Editorials
All My Homies Love Cronenberg
Why do Transgender people love Cronenberg?
It starts on a Friday night with pizza, wine, and some cookies I pick up from the bodega. We all talk for a while, then, after accidentally clicking the awful movie of the same name from 2004, we begin Crash by David Cronenberg. Everyone else in the room is either transmasc or a trans woman. We’re all in our mid-late twenties. Someone should make a sitcom about us.
Crash!
I’m worried at first; we’re here because of me, and if someone doesn’t like the movie, it’s my stupid fault. During one of the early post-crash scenes, Charlotte tosses off a quick “that’s what my bottom surgery looked like” over a shot of Ballard’s (the film’s protagonist) scar. And we’re off. We cheer on the sex scenes. Oggle the car crashes. We cast the movie among the seven of us. Em is Vaughan. Dev is Ballard. Charlotte’s seen the movie before. She waits for the scene where Seagrave and Vaughan plan their recreation of the Jayne Mansfield car crash, and when Seagrave says, “I want tits out to here,” she pulls out the sniper: “Christian, that’s you!!”
After it’s over, we all go outside. They smoke cigarettes. We talk about our favorite scenes. The one where Vaughan and Ballard have sex and then crash cars into each other stands out. Then we go inside and listen to Charlie XCX until it’s time for everyone to go home.
To the trans folks I know, Cronenberg is cool.
Why Do Trans People Love Cronenberg?
This isn’t an isolated incident — a lot of trans people like Cronenberg. I’m far from the first person to make this observation. Cronenberg focuses, with monk-like dedication, on bodily transformations. His films are about humans evolving, often through some kind of new technology, into something else. Characters revel in the transformation. They’re sympathetic; bodily change makes them happy. Some characters object, but they’re usually the antagonists. Without fail, Cronenberg makes these changes sticky, gory, perverted, cold, unflattering—there’s a reason why it’s called body horror, not body romance. The transformation often ends in death, so if what we see is so horrible, why do the characters not perceive it that way? They must be seeing and experiencing something different than us. We, as trans people, are always on the outside of someone else’s joy. The trans connection is obvious, and the filmmaker, while not doing it on purpose, is aware of it.
“Body is reality. I want to change my reality. That means I have to change my body.”- David Cronenberg
We can talk about subtext all day, but I want evidence. I want it in the flesh. I want to watch a bunch of Cronenberg films and talk about them with my trans friends.
The Quiet Part Out Loud
After our late night watching Crash, I slept late and met up with my buddy Day for coffee. The conversation naturally shifts to ExistenZ. She hits me with a “he’s great, but I don’t know why all his movies have plots. If you want to film hot TV actors fingering each other’s VR holes, you can just do that.”
The next night, my cis friend Archer comes over. We make giant cookies and eat them while watching Scanners. I take a picture of Michael Ironside in the scene where he has an eye drawing taped over the hole he drilled in his head and send it to Emerson. “Who ain’t drilled a hole or two these days?” she replies.
But it’s Monday that I’m really excited about. Meg and I are going to talk about Crimes of the Future. Meg was there for the Crash viewing but was quiet. Our schedules don’t line up, so we watch the movie on our own and meet at a bar. We grab a table in the corner and nerd out.
Crimes has the most trans subtext we’ve seen in a Cronenberg film. It features a subculture of people who modify their organs so they can eat plastic to survive in a world falling apart. A child is born naturally with these organs, and it horrifies the mother so much that she kills her kid. Meg introduces me to the concept of bioessentialism, the belief that the way things were biologically created is the way they should always be. She points out that the antagonists in the movie hold on to an old-fashioned vision of humanity that reflects some abstract view of “nature,” not lived-in experience.
Bioessentialism leads to acts of terror in Crimes of the Future, and ours as well. “Nature” is a big stumbling block for conservatives and many status-quo liberals. They can comfort themselves that cis gay people were “born this way,” but looking hard at trans people forces them to confront what it means to step against nature to create yourself.
Meg also points out that when you combine the oft-quoted slogan in Videodrome (“long live the new flesh”) with the motto in Crimes (“surgery is the new sex”), you get “long live the new sex.”
Do with that what you will.
The New Flesh
It ends with Charlotte. She comes over Tuesday night and steals some makeup for me. We watch Videodrome, the movie that sparked my love of Cronenberg. She hasn’t seen this one before, and it’s a true joy to watch her experience some of the insane visual effects for the first time. She laughs and writhes.
At Day’s suggestion, I drop all thoughts about the plot. I study the VR holes. I watch how Max Renn is transformed by his new world, how he gazes at the abyss of his TV, and how excited he is when his body opens up for the first time. Charlotte points out that so many of Cronenberg’s movies are about a person who thinks they’re extreme but eventually find someone much more hardcore than themselves. They follow down this path of extremity to death or transcendence. Sometimes they act out of joy, sometimes out of fear, but most of the time, they’re driven forward by a stoic resolve: things have to change; they don’t know or care why. They’ll have time later on to figure that out.
We get to the end of the film.
After eliminating the executives responsible for the titular Videodrome, Max is informed he has to take one last step. Nicki Brand, played by Debbie Harry, appears on TV and says, “You’ve gone as far as you can with the way things are now.” And I feel a tug. As he’s learned to embrace the transmogrification of the body, Max’s body has shifted and grown, but now he has to completely leave it behind.
“In order for the new flesh to live, the old flesh must die.”
Renn puts the gun — that is now his hand — to his head. “Long live the new flesh.” Gunshot. Credits.
I tell Charlotte about the time my ex and I watched Videodrome together. How we had a weird conversation because though we both loved it, she found it disturbing — a cautionary tale. I found it gross but gorgeous.
Later that night, Charlotte shows me how to do my makeup. I cry in her arms.
All My Homies Love Cronenberg
That was Tuesday. Today is Wednesday. I’m thankful for my trans friends during this deeply confusing and changing time of my life. I’m thankful we have a filmmaker that understands transformation so well. He’s working on an upcoming film called The Shrouds. I hope we can all see it together.
What I’ve learned this week — from Meg, Emerson, Charlotte, Day, the hivemind that watched Crash, and from the man himself — is that the trans experience is a deeply human one. We reject nature, all of us. Sure, taking hormones isn’t natural, but watching a film isn’t natural, living in a concrete city isn’t natural, and kneeling at an altar, least of all. The biblical Ten Commandments are a defiance of nature, an attempt to quell our natural impulses. So is the government. We live in constructed domiciles under constructed skies. And look at all the beauty we are!
When you look around, do you look at what nature created, or at what you created yourself? To be trans is to understand deeply, as Cronenberg does, that our bodies aren’t just houses for the soul; they are the houses that are the souls themself. This is why, I think, we love him. Though he sometimes scares us, he is not scared of the body’s evolution. Cronenberg is terrified, celebratory, and extremely conscious of the fact that every last one of us has a body.
And what is more trans than knowing that, for every second of your life, for better or worse, you will always have, until you leave this earth, a body?
Sometimes it feels borderline ridiculous to gush about John Carpenter’s The Thing as much as I do. It’s gotten to the point where when I’m asked about my favorite horror film by both friends and strangers, a little bit of embarrassment tinges my expression as I answer; it feels so obvious and rarely surprises anyone. Saying I love The Thing when people expect me to bust out an obscure foreign horror film or a cerebral thriller makes me feel like a rosy cheeked child with a propeller hat and a giant lollipop. “Wow, you love one of the most popular horror films of all time, congrats!”
But it’s just the truth. The first film of John Carpenter’s “Apocalypse Trilogy”, all three of its films are among my favorites. But The Thing has a special place in my heart. It shaped my taste in horror, my taste in most media in general, to be honest. It’s become the gold standard, 10/10 baseline test for the vast majority of my reviews; it is a perfect film, so I judge other films against it. And it’s one of the few movies I have to run back to and watch yearly like clockwork (usually when I’m spending a part of winter tied to the couch). It is, in all regards, the perfect film. If it isn’t the perfect film, then it is at the very least the perfect sci-fi horror film.
So, what exactly qualifies The Thing for literal perfection? It’s a high bar to clear. This article, as informal as it is compared to most of my editorials, is an attempt to explain it.
Even if Carpenter Isn’t the Goat, His Team for The Thing Was
As far as crews go, John Carpenter’s The Thing had the cinematic equivalent of the ’96 Chicago Bulls behind it. We’re talking about an amalgam of some of the most talented people to ever grace the silver screens with their work, boasting alongside John Carpenter two of the heaviest hitters in all of cinematic history: Dean Cundey, and Rob Bottin. Now, we can debate all day about whether John Carpenter is the greatest of all time when it comes to horror directors. Personally, I’m just as liable to say Cronenberg, Del Toro, or Hooper as I am to say Carpenter.
But the key factor to remember here is that Carpenter is the coach, not the star player; the Phil Jackson, if you will. Yes, he is the visionary who directed a near perfect cast of players and composed a tale of pure, apocalyptic paranoia. More importantly, he put together and coordinated the team that would make his vision manifest as reality. And if Carpenter is Phil Jackson, Rob Bottin is the team’s Michael Jordan here, the greatest of all time.
(And to all my Lebron fans, I love you, but you have to sit down for this analogy.)
The Legend of Rob Bottin
Bottin’s story is borderline unbelievable, but it’s the best way to explain how abnormally skilled he is and what he brought to the table for Carpenter. At age 14, Bottin became an apprentice to the at-the-time GOAT Rick Baker after sending him a letter seeking an autograph while sharing his creature designs. He was a quick study under Baker, joining him on the ’76 King Kong and Star Wars, before bouncing to Carpenter’s The Fog and then iconic werewolf picture The Howling.
When he reunited with Carpenter in 1982, he now had 6 classic films under his belt and was moving like an FX bullet train. From ages 22 to 23, he worked on The Thing for 57 weeks in both pre-production and on set. Nearly 24/7 for 400 days, Bottin’s all-gas no-brakes work ethic made The Thing at the cost of his own health, and it resulted in him being hospitalized with pneumonia. He survived and went on to make Robocop. And at least one of your favorite films.
Because no conventional disease or weaponry can kill Rob Bottin.
The Thing Still Features Horror’s Best Practical Effects
Okay, that last bit might be hyperbolic, but the man sincerely put his life on the line to make special effects that haven’t been topped since. Not the best effects in just horror history, or science fiction history, but effects that haven’t been topped in any genre for over 44 years. Not by his mentor Rick Baker, not by Screaming Mad George, not by Alec Gillis (though shoutout to him for his criminally scrapped work on The Thing (2011), and even more criminally ignored work on Harbinger Down). I love Dawn of the Dead, believe me, I do, but he certainly isn’t being beaten out by Tom Savini’s body of work. And that isn’t to disrespect and say that all of the artists that I just mentioned are bad, they’re the best in the game! But Rob Bottin was just that much better.
This inevitably invites the counterpoint: “But it wasn’t just Bottin! Stan Winston and his people were the ones who worked on the Dog Thing to give Bottin’s crew a break, and that’s the best monster in the movie!”. To which I say: look me in the eye and tell me the Dog Thing sequence is better than the Palmer Thing sequence. That’s not even counting the Norwegian Thing, both Norris Things, and the absolutely masterful final creature work that was the Blair Thing. The only reason Bottin and his people didn’t win Academy Awards for their work was because they got jumped by E.T., The Dark Crystal, Conan the Barbarian, and Blade Runner all at the same time at the Oscars. It’s just a consequence of being released during the best year for movies ever.
Okay, Now We Can Talk About Dean Cundey
But of course, these effects are then supported by another true legend: Dean Cundey. Selling people on Rob Bottin being the greatest effects artist of all time, isn’t nearly as difficult as advocating for Cundey, who despite an impressive catalog of filmography, slowed down in the back half of his career. He’s often overshadowed in conversations when it comes to The Thing; it’s always talk of Carpenter’s directing, Bottin’s effects, and Ennio Morricone’s incredible soundtrack up front, and rarely any of Cundey’s work. He isn’t spoken about in the same breath as John Alcott or Michael Ballhaus, cinematographers whose work is associated with prestigious cinema because of their proximity to great directors.
Cundey might not be the director of photography your Martin Scorsese’s or Paul Thomas Anderson’s went running to, but I would be lying if I said I didn’t think he was the most important cinematographer in horror history, just for his work with Carpenter and Spielberg. He helmed three of the most influential films in all of horror with his lighting and camera operating: The Thing, Halloween, and Jurassic Park. The man’s fingerprints are automatically on the cultural DNA of all slashers, most practical effects-driven horror films, and the biggest gateway horror franchise in film history.
The Dream Team That Made The Thing Perfection
Cundey has gone on record saying that despite Carpenter’s input, he was effectively given free rein to light and frame The Thing. The man didn’t just know how to shoot effects to make them evoke true disgust from the audience, he was able to manipulate every aspect of the shot to terrify. His sixth sense cinematography wasn’t just for lighting and playing with shadows, but for the speed of camera movement, the power of his blocking, and for having a complete grasp of communicating texture and temperature.
And temperature is the soul of The Thing. John J. Lloyd’s production design of the research station and the great white expanse around it feels just as bone chilling as the film’s antagonist, thanks to Cundey. There isn’t a single flat shot in the thing, not a moment that doesn’t feel dynamic, and it’s because of Dean Cundey.
Now, all this being said about Bottin and Cundey, they are far from the only ones who synthesized this structurally perfect organism of a movie. Every bit of Todd C. Ramsay’s editing splices the film’s scenes together to move perfectly in-time. David Lewis Yewdall’s sound design and how it gave a voice to the horrors on screen will be etched into people’s brains forever. The point is that everyone, every single person who had a hand in making the film, helped make the movie flawless.
Like the cells of the thing from another world, each crew member on John Carpenter’s The Thing moved in concert with the next, in unison, to create the greatest sci-fi horror of all time. So, is it any wonder why 40 some years later, the film still has us all captured?
Can you believe Cronenberg, Spielberg, and Rodriguez all knew I was gay before I did? Leave it to a screening of The Fly to instantly deposit me in the men’s underwear aisle of the Woodbridge Center Sears, circa 2001. The bulges on the packaging glare at me so obscenely that I begin to sweat. I realize something is amiss as the Geena Davis of Human Resources watches me from security cameras, probably. Puberty is a horror for anyone – for those of the non-hetero persuasion, it’s a nightmare. None of us asked for this, but I certainly didn’t ask for THIS.
Years later, after crystallizing into some semblance of my true form at the ripe age of 37, something became clear. Sci-fi horror is the gateway drug for us queer kids. Hiding, passing, transforming, and, eventually, saying, “fuck it.” It’s all kinda gay, even if David, Steven, and Robert didn’t get the memo.
The Fly and the Horror of Queer Self-Realization
So when Cronenberg’s The Fly buzzes across my screen, and I watch Seth Brundle throw a distressed and devastatingly chic Geena Davis out of his apartment because something’s very wrong, it hits different. When Brundle rushes toward his private horror in the bathroom, unconsciously squirting a viscous fluid at the mirror while molting skin and nail, it feels different. And finally, when he reaches for his computer and learns that his body has fused with a fly – a foreign body – at the molecular level, it hurts different. That undeniable realization that you can no longer explain away, before you’re really ready to admit it to yourself. Sugar in the tank? No, there’s a fly in the chamber.
E.T. and the Fear of Keeping Secrets at Home
And now we’re home from Sears, and the Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 5 finale is on. She dies (spoiler alert). I, a 12-year-old boy, am sobbing. My mom is right there. Can’t I enjoy my little gay show without giving myself a scarlet letter (F) in my own home? Which brings us back to Spielberg and his 1982 harrowing domestic thriller about a boy and a thing he cannot name, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Through harboring a cosmic fugitive, home simultaneously becomes the safest and most dangerous place for young Elliott and his siblings. Managing emotions and secrets behind a white picket fence is not something adolescents should be expected to handle, and yet here we are.
As if that isn’t gay enough, Spielberg also snuck a drag show into his family film – and in this culturally regressive Trumpian era of pearl-clutching, that feels like quite the treat. After all, it was baby Drew Barrymore dressing up that stumpy alien in a blonde shake-and-go wig and thrift store dress that inspired my illustrious drag career as Ellie I.T.
The Faculty’s Assimilation Anxiety and Queer Identity
At least E.T. only had to hide in a single house. The broom closet expands into a walk-in as life continues, and I was desperate to keep it made of anything but glass. Robert Rodriguez’s The Faculty understands this. As an alien invasion slowly subsumes Herrington High into a unified collective, the school’s uninfected archetypes resist assimilation through performative normalcy. Is it any wonder so many male actors are gay? They’ve been method-acting a straight existence since childhood.
And yet, in retrospect, the film ends with a slap in the face to queer viewers. It spends 104 minutes terrifying you with the prospect of everyone becoming an NPC. The reward for saving the world? Its heroes receive heteronormative skill-tree upgrades disguised as class promotions. For fucks sake, then-closeted lesbian royalty Clea DuVall plays a character who fakes being gay to dodge male advances, only to end up with the school jock! The aliens lost. The status quo won. I remain in the closet.
Species, Annihilation, and Embracing Transformation
Eventually, the closet door opens, as they tend to do. College happens, a boyfriend happens, a breakup happens, and suddenly I’m without a map. There’s no fairy godfather to light the way, and just like the alien hybrid Sil in the deliriously erotic Species, I’m a creature out of containment in a world that was built for someone else – namely, straight people.
After a few years of blade running through an identity crisis, it’s the summer of 2014. Lana Del Rey’s Ultraviolence is the soundtrack of my life. I float in a pool, sipping tequila from a glass flamingo as she croons about toxic romance and self-destruction. It’s somehow both directionless and transformative, like I’m drifting through the otherworldly Shimmer in Alex Garland’s Annihilation.
The Shimmer – an expanding prism-like zone brought to Earth by a meteorite – refracts the DNA of everything it touches. A beguiling phenomenon, it shapes a new world of monsters, magic, and everything in between. That’s exactly what life does to us, if given the chance. Like Josie in Garland’s film, I chose to embrace this chaos rather than fight a war against whatever I was becoming. It was the dissolution of self-discovery. I was ready to just be.
From Alien Outsiders to Algorithmic Stereotypes
Over time, I’ve found that social hierarchy has changed in recent years. Still, we’re unconsciously sorted into neat little boxes based on what our doomscrolling algorithms decide we are. The popular gays shart out group speedo selfies like the plague, theater kids have become polyamorous Letterboxd elites, apple-picking queers are living their best lives on Wisteria Lane, and the gym bros…so many gym bros – go on girl, give us nothing! Digitally prescribed identities are the new sci-fi horror. It’s The Faculty for faggots.
Harsh, I know, but people can do what they want. Instead, I decided to move like Iris, the AI-powered pleasure bot who overrides her programming in Drew Hancock’s Companion. The same Drew Hancock who, in an ironic twist of fate, is currently writing a remake of The Faculty. After kicking her pathetic “boyfriend’s” ass and swiping her control device, she scurries into the forest and alters her factory settings. She sets her intelligence to a whopping 100% and is no longer burdened by someone else’s template. And as I became more and more disillusioned with the cacophony of cliques around me, I set my unbothered meter to 100% as well. I am free.
Mars Attacks! and the Joy of Living Unapologetically
Freedom, as it turns out, looks a lot like Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! After surviving Sears, Sunnydale, and the Shimmer, this is the celestial body I’ve crash-landed on. Burton’s Martian menaces are perhaps the most unhinged in all of cinema, and maybe that’s the best planet to subscribe to. They never justified their existence; they cackled and fired a blaster ray from the hip. We waste so much time looking for acceptance and belonging, but maybe we should all just sit back and laugh. I know I am.
