2022-05-15 9:35:45 ¶ ●

Videodrome treats the feminine flesh as more of a prison placed around those who fall in the male gaze of technology, but to Brundlefly the ascent to femalehood is a direct upgrade… though I suppose whether ‘drome’s New Flesh is a good or a bad thing depends largely on how much we trust the priestess of the New Flesh, and whether Woods’ suicide at the end of the film is really just that or if it in actually represents an ascent to a final form, akin to Brundlefly’s final metamorphosis. I might have to confirm this for myself sometime, but apparently in directorial commentary Cronenberg indicates that he did consider an epilogue for ‘drome where Woods wakes up from his suicide in a form of heaven, and then decided against included it because it conflicted with his own atheism toward the existence of an afterlife… so I guess this ambiguity is kind of baked in?

(almost certainly related: an epilogue for Cronenberg’s Fly was fully realised in which a baby hatches from a chrysalis as a beautiful butterfly and flies away into the light, but was cut from the final release because test audiences hated it!)

possibly in line with O’Blivion’s theory of technology as the retina of the mind’s eye and the ability of a television signal to transmit biology into an organism (Videodrome), the original 1958 Fly is concerned with the consequences of transforming a living organism into electrical signals to be transmitted (literally ascending a cat beyond physical form in this way, though by accident to be fair). in Cronenberg’s remake, the idea of being transformed into electricity evolves into the more modern (perhaps even ahead of its time?) concern about being transformed into data, which is not only intangible but totally subject to the whims of a computer.

so I suppose both ‘drome and The Fly express the same concern that evolving into a new form comes with new forms of control; Brundle’s computer has very much the same male gaze as Videodrome’s television camera does. the New Flesh isn’t Woods or Goldblum’s end-all; it’s a chrysalis to be retreated into and then broken free of. the way Fly ends with Goldblum breaking out of his telepod and then immediately becoming fused with said telepod feels compositionally strange, affected… but perhaps breaking free of the computer’s womb is the only way to become one with the computer / God?

as long as I’m recalling the 1958 Fly, one detail that doesn’t initially seem to translate over is that Delambre’s telepod creates mirror image facsimiles; a china plate passed through the machine will have its stamped lettering inverted when it comes out the other end. in proper Cronenbergesque fashion, Brundle’s telepod instead inverts a baboon by viscerally turning it inside out, so we’re led to think that the telepod no longer mirrors things. but each time Brundle goes through, the fly hairs on his back seem to switch sides on his body. I remarked out loud that this must mean Brundle is still being flipped every time he teleports, to which my dad remarked, “in more ways than one!”… the film’s focus on sexuality naturally made me wonder if Brundle being ‘inverted’ by teleportation referred perhaps to sexual inversion. which I suppose makes some sense if we see Brundle’s computer as ‘turning him into a woman’ the same way the retina feminises Videodrome’s protagonist?