Opinion piece on specific films and references to literature that feed into overarching theme of flesh and technology- Iyanu Taiwo

It looks like we might just be entering the era of the cyborg. I can already feel my flesh harmonising with my iPad. 

Recently the idea of flesh and its relation to technology has been roaming through my mind. This is mainly due to my obsession with

David Cronenberg and his oeuvre. Is our flesh slowly synthesising with the metal and innovative technology we keep experiencing?

Or am I just experiencing psychosis and masking it as a moral panic? 

We haven’t fully reached the point where our flesh begins to fuse with actual metal.

But it’s feeling like we’re on the periphery of embracing this design.

Cronenberg is a director I've become enamoured with over the last few years. His work consists of harrowing depictions of body horror & mutated flesh, seamlessly blended with the rise of new technology. In his film "Videodrome", he depicts the ugly voyeurism occurring due to the increase in new technology (social media adjacent, in a way). This technology merges with the flesh to become a "new flesh" inhabiting the body. Our phones seem to replace the Flesh Gun the protagonist, Renn, wielded during the film. 

In Cronenberg’s "Crimes of the Future", this voyeuristic nature is also prevalent, reinforced by a statement declared within the film: "Surgery is the new sex". In Cronenberg's decaying world, pain doesn't seem to register in the human body. Saul (Viggo Mortensen) has a mutation which results in his body growing strangely and needs to have his organs removed. This procedure becomes a performance art that garners an audience. This whole surgical display is unmistakably an erotic experience for Saul, his surgeon Clarice (Lea Seydoux) and the audience, which includes us as well. The characters within the film constantly have their bodies reshaped through technology. It becomes a desirable act for them to engage in. Cronenberg asks whether we should be allowed to continually modify our bodies because of our autonomy or just let the body exist as it already is. 

In 1989, "Tetsuo, the Iron Man" was released. It centred around a man who has metal embedded in his flesh. It is an incredible showcase of how far body horror can go fused with the incomprehensible power of the technological landscape in Japan during that time. In Sarah Henry’s dissertation "New Flesh Cinema: Japanese Cyberpunk-Body Horror and Cinema as Catharsis in the Age of Technology", she coined the term "New Flesh Cinema", which highlights body horror and cyberpunk elements by featuring technology invading and fusing with the body. She grapples with the question, is the body undergoing transformations initiated by technology? 

The paper also discusses how technological depictions in science fiction reveal our collective, often negative feelings towards these advancements. Our bodies are becoming more and more inseparable from our devices. We are slowly turning into Tetsuo himself. Luckily, we now have the Nueralink to accelerate the process.

Another Japanese film, released a year before, which wrestles with cyberpunk body horror, is "Akira". The infamous movie depicts the horrifying nature in which the human body begins to metamorphose with advancing science and technology. The cyberpunk body relates to Freud's "The Uncanny" theory. This theory focuses on something we perceive as familiar becoming strangely unfamiliar. The flesh we've become accustomed to viewing is slowly entering the stage of the "Uncanny Valley"—a term coined by Roboticist Masahiro Mori.

This is coupled with the rapid rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in today's culture. The verisimilitude found in AI deftly plays a role in my overarching point of technology and plastic becoming the new flesh. Cronenberg echoes this sentiment in a recent interview :

 “So, our bodies are different than human bodies have ever been before in history. This is not going away.” 

We are consistently inundated with AI images meant to mimic the real world. But a lingering sense of malaise is attached to the images we are viewing. Even with this sense of uncanny prevalent in AI images. I fear that the frightening acceleration of AI usage means that soon we will not recognise AI from the real. According to Susan Sontag's collection of essays "On Photography", reality can become imprisoned.

"Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality; one can't possess reality, one can possess images– one can't possess the present, but one can possess the past."

 In addition to this, photographs dominate social culture today. We seem to yearn to photograph everything we experience.

"Like a car, a camera is sold as a predatory weapon—one that's as automated as possible, ready to spring. Popular taste expects an easy, invisible technology." 

The introduction of phones with cameras accessible to us at any moment seems to become a sort of flesh gun, as aforementioned. The camera becomes embedded into our flesh as it always becomes very accessible. We continuously get to capture as many images as we like. 

The camera also acts as a voyeuristic eye to all things depicted as desirable and undesirable. Sontag announces in the book, "Taking photographs has set up a chronic voyeuristic relation to the world". We're now desperate to capture ourselves and others in a candid view reminiscent of voyeuristic photos. Sontag states, "Photography is an act of non-intervention". In a vein similar to Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window", we sit back and continuously capture images with our phones without participating, akin to Jimmy Stewart's character in the film.

This could be seen as an exaggerated response from Sontag. But the increase in photographing people without their knowledge, uploading it to social media, and attempting to portray it as a beautiful candid moment you just happen to have captured, is a disturbing act that has been “normalised” online. Sontag’s words seem to perfectly encapsulate the current hellscape we’ve found ourselves in.


The story of “Frankenstein” also bleeds into the idea of the flesh and science, embarking on a consolidation of sorts. Frankenstein's monster comes alive due to this. Mary Shelley's work is probably one the earliest examples of the exploration between flesh and science. Frankenstein created a grotesque avatar because of his hubris. He wanted to emulate God. But it just resulted in him creating the first human embodiment of an AI image. He is portrayed as somewhat of an algorithm throughout the novel. As Frankenstein's monster learned the human language through observing a family speaking to one another, “Frankenstein”, like AI, plays on the age-old human fear that technology could gain autonomy and eradicate human life.

Marshall McLuhan, the philosophical influence on Cronenberg's work, is a Canadian philosopher who has extensively researched the "Media". In "The Medium is the Message", McLuhan wrote: 

"Mental breakdown of varying degrees is the pervasive result of uprooting and inundation with new information and endless new patterns of information.". 

This is precisely what "Videodrome" shows us, a society where constant sources of information have resulted in the steady destabilization of the collective psyche.

Technology has now been implemented into every facet of our daily lives. It has, therefore, become an extension of our flesh. 

Is it too late to decelerate the frightening increase in life-changing technology we keep experiencing? Will we start embedding our flesh with technology (maybe metal if we want) for content or performance art? Or are we already at that junction? We’re already curating our lives to fit the technological society we live in. Why not our flesh as well? Maybe I’m just overthinking the industrial landscape we find ourselves currently inhabiting. Who knows. Anyway, “Long live the new flesh” !!! No matter the harm it may cause.   

Research  

Previous

Infinite Ink
Next

We are not saved