Julius Koetsier
5604486
[email protected]
Transformation metaphors in the films of David Cronenberg
MA thesis Media en Cultuur
Universiteit van Amsterdam
Supervisor: Dr. Charles Forceville
Second reader: Dr. Laura Copier
June 20 2012
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
2
1. Metaphor theory
3
2. The transformation horror genre
10
3. Cronenberg
28
4. Conclusion
47
Sources
51
1
INTRODUCTION
In his short video essay 'Kermode Uncut: Crowning Cronenberg' (2011), film critic Mark
Kermode describes director David Cronenberg as the first horror director to seriously
explore “the idea of taking a metaphor and visualizing it.”
Indeed, it would be difficult to see the image of a man having a videotape inserted into a
slit in his torso in Videodrome, or a woman attacking a rapist with a phallic stinger under
her armpit in Rabid, without assuming to be looking at something that is actually
representing something else. Cronenberg's bodily transformations often make it
impossible not to search for a metaphorical interpretation of them. But the transformation
horror genre is older and bigger than Cronenberg's oeuvre. Werewolf films are certainly
the most common subgenre within this type of film, and have been since the early days of
film, but there are several other types of physical mutations of humans in the cinema
landscape. Many of these also seem to lend themselves to a metaphorical reading.
The aim of this thesis is to establish whether Cronenberg's transformations convey
different types of metaphors than those to be found in the conventional transformation
horror film, and if so, what these differences are.
To answer this question, I will first explore metaphor theory, in chapter 1, in order to
establish how metaphor works and what constitutes a film metaphor. Then, in chapter 2, I
will discuss the world of horror cinema and specifically transformation horror cinema,
analysing several case studies to find out which metaphors are most commonly conveyed
in this genre. Because Cronenberg's transformation films were made between 1977 and
1999, I will only concentrate on films from that period. In chapter 3, I will analyse the
five films that Cronenberg made in which humans physically transform: Rabid (1977),
The Brood (1979), Videodrome (1983), The Fly (1986) and eXistenZ (1999). Finally, in
the concluding chapter, I will discuss the similarities and differences between the use of
metaphor in Cronenberg's films and in the films discussed in chapter 2.
2
CHAPTER 1. METAPHOR THEORY
Max Black is one of the most influential contemporary authors on metaphor, and his
theories on the subject are among the most widely accepted (Forceville 2006: 4). Black
(1977: 441-442) states that a metaphor is a statement consisting of two distinct subjects,
to be identified as the primary and secondary subject. The primary subject is the subject
about which the producer of the metaphor intends to communicate something; the
secondary subject is the subject to which the primary subject is compared or likened in
order to convey this message. The message is understood by projecting certain qualities
of the secondary subject onto the primary subject. For example, in Hobbes' famous “man
is a wolf,” “man” is the primary subject, and “wolf” the secondary subject. The metaphor
works if we project qualities we associate with wolves onto man (meaning humans). In
this metaphor, such qualities would be cruelty, aggression and predatory behavior. This
collection of qualities is what Black calls the implicative complex.
For the metaphor to be successful, it does not have to be factually true that the qualities
associated with the secondary subject are actually possessed by this subject; wolves, in
fact, are not very aggressive creatures. What matters is, most people in Hobbes' culture,
and in most of Western culture today, perceive wolves as aggressive and dangerous. The
message of the metaphor may be unfair to the wolf, but it is crystal clear.
Furthermore, not all qualities that can be attributed to the secondary subject will be
projected onto the primary: when Hobbes compared man to wolf, he did not intend this to
mean that man is furry and has an extraordinary sense of smell, even though these things
can be said of wolves.
The collection of qualities that makes up the implicative complex thus does not have to
be complete or factually accurate; as long as it is generally agreed upon within a certain
culture that these qualities are associated with a certain subject, the metaphor can
function. As Black puts it: “The secondary subject (…) determines a set of what Aristotle
called endoxa, current opinions shared by members of a certain speech-community”
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(442).
The creator of a metaphor can also introduce a new implicative complex, suggesting
qualities that can be associated with the secondary subject, but commonly are not (442).
For example, columnist Ted Rall called Chris Ware's renowned graphic novel Jimmy
Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth the comics equivalent of James Joyce's Ulysses,
explaining: “no one's ever read it, and those who have know that it sucks, but it sure
looks great on your bookshelf” (Rall 2000). In this metaphor, we are asked to ignore
qualities we would more commonly associate with Ulysses, such as high quality and
literary innovation, and instead consider an alternative set of qualities: bad, largely
unread and merely interesting as an item to boast about owning. Of course, this type of
metaphor needs an explanation to be understood: had Rall simply said that Ware's work
was equivalent to Ulysses, we would be likely to take it as a compliment; Rall's
explanation of the metaphor turns it into a criticism.
Untill the 1980s, metaphor theory concentrated only on language. But this is not the only
medium in which metaphors can exist. Black defines a 'statement' as “a whole sentence,
or a set of sentences, together with as much of the relevant verbal context, or the
nonverbal setting, as may be needed for an adequate grasp of the actual or imputed
speaker's meaning” (1977: 437). Although language is included in this definition, Black
mentions the relevance of the non-verbal context of linguistic expression. However, the
idea of metaphors as something not primarily linguistic did not exist before George
Lakoff and Mark Johnson's highly influential book Metaphors We Live By (1980). One of
the most important claims of this book is that metaphor is not merely a trope of verbal
communication, but a way of thinking: when confronted with a statement that likens one
thing to another, we perceive it as an invitation to think of one thing as another, finding in
it a way to understand the world around us: “Metaphor is primarily a matter of thought
and action, and only derivatively a matter of language” (153). Lakoff further expanded
this theory in his essay “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor” (1993), where he
claimed that metaphor is a way to “conceptualize one mental domain in terms of another”
(203). When understanding something with the aid of a metaphor, we construct a view of
4
the metaphor's primary subject by considering it in terms of the secondary subject. Lakoff
and Johnson refer to the primary and secondary subject of a metaphor as the target
domain and the source domain, the target domain being the concept we are gaining an
understanding of, and the source domain being the source of the features we map onto the
target domain for this purpose.
Many of the metaphors we live by, according to Lakoff and Johnson, can be considered
structural metaphors: metaphors that allow us to “use one highly structured and clearly
delineated concept to structure another” (1980: 61). For example, when we say someone
is wasting our time, we are talking about time as if it were a resource: we are using the
metaphor TIME IS A RESOURCE (8) (Lakoff and Johnson (1980) write metaphors in
capitals, and it is now common in metaphor studies to do so). Of course, we usually tend
not to think of ourselves as speaking metaphorically when we say that our time is being
wasted, or we are running out of time, but the TIME IS A RESOURCE metaphor does
help structure the concept of time as we understand it in western society (66).
Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. (1993) points out that tropes such as metaphor do not just give us
a way to talk about our experiences, but are constitutive of them, and, contrary to popular
belief, do not violate the norms of cooperative conversation. The reason people generally
understand non-literal speech easily has often been claimed to be the context in which
such speech is uttered, but Gibbs claims that the main reason people understand tropes so
easily, is that the way people think is governed by figurative processes: we need to use
tropes in order to make any sense of the world (253).
Gibbs discusses several tropes other than metaphor, among which metonymy, in which
the mapping between two things is done within the same conceptual domain, rather than
between two separate domains, as is the case for metaphor. In a metonomy, “the name of
one entity is used to refer to another entity that is contiguous to it” (258). An example of
a would be ''Does he like Hemingway?'' where the work of an author is referred to with
that author's name (259). Unlike with a metaphor, we are not invited to understand
Hemingway's books through the person Hemingway, nor are features mapped from the
5
person onto his writings.
Lakoff and Johnson identify synecdoche as a subcategory of metonymy. In a synecdoche,
we use a part of something to refer to a whole. We may, for example, refer to a car as “a
set of wheels,” or refer to intelligent people as “good heads” (1980: 36).
Where metaphors primarily serve to gain us understanding of a subject, metonyms
generally have a primarily referential function: they allow us to refer to something by
naming something else. In other words, we “use one entity to stand for another” (Lakoff
and Johnson 1980: 36). However, as Lakoff and Johnson point out, this process often
does provide understanding in the same way metaphor does. For example, if we say that
we need to get some good heads on a project, using “good heads” as a synecdoche to
refer to “intelligent people”, there is a reason why we choose heads to refer to these
people, rather than another body part: heads are often associated with intelligence (36). If
we needed physically strong people, we might say that we need some strong hands.
The idea that metaphors are first and foremost a matter of thought rather than language,
opens the door to the consideration of metaphors in other forms of expression that verbal
communication. After all, a statement can be made in the shape of visual images as well.
John M. Kennedy (1982) explores this possibility, stating that, when confronted with a
picture of one thing given certain features of another thing in a physically impossible
way, a viewer may interpret this anomaly as a metaphor (590). Kennedy gives the
example of a drawing that depicts a hybrid between a woman and a tree. A problem with
the metaphorical interpretation of such a drawing, is the question how we can be sure
which is the primary and which is the secondary subject of the metaphor: is the artist
saying that a tree is a person, or that a person is a tree? Kennedy offers a solution in the
image itself, stating that: “Where a drawing of a tree has a few features of a person added
it may be termed 'a tree drawn as a person'. Conversely where a person is drawn with a
few features of a tree added the drawing may be considered a 'a person drawn as a tree'.”
(590). Charles Forceville (2006) discusses Kennedy's example, and agrees that if the treelike features dominate in the human-tree hybrid, viewers are likely to interpret the
6
drawing as conveying the metaphor TREE IS PERSON, whereas the metaphor PERSON
IS TREE would be seen if the hybrid has more human features (55).
I would argue that context often plays a more important part in the construction of the
metaphor when looking at such a hybrid drawing, than the features of the hybrid. If
person X would want to metaphorically represent person Y as a tree, because person Y is
known for standing still for long periods of time, person X could make a drawing of a
tree with the face of person Y. Even though the hybrid would be mostly a tree, viewers
aware of person Y's habit of standing still would probably not have a problem
understanding that the intended message of the drawing is PERSON Y IS A TREE.
Both Kennedy and Gibbs concentrate on those metaphorical statements, in language and
in images, that cannot be literally true. When Gibbs discusses figurative language, he
discusses it as opposed to literal language. Kennedy's examples of pictorial metaphor
only include images that depict physically impossible occurrences. When analyzing
metaphor in film, however, we are often faced with depictions of situations that are
physically possible, and when they are not, are at least considered to be literally true
within the context of the narrative, that may still be interpreted metaphorically. Take, for
example, Sergei Eisenstein's famous intellectual montage: in Strike (1925), Eisenstein
shows us images of striking workers being attacked by soldiers, cross-cut with images of
cattle being slaughtered. Nothing he shows us could not be interpreted literally; an
inexperienced viewer might think Eisenstein is simply showing us two separate events.
However, it is quite clear to most viewers that he means to compare the two occurrences
to each other, and is inviting the viewer to think of one in terms of the other. The fact that
the film is about a strike, and not about cattle slaughter, leaves little doubt that the attack
of the striking workers is the target domain of a metaphor, and the slaughter of the cattle
is its source domain. Thus, it seems that we are dealing with an obvious metaphor.
This, however, is not an uncontroversial view. Noël Carroll (1996) created a rather strict
list of features that must be present in a cinematic image for it to be considered a
successful film metaphor, including that the image shown must be of two physically
7
noncompossible elements saliently posed in a homospatially unified figure (218). In other
words, a film must show us two things as one thing, in a way that is not considered to be
literally true; neither in the real world, nor in the context of the film's narrative. He rejects
the idea that the human-fly-monster in David Cronenberg's The Fly (1986) could be
considered a metaphor, as although we are looking at two physically noncompossible
elements saliently posed in a homospatially unified figure, this creature actually exists in
the story the film is telling (216).
Forceville (1999) takes a different approach, identifying film metaphors even when
nothing is shown that is physically impossible: he discusses the metaphor COLIN IS A
CHILD in the film The Comfort of Strangers (Paul Schrader, 1990), giving examples of
scenes in which the character Colin is treated as one would treat a child (189) or shown
juxtaposed with children (190). Of course, such instances do not force us to construct a
metaphor, certainly not when we look at one of them out of context. It is the frequency of
instances in which Colin is associated with the concept 'child' and the context in which
this happens, that invites us to look for a metaphorical meaning (193). As Eggertsson and
Forceville (2009) point out, many cinematic metaphors are constituted by being
expressed repeatedly throughout a film (430).
Eggertsson and Forceville (2009) distinguish between multimodal and monomodal
metaphor: monomodal metaphors present target and source domain both in the same
mode (for example: only in language or only in pictures), whereas multimodal metaphors
use several different modes. A “pure” multimodal metaphor presents target and source in
two separate modes, whereas an “impure” multimodal metaphor presents target and
source in several modes simultaneously. The majority of film metaphors, according to
Eggertsson and Forceville, fall into this last category (430). This definition of multimodal
metaphor “is particularly pertinent if a metaphor is not a creative metaphor that surfaces
only once in a multimodal “text,” but is an expression of a conceptual metaphor that
keeps appearing throughout a narrative or argument” (430).
Forceville (2006) points out that metaphors do not always have to show us both target
8
and source domain. In verbal metaphor, a metaphor in which the target domain is not
mentioned is called metaphor in absenthia (136). Forceville quotes Ricoeur's (1977: 186)
example “What an ass!” This statement does not mention the person to whom the word
“ass” is referring. However, the context in which this statement is made would probably
make it clear who the target domain of the metaphor is. Forceville (2006) states that there
is an important difference between verbal metaphors in abstenthia and visual metaphors
that only show us one domain: in the verbal ones, it is the target domain that is not
mentioned, whereas in visual ones, it is usually the source domain that is not explicitly
shown and is to be recovered from the context by the viewer (136).
Forceville (2006, 1999) and Eggertsson and Forceville (2009) thus clearly disagree with
Carroll (1996) that film metaphors have to present an occurrence that is not literally
possible and not true within the film's narrative, and that they have to present both target
and source domain in one visual mode. Furthermore, Forceville (1999) and Eggertsson
and Forceville (2009) discuss conceptual metaphors being expressed repeatedly in a film,
whereas Carroll (1996) only discusses metaphors being expressed once.
For the purposes of this thesis, I will take an approach similar to that of Forceville (1999)
and Eggertsson and Forceville (2009), meaning that I will primarily focus on metaphors
being expressed repeatedly throughout a film in several modes. As Lakoff and Johnson
(1980) pointed out, structural metaphors of the A-IS-B type, such as TIME IS A
RESOURCE, help us construct our view of certain concepts and are expressed in
everyday speech. Similarly, I expect to find, as Forceville (1999) and Eggertsson and
Forceville (2009) have, structural metaphors being expressed by films in ways that may
not immediately strike the average viewer as metaphorical, but that are important to
examine if we wish to understand the way a film presents a certain concept to its viewers.
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CHAPTER 2. THE TRANSFORMATION HORROR GENRE
The transformation horror film: history
This thesis defines 'transformation horror' as a subgenre of horror in which at least one
human character transforms into a visibly entirely or partially non-human creature or
object, or into another human. The word 'visibly' in this definition excludes any creatures
who, although they are not human, do appear to be – such as certain vampires and ghosts.
It also excludes non-human creatures who take the shape of humans, such as the aliens in
Species (Roger Donaldson, 1995) and The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982).
This definition is by no means absolute; one could call most vampire films
transformation horror films, as transformations do take place. However, for the purposes
of this thesis, I must narrow the definition down as much as possible if I wish to make
any claims about the patterns and tropes to be found in this subgenre.
The subgenre is nearly as old as the horror genre itself, some of the earliest known
examples being Van Dyke Brooke's 1912 film The Reincarnation of Karma, which shows
a woman transforming into a snake, Henry McRae's The Werewolf (1913) and Lloyd
Ingraham's The Fox Woman (1915), the last two containing the type of transformation the
title suggests. Contrasted with the work of D. W. Griffith, who gave the cinema new
esteem with his 1910 epic The Birth of a Nation, and kept exploring its storytelling
possibilities with his complex film Intolerance (1916), these transformation films were
more closely related to the special effects cinema of George Méliès, primarily interested
in cinema's ability to show the impossible (Rigby 2007: 20).
Films with human-animal hybrids remained popular in the 1920s and 1930s, notable
examples being Wallace Worsley's controversial A Blind Bargain (1921), in which a mad
scientist transforms people into man-beasts, Wolf Blood (1925) and Werewolf of London
(1935), the werewolf picture being the most popular subgenre within the transformation
genre. The most financially successful of them all became The Wolf Man (1941), largely
10
due to the popularity of its star, Lon Chaney, famous for his roles in which he wore
grotesque make-up (Rigby 2007: 32).
Perhaps because of the audience's eventual familiarity with the possibilities of special
effects, transformation films were less popular in the 1950's, where the screen was largely
dominated by haunted house films and science fiction, and the 1960's, which saw the rise
of a new type of monster: the human. Films like Alfred Hitchcock's Pyscho (1960) and
Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960) showed us horror antagonists who looked like
normal human beings and were not influenced by the supernatural. These human
monsters remained extremely popular throughout the seventies and eighties, appearing in
many slasher films such as Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), John
Carpenter's Halloween (1978) and Sean S. Cunningham's Friday the 13th (1980)
(Newman 2011: 121).
The 1980's saw the arrival of an extraordinarily high amount of very successful werewolf
films, some notable examples being The Howling (1981), An American Werewolf in
London (1981), The Company of Wolves (1985), Silver Bullet (1985), and Teen Wolf
(1987). The increase in both number and financial succes of these werewolf films is,
again, likely to be caused by the innovations in the field of special effects (An American
Werewolf in London was the first film to receive and Academy Award in this category).
Their decline in the 1990's can be explained by the fact that these effects soon became
commonplace (Newman 2011, 140).
In the 2000's, several films have made use of the current possibilities of computer
generated-imagery (CGI) to create transformations: we saw werewolves in the Twilight
series (2008-2011) and The Wolf Man (2010), mutants in Slither (2006), grotesque
humanoids in Faust (2000) and King of the Ants (2003), several human-to-animal
transformations in the Harry Potter films (2001-2011) and a human swan in Black Swan
(2011); all very different films, that seem to have little in common outside the fact that
they all have humans transforming into different creatures.
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The transformation horror film: theory
Paul Wells (2007) considers most monsters in modern horror cinema to be metaphors for
certain threats to “the prevailing paradigms and consensual orthodoxies of everyday life”
(9). Whether they are ‘the beast within’ (the purely human monsters, such as Norman
Bates in Psycho) or as ‘the other’ from without (such as Dracula, the Transylvanian
vampire, or alien invaders), monsters disturb the order and question our established ideas
about the value and meaning of human life (10). In the A-IS-B type metaphor
terminology discussed in chapter 1, this would mean that THREATS TO ESTABLISHED
IDEAS AND VALUES OF SOCIETY ARE MONSTERS.
Wells discusses the antagonists that the animal kingdom has offered the horror genre,
especially (monstrous versions of) insects, vermin and reptiles. He claims that the
explanation for the fact that these creatures make such popular monsters lies in the
dichotomy between civilised, human society and the primordial world, which coexist
next to each other, but can never become one. We use animals as providers of all sorts of
products, but when they escape our control, when they are no longer our servants, they
become threatening (2007: 13).
I would add that the animal horror film shows us a creature that refuses to behave
according to the rules we created, to stay in the place we put it in, but also refuses to find
a place in civilisation. Because they are neither animals as we want animals to be
(providers for humans), nor civilised beings like we are, they become monsters.
Horror films in which the monster is partially or entirely human often seem to address a
similar fear of order being disrupted. Wells mentions two popular monsters as examples:
Jason, the killer from the Friday the 13th series (1980-2003), and Freddy Krueger, from
the A Nightmare on Elm Street series (1984-2003) (2007: 97). Jason has his face hidden
behind a mask most of the time in all the films, does not speak, and attacks every person
he meets, seemingly without motive. He does not gain anything from killing people, not
even sadistic pleasure. The same is true for the masked killer Michael Myers from the
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Halloween series (1978-2002). Freddy Krueger has control over the world of dreams,
where he kills his victims while assuming various shapes and sizes, and obviously enjoys
the sadistic pleasure of creating a nightmare. Krueger is practically omnipotent in his own
world, meaning no escape from him is possible, so the killer is never in a hurry: he taunts
his victims, laughs at them, and puts them in widely diverse horror scenarios before he
murders them.
Wells states that the above mentioned killers' actions appear to be random (2007: 97). I
propose that this randomness is fundamentally in conflict with our sense of reason: there
is no reasoning to be done with Michael, Jason or Freddy. Their actions are meaningless
and lead to nothing, but they will never stop: even destroying them does not help, as they
are apparently killed at the end of all their films, but they keep returning; if not in a final
shock moment where they turn out to be alive after all just before the credits roll, then
certainly in the sequel. They do not just disobey the rules of society, they disobey the
rules of humanity, refusing to have a reason for anything they do and refusing to die
when we attempt to punish them for their disobedience. They are the ultimate disturbance
of order.
Another fear that Wells discusses that is highly relevant for transformation horror is the
fear for other people: most successful horror texts work because the reader or viewer has
a certain commitment to the characters and is afraid of what might happen to them (2007:
15). In the case of animal transformation horror, antagonist and protagonist are frequently
the same: it is often the main character who turns into the monster. So not only do we
have a creature to fear because it breaks the rules of civilisation, we also have the
frightening thought that this creature was once a part of civilisation. When discussing
animal horror, Wells states that this subgenre often prompts “a deeper recognition of the
required consensus and constraint needed to achieve even the most basic level of
civilisation” (2007: 13). Although he does not mention transformation horror in this
context, this seems true for this subgenre more than any other: it is civilised humans
themselves who turn out to be capable of switching to the other side, becoming part of
the primordial world that civilisation tries to suppress and becoming, like Michael, Jason
13
and Freddy, a disturbance of order.
Robin Wood also links the horror genre to repression, distinguishing between basic
repression, which is the repression of our animal instincts and urges necessary to be
civilised, and surplus repression, which is the repression of certain minorities, alternative
opinions and sexual desires by culture (2005: 25). In the case or surplus repression, what
is being repressed is what in psychoanalysis is called “the Other”: that which society
cannot accept and therefore must suppress or destroy (27). Woods claims that central to
the horror genre is the “dramatization of the dual concept of the repressed/Other, in the
figure of the Monster” (2005: 28). In other words, the monster metaphorically represents
that which society suppresses.
Although Noël Carroll does not consider this psychoanalytical approach to be sufficiently
comprehensive of the horror genre (2005: 41), his description of monsters in horror does
remind us of the concept of the Other: he states that part of the reason for people's
fascination with fictional monsters is the fact that, were we to encounter a typical horror
monster in real life, we would not know how to deal with it, as it defies our notions of
what is possible and what is not (40). Carroll does not see the monster as a representation
of the repressed, but he certainly agrees with Wood (2005) and Wells (2007) that part of
the reason that monsters effectively scare people is the fact that they do not 'fit in' our
world.
Andrew Tudor rejects such attempts to explain what is fascinating about monsters in
general, as the monstrous can be made pleasurable in many different ways (2005: 50): it
can be portrayed as subtly frightening, excessively repulsive, or even sympathetic or
humorous. Tudor does however look for certain conventions within different subgenres of
horror, among which he names body horror: a subgenre in which the human body plays a
central role, usually changing shape in realistic (mutilation, disease) or unrealistic
(metamorphoses, destruction by a supernatural force) manners. Transformation horror, of
course, can be categorized as a subgenre of body horror. Tudor (1995) sees body horror
as a specifically postmodern genre, as the presentation of the body as undergoing changes
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can be seen as an expression of the social fragmentation and relativism that characterize
the postmodern age (40). Although he does not use the word metaphor, we can construct
one out of this statement: THE CHANGING INDIVIDUAL IN THE POSTMODERN
WORLD IS A PHYSICALLY CHANGING BODY.
Kim Newman (2011) cites the revolt of nature and the revolt of the machine as two
important themes of the modern horror film. His use of the word 'revolt' suggests that
these things had been suppressed before, and indeed, Newman detects similar metaphors
to the ones Wells described in his discussion of monsters as a representation of the
oppressed. Not referring to metaphor theory or even using the word metaphor, Newman
describes monsters as 'standing in' for something: the rats who often populate animal
horror films are “standing in for all the repressed, filthy, forgotten and despised elements
we have tried to squash from our lives” (2011: 89). Newman points out that in many
animal revolution films, the human victims have themselves to blame for their suffering,
their lack of ecoconciousness having been the cause of an animal's mutation into a
monster (90): their oppression having led to the revolt. In the case of horror films
involving monstrous pets, Newman notes how they “stand in for the failings of mankind”
(2011: 95), their behavior a reflection of the character flaws of their owners.
Werewolf films can be seen as a subgenre within the revolt of nature films, in which the
revolt takes place in the human him/herself. Such films have often been described as
containing the 'beast within' metaphor: the werewolf as a representation of the animal
urges that society requires us to repress (Newman 2011: 362).
Then there are the revolt-of-the-machine films, in which machines, expected to serve
humankind and not have a will of their own, start killing people. Newman interprets them
as a metaphorical representation of the actual battle between humans and machines, or
warnings that this battle will take place if we let technology run out of hand: “[i]f the
revolt of nature sees man jolted by a savage past, the revolt of the machine has him
crushed by a technological future” (2011: 96). Despite this obvious difference between
animal horror and machine horror, both subgenres share the theme of the rise of the
15
suppressed, no longer willing to obey the rules society has made. But where the animals
seem to represent the savage urges humans attempt to annihilate, and are therefore
frightening in their difference from us, the machines often become monstrous when they
do attempt to be human. Newman mentions a number of films in which robots pose as
people and artificial intelligence expresses an urge to be alive (97-98). These monstrous
machines raise the question what it means to be human, and whether the word 'human'
can ever be used for something that is not the offspring of two humans. And, perhaps
more frighteningly: what if the machines take our place? Where animals are threatening
to destroy us because of their savage nature, machines might make us obsolete, by
becoming superior beings. They do not merely disrupt the order, they replace it with their
own, even more orderly society.
What makes all the ideas on the subject of monsters discussed above relevant for the
study of transformation horror, is they all concentrate on the fundamental difference
between the monster and the human. Whatever the monster is, its effectiveness as a
source of fear seems to lie in the fact that it represents what humans are not, or rather,
what humans would not like to see themselves as. This raises important questions about
the image that transformation films offer us of a human turning into a monster: if the
monster is typically something that cannot be human, then what does is mean if a human
becomes a monster?
The transformation horror film: case studies
An American Werewolf in London (John Landis, 1981)
The werewolf film is arguably the most popular transformation subgenre. One of the
most famous examples is An American Werewolf in London. Its title immediately draws
attention to one of the most important subjects of the film: difference. The film feels the
need to emphasize that we are not just watching a werewolf, we are watching in werewolf
in a different country than the one he is from. Indeed, much of the film concentrates on
pointing out that the main character, David Kessler, an American vacationing in England,
16
is confronted with a very different culture than the one he is used to. David gets bitten by
a werewolf in the film's first twenty minutes, but does not transform into one until an
hour into the film (two thirds of its running time); the first hour is largely devoted to
showing a man in the wrong place.
The opening scene shows us a typically English rural landscape, in which a shepherd
arrives with his flock of sheep on a trailer behind his car. Among the sheep, it is revealed,
are American backpackers David and Jack, hitching a ride. The shepherd stops his car,
lets them out and tells them where they are. Clearly, we are looking at two men getting
used to an entirely new environment. This is emphasized even more when they
reluctantly enter the stereotypically English pub 'The Slaughtered Lamb': a pub that only
serves beer and tea, where visitors play darts, and an awkward silence falls the moment
the two tourist step in: they are not used to strangers around here. One visitor calls the
John Wayne film The Alamo (1960) “bloody awful” and loudly tells a joke ridiculing 'the
Yanks', as he calls them, to the amusement of everyone in the pub except for David and
Jack. These first ten minutes make it crystal clear: David and Jack do not belong here.
On their way back from the pub, the two get attacked by a werewolf, who kills Jack and
bites David. This leads to David turning in a werewolf at the next full moon, and going
on a killing spree through London. Waking up the next morning and realizing what he has
done, David attempts to get himself arrested before he changes again. He uses his
established non-British-ness to upset a police officer, insulting British culture: “Queen
Elizabeth is a man! Prince Charles is a faggot! Winston Churchill was full of shit!
Shakespeare was French!” The attempt fails, as the officer considers David a harmless
joker. That night, David transforms again, going on a second rampage through the city,
which starts in London's famous Eros Cinema and climaxes when he causes a typically
English red double decker bus to crash. Eventually, David is shot dead by police officer,
which transforms him back into his human form.
Of course, Carroll (1996) would not consider David's transformation to be metaphorical,
as it is an event that occurs within the reality of the film. Saying that David is a werewolf
17
is not a figurative statement: it is literally true. But what if we assume that the target
domain is not 'David', but an aspect of David's character? As described above, David has
been established as a character who is far from home and trying to get used to an
environment that is strange to him. He is fundamentally different from everyone around
him. Thus, he represents the different. A specific aspect of his character makes him a
representative for everyone who is a stranger in their environment: David serves as a
synecdoche everyone who is 'different'. The metaphor constructed by this is: BEING
DIFFERENT IS BEING A WEREWOLF. David does not fit in with English culture,
insults and destroys parts of it, and is eventually punished for this by the law: the officers
who kill him.
The Howling (Joe Dante, 1982)
The other famous werewolf film of the earlier '80s in The Howling, which presents one of
its central metaphors in the opening scene: we see a psychiatrist being interviewed on a
talk show, stating:
Repression is the father of neurosis. Of self hatred. Now, stress results when we
fight against our impulses. We've all heard people talk about animal magnetism.
The natural man, the noble savage. As if we'd lost something valuable in our long
evolution into civilised human beings. Now, there's a good reason for this. Man is a
combination of the learned and the instinctive. Of the sophisticated and the
primitive. We should never try to deny the beast, the animal within us.
Knowing the subject of the film, this monologue can already lead us to the assumption
that this 'beast within' metaphor, OUR NATURAL IMPULSES ARE AN ANIMAL
WITHIN US, will be literalized in the shape of werewolves.
Indeed, immediately after the scene of the interview, we meet our first werewolf: a rapist
who lurks in an erotic video store and invites a young woman named Karen into a booth.
He makes her watch footage of a girl being raped, telling her that “she doesn't feel
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anything. None of them do. They're not real, the people here, they're dead. The can never
be like me.” He then transforms into a wolf-man and assaults Karen, after which he is
shot dead by police officers hearing her scream. With the context provided by the
psychiatrist's monologue, we can easily construct the metaphor PEOPLE WHO LET
THEIR ANIMAL URGES RUN FREE ARE WEREWOLVES.
After this traumatic experience, Karen visits her therapist, the psychiatrist from the
opening scene, who recommends her and her husband Bill to go with him to the Colony,
a secluded resort in the woods where he sends “very special patients,” describing it as “a
place where you can get back to what you really are.”
A the Colony, people live in rather primitive circumstances: without modern technology,
spending much of their time out in the woods or on the beach, preparing meat on open
fires, making music and dancing. One of them is a nymphomaniac named Marsha, who
seduces Bill and has sex with him in the forest, during which the two both transform into
wolf-people. Notably, unlike in most werewolf stories, the moon does not influence their
werewolfism: it seems to be the result of them behaving 'animalistically'.
In the film's climax, it is revealed that all the patients at the Colony and the therapist
himself are werewolves who can shapeshift at will. The therapist apparently started the
Colony in order to help werewolves accept their 'gift', as he calls it, and is planning to
persuade Karen to join them. He wants werewolves to be able to coexist peacefully with
normal people, controlling their transformations and fitting in with society. An old colony
member disagrees: “You can't tame what's meant to be wild, doc. It ain’t natural.”
Aside from the PEOPLE WHO LET THEIR ANIMAL URGES RUN FREE ARE
WEREWOLVES metaphor being repeated, the way this scene shows werewolves as a
separate community struggling to fit in with society, also conveys that MINORITIES
ARE WEREWOLVES.
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Cat People (Paul Schrader, 1982)
In Cat People, the title characters are members of a race of people who transform into
black leopards when having sex with people who are not part of their race. The only way
to transform back into a human, is to kill a human who is not a cat person. The cat people
are incestuous, as this is the only way they can reproduce.
One of them is Irena Gallier, a young woman who lives in New Orleans, and who has
never known her family and is unaware that she is a cat person at the beginning of the
film. Her brother Paul tracks her down to tell her about her heritage, and to explain to her
that he is her only possible sexual companion: having sex with anyone else would lead to
a disaster. Irena refuses to accept this fate and begins a relationship with zoologist Oliver,
keeping her cat identity a secret from him and not consummating their love out of fear of
what might happen. Eventually, however, she can no longer contain herself: she has sex
with Oliver and transforms into a leopard. She then flees, not killing Oliver, as even in
her leopard shape, she feels love for him. Irena ends up at a secluded lakehouse, where
she kills a caretaker to regain human form. Olivers manages to track her down, and she
asks him to kill her, devastated by the realisation they can never have a functional
relationship. When Oliver refuses to kill her, Irena answers: “Then free me. Make love to
me again. I want to live with my own.” Oliver ties Irena to a bed and has sex with her. In
the following scene, the closing scene of the film, Oliver is seen working at the zoo and
romantically involved with another woman. When his new lover asks him if he wants to
have lunch, he answers: “not right now,” and walks off to a cage containing a black
leopard. He hand feeds and strokes the leopard, which it allows, after which it growls at
him. The implication is, of course, that this leopard is Irena, who will now remain a caged
leopard for the rest of her life.
The fact that Irena's transformation is the result of her giving in to her sexual urges
conveys the metaphor OUR NATURAL IMPULSES ARE AN ANIMAL WITHIN US
that is also present in The Howling. Irena knows that having sex with Oliver is dangerous,
20
but she cannot contain herself: the inner beast comes out.
There is another striking similarity between The Howling and Cat People: as those in The
Howling, the shapeshifters in Cat People are shown as a minority that seems unable to
exist in normal society. They can only reproduce amongst themselves, and will cause
harm if they have sexual relationships with people who are not one of them: they must
live in their own small society, away from everyone else. Irena attempts to fit in with
society by having a relationship with Oliver, but is doomed to fail. The idea of Irena as a
character who does not belong in the environment she lives in is also strongly present in a
sequence where she dreams that she is in the place where the cat people are originally
from: a savannah occupied by black leopards, where her brother Paul awaits her, saying:
“Welcome home.” This is Irena's real home, and no matter how hard she tries to live a
normal life in New Orleans, she will not succeed: she will always be the Other.
Eventually, Oliver finds a way for her to exist in conventional society without being a
threat to it, by keeping her locked up. He represents a society that allows minorities to
exist, but only at a safe distance from the rest of the world. The film thus gives a rather
bleak view of minorities struggling but failing to fit in with society, and only being
allowed an existence without freedom: MINORITIES ARE CAT PEOPLE.
Teen Wolf (Rob Daniel, 1985)
Several werewolf metaphors can be found in Teen Wolf, in which unpopular teenager
Scott Howard is a rather uncharacteristic werewolf: his transformation is not one into a
savage creature, but into a hairier version of himself with superhuman strength and
dexterity, who has essentially the same personality as his 'normal' self. The
transformations are not caused by the full moon, as in most werewolf movies, but occur
when he is in stressful situations, until he manages to control them and turns into a wolfteenager whenever he wants to. Finally, his werewolfism is not caused by an attack by
another werewolf, but inherited from his parents. It is not an unnatural force of evil, but a
natural part of his development, which starts when he is in his teens. All this makes it
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easy to detect the metaphor PUBERTY IS WEREWOLFISM: Scott becomes hairy, his
voice gets lower and he finds it difficult to deal with these bodily changes, initially being
ashamed of them. When he tells his basketball coach that he is considering quitting the
team because he is 'going through changes', the coach interprets this as meaning Scott is
going through puberty and tells him everybody has this experience. Only after having a
conversation with his father, who shows him his own hairy wolf-face, does Scott become
more comfortable with his new identity.
Then the metaphoric message of the film seems to change to the BEING DIFFERENT IS
BEING A WEREWOLF metaphor also found in An American Werewolf in London, albeit
in a more positive way. When helping him come to terms with his condition, Scott's
father tells him that despite society's prejudices, “Werewolves are people too,” describing
them as a discriminated minority. The idea is emphasized when Scott wants to tell his
friend Styles that he is a werewolf, and Styles replies to Scott's statement that he has
something important to say: “You're not gonna tell me you're a fag, are you? 'Cause if
you're gonna tell me you're a fag, I don't think I can handle it.” The idea of werewolves as
a discriminated minority is perhaps expressed strongest when a bully, aware of Scott's
werewolfism, calls him a freak and tells him: “I've dealt with your kind before. Your
mommy used to steal chickens from the backyard. Until I blew her head off with a
shotgun.”
But despite society's fear and hatred of monsters, most people react positively to Scott's
werewolfism when they discover it has its advantages: in his wolf-shape, Scott becomes
an excellent basketball player and dancer, and helps his friend find a lost bag of
marijuana with his superior sense of smell. He decides no longer to hide his condition,
instead walking around proudly as a wolf-teenager almost permanently, and quickly
becomes the most popular boy in school. Finally, however, he decides that wolf-Scott is
an alter ego that should not take over his life. He helps his basketball team win a game in
fully human shape, and from that point on, does not transform again. His love interest
likes fully human Scott better than wolf-Scott, and the two get a relationship. Although
Scott's werewolfism gave him the confidence required to excel at basketball and get the
22
girl he is in love with, it is now time to leave that part of him behind. The PUBERTY IS
WEREWOLFISM metaphor has returned: Scott's werewolfism was a period of change
that helped him grow and turn from a boy into a man.
Society (Brian Yuzna, 1989)
Society is an entirely different type of transformation film. Billy Warlock feels that he
does not fit in with his upper class family. He is a regular, down to earth teenager with
lower class friends of whom his parents do not approve. His parents and sister, always
dressed as if attending a dinner party and often accompanied by light classical music on
the soundtrack, are a clear parody of the upper class. They keep telling Billy that he will
one day “make a great contribution to society,” an opinion repeated by Billy's
psychologist.
As in the films mentioned above, we are shown someone who is notably different from
his social environment. However, it is not Billy who turns out to be the monster. In the
film's climax, Billy discovers that he was adopted, and his 'parents' belong to an ancient
secret organization called Society. Members of Society are capable of transforming into
many different shapes: we see Billy's mother as an armless torso with a man's arms for
legs, and his father as a body consisting of two legs and a pair of buttocks with a face
where the anus would be. Billy suspects the Society members are aliens, but this is
denied. The film never reveals what exactly Society is, but it is implied that they
practically the entire upper class belongs to it. All the members are high society
socialites, their leader is a judge. “You were never one of us,” Billy's adoptive father tells
him. “You have to be born into Society.” “It's a matter of good breeding, really,” the
judge explains further. Later, a certain member is described as a descendant of Julius
Caesar and Genghis Kahn. Apparently, the upper class, through inbreeding, has
developed superhuman powers.
When Billy's adoptive parents told him he would make a great contribution to society, of
course, they meant Society. The 'great contribution' they had planned was for Billy to be
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devoured by the Society members, as this is what they do to the lower class. First, they
take Billy's friend David: they strip him naked and start sucking on his flesh, growing
long snouts during the process. This transforms David into a giant blob and eventually
melts him. The Society members suck him up and rub themselves in his liquid remains
while enjoying cigars and champagne. As Billy watches in horror, one member addresses
him: “Didn't you know, Billy boy? The rich have always sucked off low class shit like
you.”
This comment is literally true in the film, but most viewers will probably understand its
metaphorical meaning: 'sucking off someone' is, after all, a common expression meaning
'exploiting someone.' The message is obvious: the rich exploit the poor.
Society shows the upper class as shapeshifting parasitic monsters. Again, Carroll would
not detect a metaphor in this representation, as it is the literal truth in the film's narrative.
But Society has a clear political message: it is not just about Society, it is about society.
Its claim is that the actual upper class are figuratively like the creatures it shows us: that
THE UPPER CLASS ARE PARASITIC MONSTERS.
Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola, 1992)
In Dracula, the transformations experienced by the title character refer more to Dracula
himself than to anything outside the film's context. The vampire seduces a promiscuous
young girl by hypnotizing her, and takes the shape of a werewolf-like monster while
having sex with her. There seems to be no narrative reason for this shapeshifting, as it is
never referred to before or after the event. Its main purpose seems to be to show the
viewer that Dracula, despite having the appearance of a sophisticated and polite
gentleman, is actually a savage beast. The fact that this is literally true and that the scene,
unlike the transformation sequences discussed above, does not metaphorically refer to
any concept outside the film's narrative, makes it tempting to agree with Carroll (1996)
that this is not a metaphor. However, the fact that the transformation has no narrative
purpose and only exists to tell the audience something about the character makes it
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possible to detect the metaphor DRACULA IS A SAVAGE BEAST.
In another scene, the vampire escapes his hunters by changing into a group of rats and
fleeing a room where they had cornered him. This scene does have a narrative purpose,
but the fact that specifically rats where chosen as Dracula's escape-method-animal cannot
be a coincidence. Rats are perceived as filthy, vile, and difficult to catch and exterminate;
all things that we know about Dracula.
One of the vampire hunters, an upper class woman, screams “unclean!” as the rats run
past her feet. A strange comment to make when one is hunting for a demonic, murderous
monster; there are worse things to worry about than rats being dirty. But the statement
reinforces the idea that Dracula is unclean, not just in his rat form, but in his human form
as well: DRACULA IS A RAT.
Although it is tempting to detect metaphors in transformations, not all transformation
horror films aim to convey a figurative message. Let us discuss some examples where
metaphors are probably not present.
From Beyond (Stuart Gordon, 1986)
There are two people experiencing transformations in From Beyond: Crawford
Tillinghast, a scientist whose pineal gland grows after an experiment, enabling him to see
creatures from another dimension; and Edward Pretorius, a scientist who, in the same
experiment, in dragged to this dimension and returns with the possibility to change shape
whenever and however he pleases. “It's just the body,” he says, peeling of his face to
reveal another, monstrous face underneath, “but my mind is indivisible. Bodies change...”
When Crawford asks him: “Edward, my God, what have you become?”, he replies:
“Myself.” Having gained complete control over his physical shape, Edward feels he can
now finally be who he is. Although he takes many different form throughout the film,
none of them seem to convey a metaphor; he never changes into a shape that resembles a
real life object enough for us to say: EDWARD IS (…), and the film does not tell us
25
enough about his character to say he represents a certain character trait or a certain group
of people. From Beyond certainly has something to say about the mind and the body, but
does not do so in a metaphorical manner.
Other transformation films
The same can be said for most of the many transformations of Freddy Krueger, the
boogieman from the seven A Nightmare on Elm Street films (1984, 1985, 1987, 1988,
1989, 1991, 1994). Krueger attacks his victims in their dreams, of which he has complete
control, meaning he can take any shape he pleases. In the first film of the series, he makes
his arm grow twice its size for apparently no other purpose than to scare a potential
victim. In A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors (Chuck Russell, 1987), he
turns into an attractive nurse in order to seduce a teenager before killing him, and later,
into a giant snake when fighting the film's heroes. The snake transformation may be
interpreted metaphorically: like a snake, Krueger is dangerous and predatory. But other
than that rather simple metaphor, Krueger's transformations seem to exist for the purpose
of being scary, and nothing else.
Simpler transformations are found in The Evil Dead (Sam Raimi, 1981) and The Evil
Dead 2 (Sam Raimi, 1987), in which people become possessed by demons and turn into
humanoid monsters with glowing eyes, blue faces and bright green blood, and The Night
of the Creeps (Fred Dekker, 1986), in which alien slugs infect people's brains, turning
them into pale, yellow eyed ghouls. The transformations do not seem to want to tell us
anything about the characters and what they represent, but exist only to provide the films
with threatening villains.
Metaphors in transformation horror: concluding remarks
Many transformation horror films do not seem to convey metaphors with their
transformations, but in the ones that do, there are certain patterns: many of them seem to
be about difference. The shapeshifters often represent those who do not fit in: minorities,
26
unpopular teenagers and people trying but failing to fit into society. Society is a striking
exception to this rule: it is the only transformation film I have come across where it is the
elite who are the shapeshifting monsters, and those who do not fit in with society are the
normal people.
Thus, the structural metaphor repeatedly expressed, in several modes, in many
transformation horror films is THE OTHER IS A MONSTER.
This metaphor, which is especially common in werewolf films, is an interesting case, as
in the instances of this metaphor being conveyed that I have discussed, the target domain
– THE OTHER – is never specifically presented. The films show people transforming
into monsters, and it is up to the viewer to figure out what these people may represent.
This gives the viewer more freedom than a metaphor in which both target and source
domain are explicitly shown. For example, we are not forced to see David in An
American Werewolf in London as a representation of everyone who is different from their
social environment, as the film never clearly states that this is what he is. However, the
many instances in which he is shown not to fit in with his environment certainly suggest
that this aspect of his character is what we should focus on when searching for a
metaphorical interpretation of his transformation into a creature that attacks this
environment.
Forceville's (2006) claim that in most visual metaphors that only show us one domain, it
is the target domain that is shown and the source domain that has to be supplied by the
viewer is probably applicable to most monomodal visual metaphors (136). But in the
structural metaphor THE OTHER IS A MONSTER expressed multimodally throughout
the discussed transformation films, I would argue that the exact opposite is the case: the
source domain, A MONSTER, is clearly presented to the viewer. In order to perceive the
metaphor, the viewer has to examine the context in which the monster appears, to
understand that it represents the Other. The metaphor becomes clear because the films
repeatedly show us the shapeshifters, in their human form, in situations where they do not
fit in with their environment and are considered 'different'.
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CHAPTER 3. CRONENBERG
David Cronenberg has made five films that can be characterized as transformation horror
as defined in chapter 2: Rabid (1977), The Brood (1979), Videodrome (1983), The Fly
(1986) and eXistenZ (1999). I will discuss them, compare them to the transformation
films discussed in chapter 2, and point out those metaphorical meanings that they have in
common and those that make Cronenberg's work unique in the genre.
Rabid (1977)
In Rabid, a young woman named Rose is given a plastic surgery treatment after suffering
a motor cycle accident. Skin tissue is taken from her thigh and grafted onto damaged
parts of the body, using a new method invented by Rose’s surgeon, Dr. Keloid. The skin
is first morphogenetically neutralized, meaning it loses its specificity as thigh skin, and
when placed on another part of the body, differentiates and replaces the damaged skin.
The operation has a side effect: Rose grows an orifice that resembles a vagina near her
armpit, from which a “stinger” can emerge that closely resembles an erect penis. She uses
this stinger to attack people and consume their blood, which she now needs to survive.
Her victims then become infected with a virus that seems to be related to rabies, turning
them into zombie-like people who spread the virus by biting others. Soon, the city of
Montreal is overrun by the infected, who are beyond medical help.
Upon discovering that she might be responsible for the spread of the virus, Rose
effectively kills herself by attacking a man, then waiting until he becomes infected and
letting him bite her.
Rabid has many features of the conventional transformation film: someone transforms
into a dangerous creature that disrupts the order, not only because she kills people and
spreads a virus, but also because she is a woman with a phallus, making her a
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transgressive minority. Newman (2011) points out the many small scenes of uneventful
occurrences in the film: social conversations between hospital staff, the details we learn
about the lives. These conversations suggest “a fragile, normal world” that is threatened
by Rose’s transgression (159). Also in accordance with the transformation horror
conventions, Rose does not intend any harm, and when she realizes what she has done,
effectively decides to kill herself.
There is, however, an important difference between Rabid and the similar films discussed
in chapter 2: Rose's transformation is not the result of a mythical supernatural cause, but
of medical innovations. Dr. Keloid, the first cause of all the violence and chaos that
disrupt the order in the film, was actually doing exactly what society expects and wants
of him: prolonging life.
Jonathan Crane compares him to Dr. Frankenstein, stating Keloid considers life to be
flawed as death takes it too easily, and attempts to defeat death (2000: 55). But surely, to
prolong life and increase health is the purpose of any surgeon. Keloid is not a mad
scientist who raises the dead or creates life out of lifeless objects. He is not playing god.
He is merely practicing his profession. His methods of helping Rose are fictional, but
they are not the type of controversial science fiction practiced by Frankenstein. In the
scene in which he is introduced, he even points out that he does not want to be seen as the
“Colonel Sanders [the founder and mascott of the Kentucky Fried Chicken fast food
chain- JK] of plastic surgery”; he is a respectable member of society. His purpose is not
to disturb the order, but to restore it: Rose’s body has been ruined, and Keloid attempts to
recreate what it used to be and what it should be. In fact, as Scott Wilson points out, as a
plastic surgeon, Keloid is partially responsible for society’s notions of body image (2011:
53). Thus, the first cause of the disturbance of the order is someone who is meant to
represent, create and keep the order. Society unwittingly creates its own deviants. Keloid
can thus be said to serve as a metonym for society: he stands in for society, because he, as
a respected doctor, is associated with it.
So, society unintentionally creates its monsters to disturb the order it imposes. This is one
aspect in which Rabid seems to be very different from the average transformation film, in
29
which the cause of the transformation is more primitive and primordial: in The Howling
and Dracula, shapeshifting into a monster is the result of animalistic sexual urges; in An
American Werewolf in London, it is the result of a curse believed in by the simple rural
folk who practice pagan rituals to keep the werewolves at bay; in Teen Wolf and Cat
People, it is a condition that has run in the family for an unknown amount of time. The
causes of these transformations seem to predate society; in Rabid, the transformation is
the direct cause of society.
More precisely, it is the cause of patriarchal society: in the begin of the film, Rose is a
completely passive character, and everything that happens to her is the cause of men
controlling her body and her life (Wilson 2011: 54). It is her boyfriend Hart who gets her
into a coma, by crashing with his motorcycle with her on the backseat. She then remains
unconscious as Dr. Keloid decides to restore her body. Then, we find her naked in a
hospital bed, breasts uncovered, being looked at by a male fellow patient. Rose has not
said a single word yet at this point in the film: she is a voiceless woman, merely a body
for men to change and observe. When she wakes up, she speaks her first words, telling
the man who is looking at her to hold her, because she is cold. This would seem to be the
confused ramblings of someone who has just woken up from a coma in a strange place,
but the man obliges to hold her in his arms. He immediately gets stung by Rose’s stinger,
which so closely resembles an erect penis that it is virtually impossible not to spot a
metaphor in this situation; especially as she uses it to penetrate a man in a sexually laden
context. In the words of Wells (2007), Rose’s transformation is a “usurpation of the
phallic” (90). After having been controlled by men, she strikes back, using a phallic
weapon: ROSE'S STINGER IS AN ERECT PENIS.
This idea is confirmed during her second attack: having realized that she needs to
consume blood to survive, Rose flees the hospital and breaks into a stable, where she
attempts and fails to gain nourishment by stinging cows. The owner of the stable, a
drunken farmer, comes in and discovers her. He is a caricature of a misogynist, sexually
aggressive male: without wondering for a second what this young woman is doing in his
stable, he decides to rape her. Rose, of course, immediately stings him: she punishes the
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aggressively dominant male with his own weapon.
Most of Rose’s victims are men, and all her attacks on men are sexually charged: after
stinging the fellow patient, the rapist farmer and Dr. Keloid, Rose hunts for blood by
letting men try to seduce her. This is a very simple process: she sits down in a public
place where she expects to find willing men (such as a pornographic cinema and a
shopping mall) and waits for one to sit next to her, which always happens. The man then
starts making his intentions clear, as Rose first remains a passive woman, agreeing with
the male taking the dominant position, then attacking when the opportunity presents
itself. She lures men by assuming the role of the passive female, then suddenly takes the
dominant role by penetrating them, reversing the traditional gender roles.
Two of Rose’s seven victims are women, and Rose’s treatment of her female victims is
very different than her treatment of her male victims: the first is a fellow patient called
Judy, whom she visits in the hospital after the stable incident. In Judy’s introduction
scene, it is made clear that she is in the hospital to have her nose altered, on the insistence
of her father: “I keep on saying it looks exactly like his, and he says: ‘That’s why I want
you to change it’.” Judy is a passive woman, allowing herself to be led by patriarchal
society’s rules concerning body image. She is apparently considered to look too male,
having a nose that looks like her father’s. Rose, of course, has a similar problem,
possessing a phallus. In the scene where she attacks Judy, Rose takes the traditionally
male position: Judy is relaxing in the hospital’s hot tub, and Rose steps in and grabs her,
despite Judy’s resistance. Where Rose has been presented as a lust object in previous
scenes, being shown in a hospital bed with her breasts exposed, this time, it is Judy who
is sexualized, wearing a small bikini, while Rose keeps on her dress during the attack. As
William Beard (2006) puts it, Rose is “the ‘male’ in this coupling” (55). Another clear
metaphor: ROSE, USING HER PHALLIC STINGER, IS A SEXUALLY AGRESSIVE
MAN.
The only non-sexual attack is the penultimate one, on Rose’s best friend Mindy. This is
also the only attack where Rose tries to fight her blood thirst, but unsuccessfully: Mindy
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embraces her friend in an attempt to comfort her, and gets stung. Her boyfriend Hart finds
her kneeled over Mindy’s corpse, and realizes that Rose is the cause of the virus that has
overrun the city. Rose, only now starting to understand the consequences of her actions,
seduces one last male victim, stings him, and stays with him as he becomes infected; she
is committing suicide through a man.
To summarize: what Rabid shows us is a passive woman being turned into a monster by
patriarchal society. She adopts one of the symbols of patriarchal society as her weapon,
and starts behaving sexually aggressive. She eventually realizes that she is a monster, and
destroys herself, using a man. Rabid shares some of the conventions of the traditional
transformation film – the monster and the hero being the same, the association between
shapeshifting and sexual urges, the monster representing a repressed minority – but
differs from the norm by having the monster adopt the weapon of the society it revolts
against.
The Brood (1979)
The transformation central to the plot of The Brood is not revealed until the very end of
the film: one of the characters, Nola Carveth, is shown to have grown an exterior womb,
attached to her body, from which small humanoid creatures – the Brood from the title –
are born. These creatures attack people that Nola is angry at, often without her
knowledge. They are the physical manifestation of her rage. The womb can thus be seen
as a metaphorical source domain for an outlet for anger.
The existence of the womb is the result of a controversial new type of therapy called
psychoplasmics, practiced by the psychiatrist Dr. Hal Raglan, which leads to patients'
bodies transforming as a result of their traumatic memories and emotions being let out. A
relatively subtle example is shown in the film's opening scene, where we see a patient
with red marks all over his body as a result of his memories about his abusive father.
Emotions being metaphorically represented as physicalabnormalities are common in
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visual media: we are all familiar with characters in cartoons steaming with anger, or
having their eyes pop out of their sockets in surprise. Usually, these alterations to the
body have no real impact on the narrative; they simply exist to show us that a character is
angry. In The Brood, however, the physical representations of emotions are literal, and the
characters' experience of them is what drives the plot. Furthermore, unlike most
'emotions as physical abnormalities' metaphors, the bodily changes in The Brood actually
invite us to look at anger in a different light: ANGER IS A RASH ON THE BODY and
ANGER IS A WOMB GIVING BIRTH TO MONSTERS. The specific features of these
monsters tell us even more about them as a metaphorical representation of anger: a doctor
examining one of the dead bodies comments that, due to the nature of the creature's eyes,
he assumes it only sees in black and white: a reflection of the manner in which people
controlled by anger tend to view the world in terms of clear right and wrong. This is
certainly true for Nola, whose anger is a force of punishment without the possibility of
forgiveness. The fact that the creatures kill without Nola being aware can be seen as a
representation of the lack of rationality with which people controlled by anger are known
to act.
Dr. Raglan's insitute, the cause of the bodily mutations experienced by the characters, is
called the Somafree Insitute of Psychoplasmics. 'Soma' is the Greek for 'body', but the
exact meaning of the word 'somafree' remains unclear: does it refer to freedom of the
body or freedom from the body (Wilson 2011: 154)? Both interpretations are possible: the
dwarves given birth to by Nola represent her emotions while separate from her body. Her
emotions escape her body. At the same time, the patient's bodies are being given the
freedom to change in ways that seem impossible.
Like the transformation films I have discussed in chapter 2, The Brood deals with
physical mutation as an expression of something repressed. However, in this case, we are
not dealing with the repression of a minority, but with the repression of emotions. In this
sense, The Brood seems related to the animal transformation subgenre, where primal
urges and feelings are physicalized in the shape of savage beasts. But unlike those films,
The Brood does not see anyone change into another creature: like in Rabid, characters are
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given new physical attributes while still being recognizable as humans.
The concept of revolution discussed in chapter 2 is certainly present in The Brood. As
one of Dr Raglan's patients says: “Raglan encouraged my body to revolt against me. And
it did. Now I have a small revolution on my hands, and I'm not putting it down very
successfully.”
Anger has been repressed and is now revolting in the shape of a mutation of the body.
What was the cause of this anger? In all the cases of psychoplasmatics at work that we
are shown in The Brood, it is society. The first patient we meet is a man named Mike,
who is shown in a role playing game with Dr. Raglan in the opening scene. Dr. Raglan is
playing Mike's father, who considers him weak and calls him a girl. Mike starts crying,
shouts that he hates his father and tears open his shirt, to reveal the red boils that are the
physicalisation of this emotion. Mike did not meet society's expectations of what it means
to be male, and is told so by an archetypical authority figure: his father. The next person
towards whom anger is directed in a psychoplasmatic therapy session is Nola's mother
Juliana, who Nola claims beat her when she was a child. Juliana becomes the first victim
of the Brood, for being, as Nola describes her, “a bad, fucked up mommy.” The second
victim is Nola's father, who Nola feels should have protected her against her mother's
abuse. The third victim is Ruth, the kindergarten teacher of Nola's daughter Candice, who
has become a mother figure to Candice, which Nola fears will destroy her family.
All the victims of the Brood and the first person to be the receiver of anger in The Brood
are authority figures: three parents and one teacher and mother figure. As with most
transformation films, the case can thus be made that those mutating are revolting against
society. And as in Rabid, it seems that the direct cause of the mutation is also a
representative of society: Dr. Raglan, a medical man who is introduced as playing the part
of a strict, authoritative father. With the control psychoplasmics has over the bodies of
patients, it “stands in for a series of extra-filmic authoritative discourses” (Wilson 2011:
159). Like Rabid's Dr. Keloid, as a plastic surgeon, is responsible for society's image of
the human body, Dr. Raglan, as a psychiatrist, is responsible for ideas about what
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constitutes 'sane' and 'insane' behavior. He creates the order, but, by doing so,
inadvertently creates those who disrupt it.
But the issue here is more complex than in Rabid. Although Nola's anger is directed
towards representatives of the existing order, it is caused by those people failing to do
what society expects of them. Her mother was abusive and her father fails to effectively
play his role as a father by protecting his daughter: the “institution of masculine power
appears to be in crisis” (Beard 2006: 81). Ruth, the teacher, threatens the order of Nola's
family by becoming like a mother to Nola’s daughter. These three victims of the Brood
are punished for disrupting the order that Nola feels should be present.
In the film's climax, it comes down to Nola's husband Frank to restore the order: he
attempts to convince Nola that he wants to form a functional family with her, to get her
calm so that the Brood will cease to be violent. He fails, as she sees through his attempt,
and rightly suspects him of wanting to take Candice away from her. The Brood turn
violent and attack Dr. Raglan, and Frank only manages to destroy the Brood by strangling
Nola.
The Brood has some similarities to the previously discussed The Howling: patients of a
psychiatrist are given the opportunity to express their emotions by physically mutating.
But in The Howling, the mutants form a community that revolts against the rules of
society; in The Brood, Nola's anger is caused by people not effectively following those
rules: not being a good mother, not being a good father, threatening to disband a family
and, in the case of Frank, not being a good husband. Nola appears to be the only
representative of the order who lives up to society's expectations of her as a mother: when
she gives birth to one of her anger children, she licks it clean, a disgusting but
archetypically maternal act.
Nola represents the order of society in its most extreme form, turning violent in order to
keep thing the way society dictates they ought to be: “I'd kill Candice before I'd let you
take her away from me,” she shouts at Frank. Fathers need to be strong, mothers need to
35
be caring and children need to grow up in a functional family; if this does not happen,
there will be chaos.
So like in Rabid, we see a representative of society create a monster that revolts against
society- but this time, the reason for the revolution is that society does not live up to the
monster's expectations. The purpose of the monster is not to disrupt, but to restore the
order.
Videodrome (1983)
The transformer in Videodrome is Max Renn, president of CIVIC-TV, a television
channel that, as another character puts it, “offers everything from soft-core pornography
to hardcore violence”. In his quest for a show that will provide him with a wider
audience, Max comes across Videodrome, a mysterious, plotless show that only shows
scenes of torture and murder. Max becomes fascinated with Videodrome, and as he
watches more and more of it, starts vividly hallucinating.
He eventually discovers that Videodrome was the creation of Professor Brian O'Blivion, a
self proclaimed media prophet who sees it as “the next step in the evolution of man as a
technological animal.” O'Blivion, in a monologue he delivers on videotape -his preferred
method of communication- claims that “the television screen is the retina of the mind's
eye.” The retina, of course, functions like a screen to the brain, and to those who watch
television, the TV-screen can be seen as an extension of the body. This statement can be
interpreted metaphorically, but for O'Blivion, it holds literal truth: he claims that which is
viewed on television “emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore,
television is reality and reality is less than television.” It is never made clear what exactly
Videodrome does, but its purpose seems to be to blur the lines between reality and
television: to make them one and the same. The Videodrome signal causes a brain tumor,
which gives its carrier hallucinations that are indistinguishable from reality.
Professor Brain O'Blivion, Max finds out, has been murdered by Videodrome's other
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creators, who aimed to use it for more malicious purposes. Videodrome's current
producer, Barry Convex, has exposed Max to the show in order to gain control over him
and get him to broadcast the show, so that Convex' company Spectacular Company can
win “the battle for the mind of North-America” by influencing the show's viewers.
Videodrome has, in a way that is never fully explained, given Max a vertical slit on his
torso. When he first discovers this, it may be seen as a hallucination, but this assumption
is proven wrong when Convex shoves a videotape into the slit, after which Max is
completely under his influence. He kills his partners at CIVIC-TV, so that he can give the
channel to Spectacular Optical. Finally, Professor O'Blivion's daughter Bianca manages
to reprogram Max, and he kills Convex. In the film's closing scene, Bianca appears
before Max on a television and tells him that, in order to completely defeat Videodrome,
he has to “leave the old flesh.” The TV then shows the image of Max uttering the words
“long live the new flesh” and shooting himself in the head, an action which Max repeats.
The familiar subversion theme is certainly present in Videodrome: “In Central America,
making underground videos is a subversive act,” Max tells his friend Nicki. He is
referring tot subversion against the government, but as Bukatman points out, Videodrome
subverts more than that: “experience, reality, and the very existence of the subject”
(1998: 89).
When viewing an erotic show that his channel has been offered, Max complains that it is
“too soft”: he is looking for something that will “break through.” Videodome, of course,
breaks through in ways he could not have imagined: it breaks through the very
boundaries of reality. By giving inanimate objects like videotapes and television sets
qualities of living beings, the film “overrides the fundamental division between the living
and the non-living” (Grant 2000: 6).
The order that is disrupted here is not an authoritative discourse, social norms and values
or laws, but physical reality as we experience it. We never get a clear answer to the
question how 'real' Max's transformations are. Is he hallucinating, and are we subjectively
37
seeing the film through his eyes? And if he is, would that make any of the things that
happen to him less 'real'? After all, he is experiencing the world as it is presented to him
by television, which O'Blivion claims is 'more than reality'. The film intentionally
presents Max's hallucinations in the same filmic language as it shows us the objective
reality of the film, leaving us to conclude that O'Blivion is right: there is no difference
between reality and television (Wilson 2011: 190).
Even in the scenes in which Max does not hallucinate, this point seems to be made: the
first time we meet Nicki, she and Max are guests on a talk show to discuss the social
impact of CIVIC-TV. Before the recording has started, we see Max, turning to an unseen
person sitting next to him asking: “You get nervous?” The camera then pans to reveal
Nicki, but not as she is seated next to Max: we see her on a monitor in front of Max. For
our understanding of the situation in terms of narrative, this is irrelevant: we understand
that Nicki is next to Max, and that we see her on a television screen because there are
monitors in a television studio. This seems to be exactly the point of this unusual way of
introducing the character: it does not matter if we see someone on television or in 'real
life': what we experience is equally real. “Better on TV than on the streets,” Max says
about the violence in Videodrome. But there is effectively no difference.
Bianca O'Blivion runs an institute where derelicts are helped to return to society by
getting to watch TV: “It helps patch them back into the world's mixing board,” she
explains. When Max wants to speak to Professor O'Blivion personally, Bianca lets him
into a room full of videotapes: recorded monologues that are all that is left of the
deceased professor. “He was convinced that public life on television was more real than
private life in the flesh,” Bianca says, “He wasn't afraid to let his body die.” Although the
professor's body has died, Bianca still considers him a living person, as his image can still
be seen and his voice can still be heard.
According to Beard, Videodrome thematizes media as an “intrusive and identitythreatening force” (124). As he points out, the choice of the creators of Videodrome to
use Max as their assassin seems to be quite arbitrary: “it could have been any of us
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postmodern transformed subjects in a cultural environment where we are destined to
function as 'terminals'” (127). Max is thus as synecdoche for the television audience in
general, and Videodrome for television in general. Max is certainly characterized as
someone whose life is controlled by television, even before he sees Videodrome: in the
opening scene, the first image we see is of a television screen that delivers Max his wake
up message. His reality is largely determined by television, as is that, the film seems to
say, of many other TV viewers. “The battle for the mind of North-America,” says
Professor O'Blivion, “will be fought in the video drome.” He does not mean the specific
show Videodrome, but television in general: television disrupts reality and fights for
control of our mind.
This idea is literalized when we see Max getting a videotape shoved into the slit in his
torso. There is an easily detectable metaphor: MAX IS A TAPE RECORDER. He is
'playing' Videodrome's message by obeying Spectacular Optical's demands and killing his
partners. Again, this seems to refer not just to Max specifically, but to comment on the
way television 'programs' its viewers: “image addiction reduces the subject to the status
of a videotape player/recorder” (Bukatman 1998: 89). It is not just Max who is a tape
recorder: TELEVISION VIEWERS ARE TAPE RECORDERS. And of course,
VIDEODROME IS TELEVISION.
Most transformation films seem to use the 'beast within' metaphor to at least some extent:
it is a common trope in werewolf films, and even in The Brood, the transformations are
an expression of what is inside the mutant. In Videodrome, however, the force that
transforms the body is explicitly from outside. It is television taking over the body,
making the human being nothing more than a recorder and broadcaster of television's
message, unable to distinguish between video and reality. As Nicki tells Max in the film's
closing scene: “You are the video word made flesh.”
The Fly (1986)
In The Fly, scientist Seth Brundle has developed a teleportation machine consisting of
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two telepods. Anything placed inside one will be decomposed and recomposed in the
other. Brundle successfully teleports himself, but fails to notice a fly that has gotten into
the telepod with him. The computer fuses their DNA, so that Brundle emerges as
Brundlefly: a hybrid between himself and a fly.
At first, the effect is hardly noticeable: Brundle misinterprets his sudden hyperactivism
and confidence as the purging effect of being teleported, which he considers a cleansing
experience, “like coffee going through a filter.” However, he soon begins to physically
transform: his physical strength increases to superhuman levels, but his flesh begins to rot
and fall off. Brundle becomes fascinated with his own transformation, sometimes
considering it a horrible disease, sometimes a welcome change.
His girlfriend Ronnie discovers that she is pregnant with Brundle's child, and, fearing that
it will be the same type of creature Brundle has become, wants an abortion. Brundle, now
a virtually unrecognizable monster, demands he and Ronnie go into a telepod to emerge
as one being consisting of him, her and their child. Ronnie's ex boyfriend Stathis manages
to stop this from happening: as Brundlefly is about to teleport himself and Ronnie, Stathis
shoots him through the telepod door. Ronnie is freed, but Brundlefly cannot escape
before the teleportation process has begun, and eventually emerges as a combination of
Brundle, the fly and the destroyed telepod. No longer able to speak, he points the gun
Ronnie is holding to his own head and Ronnie shoots him.
The 'beast within' metaphor can be found in The Fly, when Brundle points out that
“insects don't have politics. They're very brutal,” and considers himself to be “an insect
who dreamt he was a man, and loved it. But now the dream is over. And the insect is
awake:” He claims that he is only now reaching his full potential. By transforming, he
has awakened a primitive, amoral animal that he seems to think was already a part of
him. The metaphor is visually literalized when, in the film's finale, all of Brundle's rotting
flesh falls away to reveal the flycreature underneath: the first time Brundle actually looks
more like a fly than like a human: “the inner fly emerges” (Newman 2011: 163).
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However, Brundle's image of himself as a man who has been able to free the inner animal
seems mainly based on his early misinterpretation of his transformation. In fact, he is not
letting out something that was always inside of him: Brundlefly is something entirely
new. “Something that never existed before,” as Brundle later calls himself. He keeps parts
of his body that have fallen off in his medicine cabinet, which he calls The Brundle
Museum of Natural History: “Artifacts of a bygone area. Of historical interest only.”
The telepods are obviously shaped like giant eggs. As Brundle emerges from one of them,
naked and bathinh in white light, it is hard not to see this image as one of metaphorical
birth. Brundle has effectively disappeared and made place for a new creature: Brundlefly.
TRANSFORMATION IS REBIRTH.
Unlike in most animal transformation films, no return is possible from this point: most
shapeshifters can turn back into humans, either at will or due to some external force, but
Brundlefly will always remain Brundlefly. That is simply what he is now: Brundlefly is
not the 'other side' of Brundle, it is his new identity. “I seem to be stricken by a disease
with a purpose,” Brundlefly says. “Maybe not such a bad disease after all. It wants to turn
me into something else. That's not too terrible, is it? Most people would give anything to
be turned into something else.” More than about the animal nature of humans, The Fly is
about “the unavoidable nature of change (it is not good or bad, it simply is)” (Kermode
1992: 11).
Of course, change does turn out to be bad for Brundle, but only because, as a human fly,
he cannot function in a world of humans; “Insects don't have politics.” As a new species,
however, Brundlefly is perfectly functional: he can eat, he can move, he can
communicate and the effects of his transformation are, although initially unpleasant, not
fatal. The only reason Brundlefly eventually wants to be killed, is that he does not fit into
the world in which he exists: he disrupts the “natural” order. Ronnie wants his baby to be
aborted as soon as possible, and even threatens to do it herself if a doctor will not help
her immediately: “I don't want it in my body,” she yells. The fly-humans simply do not
belong amongst the humans.
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The mutant in The Fly thus seems to stand not for “the Other” as a discriminated minority
or for the primitive nature of humans, but for “the new”: an entirely functional being that
is nevertheless rejected by the order for its difference from the norm. Brundlefly is not
characterized as something inherently evil or wrong; he does not kill anyone and the only
reason he causes harm is because he attempts to give himself a place in a society where
he does not belong. In a world inhabited by creatures like him, Brundlefly could exist.
The Fly asks us how an entirely new species proceeds in a world where it is alone (Beard
2006: 200), and its answer seems to be: it does not.
EXistenZ (1999)
EXistenZ is a science fiction film about a future form of virtual game play: gamers plug a
cord, resembling an umbilical cord and called an umbicord, into a hole in their lower
backs created for this purpose, resembling an anus and called a bioport. The cord is
connected to an organic game console known as a game pod, which resembles a lump of
flesh covered in skin. When this process is completed, the subject goes unconscious and
experiences a virtual reality game so real that it is impossible to differentiate between it
and reality; the question 'are we still in the game?' is often asked in the film.
The bodily transformation in this film is a relatively small one, and some would perhaps
not even consider it a proper transformation: the creation of the bioport in the human
body. This entrance for the umbicord is created with a machine that resembles a large
drill. One could see it as a wound. This, however, would be incorrect. When main
character Ted Pikul has just had his bioport made, he asks: “How come bioports don't get
infected? I mean, they open right into your body.” Game designer Allegra Geller replies:
“Listen to what you're saying, Pikul. Don't be ludicrous,” and opens her mouth wide, to
indicate that a bioport is more like a mouth than a wound: it is a body part.
One could even perceive the game pod as a new body part. It is a hundred percent
organic, having been grown from fertilized amphibian eggs stuffed with synthetic DNA.
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Despite its amphibian origins, “with their flesh-pink color and the prominence of an onbutton that looks exactly like a nippe they seem literally mamalian” (Beard 2006: 446).
Allegra refers to her biopod as her baby and it is also described as “basically an animal,”
but it could be seen as a brain: when connected to the pod, the subject experiences life
only through it, perceiving its reality as the real world. The pod influences not only the
subject's perception of reality, but its behavior as well: within the game, people do and
say things they claim they would never have thought of in 'real life'. They suddenly have
emotions and talents they would not normally have, and on some occasions even get an
accent. The body as it exists outside the game serves as a battery for the pod: when the
subject is tired, the game does not run properly.
Thus, the transformation actually taking place in eXistenZ is the human body getting a
new body part, which changes it into a battery, and changes the human subject into a
game character. It is a physical transformation that leads to a psychological
transformation.
Can any of this be interpreted metaphorically? One could say that the human body
becoming a battery is a metaphor, but is this not literally true? A battery is a source of
power. A human providing power to a game pod seems to fit this definition; when Allegra
tells Ted that he is the gamepod's battery, she is speaking literal truth, which by definition
cannot be metaphorical.
But what if those connected to the pods are to be considered synecdoches for media users
in general? The metaphor, then, does not refer to the specific body of whoever is playing
the game, but to every user of media. The metaphor MEDIA USERS ARE BATTERIES
can be constructed. Every media product needs a user to function; certainly video games,
which can only get played if there is a player present, but also films and television, which
can only exist by virtue of an audience.
There is a clear link between eXistenZ and Videodrome: both films are set in a world
where media become a part of people's bodies and the borderlines between the real world
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and the virtual world are blurred. And both films have a human body as a necessary
condition for the medium to function: Max Renn becomes a tape recorder for
Videodrome, and the characters in eXistenZ become batteries for the game. ExistenZ
makes the point more explicitly than Videodrome: these media that change us and control
our lives need us to exist.
The connection between the insertion of the umbicord into the bioport and sex is easily
made: an organic orifice in the body is penetrated. When Allegra wants to get Ted a
bioport, she announces this by seeing they need to have “an intimate moment.” Later, Ted
hooks a pod up to Allegra's bioport and, out of an instinctive impulse he cannot control,
licks it. Allegra reacts shocked at first, but then passionately kisses Ted.
If we perceive the practice of plugging pods into bioports as a metaphorical source
domain for sex, the most prominent features we can map from sex onto the podplugging
is that they both lead to life: sex, of course, is a necessary condition for life to exist, and
plugging into a bioport is a necessary condition for life within eXistenZ to exist.
If PLUGGING IN BIOPORTS IS SEX, then perhaps EXISTENZ IS LIFE. Allegra
certainly seems to perceive it that way: when Ted states that he feels there is not much
free will to following to plot of eXistenZ, she replies: “Just enough to make it interesting.
Just like real life.” Later, Ted complains about the uncertain nature of the game, in which
the only way to find out the goal is to play it. He says: “We don't know what's going on.
We're both stumbling around together in an unformed world whose rules and objectives
are largely unknown, seemingly indecipherable or even possibly non-existent. Always on
the verge of being killed by forces that we don't understand.” Ted thinks that for this
reason, the game will be hard to market, to which Allegra replies: “But it's a game
everybody's already playing.”
A gas station operator known as Gas, tells Allegra that she has changed his life. “What
was your life like before?” asks Ted.
“I operated a gas station.”
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“You still operate a gas station, don't you?”
“Only on the most pathetic level of reality,” Gas answers.
So there are several levels of reality, and Gas measures them in order of preference, not in
order of how 'real' they are; after all, if something is experienced as reality, then why
would it not be?
This point is made more explicitly in the film's closing scene, where it is revealed that
everything we have seen, including the scenes we assumed took place in 'the real world',
is actually part of another game called tranCendenZ, in which players get to play people
who play eXistenZ. But even in this closing scene it is not clear whether the film is
finally showing us 'reality': the last words spoken are: “Are we still in the game?” The
possibility is left open that literally everything eXistenZ has shown us, has taken place in
a 'fake' reality. Which, of course, it has: we have been watching a film.
EXistenZ “problematize[s] the borderline between the different worlds of game and
'reality'” (Browning 2007: 157) in such a way that they seem to become irrelevant. All we
have to perceive reality is our body; the biopods are parts of our body. Thus, is reality as
experienced through the biopods not as real as any other reality? EXistenZ allows its
players to experience life is a way that is not much different than the way we all
experience it: filled with uncertainty. In the end, the transformation into a human-pod has
changed nothing. HUMAN-PODS ARE HUMANS.
Concluding remarks
Cronenberg has given us many different types of transformations: in Rabid, the mutant is
clearly the Other, but differs from the conventional expression of this concept in that she
uses the weapon of her oppressor: the phallus. In The Brood, the common 'beast within'
metaphor can be found in the literalization of anger, but the purpose of the mutant is not
to disrupt, but to restore the order. In Videodrome, the order that is disrupted is reality
itself, and the constructed metaphor shows us humans as machines unable to distinguish
45
between video and reality, and able to function as recorders and players of any media
message. In The Fly, the 'beast within' metaphor is again suggested, but the beast is
actually a new creature, not evil or savage by nature, but simply unable to function in a
world where it does not belong. In eXistenZ, finally, the order of reality completely falls
away as it does not seem to matter what is physically 'real' and what is virtually 'real' if
we experience it in the same way. The pod-humans that the characters become by
plugging themselves into game pods do not perceive reality any less than any other
humans.
In chapter 2, I discussed the fact that many transformation horror films do not make the
target domain of the structural metaphor THE OTHER IS A MONSTER explicit, leaving
the viewer to supply it. In Cronenberg's films, however, we often see explicit target
domains: in ROSE'S STINGER IS AN ERECT PENIS, ROSE, USING HER PHALLIC
STINGER, IS A SEXUALLY AGGRESSIVE MAN (Rabid), ANGER IS A RASH ON
THE BODY, ANGER IS A WOMB GIVING BIRTH TO MONSTERS (The Brood),
MAX IS A TAPE RECORDER (Videodrome), TRANSFORMATION IS REBIRTH
(The Fly), PLUGGING IN BIOPORTS IS SEX, EXISTENZ IS LIFE, and HUMANPODS ARE HUMANS (eXistenZ), the source domains are clearly presented to us. Of
course, we do still need the context of these films' narratives to make sense of them.
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CHAPTER 5. CONCLUSION
Although many horror films in which transformations take place, do not seem to convey
a metaphor through this shapeshifting, those films in which the transformation is a central
part of the plot usually seem to do so. One of the most commonly conveyed metaphors in
transformation horror is that of the shapeshifter as the Other; as a member of society who
does not fit in. In An American Werewolf in London, we see a tourist dealing with the
cultural differences between his place of birth and the place he is staying in, turning into a
monster that attacks members of this society, to be finally destroyed by the authorities. In
The Howling, werewolves are represented as a minority community, trying to find a place
in society where they can function, but failing because of their savage nature. The same
can be said for Cat People, although in this film, the Other is eventually allowed to exist
at a safe distance from the rest of society. Teen Wolf seems to have a more positive
approach to difference: teenager Scott’s werewolfism certainly marks him as
fundamentally different from the norm, but although several people hate him for this
reason, it makes him more popular than he ever was with most of his social environment.
However, he eventually decides to leave his wolf identity behind him, having learned to
be confident without being different. The monster is not killed, but it is effectively
destroyed by Scott accepting the norms of society: the status quo has returned.
All these films feature prominent figures of authority as the shapeshifters' enemies: in An
American Werewolf in London, the fact that David is a werewolf is discovered by a
doctor, and he is killed by police officers. The first werewolf we meet in The Howling is
shot by police officers as well, and a psychiatrist attempts to make the werewolves
repress their animal nature in order to fit in to society. In Teen Wolf, Scott’s enemies are a
socially popular high school jock and the high school principal, who keeps telling him to
behave. In Dracula, the vampire hunter is a respected professor. These characters can all
be seen metonyms for society: they represent society's norms and values, having
professions that are often associated with authority. Society either destroys the monster,
or manages to convince it to become 'normal'; either way, it enforces its rules on the
monster and thus makes it harmless.
47
So, broadly speaking, in most transformation horror films THE OTHER IS A MONSTER
and SOCIETY IS THE MONSTER'S ENEMY.
In most of these films, the ‘beast within’ metaphor can also be found. Shapeshifters do
not turn into more intelligent, sophisticated beings: they become violent, savage,
unreasonable animals, in some cases driven by sexual urges. These transformations are
often a representation of their inner nature as humans: the first two werewolves we see in
The Howling are a rapist and a nymphomaniac, Dracula transforms into a beast when
having sex, and Freddy Krueger becomes a giant snake in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3,
showing him as the dangerous predator he is. In these cases, THE PERSONALITY OF
THE SHAPESHIFTER IS A MONSTER.
In some of these cases, the metaphor is only expressed once, as with FREDDY
KRUEGER IS A SNAKE and DRACULA IS A BEAST. Of course, we do need the
context of the rest of the film to understand these specific transformation scenes as
metaphorical: the shapeshifters' character needs to be established in order for the
audience to understand it in terms of something else.
Most of the time, however, transformation metaphors are expressed repeatedly
throughout the film, and we cannot point at one scene as being the sole expression of a
certain metaphor. As described by Eggersston and Forceville (2009), it is the cumulative
effect of all the different instances in which a metaphor is suggested that successfully
conveys it (430).
The most common metaphor in conventional transformation horror, THE OTHER IS A
MONSTER, is a structural metaphor as discussed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), and,
more specifically dealing with film, by Forceville (1999) and Forceville and Eggertsson
(2009). The metaphor is expressed throughout the films and seems to be at the basis of
the films' view of the concept “the Other”.
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In the films of Cronenberg, metaphors often work in a similar fashion as in conventional
transformation horror: they are usually repeated throughout the film, and they often have
monsters as the Other and have authorities serving as metonyms for society attempting to
destroy or neutralize the monster. However, there are important differences between
Cronenberg’s films and the transformation films discussed in chapter 2. In Rabid, it is an
oppressive society (Dr. Keloid) that creates a monster (Rose), which attacks society
(sexually aggressive men) with it own weapon (the phallus of patriarchy). Although Rose
is certainly shown as a member of a suppressed minority, it is not her difference from
society that makes her dangerous; it is the fact that she is a product and an imitator of
society. A similar theme is found in The Brood, in which again, the monster is created by
a metonym for society (Dr. Raglan). Unlike Rose, Nola does not seem to be the Other:
she does not attack society, she enforces its rules on those who disobey them, violently
punishing everyone who poses a threat to the idea of the 'traditional family'. In
Videodrome, the transformer is not the monster at all; a rare occurrence in transformation
horror. It is the Videdrome show, serving as a synecdoche for television in general, that
transforms Max and reprograms him to become a murderer. In these three films,
responsibility for the atrocities committed does not belong only to the Other, but
primarily to larger institutions, which appear in the film as metonyms and synecdoches:
patriarchal society in Rabid, the 'traditional family' in The Brood and television in
Videodrome.
The Fly gives us what is probably as close to a conventional transformation monster as
Cronenberg ever came: a man turning into a hideous beast. The 'beast-within' metaphor
can be spotted, but actually seems to be a misconception from the mutant: Brundlefly is
not Brundle's inner animal urges coming out; rather, he is becoming something entirely
new. But unlike in most animal transformation films, this new creature is not inherently
dangerous or evil. It simply does not belong in our world, because our world was not
made for it. Although society is not responsible for creating this monster, it is responsible
for the fact that the monster does not function in society and has no choice but to be the
Other.
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EXistenZ, finally, shows us virtual reality as a metaphor for life itself, and people who
transform themselves into gamepods as a metaphor for the entire human race. There are
no transforming monsters and there is no revolt of the Other against society.
Cronenberg plays with the conventions of the transformation horror genre in his first four
transformation films, using them but also subverting them. In eXistenZ, he seems to leave
them behind completely.
Lakoff and Johnson's (1980) theories on structural metaphors being as the basis of our
understanding of certain concepts have proven useful to show the way structural
metaphors tend to work in transformation horror films. As the film metaphors described
by Forceville (1999) and Forceville and Eggertsson (2009), they become clear by being
repeated throughout the films in several modes. However, in the transformation horror
genre, the often present structural metaphor THE OTHER IS A MONSTER usually
appears without the target domain being explicitly mentioned. The viewer has to recover
it by looking at the instances in which the shapeshifter, in his or her human form, is
presented as someone who does not 'fit in' with society, making him or her a
representation of the Other.
Whether this conveying of a multimodal structural metaphor without making the target
domain explicit is a unique characteristic of the transformation horror genre, or appears in
many other genres as well, could be a subject for further studies.
In Cronenberg's work, structural metaphors tend to present their target domain quite
clearly. Like most transformation horror films, those made by Cronenberg seem to be
interested in the concept of the Other, but they treat it quite differently, focusing not
merely on the Other as a threat to society, but rather as a product of society (Rabid, The
Brood), a product of television (Videodrome) or a creature that is simply different, but is
not therefore necessarily evil (The Fly). This alternative representation of the Other seems
to be the most significant difference between Cronenberg's transformation films and the
conventional transformation horror genre.
50
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Films
An American Werewolf in London. Dir. John Landis. PolyGram Filmed Entertainment,
1981.
The Brood. Dir. David Cronenberg. Canadian Film Development Corporation, 1979.
Cat People. Dir. Paul Schrader. Universal Pictures, 1982.
Dracula. Dir. Francis Ford Coppola. American Zoetrope, 1992.
53
The Evil Dead. Dir. Sam Raimi. Renaissance Pictures, 1981.
Evil Dead II. Dir. Sam Raimi. De Laurentiis Entertainment group, 1987.
eXistenZ. Dir. David Cronenberg. Alliance Atlantis Communications, 1999.
The Fly. Dir. David Cronenberg. Brooksfilms, 1986.
From Beyond. Dir. Stuart Gordon. Empire Pictures, 1986.
The Howling. Dir. Joe Dante. AVCO Embassy Pictures, 1981.
Night of the Creeps. Dir. Fred Dekker. TriStar Pictures, 1986.
A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. Dir. Chuck Russel. New Line Cinema,
1987.
Rabid. Dir. David Cronenberg. Canadian Film Development Corporation, 1977.
Society. Dir. Brian Yuzna. Society Productions Inc., 1989.
Videodrome. Dir. David Cronenberg. Canadian Film Development Corporation, 1983.
54