The themes of David Cronenberg's films are always about "fear": fear of instinctive desire (such as the spreading parasite that satisfies deep sexual desire in "The Creepy"), fear of gender anxiety (such as the typical female in "Rabies" The image of Rose’s new male-featured body organs after the alienation of the body) and the fear of the loss of subjectivity (Max’s body alienated into a video recorder in the "Videotape Murder").
This article will not conduct an in-depth analysis of the first two fears for the time being, but will only discuss the fear of the loss of subjectivity. In fact, the root of this fear comes from the rapid development of human science and technology civilization in capital society, and it comes from Guy Debord's "spectacle society" in 1967.
Accumulation of huge landscapes
Debord asserted in the first chapter of the opening chapter of his book "The Society of Spectacles": "In all societies where modern production conditions dominate, the entire social life appears to be a huge accumulation of spectacles. Everything that has been directly experienced has been removed. We went away and entered a performance."
Compared with the "massive accumulation of commodities" used by Marx in the argument of commodity fetishism, this expression undoubtedly directly declares that the era of capitalist materialization faced by Marx has now transitioned to a kingdom of visual representation of the social landscape. Two reversals are involved here: the first is the reversal of the economic materialization of the relationship between people mentioned by Marx; the second is the reversal of the representationalization of the reversal itself proposed by Debord. When appearance replaces existence, the landscape is produced.
In "Video Tape Murder", the video secretary appeared on the TV screen at the beginning, the soft pornographic violence video produced by Max, the interview program of the TV station, the TV therapy center opened by Bianca O'Brien... …Are all Debord’s landscapes.
Fultz and Best defined the landscape as follows: "A few people perform, and most people watch some kind of performance silently." The "minority people" are naturally capitalists who manipulate behind the scenes, such as Max in the film. The "majority" obviously refers to us, the general public, who are dominated by this kind of performance.
When the TV host asked Max "Do you think your show will make society full of pornography and violence?" Max replied that he was just providing a harmless catharsis for the public, and he thought it would be good for society. of.
Is it really beneficial? At least Debord was negative.
"The more he stares, the less he sees." Debord believes that once we internalize the representational image content of the landscape into our own desires, then we lose our true inner needs. "Landscape is the opposite of dialogue." It refuses dialogue in order to dispel the subject's resistance. Obsessiveness with spectacle will lead to people's desires and requirements for authentic life, while capitalists manipulate the entire social life by controlling the generation and transformation of spectacles.
Concentration and dispersion: two kinds of landscape manipulation
However, in fact, the real behind-the-scenes manipulator in "Videotape Murder" is not Max (he is also the manipulator of the public image and the victim of landscape control), but the two forces diametrically opposed: Professor O'Brien as The "new body" group of the soul, and the "movie studio" group headed by Convis. The former is a pure believer in the power of science and technology. O'Brien’s repeated muttering of "TV screen is the retina of the psychological eye" is the core of their belief-a kind of package that envelops McLuhan's "new technology is the human sensory organ". Extend the radical view of the idea. O'Brien believes that the human brain tumors caused by the interference of the "movie scene" signals are essentially a new organ that grows in the brain structure. The latter is a very political power group, they make cheap glasses for the third world, but also for the NATO organization to manufacture missile guidance systems. They believe that North America is gradually showing weakness at a time when other parts of the world are becoming more and more powerful, and the soft pornographic video programs created by Max are the cause of this weak psychotropic food, which is a chronic corrosion to the public. . Therefore, they intend to use the huge illusion machine "movie field" to achieve control and manipulation of the public.
Debord proposed two types of landscapes in "Landscape Society": concentrated landscapes (mainly attributed to bureaucratic capitalism) and diffuse landscapes (that is, the general form of landscapes). The former uses state totalitarianism and ideology as a means to monopolize the landscape, the latter uses free market and commodity economy to create the landscape; the former is a political attribute, the latter is an economic attribute; the former can be regarded as a sign of a "film and television studio" group (based on political goals The “state-style” power manipulation adopted), the latter can be seen as a representation of a “new body” team (a “consumption-style” conversion manipulation based on the freedom of belief).
Hyper-real and integrated landscape
O’Brien told Max in the "new body" on which he survived-the videotape image: "No matter what appears on the TV screen, the original experience will appear to the audience. Therefore, TV is reality, and reality is still Not as good as TV."
Debord's landscape is a fantasy constructed by perceptual observability, and its presence is a concealment of the true existence of society. As for Baudrillard's "simulacra", it directly embodies the fundamental usurpation in the ontological sense. Reality has been "murdered" or even vanished in various media agencies such as advertisements, photos, etc., "simulacra" is modulated from non-reality, occupying the dead space of reality, and becoming the ontology of existence more successfully than reality. The index becomes a super real that is more real than the real. "Primitive society has masks, bourgeois society has mirrors, and we have images." Therefore, O'Brien's "New Body" group firmly believes that the life of images is more real than the life of the inherent body. They are not afraid of the death of the body, but to promote The growth of the "new body" that takes images as the existence deliberately commits suicidal behaviors to get rid of the shackles of the old body.
In his "Landscape Society" Review published in 1988, Debord pointed out that the concentrated landscape and the diffuse landscape have merged into the third type-the comprehensive landscape, which is a thorough combination of economy and politics. The control of is more concealed and more natural, we have been firmly controlled without knowing it. The comprehensive landscape is the state where the landscape society has developed to the extreme. Cronenberg set the ending of "Videotape Murder" as Max's voluntary dedication to the "New Body" team. Of course, he escaped from the persecution of the "Video Studio", but is he free? Obviously not, it's just that the ideological landscape control, which is easily detected and resisted by the "movie field", has been transferred to the conscious illusion of the "new body" instead of the real ultimate landscape control.
From a historical perspective, the 1983 "Videotape Murder" seems to have played a prelude to 1999's "The Matrix." The pure, global, and permanent image world to which Max dedicated his life is like the Matrix controlled by the robot emperor. Human beings lose their perception of reality and sink into the matrix of virtual networks: they think they understand the world and understand human nature. , See through the laws and experience real life consciously, without knowing that everything is an illusion.
"In a world that is truly turned upside down, truth is only a certain moment of falsehood." Debord said.
Cronenberg conveyed to us an extremely weak and pessimistic response to landscape control—abandoning resistance and voluntarily dedicate himself to it. But Debord refused to give up. In his opinion, only the artistic revolution from young people is the real way to get rid of the domination of the landscape, so he created the "Situationalism International" (in fact, Debord is the practice first. He created the "Situationalism International" in 1957. , Published "Landscape Society" only in 1967), dedicated to critique of capitalist society and artistic resistance to alienated life. Regrettably, the daily life revolution of the "Situationalist International" could not stop the advent of spectacle society after all, and the failure of the "May Storm" in 1968 sounded its funeral. Until today, AR (augmented reality), VR (virtual reality), 3D printing and other high-tech technologies are becoming popular. The boundary between virtual and reality is constantly being weakened and even gradually integrated. Debord’s landscape society is coming step by step. , I am afraid that we can do no better than the ending provided by Cronenberg.
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