hallucination sequence
posthuman dreaming in the films of albert pyun, david cronenberg's crimes of the future, and the music of cabaret voltaire
1 albert pyun (vicious lips (1986), cyborg (1989), nemesis (1992), crazy six (1998)). albert pyun died last november, a few days after thanksgiving. i read the news at an airport bar, waiting to board a red-eye flight that, thanks to a failure in the plane’s steering, would never actually leave the ground. pyun had been sick for a long time before his death; as far as i know, he kept making movies until he was physically incapable of doing so. his final decade of work can be hard to look at with its hallucinatory applications of green screen and rudimentary computer graphics, like a labyrinth made of holographic walls. but who cares? pyun never let the total absence of a budget or a visual effects team stop him from doing what he loved, from telling stories in a medium that frustrated him as often as it communicated the exactness of his vision. every film he worked on bears the impression of his efforts, even when it was wrested from his creative control, even when the final product fell apart wherever time or money ran out.
one of my favorite pyun films, vicious lips, falls apart at its halfway point, just as the coolness of the initial concept (retrofuturist rock opera wrought out of smoke and neon a la streets of fire, but set in space) exhausts itself and all we’re left with is barely-sketched characters drifting around a hollow metal spaceship like ghosts who’ve forgotten their original selves. on their way to an interplanetary battle of the bands (an idea so cool you may despair at how it barely materializes in the film at all), the vicious lips crash land onto a desert planet, all of them dressed as if ‘80s aesthetics were not abandoned as the decade ended but used as a model from which to build the future—fluorescent outfits, planet-sized wigs, five different kinds of eyeshadow forming luminous stages for their eyes. while they wait for help that may never arrive—the desert horizon stretches on forever—they talk to each other, though it’s hard to say even with the subtitles on what they’re talking about, or who they think they’re talking to. all of the girls want to “make it,” become fixed stars in this universe held together entirely by hairspray, but they can’t stop fighting over who deserves it the most, at least until they each suffer a sudden existential crisis and begin to wonder if they deserve it at all. their personalities erode to almost nothing, becoming one mind doubting and screaming at itself. this sequence takes about 20 minutes to resolve (and “resolve” is an exaggeration—the main character escapes the ship only to find the desert has been replaced by what is either an unfinished film set or an utter figment of space) but somehow it feels much longer, as if the movie’s gone to sleep and it’s dreaming.
i felt compelled to explore pyun’s work after attending a screening of the panos cosmatos film mandy, where co-writer aaron stewart-ahn cited cyborg as a major inspiration for the film1. i’d known of cyborg since i was a kid, could reconstruct the image on the cover of the vhs tape instantly in memory, jean-claude van damme’s enormous arm swaddling a big gun like they’re just two different kinds of guns and they’re kissing. all my life i had heard it was an awful film, it may have even merited a one-star review in the tv guide i perused every week for action movies to tape from cable. now i could order a gorgeously-restored version of it from scream factory, one of several boutique movie distributors that sell state-of-the-art transfers of odd curios from the vhs landfill, movies marketed to resemble legitimate blockbusters so they might be plucked from the shelves by pure accident of association. perusing a video store in a suggestive, half-asleep state your brain just might blur “arnold schwarzennegger in the terminator” and “jean-claude van damme in cyborg” into the same phrase. then you would come home to watch something that is what you wanted in some ways and not what you wanted in most ways. van damme isn’t even the titular cyborg. it is filmed on the discarded sets of a masters of the universe sequel and a spider-man adaptation, both of which were canceled before shooting began. by a lot of standards i no longer have, cyborg is barely a movie, an anti-movie, something that clawed its way into existence out of the refuse and debris of failure.
this is where pyun excelled. where others would not make a film, he made a film2. when pyun saw a junkyard, he saw more than just a junkyard: he saw punches and kicks, bullets and fire reeling through a landscape of rubble and corroded metal. this was his canvas even after he stopped making science fiction movies: the cheapest possible nowhere, a world ground to dust and ash. cyborg opens on such a broken reality, bridges collapsed into the water, buildings breathing smoke, as a voice offscreen intones, “i like the death, i like the misery, i like this world!” a plague has destroyed civilization as we know it, and now the earth is ruled by evil pirates decked out in the leading postapocalyptic fashions: chainmail, torn t-shirts, black sunglasses that admit no light. they’ve kidnapped a cyborg embedded with the cure for the virus, and only van damme can rescue her and save the world.
when i finally saw cyborg, i wondered why i’d rejected it out-of-hand for so long, as it is the only kind of movie eight-year-old me ever wanted to see—an unfinished sketch of a science fiction plot tying a bunch of rad fight sequences together—though a nice thing about encountering his work as an adult is that i am better prepared to notice the staggering images pyun and his cinematographers crafted. his camera is always peering into interiors lit like the sunset sinking into the ocean: bruised oranges, metallic blues. rain and smoke pour into every frame like the world itself is a machine that’s breaking down.
this style reaches its peak in pyun’s 1993 film nemesis, easily his most kinetic film, a 90-minute chase sequence that never gets derailed by anything resembling a plot or character. like vicious lips many of pyun’s films stop dead in the middle, too stoned to leave the couch or answer the door, but nemesis never stops moving, a liquid flow of action i’ve only seen approached in the last decade of john wick films. i couldn’t tell you how many scenes consist of just the principle characters running. but they have to. someone is always firing a machine gun in the distance.
what happens in the movie? hard to say. plot is always a mistier property in pyun’s work than it is in normal movies. what is a plot, if not an excuse for backflips and explosions? kickboxer olivier grunier plays a future cop named alex rain3, a blade runner-of-sorts working for a globally-expanded LAPD to exterminate cyborgs. except suddenly he doesn’t work for the LAPD, except now the LAPD has kidnapped him and is forcing him to complete one last assignment: assassinate his former handler who heads up an anti-cybernetics terrorist cell… even though she is also a cyborg? in fact, almost every character in the film is a cyborg, including the LAPD officers? they all have some kind of metal implant or entire robot lurking beneath their skin, and their eyeballs routinely extend from their sockets to reveal the dense circuitry beneath4. this is why the main character proudly asserts that he’s 86.5 percent human at the start of the movie—a number that likely degrades when his exploded body is reassembled twice. after almost nothing is left of us, pyun seems to ask, what’s left? the threat/promise/inevitability of nuclear war or similar extinction level event hovers over his science fiction movies like a shadow unbound, and it feels like he wants to see and wants us to see the survival of humanity past a point of almost total annihilation, a flowering out of a lifeless earth. in this respect, pyun’s creations can feel like works of profound optimism; through all the branchings of smoke and ash and metal there is always a wry smile belonging to someone trying to make things right, even if they are as corrupted by the world they live in as anyone else.
pyun would later characterize his interest in sci-fi as superficial, just a popular genre that he used as a vehicle for his ideas, so it makes sense that in the mid-’90s, more than a little inspired by the critical success of pulp fiction, he abandoned science fiction and started making crime movies with self-consciously snappy dialogue. the casts of these movies are surreal collages of faded film stars and contemporary rappers, none of them working on the set at the same time, acting at a blank space that would be filled in with christopher lambert or ice-t once their schedules opened up. pyun’s budgets continued to shrink—he shot two of these films in an empty los angeles prison just because it was available for cheap—and his ability to choreograph vivid and arresting action sequences wilted into almost nothing; all of the sudden, crowds of gangsters firing fake guns across a room seemed sufficient5. in the quaking silence after the gunfire, you hear a woman’s voice; she’s singing a romantic power ballad that glistens like splintered glass until it gets sucked away into corroded ambient sounds. rob lowe, playing an ex-con and crack addict nicknamed “crazy six,” stumbles into the club where the woman is performing her song, his face lit pale blue against a curtain of red light, as if he’s too cold and removed from the world to notice the hell seething around him.
if pyun’s sci-fi work mostly takes place in realms scraped clean of all life by some nuclear event, crazy six is what would happen if that nuclear event occurred on the surface of someone’s mind6. again, there’s no plot, not even the suggestion of one like in cyborg and nemesis, just damaged people falling through the abysses inside of them. you may witness a robbery, you may witness some kind of retaliation for the robbery, but none of it registers when the main character overdoses on crack and it’s like a drain opens up at the bottom of the world and everything sinks into it.
most of my experiences with hard drugs i try to lose myself and then i spend the whole trip worrying about who or what is going to spring up in my place. when lowe is acting in this film i feel like i can see what’s replacing him, erupting from his body like a black cloud. he has plunged himself completely in void, is staring at the visible world from its bottom, even though there is no bottom, every time you believe you have hit the bottom of the void it melts away and is replaced by another bottom, until finally the world narrows to a pinhole, star-sized, an eyelid beginning to close, and you cannot swim back up to it because your limbs and entire body and every second of every neverending minute feel heavier than stone.
2 crimes of the future (2022, dir. david cronenberg). for reasons that are still obscure to me, the past few summers i’ve felt a numbness working through my hands and feet, leaving an ache behind like a concavity opening. it suddenly becomes difficult to get out of bed, difficult to accomplish dexterous tasks, difficult to rest my hands on a desk and type without a noiseless buzzing taking over my extremities. i spend a lot of time on the internet googling “inexplicable numbness” and “dying.” it’s in these moments that i feel most out of control of my own body, like i’ve vibrated a plane of reality away from it and have to puppeteer it from afar somehow.
last june, while feeling this horrible way, i walked to the theater with my girlfriend to see crimes of the future, the most recent david cronenberg movie. cronenberg’s films are very close to my heart. they are more like poems about their subjects than they ever resemble a story being told, and his subject matter is the most adult—by which i don’t mean sophisticated or complex, but erotic—version of the cyborg movies i watched so often as a kid, exploring how the more perverse progressions of technology and culture can warp our inner realities as much as the outer one. his characters are often catastrophically repressed, and in trying to overcome this repression, they (and especially their bodies) are drawn into the furthest limits of pleasure and violence. it’s like a hole opens up in them and they go inside of it.
in crimes of the future, human bodies are changing. human pain and infection have dwindled to almost nothing and are barely experienced. the world has fewer people in it, and they’re all consensually slicing into each other with knives. performance artists who disfigure themselves in front of small audiences in empty warehouses are the new pop stars. one of these artists, saul tenser, lives in a body that is always developing new, pointless organs that make his face splinter with pain. his partner and artistic collaborator caprice removes these organs from tenser’s body and displays them as objects of art while tenser passively dwells in surgical unit that looks like a hollow cockroach.
i think i fell in love with crimes of the future from the moment i saw the biomechanical units they designed for it—not just the surgical tubes but the elaborate exoskeletal beds and chairs that twitch like dying insects in order to regulate tenser’s digestion and sleep. they’re weird, misshapen, stuttering concavities, aesthetically transplanted from a cool industrial music video circa-1995. despite all their complexity they don’t even seem to mediate tenser’s pain; it’s a credit to viggo mortensen’s performance that whether he’s lying down or sitting or kneeling his face is adrift in unbroken discomfort, always slightly removed from whomever he’s conversing with, always having to talk through the noise of his pain.
tenser’s problem, as other characters frame it, is that he’s rejecting the mutations of his body when he should be embracing them, accepting the new, the boundless, the altered flesh. there’s something as yet undreamed, something more than human just beyond the rim of our understanding. wouldn’t it be wonderful to get acquainted with such a thing or, even better, make out with it? it doesn’t have to be so painful; the body need not be falling sheets of dissonance within; maybe you could experience harmony with your body for once in your life if, instead of rejecting your discomfort, you accepted and maybe even pursued it.
if this sounds perverse or dangerous then the government probably agrees with you. tenser keeps running into agents and counterrevolutionaries and systems that are motivated by ideas of what bodies should be instead of what they are. but they cannot control what is already happening. we were meant to change, to explore the margins of ourselves, to remake ourselves in an image that we could finally know and love without suffering7. if cronenberg’s films can seem occasionally apprehensive and ambivalent about these digressions of the self8, i think what ultimately animates his interest in the body is curiosity rather than judgment. nothing in a cronenberg film is natural or unnatural, and in fact the very concepts of “natural” and “unnatural” are revealed as inventions we’ve imposed on ourselves and others. this is why he can film the abject and gross with such a palpable sensuality, one that reminds me of the far more pedestrian sensation i feel when i put on makeup or a dress and can sense i’m becoming someone else who is also myself.
3 cabaret voltaire (1973-1994, 2009-2021). in september 2021 richard h. kirk died. kirk was one of the founding members of cabaret voltaire, a group that was formative in the creation of industrial music in the uk in the late seventies. when they started they made unsavory sound collages out of which a bassline or a distorted voice would arise like a hand from a grave. by the end of their first run in the early nineties, they were producing pristine ambient techno that could sit next to orbital or underworld in a dj set. they were my favorite kind of artists: never quite the same from project to project. just as you presumed to have an idea of what they did they slipped through a hole in the net of your understanding.
the throughline of their records, including when kirk revived the name a few years ago without voltaire member stephen mallinder, is that they all sound as if a mass of cultural detritus were trying to sing in a beautiful voice. they often relied on sampled vocals, extracted from sources as widely-ranged as outer limits episodes and documentaries about long beach street gangs, and they would transplant these voices from their original context into an irradiated air where they degraded rapidly. mallinder played bass and sang, but his singing voice, particularly in the early work, sounds like what would happen if a meat grinder had a mouth. the band rarely used drums and instead employed programmed rhythms that breathed, clanked, whirred, scraped against themselves in a desperate attempt to move their limbs made of scrap metal.
like many of their contemporaries—they emerged from a scene that gave birth to the repressed howlings of throbbing gristle as well as the more camp futurism of the human league—they were invested in their visual presentation, performing live in front of film projections and elliptically blinking lights. i have a copy of doublevision presents: cabaret voltaire on dvd, which collects several of their rudimentary music videos and live performances, and which appears to have been barely restored from whatever rotted vhs tape it was transferred from. each video contains looping images from history and popular culture as well as footage of the band itself, bleeding into each other like stains through a canvas.
on a particularly suggestive night9 i loaded doublevision into my dvd player to see where it would take me. for a while i saw images struggling to appear through a mesh of static. faces loomed and then hydra’d into a legion of faces. mannequins stood motionless in a window display. factories breathed dark clouds in silhouette. cities and civilizations collapsed; through their ruins marched war, famine, communism, fascism. things ended then began then ended again. no narrative could be applied to the images that wouldn’t immediately fall apart into the same debris that the images had been sifted from.
it was at this point that the screen began to warp into a hole, like a portal, the walls of which were blackened shivers. i leaned forward even though it was technically impossible to look further into it. it warbled. it shook. i thought i saw a figure waltzing out of the hole toward me, a shadow that as it approached began to take on dimension. it was a woman in a long dress that swam around her like black liquid. she had blonde hair, and i was about to tell her how nice her hair and dress were until i beheld her face, which was sewn together from other faces. i asked her who she was. without opening her mouth she said in a voice that was sewn together from other voices, “i’m you.”
then i woke up.
cyborg, at least as pyun originally intended it, is kind of a heavy metal horror film, so it figures.
if pyun finished a film early and still had a few days left on the camera equipment rental, he would just write and shoot another movie. i’ve seen three of these guerilla-style pyun productions (deceit, bloodmatch, nemesis 4: death angel), each of them fever dreams that despite nonstop expository dialogue never sufficiently explain themselves. imagine being kidnapped and waking up in darkness and only being able to decipher your situation through a slow motion voice being played backwards on a tape recorder. these films take place in that world, a world where time oozes forward, where nonsense is the only sense, where there is only one overhead light and it is shining directly on you and shipping the rest of the world into black space.
i miss the ’80s/’90s action movie convention where it wasn’t a real action movie if the main character wasn’t named something incredibly cool like “jack deth” or “alex rain.”
there’s also a scene where a guy’s head opens up and there’s a gun in there.
the total absence of blood in these films also makes you wonder if the gangsters lack as much authentic flesh as pyun’s cyborgs did.
the film literally takes place in eastern europe “after the fall of communism,” another lawless nowhere for pyun to wander.
and, if i’m reading his work correctly, we were especially meant to french kiss each other’s open wounds, for what is a wound or a hole but a portal to the inside of someone?
jeff goldblum’s transformation in the fly and samantha eggar giving birth to small murderous mutants through fleshy sacs and tubes that are the externalization of her psychic trauma in the brood one could argue are intentionally like… “bad,” much as samantha eggar is the very best thing about the brood, the incandescent rage she channels throughout the film gives her an almost spectral presence.
thunderstorming outside, lights off so that the television looked like it was leaking another reality’s light onto the carpet.