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What does government govern? What, in other words, is government the government of? The answer – at least in the West – has shifted over time. In the age of religion, kings and queens ruled over souls, preparing them for the divine beyond. After the Enlightenment, the soul gave way to the mind as the focus of governance. By the late 18th century, the target had shifted again. In the first volume of The History of Sexuality (1976), the philosopher Michel Foucault observed that, as the 19th century approached, government was turning its gaze to the body itself. Biological life was no longer incidental to politics: life and death, sickness and health became objects of management, control and regulation. Foucault called this new regime ‘biopolitics’ or ‘biopower’.

Across the centuries since, the government of bodies has grown only more visible – and more contested. So much of our politics now revolves around managing them. We see it in battles over trans participation in sports and access to abortion, the furore over Elon Musk’s Neuralink brain implants, and the push to regulate red dye in food. Even an issue as seemingly distant as school funding is, at bottom, a struggle over the body; that makes sense, since research shows how profoundly the environment impacts brain development and neuroplasticity from childhood all the way through early adulthood. When we talk about school budgets, we’re talking about the kinds of brains (and bodies) we want to produce. When we worry about AI in classrooms, we’re worrying that students may never form the pathways of critical thought and focus they need.

The reigning biopolitical disputes hinge on deceptively simple questions: what is the body for? What should we do with it? Are there levels of biology where a difference of degree becomes a difference of kind? If a human body changes (or is changed) beyond a certain point, does it stop being an altered human body and become, instead, something else?

There’s no shortage of modern artists and thinkers wrestling with these questions. The choreographer Meg Stuart pushes bodies to extremes of movement; the multimedia artist ORLAN and the transgender artist Cassils use performance to test the boundaries of flesh and identity; another performance artist, Stelarc, stages the body as machine, grafted with prosthetics. Patricia Piccinini’s sculptures imagine hybrid anatomies, while the films of Julia Ducournau – director of the body horror Titane (2021) – and Claire Denis probe bodily desire and transformation. In scholarship, Yuval Noah Harari tracks the future of the human species, Kate Crawford critiques the bodily costs of AI, and Paul B Preciado theorises on gender transition and pharmacopolitics.

And yet, few voices have been as persistent – or as transformative – as David Cronenberg’s. Since the 1970s, he has been cinema’s great anatomist, staging dramas of growth, decay and mutation. Over the decades, his vision has shifted: from a romantic belief that altered bodies deserve celebration, to a more careful insistence that people should be free to alter themselves only if they choose. The arc feels natural, but it is also urgent right now. At a moment when the fight over bodies threads through disputes on everything from vaccines to elder care, Cronenberg offers a framework we need: a way to affirm bodily autonomy without stoking the panic that casts every transformed body as a threat. His cinema points toward a politics of protection – one that secures the vulnerable while refusing to weaponise their difference, and that shows how the defence of bodies can be a form of solidarity rather than a spark for fear.

‘Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.’ That’s a quote often, though wrongly, attributed to Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22 (1961). But it might as well be the theme of Cronenberg’s cult classic Videodrome (1983). The film’s ‘they’ are the menacing minds at Spectacular Optical – a supposed global corporate citizen whose public face is the production of reading glasses for the developing world, while its true business is weapons technology. The company is run by Barry Convex, who tells the hapless protagonist Max Renn (James Woods) not about missiles, but about another product altogether: Videodrome.

The name refers to a top-secret video stream picked up by pirate TV stations like the one Max runs in Toronto – Civic-TV. Part-snuff, part-hardcore porn and entirely unburdened by sentiment, Videodrome delivers in brutal closeup the sadomasochistic torture and murder of its ‘contestants’. Unbothered by the violence and desperate to attract more audience to his flagging station, Max resolves to license Videodrome for Civic-TV. Max is hardly a prude. Reviewing clips of erotica that his production assistant Harlan recommends, Max responds only that ‘There’s something too soft about it.’ He wants something ‘tough’ enough to ‘break through’ and finds it in Videodrome.........

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