"Send Your Men of Science Quick!"

[Shivers] acts out the surreal death of the love generation, a death writ in blood, pus, and parasites. (1)

Shivers could well be the first parasitic feel-good film. (2)

In 'The Imagination of Disaster,' (3) her short treatise on Science Fiction genre cinema, Susan Sontag wrote at length about modern man's anxiety in the face of a cold, dehumanised and technological future, suggesting that "Science Fiction films may . . . be described as a popular mythology for the contemporary negative imagination about the impersonal" (4) and that "the . . . technocratic man [is a man] purged of emotion [and] obedient to all orders". (5) This astute line of inquiry arguably finds its apotheosis in Don Siegel's seminal Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), a picture that arouses anxiety in the spectator primarily through its deft exploitation of the looming threat of a future devoid of all human emotion and feeling.

It is interesting to note, then, that David Cronenberg's Shivers (1975), despite its various similarities to Invasion of the Body Snatchers on the level of plot, (6) approaches this same thematic concern—the increasingly intertwined futures of man and technology—with such a strikingly disparate thesis. With Shivers, Cronenberg seems to be suggesting that, unlike in Science Fiction's hypothesis, the technocratic man a man imbued with nothing but emotion; a chaotic, unpredictable and sensual being, devoid of social conscience and free of all responsibility. Technology and science may, according to Shivers, ultimately liberate man, arousing his emotions as opposed to simply nullifying or suppressing them. In this respect, Shivers, a film that seems to be straddling two genres at once, is in actual fact, despite its Sci-Fi elements and allusions to Invasions of the Body Snatchers, firmly rooted in and reliant upon the eroticism of the Horror film (and of the Monster Movie in particular).

The transformations undergone by Shivers ' characters are charged with the eroticism of the Horror movie, both traditional ( Dracula [d. Tod Browning, 1931]) and untraditional ( Flesh for Frankenstein [d. Paul Morrissey & Antonio Margheriti, 1973], Blood for Dracula [d. Paul Morrissey & Antonio Margheriti, 1974]) alike. The transformations undergone by characters in Horror, as opposed to those undergone by characters in Science Fiction, are, as Sontag aptly put it, transformations from "human amiability to monstrous 'animal' bloodlust as in the old vampire fantasy"—in other words, sexual and sensual awakenings, not suppressions of emotion and feeling.

In the interest of following this line of thought, consider the scene in Shivers in which Nicholas (Allan Migicovsky), a dull, upper-middle-class business executive who looks like a character out of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (d. Luis Buñuel, 1972) and who is, for reasons involving adultery and the biomedical experiments of a mad scientist, carrying a hive of venereal parasites in his abdomen, lies on his bed, shirt unbuttoned and open, rubbing his hands very lightly over the swelling, pulsating contours of his stomach. The scene itself is dimly lit, the camera intimately, though not invasively, close to the action: a masturbation sequence, pure and simple, if also, admittedly, very strange. The scene—which looks forward with great fervour to James Woods curiously fingering his vaginal chest in Videodrome (1983)—is indicative of Shivers ' debt to the tradition of the Monster Movie: the 'monsters' of this film (the parasites), like the 'monsters' of King Kong (d. Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933), Creature from the Black Lagoon (d. Jack Arnold, 1954) and the various Dracula pictures (to cite but three examples), are introducing a sexually repressed man to a more basic, immediate and sensual mode of existence (which, at first, understandably, is frightening for him). This is the mark of the Horror film's influence and of the Monster Movie's in particular; indeed, if Shivers were more like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and other Science Fiction films, Nicholas would, like the citizens of Santa Mira, be more subdued—more calmly detached from his own body—and certainly not bringing himself to orgasm while playing with his stomach. He wouldn't, a few scenes later, be molesting his wife and demanding to make love. Given this connection to the eroticism of Horror, one might be inclined to add to Thomas Caldwell's suggestion that Shivers is a kind of "parasitic feel-good film" that it's also positively 'Dracularian'.

However, a reading such as this presupposes that the sexual awakenings of the characters in Shivers are, by default, positive ones. The problem with this is that such assumptions forcibly negate the countless contradictory elements of the picture that need to be addressed. For while, yes, as Caldwell suggests, "once infected, the [victims] appear a lot happier and unrestrained than they were at the start of the film" (7) (as, for example, in Nicholas' case), the parasitic epidemic is by no means a wholly positive phenomenon, imbued as it is with countless negative aspects, which are often profoundly disturbing. (8) One should not forget that, despite the sexual liberation they supposedly bring about, the parasites, which are blatantly phallic, effectively rape almost everyone in the picture, most notably (and shockingly) Betts (Barbara Steele), who, in the film's most simultaneously comical and distressing sequence, has a parasite emerge from the drain of her bathtub and crawl into her vagina. Later, the rabid behaviour of the masses (whom Michael J. Collins dubs the "horny hordes") (9) takes on the appearance of something more akin to gang rape than to innocuous orgy, the film becoming—at several points—a virtual catalogue of sexual violence, particularly against women. At the same time, one cannot completely deny the utopian possibilities that Caldwell alludes to when he talks of "what is in store for the rest of us now that science has finally kick-started evolution". (10) Indeed, these are some ethically ambiguous parasites.

How is one to reconcile such disparate and contradictory elements?—the sexual awakening and the sexual violence?—the liberation from society and the "death writ in blood, pus, and parasites"?—the comical and the distressing?—the eroticism of Horror and the thematic concerns of Science Fiction? As William Beard acknowledges in The Artist as Monster: The Cinema of David Cronenberg, " Shivers is suspended across the polar oppositions of a complex series of related dichotomies," (11) pushing and pulling against itself, rewriting and re-evaluating rules, conventions, theories and genres as it does so. There is no one way of interpreting, for example, the film's qualitatively ambiguous coda, in which the infected residents of Starliner Towers drive off into the night with a mind to infect the world. Is this scene indicative of victory, failure, neither or both? In insisting upon such narrative, generic and thematic ambiguities, Cronenberg seems to be saying that what needs to be understood about the future of man is that our self-induced techno-biological evolution will be so unavoidably multifaceted—so simultaneously painful, orgasmic, frightening and enlightening (all qualities that are evident in Nicholas' masturbation scene)—that we can ultimately choose to react to it in any way we see fit—just as long as we don't delude ourselves (as Roger St. Luc [Paul Hampton] does) into thinking we can avoid it.

Ultimately, Shivers is both Cronenberg's Horror film response to Science Fiction's key concerns and an intelligent reformulation of the genre's notion of the technocratic man. Virile and engaged as opposed to cold and detached, suspended like Shivers itself across "the polar oppositions of a complex series of related dichotomies," this man is at once both dead and alive; sensual and diseased; organic and engineered; and erotic and scientific. He plays by a set of rules that don't apply to the technocratic men of Siegel, Science Fiction and Sontag, and he points towards an ambiguous future that is both strangely seductive and inherently disturbing. It's not a question of 'good' or 'bad,' but one, instead, of our own evolution:

Are you willing to accept the new flesh? Are you ready to evolve?

Notes

1. Collins, M. J. (1996) 'Medicine, Surrealism, Lust, Anger, and Death: Three Early Films by David Cronenberg'. Post Script, Vol. 15, No. 2.

2. Caldwell, T. (2002) ' Shivers '. Senses of Cinema, Iss. 19, Mar. – Apr. 2002. Available online at: http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/01/19/shivers.html

3. Available in Sontag, S. (1966) Against Interpretation. New York, Picador.

4. Ibid. (pg. 220 – 1).

5. Ibid. (pg. 222).

6. Both films are about human bodies becoming possessed by other life forms until only one man—in both cases a doctor—"send your men of science quick!"—remains.

7. Caldwell, T. (2002)

8. Caldwell himself, in the interest of his "feel-good" reading of the film, is forced to consign each and every one of these negative aspects to one unsatisfactorily brief (and bland) statement towards the end of his discussion.

9. Collins, M. J. (1996)

10. Caldwell, T. (2002)

11. Beard, W. (2001) The Artist as Monster: The Cinema of David Cronenberg. University of Toronto Press. (pg. 34)