The mind-blow­ing lega­cy of David Cronenberg’s Scanners

A film­mak­er obsessed with the emer­gent rela­tion­ships between tech­nol­o­gy and human­i­ty, David Cro­nen­berg has been one of the most per­cep­tive and prophet­ic observers of moder­ni­ty for over half a cen­tu­ry. Com­bin­ing a cold, ana­lyt­i­cal gaze with a pen­chant for the glee­ful­ly grotesque, his visions of the present and the near-future have always been trou­bling, though it has some­times tak­en a while for our own real­i­ty to prove how trou­bling­ly accu­rate they were. This was cer­tain­ly the case for his 1981 sci-fi hor­ror Scanners.

The film con­cerns arti­fi­cial­ly-enhanced indi­vid­u­als with extra­or­di­nary psy­chic abil­i­ties, and a shady corporation’s hunt for one mem­ber of the tit­u­lar group, Dar­ryl Revok (Michael Iron­side), who has been wreak­ing hav­oc with his pow­ers as part of a plan for glob­al dom­i­na­tion. Four decades on, Scan­ners is still prob­a­bly best known for an ear­ly scene in which Revok shows what he’s capa­ble of. Dur­ing a con­fer­ence on the new ​“scan­ners” phe­nom­e­non, a low-lev­el psy­chic invites him to come on stage as part of a demon­stra­tion, only to have his own head uncer­e­mo­ni­ous­ly blown to smithereens by Revok’s advanced telekinesis.

An instant­ly icon­ic shot, the explod­ing-head sequence was achieved by fill­ing a plas­ter skull with latex, wax and old ham­burg­ers, then blast­ing it with a shot­gun. Like many of the most mem­o­rable images in Cronenberg’s work, it’s the kind of sat­is­fy­ing old-school prac­ti­cal effect that just wouldn’t hit the same if it was done with CGI. Indeed, the scene’s infamy con­tributed to the film achiev­ing a degree of box office suc­cess – some­thing of a com­mer­cial break­through for Cronenberg.

Scan­ners also marked a the­mat­ic tran­si­tion for the direc­tor. He had long been fas­ci­nat­ed by infes­ta­tions, incu­ba­tions and meta­mor­phoses, but here his brand of body hor­ror took a more cere­bral turn. Though he would lat­er expand on this more ful­ly in Video­drome and The Fly, Cro­nen­berg was already start­ing to explore the idea that human­i­ty might be com­plic­it in its own trau­mat­ic transformations.

The film’s ini­tial release pre-dat­ed the inven­tion of the inter­net by two years, but a basic descrip­tion of its premise – a glob­al net­work of indi­vid­u­als have a direct con­nec­tion to each other’s thoughts that’s almost impos­si­ble to tune out, often lead­ing to shock­ing acts of vio­lence – seems uncan­ni­ly famil­iar in our extreme­ly-online age. Today, we’re just a click away from an unfil­tered stream of ideas and opin­ions from peo­ple all over the world, as social media has allowed us to merge into a kind of all-con­sum­ing hive mind.

There was a time when this new inter­con­nec­tiv­i­ty felt lib­er­at­ing. With tech break­throughs allow­ing peo­ple to form con­nec­tions that were hith­er­to impos­si­ble, pre­vi­ous­ly exclud­ed com­mu­ni­ties were start­ing to be empow­ered more than ever before. But it’s become hard­er to main­tain a pos­i­tive out­look, as the spread of mis­in­for­ma­tion and divi­sive rhetoric has ter­mi­nal­ly weak­ened our demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions, while our fraz­zled ner­vous sys­tems have been rewired by the overuse of mobile devices and social media. What Scan­ners sug­gests is that this process may have been set in motion a long time ago.

An ear­ly exam­ple of what would become Cronenberg’s sig­na­ture aes­thet­ic, Scan­ners com­bines ster­ile light­ing, uncom­fort­able close-ups and occa­sion­al­ly stilt­ed per­for­mances to cre­ate an atmos­phere of social alien­ation. Its open­ing scene is shot from the point of view of a home­less scan­ner who trig­gers a seizure in a woman, but only after she makes a cru­el, judge­men­tal com­ment about the man’s shab­by appear­ance and men­tal state. Beneath the film’s super­nat­ur­al phe­nom­e­na and cor­po­rate con­spir­a­cies, we can feel the more mun­dane, imper­son­al vio­lence of the mod­ern world. And while the scan­ners’ psy­chic pow­ers seem to offer a way to tran­scend this, they can only lead to fur­ther suf­fer­ing and destruction.

The par­al­lels with the past few decades are all-too clear. If real-world con­nec­tion in our late-cap­i­tal­ist soci­ety wasn’t already in a state of ret­ro­grade, then it’s unlike­ly the social inno­va­tions of the inter­net would have tak­en hold in the way that they did. And our own ver­sion of men­tal inter­con­nec­tiv­i­ty has end­ed up dri­ving us even fur­ther apart, exac­er­bat­ing pre-exist­ing sociopo­lit­i­cal divi­sions. Rewatch­ing Scan­ners, you get the impres­sion that Cro­nen­berg saw all this com­ing. Yet the film is no fin­ger-wag­ging screed about the dan­gers of tech­nol­o­gy or the nefar­i­ous schemes of those in pow­er. It sees the dri­ve towards inter­con­nec­tiv­i­ty and neu­ro­log­i­cal enhance­ment sim­ply as an evo­lu­tion of our iden­ti­ties, and in the process makes us ques­tion who we real­ly are.

In the film’s show-stop­ping cli­max, a fiery psy­chic bat­tle sees bod­ies and brains pushed to their lim­it as Revok is con­front­ed by Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack), the pow­er­ful scan­ner sent to take him out. After both men have been lying appar­ent­ly dead for a while, Revok even­tu­al­ly wakes up. Look­ing out through Vale’s eyes and speak­ing with Vale’s voice, he declares ambigu­ous­ly, ​“We’ve won”. With both minds sub­sumed into a new col­lec­tive con­scious­ness, it’s no longer pos­si­ble to tell who has pow­er over whom.

What if we’ve already become part of some­thing much larg­er and more com­plex than our­selves? And what if, instead of hos­tile forces devis­ing an elab­o­rate plot, there’s now nobody in con­trol of what’s hap­pen­ing to human­i­ty? Scan­ners is an eerie reminder of just how lit­tle influ­ence any of us can have over our own minds, in a dehu­man­is­ing glob­al soci­ety that’s also irre­versibly inter­con­nect­ed. But, like all Cronenberg’s best work, it’s still fas­ci­nat­ed by how we’re chang­ing, and curi­ous about how our new tech­no­log­i­cal­ly-mod­i­fied selves might turn out.