Tortured Bodies, Ravaged Flesh, Killing Machines: David Cronenberg and the Sociology of Disgust

Over the past two decades, reflections on disgust and repulsion have been piling-up in Social Theory. Moving away from an analysis entirely centred on biological response or emotional expression, theorizing disgust became an important instrument to understand moral boundaries and civilizational constructions. Disgust seems to fulfil a position akin to incest prohibition – adequately universal to be declared biological, and sufficiently particular to be deemed cultural. If the traditional views on disgust revolved around the issues of purity, pollution, and contamination, having the body at the centre stage, some of the contemporary approaches are linked not to external threats to the human integrity but to the transformative capacity of science and technology, breaking barriers, violating interdictions, and destroying moral boundaries. The danger of the body snatchers becomes the menace of the creators of revulsion. Terror and horror movies, tend to epitomize both dimensions of disgust by focusing their attention either on the mutilated, raped and transformed bodies of the victims of epidemics, and serial killers or on the creative and uncontrolled hubris of the brilliant but mad scientist that aspires to play a demiurgic role in a new but demented universe. This double feature of disgust is paramount on the films of Canadian director David Cronenberg, representing both the civilizing and uncivilizing roles that disgust can play, especially when linked to scientific projects. If science is seen as a cornerstone of modernity, a civilizing process and  symbol of progress and enlightenment, reducing human suffering and enabling longer, healthier and happier lives, it is also possible to see it as a suppressor of the traditional boundaries of the artificial-natural divide or the human-animal partition. Cronenberg’s filmography is a clear example of how the medical, biological and chemical sciences have entered the realm of disgust, side by side with porn or sexploitation.