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The word, the flesh and the films of David Cronenberg

by John Harkness

Let*s talk about evil. In the horror film, what he calls Cronenberg's "sexual dis­ cally correct filmmakers who attack the humanist criticism (using neither of there are basically two kinds of evil, gust" and "the projection of horror and notions of bourgeois normality (Craven, these terms pejoratively), whereas the with characters and actions falling on a evil onto w^omen and their sexuality" Romero, Tobe Hooper, Stephanie Roth- lone of his more recent work suggests continuum between interior evil and misses the point almost entirely, because man) are by definition better than con­ that we should ignore that earlier phase exterior evil. Interior evil is that created he is dealing with Cronenberg in the same servative directors like Brian De Palma of his criticism because it was presented within characters (Norman Bates in Psy­ terms as Wes Craven and George Rome­ and David Cronenberg, who by almost to us under false pretences. cho, the shape in Halloween) as a result ro - as a horror-filmmaker who attempts any critical standard are better filmma­ The ideological tunnel-vision of Robin of warps in their psychological makeup to examine the nature of society's struc­ kers than the aforementioned directors. Wood ignores the component of science or because of their relationship with ture and its dehumanizing of the indivi­ Wood and company operate within a in Cronenberg's work and it is the scien­ society. Exterior evil is an outside force dual. critical system that acts to limit their ce element that lifts the director's work which attacks what Robin Wood would If I take issue with Robin Wood, it is viewpoint to issues that deal with re­ above the realm of the exploitation no doubt refer to^ as the bourgeois less out of dislike (Wood, with a group of pression of alternative forms of sexual horror film. There is furthermore a patriarchal normalcy of our society - like-minded fellows - Andrew Britton, and moral expression in the structure of darkly Cronenbergian irony to what the devil invading Regan in The E/corcist Richard Lippe, and Tony Williams, most contemporary capitalist society. Wood once wrote about S/ii vers, ("a film is a good example, as are the vampires of whom studied with Wood at some It is significant that these concerns singlemindedly about sexual liberation, in any given version of Dracula, or the point - is one of the few major critics to emerged in Wood's criticism after he a prospect it views with unmitigated space spores in Invasion of the Body examine the subterranean side of the came out of the closet (in the London horror... The release of sexuality is linked Snatchers (either version). American cinema represented by exploi­ Times Educational Supplement in 1974) inseparably with the spreading of vene­ When critics treat the films of David tation filmmakers like Romero and Cra­ with his own gayness, for it is possible to real disease"') now that the most explo­ Cronenberg, however, they generally ven) than resentment of the way his argue seriously that Wood was a belter sive liberation of sexual energy of recent make a singular error in confining his quintessentially ideological approach to critic when he was repressing his homo­ years, in the gay world, has been linked Kims to the realm of the horror film, the contemporary cinema acts as a strait- sexuality. His books on Hawks, Bergman to the spreads of AIDS and Kaposi's which limits the approach one can take jacket on the films he examines. Politi­ and Hitchcock are classics of bourgeois Sarcoma (known as "gay cancer"). by ignoring their most important ele- What I hope to do here is examine the riient: that of science fiction. Admitted­ relationship between the two types of ly, this is easy to do, because examples evil engendered by the marriage of af true science fiction films have become science fiction and horror, the role of increasingly rare in the past two deca- science, and the function of the victims :les, and the boundaries have never in the cinema of David Cronenberg, been exactly clear {The Andromeda particularly the wa\ that Cronenberg's Strain and THX 1138 are almost the thematic has evolved in terms of the 3nly pure science fiction films of recent intentionality of the science fiction films i'ears that come to mind) and while a from experimentation to accident, from 51m like Alien is marketed as science specific to general malaise within the fiction, its horror element outweighs films themselves and within the oeuvre. the science element almost two to one. What is important about the science The road to Hell is paved with good fiction element is that the scale of evil in Intentions science fiction films is not the continuum ^:it\ It is worth noting that there are very from interior evil to exterior, but from few outright villains in the cinema of accidental to intentional. Did the mad David Cronenberg. Dr. Emile Hobbes, scientist create a human being (Fran- who creates the parasites in Shivers, is kenstein) or did he create a monster attempting to break down the barriers (later versions of the same story, when in man, "an over-intellectual creature the creature loses his speech and his who has lost touch with his body." innate decency), and which did he mean When he realizes what he has done, he to create ? commits suicide. Dr. Lawrence Kelloid, Thus Robin Wood's consignment of who performs the skin grafts that beco­ Cronenberg's films to the category of me much, much more in Rabid, is at­ "reactionary" horror films^, based on tempting to save the life and beauty of that film's heroine, who has been horri­ John Harkness is the film critic of bly burned in a motorcycle accident. Toronto's NOW magazine, anda regular Invasion ol privilege: The Brood was Cronenberg's version ot the vi/hitebread melodrama The Brood's psychotherapist. Dr. Hal contributor to Cinema Canada. Raglan, is attempting to get his patients

Cinema Canada -June 1983/23 TUXTTS^ to bring out their repressions and terrors resurrected from the dead by a team of into a physical manifestation that can dedicated surgeons. The scientific ex­ be cured, removing the neuroses. Dr. planation oflhe strange new organ she Paul Ruth had no idea that he would be develops - a syringe in the armpit that creating a generation of Scanners when draws blood from her victims and leaves he invented his tranquilizer ephemerol. them carrying a virulent form of rabies- With the exception of Videodrome, is one of Cronenberg's great coups in which we will deal witli later, the villains scientific terms. When Rose receives in Cronenberg's films are not bis scien­ skin grafts, the graft tissue is rendered tists, but outsiders to the central worlds morphogenetically neutral (all tissue is oflhe characters-Scanners'Keller, who the same tissue), assuming that the body is collaborating with the Scanner under­ will absorb the tissue into its biosphere, ground for his own power ; Fast Compa­ ignoring the fact that in intensive care, ny's corporate manager, who fails to the body is operating under a different understand the obsession with speed system (being fed on plasma.) and that that powers his drivers ; the collector in the grafts may absorb the body into a the short film. The Italian Machine, who new ecology. buys a phenomenal motorcycle then In Shivers and Rabid, both the "vil­ puts it in his living room as an objel lains" and the "victims " (both terms are d'art. The crime in all these films is not to be used with extreme care) are un­ ambition as much as it is stupidity. witting. The scientific intervention is a The problem with intelligence, of physical invasion that effects the brain. course, is that it is human, and thus When they realized the nature of their limited. The failure of the majority of actions - Dr. Hobbes in Shivers and Rose Cronenberg's scientists is that all the in Rabid - the effect is to kill them, implications of everything they do is because both commit suicide. The mes­ never quite apparent. Unlike, say, a sage is quite plain : knowledge kills. computer with a chess program, they It is reflected very plainly in the cannot work out all the implications of straightforward style of the two films. a Trace, Kramer vs. Kramer, Table for finds attractive, and ultimately her doc­ each move. These are not horror films that relish Five). tor. Cronenberg has said that "I make no dark corners and lurking menace, but As a psychiatrist. Dr. Hal Raglan is There has been research on the effects attempt to say that scientists go too far. rigidly controlled frames and tautly doing exactly what he is supposed to of the emotion on our physical beings - I'm very ambivalent about the ecology Apollonian environmenls - sterile mo­ do ; that is, help people bring out their calmness and tranquility seem to be dem apartment buildings and hospitals, repressed emotions and conflicted de­ related to longevity almost as surely as and clean, Canadian shopping centres sires. His tragedy is that he succeeds all natural foods and physical exercise - and subways. In an American horror too well, and as one oflhe few characters thus The Brood has a beautiful perverse film, it is not at all surprising to find in Cronenberg's work to suffer from logic. If a healthy mind can help the slashers stalking 42nd Street or wolves hubris, he has no idea of when to stop. maintenance of a healthy body, cannot in the South Bronx, for these are deran­ When confronted with mad Nola Car- the forcing of sick emotions to the surface ged environments, decaying and cor­ veth, whose husband has institutionalized cause physical changes ? rupt. The high-lech beauty of Cronen­ her because he fears for the safety of Yet Dr. Raglan is not the villain of the berg's environments are logical monu­ their daughter, he uncovers the bruised, piece. The villain is Nola's own family ments to clarity and order, and the violent soul of a child abused by her and the uncomprehending decency of eruptions of madness and disease in mother and ignored by a weak, ineffec­ her husband, whose job is restoring old these regions is much more shocking. tual father. While his other patients homes (a nicely pointed bit of symbo­ Even his casting of Marilyn Chambers in remain attached to their violent neuro­ lism). In The Brood, science is only able Rabid reflects this ambition, for Cham­ ses - one develops a series of welts on to discover and awaken monsters - the bers, who is all muscle and sinew, is the his body, another a set of lymphic enlar­ seeds are planted deep within the cha­ most high-tech of all the porn queens, a gements that dangle from his neck like racters themselves, and Nola contains product of self-design (clearly a lady the wattles of a turkey- Nola is his prize so many seeds that only death can cure who spends a lot of time in the gym). patient, because she produces actual her. The Brood demonstrates the way The film would have been very different children, monstrous simulacra without that the family can serve as a source of had he been allow^ed to follow his origi­ retinae, teeth, speech, sexuality or na­ evil and delusion (as Nola's mother nal casting of Sissy Spacek in the lead. vels. They are, quite literally, manifesta­ remarks, "Thirty seconds after you're tions of her rage (they are short-lived) born you have a past, and sixty seconds who are connected to her not by an after, you start lying to yourself about movement, for instance. It's not at all Children of rage umbilical cord, but by a mental link that it"). clear to me that the natural environment The relationships in Stunners, The Brood directs them against those she sees threatening her - her mother and father, Like most of the characters in The for man is the woods ~ for all we know, it and Stero reverse the terms of Shivers a /pretty school teacher her husband Brood, Scanners' Dr. Paul Ruth is a could be downtown Chicago. The thing and Rabid in two major ways. master of self-deception, believing that about man, the unique thing, is that he First, the films move from the relative creates his own environment. It's in his freedom of the rootless characters of nature to try to take control of it away Shivers and Rabid into the heart of the from chance. So in a sense, my doctors basic unit of our society - the family. and scientists are all heroes. Essentially, Second, the emphasis shifts almost dia­ they're symbolic of what every human metrically from the effects of the body tries to do when he brushes his teeth." on the mind to the effects oflhe mind on The irony, of course, is that chance the body. cannot be controlled, and it is the acci­ Almost as important, there is a shift in dent that defeats human intelligence in the type of science involved. Dr. Raglan every one of his films. The distance in The Brood and Dr. Ruth in Scanners between what Cronenberg says his films do not intervene nearly as radically in are about (the intentional fallacy) and the biology of the human body as do what people perceive them as is immen­ their predecessors {Stereo, Cronenberg's se. Were the people in Starliner apart­ first, experimental, feature film, is some­ ments (in Shivers) better off as repressed what different, and is included in this discussion as it stands as a rough draft zombies in a sterile planned environ­ of Scanners). There is no surgery in The ment or are they better off as crazed Brood and Scanners. Both films deal sexual zombies in the throes of an with a sort of telepathic murder- directly orgiastic hunger ? Cronenberg views the in Scanners and by a secondary agent in spread of the parasites in that film as The Brood. liberating. Vet the predatory sexuality of the various victims is presented in terms The Brood is Cronenberg's version of of the classic horror film, as if proving the whitebread melodrama (he has des­ the dictum to be found on the wall of the cribed it as his own version of Kramer doctor who is one the film's centres of vs. Kramer), and the genre is concerned sanity ("Sex is the invention of a very with the violation of privileged middle- clever venereal disease"). class space by unbearable emotions, Rose in Rabid is a zombie in a different usually centred on the loss and recovery of a child (cf Ordinary People, Without sense, for she has almost literally been

24/Cinema Canada - June 1983 the generation of superhuman telepaths Max Renn's suicide - the final scene created by his sedative ephemerol (desi­ of the film - is equally ambiguous. What gned for pregnant women) are capable leads him to suicide is the promise of of creating an era of a new renaissance rebirth into a more highly evolved stale in human society. (the next stage in the evolution of man He simultaneously gathers unto him­ as a technological animal) but there is self the guilt of having created them, no guarantee, which suggests that Renn, clutching it to himself like a treasure. He whose dying \\ords are "Long live the seems to ignore the strong possibility new flesh," may be the first martyr of a that the Scanners may not have been new religion. created by ephemerol, but were, like One oflhe most interesting elements Nola Carveth's monsters, released by his of Videodrome is the fact that while action. It is no accident that the begin­ there is overtly evil acti\'ity for the first ning of the "scan tone" heard on the lime (Barry Convex and Harlan are expli­ soundtrack when one of the Scanners citly turning Max into a monster that unleashes his power sounds uncannily they can direct), it is also the first lime like the creaking open a huge iron door, that the victim is a \vitting accomplice in suggesting that, when the Scanners were his own destruction. Were Max Renn created, it was not a deformation oflhe not interested in the pornographic vio­ brain that created their power, but the lence that his television station peddles unlocking of a cerebral region that is not to the public, he would not be hooked part oflhe ten percent normally used by into the Videodrome signal. Were he not human beings. fascinated by the changes happening in In a very real sense, both Cameron his own body, he would not continue to Vale and Darryl Revok in Scanners and view the signal. While his first murders, The Brood are children of rage, one set those of his partners, is done under the released chemically and the other compulsion of Videodrome, his second through pure mental coercion. This is murders, of Harlan and Convex, are quite different from the artificial tele- committed as acts of vengeance. paths in Stereo, who were created surgi­ Despite its narrative and moral confu­ cally and locked into symbiotic and sion, Videodrome serves to clarify the intense telepathic relationships during relationships of science to man, destruc­ their slay at the Canadian Academy for tion and creation, man and society in Erotic Research, w^here Luther String- the works of Cronenberg. There is little fellow's motto is "If there can be no love of good and evil in the world. There is between the researcher and the subject, accident and evolution, whereby crea­ there can be no experiment," tion can become destruction, \illains Intriguingly, the created telepaths in become victims (often the first victims), both films develop pathological symp­ and victims can turn the tables with toms - an inability to deal with the flood frightening suddenness. of information received by their minds The linkage between science and evil and a tendency towards self-destruction is a perverse one, almost entirely sepa­ (both Darryl Revok and one of the tele­ rate from intention, and society is less paths in Stereo drilled holes in their important by far than individual morali­ foreheads to relieve the pressure created ty. What anti-Cronenbergians, who atta­ by having all those voices in their The evolution of man as a clues to deny it. Is Nikki Brand, the radio ck his films on social grounds, fail to see heads). technological animal: Videodrome personality with whom Renn falls in is that his work is not so much about Of course. Dr. Ruth is not merely a If Videodrome is David Cronenberg's love, an agent or a victim of Videodro­ present society and its discontents but melaphoric father to Vale and Revok, masterpiece, it is because its narrative me? Is Bianca O'Blivion an enemy of about alternative social structures based but their literal father (in the absence of confusion and profusion conceals a dri­ Videodrome or part of a struggle for on our world. a physically present mother, his oddly ven, inexorable logic. Max Renn, a To­ power within the conspiracy who is It is an essentially visionary world bi-sexual name with its masculine pre- ronto television entrepreneur with a using Renn to eliminate her rivals ? that would be capable of arising from name and feminine surname, suggest taste for the bizarre (mostly prime-time our own, and while Cronenberg publicly that they were not mothered at all, the sex and violence), discovers a strange expresses his belief in man as a techno­ same way that Nola Carveth's brood has television program that features nothing logical animal, (the bloody fear and no literal father), their competition is but torture and murder emanating from David Cronenberg mutant desires of the films are deeply not merely between the dream and the Pittsburgh. He assigns his in-house video ambivalent towards these changes). nightmare of a Scanner society, but shot pirate, Harlan, to discover the location Ftlmosrapliy Science can create (or unleash) a new through with sibling rivalry and an of the signal and a sales agent to buy it. race of beings without knowing what increasingly Oedipal relationship with What he does not reaUze is that im­ those beings are capable of- and unawa­ the father. In addition, Ruth's association planted in the signal is an encoded Shorts re of the potentials of that race for self- with the Scanner program at Comsec message that works directly on his brain, Transfer 16 mm color destruction. It is a world fully cognizant suggests a domineering father unwilling leading to massive, hyperrealislic hallu­ From the Drain 16 mm color that every human endeavour, every hu­ to admit to the adulthood of his children, cinations and, eventually, physical mu­ man institution, and every human rela­ and thus Revok's rebellion is as Oedipal tation. The Italian Machine tionship is a two-edged sword, and that an action as Nola Carveth's responsibi­ Investigating, he discovers a set of Secret Weapons good turns to destruction in a blink of lity for the death of her own mother interlocking conspiracies involving Vi­ the eye. Cronenberg's New World is a (who is responsible for Nola's rage, in an deodrome (the program) which is at­ Features world that reflects the incoherence of endless circle of guilt). tempting to re-order the morality of Stereo (1969) 65 min. 3S ram B & W reality (explain, if you disagree, the logic The sleep of reason breeds monsters society, and a counter-conspiracy led by Crimes of the Future (1970) 65 min. to be found in mass murder, nuclear - and in Shivers, Rabid, The Brood and Bianca O'Blivion (daughter of Brian 35 mm color weapons, starvation, television, and bu­ reaucracy) and thus strikes at the very Scanners, the monsters function in a O'Blivion, who created Videodrome), Shivers (1975) 35 mm, 87 niln p.c Dai world of appetite, desire and murder attempting to liberate society and move Productions Can. dist Cin^pix (US title : heart of the way our world works. 9 that is the absolute reverse of the ratio­ man into a higher state of evolution They Came From Within; Quebec title: nality that led to their creation. through integration with the machinery The Parasite Murders) (Votes Yet from these films, it is difficult to and content of television. Rabid (1976), 35 mm, 90 min. dist. Cin6- pix The author would like to acknowledge the understand in precisely what direction Locked inside what Cronenberg has assistance of the following people and organi­ Cronenberg is moving. His overtly Carte­ called the "paranoid inventiveness" of Fast Company (19781 35 mm, 93 min. zations for providing the opportunity to re­ sian concerns, and his fascinated horror Max Renn, we watch as he may or may p.a Michael Lcibowitz, sc. Cronenberg view the films of David Cronenberg in the at the spectacle of physical decay are not commit murder, may or may not with Phil Savath, Courtney Smith preparation of this article : Susan Kennedyof quite evident. While the technological commit suicide, may or may not have a The Brood (1979) 35 mm p.c. Mutual the Canadian Film Development Corpora­ aspect of scientific intervention is pre­ video program inserted into a strange, Films/Elgin International dist New tion, ,\dmit One \ ideo. Debt U'eldon of New sent, it is not nearly as evident as it will vagina-like organ that develops in his World-Mutual (Can), New World Pic­ Cinema, Ilona Pokol of Cineplex Corp., and become in his most recent film, Video­ stomach. tures (US) Virginia Kelly of United .Artists Cla.ssics. drome, which finally comes face to face The inexorable logic of Videodrome Scanners (1980) 3S iimi, 105 min. pc. with the concern that is at the heart of is that the illusion is the reality, and whan Filmplan International dist New W orld- 1. In Andrew Britton, Richard Lippe, Tony Cronenberg's world - the interface bet­ Mutual (Can), Avco Embassy (VS) Williams, and Robin Wood The American dealing with a medium as insidious as Nightmare: Essays On the Horror Film, ween the human and the inhuman, television, it doesn't make any difference Videodrome 11981) 35 mm, 88 min. p.c Toronto, 1979 between biology and other sciences. which is which. One can interpret the Filmplan Inl I dist (Can., US it Eng.) 2. Ibid., p. 24 narrative in an> xvav, and find no textual Uni\ersal Pictures, :i Ihid.

Cinema Canada - June 1983/25