Cronenberg’s anesthetics (virtual flesh)

Abstract

This essay investigates the marked disappearance of body horror elements in David Cronenberg’s films since A History of Violence (2005). While the absence of body horror’s conventional iconography is undeniable in Cronenberg’s recent cinema, I contest that this disappearance signals a departure from his longstanding investment in the politics and spectacular possibilities of flesh. By developing Jacques Derrida’s discussion of contemporary capital punishment’s ‘anesthesial logic’ in The Death Penalty Vol. 1, the essay contends that Cronenberg’s apparently fleshless cinema functions anesthetically whereby his avoidance of the shocking iconography that characterizes his archive does not signal its complete erasure. Rather than eradication, anesthetics redirect the anticipated avenues of synesthetic transmission and perception; in Cronenberg’s cinema, they generate an unseen or virtual encounter with the fleshiness distinguishing the ‘Cronenbergian’ signature. The essay begins its discussion of ‘Cronenberg’s anesthetics’ through an analysis of the short video, The Nest (2014), and then proceeds to identify how this mode of concealment functions throughout his films since 2005.