From Videodrome to Virtual Light: David Cronenberg and William Gibson‪.‬

On the face of it, a comparison between the work of David Cronenberg and William Gibson might seem surprising; they work in different media, and they are generally thought to work in different genres, Gibson being renowned as the father of cyberpunk and Cronenberg as the father of body horror. Nevertheless, Gibson's work, despite its obvious status as SF, involves, as Timo Siivonen observes, "the inclusion in the narrative of horror elements referring to nature, instincts, and the body" (231), while despite Cronenberg's reputation as the "Baron of Blood," all of his work prior to Dead Ringers (though little of it since, with the notable exception of eXistenZ) fails resolutely within the parameters of Science Fiction, as commentators on that work are coming increasingly to realize. Bart Testa suggests, for instance, that much of the criticism of Cronenberg's work is limited in its failure to recognize that "In Cronenberg's films ... the motifs of origin belong to science fiction and not horror"; Testa also cites a general failure to deal adequately with Cronenberg's Canadianness, though William Beard (in "The Canadianness of David Cronenberg"), Piers Handling, and Gaile McGregor have attempted to address Cronenberg's work in relation to his nationality. Such commentators have gone a long way toward demonstrating the importance of Cronenberg's nationality to his work, but his importance as a creator of Science Fiction still needs further development. Cronenberg's importance to SF can be most profitably considered in the context of the cyberpunk movement, with which Cronenberg's affinities have in fact been noted on a few occasions. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. has asserted that "Videodrome captures the essence of cyberpunk" ("Futuristic Flu" 40-41), for instance (the essence perhaps, but it lacks the hardware: not a single computer appears in the film, though many would see computers as essential to cyberpunk), while Richard Kadrey and Larry McCaffery include the film in their (rather idiosyncratic) cyberpunk canon (26) and Lance Olsen asserts that Videodrome "clearly and directly feed[s] Gibson's vision" (8), though he provides no analysis of how. Gibson himself has acknowledged his admiration of Cronenberg, in this statement from an interview conducted by Clive Barker, for instance: "I really, really admire Cronenberg tremendously, but I thought that movie [Videodrome] was just exquisitely over the top...."