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36 Much of the writing on Cronenberg’s work has focused on his literary influences and the literary quality of his screenplays.1 And to be sure, Cronenberg has spoken of being deeply influenced by writers J. G. Ballard, William S. Burroughs, and Henry Miller, among others.2 There is less attention paid to the fact that Cronenberg began his undergraduate career in the sciences (with a special interest in biochemistry) at the University of Toronto. Of this, Cronenberg once said: If I had stayed the course, I would have been in biochemistry. I was never interested in hardware sciences. Chemistry was more interesting because it related to the body; not just the human body, but the planet’s body. I loved botany. I loved the interchange of fluids and plants; the chemistry of plants. All that stuff. So it was biochemistry in a broader sense; because there’s biochemistry in the brain, getting at the physical basis of thought and imagination. I think it is natural that I should try to draw those parts of myself [literary and scientific] together and integrate them, finally, in film-making.3 Cronenberg found that path of study stifling and left it early in his undergraduate career, but I will make the case that his background in the sciences has deeply influenced his work and that it provides the X factor that powers the more unsettling and provocative aspects of his work. Crucially, my point will be that it is not the scientific facts and technologies larded throughout his work that power it, so much as three important attitudes at the foundation of modern science. The first attitude is the suspicion (if not outright rejection) of essential properties in natural systems. Essential properties are those properties that Cronenberg as Scientist Antiessentialism, Sex as Remixing, and the View from Nowhere Peter Ludlow Cronenberg as Scientist 37 the system has by virtue of metaphysical necessity. Sometimes philosophers explain this by saying that the system has the properties in every metaphysically possible world. Consider biological kinds, for example. From Aristotle until Charles Darwin science offered taxonomies of organisms and systems that pegged them as essentially different from each other—for example, that there are properties like rationality that distinguish humans from all other creatures. But work in biology from Darwin onward has shown these taxonomies to be less than rigid (different species have common ancestors, after all), and in important cases the taxonomies have collapsed altogether. How could they not collapse given the basic tenets of evolution introduced by Darwin in The Origin of Species, including the idea of common ancestry, and the idea that genetic variation takes place via mutation and recombination ?4 I’ll make the case that this assault on neat biological taxonomies is expressed in many of Cronenberg’s films, including The Fly (1986), Scanners (1981), and Shivers (1975). Similarly, we traditionally suppose that there are important differences between organic and inorganic systems (biological systems and machines), but fusions of such systems are clearly possible. For example, work on Artificial Life (or “A-life”) has shown that mechanical and computational systems can reproduce and evolve in a way that is mathematically parallel to the way biological organisms do.5 Meanwhile, technologies for the enhancement of the human body have collapsed the neat distinction between organic and inorganic systems—a theme common in Cronenberg’s work (The Fly, eXistenZ [1999], Videodrome [1983])—and work on virtual reality and virtual worlds has put the distinction between virtual life and real life under pressure (a theme that dominates eXistenZ, for example). The second attitude is the notion that sex is not the expression of love one finds in Shakespearean sonnets, but is in fact a process that is ubiquitous in the organic world and not so very different from information processing. Although much has been written about the sexual content of Cronenberg’s work, and critiques of it come in every flavor (from feminist to Freudian to Marxist/queer theorist to traditional moralist6 ), I’ll make the case that these efforts badly miss the target. The key perspective of Cronenberg on sex (and a plausible perspective in biology) is simply this: Sex is a process by which information is not directly copied but is recombined and synthesized from multiple sources, and the process exploits whatever coupling mechanism is effective in accomplishing this information exchange and synthesis. It is a process analogous to remixing in music. The third scientific attitude is the idea that we might...

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