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David Cronenberg's films-The Fly, Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch, Crash, and the recent eXistenZ-reveal an obsessive preoccupation with the blurring of the organic and the technological world. Under the spell of cyber and/or virtual reality, these films seem to foretell the death of humanism while feasting on the dismissal of the objective world.
Cronenberg's films address a trend in our culture that strives for unity between two different realms, namely the organic and the hightech. His films are futuristic and prophetic. The director explores how our contemporary techno-culture may alter our perception of the natural world in its relationship to the artificial or mechanical world. Like a Jules Verne of the cinema, Cronenberg shows us the means by which technology imposes its contraptions not from outside the body-as machines did in a precomputer age-but in its impingements within the body.
The Canadian director mixes Romantic cravings with science-fiction glitz. He has managed to translate the nineteenth-century adulation of the unleashed power of the forces of nature into a contemporary saga about the increasing dominance of technology. The underlying message seems clear: No aspects of human behavior may escape the effect of technology. Cronenberg's films invite the audience to take a dangerous journey into a postbiological realm where Darwinian evolution incorporates and adapts sophisticated technological advances into genetic templates. The body and the mind are represented as elusive, flexible, and incomplete entities which-in order to achieve wholeness-must not only merge and fuse with other bodies and minds, but also with the nonhuman environment.
The history of civilization is marked by continuous human efforts to invent machines so that humans may overcome their limitations, and in the process conquer the natural world. The Industrial Revolution imposed radical changes in the way men and women perceived themselves and their relationships with each other. Machines