The Monster and The Mob.

This rough beast that slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.

I've had a David Cronenberg moment every decade now pretty much since my teens.

Ever since I watched Videodrome in maybe 1988 on a Toshiba portable TV at my parents house. It will no doubt have been on Alex Cox's Moviedrome late at night on BBC2 which was itself a memetic play on the title of the great man's film. Clouds of static wasps would swarm on the screen as my coat hanger aerial tried to scoop up and connect with waves of energy from the ether.

Then we fast forward to the early nineties London when Jo who was my wife then and myself dropped acid and went to see Naked Lunch at the arthouse cinema In Camden Town. Little did I know at the time that living insect typewriters addicted to bug powder would lead me to the Petit Socco district in Tangier where I would meet a middle aged tortured soul with brown leathery skin and a drooping moustache who told me that he used to go with William Burroughs for money when he was a young boy and the Hip Priest used to roll up his sleeve and slam in the needle, mainlining junk, right there in front of the world in The Cafe Central.

We then of course had Crash which took the human/machine merging of ecstatic augmented perverts strapped to analog V8 engines and put them in this new dating game of metal meeting flesh. In other words the libido struggles to philosophise and understand its function while being encased in metal, plastic and silicon, its no big shock in 2023 but in the nineties it was a fringe fetish that would get you labelled as a sicko if you said that you got a rush of blood at a car accident, now we more or less understand that people trapped in metal heading towards each other at great speeds in a death collision fireball could be one of a thousand Manga story lines.

So this story about the effect of Cronenberg's films on me is subjective and not in any rational order of importance or chronology.

Next up would probably be The Fly.

As the story of a truth seeker who could be any transgressive artist turned junky in the last thirty years. In this updating of Frankenstein the young good looking idealistic scientist Seth Brundle does away with simplistic dialectics of man and monster and becomes the next paradigm shift in inter species genetically spliced lab louse: Brundle fly. As he experiences the Apex of transformational power surges in his physical strength, he has to stay strapped into his meat cage as the insects DNA alters his dietary habits from Sushi( when he was a hip young scientist) to rotting matter covered in his own corrosive vomit to wash it down with, all under the horrified gaze of his ex lover played by Gina Davis. He ends up following his muse all the way into the dumpster of hubris and misfortune. This deep dive could only bring personal destruction and death as his friends want his monstrous present removed so that they can preserve any memories of him in the before picture scenario before he went all Kafkaesque in the after shot. He pays the final price for his experiments by dying a loathsome death of insect annihilation in body and soul 

This leads on to "The Crimes of the Future."

In 2023 the sanctity of the human flesh unit we used to call a human being is slowly being undermined in preparation, it appears, for erasure:

COVID, Ukraine, Trans rights, Climate change, UFOs. All these mass displays of civil obedience feel like a preparation for what's coming. Say goodbye to the old world! 

In this latest installment of physical mutation from Cronenberg the real monsters of the film have learned to digest plastics. In the opening scene a young boy is seen biting around the rim of a litter bin. He is doing it in secret away from his mother's gaze. She hates him and ends up taking his life as he reminds her of his father, another plastic muncher. Could this plot development be telling us something about our ingestion of micro plastics? No shit! What do you reckon?

Viggo Mortenson's character is a performance artist who grows surplus organs in order for them to be removed in ritual ceremonies in front of an audience of bourgeois art afficinados and hangers on, curious about the spectacle of this new form of celebrity. Cut open in front of the world in a mech tech sarcophagus, his vulnerability is the new currency fuelling the crowds curiosity. The human body, broken down and fused with technology is the only game in town. The artist's transformation from post modern clown knitting Ukraine flags out of yellow and blue spaghetti to shamen blasted into the heart of darkness of his or her own inner space void comes to mind. There is something at stake once again! There is skin in the game. The weirdos have come back to quiz trans imposters about their protected status in society.

The child from the start of the film is given a very public autopsy in the name of art. It brings to mind Marina Ibramovic walking around a Jacob Rothschild party with Lady Gaga on all fours on a leash. Of course these people are sick fucks to retired bricklayers sat at home watching Netflix, maybe that's the point. The same big money power movers in big pharma are a part of this world, near the eye at the top of the pyramid. The scuffed up lighting in a dingey backroom scene of a Cronenberg art seance could be where men in black cloaks stood before human skulls and burning child fat candles and instructed the main stream media to blanket bomb normal citizens with misinformation to seduce and bully them into opening their veins in the name of the new fear.