The imminent remake of Videodrome promises to ‘modernise the concept, infus[ing] it with the possibilities of nano-technology and blow it up into a large-scale sci-fi action thriller’ (Fleming 2009: 1). Like cyberpunk itself, Cronenberg's film devours its own logic, so that, by the end, the New Flesh isn't flesh at all, but a cerebrocortical discharge into corporate messianism. So too there is something autocannibalistic about remaking a film about the subsumption of existence by imagistic technologies. Videodrome's analogue technology has never circumscribed its uncontrollable flesh, yet one can only assume that nanotechnology will be complemented by digital technologies and platforms. Deleuzian schizoanalytical readings of the film are inevitable, and I trust that my own work shows the extent to which capital provides the internal animation of Cronenberg's film and, more than likely, its hideous progeny. If Baudrillard is to play the role of antagonist in a repetition of becoming-Deleuzian, then he will be a more challenging obstacle on this occasion. The question raised by the remake is what a cyberpunk film might look like in the biotech century. For biopunk to cannibalise its cyberdaddy might be the next evolutionary step, and a schizophrenic one at that. Against the interminable abstraction of value biocapitalism has planned for us, with a renewed appreciation and sympathy for the meat, a biopunked Videodrome might well redistribute its psychic and corporeal coordinates away from the cul-de-sac of capitalist virtual reality. Then we might discover of what the New Flesh is truly capable.

The Shape of Punk to Come

Becoming-Deleuzian demands a thorough reappraisal of Baudrillard's place in SF studies and, combined with the mutations of the genre, a need to rethink cyberpunk as the literature and cinema of late capitalism. Many of cyberpunk's once-progressive impulses have proven as technologically naïve as they are politically harmful. Deleuze and Baudrillard have more to offer this discourse than unlicensed desire and revelries in virtual reality. This is why the opening move of the book was to reinscribe cyberpunk into the broader critical apparatus of control. Burgess's and Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange are the most replete elaborations of control, as evidenced by their linguistic, auditory, perceptual and pharmaceutical schizo fluxes and accompanying reterritorialisations.