Chapter 24

The Cinema of David Cronenberg

Objectives: The objective of this chapter is to introduce the learners to the films and works of David Cronenberg, one of the leading Canadian filmmakers.

Key words: body horror, graphic sequences, auteurism

David Cronenberg (1943- )

Cronenberg’s became a significant presence in world cinema since the commercial success in the United States of his 1981 film Scanners. He is an author as well as an auteur, writing or adapting the screenplays for most of his movies.Yet, the English-speaking Canada has never been really comfortable with Cronenberg. A filmmaker of remarkable originality, Cronenberg has rarely received an appropriate consideration from scholarly opinion in English Canada. A voracious reader, his readings range from the modernists to science fiction, and he cites Vladimir Nabokov and William Burroughs, rather than any filmmakers, as his artistic influences.

David Cronenberg’s movies are often described as ‘immoral.’ They are consequently criticized for being ‘sick, perverse, and sometimes downright depraved’. Often called Dave ‘Depraved’ Cronenberg and ‘The Baron of Blood’, he is one of the principal originators of what is commonly known as the body horror genre, a style of filmmaking which explores people’s fears of bodily transformation and infection. The idea of cursed intelligence occurs frequently in his films. His Videodrome (1983) is a commentary on how films and television have changed the notions of reality and fantasy. In Dead Zone (1983), based on a Stephen King novel, Christopher Walken plays a man who is able to see the end of life in anyone he touches.

Early shockers • Shivers (1975 ), • Rabid (1977 ), • The Brood (1979 ), • Scanners (1981), • Videodrome (1983). • The Dead Zone (1983 ) • The Fly( 1986) • Dead Ringers (1988), • Naked Lunch (1991), • Madame Butterfly (1993), • Crash( 1996), and • eXistenZ ( 1999) These films have increasingly tended to downplay body horror in favour of aesthetic and psychological contemplation, while his more recent eXistenZ, is a multifaceted reprise of many of his themes and concerns.

Cronenberg is a staunch Canadian filmmaker, with nearly all of his films (including major studio vehicles The Dead Zone and The Fly) having been filmed in his home province of Ontario. Notable exceptions include M. Butterfly (based on a play by David Henry Hwang) and Spider, most of which were shot in China and England, respectively. Also, Rabid and Shivers were shot in and around Montreal. Most of his films have been at least partially financed by Telefilm Canada, and Cronenberg is a vocal supporter of government-backed film projects, saying “Every country needs (a system of government grants) in order to have a national cinema in the face of Hollywood”.

Critics generally regard The Fly as an authentic Hollywood product. Though a horror film, it was the compassionate relationship between the Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis that turned the film into a romantic drama. Based on George Langelaan’s short story, The Fly has been read as an allegory for AIDS, since the hero warns the woman he loves that he is a danger to her. “I’m an insect who dreamt he was a man and loved it. But now the dream is over, and the insect is awake.” Cronenberg derives parallel between The Fly and GregorSamsa in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis:

Stories of magical transformations have always been part of humanity’s narrative canon. They articulate that universal sense of empathy for all life forms that we feel; they express that desire for transcendence that every religion also expresses; they prompt us to wonder if transformation into another living creature would be a proof of the possibility of reincarnation and some sort of afterlife and is thus, however hideous or disastrous the narrative, a religious and hopeful concept. (Cronenberg, 2014).

Dead Ringers (1988)

The film starred Jeremy Irons (in a double-role of twins), and Genevieve Bujold. It belongs to the genre of medical-horror and is adapted from the true crime novella Twins by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland, and is a documentation of the Mendle twins - New York City gynecologists who committed suicide to escape the charges of malpractice.

The film begins with the information “Toronto 1988”, the first time Cronenberg specifies location, destabilizing prior notions of North American miscellany. Doctors Elliot and Beverly are a set of brothers, not complete in themselves, but rather who complement each other. Both the characters have femaleness in them. Elliot has had more women, but in terms of ever establishing emotional rapport with women, Elliot is totally unsuccessful. Beverly on the other hand is successful, but he does not see this success as an achievement. Instead he sees that as another part of his weakness.

Dead Ringers partly seem to stem from Cronenberg’s lifelong passion for science, particularly biochemistry. One gets a glimpse of Cronenberg’s autobiographical impulse when we see the Mantle twins in the initial scenes of Dead Ringers, whose fascination with the mysteries of human body is obvious by their early experiment in ‘inter-ovular surgery’. At one point, one of the brothers says, “I’ve always thought there should be beauty contests for the inside of the human body,” and launches off into a speech about contests for best spleen, best kidneys and best female sexual organs.

Dead Ringers, in a true Cronenberg style, explores an idea of imposed order, with its blue-lit examination theatres, sterile red gowns, and polished penthouse surfaces, sabotaged by the ever-present spectre of sexual jealousy and addiction. Motifs, such as insects occur in the form of a specially commissioned set of surgical steel gynecological instruments, illustrating Cronenberg’s juxtaposition of the human with the inhuman.

The doctors specialize in the area of female fertility (“We don’t do husbands, we do only wives”, says Beverley at some place to a patient pleading him to treat her infertile husband), the Mantles become fascinated, and later obsessed with the ‘trifurcate’ actress Claire Niveau, a mutant woman and expert in promiscuity, masochism and drugs. What begins as a playful distraction for the brothers, turns into a dangerous game leading to their descent into jealousy, rivalry, paranoia and self-destruction. Eliot’s passion for Claire, Beverley’s discomfort with his twin’s love life, and the brothers’ subsequent descent into self-induced misery, form the crux of the plot.

The film’s most graphic sequence occurs when the twins are depicted organically joined at the abdomen like Siamese twins, with Claire biting through the tissue to separate them. As Eliot increases his dependency on drugs, Beverley plunges into guilt and remorse. He uses their banned instruments to try and separate them, by opening up his own twin where his womb should be and ends up killing him, and in the closing shot he is discovered dead draped over his twin. The audience is left pondering the way, “Their unresolved masochistic desires re-figure them as the real mutant women, the true object of their lifelong gynaecological quest” (O’ Day 2004: 132).

The city in Dead Ringers is sleek and icily elegant. The physical and psychic disintegration of the twins find a perfect setting in the technologically advanced, perfectly sanitized and highly urbane world. Much of the film is shot indoors and the cool, detached and ultra-modern interiors, and most often we find the doctors in the expensive and high-tech clinic and apartment.

There is certain ambiguity in the film. Nothing is said, for instance, about the fact that when the Mantles appear in the operating room, the doctors, nurses, orderlies and patients are serenely draped in fabric that is blood red. Dead Ringers, like most Cronenberg films, evoked a deep sense of shock among the audience, though the film was particularly praised for its elegant cinematography and intriguing performance by Jeremy Irons.

For David Thomson, “ Dead Ringers was a masterpiece…it has some of the austerity of Fritz Lang, or Ernst Lubitisch” (Thomson 2002:189). According to a New York Times critic, “Among the film's more hauntingly strange developments are Beverly’s invention of a new set of surgical devices, which frighten everyone who sees them; the brothers' growing identification with the Siamese twins Chang and Eng, and the drug addiction that finally leaves one brother utterly oblivious to his sibling’s fate” (Maslin 1988). Roger Ebert says, “Dead Ringers is a stylistic tour de force, but it's cold and creepy and centered on bleak despair. It's the kind of movie where you ask people how they liked it, and they say, ‘Well, it was well made,’ and then they wince.” Whether this had to with the fear associated with going to the hospital, the stigma involved with gynecology, or the outright nervousness induced by the sight of men in blood red suits using “tools for operating on mutant women” whilst inebriated, Dead Ringers struck a chord with the audience.

Crash (1996)

J.G. Ballard, in introduction to the novel Crash (1973) says “Throughout Crash I have used the car not only as a sexual image, but as a total metaphor for man’s life in today’s society. As such the novel has a political role quite apart from its sexual content, but I would still like to think that Crash is the first pornographic novel based on technology. In a sense, pornography is the most political form of fiction, dealing with how we use and exploit each other in the most urgent and ruthless way. …the ultimate role of Crash is cautionary, a warning against that brutal, erotic, and overlit realm that beckons more and more persuasively to us from the margins of the technological landscape.” (Ballard in Bernard 2005: 67).

A terrifying work of speculative fiction, Crash explores his passion for the automobile. Adapted from J.G. Ballard’s 1973 novel, Cronenberg documents in Crash, the nature of human tendency, an accentuation of the limits to which the individual will endeavor to possess what they desire.

The film’s mood remains ice cold and grey, under the metallic grey palette. Television commercial director James Ballard (James Spader) is established as having an “open” relationship with his wife, Catherine (Deborah Unger). In the first crash we see James collide with another car on a freeway because he is looking at a set of storyboards while driving. The crash is over in a flash, and we find the other driver dead on the hood of James’s car. The dead man’s wife Helen (Holly Hunter) is injured and, soon James and Helen sense a new kind of erotic possibility. Soon they are acquainted with Vaughan, a survivor of multiple crashes. Vaughan introduces James, Catherine and Holly to an entire cult built on the “erotica” of car crashes.

At its core, Crash is a complex and frightening look at where the predictability and innovations of modern life have led us, at how dull our over-sated senses have become. Like the book, the movie is a cautionary tale of how we might adapt to the environment that we have ourselves created, sterile and isolated from nature. Crash unfolds without moral judgment, presenting an unflinching vision of a modern wild kingdom, man-made of concrete and metal.

At the 1996 Cannes Festival, the film received a Special Jury Award for “originality, audacity and daring.” Such a response from the judges of that prestigious event and a substantial amount of critical acclaim from other quarters did not prevent Crash from being banned in England and having its United States release delayed by nearly half a year. It is still banned in the Westminster section of London on the grounds that it would encourage “road rage.”

In 1995 Cronenberg met Salman Rushdie─ at that point still deep in hiding from the fatwa issued against him─ and interviewed him at length for the Canadian magazine Shift. Similarity could be due to the fact that Cronenberg, too, has had experience with moral Puritans trying to prevent his art from finding an audience. In terms of reception, Crash seemed to offend people. It could not be shown in certain countries, and it served for much lively debate ─ as had the book upon publication.

As a scriptwriter he has been able (unlike many Hollywood auteurs) to exercise considerable control over his material. In 2005, Cronenberg made a big budget studio style film, A History of Violence, which was rather conventional by Cronenberg’s standards. This was followed by Eastern Promises (2007) and A Dangerous Method (2011), based on Christopher Hampton’s play The Talking Cure (2002). A critic analyses the film as: “the film never really establishes the stakes of the drama. No doubt Cronenberg is expressly flouting a tradition of films about psychoanalysis that are excessive and overtly dream-like. But this decorous, if visually beautiful, piece feels too repressed to breathe.” Both films did well and it appears that audiences have now come to terms with Cronenberg’s genre of films.

Lack of connection between people seems to fascinate Cronenberg. Following the release of Cosmopolis, he said in an interview:

None of these people really relate on a normal human level. They've sort of created a weird abstraction, a bubble, a vacuum, and that's sort of represented by the limo -- it's a strange, disconnected space. It has every sort of luxury and amenity and technological gadget and it's really disconnected from the sight and the sound of the city that it's traveling through, and that represents the way that they construct their lives. It's sort of interesting that one of the investors in this movie is a genuine French billionaire who deals with billions of dollars or trading and so on; he really wanted to be connected with this movie because he said it was absolutely accurate -- he deals all the time with people who are exactly like Eric Packer. They live in a bubble, a strange virtual reality that they've created, and they really don't know how to relate to people on a normal level.

References

1. Cronenberg, David. “The Beetle and the Fly.” The Paris Review. Jan 17, 2014. http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/01/17/the-beetle-and-the-fly/ (accessed on 15 Feb 2014). 2. Romney, Jonathan . “A Dangerous Method.” Independent. 12 Feb 2012. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/reviews/a-dangerous-method-david-cronenberg- 100-mins-15-6776940.html (accessed on 15 Feb 2014). 3. Thomson, David. The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. 4th ed. NY: Little, Brown, 2002.

Selected readings:

1. Ballard, J.G. quoted in Jonathan Rosenbaum. “Crash: Cronenberg and sex drive”. The X List: Movies that Turn us on. Jami Bernard (ed). New York: De Capo, 2005. 2. Cronenberg, David. Cronenberg on Cronenberg. Chris Rodley (ed).Faber& Faber, 1997. 3. O’Day, Marc. “David Cronenberg.” Fifty Great Contemporary Film Makers. Yvonne Tasker (ed). London & New York: Routledge, 2004.

Selected websites

• Maslin, Janet. Dead Ringers. The New York Times. September 23, 1988. • http://www.criterion.com/films/541-dead-ringers • http://www.channel4.com/film/reviews/film.jsp?id=102374&page=2. • Tyrkus, Michael J. “Dead Ringers.” http://www.filmreference.com/Films-Dah-Deu/Dead-Ringers.html

Quiz

1. Answer the following: i. Why is Cronenberg called Dave ‘Depraved’ Cronenberg? ii. Describe the reception of Dead Ringers.

2. Fill in the blanks: i. At the 1996 Cannes Festival, ……..received a Special Jury Award for “originality, audacity and daring.” ii. Dead Ringers is set in……… iii. Cronenberg interviewed …….. …….for the magazine Shift.

3. Match the following: i Crash a George Langelaan ii Dead Zone b J.G. Ballard iii The Fly c David Henry Hwang iv M. Butterfly d Stephen King

Answer key

2. i- Crash ; ii. -Toronto; iii. –Salman Rushdie 3. i-b ; ii.-d ; iii.- a; iv.-c