This anxiety naturally extends to sexuality, another central theme in Cronenberg's work. In eXistenZ, Ted's distrust of the virtual game world is tightly linked with a masculine penetration anxiety: the desire not to have something foreign inserted into him. This seems an extension of an idea explored earlier in Videodrome, where TV producer Maxx Renn (James Woods) begins developing a new orifice in his stomach, within which a fleshy video tape is inserted. A television comes alive, with the image of Maxx's possibly dead lover Nikki Brand (Debbie Harry) on the screen, as the television itself begins pulsing with a sexual energy.



Like the Burroughs novel on which it is based, Naked Lunch involves a great deal of sexuality—and the sense of homosexuality as an outlaw choice in the mid-twentieth century America. For much of the film, Bill Lee (Peter Weller)'s typewriter is an insect with an sphincter-like orifice, and this "typewriter" consumes drugs when Lee rubs it on its "mouth." Another typewriter transforms into a naked human torso, which joins in a rendezvous Lee is having with a woman.  

  

Cronenberg's most controversial film, the NC-17 Crash (1996), is about a group of sexual fetishists (including James Spader and Holly Hunter) who get off on car crashes and the physical aftermath. The book, which J. G. Ballard wrote to (in his words) "rub the human face in its own vomit, and force it to look in the mirror," confronts the acceptance of the integration of such a destructive force (the car) into everyday life. However, Cronenberg focuses more on the integration of people and machines, and specifically the extension of men, in particular, through vehicles.

 

The dual nature of reality as a space that we both observe and create forms the crux of many of Cronenberg's works, and in a way seems to be the key struggle faced by all his protagonists, body horrific or not. The Dead Zone and Spider—both literary adaptations—move away from the body horror but are still infused with metaphysical dread. Zone has Christopher Walken as a clairvoyant whose life is rooted in uncertainty: the dead zone exists between the future that he sees and his own potential to change it. In Spider, a character's perception of the world collides with the reality of his world. Spider's (Ralph Fiennes) slipping grasp on reality arises during his adolescence and is closely tied to his burgeoning sexuality (and witnessing that of his parents). Based on a similarly titled book by Patrick McGrath, the film follows him after his release from a mental institution to a halfway house. The character lives simultaneously in his past and his present, never fully able to sort out reality from his perception of it.   

  
The myriad worlds of Cronenberg collapse in the flesh. Some characters attain redemption, like James Ballard and his wife in Crash. Others are incapable of reconciling the world of the mind and the body, and end up mutants like The Fly's Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) or madmen forever trapped in their own realities like Spider. Who falls into what category is as much a matter of chance as it is of character, but all must face the metaphysical challenges presented to all of us sacks of meat and blood walking the earth. 

I feel a sense of relief every time I pull the needle out of my flesh. The catheter stays in, and the machine is attached, but I am once again unified. No longer a split—actor and acted upon, doctor and patient, observer and observed. Sometime there is pain, occasionally sharp, but this too is a centering, albeit around a negative sensation. The body is the first object, and through it all good and evil derives, all truth is found, all beauty resides.