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?