Sex Death & Technology

In J.P. Telotte’s statement “we ‘dream’ through the technologies we produce; we dream of ways to alter our material reality, including our own bodies, to make it correspond to our desires, and to banish our sense of limitation,” (20) it is easy to hear the echo of Georges Bataille and Octavio Paz in his words. Technology and eroticism are the dominant creative constructs of humanity. In the three films I will be discussing, David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986), Crash (1996), and Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof (2007), eroticism becomes more than “a thinking through of sexuality” (Caputo). It is made real, constructed in technology as a transformative power which pushes far beyond the limits of the flesh. Crash and Death Proof exist in the here and now, examining facets of our relationship to vehicles in a somewhat realistic manner, and thus make interesting comparative pieces. The Fly, while sharing thematic similarities, is more closely aligned with the world of science fiction[1] and the dreams of technology, so I will leave my discussion of it till last. In these dreams, transportation becomes more than an extension of our physical form. Vehicles are reconfigured as partners in our quest for continuity and as sites for despoiled acts of erotic violence. In addition, transportation is no longer about the distance travelled. These are not road movies. These are films in which the area traversed is the human body. The destination is no longer route 66. Instead we are on a way one trip to the river Styx.

Octavio Paz suggests that the purpose of eroticism is to be “a lightning rod” to the “perpetual electrical discharge of sex.” The purpose of this “invention” is to protect society from “onslaughts of sexuality” (11-12). Bataille states the same when he refers to society as “the world of work,” and that this world is protected from the animal violence of sexuality by taboos (42). Eroticism and taboo go hand in hand. The sexual drive to reproduction is a natural instinct. Eroticism is thus a construction which subverts and deflects this drive. It is imagination, which “turns sex into ceremony and rite.”( Paz 3)

Eroticism is representation, a construct of our own invention. We live in a world suffused with our inventions; we are dominated by eroticism and technology. Robert Romanyshyn, as quoted by J.P. Telotte, states that technology is not so much a thing as an “enactment of the human imagination in the world” (20). It is “a work of reason,” but also a “reason lined with desire.” Our dreams have manifested in technology, and, having allowed us to transform the world around us, are now refiguring our humanity and our sexuality. We attempt “to banish our sense of limitation” through these technologies (20). Technology as a manifestation of eroticism and as a desire for continuity binds these three films together.

Bataille writes that “between one being and another, there is a gulf, a discontinuity”. This is inherent to all beings as reproduction implies a distinction from one being to another, and that those who are reproduced are likewise distinct. However, we are capable of experiencing the dizziness of this gulf when we come together. We can become hypnotised by it. Bataille suggests that this gulf is, in one sense, death. That in this gulf is the possibility of continuity: “death means continuity of being” (12-13). But death is not the only point at which beings can touch continuity. In birth, at the opposite end of the life cycle;

“sperm and ovum are to begin with discontinuous entities, but they unite, and consequently a continuity comes into existence between them to form a new entity from the death and disappearance of the separate beings. The new entity is itself discontinuous, but it bears within itself the transition to continuity, the fusion, fatal to both, of two separate beings” (14).

We are caught between the desire for life to continue ever on, and the desire to return to this continuous state of being, of which we may have no inkling of yet still find ourselves nostalgic for. “We yearn for our lost continuity. We find the state of affairs that bind us to our random and ephemeral individuality hard to bear.” (15) We become bound up in eroticism, the purpose of which is the destruction of participators self-contained character, of who they are in their normal lives (17). Sex and death are thus bound together.

Technology within these three films becomes a portal into continuity. These steel dreams are a promise of more, ever more. Cronenberg states that we have “incorporated the car into our understanding of time, space, distance and sexuality. To want to merge with it literally in a more physical way seems a good metaphor. There is a desire to fuse with techno-ness” (Rodley, 1996, 10). The vehicles are eroticised, bound to creative sexuality. The very forms they take are sexually charged, being both phallic and vulvic. The telepods of The Fly are both erect and open. They are a transformative womb, giving birth to new wonders. The cars are thrusting and angular, while also being enveloping and containing. They are home for some, and tombstones for others. The Porsche 550 Spyder marks the death of James Dean while the Lincoln Cosmopolitan stands in for JFK. Through technology the dialectic metaphor of sexuality which is eroticism is presented as a graspable object; life-death, male-female, human-animal, animate-inanimate. These become more than possibilities of juncture in theory and are instead played out on the flesh and steel of subjects and objects.

The linking of sex and death is openly engaged in Death Proof. Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell) is a sexual predator. He is “a wolf” who marks beautiful women, slowly circling his prey until finally he murders them. “Beauty has a cardinal importance,” writes Bataille, “for ugliness cannot be spoiled, and to despoil is the essence of eroticism” (145). However, the phallic knife is not his instrument of death. Instead it is an automobile, one which he has made “death proof” so as the person sitting in the drivers seat will survive any collision. The car accident is a moment of climax; to quote Sheriff Earl McGraw (Michael Parks):

“it’s a sex thing. High velocity impact, twisted metal, busted glass, all four souls taken at exactly the same time. Probably the only way that diabolical degenerate can shoot his goo.”

The accident to which the sheriff is referring to is lovingly repeated four times in a matter of seconds, each time shifting to a different part of the car in order to clearly demonstrate the violent damage inflicted upon the four female occupants. The moment is eroticised, but not for the general audience whose response is most likely one of horror as shattered limbs fly through the air. It is porn-like in its attention to close up intersections of flesh. This is perhaps a moment of sexual climax for Stuntman Mike, but it is also the climax of an elaborate ceremony. These girls are a sacrifice upon the altar of the automobile. It is a ceremony designed to bring him into confrontation with continuity and yet, as his death proof car suggests, continue to live. Bataille, in discussing the meaning of religious sacrifice, states that

“a violent death disrupts the creature’s discontinuity; what remains, what the tense onlookers experience in the succeeding silence, is the continuity of all existence with which the victim is now one” (22).

In this film and Crash, when car and flesh collide it is never as simple as penetration. It is the despoiling of beauty, and the dream of continuity made presence.

Crash details an overtly eroticised world of automobiles, where the sex act and the car crash become forcefully entwined. It is perhaps the most straightforward of the three films in its deployment of these ideas, as it envisions a newly “conceptualised relationship of flesh and metal; man and machine” (Rodley, 1996, 6). There is an element of ceremony to this film as well. The restaged accidents of famous deaths are designed to bring the participants as close as possible to the ghosts of the beautiful dead, while still allowing them to survive. However, as opposed to Death Proof, the car accident is a regenerative occurrence. The destructive elements are viewed in a positive light instead of a negative. When Helen Remington’s (Holly Hunter) husband is flung through the windscreen of the car he is passing through the veil, traversing the gulf of discontinuity. He is not a destroyed body but is instead a sign of the unity promised by death. The collision of bodies in the sex act is aligned with the entangling of metal in car accidents; they are metaphors for each other. Semen and blood mingle with motor oil as pain and pleasure become indivisible. It is established from the beginning that the sexual act is simply not enough. Reproduction does not appear to be the goal of the couplings between James Ballard (James Spader) and his wife, Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger). The characters instead desire to become entwined in eroticism, drowned in a flood of unbound sexual energies.

This returns us to the idea of the car as a physical construct of our desires. The cars are eroticism driven to the edge of reason. When reproduction and socialisation cease to be the ultimate goal of the sex drive, the human imagination (as demonstrated in Crash) turns toward reunification with the universal matter from whence we were born. It is however not so simple as just killing oneself. As Bataille said, it has to be a violent death. The collision with the automobile is not only violent; it is symbolic, as it represents both the ideal we want to become indistinguishable from and the idea of transport – moving to another place.

The car crash is also regenerative in that it places the characters back into their bodies, regenerating sensual awareness. Our human world, always in transition, is now sliding into the digital age. It is an age of ethereal 1s and 0s. Daily items are increasingly ghost-like, losing their weighty reality. Literature shifts from textured pages to digital readers; music stops existing in the “real” world of instruments and vinyl; transport shifts from muscular, living animals and steely, muscle cars to sleek, seemingly weightless, silent science-fiction cars. Film is slowly giving up its flickering vitality to weightless computer generated images and beyond perfect digital projection. In Crash, Ballard ruminates on his car accident and how, after years of simulated car safety awareness advertising, having a real accident was something of a relief. In his detached world, the car accident forcefully reconnects him with his body and the elusive reality of the physical. It is the violence of the immediate world.

Death Proof also stands in opposition to an artificial world. It began life as part of a double feature entitled Grindhouse (2007), which was an attempt by Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez to emulate the seventies trashy horror double feature.[2] It has been judged harshly in this regard as it doesn’t actually resemble in style, genre, structure or execution, any of the films to which it is devoted to.[3] However, in one significant way it is precisely “old school”: the cars and the accidents are not digital effects.[4] Death Proof is a film dedicated to the physical. Stuntman Mike is a flesh bound monument to a past made up of roaring muscle cars and men who’d drive a death proof car into a wall at 100mph just for the hell of it. The film stock has been deliberately scratched and beaten up to give the appearance of a classic grindhouse film. This was apparently not done with computers; instead the film stock itself was attacked to better create the random, physical sensation of damage.

Death Proof is first and foremost a sensual film. It is best experienced on the cinema screen, where every detail is fifty times the actual size and the sound system can tickle every bone in your body. It is after all a car film, and rarely has the vibrating textures of steel and the growling rattle of an engine been so powerfully realised. The audience is made to feel the world which envelops these characters, from the aural textures of LP vinyls to the cascading rain of water running from a bared foot. Unlike Crash, which has often been described as a cold and distant experience for the audience, Death Proof desires to engage the audience’s senses. This is never more apparent than the final scene, when Zoe (Zoe Bell) is riding on the bonnet of the car. We the audience can practically feel the wind pounding down on her highly eroticised body as it fuses with the super-powered muscle car.

Now that we have reached the topic of fusion, it is time to examine The Fly. Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) suffers from motion sickness when travelling in vehicles. His is the opposite problem to that of Ballard in Crash: he is too aware of his body. The teleportation device is an attempt to bypass the problem: it removes the physical traversing of distance. The telepods are still transportation devices, heightened to an extreme of immediacy. However, there is still a distance travelled, an evolutionary distance. To begin with, the telepods cannot transport meat, the computer reconfigures it “all wrong.” Brundle realises that this is due to a lack of understanding with regard to flesh on the part of the computer, and that he has to make it as “crazy” about flesh as humans are. His education of the machine has unusual results however, resulting in gene-splicer, which fuses his body and a fly. Brundle’s achievement is to become “a point of absolute singularity” (Shaviro 148), a BrundleFly, an artificial[5] creature. It embodies the artificial eroticism of a computer. It is the erotic imagination of the computer made flesh.

The telepod is a portal to continuity, but unlike the cars it does not take us to continuity. Instead it brings continuity to us, drawing it out from the hereafter. “Cronenberg’s ‘monsters’ are forms of alterity that cannot be reduced to the economy of the Same, but that also cannot be identified as purely and simply Other” (Shaviro 146). What I mean to suggest by this quote is that BrundleFly has gone too far beyond the world of the flesh, drawing a form of continuity back into our world of work. This singularity is completely incapable of assimilating, of returning to anything that is familiar. While this may seem obvious, there is the important secondary element, that this creature is not altogether unknown to us. Cronenberg has stated that The Fly is about “the disease of being finite” (Rodley, 1992, 128), a disease from which we all suffer. As BrundleFly becomes supercharged, never failing in energy and vitality, he also begins to rot. He is the physical embodiment of the duality of eroticism: the beautiful perfect dream and the rotting earthly matter of death. This “hell of embodiment” (Shaviro 148) becomes overly invested in the computer’s eroticised imagination, and his body begins to abandon those unwarranted accessories that relate to reproduction, the genitals. His humanity begins to break apart as the dreams and functions of the human being become archaic museum pieces. BrundleFly attempts once more to generate continuity through the telepod by fusing himself to Veronica (Geena David). However, it is too late. There is no returning to the “Same”, there is only moving further into the “Other”. In the final scene of the film he is fused with the telepod itself, becoming the holy trinity: animal, man and machine. “This new body, this mass of mingled tissue and metal, is a burden to great to bear. Its sheer weight epitomizes sensory and corporeal overload” (Shaviro 148). BrundleFly’s last act is to choose death, a final dream of entering into a naturalised continuity.

The hidden purpose of technology and the body is key too all three films. It is a secret mystery that brings itself into focus through chance encounters in Crash and The Fly, much like the chance encounters that lead us to love. The hidden secret of the technology in these films is that they unmake humans. They break apart all our defences and structures (physical and mental) in bouts of erotic violence. This violence is birth and death, destructive and regenerative. In Death Proof, this secret purpose is not unknown to Stuntman Mike. It is the purpose around which his whole existence revolves. He attempts to dominate it, a never ending ride on the waves of eroticism which can only be achieved by being “death proof.” The ultimate goal in Crash differs in that the protagonists desire to be immersed in these waves. “Maybe next time,” whispers Ballard to his wife as they lie besides a shattered car. They are not survivors. They are the abandoned, marooned in the flesh as is BrundleFly. His trajectory to the stars has failed. He has blasted sideways into a horrific limbo of ultimate fusion and ultimate singularity; a continuity displaced.

Eroticism is a step beyond sexuality; it is a dream grafted to the animal need. Love is perceived as being the next step beyond eroticism. Yet in these films love exists as a background note, a sideshow to the marvels and horrors of technology and man. They are the true lovers of the new world, human and machine. These new intersections of subjects and objects promise unbound dreams of new experiences and the banishment of limitation.

Works Cited

“Artificial.” Def. 1. Collins English Dictionary: Discovery Edition. 2^nd Ed. 2006.

Bataille, Georges. Erotism: Death and Sensuality (San Francisco, 1986).

Caputo, Rolando. “Lecture.” Cinema and Sexuality. La Trobe University. 27^th May 2007.

Crash (1996): Dir: David Cronenberg. Alliance Communications Corporation. (DVD: Reel).

Death Proof (2007): Dir: Quentin Tarantino. Dimension Films. (DVD: Village Roadshow).

The Fly (1986): Dir: David Cronenberg. Brooksfilm. (DVD: 20^th Century Fox).

Grindhouse (2007): Dir: Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino, et al. Dimension Films.

Paz, Octavio. The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism (New York, 1995).

Rodley, Chris. “Crash: David Cronenberg Interview,” Sight and Sound (June 1996).

Rodley, Chris. Cronenberg on Cronenberg (Toronto, 1992).

Shaviro, Steven. The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis, 2006).

Telotte, J.P. A Distant Technology: Science Fiction and the Machine Age (Hanover, 1999).

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[1] Crash has been described as science fiction (see Rodley 1996), but in my own personal opinion I believe it is far closer to the real world and that describing it as science fiction is an easy way to try and make it safe.

[2] The version which I have viewed is the non-Grindhouse version, which features a “missing reel” not present in its original double feature format.

[3] Considering that most of the “grindhouse” cinema of the period is atrocious and boring, this lack of perfect reproduction is not necessarily a bad thing.

[4] Cronenberg is also adverse to special effects, though it is not specific to one film.

[5] I had some difficulty deciding on what precise word to use in describing the unnatural BrundleFly and decided upon “artificial” with this particular definition from the Collins English Dictionary: “Man-made, not occurring in nature” (38). Of course, I would substitute the word man with computer.