From Death to Deepfakes: How David Cronenberg's Fusion of Flesh and Machine Informs the Spectacle of Contemporary Digital Spaces

Abstract

I will be analyzing in detail David Cronenberg's Videodrome (1983) and Crash (1996), a pair of films that highlight his fixation with the horror that derives from a loss of bodily agency at the hands of technology. These films punctuate the human need for connection and fulfillment but are distinguished by the harmful measures taken to access them via technology. These needs have not disappeared in the present day, as new technologies have since taken up the mantle in furthering our tragic fusion with the machine. Alongside Cronenberg's films, I analyze concepts such as Guy Debord's spectacle and Roland Barthes's image-as-death to highlight the overwhelming drive towards death via technology found in Cronenberg's horror, as well as our current era. Placing his films within our current world of social media and advanced intelligence, I want to investigate how the destructive drive within Cronenberg's body horror connects emerging spectacles and images to a greater dependence on technology in contemporary life.