David Cronenberg\'s body-horror masterpiece anticipated the merger of media and physiology — VHS, video-on-demand, brain-rewiring social media — through the metaphor of a TV signal that grows into your body. Forty years later it still feels like a forecast.
Cronenberg's media-prophet film: the body grows a VHS slot, the gun grafts to the hand, the television is the new flesh. Every prediction has come true except the slot.
Cronenberg saw cable TV becoming a hallucination, a brand, and a delivery vector for body politics — long before social media made it literal. "Long live the new flesh" is the most accurate slogan ever written about screens.
Cronenberg saw cable TV becoming a hallucination, a brand, and a delivery vector for body politics — long before social media made it literal.
Cronenberg predicted that the screen would grow flesh and the flesh would grow a slot. The metaphor was always literal; we just hadn't built the slot yet.
