2022-05-13 17:00:35 ¶ ● ⬀ ⬈

lime-bloods:

> lime-bloods:

> > saw Videodrome. what’s there to say… James Woods, a nonchalant enabler of the sexist establishment, is caught in the male gaze of the television screen (“the retina of the mind’s eye”), which feminises (appearance of the vagina on his stomach) and emasculates him (his gun literally being sucked up into his body)… chauvinist establishment take ownership of the feminised Woods, repeatedly molesting him with video tapes, using him for their own goals; then he receives enlightenment and fights back with his pussy power, right down to a far-from-subtle use of vagina dentata. feminist movie!

> saw Cronenberg’s The Fly. got the impression very early on that it would be of a piece with ‘drome, and Goldblum proves me right very quickly with his tirades about “The Flesh”. while ‘drome is pretty clear in its message of shedding the male Old Flesh and growing into the female New Flesh, though, I’m not so sure what Brundlefly’s fixation seeks to achieve.

> Brundle seeks to understand the flesh, and then seeks to make his computer understand the flesh, and then at the very climax of the film is himself fused with his technology… the computer kind of stealths its way through the film as a major character, having dialogue but no given name. all we know of its nature comes from offhanded comments from Brundle implying it has its own creative mind; so the Brundlefly metamorphosis was really the computer’s idea, echoing the feminisation-by-technology ‘drome’s James Woods undergoes? I really want to try and see eXistenZ, which I understand is Cronenberg’s other film about the body horror of man laying with machine… would love to see if this narrative continues.

> and of course Brundle plays opposite Stathis, who has his own form of obsession with the Flesh, completely unable to take his mind away from Ronnie’s body; even in the more grim scenes he can’t stop himself from making seemingly nonsequitur remarks about putting his hands on her

Brundlefly thinks of himself as the offspring of Brundle and fly, rather than just Brundle in a new form, but seems to make no note of the fact that it is his computer who physically birthed him through the telepod… so in the climax, where he seeks to fuse with Ronnie and his unborn child to become the “ultimate family”, there’s perhaps a touch of irony in that it is instead the telepod he is fused with? a return to womb et cetera.