I didn’t know that David Cronenberg is directing an opera based on his 1986 remake the of the Fly.

DEFAMER: Why does it seem like all your movies are in some way obsessed with the human body?

CRONENBERG: People don’t pay enough attention to the body. My understanding of life is very existential. I think that we are our bodies. There’s nothing else, and when we die, that’s it. No afterlife. I’m very anti-religious because religion tends to disembody you. There’s an emphasis on your spirit, or where you’ll be when your body’s gone, and that’s misleading. I think the world would be a better place if it we admit that’s not the case.

Full Story: Defamer

(via Tomorrow Museum)

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The other day I watched eXistenZ. Afterword, I reached into the box of old Mondo 2000s that Bill Whitcomb recently gave me, and pulled out an issue at random. It just happened to have an interview with David Cronenberg (an excerpt from Cronenberg on Cronenberg, which I was also flipping through). Here’s an interesting bit where he talks about gender:

William Burroughs doesn’t just say that men and women are different species, he says they’re different species with different wills and purposes. That’s where you arrive at the struggle between the sexes. I think Burroughs really touches a nerve there. the attempt to make men and women not different - to pretend that little girls and boys are exactly the same and it’s only social pressure, influence, and environmental factors that make them go separate ways - just doesn’t work. Anyone who has kids knows that. There is a femaleness and a maleness. We each partake of both in different proportions. But Burroughs is talking about something else: will and purpose.

If we inhabited different planets, we would see the female planet go entirely one way and the male another. Maybe that’s why we’re on the same planet, because either extremes might be worse. I think Burroughs’s comments are illuminating. Maybe they’re a bit too cosmic to deal with in daily life, but hear it reflected in all the hideous cliches of songs: “You can’t live with ‘em, and you’ve can’t live without ‘em.”

Burroughs was fascinated when I told him about a species of butterfly. They couldn’t find the male of one species and the female of another. One was huge and brightly colored, and the other was tiny and black. It took forty years before lepidopterists realized were the same species. When Burroughs talks about men and women being different species, it does have some resonance in other forms of life. But there are also hermaphrodite version of this same butterfly. they are totally bizarre. One half is huge and bright and the other halve - split right down the middle of the body - is small and dark. I can’t imagine it being able to fly. there’s no balance whatsoever.

(See also my article on Breyer P-Orridge).

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What Cronenberg is moving toward is a more muted version of the exercises he’s always created. His new films just happen to involve gangsters rather than scientists and technological freaks.

What has not been left behind is Cronenberg’s capacity to shock and disturb an audience riveted by his films’ destruction of the human body. And in a world saturated with snuff films the likes of which Videodrome could barely imagine, he’s more than willing to take the less-is-more approach to physical violence.

“We’re in a very bizarre era right now, where snuff porn that never really existed before is now available,” he says. “If you want to see beheadings or stonings, you can see them any time you want on your computer. And it’s low-tech, too: not the internet, but a woman being stoned to death.”

He’s taken that cultural phenomenon to heart: The most advanced weaponry in Eastern Promises is a carpet knife.

Full Story: Wired News.

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See also the William S. Burrough’s Nike commercial.

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NeoFiles: Talking Tech News With Paul Boutin.

RU Sirius Show: GettingIt.com Reunion, Part 2 .

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