despise: shallowness. That would explain their venom. Such is the condition that makes final judgements on films based on an actor’s hair and lips, or on the portrayal of vanity in a study of wounded vanity.

by Gyrus

In an age where anti-flesh puritanism seems to be waning, and yet still persists in subtle manifestations, more and more extreme stimuli—both physical and conceptual—may be necessary to re-establish our relationship with our bodies. The vicious and relentless suppression of bodily awareness that is our inheritance from Pauline Christianity will not just fade away if we ask nicely. It seems that the growing popularity in the West of body modification practices, and physical forms of S/M sexuality, is indicative of the what may be necessary to reclaim our flesh and provoke ourselves into a deeper body-consciousness. And, as we shall see, our cultural myths, the imagery and conceptions that our artists generate, may also have become equally extreme in their treatment of the flesh, of necessity.

What is most relevant to us here is the phenomenon that stands as the most violent litmus test of attitudes towards the body—physical illness. I say ‘physical’ to distinguish from mental illness, and straight away we’re plunged into the arbitrary, and only sometimes useful division of existence that is embedded deep within our psyches and our language. We’re talking Cartesian dualism, of course… body = matter, mind = spirit… they’re utterly divorced, and God knows how they interact. To me, this is less a scientific observation than a philosophical rationalization of the core myth of Christianity. That is, the belief that we have been expelled from the spiritual paradise of Eden into this lumpen world of mortality, matter and disease. This world, and thus our bodies, in which our souls are supposedly encaged, is our punishment for the transgression of Adam & Eve. However, as Science gradually replaced Christianity as the West’s guiding mythology, there was a growing impatience with the whole idea of ‘spirit’ or ‘mind’ ("Where is it? How can we measure it?" cried the anxious minds in the laboratory). So the concept was dropped altogether as an embarrassing ghost that evaded quantification—and we arrive at materialist reductionism. All mental phenomena are seen as illusory by-products of the chemical and electrical activity of the brain. The world, and our bodies, move from being seen as corrupt to being seen as essentially meaningless. Disease is seen as just a mechanical fault, to be repaired and patched up. Patients are usually allowed to believe that their thoughts and emotions are real, but any connections and correlations made between the mental and the physical are seen as dangerous superstitions.

To set the debate rolling, let’s look at Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, perhaps the most concise, lucid and passionate statement denying a non-physical basis for physical illness. Briefly, her main argument runs along these lines…

In the nineteenth century, tuberculosis was a relatively widespread terminal disease that was seen in popular folklore, and through the eyes of artists, as indicative of a certain emotional temperament. The Romantics romanticized TB, seeing it as a sign of a passionate and sensitive nature. Then science discovered the physical basis for the disease, and consequently found a cure. The mythologizing of TB rapidly faded away, to be completely superseded in our century by another disease ripe for fantasy-projections: cancer. And, as a guaranteed medical cure remains elusive, cancer remains a condition muddied by unnecessary metaphorical thinking.

Sontag’s book is very persuasive, but tends to be very glib with regard to non-orthodox medical practice. Her persuasiveness largely stems from how she plays with the belittling connotations of ‘folklore’ and the authoritative tone of ‘scientific truth’. Also, she attempts to claim that ‘illness as metaphor’ is a dominant cultural myth of the modern era, when materialist science—’illness as mechanical breakdown’—undoubtedly holds this honour.

Neglecting to mention the vested interests that drug companies have in patients being treated solely via medicine, she states that "such preposterous and dangerous views", such as the idea that illness is a manifestation of unexpressed desires or impulses, "manage to put the onus of the disease on the patient and not only weaken the patient’s ability to understand the range of plausible medical treatment, but also, implicitly, direct the patient away from such treatment."1 This is a common distortion. The idea that a psychological view of certain diseases automatically places the blame for the condition on the patient is overly simplistic. In her criticism of Wilhelm Reich ("who did more than anyone to disseminate the psychological theory of cancer"—Sontag), for instance, she entirely neglects his extensive sociological analyses. While Reich placed the blame for cancer on unexpressed emotions, he usually placed the blame for this repression on repressive social systems. Of course, when thought about deeply, this reasoning leads to a classic ‘chicken and egg’ loop—which came first, consciousness or culture? To avoid metaphysical ‘first cause’ speculations, it is obvious that the most practical model for causality here is to accept the loop; to see causality as a dynamic interplay of external and internal factors.2

Essentially, then, Sontag is reiterating the doctrine of Cartesian dualism, or Christianity in disguise: that mind is separate from body; that the body is no more part of our identity than a car is; that disease, though painful, is merely a mechanical breakdown or invasion. And, like a car, the body should be repaired from a purely physical standpoint—any reference to emotional states or character traits is romantic mythologizing at best, dangerous delusion at worst.

While posing as a radical out to scythe down the perilous weeds of mythology, she perpetuates yet another form of the mind/body split that has drastically alienated us from the world we are part of.

The films of David Cronenberg are, if nothing else, resolutely body-conscious. Although the average reaction to this consciousness is one of hysterical revulsion, and although many critics claim that Cronenberg demonstrates a puritanical disgust with the flesh, it is my view that his films can be seen as a bloody and painful—but natural—conceptual birth process. The birth, back into awareness, of our relationship with our bodies. Just as scarification or piercing may be necessary to re-invoke body-awareness on an individual scale, the visceral pain of Cronenberg’s imagery may be a good example of what is necessary to kick-start the cultural meme-pool’s body-awareness.

Cronenberg has stressed his fascination with Cartesian dualism in statements too numerous to mention. He envisions the ultimate comment on this unfathomable ‘split’ (and the basis of all horror) as being the process of physical death. "Why should a healthy mind die, just because the body is not healthy? … There seems to be something wrong with that. It’s very easy to see why many philosophers detach the mind from the body … But I don’t believe that."3 It is this anguish of contradiction that lies at the heart of the painful mystery in his films. Cronenberg sees an apparent split—but his intuitions deny that such a thing exists.

Martin Scorcese once said that Cronenberg doesn’t understand what his films are about.4 Cronenberg himself has admitted that he makes a film to find out why he wants to make it. It is my argument that, from film to film, his central line of questioning has revolved around the mysteries of the mind/body/disease axis; and that in recent years, he may well have started to brush against some answers.

The Brood (1979) was Cronenberg’s first film with ‘name’ actors—starring Oliver Reed and Samantha Eggar. Reed plays Dr Hal Raglan, a maverick therapist who has set up a retreat to practice the controversial technique he has developed, known as Psychoplasmics. It is here, at The Soma Institute, that the film begins.

We are immediately plunged into a dark auditorium, where Raglan is giving a demonstration with a male patient. Psychoplasmics appears to be a rough parody or charicature of many of the alternative body-therapies of the seventies. Here, the patient is taunted and humiliated by Raglan, who plays the role of the dominant father, persuading him that he would have been better off as a girl—his weakness would then be more ‘acceptable’.5 The patient resists this suggestion fiercely, and as his anger wells up, Raglan encourages him. "Show me your anger!" he shouts, and the patient removes his top to reveal his torso—which has developed strange scarlet boils. With a mixture of defiance and frustration, the patient cries, "This is me, daddy!"

In line with the real-life therapies it apes, Psychoplasmics proposes that bodily dysfunctions give physical form to emotional dysfunctions—a hypothesis amplified here under the cinematic lens into a quite immediate process. This concept is neatly expressed in the title of Raglan’s book, The Shape of Rage.6 And this, in turn can be seen as a reflection of Cronenberg’s greatest contribution to cinematic expression, its visual grammar. In exploring and revealing hidden anxieties and abstracted conflicts, he has utilized the "gloop" (his word) of prosthetic special effects to give visual form to these mental phenomena. The basic model for nearly all Cronenberg’s films is to turn a violently alienated individual inside-out, to externalize their internal dynamics for the audience’s inspection—in the same way that illness, in the psychosomatic model, brings repressed conflicts to the attention of the individual.

Videodrome (1982) is probably Cronenberg’s most complex and provocative film, in both form and content. It deals with a vast constellation of issues that infest the late twentieth century: mass media landscapes, censorship, the effect of technology on humanity, loss of stable identity, violent sexuality, mind control… All these themes are woven together in the film via the body-mind of one individual, Max Renn (James Woods).

Renn runs a small cable TV station, Channel 83, which specializes in softcore sex and hardcore violence. While looking to commission a new show, he is intrigued by the latest illicit interception made by Harlan, Channel 83′s satellite broadcast pirate. Renn watches a short scene from a show called ‘Videodrome’. We see a rust-red chamber, lined with electrified clay, in which naked women are beaten and tortured by men clad in enveloping black uniforms. No plot, no dialogue, no characters, just "torture, murder, mutilation". Max tries to track the show down, encountering an intricate maze of leads, and it is revealed that what he has seen is in fact a prototype of a new TV show to be broadcast in the near future by a large, sinister defence corporation, CONSEC. He had been shown pre-recorded tapes by CONSEC plant Harlan to expose him to a signal which is transmitted together with the televisual images. The violent imagery supposedly opens up neural receptors, allowing the signal itself to sink in, and to eventually induce a tumour (or new organ) to grow in the brain—which in turn triggers bizarre hallucinations. It is also revealed that this Videodrome signal was invented by an eccentric, McLuhanesque media prophet, Brian O’Blivion, who was killed by CONSEC—they intend to utilize his creation to facilitate extensive mind control over the population.

Max’s hallucinations begin with video cassettes turning fleshy, and imagined episodes of sadistic violence against women. Never a friend of the censors, Cronenberg is confusing expectations here by following the censors’ own ‘screen violence leads to real violence’ logic. But, as in reality, things are not quite so clear-cut. On viewing some Japanese porn intended for Channel 83, Max remarks, "There’s something too soft about it. I’m looking for something that’ll break through, y’know, something… tough." Thus, before he’s even aware of Videodrome, we can see his attraction to the violent, penetrative shades of sexuality. And later, when confronted by CONSEC head Barry Convex, he comes close to having his rationalizations about Videodrome undermined. "Why would anybody watch a scum show like Videodrome?" Convex asks, "Why did you watch it, Max?" "Business reasons," is Max’s glib answer. "Sure, sure," Convex smiles. "Why deny you get your kicks out of watching torture and murder?" Convex knows Max better than he knows himself. This is precisely how CONSEC was able to lure him into being exposed to the signal, placing him under their control and giving them access to his TV station for the broadcast of Videodrome.

Then there is Masha, an ageing woman who commissions shows for Max. She can also sense Max’s hidden desires. She asks him what kind of TV show he would produce, given the chance, "for the subterranean [read: unconscious] market. Would you do… Videodrome?" Cut immediately to a scene between Max and Nikki Brand, a radio personality with a strong and guiltless penchant for scarification and masochism. Here, after Renn has frantically tried to persuade her not to ‘audition’ for Videodrome, she takes a cigarette and burns her breast.7 Previously, we have seen Max pierce her ear during sex. Nikki’s role in the film, then, is to initiate Max into the expression of his sadistic impulses.8

But the relationship is never allowed to settle into an easily categorized top/bottom, male/female one. And it is here where the role of the body becomes paramount in the revelation of Max’s unconscious dynamics. The first body-image hallucination that Max experiences involved his stomach opening up into a throbbing vaginal slit. In a startlingly literal scene of self-penetration (=self-knowledge?), he forces his handgun into his stomach, which then, inexplicably, closes up, leaving Max to search vainly for the gun. It is this slit which provides CONSEC with their control over Max. Fleshy video cassettes are inserted into his slit to ‘play’ a programme (or program) on his psychic video (or biocomputer). So Max’s body has become the site where his unacknowledged receptivity has manifested, with a vengeance. Aleister Crowley once wrote, "The act of repressing has the effect of exciting."9 Max’s repression of his passive receptivity (which seems to be more insidious than the repression of his sadistic aggression) leads to this receptive aspect emerging even more strongly? allowing CONSEC to control him with relative ease. But categories are mixed up again when Harlan tries to insert a cassette, only to have his hand ‘bitten off’ by Max’s slit. Vagina Dentata is evoked as Max (with help from O’Blivion’s daughter) turns his apparently receptive organ into a tool of assertion.

It may be time to pause here, and return to alternative therapeutic theories. In his many books on his clinical discoveries, Arnold Mindell has described his concept of the ‘dreambody’. He envisages this aspect of humans as a very fluid and pervasive version of the standard unconscious. It manifests in dreams, hallucinations and fantasies, as well as in bodily symptoms—the two areas are seen as opposite poles on the continuum of the dreambody. Mindell’s theories, developed through extensive work with ordinary patients in therapy, psychotics and the terminally ill, suggest that bodily symptoms reflect processes in the psyche which are trying to manifest. These processes are often natural developments in the individual’s evolution, stifled by various repressive mechanisms. His basic method for therapy involves ‘amplifying’ the symptoms (analogous to Jungian amplification of dream symbols) until their full intensity and meaning is experienced. Evading both Sontag’s criticism of models of illness that seem to blame the patient, as well as avoiding any absolutist mind/body split, he states: "I don’t believe that a person actually creates disease, but that his soul is expressing an important message to him through the disease."10 There is still a duality here—that of the individual ego and the unconscious, or the ‘soul’. I don’t think that many (except perhaps radical Taoists or Buddhists) will deny that this split exists; my main point is that it negates, through re-modelling, any absolute mind/matter division. Many consciousness researchers have realized that the ego/unconscious split is an imposition of our culture, and has been bridged in the past—and may well be bridged in the future, with the creative use of the many techniques of psychic integration we have at our disposal. What is important for now, though, is to recognise that the body, diseased or not, can be seen as a reflection of the unconscious—the regions of the soul, or Self, that the ego is removed from. Antero Alli describes this nicely: "The physical body is the visible manifestation of the so-called Subconscious Mind. The body is the fingerprint of the soul, a Rorschach of the Self. Nothing can be hidden. The body communicates it all."11 These last two sentences may be the motto of Cronenberg’s work—the unconscious is never as ‘un-conscious’ as we like to think.

I’d also like to briefly look at another objection to psychosomatic theory—that this view doesn’t acknowledge the effect of the external environment on a person. In fact, in all but its most extreme versions, the philosophy I’m describing here has plenty of room for this side of the equation. In his vision of a utopian state, where medical science is entirely balanced, Mindell sees a world where a doctor will sometimes prescribe drugs, sometimes operate, sometimes work on body processes, sometimes bring the whole family in for therapy. And sometimes, "the doctor might say, ‘My dear man, go home, and wait and see what happens. Your problems are coming from planetary disturbance, and there is no sense in taking your problems personally. Wait until the city government makes certain changes. Write them your dreams now."12 Given the cultural milieu of Max Renn’s world, this may be a valid way of looking at his body mutations. Indeed, in his essay on media, identity and modern sci-fi, Scott Bukatman sees the body, in Cronenberg’s films, "as the overdetermined site for the expression of profound social anxiety. The subject of the Cronenberg film is hardly human action: it is instead … the structures of external power and control to which the individual (in body and soul) is subjected." Though valid, for me this is also too one-sided. Far better to view ourselves in terms of a continuum, a focused point in an organism-environment field, in the words of Alan Watts.13 Alternatively, in Mindell’s process terminology, "The inner world and outer world dreambodies are two-way streets, and it’s impossible to place blame, for we all contribute to the body as a whole. Our dreambody is part of the entire world’s dreambody, yet the world’s dreambody is also found within us."14

To return to the film itself, we can now discern a process of psychic integration, of sorts. In the final scene, Max ends up in a derelict boat—a ‘condemned vessel’. Inside, he is informed by Nikki, or at least her televisual image (if there is any difference), that it is time for him to let his body die. His present physical form, like the boat, has outlived its usefulness. He is shown himself committing suicide on the TV—placing a gun to his temple, saying "Long live the New Flesh," and firing. The screen explodes and spews out guts and intestines. Max proceeds to carry out his suicide, and the blast of the shot echoes over a blank black screen before the credits roll.

It is unfortunate that the intended ending never made it into the final cut—not due to censorship, but to inadequate gloop.15 The original script called for a scene following Max’s apparent suicide, where Max, Nikki, and Bianca O’Blivion meet in the Videodrome chamber and engage in a polysexual union, each producing new mutated sex organs, Nikki and Bianca developing cocks to match Max’s slit, all of them physically melting into one another. The New Flesh, the New Self. The Videodrome chamber, previously the site of Max’s fantasies of violence and torture, is transformed through (ego?) death into a place for a more creative, viscerally psychedelic existence—boundary dissolution and mind manifestation in the flesh. The womb connotations of the chamber were quite consciously wrought—"Freudian rebirth imagery, pure and simple."16 The dark orange/red colour of the chamber and the rusting boat Max finds himself in blend and evoke both decay and bloody birth. Note also Nikki’s advice to Max to "go all the way through". However, Cronenberg thought the scene may not have had the intended effect, that the mutated sex organ prosthetics may have been laughable.

As it is, we are left with a taste of the tragic finality that was to characterize his films’ conclusions throughout the eighties.

It is fitting that Cronenberg’s last overt ‘disease movie’ (to date) brushes closest to the roots of the quest for meaning in bodily illness. In The Fly (1986), Jeff Goldblum plays Seth Brundle, a lonely, obsessive scientist who has virtually perfected the world’s first teleportation system. There is one glaring fault—it cannot teleport live, organic matter. A baboon ends up being turned inside-out by the process. "I must not know enough about the flesh myself," says Brundle after the disastrous experiment. "I’m gonna have to learn." His first lesson occurs in bed with Veronica (Geena Davies). In post-coital play, Veronica pinches Brundle’s skin. "I wanna eat you up," she says. "That’s why old ladies pinch babies’ cheeks. It’s the flesh—it just makes you crazy." A flash of ‘Eureka!’ descends on Brundle, and he quickly realizes that he has to program that same ‘craziness’ for the flesh into his computer, so that it can cope with teleporting organic matter.

Another baboon is put through, this time successfully, and they agree to wait for tests on the animal to be performed before a human goes through. But Brundle gets drunk and jealous one night, believing Veronica to be with her ex, and teleports. He fails to notice a housefly in the telepod with him—the computer gets confused, and decides to splice the two genetic patterns together. Brundle emerges, apparently invigorated; but deep within him are insectile DNA patterns waiting to erupt.

Now, neuroscientists, psychonauts and tribal cultures alike know that we’ve already got some animals inside us. Evolution has built up layers of brain tissue, so that the human brain can be seen as being composed of an old reptilian brain, an overlaying mammalian brain, and the most recent and explosive development, the uniquely human neocortex. It seems that this neocortex developed so rapidly that it failed to fully integrate with the older animal brain sections, leaving a neural discrepancy that has been held by some to be responsible for humanity’s notorious inhumanity.17 And yet techniques for forcing integration of these layers have existed for many thousands of years. Frequently, researchers have come to the conclusion that the copious animal mythologies of tribal cultures around the globe, and the many pagan human/animal hybrid deities, represent an ancient awareness of our animal inheritance. And perhaps the most direct method of contacting and integrating this inheritance lies in the shamanic practice of shape-shifting.

I believe that in The Fly the genetic splicing idea and its subsequent developments represent a science-fiction model of this ancient consciousness-expansion technique, which finds its modern equivalent in Austin Osman Spare’s ‘atavistic resurgence’ (Spare’s art contains numerous shape-shifting motifs). Using various trance techniques, a state of consciousness is induced which allows total identification with a certain animal. This may be used for achieving certain effects in the world, but often it functions as a method of psychic integration—balancing. It seems clear that Brundle’s experiences propel him through an unexpected and violent process analogous to many aspects of the traditional shaman’s vocation. Aside from the shape-shifting aspect, the film also contains the following correspondences:

• What the teleporter does is what the shaman goes through during the initiatory experience—deconstruction/reconstruction, or death and resurrection. Like a shaman, Brundle (initially) becomes ‘superhuman’ as a result of this experience, incredibly strong and energetic. He says, "I’m beginning to think that the sheer process of being taken apart atom by atom and being put back together again… Why, it’s like coffee being put through a filter—it’s somehow a purifying process."
• An almost certainly unintentional, but amusing hint sneaks into the script. After seeing Brundle go through the teleporter, a woman he’s just picked up gasps, "Are you some sort of magician?"
• The shamanic initiation is reversed in the film. Brundle gets taken apart and put back together, then experiences an ‘initiatory sickness’. "I seem to be stricken by a disease with a purpose," Brundle quips, as any proto-shaman might.

You may object that what eventually happens to Brundle puts across a very negative message about the bizarre, rapid cancer he develops as he becomes more and more fly-like. And yes, we should always bear in mind while making the above connections that Cronenberg’s films are essentially morality plays—they show where the wrong paths may lead, as warnings. I feel that the tragic conclusion of The Fly is due to two main factors. First, there is the law of repression = excitation. Brundle’s initial repression of his animal nature, his relationship to his flesh, seems to be too rapidly torn away. His moment of realization in bed with Veronica is merely a conceptual lesson. His animality is yet to be unleashed through the teleportation ‘accident’, and his body, the canvas of the unconscious, reveals not only what he has repressed, but how much he has repressed it. (In a way, Brundle doesn’t escape being turned inside-out like the first baboon.) Secondly, there is the incomprehension and revulsion of others, represented here by Veronica. "I know what the disease wants," says Brundle. "It wants to turn me into something else. That’s not too terrible, is it? Most people would give anything to be turned into something else." "Turned into what?" Veronica asks. Although understandable, to me this attitude seems to resonate with our culture’s general fear of change, especially when it involves disturbing aspects (which it usually does). Even though The Fly manages to echo the shamanic roots of the idea of transformative illness, the impulse remains strangled by Cronenberg’s acute awareness of the dangerous stagnancy of Western society.

I mentioned at the start of this essay that I believe Cronenberg may have recently been moving towards some answers to his cinematic explorations. His (probably) unconscious connection with ancient mind/body/disease awareness is one of these tentative ‘answers’. The other came as the result of his fusion with his literary idol William S. Burroughs, in his film version of the novel Naked Lunch.

I do not have space to delve deeply into the fascinating relationship between Cronenberg’s previous treatment of disease and the ‘sickness’ of junk addiction in this film.18 My main focus is on how Cronenberg utilized Burroughs’ ‘Talking Asshole’ routine, the story of how a guy teaches his asshole to talk—and eventually gets his mouth sealed by the mutinous asshole. Though the routine appears verbally in the film, its visual influence is most interesting. The insectile typewriter that Bill Lee uses, and is given instructions by, has a ‘talking asshole’ through which it speaks. On one level, it functions as an alien intelligence using Lee as an agent; on another level, it is Lee’s unconscious mind guiding his actions.

The Talking Asshole is Burroughs himself, in the sense that it’s the part of you that you don’t want to listen to, that’s saying things that are unspeakable, that are too basic, too true, too primordial and too uncivilized and tasteless to be listened to… but are there, nonetheless. So in a sense, the mind/asshole schism, the head/mouth versus the asshole, is maybe more of a Freudian schism—the asshole’s really the unconscious and the head’s the superego. More than it being a true mind/body schism, it’s a sort of mind/mind split, I think.

David Cronenberg, Naked Making Lunch

So—for the first time, Cronenberg arrives at the previously described re-modelling of the Cartesian split. The somewhat gentler tone of his recent work may indicate a level of resolution in his mind/body dilemmas; for his own work, the visceral extremities of Videodrome and The Fly may no longer be necessary as stimuli to achieve consciousness of the body. The body is no longer separate from the mind—it is merely the physical aspect of the mind’s hidden depths. The gulf to be bridged is no longer that unfathomable metaphysical abyss between spirit and matter—these are already united. What now needs to be achieved is the dissolution of culturally sanctioned ego boundaries that make us all such fragile and illusory islands in the ocean of Self.

Whether Cronenberg is able to achieve the cinematic New Flesh he fell short of in Videodrome, and whether our culture can develop respect for our bodies’ intimate relationship to the deepest levels of our Selves, remains to be seen.

Postscript: Crash!

When I was writing Crash I did a fair amount of research, particularly from this book called Crash Injuries, a medical textbook full of the most gruesome photographs as well as a lot of extraordinary material . . . Upon viewing the photographs in Crash Injuries taken immediately after violent car crashes—all one’s pity goes out to these tragically mutilated people. After all, any of us who drive a motorcar may end up like them 5 minutes after starting the engine . . . But at the same time, one cannot help one’s imagination being touched by these people who, if at enormous price, have nonetheless broken through the skin of reality and convention around us . . . and who have in a sense achieved—become—mythological beings in a way that is only attainable through these brutal and violent acts. One can transcend the self, sadly, in ways which are in themselves rather to be avoided—say, extreme illnesses, car crashes, extreme states of being.

J.G. Ballard, Re/Search #8/9

After the commonplaces of everyday life, with their muffled dramas, all my organic expertise for dealing with physical injury had long been blunted or forgotten. The crash was the only real experience I had been through for years. For the first time I was in physical confrontation with my own body…

James Ballard, Crash

Seeing Crash (after aeons of waiting for the media-hounded censors to stop sitting on it) made me think of two things I had written two years before in Psychoplasmics. My tentative conclusion that Cronenberg’s work may become "gentler in tone", avoiding the "visceral extremities" of earlier films, turns out to be—thankfully!—a bit premature to say the least. While there’s no sign of a return to gloop, Crash is undoubtedly one of his most intense and provocative films—and easily one of the most uniquely disturbing films ever to make it onto the ‘mainstream’ cinema circuit.

The second part that struck me was my use of the driver/car analogy to look at mind/body dualism. My assertion that, in dualist thinking, the body has as little to do with our self-identity as a car does, is both revealing and flawed.

Firstly, by equating ‘body’ with ‘car’, it opens up the connection between the body and the environment. After the demise of classical physics, awareness of our physical manifestation in this world can no longer be seen in terms of strict separation. Our bodies are ultimately no more self-contained and isolated, no more in need of abstracted ‘spirit’ or ‘mind’ to transcend boundaries, than atomic particles are.

The flaw in my analogy is my failure to recognize that, even in a dualist, logos-dominated and bios-denying culture, there will still be very strong bonds between self-identity and body/environment. The fact that the interdependence of these things is not consciously dealt with results in the dynamics of the relationship being driven by neurotic and destructive elements in our psyches. Eating disorders, fitness-fanaticism, brand-name fetishism, fashion, all these things are signs of how deeply body-image (body consciousness) and objects in the environment are embedded into our sense of our selves. Crash is the pathological conclusion of the neurotic body-environment relationship, and hints at the initiation of a new relationship. Just as Process-Oriented therapy seeks to intensify bodily symptoms to force their unconscious meaning into consciousness, Crash pushes our culture’s deviant eroticism and obsession with vehicles (bodies or cars) into a place where they may be transformed, and true body-environment consciousness—where no fixed divisions hold inside and outside apart—may be reborn. "The deformed body of the crippled young woman, like the deformed bodies of the crashed automobiles, revealed the possibilities of an entirely new sexuality. Vaughan had articulated my needs for some positive response to my crash." (James Ballard, Crash)

The experience of seeing the film made many threads of connection between car crashes and eroticism more tangible to me than reading the book did, however vivid and striking Ballard’s prose is. One instance was when several characters were watching a video of test crashes while rubbing each other’s crotches. The slow-motion footage of cars hurtling into each other, their windows exploding out as they shatter, brought to my mind Wilhelm Reich’s focus on the idea or feeling of bursting in his patients. Many patients felt the therapeutic attack on their bodily armour, their rigidified energy structures, as a threat to their self, their entire being. In conjunction with this element of the psyche, which identifies with the body’s armour, and fears its downfall, there are also elements that desire the dissolution of these muscular cramps, longing for the free flow of bio-energies. The patient simultaneously wishes for and dreads the very same thing. Through exploring one patient’s fantasies and experiences of armour-dissolution, Reich came to this conclusion: "The destruction of the armor, the penetration into the patient’s unconscious secrets, is unconsciously felt to be a process of being pricked open or being made to burst."19 He goes on to make clear the connections between armour-dissolution and orgasm, and between the breakdown of the sense of ‘self’ in orgasm and the dissolving of identity in the process of dying.

To the extent that we base our identity, our conception of our selves, on the tense stiffness that our bodies have developed in this body-negative society, a threat to this hardness will be sensed as a threat to us. Yet it will also be, somewhere, our greatest desire. The bursting of energetic tension in the body becomes our gravest fear, often associated with death and dying; and at the same time it will be an erotic, life-affirming fantasy. One need only note the tendency of most people to invest personal energy in their possessions, to bestow upon exterior objects (especially houses and cars) an underlying quality of "me-ness", a symbiosis with our personal essence, and the formula for the psychic logic behind Crash is self-evident—not the wild alien pathology many have seen it as.

The car has been the 20th century’s dominant ‘image of self’ provided by technology, though this dominance seems quite mute and tacit. Much has been written about the computer as a self-image (or more precisely as an image of the mind or brain), perhaps because the emergence of this technology coincided with the popularization of psychology. Cars, however, seem to have slipped into our everyday lives, and thus into the deepest levels of our psyches, without overt recognition of the extent to which we identify with them, or allow them to mediate our experience of the environment. Their hard metal shells make them perfect totems of the armoured body, the petrified self. Their mutilation, destruction and deformation in violent crashes is thus the perfect exterior analogy for the melting, bursting and dissolution of hardened bio-energies, and their release in explosive eroticism.

On the same weekend that I saw Crash there was a brilliant documentary on Channel 5(!) called Damage. It looked at the increasing number of women and girls who cut or burn themselves. This is often associated with eating disorders like bulimia, and like such disorders it’s more common in females than males (one psychiatrist astutely observed that men with similar impulses and motives often harm their bodies in less obvious ways like getting into fights and playing violent sports). Most of the girls and women interviewed had seriously scarred arms. They cut themselves whenever they felt a seething rage or unbearably intense depression overwhelming them. And most of them said that the feeling they got from the experience was one of utter release—some were blissfully nostalgic about the experiences. Of course, they suffered too. Self-recrimination for harming themselves, recrimination from loved ones for harming themselves, even medical staff scolding them for ‘trying to get attention’.

What was clear, though, was that these were not suicide attempts, not half-hearted flirtations with death with which to guilt-trip others. These people were (in my eyes) responding positively to a very negative situation. I admired some of these teenagers immensely, for staying true to their survival instincts amidst vast negative forces, however strange their method seemed. Yet the clinic featured in the programme, which specialized in self-harming, was "radical" for taking the step of not reprimanding patients for cutting themselves. For most people, all they see in someone cutting their skin is negativity and self-destructiveness. Perhaps if more people were educated about the long history of life-affirmative self-mutilation practices (the American Indian Sun Dance being a famous example), these people’s spontaneous rediscovery of them wouldn’t get caught up in the knotted tangles of guilt, shame and fear that our culture wraps around nearly every intense, direct confrontation with our bodies.

This isn’t to suggest that scarification is some cure-all for mental distress! For my purposes here, I’m just trying to get a slightly closer understanding of the obsession with wounds and scars that runs through Crash.

Our identification with the environment, at present, is usually unconscious, and often neurotic. Cars are often status symbols, emblems of power or (supposed) desirability. The characters in Crash are seeking to merge with their environment in a more urgent, erotic, bodily way. Aside from the immediate experience of physical mutilation (which, depending on whether you want it or not, can be liberating or catastrophic—sometimes both) these people are erotically fascinated by the way scars describe a history of the body’s interaction with the environment. This is conveyed explicitly in the novel. In the film, there are many scenes where people tenderly kiss and caress each other’s scars, fleshy relics of a time when the barrier between the body and the environment was literally shattered—a violent parallel to sexual union. For a while, violence destroyed the burden of being cut off from the outside, caged in a sealed shell of defences. So as well as being an exterior image of the armoured body, the car is also the place where these people try to merge with their environment. The perverse extremity of their chosen means to try and fuse with their surroundings is dictated by the extremity of their alienation from it (just as the natural sweet melting of bodily tension may evolve into a violent sensation of explosion in the chronically tense). The sad fact that their environment is overwhelmed by these metal boxes is also a factor.

A scar is at the centre of an astounding scene where Ballard fucks Gabrielle, a paraplegic crash victim. Instead of taking the usual route, he becomes transfixed by a huge gash in her thigh, and enters her here. It’s astounding in its sheer perversity, and in the fact that it wasn’t cut out; but it’s also the first time, I think, that there has been a literal equation of vagina and wound in a film (beyond degrading verbal remarks, and that slightly less obvious scene in Videodrome). For the Freudian, this equation is due to castration anxiety: boy sees that women have no cock, assumes it’s been hacked off, and fears the worst for himself. Many books have been written about horror films, particularly ‘slasher’ films like Halloween, where cuts are seen in this symbolic light.

A more solidly grounded link in the vagina/wound equation is menstruation. Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove look at a few horror films as ‘fear of menstrual power’ films in their excellent book The Wise Wound. Whichever side you take, the dream-logic association of female genitalia and bleeding wounds seems to be one of the roots of the fear, excitement and attraction generated by bodily mutilation in horror films. The literal demonstration of this equation in a film, and the fact that erotic liberation and pleasure results from this odd union, is quite something. Cronenberg has already defined his own sub-genre within horror. With Crash, he makes explicit something that only psychoanalysts could dig out of other horror films, and transcends the genre completely.

As a final note, I should say that I agree with the censors on one point: Crash will make you commit irresponsible acts! As a direct result of seeing it (no, I didn’t go and cause a pile-up) I did something I had had the impulse to do many times before, but had kept in the ‘Er… Not Yet’ box in my mind. I went up on to a very beautiful, but very spooky moor near Leeds, and spent the night alone in the open. I experienced a lot of fear, but pushed through it and experienced a glorious sunrise as I chanted over a stone, soaking in the light and five minutes of rain that created a beautiful rainbow behind me.

If I had to pin it down, I would say the scene that inspired me most was where Ballard, Catherine and Vaughan encounter a car crash site. The whole sequence creates an utterly bizarre and compelling sensation that mixes fear, revulsion, excitement and fascination in a very powerful way. Our society’s secret morbidity is brought to the surface by encounters with crashes—truckers have a name for people who slow down on motorways to look at an accident on the other carriageway, ‘rubber-neckers’. This scene pushes that morbidity into the open, and transforms it into a strangely magical feeling of boundary-crossing. It may seem odd that I was inspired to spend a night on a moor by seeing some people hang out at a car crash. I would call it an imaginative response. And this is essentially what Crash is about—reacting creatively to extreme or negative situations. That it even shows signs of catalyzing the capacity for imaginative response in its audience makes it almost unique in cinemas today.

Footnotes

1. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, p.46 [back to text]
2. See ‘Individual as Man/World’ and The Book by Alan Watts for perhaps the most rational and accessible discussions of these issues. Describing Behaviourism’s surprising relationship with Mahayana Buddhism, he notes that " . . . the universe is a harmonious system which has no governor, . . . it is an integrated organism but nobody is in charge of it. [The] corollary is that everyone and everything is the prime mover." [back to text]
3. Chris Rodley (ed.), Cronenberg on Cronenberg, p.79 [back to text]
4. ibid., p.xxv [back to text]
5. The recurring polarities of weak/strong, female/male have been the focus for relentless feminist criticism of Cronenberg’s work. Most of this criticism merely reveals the simple-mindedness of the critics themselves. The director consistently portrays these polarities as intertwined, shifting continuums; his aggressive male leads usually turn out to be weak in their lack of self-knowledge, and seemingly victimized female characters are often the strongest in terms of knowing their own desires. As the refreshingly perceptive Carol J. Clover has noted in her book Men, Women & Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, "…what filmmakers seem to know better then film critics is that gender is less a wall than a permeable membrane." [back to text]
6. Also, the ‘plasma’ of Psychoplasmics comes from the Latin meaning ‘form’ and the Greek meaning ‘shape’. Interestingly, the word ‘psychedelic’ is nearly a synonym of psychoplasmics—it literally means ‘mind-manifesting’. [back to text]
7. This shot was originally censored. The impact of the film, in fact one of its central themes, is hopelessly distorted by this, and other cuts. [back to text]
8. The casting of Debbie Harry as Nikki Brand has interesting resonances. As lead singer of Blondie, she was often criticized for using her femininity and sexuality—visually, she fitted the role of blonde rock bimbo, but her attitude as lead singer undermined the stereotype. [back to text]
9. Aleister Crowley, Magick [back to text]
10. Arnold Mindell, Working with the Dreaming Body, p.13 [back to text]
11. Antero Alli, Angel Tech: A Modern Shaman’s Guide to Reality Selection, p.38 [back to text]
12. ibid., p.78 [back to text]
13. See Leary, Metzner & Weil (eds), The Psychedelic Reader, pp.47-57, and Alan Watts, The Book [back to text]
14. Mindell, p.79 [back to text]
15. See Rodley, p.97 [back to text]
16. ibid., p.97 [back to text]
17. See Janus: A Summing Up by Arthur Koestler [back to text]
18. Maybe I can just mention another shamanic correspondence. When Lee’s typewriter is destroyed, Kiki takes him to get it repaired, asking if fixing the typewriter will also fix his life. Lee is led to a blacksmith’s, where the pieces of the typewriter are slung into a furnace, and re-forged into a Mugwriter – the head of a Mugwump. This represents a new stage in the evolution of Lee’s ‘assignment’ in Interzone; and it resonates clearly with the blacksmith frequently encountered in shamanic underworld journeys, where the shaman is ripped apart and then re-forged. [back to text]
19. Character Analysis, p.334 [back to text]

Bibliography

• Cronenberg on Cronenberg, edited by Chris Rodley
• ‘The Wrong Body’ by Amy Taubin & ‘Interview with David Cronenberg’ by Mark Kermode, in Sight & Sound, March 1992
• Exterminate All Rational Thought, edited by Damon Wise (magazine accompanying Cronenberg/Burroughs season at the Scala Cinema, King’s Cross, London, 1992)
• Everything is Permitted: The Making of Naked Lunch, edited by Ira Silverberg
• Illness as Metaphor, by Susan Sontag
• Working with the Dreaming Body, by Arnold Mindell
• Angel Tech: A Modern Shaman’s Guide to Reality Selection, by Antero Alli
• ‘Who Programs You? The Science Fiction of the Spectacle’ by Scott Bukatman, in Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema, edited by Annette Kuhn
• ‘The Individual as Man/World’ by Alan Watts, in The Psychedelic Reader, edited by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner and Gunter M. Weil
• Echoes From The Void, by Nevill Drury
• Naked Making Lunch (documentary), directed by Chris Rodley
• Crash by J.G. Ballard
• Re/Search #8/9: J.G. Ballard, edited by V. Vale & Andrea Juno
• Character Analysis by Wilhelm Reich
• The Wise Wound by Penelope Shuttle & Peter Redgrove

For really good sex I don’t have to be with someone who I have an erotic connection with because ultimately I feel I’m the source of my own sexual pleasure.

Annie Sprinkle, interview by David Jay Brown & Rebecca McClen Novick

Annie qualifies this with the obvious fact that if there is a spark of real erotic connection with someone, the sex can be even better. But in itself, this thought has been intriguing me recently. For myself, a woefully single 32 year-old still trying to rebuild bridges to the outside world half-consciously burned down during solipsistic teen years, there’s a knee-jerk "Fuck off!" reaction. Y’know, it seems like something that’s easy to say when monogamy is an "experiment" for you. When celibacy is something to "try out".

But a little humility helps the truth in it emerge. It’s a truth that years of yearning for another will dull beyond recognition. And I suppose that years of socially positive prostitution will render this truth clear, bright and empowering. It does seem solipsistic, a kind of navel-gazing sexuality. But I sense a paradox at work, just beyond the bounds of my language at this moment, but one that’s helping me see that without being able to pleasure myself—yes, in every sense, but in their deepest aspects—I’m getting tangled in a thicket of illusion trying to find someone to give me pleasure. And that owning a connection to my source of pleasure—"touching myself", in the TOPY sense—is the real path to connection with others.

Annie’s observation, as it burrowed its way quietly through my brain, met one of Nietzsche’s early prescriptions for "becoming what one is":

But how can we find ourselves again? How can man know himself? He is a dark and veiled thing; and if the hare has seven skins, man can shed seventy times seven and still not be able to say: "this is really you, this is no longer slough." In addition, it is a painful and dangerous mission to tunnel into oneself and make a forced descent into the shaft of one’s being by the nearest path. Doing so can easily cause damage that no physician can heal. And besides: what need should there be for it, when given all the evidence of our nature, our friendships and enmities, our glance and the clasp of our hand, our memory and that which we forget, our books and our handwriting. This, however, is the means to plan the most important inquiry. Let the youthful soul look back on life with the question: what have you truly loved up to now, what has elevated your soul, what has mastered it and at the same time delighted it? Place these venerated objects before you in a row, and perhaps they will yield for you, through their nature and their sequence, a law, the fundamental law of your true self. Compare these objects, see how one complements, expands, surpasses, transfigures another, how they form a stepladder upon which you have climbed up to yourself as you are now; for your true nature lies, not hidden deep within you, but immeasurably high above you, or at least above that which you normally take to be yourself.

Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Schopenhauer As Educator‘

A strange, convoluted, beautiful convergence happens between Annie and Freddie, where the path to connection with others lies in your connection to your core, and your connection to your core is empowered by the feelings that flood out of your admiration for others. Some Tantric revelation beckons… Obviously Nietzsche was grasping at something quite distinct from idolisation here; it’s equally obvious that, through his relationships to Schopenhauer and Wagner, he eventually shed even his constructive impulses towards his "venerated objects". As ever, he’s interested in processes along the way, not systems that are The Way.

But, as I recently find myself finding more pleasures in other people’s creations alongside finding more pleasures in myself, it’s been interesting to meditate on the notion that the qualities that art, music, film and so on evoke in you are in you. Admiration can (and does) over-ripen and rot into envy. If plucked at the right time, though, the delicious fruit can open up genuine, hidden parts of your true nature. Gathering together the fragments of youself that have been scattered far and wide in the mediascape, hiding in revered albums, wonderful performers, magical films… Which brings me to the things that have been ringing my bell of late.

The whole cluster of gigs around Halloween were great. Thursday found me down at the Hammersmith Lyric for Julian Cope‘s first night of his 3-night stint playing full-band gigs for the first time in years and years. Playing a very Brain Donor oriented set, Copey managed to truly rock the entire place, despite the curious choice of a seated venue. His customary jaunts into the audience to feel everyone up started early. I saw him collapse into the aisle at one point, his thrashing legs just visible, and I decided this would be a good point to break for a pee. I exited on the other side of the stalls, and was pretty befuddled and stricken with hilarity at meeting him on the foyer landing coming the other way. Really, who else wanders around the venue in the middle of their own show? When I got back, all eyes were on the upper circle, where Copey was rubbing against the railings and whipping the crowd with righteous rockisms. A frankly astonishing ‘Reynard The Fox’ finished things off, the swelling climax fired by a psychedelic stream-of-consciousness rant.

Halloween itself was Jane’s Addiction at Brixton Academy. It’s been a while since I’ve been inspired to go out in drag, but if any night was going to re-ignite that flame, this was going to be it. Fishnets, black sequined skirt, lacy black vest and my big grey fur. I looked fabulous, as did everyone I went with. Such a great feeling to be glammed up on the tube with friends, a few shrooms kicking in. Not many others had made an effort as it turned out (though my friend Mee looked great playing her electric violin above the lobby). But the band were everything I hoped they might still be, and everyone down the front was up for getting gleefully violent and happy as Perry and the boys crashed through ‘Up The Beach’, ‘Oceansize’, an explosive ‘Three Days’, ‘Mountain Song’, and the glorious ‘Jane Says’. Everyone sang along to their new material as much as their classics, which ranks as a real achievement by the band.

The next night was The Legendary Pink Dots at the Slimelight in Angel, where I realised two things: the Pink Dots are one of the best live acts on the planet, and never having heard of them really shouldn’t stop you from keeping your ear to the ground and trying to catch them next time around; and, say what you will about goths, at least they make the effort to dress up. (Going from a ‘special event’ where most people stuck to jeans and T-shirts to a regular club where nearly everyone looked fantastic, if easily categorised, was an eye-opener for me.) Then there’s the conundrum: if a beautiful woman you’ve just met mentions her "ex-boyfriend" by her third sentence, is that an "I’m single, grab me" kind of hint, or an "I’m still obsessed, steer clear" kind of hint? Predictably, I missed it completely, whatever it was, and clammed up.

The next day, hangover tempered by pickled gherkins and a greasy spoon fry-up (and a lunchtime pint) found me ambling into the Screen on the Green near Angel for Kill Bill. Nowhere near as likeable as Pulp Fiction, but equally deft and rich. Like Reservoir Dogs, the humour is a salve to make the cold-hearted repression of feelings bearable. Equally, there’s the same sense of feelings inexorably bubbling up to make a mess things in the final act. Looking forward to volume two.

And then, throughout this week, Jim and I have been mining the local video store for good-sounding gems that we missed at the cinema. First up was the marvellous Adaptation, from the team that created Being John Malkovich. Anyone enamoured of the latter will find more expansive self-absorption and fresh, disarmingly honest observations in this great film. Nic Cage, Meryl Streep and Chris Cooper are all brilliant, and I’m kind of shocked that the film actually manages to be more original, and probably better than its predecessor. Following the Charlie Kaufman trail led us next to Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, George Clooney’s directorial debut. A cracking film, showing (once again) that: George Clooney is vastly underrated by all my friends who don’t rate him (we also caught his funny and amiable bungled robbery romp, Welcome To Collinwood); that Sam Rockwell’s a totally fascinating ball of energy; and that Charlie Kaufman’s one of America’s most promising film talents. I’m salivating in anticipation of his next project, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet as a couple attempting to rescue their failing relationship by having their bad memories erased…

Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love would make a great double-bill with Adaptation. Anderson and Kaufman share a knack of unveiling the seedy battles people fight against themselves, a magical process for anyone who shares those battles, as embarrassing, ugly, shameful behaviour is transfigured through frank, compassionate portrayal into… something else, something to be looked at. I’ve not seen Adam Sandler in anything else, but this film shows him to be an incredibly courageous and talented actor. Anderson’s at his most idiosyncratic, despite the Romantic Comedy plot arc and the attention-friendly just-over-an-hour-and-a-half running time. A kind of slapstick Taxi Driver, the film rattles along through one excruciating situation after another, protagonist Barry Egan’s seething, barely-contained inner violence reflected in the hectic, expressionistic score, erupting here into mindless destruction, melting there into abstract psychedelia. Genius.