...and that's one reason why I love it.
Pick any year between 2009 and 2013.
You know what I was doing often?
Writing blog posts.
Reading your blog posts.
Sometimes, we'd get a back-and-forth going in the comments section of one of the blogs. That was always great. More often, there was a continued discussion developed across all of our blogs. That was always even greater.
Writing posts was sometimes easy, sometimes hard work, but we'd do it, repeatedly, then just... release those posts out into the world without any immediate feedback. I had no way of knowing when any of you read the post. There were no likes. There were no congratulatory text messages or whatever. There was only the cold hard fact that the writing was out there and now it was up to others to either respond or not.
I don't think I'm lying or exaggerating when I write that I read every word of every post on every CR5FC blog. I read about movies I'd never seen and never would see. I read about movies that I had just seen.
Now, years later, I'm doing it again. I read Brandon's new post a day or two after he posted it. Six days later, six days of thinking about that post, six days of watching other movies, I'm here finishing this new blog post of my own. Six days feels like a long time in an age of constant contact, I guess, but six days is also hardly any time at all. Six days have given me time to think about what Ingmar Bergman and David Cronenberg have in common.
Even "normal" "healthy" marriage is always body horror. It is the giving up of bodily autonomy and submitting in humility to the needs and desires of another, not demanding but giving and satisfying. How can this not be horror for anyone (all of us) who have been separate individuals with separate wills and separate bodies.
Bergman focuses on the mental anguish of this dying to self (subsuming one's selfish destructive desires), then on the further anguish resulting from failure to die to self (submitting to the selfish desires causes worse anguish). In marriage, failing the Other (who is or at least has been the Beloved) is failing oneself, so that paradoxically as one pursues selfish acts of betrayal, one is harming oneself, because maybe there's something to "one flesh" talk as both a metaphor and as a reality. Bergman's characters are pained as they give pain to each other. Mental anguish is always physical anguish. It's in their bodies. It's in the way they approach one another and how they converse with one another.
Bergman as a failed lover, a failed husband focuses on relationship horror because it's what he knew. He knew that marriage was good. He knew that he was an horrific disappointment to those around him. And relationship horror is always body horror because we relate to each other in bodies. Even the "ghosting" of a break-up text message followed by silence is the horror of the absence of a body where there once was a body.
Bergman lived in an old world that was still in-person and relational. Bergman's attempts at evaluating his failures and expressing his capacity for love are embodied on screen by actors (often former lovers in the case of the women involved) who relate to one another bodily, in person, as painful and difficult as that always is.
Cronenberg began making movies in the context of the commercialized human body, mediated human bodies. Everything from the beach party films of the 1960s to Colgate-Palmolive "sponsoring" the national televised broadcast of the Miss America contest. Admittedly, those two examples probably weren't things Cronenberg grew up on, but they're the first things that came to mind as examples of the broad commodification of the body that Cronenberg knew well.
If Bergman focused primarily of the horror of bodies loving (and failing to love) other bodies, then Cronenberg focused primarily on the horror of bodies being used and abused for profit.
The Brood may be Cronenberg's version of a Bergmanian divorce film (right?), but it's also about a man who has found a successful technique that has gotten out of control. There is conflict between a husband and a wife, but the triggering incident that leads to "body horror" is the outsourcing of pain to the management of a psychotherapist, as something that can be controlled. This allows for a science fictional explanation of the physical manifestation of internal trauma in the film, but it's also important that it's the attempt to manage and control the body through a scientific technique that leads to the worst bodily pain of all (leading to intensified emotional/relational pain).
If The Brood's doctor can still pretend some semblance of helping others rather than selfish manipulation of the body, well, Scanners is more explicit about bodily skills being harnessed by exploitative companies out to profit off of these same bodies.
The Dead Zone has someone able to know someone, really know someone, primarily through touch, through the touch of bodies. The Fly features a man trying to overcome the limitations of the body by creating a first generation teleportation device while simultaneously coming to terms with joining in flesh with another human being momentarily, then still being so separate. How to overcome this?
And of course Videodrome is the dirty exploitation film that exposes all dirty exploitation films. Not only are beautiful bodies for sale like in the commercials and the beauty pageants. Tortured bodies, hurt bodies, despised bodies, these are all our entertainment now. Death to Videodrome. Long live the new flesh.
Cronenberg's characters don't know how to use their bodies. When they do express themselves bodily, it leads to pain or exploitation. It's the mediated disembodiment of the media age that has only worsened in the last few decades, the Cronenbergian Age of the body reasserting itself against all attempts to relativize, devalue, or commercialize it (I only just heard the dystopian word "looksmaxxing" for the first time this week; if that's not an expression of body horror, I don't know what is).
I'm barely into the 80s, but I guess that's enough.
So, I've rambled a while. I've mentioned movies I haven't seen in years. I don't know if this has all come together or not.
My point is... that blogging is slow? That I like it that way? Yes. :-)
That slow pace is a pace that recognizes the limitations of the body. "Processing" information is a bad computer metaphor for what humans do. A better, more human-centered one, is ruminating on information. Taking in something like Brandon's recent post as food. Eyeing its shape. Taking it into me. Letting it roll around on the tongue, tasting it. Enjoying it. Spitting out the gristle. Swallowing. Digesting. [I could ruin the metaphor by saying that this response post of mine is the defecation when I'm all done with it, but no, no, no (even though I couldn't resist mentioning it), that was not where I was going with it.] What I meant to say is that treating Brandon's words as a meal, not as something disposable but as something meant to feed me, I do indeed gain nourishment. Whatever we mean by mind, whatever we mean by heart, writing and reading engages those things and it does so in a bodily way. I am nourished. I am refreshed by reading the writing of a friend, even if I disagree with, maybe especially if I do, because it opens me up to new ways of seeing and experiencing the world. Taking in someone else's words, just like taking in a good meal, changes a person. You are what you eat. (This is also an argument to be careful what you take into yourself, not making a steady diet of junk writing/viewing/etc. but that's another whole post.)
After reading Brandon's post, I needed quiet and time to reflect. Slow blogging gives a space for this. Now, days later, my shoulders ache a little bit as I hunch over and use my fingers to type out a reply, using my body, hoping that my words express my gratitude and in turn give Brandon something to chew on.
I complain about the internet often enough, but I actually love the internet... when it is a successful supplement to bodily presence and not a replacement for it.