[Barbara Steele, Shivers]
And our bodies haven’t stopped changing. For example, as STDs up the ante in the sexual lottery, a kiss has never been so deadly. On the one hand, our slow-evolving immune systems remake our blood, trying to keep up with new strains of bio-invaders. On the other, technology invades our bodies: gas-permeable contact lenses, transgender surgery...
The idea that we can remake our own flesh brings with it (along with new hopes and anxieties), new potential fetishes to obsess on and new forms of desire to obsess with. Where does that leave good old-fashioned sex? The imaginative film directors I'm about to discuss in this series have tapped into this question and their explorations give us evolutionary sexual visions cast in bodies transformed by desire.
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No director alive looks at sex, and how our desires and anxieties can transform us, as daringly as David Cronenberg. His films from the 70s and 80s are filled with stark, original, and sometimes violent sexual imagery that were years ahead of their time. His first feature film, Shivers (aka: They Came From Within and The Parasite Murders) is all about sexual obsession.
Made on a low budget in 1975 -- and pre-AIDS -- Shivers is about a kind of sexual plague. The movie opens with a sort of infomercial for a new luxury apartment highrise on the outskirts of Montreal. We see images of ultra-modern apartments, convenient shopping and faux countryside, all accompanied by the voice of an unseen salesman. These images of 70s-style gracious living are cut with a scene in which an older man attacks a beautiful young woman in her apartment. She fights back, but the man overpowers her. In the process, her skirt rides up, revealing her schoolgirl knee-high socks and white panties. The man undresses the woman, lays her out on a table and proceeds to cut her open with a scalpel.
Are we watching a Ted Bundy-style sex-crazed madman? Maybe not. The older man is a scientist and he just might have been trying to save the woman from the results of his new experiment: a small bio-engineered creature meant to live in her bloodstream, replacing one or more of her diseased organs. Instead the doctor has released a sexual plague on the residents of the high rise where the young woman lives. This isn’t an AIDS-like plague that makes people think twice about having sex, but a plague of mindless, savage carnality.
Shivers, however, isn’t all body horror and blood. Cronenberg is too clever a filmmaker for that. The movie is full of beautiful young bodies, including Italian screen queen Barbara Steele, and Canadian soft core star, Susan Petrie. Cronenberg seduces us with sexual images all through Shivers, before kicking us back into deep, dark fear. The movie ends as all the surviving high rise residents meet in the underground pool for a murderous orgy before wandering off, Night of the Living Dead-style, to spread the plague into the nearby city.
Shivers, isn’t the only movie where Cronenberg has examined our fascination and anxiety around sex. For all of the blood and orgiastic sexuality of Shivers, it’s subtle in that while the infected residents are made into monsters by their infection, they still look like us on the outside.
That isn’t the case with Cronenberg’s 1983 film, Videodrome. If Shivers was about the dark side of sexual liberation in the 70s, which turned social and sexual experimentation into a commodity as mandatory as shag carpeting, Videodrome is about how the media invades and transforms us. Videodrome isn’t a horror movie that uses porn images. It’s a movie in which porn images coming through our TVs use us. James Woods is a sleazy TV executive who discovers a secret sex and torture TV signal–Videodrome–imbedded in another signal. Debbie Harry, the bleach-blond former Playboy Bunny of the band Blondie, is his masochistic girlfriend who is more obsessed than Woods about finding Videodrome, so that she can join in the fun. Woods’s body mutates as he watches the Videodrome images. His arm melds with his gun. He grows a sort of vagina in the middle of his stomach. Debbie Harry burns herself with cigarettes. Everyone’s body is changing.
When Debbie finally makes it to Videodrome, Woods’s TV is transformed into her soft, luscious body. The set breathes and pulses. The TV screen swells like an engorged clitoris and Woods buries his face in Harry’s mutated TV flesh.
Cronenberg continues the transformation in his 1996 release, Crash. This time, the sexual adventurers aren’t changed by parasites or video signals but by that ubiquitous piece of modern technology: the car.
Through a series of personal traumas, a group of strangers gathers together, all obsessed with sex and car accidents. Lust, buckling metal and shattering glass are all inextricably linked in their minds and libidos, and they carry the marks of their obsessions on their bodies. Every member of the group sports a black eye, scars or a brace on a damaged limb. Rosanna Arquette plays a black leather seductress whose legs are damaged beyond repair. She hobbles on a cane and a pair of metal leg braces, all the while radiating a consuming and predatory sexual hunger. Holly Hunter and James Spader are pulled into the group by a chance meeting (their cars crashed into each other on the freeway). For them, every wreck on the side of the road is a peep show, every
video of a car accident is the hottest porn imaginable.
Crash abounds in the gorgeous flesh of its stars as they seduce each other in moving cars and long-abandoned wrecks. The sex is explicit and dangerous enough that when Crash was originally released, there were attempts to keep it out of both US and UK movie theaters.
(From The Operation)
[In the second part of this three-part series, sex and bodies are transformed in the underground art-sex hit, The Operation.]
