Masaryk University in Brno Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Vendula Pšeničková Sexual Deviations in Recent Canadian Cinema: David Cronenberg's Crash and Lynne Stopkewich's Kissed
B.A. Major Thesis
Supervisor: doc. PhDr. Tomáš Pospíšil, Dr . 2008 2
I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………………….
Vendula Pšeničková
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Acknowledgements: I would like to thank my supervisor, doc. PhDr. Tomáš Pospíšil, Dr. for his help and patience. I am also grateful to Kristýna Brejšová a Milada Burianová for their support.
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction……………………………………………………………………………..5
2. The Topic of Sexuality in Canadian Films…………………………………………… 8
3. Directors…………………………………………………………………………………9
3.1. David Cronenberg………………………………………………………………....9
3.2. Lynne Stopkewich………………………………………………………………....11
4. Crash…………………………………………………………………………………….12
4.1. Synopsis…………………………………………………………………………….12
4.2. Production………………………………………………………………………….14
4.3. Response……………………………………………………………………………16
5. Kissed …………………………………………………………………………………. 17
5.1. Synopsis…………………………………………………………………………….17
5.2. Production …………………………………………………………………….. …..18
5.3. Response…………………………………………………………………………....20
6. Cinematic Techniques…………………………………………………………………..20
6.1. Crash …………………………………………………………………………………..20
6.2. Kissed ……………………………………………………………………………….....24
7. Motifs………………………………………………………………………………….....29
7.1. Social Relations……………………………………………………………………….29
7.2. Sexual Deviations……………………………………………………………………..30
7.3. Rituals………………………………………………………………………………....33
7.4. Sex and Death………………………………………………………………………...35
8. Reasons for Picturing of Sexual Deviations in Recent English Canadian Films...….38
9. Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………….....40
Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………………..42
5 1. Introduction
The English Canadian film industry is not as commercially successful or popular as the
Hollywood film industry in the USA. Canadians struggled for a long time to establish their own national cinema in the shadow of the American one.
Unlike in Great Britain, Germany or the USA in the 1920s, in Canada the state failed to adopt any legislation that would support the development of Canadian feature film production.
Although there were some government established institutions supporting Canadian national film production like the Exhibits and Publicity Bureau founded in 1918 (after 1923 called the Canadian
Government Motion Picture Bureau), which was later in 1941 absorbed by the National Film
Board, these institutions emphasized the production of documentary films promoting tourism and trade over the production of feature films. Moreover, the growing Hollywood film industry took control over the distribution and exhibition system in Canada and, by providing its own films left almost no space for distribution and exhibition of Canadian independents (Gittings 78 79).
This difficult situation did not change until the 1967 when the Canadian Film Development
Corporation (the CDF, which later became Telefilm Canada) was established in order to invest in the Canadian feature film industry. However the CFDC managed to stimulate the production of feature films, because of the US monopoly on the Canadian theatrical distribution, they could not have been seen by Canadian audiences. As Gittings remarks, a new tax shelter legislation was introduced in the late 1970s in order to secure distribution and exhibition, but it led only to focusing on the American market, therefore making films for American audience, which meant repressing the Canadian spirit in them. In the 1980s because of the new content regulation for Canadian television companies, they provided more broadcasting time for Canadian feature films. In 1984 this “shift towards television production and the increasingly close relationship shared by television and film are reflected in the renaming of the CFDC as Telefilm Canada” (Gittings 98). Another option for Canadian Films “to circumvent the US monopoly on distribution and gain access to new markets” is a co production (Gittings 99). Today Canada has treaties with 44 countries and many
6 successful Canadian films were co produced: Map of the Human Heart (Vincent Ward,
Canada/Australia/France/United Kingdom/United States 1992), Zero Patient (John Greyson,
Canada/United Kingdom 1993), and The Red Violin (Francois Girard, Canada/Italy/United
Kingdom/United States 1998) among many more (Gittings 100).
As Gittings further suggests the company that has a great share on the commercial viability of Canadian cinema in an international extent is Alliance Atlantic which for example enabled production and distribution of films by Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg (100).
Despite all the state or private funding and critical success there still is obviously not much point for Canadian filmmakers in trying to compete with Hollywood production of feature films as far the commercial success and popularity are concerned. Canadian director Lynne Stopkewich comments on this fact:
The Americans are like an older brother who is blond and drives a convertible and we are
like a dark haired recluse sitting in the attic writing strange poetry. We live in a harsher
climate; the population is a lot smaller. We [filmmakers] want to show the other side of
what it is like to live here, not the tourist propaganda. (qtd. in Macnab)
As a result, Canadian filmmakers, who wanted to make large budget films, had to work in, or at least cooperate with Hollywood like, Norman Jewison, James Cameron or Ivan Reitman and the others, who stayed in Canada, often tend to oppose the “classical Hollywood narrative style” by making their films distinct (Vanderburgh).
The strong point of Canadian feature films is their originality, and quality. Therefore
Canadian contemporary filmmakers have an inclination to deal with marginal topics and experiment with style in their films.
Although it is difficult to sort out the work of contemporary English Canadian filmmakers, there are some themes and features which became typical for English Canadian films. Among these topics are road trips, dysfunctional relationships, breaking of various taboos, catastrophic visions of
7 technological development and also the topic of various sexual deviations like sadomasochism, incest, necrophilia, pedophilia or sexual abuse.
Thesis
In this thesis I concentrate on the topic of the sexual deviations in contemporary Canadian films. Because I cannot deal with all Canadian films depicting some form of sexually deviant behavior ever made, I have to select two recent Canadian films as key studies.
Eventually, I chose two films, both released in 1996 and both picturing the characters having a deviant relation to sex. One of them is a debut feature and the other one is made by an experienced filmmaker.
The first film I have chosen is Kissed , directed by the young Torontian director Lynne
Stopkewich. Kissed is Stopkewich’s debut. The film is based on the short story by Barbara Gowdy
“We So Seldom Look on Love” about young Sandra, who is a necrophiliac.
The second film, called Crash , was directed by David Cronenberg, who had in the year of release of this film been an active filmmaker for already thirty years and Crash was his twenty first film. As well as Stopkewich’s Kissed Cronenberg’s Crash is based on a novel. The novel was written by James Ballard and is about a group of people who are obsessed with car accidents and who are only able to become sexually aroused by the fantasies about being involved in the car crashes.
I analyze the cinematic techniques used, compare the different ways in which sexual deviations are depicted in them and finally offer some possible explanations for the Canadian directors' tendency to deal with the topic of sexual deviations.
8 2. The Topic of Sexuality in Recent English Canadian Films David Clandfield believes that the first unconventional sexually transgressive English
Canadian films emerged in the university background in 1960s:
The underground films of the period often distinguished themselves from the
mainstream by breaking sexual taboos and ran afoul of provincial Censor
Boards. Filmmakers in this tradition did not serve the apprenticeship with either
the NFB or CBC. They were not particularly shaped by contemporary trends in
documentary and sought to make low budget features as their first works. (100
101)
There were several centers of activity throughout Canada: in Toronto, Vancouver and in
Hamilton. David Cronenberg also started his career in this period at the University of Toronto where he made his first two short features Transfer (1966) and From the Drain (1967)
(Clandfield101).
Later in the 1970s even the mainstream films started dealing with human sexuality like
Outrageous (1977) , or In Praise of Older Women (1978), by Robert Lantos and also the early films by David Cronenberg. They first caused a huge shock for conservative Canadian audience, but at the same time opened the way for more liberal attitude of Canadian audience towards the picturing of sex on screen. Monk comments on this: “From a society that was completely closed on the subject of sex, we were slowly opening up and letting all those wily sexual demons loose” (124).
Another way of demystifying sex on screen in Canada was through documents which “dealt with things that should not be done” (Monk 124). Among such documents were Sexual Abuse-The
Family Sexual Abuse of Children: A Time for Caring and Feeling Yes, Feeling No , Bonnie Sher
Klein's Not a Love Story about the world of prostitutes and exotic dancers, Peg Campbell’s Street
Kids , Aerlyn Weissman's and Lynne Fernie's Forbidden Love about lesbians , Penolope Buitenhui's
Tokyo Girls hostesses in Japan hotels and Mark Asbar's Two Brides and a Scalpel: Diary of a
Lesbian Marriage about a cross gendered man who wants to marry a lesbian woman (Monk 124).
9 With more liberal attitudes of Canadian audience towards sex on screen, the topic of various sexual deviations has gradually become present in Canadian fiction, too.
Katherine Monk reckons that the turning point came in 1994, when the Canadian films at the annual Toronto International Film Festival were mostly about sex and its different forms. Like, for example, Eclipse , directed by Jeremy Podeswa, which is about the sexual lives of people living in
Toronto at the time of solar eclipse, and Super 8 ½ by Bruce La Bruce about a porn star. The Award for Best Canadian First Feature Film was won by Exotica directed by Atom Egoyan, a film about a man who developed obsessive relationship with a stripper after his daughter's death (125).
Finally, two years later, in 1996, both Cronenberg's Crash and Stopkewich's Kissed came out .
3. Directors
3.1. David Cronenberg
David Cronenberg is considered to be the best known and at the same time the most controversial recent English Canadian film director. He is also considered to be founder of so called
“body horror” a genre which is based on a “primal phobia of being entered by force or a thing beyond our control” (Monk 236).
He was born in 1943 in Ontario. He grew up in an artistic and very liberal home environment; his father was a freelance writer and his mother was a rehearsal pianist. Among
Cronenberg’s main interests were science and fiction. After graduating from the North Toronto
Collegiate Institute he enrolled to the Faculty of Science of the University of Toronto, but only after a year switched to English language and literature and was determined to become a novelist.
Despite changing the subject of his studies he did not abandon his interest in science and used this topic in many of his films (Morris 13 20).
Later he dropped out and spent some time in Europe. As a writer Cronenberg struggled to liberate himself from the style of Nabokov and Burroughs, whom he both admired. After his return
10 back to Canada he, according to Beard, “found his own voice” in filmmaking (ix). Cronenberg managed to create his own distinct and compact style that “[is] deliberately provocative and transgressive with emotionally and psychologically dysfunctional status” (qtd. in Melnyk 148).
His films are thematically consistent and according to Beard, some re occurring features can be found in his work, especially in his work from 1960s to 2000. These features include: scientific or medical experiments that go wrong , transgressive desire , bodily transformations, monstrosity, gender stereotypes, loss of control, illness, parasites or connection of human body and technology
(x).
Typically his main heroes are going through some kind of bodily or mental transformation that is often set off in their own imagination and usually leads to their own destruction. They also tend to have the status of an outsider, who rather likes to watch the other people than socialize with them. Monk says: “In almost every case, Cronenberg shows us uptight or emotionally repressed people altered by acts of their own imagination” (234).
Cronenberg as a filmmaker considers himself to be a “card carrying existentialist”:
He declares that art must be courageously transgressive and the artist (by implication) a kind
of romantic hero who must brave the awful depths of his own unconscious in the tradition
not only of terrifying modernist writers such as Kafka and Burroughs but also of pre
modernist ones like Coleridge, Poe, and Büchner. (Beard xi)
George Melnyk classifies Cronenberg's films into four phases: his first two short films
Transfer (1966) and From the Drain (1967), and his first two feature length films Stereo (1969) and
Crimes of the Future (1970), have a common topic of work of “pseudo scientific organizations and mad doctors who create bizarre experiments or perform procedures that go awry” (149).
Those films and his five later films including Shivers (1975), Rabid (1977), The Brood
(1979) and Videodrome (1982) belongs to Cronenberg's “exploitation phase”, in which he typically mixes genres like pornography, horror and science fiction to create the disturbing effect of his films
(Melnyk 151).
11 Second phase lasts only one year. It begins with Videodrome (1983), which Cronenberg himself found to be certainly the least offensive of his films, and ends the same year with The Dead
Zone (Melnyk 152).
The third phase Melnyk labels “the films of his maturity” and includes The Fly (1986) , Dead
Ringers (1988) and Naked Lunch (1991). His M. Butterfly (1993) was already signaling the end of the third phase and the beginning of the fourth one. It was opening the Toronto festival and was impatiently awaited, but was considered somehow out of Cronenberg's style and it was a disappointment (Melnyk 152).
1996’s Crash, based on the novel written by James Ballard, definitely shocked its audience by the sexually explicit scenes. Crash did not only attract much attention, but also aroused discussion and proved that Cronenberg was still capable of creating a really shocking film. Crash was so controversial that it was even banned in public cinemas in Great Britain. This last fourth phase does not have any single trajectory and with the release of eXistenZ (1999), which was thematically a return to Videodrome, Spider (2002) , History of Violence (2005) and his latest
Eastern Promises (2007) demonstrate Cronenberg's departure from the body horror genre and shift to drama.
3.2. Lynne Stopkewich
Lynne Stopkewich was noticed at the Toronto International Film Festival in 1996, where she introduced her debut feature film Kissed , about a young necrophiliac. Since then, she has been considered one of the leading young Canadian directors.
She was born in 1964 in Montreal. She got her Bachelor’s degree in film at Concordia
University and then continued her Master’s studies in Vancouver at the University of British
Columbia (von Busack).
During her studies in Vancouver she worked as a production designer. In 1991 she production designed her fellow student’s John Pozer’s debut feature film The Grocer’s Wife , which
12 was praised at both the Cannes and Toronto film festivals. In 1993 she cooperated with Paul
Donovan on his film Dangerous Desires , with Sandy Wilson on her comedy Harmony Cats , with
Paul Ziller on Breaking Point and with Mark Malone on Bulletproof Heart. In 1995, she again worked with John Pozer on his second film, The Michelle Apts., and finally in 1996 with David
Cronenberg, on Crash (von Busack).
Stopkewich started making films when she was only thirteen. During her studies at
Concordia University she made two short films The Flipped Wig about a young girl’s first visit to a gynecologist and 3 $ Wash & Set, which brought the attention of critics to her at film festivals (von
Busack).
In 1996 her full length debut feature film Kissed came out, about a necrophiliac young woman. Four years later Stopkewich continued with her study of female sexuality in her second feature Suspicious River , about a young masochistic motel receptionist who makes extra money as a prostitute, which, however, never reached the success of Kissed. In 2001 she made a documentary
Lilith on the Top about a Sarah MacLachlan's tour (von Busack).
Since then she has mainly worked as a director of television series like Bliss , The Atwood
Stories , The L World , Terminal City and The Guard .
4. Crash
4.1. Synopsis
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. And, like the book, Crash unfolds without moral
judgment, presenting an unflinching vision of a modern wild kingdom, man made of
concrete and metal. (Fine Line Features)
13 Crash is a story of a middle class couple James Ballard and his wife Catherine. They are both are having a crisis of their sexual life together and try to find the thrill elsewhere. After James gets in to the car collision with another car carrying Dr. Helen Remington and her husband, who is killed in the accident, his monotonous life suddenly changes. While recovering, he realizes that the whole traumatic experience in fact had unloosen some very strong emotions in him, something he had been trying to do for a long through his encounters with casual lovers. To re evoke this feeling he has to relive the trauma all over again.
Later he meets Helen, who appears to be going through the same process, and their find themselves being mutually aroused by the thought of their accident and become sexually involved with each other.
Subsequently they join an underground group of people who also as a result of their car accidents became sexually fascinated by car accidents. The group is led by Vaughan, “a former scientist twisted by his own disfigurement in an accident and, as a result, a man obsessed with car crashes as a liberation of sexual energy” (The Fox). Ballard “through an instinct to use this perversely liberated psychic sexual energy to revitalize his relationship with his wife Catherine” and brings her to join the group, too (Beard 380). Together, they participate in re enactments of famous film star's car accidents like those of James Dean or Jane Mansfield, watching photos or tapes of various kinds of car collisions, or their victims. Cronenberg explains: “These people are actively trying to create a new form of sexuality, of eroticism. They've all experienced car crashes which have somehow unleashed a kind of erotic imagery that surprises them, and they try to incorporate it into their lives” (qtd in Fine Line Features), and James and Catherine are at the same time trying to find their way to each other again.
14 4.2. Production
The film Crash is based on novel Crash written in the 1973 by J.G. Ballard. Crash , the novel, was considered to be a book event of the seventies. The author stated in the preface that by writing this novel he had tried to invent a new form of pornography (Grőnberg 138).
It took Cronenberg several years before he decided to make Crash . He remembers that he came across the novel about ten years before he made the actual film, when some film critic send him a letter suggesting he should make a film based on this novel, but he did not read it that time.
Later Jeremy Thomas, the producer of Naked Lunch, mentioned making Crash into a film, too. That time Cronenberg started reading the novel, but he did not finish it, because he found the book to disturbing. After some time he returned to the novel and this time decided to realize the idea
(Grőnberg 138 139).
It took Cronenberg several years from the conversation with Jeremy Thomas to start working on the script. “I think I was afraid to write the script, thinking about Naked Lunch and how long it had taken me to write that” (qtd. in Grőnberg 139 ), but to his own surprise it went very quickly. The script stayed quite faithful to the novel:
I really was using the dialog from the book, which, when you first read it seems very
artificial. I t does not seem like movie dialog, but then it somehow was perfect: you din not
want naturalistic dialog because it was not a naturalistic movie. So suddenly I was using the
dialog. It was using bits and pieces of the descriptions that Ballard wrote to describe the
various cars. They are all embedded in the screenplay, in a way he wrote half of the
screenplay, really. And it had much more of narrative shape than I ever suspected. When I
read it, it did not ever seem that it had a coherent narrative, but it did. (qtd. in Grőnberg 139)
However he made some changes: he shifted the original first person narrative of the book to a multi person narrative, he skipped some scenes from the book, he changed the beginning and, with Ballard's approval, he added the final scene in which Ballard is driving the Lincoln, in which
15 Vaughan died, and he pushes his wife's Catherine car of the road, seriously injuring her, apologizes for not killing her and then makes love to her on the edge of the road.
Financing
After the commercial failure of Cronenberg's two previous huge budget studio projects M.
Butterfly and Naked Lunch there was little chance that Cronenberg could make another expensive film and therefore Cronenberg had only limited budget for making Crash.
The final budget was $9,000,000, which was considerably less than the budget for M.
Butterfly ($22, 000,000) (Beard 379).
Shooting
The shooting took place, unlike in the novel which is set in London, in Toronto locations and due to the limited budget with only the available light, minimal hardware and minimal special effects.
As Chris Rodley suggested in his interview, from the financial perspective Crash was
Cronenberg's back to basics low budget movie. Cronenberg himself admits that the shooting of
Crash was similar to the shooting of Scanners “That means you have to absorb and incorporate what's there” (qtd. in Rodley ix). The final version of the film is only 100 minute long; because of the low budget Cronenberg could not afford more shooting days and decided rather to concentrate on the details. The result is a very minimalist, clean and ultra modern industrial look (ix).
The characters, due to the environment they live in, are numb, emotionally unattached and bored. The dialogs are minimal and the characters do not face each other. “People walk around in a zombie like state” (Beard 387).
The film attracted some famous names known from Hollywood films like James Spader who plays James Ballard and Holly Hunter as Dr. Remington. Ballard’s wife Catherine is played by
Debra Unger and Vaughan by Elias Koteas, who is known from Atom Egoyan’s films. Beard points
16 out that the physical appearance of both James Spader and Debra Unger is a “major tool in the film’s creation of the world where smooth technologized surfaces” have incorporated to humans
(396 397). Spader’s and Unger’s cold classically beautiful perfect faces and their blank expressions are the antipoles of black haired, greasy, unwashed, constantly gum chewing and scarified Vaughan with his diabolical expression and Gabrielle with her “provocative glances” (412), dressed in a black leather bodice and “encased in braces and harnesses, aided by a cane” (413).
The music was composed by Howard Shore who also wrote music for Cronenberg's other films. Cronenberg notes:
Since Dead Ringers my composer, Howard Shore, had got into the habit of going to London
and recording with 84 piece orchestra! We did not have the budget, so he came to Toronto.
So it would be: first day do the whole movie with three harps; second day do the whole
movie with six electric guitars; third day do the whole movie with two percussionists. (qtd.
in Rodley ix)
4.3. Response
The reaction of the audience varied greatly. Many people found the film, mainly because of its controversial topic, very disturbing. It was even banned in Britain. Cronenberg suggests that film, because of the influence of Hollywood, has become a medium of reaction and people tend to react more sensitively to radical topics in film than in literature or on TV. He takes such reactions as a compliment, because it indicates that the film really works, that “obviously the tone of the movie draws people in, put them in a certain mindset where they are vulnerable to the message the movie is giving”, which is a primary function of art (qtd. in Grőnberg 140).
There were also some strong reactions to depicting sex with a disabled person, Cronenberg however argues that he received very positive response from disabled people themselves, who appreciate Crash for the exactly same reason and liked that the character of disabled Gabrielle is presented there as a sexual being (Grőnberg 142).
17 Crash received very positive criticism, too owing to its originality of both topic and cinematic style. It was awarded a special prize at the Cannes festival in 1996. Nominated in seven categories at the Genie awards, and won five of them including the prizes for best achievement in cinematography and best achievement in direction. Moreover, it has become one of best known films Cronenberg has ever made.
5. Kissed
5.1. Synopsis
[...] whereas film's obsession with death traditionally focuses on the objects of its desire
(corpses, zombies, murders and bad marriages), Kissed considers as its subject a person
drawn to the edge of mortality, to the nebulous space between life and death, or, in
cinematic terms light and darkness. (Bowen)
Kissed is a story of young female necrophiliac, Sandra Larson. She has been fascinated by death since her childhood. As a little girl she enjoyed looking for small dead animals' bodies and burying them afterwards in her rituals.
Later she gets a job as an embalmer in a local funeral parlour, where her fascination with death can fully develop on both spiritual and sexual level. Her encounters with the dead corpses do not seem to be solely sexually motivated. She treats the corpses in a very emotional and spiritual way.
There is a visible contrast shown between Mr. Wallis, the director of the funeral parlour, who is also necrophiliac, and Sandra. His only motivation seems to be his sexual satisfaction. On the other hand, Sandra's rituals are demonstration of a deep respect for the corpses.
She meets a medical student Matt, whom she confides with her secret, and they begin a relationship. As Matt starts to be increasingly obsessed with Sandra's necrophilia, he realizes that she could never love him and therefore the only way for him to reach that is a suicide.
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5.2. Production
Lynne Stopkewich first came across the story 'We So Seldom Look on Love' from a collection The Girl Wants To by Barbara Gowdy when she was working on another project, but she could not forget the story and when she later had an opportunity, she suggested Kissed to her producers (von Busack).
Stopkewich admits that when she read the story for the first time she was shocked, but eventually decided to make the story into a film, because she liked the main character and particularly the idea of exploring her psychology (Richardson).
Stopkewich found the process of writing of the script, after getting over the initial shock and finding “a common ground with the character” (qtd. in Richardson), easy. She recalls:
I was fortunate that the story I based the film on, the writing of Barbara Gowdy ( We So
Seldom Look on Love ), is exceedingly cinematic. When I read it I can see shots, and can
imagine the detail. I wrote the first draft of the screenplay in three days. It just sort of poured
out. For me, the biggest challenge was getting over the shock and horror of the necrophilia
[...] I tried to create shots which allowed personal contact with the character. The story is
written in the first person that really allows you to get inside the head of the character, and I
tried to shoot the film in this manner. (qtd. in Richardson)
Stopkewich's main aim was to picture the story in a way no one would imagine a story about necrophilia could be presented. Se adds:
If someone said to you, “Oh, I am going to see this movie about someone who is sexually
interested in dead people,” you would think it is a horror movie that it is going to be dark
and gothic and gory. What we tried to do is make it accessible by setting it in suburbia and
making her the girl next door. (qtd. in Richardson)
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Financing
The project was financed partly by private investments by Stopkewich's family and friends, producer Dean English, executive producer John Pozer and by grants from the Canada Council
Medial Arts and Telefilm Canada. The lab service was donated by the National Film Board and finishing funds by British Columbia Film (Thease.com). The final budget was $80,000, which is considerably less than the budget for Crash at $9,000,000.
Shooting
The shooting took place in Vancouver and took 24 days during the peak production season from September to October 1994. Stopkewich recalls:
We approached the film commission here in town to see if they could sanction our
production, and they told us we were crazy to be doing this kind of film, given that there
were an unprecedented number of productions in town approximately 32. Anyone who
could hold a stop sign was already working. But because my hands were tied in terms of the
time frame, I could not move the shooting schedule to a down time. Ultimately when we
came down to the crew, we had maybe a half dozen people who had ever worked on a
feature before, and the rest of them were people who loved the script and wanted to get their
foot in the door on a film. (qtd. in Thease.com)
Sandra, the main character, was played by a Canadian actress Molly Parker, whose beauty and delicacy, help to enhance the audience's sympathy with the character. Her appearance in Kissed and the Genie Award for the best performance by an actress in a leading role which she received for
Kissed, started her successful career. The part of Matt, Sandra's lover, was played by another
Canadian actor, Peter Outerbridge.
Stopkewich decided to hire a cinematographer who had never shot a feature film before, and eventually chose Greg Middleton.
20 Middleton's chief strategy was to make Sandra look like an “angel of light” even when she is doing things that people would consider “despicable to even contemplate” and therefore the characters are in most of the scene backlit (www.Thease.com).
The editing was done by Stopkewich, Pozer and Roeck.
5.3. Response
Kissed was for the first time screened at Toronto International Film Festival in 1996. The audience mainly appreciated the originality and the poetical element the film has despite its tackling such a controversial topic as necrophilia. It also received much critical acclaim there and at other international film festivals. It was awarded the Best Canadian Feature Film special jury prize,
Stopkewich received the Best New Western Canadian Director Award at Vancouver International
Film Festival and Molly Parker received the above mentioned Genie Award.
6. Cinematic Techniques
6.1 . Crash
6.1.1. Narration
Although the whole plot of the film, unlike the plot of the original novel, unfolds chronologically, it might at the first sight seem to be almost incoherent, like a montage of scenes connected only by the characters and settings. The viewer has to make an effort to link them together and subsequently create the plot line out of them. This apparent discontinuity is even intensified by very limited dialogs and the viewer is often made to speculate about the motivation of the characters' actions.
Despite Sinclair's claim that Cronenberg's Crash has no beginning and no ending and that the film is more like a dream that can be entered and left whenever one wants (qtd. in Browning 147), there is some feeble, but undeniable, narrative structure.
21 The three parallel introductory scenes of Catherine while having sex with a man in hangar, of James while having sex with a girl in a camera room and the last one of both discussing their experiences together at home later, pictures not only the boredom and emptiness of the main character's life, but particularly the emotional alienation from his wife Catherine. This is in fact the introduction of the initial state of things, in other words the cause for the main conflict that will be solved in the story.
The narrative chain then continues with James' effort to change this initial state of things, to liven up his monotonous life and, in the first place to find the way back to Catherine. Later after experiencing a car accident, he starts discovering his fascination with car crashes and their effects on human sexuality and emotions, which gradually leads to his obsession. Through this process and after he nearly kills his wife he finally succeeds; in other words, he resolves the conflict.
Like Kissed , Crash is almost entirely restricted to one character's range of knowledge. James
Ballard is present in all scenes except for the first scene in hangar.
Since the plot confines the spectator only to the external behavior of the characters, the narration is objective, because there are almost no signs of the subjective perception, thoughts or emotions of the characters in the whole film.
6.1.2. Mise en scene
Setting
Interestingly enough there are almost no temporal clues in the whole film. Therefore the viewer can only guess the period in which the story is set.
The settings could be divided into two groups representing the two completely different worlds in which the characters of the story live.
In the first group are the highways, multi storey garages, hospital and Catherine’s and James' flat which all represent the over technologized, ultra modern, minimalist, almost sterile, unemotional and anonymous world of Catherine and James.
22 The second group includes the bone yards and mainly Seagrave's house, which is very messy and cramped, but at the same time very cozy.
The key scenes of the film take place on a highway. They were shot on eight different sections of Toronto freeways and the shooting took 18 nights. Cronenberg employed 60 stunt drivers and over 200 cars including Vaughan's “hero car”, a 1963 black Lincoln convertible and three other vintage cars: a 1955 Porsche Spyder, 1950 Ford Tudor and 1966 Buick (Fine Line
Features).
Costumes and make up
The costumes and make up of the characters are in harmony with the environment they live in and, as Sinclair points out, Cronenberg adopted the use of color codes of the original novel. Silver, grey and blue colors in the background emphasize the appearance of the red color on characters' costumes. He pinpoints that: “Red announces future arousal, the wound patterns of an expressway fatality. Red rushes the eye while the blue road, seen from the balcony, effaces itself in a heat haze, dissolves into the sky [...]” (37).
Catherine, James and Helen Remington are dressed in a very simple, functional and elegant fashion. On the contrary, Vaughan's clothes are more extravagant and often dirty. Gabrielle wears a provocative black corset, net stockings, and braces on her injured leg and she walks with a cane.
Much attention was paid to the scars, wounds and other car accidents physical after effects of the accidents that were essential part of the actors make up.
Production designer Carol Spier thoroughly studied various medical books and she also cooperated with Stephan Dupuis, a prosthetic designer, who studied forensic photos of wounds caused by car accidents as well as the treatment of scars in order to replicate the bruises and stitches in various stages. In order to make these injuries to look as realistic as possible, he made “gelatin prosthetic appliances colored to match the actors' skin” (Fine Line Features). He says: “This process
23 took three steps, starting with the initial cuts and abrasions, moving on to the swelling and bruising to the final scar tissues” (qtd. in Fine Line Features).
Figure expression and movement
Sinclair points out, that characters in Cronenberg's film “[are] always under described, spare as line drawings in a graphic novel” (21) and Crash is not different.
The dialogs of the film are very limited, therefore the actors' options to capture the characters' qualities, moods and scarce emotions are narrowed to their facial expressions and gestures.
Deborah Unger with cold elegant beauty, empty gaze, deep voice and slow movements expresses the unemotional and flawless perfection of Ballard's Catherine. Similarly James Spader managed to capture likeable, handsome and at he same time a little insecure and slightly feminine
Ballard and his growing fascination with the newly discovered dimensions of his sexuality.
Vaughan represents the 'mad scientist' figure that can be found in almost every one of Cronenberg’s film. Koteas' Vaughan is loud, strong, extremely charismatic and very masculine. He talks and chews all the time.
Rosanna Arquette as Gabrielle is despite her injury, the most sensual and sexually provocative of all the characters.
6.1.3. Cinematographic Properties
Crash was shot with Panaplex cameras in 35mm format and Peter Suschitzky, the director of photography, also employed Panavision lenses (Fine Line Features).
The camera is very mobile throughout the whole film. The scenes often begin with the camera exploring a detail of the set from various unusual positions and slowly moving towards the main action. This feature can be spotted already in the very first scene where the camera travels across the whole hangar before it lands on Catherine, or in the hospital ward scene where the camera first at length examines James’ leg in a metal bone fixator and only then reveals the whole ward.
24 The objects and sets are shot frequently from different, often atypical angles, and the shots range from extreme close ups to extreme long shots of the highways and some of the shots are noticeably long.
The overall image of Crash is extremely clear and sharp with clearly defined structure of the depicted objects.
6.2. Kissed
6.2.1. Narration
The narrative structure of Kissed is not complicated; the film has only one narrative line and the director did not use any narrative tools to confuse the viewer.
The whole story begins in media res with the scene of Matt's dead body being taken by funeral workers out of his flat. The scene is foreshadowing the subsequent development of the story and makes the viewer speculate about its causes.
This opening scene is followed by a flashback of Sandra's childhood; she recalls the moment she started being obsessed with death. Then there is a shift to her high school years. The shift is realized by the use of temporal ellipsis that enables to omit several years of Sandra's life. At the moment when Sandra is sitting on grass under the tree, she realizes that she is different from other children. There is a shot at sunset indicating an ellipsis which fades into a next shot of Sandra, already adult, in her biology class at a high school. Stopkewich employed elliptical editing also in some other scenes. In the stripping scene she used temporal expansion to stress the significance of the moment. While slowly uncovering the corpse Sandra is whispering and the action is prolonged through overlapping her movements from shot to shot. In the shot of Sandra's house is, on the other hand, the duration is compressed. The whole lengthy duration of sun setting is accelerated so that it takes only a few seconds.
25 The following narration till the end of the film is linear and chronological. At the end we see again the opening scene in more detail and it is shown in the whole context, what preceded
Matt's suicide and what followed after his death.
The viewer learns everything the character of Sandra does throughout the whole film and she is present in almost every scene. Therefore the narration is restricted to the character of Sandra.
She also represents a diegetic narrator.
As far as the point of view of Kissed is concerned, the narration is subjective, because the viewer has access to what the characters hear or see, and to what they feel, too.
6.2.2. Mise en scene
Setting
The exterior scenes are shot in the countryside near Vancouver. There is lot of greenery in these scenes and they look very fresh and bright when contrasted with the funeral parlour and Matt's dark apartment.
The interior scenes were shot in artificially constructed settings. Although Stopkewich had originally wanted to shoot the funeral parlour scenes in a real parlour, having been production a designer for several years, she eventually decided to make her own (von Busack).
In order to make it as realistic as possible Stopkewich and her first assistant director,
Michael Gazetas, went to see a real funeral home and a real embalming room. She recalls:
Inside, it was a really clean room, really sterile. There was a cadaver on the slab, a sheet up
to its waist, embalmed. It stopped me in my tracks. I was thinking, “This is the kind of guy
Sandra would be into.” It all sort of came crashing in. Michael came out on the sidewalk
with me afterward, trying not to faint. It was at that time that I realized how challenging the
story really was, and how out on a limb I was. (qtd. in von Busack)
Both two key sets, the mortuary and Matt's apartment, were built, one after another, in the empty Kissed production offices. Stopkewich explains: Entering the embalming room “was
26 supposed to be like diving into a lake” (qtd. in Thease.com). “We wanted to make it really cool and crisp, silent and expansive” (qtd. in Thease.com).
This effect was accomplished by Gregory Middleton, the director of cinematography, with the use of “a soft overhead, cooler temperature light created by bouncing two 2,500 watt HMI Pars off the ceiling, which was covered with white laminated corkboard” (Thease.com).
Later the same space was converted into Sandra's boyfriend Matt's “basement bachelor pad”
(qtd. in Thease.com). This time the scene was supposed to look, in Stopkewich's words, “orangey and wood paneled, claustrophobic and hot” (qtd. in Thease com). In order to achieve the desired atmosphere Middleton used strong gels (Thease.com).
Make up, costumes
The whole film is set in the 1970s. Stopkewich said that she chose the 70s, because, having lived through that period, she could have inserted herself into the story easily and, moreover she got the costumes from Salvation Army very cheaply (von Busack).
“Told in flashback, a 1970s look was required and achievable in a small town or suburb with frequent interiors. Sourcing thrift shops and garage sales, the 1970s look was cheaper to realize than a contemporary look” (qtd. in Paakspuu).
The only problem was the uncomfortable material of the costumes. Stopkewich says: “The actors cursed me, having to wear all of that polyester under hot lights” (qtd. in von Busack).
The actors’ make up is very natural. Molly Parker as Sandra looks very pale and her complexion, in contrast with her dark hair, almost radiated in the erotic scenes in particular.
The only scene where there is more dramatic make up used is the party scene in which the young Sandra is wearing heavily and unskillfully applied blue eye shadows and lipstick.
In order to make the dead corpses look real, the actors were put on very light make up.
Make up is also used diegetically in the film by Matt, when he applies it to his face to look more like a dead corpse trying to look more attractive for Sandra.
27
Light
The reference of light is already present in the main heroine's monologue in the original short story by Gowdy:
When you die, and your earthly self begins turning your disintegrated self, you radiate an
intense current of energy. There is always energy given off when a thing turns into its
opposite, when love, for instance, turns into hate. There are always sparks at those extreme
of extreme points. But life turning into death is the most extreme of extreme points. So just
after, you die, the sparks are really stupendous. Really magical and explosive. ( Kissed )
Therefore the use of light is probably the most important feature of mise en scene in the film .
It is not only used for illuminating the objects so that they could be seen, in Kissed light has also its own narrative function, and it is used there for aesthetic and psychological purposes. It is a major tool for expressing the spirituality and passion of Sandra's rituals.
The scenes were often backlit, which caused only the illumination of the edges of the figures and helped to define depth, enhance spirit of the moment, and transform Sandra into an ethereal creature.
Cinematographer of Kissed, Greg Middleton, points out that light was crucial particularly in the scenes where Sandra is with the corpses:
The more emotionally involved she becomes, the brighter the lights is on her. When she
climbs on top of the corpse at the funeral home, we were 4 ½ or 5 overexposed. Actress's
skin was pale to begin with, so we got a kind of luminosity that started to expose beyond the
edges of where the light was hitting. It burned so much that it started to blur the edges, so
sometimes I used a filter to augment the look. (qtd. in Thease.com)
In several scenes, underlightning was used, to suggest the off screen diegetic source of light like a fire, a torch or a lamp, and even the corpses seem to glow when Sandra opens their coffins.
28 Molly Parker's acting in Kissed is very realistic. There is no need for her to use any extreme gestures or facial expression. Although her performance is quite restricted and quiet, she managed to embody Sandra as a quiet, a bit awkward shy girl with a timid and innocent look, on one hand, and the deviant who is engaged in the most twisted encounters within her, on the other.
She expresses the emotions in a rather subtle way and the intensity of the moment is highlighted more by the light, her facial expression, music or voice over, than by gestures.
Peter Outerbridge's Matt transforms from a self conscious and friendly student into an obsessed maniac with an insane look in his eyes.
6.2.3. Cinematographic Properties
Kissed was shot with an Arriflex SRII in 16mm. The cinematographer, Greg Middleton, employed Fuji stocks: for interiors 64 ASA (a medium speed film with a fine grain and sharpness),
“daylight balanced” Super F 8621, the tungsten balanced 125 ASA 8631 and a 64 ASA tungsten emulsion (Thease.com).
He also used focus pullers including a Zeiss 10:1 zoom and a selection of primes, which “he tried to use as much as possible, because they are a bit sharper and do not breathe as much”
(Thease.com). He notes:
“We ended up using fairly high light levels, but fairly wide open stops, so focus was much more critical, especially considering that we were hoping to blow the picture up to 35mm” (qtd. in
Thease.com). As a result in most of the film the front images are sharp and clean whereas the background is blurry.
For the shooting of the car wash scene and for creating a humid atmosphere in Matt's apartment, masks and gels were applied.
As far as framing is concerned, after blowing up Stopkewich used a vertical scanning machine and scrutinized every shot individually. She says: “I changed the scanning marks 175
29 times, and that is very expensive, but it was important to me that the footage looked properly framed” (qtd. in Thease.com).
In order to capture Sandra's “dealings with the outside world to appear as moments frozen in time” (Thease.com), the camera is quite static. In fact the camera is moving only when shooting the moments “where Sandra is having transcendent moments with death” (Thease.com). Like the love scene with recently embalmed man which was filmed with a “prototype rolling jib arm designed by a member of the Vancouver based film cooperative Cineworks” (Thease.com). “All other camera moves were executed on a skateboard dolly with plastic pipe typically used for interior plumbing”
(Thease.com).
Medium close ups and close ups prevail in the whole film and many scenes begin with an extreme close up showing detail of a face or a prop first, and then the whole set, like in the opening scene where the first thing the viewer sees is a detail of hands and faces.
The tempo of Kissed is relatively slow and the individual shots often gradually fade or overlap into each other.
7. Motifs
7.1. Social relations in Crash and Kissed
People are social beings and it is natural for them to feel the need to interact with each other and to share their lives with other human beings. If this need is for some reason not satisfied, they tend to feel lonely and suffer.
The characters of both films Kissed and Crash for various reasons live very lonely lives and their social interactions are very limited.
In Kissed Sandra is lonely, because of her natural introvertness and her distinctness with which she is painfully confronted when her only childhood friend Carol abandons her, because she gets frightened by her burial ritual. At this crucial moment of her life she realizes that she is
30 different from other girls and becomes even more withdrawn and indulges herself in her passion for death. She does not believe that she could be understood by another living person and therefore she forms stronger attachment to the non living ones.
Later she meets Matt, a medical drop out, whom she confides in, and she gets another chance to bond with a living human being and even form a regular relationship. However hard she tries, she is not able to deny her true self and give up her desires. This is something that her lover cannot put up with and to be truly loved by her he commits suicide, which probably causes Sandra become even more reclusive.
Similarly like Sandra, the characters of Crash live in a social isolation and they desperately look for attachment to another person. Their isolation is mainly caused by the environment they live in, an anonymous city that is in Cronenberg's vision over technologized, where everything is impersonal.
Delville points out that the society which characters of Crash are part of “[is] essentially post emotional, one in which human beings emerge as strangely distanced and detached observers of their own affectless condition” (qtd. in Browning 141).
Catherine and James do not have many social contacts except for their business ones, and the occasional encounters with their anonymous lovers. Their marriage is also strangely unemotional and almost all their scarce and clinical conversations are concerned with sex, from which they do not seem to get much pleasure anyway.
James' car accident does not only shake his monotonous life, evoke emotions and a new sexual energy, it brings him into a group of people who share his fascination, too.
No matter how unconventional this group around Vaughan is, it also fulfills James' desperate need to socialize.
7.2. Sexual Deviations
The sexual practices of the characters in both Kissed and Crash can be labeled as “a non mainstream sexual practices” in other words paraphilias or sexual deviations, which imply:
31 [. . .] persistent, strong atypical sexual urges associated with highly distracting sexual
fantasies. Paraphilias may involve erotic feeling for nonhuman objects, age inappropriate
individuals, unwilling or nonconsenting adults, or the allure of punishment humiliation and
degradation aspects of sexual activity. (Westheimer 659)
In Kissed Sandra, the main character, has erotic feelings for the death corpses of young males. Her behaviour is typical of necrophilia, a paraphilia which indicates erotic feelings for dead corpses and sexual intercourse with them. She fits the description of a typical female necrophiliac.
According to the Dr. Jonathan Rosman's and Dr. Phillip Resnick's research, half of the necrophiliacs they studied worked in the funeral industry and despite the fact that about 90% of the necrophiliacs were male, there were also some cases of female necrophiliac reported (Ramsland,
"Varieties of Necrophilia") .
These female necrophiliacs, as well as Sandra in Kissed , maintained that their sexual encounters were not purely motivated by the physical stimulation, but they were attracted by the whole atmosphere of the funeral home and by “the aura of death” (Ramsland, "The Weaker Sex").
However, necrophilia is often connected with the desire for unrestricted power, destruction and even sadistic behavior, Sandra as well as many other female necrophiliacs considered their encounters to be rather the act of worship of the death than abuse, and they often accompanied their intercourse by necromantic 1 rituals. Although necromancy does not include the actual sexual intercourse with the corpses, necrophilia and necromancy sometimes overlap.
In Sandra's case the necromantic phase preceded her necrophilia that eventually developed later in adulthood when she started working as a funeral worker.
Sandra's behaviour is contrasted with the behaviour of her boss, who is also a necrophiliac, but his motivation seems to be only physical and his acts appear to be highly disturbing and abusive towards the corpses. Conversely Sandra's sensual rituals, by which she shows an emotional involvement a deep respect to the corpses, seem almost like an act of worship than an abuse. 1 Necromancy was originally a method of communication with dead people, but in modern time is the term used for performing certain rituals with the dead corpses in order to connect with a death energy (Ramsland, "The Weaker Sex"). 32 The paraphilia pictured in Kissed could be without any doubts classified as necrophilia; the situation is more difficult in Crash . The characters of Crash show signs of more than one paraphilia which suggest a combination of more paraphilias.
The characters tendencies to get sexually aroused by the thought of their own car accidents and by watching the videos of other people's car accidents after experiencing one themselves suggests fetishism; an obsession with thoughts, fantasies and urges about some nonliving object
(Westheimer 669).
Besides fetishism most of the characters also show signs of sadomasochism or masochism.
Vaughan clearly shows the most extreme signs of sadomasochism of all the characters; he derives sexual pleasure from both hurting others during sexual interactions and from watching people being injured in car crashes as well as from experiencing pain himself. His body is literally covered in scars, and he is fascinated by the scars and wounds of the other car crash victims.
Moreover he considers a car collision to be rather a fertilizing than a destructive act, and enjoys threatening his own life by re enacting the ones of famous people which eventually takes his masochist desires to the ultimate end when he kills himself in a replica of James Dean's “hero car”
(Fine Line Features).
The other people in the group formed around the dominant Vaughan are masochists. Unlike
Vaughan they do not enjoy causing pain to anyone else, but they are attracted by his magnetic personality, strength and violent behavior, and derive pleasure by experiencing the pain he inflicts on them.
Another interesting feature of Crash is the facts that through its stylistic methods, particularly its atypical camera positioning during the shooting of the erotic scenes, it places the viewer in the role of a voyeur, who does not feel comfortable to watch on one hand, but cannot move his eyes of the screen on the other.
Although Kissed and Crash both deal with the topic of sexual deviations and it is difficult to determine whether some of these deviations pictured is socially more acceptable than others, due to
33 the completely different stylistic and narrative approaches Stopkewich and Cronenberg adopted in depicting them, both films have contrasting impacts on the audience.
Stopkewich's main goal was to make to Sandra look as likeable and ethereal as possible and by the use of light, by showing scenes from her childhood and by using a voice over which gives the viewer access to her thoughts and emotions she managed to create a poetical story with character the audience can sympathize with.
Inversely, Cronenberg's clinical and emotionally detached, materialistic view mostly cold, rough, unemotional characters and virtually no access to their feelings make his film highly disturbing and, for some viewers, virtually indigestible.
7.3 Rituals
Various rituals have been inhibited in all the known societies throughout the history.
Ritual can be defined as an action or set of actions that are believed to have some symbolic value.
The process of ritual is irrational and is usually prescribed by tradition or religion. They may be performed by a group of people or an individual, regularly or on a specific occasion, and are often accompanied by recitation of texts, dance, music, gestures, or processions. The purposes of rituals vary ranging from satisfaction of emotional or spiritual needs, expressing of respect or approval, to the strengthening of social bonds ("Ritual", Wikipedia ).
In Kissed the main character Sandra performs funeral rituals for both dead animals and later for dead people. Sandra's rituals at first seem to be only a form of an innocent child's game. She looks for dead animals to bury them in a shoe box in the garden. The actual burial is preceded by the religious like ceremony which involves a dance, and the whole process is finished by Sandra's recitation of a funeral oration.
Later her necrophilia and fascination with death gradually develop; it becomes clear that her rituals have some deeper sense. Sandra believes that she sees the energy coming from the corpses and the manipulation with the corpses enables her to taste this energy. In fact the purpose of her
34 ritual is not only to pay the last honour to the dead animal or person, but the physical contact with the corpse also enables her to achieve a connection with a certain form of spiritual energy, and the actual intercourse with the corpse means the ultimate fusion of her body and mind with this energy.
Interestingly enough, Sandra's rituals and believes are typical of a modern necromancy, which is form of spiritualism which is concerned with a “the art (or manipulation) of death”
(Ramsland, "The Weaker Sex"). Modern necromantics believe that by performing particular rituals listed in a book The Book Ritual Necromantic , written by Leilah Wendell they will be able to share consciousness with “the Angel of Death” (Ramsland, "The Weaker Sex").
However in Kissed there is no sign that Sandra would come across with the theory of necromancy. Her behaviour is presented as purely instinctive and arising only from her own experiences.
The re enacting of famous people's car crashes in Crash also shows some ritualistic features and can be perceived as a ritual.
The process is preceded by very careful preparation that involves getting the exact replica of the cars and dressing in the same costumes the people wore at the moment of their accident. It takes place in a secret location and only for the selected audience, because it is illegal. In this sense being invited to watch the performance means for James invitation to join Vaughan's crash cult.
Vaughan is a presenter of the story that is re enacted. From this point of view it is very similar to the imitative rituals which repeat the story of a myth ("Ritual", Britannica ). However, because the actors performing the ritual get injured and endanger their own lives, they in fact, imitate transition from the mode of life to the mode of death; it is by its nature a life crisis ritual.
Life crisis ritual implies separation from the old situation followed by transition to the new one with the emphasis on separation. This process of transition sometimes involves “ordeals of suffering” and sometime even death ("Ritual", Britannica ).
35 In this case, the separation means symbolic or actual death of the performers and their transition into a spiritual or immortal existence. Although the actual death of the performers is not the main goal of the ritual, they do not try to avoid it and Vaughan actually dies in one of the rituals.
7.4. Sex and Death
In both studied films Stopkewich's Kissed and Cronenberg's Crash are sex and death the central motives. In Kissed the main character Sandra cannot resist the temptation to taste the death through her 'crossing over' with the young male corpses even if it means rejecting the traditional relationship with her lover Matt.
In Crash a group of people living in an over technologized world finds fascination in the re enacting of the past traumatic experiences of car accidents.
In this chapter I would like to attempt to explain the characters’ motivation for endangering their own lives and social positions by applying Georges Bataille's theory of sex and death.
Bataille claims that we are all “discontinuous beings” and therefore there are gulfs between people and by conquering these gulfs through sexual intercourse we reach exactly the same continuity demanded by death, therefore sexual activity provides people with a “foretaste of death” and “some few people find it tempting and occasionally go the whole way” (19).
In Crash the characters experienced a car accident which brought them closer to death and because they found their sexual lives monotonous this new experience of going one step further, that gave them the “ foretaste of death“ even more intense than the foretaste provided by sexual activity, opened new dimensions of their sexualities. Bataille describes origin of masochism:
[. . .] the violence of death and sexual violence, when they are linked together, have this dual
significance. On one hand the convulsions of flesh are more acute when they are near to
black out, as long as there is enough time, makes physical pleasure more exquisite. Mortal
36 anguish does not necessarily make for sensual pleasure, but that pleasure is more deeply felt
during mortal anguish. (104 105)
In the chapter about De Sade he explains origin of sadistic behaviour:
If we follow the dictates of reason we try to acquire all kinds of goods, we work in order to
increase the sum of our possessions or our knowledge, we use all means to get richer and
possess more. Our status in the social order is based on this sort of behaviour. But when the
fever of sex seizes us we behave in the opposite way. We recklessly draw on our strength
and sometimes in the violence of passion we squander considerable resources to no real
purpose. Pleasure is so close to ruinous waste that we refer to the moment of climax as a
‘little death’. Consequently anything that suggests erotic excess always implies disorder.
(170)
According to him “[b]rutality and murder are only one step further from this direction [. . .] once we have ventured along the path of sensual disorder it takes a good deal to satisfy us.
Destruction and betrayal will sometimes go hand in hand with the rising tide of genetic excess”
(171).
Once the characters in Crash experienced this intensified sensual pleasure connected with violence and disorder, the sensual pleasure of sexual intercourse without the feeling of “mortal anguish” is no longer sufficient (Bataille 19) and they are tempted to experience that intense pleasure again and this results in their car crash related obsession.
De Sade claims that “for passion to become energy” one has to go through “a phase of insensibility [and the passion has to be compressed in order to make its] full potentiality to be realized” (qtd. in Bataille 172).
Therefore the previous emotional depravity of the characters results in an intense sexual fever that causes their absolute blindness towards all the possible risks caused by the disorder.
However Bataille does not deal with necrophilia in Eroticism I believe that the cause of
Sandra's necrophilia is linked with the “foretaste of death” which she experiences during her
37 intercourse with the corpses and it is possibly also connected with the excitement provided by breaking of a taboo (19).
As Bataille further suggests man is distinguished from animals by work and even though man created himself the rational world of work, there remained some “wild impulses” inside him that threaten his ability to work and in order to repress these impulses he had to set some limits known as taboos, which were primarily concerned with death and sexual activity (43).
According to Bataille the taboo of death developed already in the period of a Neanderthal man when people began to be disturbed by death and started to bury the corpses. The taboo itself arose from the living people's belief that the dead body is an image of their own destiny. “It bears witness to a violence which destroys not one man alone but all men in the end [. . .] by burying the corpses they cut themselves off from violence (44).
The formation of taboos naturally brought about the temptation to break these limits, in other words, to transgress. Bataille comments on this temptation: “It is always a temptation to knock down a barrier; the forbidden action takes on a significance it lacks before fear widens up the gap between us and it and invests it with an aura of excitement” (48). Bataille considers it natural for people to be terrified and at the same time fascinated by death and people often feel tempted to touch a dead corpse (45 48).
Sandra’s the fascination with death is, for some reason, so strong that overpowers the horror of it. Her overwhelming desire to 'cross over' is therefore motivated by experiencing the “foretaste of death” during her intercourses with corpses (Bataille 19).
She also experiences the sensual pleasure intensified by a “mortal anguish” (Bataille 105), but does not experience the violence directly by inflicting it on herself or someone else like the characters in Crash , but she experiences it mediated through the sex with dead corpses and her pleasure is even further increased by the excitement of the transgressing the taboo. This is a feeling she cannot reach with her boyfriend before he commits suicide..
38
8. Reasons for Picturing of Sexual Deviations in Recent English Canadian
Films
Approximately about past 30 years have English Canadian filmmakers demonstrated tendency to picture various sexual deviations and other non mainstream sexual behaviour like necrophilia, sadomasochism, fetishism and many more. The study cases, Lynne Stopkewich's
Kissed and David Cronenberg’s Crash , analyzed in this thesis are only two of the many.
In this chapter I attempt to offer some possible explanations for this particular recurring feature of Canadian films viewed from different perspectives.
Canadian film directors like Lynne Stopkewich and Robert Lepage advocate an economic explanation. They believe that the Canadian filmmakers' tendency to make sexually transgressive films are a reaction to being a neighbour of the USA, the internationally recognized world power in film production, and particularly the Hollywood productions' dominance within Canadian territory.
A far as the film distribution is concerned, Canada has been always perceived as a part of the USA's market, and as a reaction the Canadian filmmakers have tried to differentiate their films from the classical Hollywood style as much as possible. The chief programmer of the Toronto Jewish Film
Festival, Shlomo Schwartzberg explains:
We're outside the US, we get all their culture, all their TV, all their music, all their cinema,
and we're always watching. It's not surprising that Cronenberg or Egoyan see things in that
way. They sit in Toronto and look at the US with a probing eye. We're always analyzing
ourselves, analyzing where we stand vis à vis the United States, trying to be not too
American. (qtd. in Macnab)
Atom Egoyan in the foreword for Weird Sex & Snowshoes proposes another explanation that also stems from cultural dominance of the USA within Canada, but this time he does not consider its effect of competition or differentiation but rather the liberating effects it has on production of
Canadian films. He claims that the fact that the Canadian internal market is not as strong means that
39 Canadian filmmakers do not have to compete with each other over a commercial success. He says:“
[...] it means survival is not set by public taste, but by the opinion of our peers – festival programmers, art council juries, and even with Telefilm [...] ” (qtd. in Monk 1 2). Therefore not being under market pressure Canadian filmmakers have freedom to experiment and make distinct films:
We experiment with form, tell unconventional stories, use brilliant actors who
are not 'stars', and generally free of test screening, market research and all the
other industrial processes that have homogenized film culture [. . .] we prefer to
go back to the margins than run the risk of becoming banal. (qtd. in Monk 2)
Jason Morgan rejects the economic explanation. He claims that the reason is in Canadians inability to define themselves as a nation. He asserts that, because of the lack of the nation's temporal definition, which includes history and culture, Canadians tend to rely too much on the spatial definition and this has an effect on their representation. Morgan further refers to Janice Kay's concept of a “Canadian hero” (214). However, this hero is perceived to be male; he is surrounded by female space; and because this space (Canadian landscape and Nature) is dominant, it can never
“be physically or even mentally encompassed” and this results in feelings of powerlessness and marginalization (214). The “loser paradigm” as Morgan calls it makes Canadian art expresses the defeat and failure (214). “Because the heroic ideal, as a manifestation of patriarchal ideology, necessarily excludes the feminine' the Canadian 'heroes' tend to be weak, plagued with self doubt and crippled by their own excesses and, consequently, are prone to reckless self destruction and sexual deviance (214).
Katherine Monk considers the Canadian tendencies to picture sexual deviations to be the result of repression that had to be released. She says that in the French speaking part of Canada, the repression was a result of Catholic education, while in English speaking Canada it was caused by the “Victorian codes of physical denial” (120). She regards Canadian people to be highly
40 conservative and unwilling to discuss publicly any of their bodily functions and therefore these topics that are not spoken about are presented in their films (119 126).
It is difficult to decide whether one of these explanations is truer than another, but the real reason for the tendency to picture sexual deviations in Canadian films is probably combination of all these factors.
9. Conclusion
Both films I dealt with in this thesis are concerned with sexual deviations.
Thematically, both Kissed and Crash fit into the wave of films dealing with sexual deviation that started gradually developing in Canada in the second half of the twentieth century.
In Cronenberg's Crash the characters demonstrate sadomasochistic and fetishistic tendencies developed after the traumatic experience of a car accident. In Stopkewich's Kissed the main character's obsession with death develops into necrophilia and makes her to pursue the career of an embalmer.
Both directors based their films on a novel and Cronenberg as well as Stopkewich had to overcome the initial shock they experienced after their first reading of the novels. It took them several years to realize their projects and both films were released in 1996. The same year they were screened at the Toronto International Film Festival and both received a very positive critical acclaim.
Despite these numerous similarities Crash and Kissed are very different from one another.
At the time of their production, the directors Lynne Stopkewich and David Cronenberg were at very different stages of their careers. Cronenberg had already made more than twenty films before and was a renowned film director with 30 year career behind, while for Stopkewich Kissed was a debut feature film.
41 This fact naturally had a significant impact on their budgets. Although for Cronenberg, who had got used to big budget studio productions, the $9,000,000 he received for Crash was a financial limitation, Stopkewich made Kissed for only a tenth of his budget. And while Cronenberg could afford to cast famous actors like Rosanna Arquette, Holly Hunter or James Spader, Stopkewich casted mostly unknown Canadian actors.
Furthermore, the approach the directors chose to picture the sexual deviations markedly differed. Stopkewich pictured her main character Sandra as a beautiful, soulful and sensitive young woman with deep respect for death, and employed various stylistic and narrative features like light, flashback to childhood and diegetic narrator, to make Sandra as likeable as possible in order to make it easier for the audience to relate to her. On the other hand, Cronenberg in Crash presented a chilling and disturbing vision of people living in a modern, over techologized and impersonal, urban environment, where people desperate for some emotional attachment to someone engage in various dangerous self destructive sexual practices to evoke at least some emotions in their burnt out souls.
The directors' approaches to such controversial topic as sexual deviation is naturally influenced the public response. Despite the fact that both films generally received positive appraisal by critics, the general audience preferred Stopkewich‘s poetic Kissed over Cronenberg’s Crash, which was often misunderstood and in some countries even banned.
To sum it up, however different Kissed and Crash are, they both have awaken an international interest, and until today are considered to be the two of the undoubtedly most controversial films that have been ever made.
42 Works Cited
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Kissed . Dir. Lynne Stopkewich. Perf. Molly Parker, Peter Outerbridge. 1996. DVD, MGM.
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Filmové ztvárnění sexuálních deviací v současném kanadském filmu
(David Cronenberg: Crash a Lynne Stopkewich: Kissed ) Cílem této práce bylo popsat a analyzovat, jak je téma sexuálních deviací ztvárněno v současném anglicko kanadském filmu. Pro tento rozbor jsem si vybrala filmy Crash a Kissed oba z roku 1996. Crash je adaptací kultovního románu J. G. Ballarda a autorem jeho filmové podoby je světoznámý a zkušený kanadský režisér David Cronenberg. Kissed je adaptací povídky “We Seldom Look on Love” kanadské spisovatelky Barbary Gowdy a je to celovečerní debut mladé začínající kanadské režisérky Lynne Stopkewich. Ústředním motivem obou filmů jsou sexuální deviace (sado masochismus a fetišismus v Crash a nekrofílie v Kissed ), čímž se oba tvůrci zařadili do vlny anglicko kanadských filmů, které se zabývají touto tématikou. Tento fenomén se začíná v kanadských filmech postupně objevovat v 2. polovině 20. století a podrobněji se této problematice věnuji v kapitolách 2, kde mapuji historii vývoje tohoto fenoménu, a 8, kde nabízím možná vysvětlení jeho vzniku. Důležitým prvkem je v případě obou filmů proces produkce, kterým se zabývám v kapitolách 4 a 5, a s tím související filmové techniky, které oba režiséři použili a jejich výsledný efekt (kapitola 6). Nedílnou součástí mé práce je také divácká percepce obou filmů, která odráží použité filmové a narativní techniky, a navzdory faktu, že oba filmy se zabývají kontroverzním tématem, se liší. Ačkoli byly oba pozitivně hodnoceny odbornou veřejností, laická veřejnost dávala přednost poetičtějšímu Kissed před syrovým Crash .