transCendenZ (TM)

I find it interesting that Cronenberg often talks about "flesh" when he means so much more than that. From Videodrome's "Long Live the New Flesh" to EXistenZ' "MetaFlesh Game-Pod," Cronenberg seems to be locating new, reality-breaching experiences at the layer of the skin. Like much of the new forms of human described in the cyberpunk we've read this quarter, the new ways of being in Cronenberg have to do with growth or bio-organics but also link very closely to tropes of death: "Death to Videodrome!" and "Death to the demoness Allegra Geller!" (For a nice discussion of Cronenberg and the death drive, see Teresa de Lauretis' "Becoming Inorganic" in the Summer 2003 issue of Critical Inquiry.)

Perhaps it's the penetrable body that Cronenberg sees as both the enabling device to generate horror in his audience and also the site at which to imagine this work's central novum. The body not only offers a physical entrypoint for the gamepod to connect and affect the characters, but it also offers the central metaphor by which the gamepod communicates with the humans. Indeed, the body is the means by which we realize the gamepod's sentience. Take for example Allegra's realization that the pod introduces the theme of disease into the game in order to let her know that it is malfunctioning. Like a child or animal without language, the pod strives to communicate its suffering through gesture and other metaphorical representations of its pain. Further, the pod seems to only know how to create objects from other bodies (e.g, the fishbone gun).

Might the gamepod be communicating both its own independent thinking and its status a new kind of living being birthed from the human?