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Rabid (1977) – *½ (out of four)
In many ways a continuation of the sexual “zombification” of Shivers–complete with technology gone awry, a parasitic evolution of “new flesh,” and the idea that the basic human cell is, indeed, a selfish one invested in progeny–Cronenberg’s Rabid is again a strong indicator of the auteur’s obsessions, but it lacks the sustained energy and invention of most of his other work. Individual scenes startle, there’s no question (and the actual “creature,” a vampiric phallus ensconced in a vagina-like opening in ex-porn queen Marilyn Chambers’ armpit, is so archetypically disturbing as to forgive a little jerkiness in the puppetry), yet the director’s trademark aloofness acts counter here to the effectiveness of the piece. It occurs that Cronenberg’s work, more than some, requires the services of gifted performers to lend humanity to pieces that are for the most part involved in intellectual explorations of ultimate biological/behavioural questions; while Chambers (whose casting provides the film a great deal of subtext for examination, including a sneaky commentary on the objectifying nature of pornography) is game in her first non-blue star turn, the quality of the acting here is predictably sub-par for what is essentially a zero-budget genre film. And though the subtext of “abandoning all rational thought” may conceivably be aided by the austerity of its setting (Montreal in winter) and its performances, the aggregate affect of all the detachment is an almost clinical regard for the acts of violence and atrocity. |
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Knowing that you return to the topic with Videodrome and Blue, was the casting of Marilyn Chambers any sort of statement on pornography?
Well, of course I didn’t know that I was going to be doing Videodrome and Blue at the time. (laughs) No, it wasn’t meant to be a comment on any of that. When you go to the Cannes marketplace you find thousands of films being sold. It’s shocking because most of them you had never heard of before and you never will hear of them and you’re aware of that and it makes you afraid, because you’re worried that your film will also sink beneath that sea. So the question becomes how do you get distributors from every country to come and see your movie when you don’t have a big budget and can’t afford Mel Gibson… The answer, and this was [producer] Ivan Reitman’s brainstorm, he’d heard that Marilyn Chambers–the Ivory Soap girl who’d turned into a big porn star, it was a very big scandal–was interested in doing a straight movie to prove that she could act. Was I interested in her, would I audition her, knowing that when we go to Cannes if we have a movie starring Marilyn Chambers, people will come and see it and would be interested in buying it perhaps for their territory? Ivan told me that if I thought she couldn’t do it after she auditioned, we wouldn’t have to go forward, but let’s see her and see what happens.
So you saw her…
…and she was better than all the other actresses that we had seen except for Sissy Spacek. I really wanted Sissy, but since she wasn’t a star then she got shot down by my producers for a couple of reasons.
What reasons?
Well, she had a Texas accent, I think was one of them, and freckles. It was all very bizarre. Of course by the time we started shooting, Carrie had come out and suddenly she was a star. So that was really the reasoning behind Chambers–it was, for me at that time, really unlikely for me to be able to cast someone for the purposes of commentary.
Rabid is home to your first major statement about body-modification–plastic surgery.
Yes, and ironically enough what I invented in that movie has recently come to pass in stem-cell research. Not that I think of prophecy as my métier, but we invented this neutral tissue that would become whatever tissue it came in contact with and that’s the basis of stem-cell research, sort of the universal organic loam–so I have to take a little credit. (laughs) I suppose that there were some intimations even in my earliest work, Stereo and Crimes of the Future, about technology altering the body and there’s some of that in Shivers, too. The plague in that film is an artificial one, of course, the result of an experiment gone wrong, and it occurs to me now that it was also meant to replace damaged organs. I hadn’t thought of that in years.
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Fast Company (1979) – ** (out of four)
Seen largely as a puzzling departure (and there’s no question that it’s largely unique in the auteur’s oeuvre), there are elements in Cronenberg’s racing film Fast Company— experimental technologies, evil corporations, the biological-morphism of objects–that locate this film comfortably within an auteur examination. Distinct first in that it isn’t a horror film and, more subtly, in that the sex is mutually exploitive rather than for the purposes of some sort of obscene reproduction, this tale of noble funny car drivers and dragsters arrayed against the greedy titular Company finds itself pretty clearly as a product of the drive-in culture while confusing expectation with Cronenberg-ian stretches of meditative silence and extended–clinical scenes of mechanics working on their charges like surgeons in an operating theatre. A film after the director’s own heart (he’s an avowed racing enthusiast), Fast Company is a valuable film in a study of the director’s work in that it not only predicts the adaptation of Crash, but the fascination with symmetry found in the Mantle twins and the “doubling” imagery of the opening credit sequence of Spider. |
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The scenes where the race crews are working on their cars have a definite surgical quality to them.
Oh absolutely, the way that the tools are laid out are just the ways that a surgeon will lay out his tools and, in fact, the crews often boast that their workshops are “surgically clean.” I’m a big fan of motor sport, anything with wheels and a motor–even just wheels, I like bicycles, too. (laughs) I’m interested in and I like that kind of racing. Not something people see too often in my movies, but Fast Company I did because first of all it was a protection–it was there and I was looking for something to do–and secondly, it was about something that I could get into. I had been a racer myself in the sixties and then later became a vintage racer in the eighties–I had never done the drag racing that is the subject of the film, but because they were fantastic beasts I wanted to go after them. We were the first people to ever put a film camera on a funny car–that was our claim to fame. We burned it and had all sorts of insurance problems (laughs), but still, we got the shot. Now you see it all the time, but anyway Fast Company was about my interest in and love for motor racing and, of course, there’s my fascination with technology here again.
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The Brood (1979) – *** (out of four)
Widely recognized as the first mature film of David Cronenberg’s career, The Brood, his self-described Kramer Vs. Kramer, is also the director’s most bitter, uncompromising statement about gender politics as they pertain to progeny and sexuality. It encompasses auteur throughlines like the evolution of the flesh, new religions genuflecting before the “new flesh,” and again the literal externalization of sexuality–while adding to the mix an unhealthy dose of cynicism and anger. Whereas before, and since, the interplay of parasites and the evolution of new biologies is seen as something potentially positive for all its alien-ness (note Seth Brundle’s early-transformation optimism), in The Brood, the physiological changes are children of hatred and anxiety and the resultant progeny is sterile and malevolent. The picture is, in other words, a definitive metaphor for the coldness and cruelty of acrimonious divorce. Exciting for so many reasons (including the assembly of what is easily Cronenberg’s best cast to date: Oliver Reed, Samantha Eggars, etc.), The Brood presents a trenchant dose of well-aimed social satire to go with the sort of theories of sexual evolution that tend to dissolve familial loyalties and subvert cultural standard. Already notorious for his ease with graphic violence, a scene where a mother bites through a weird “psycho-plasmic” placenta to lick the birth fluids from her angry spawn centres its discomfiting brilliance in the juxtaposition of the utterly natural with the essentially unnatural. Powerful and uncompromising, The Broodis an important film for the Cronenberg completist, and perhaps the first that holds together for the casual fan. |
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The Brood is your first collaboration with composer Howard Shore. Can you tell me what you did with score to this point, and how did the relationship come about?
Rabid does not have a score technically, in the sense of a score written specifically for the movie. It’s actually the same thing we did for Shivers in that Ivan [Reitman] would find “drop needle” music–that is to say, music that you could just buy by the yard and then you could cut it and fit it like a tailor to the movie rather than have it composed specifically for the piece. With The Brood I was very excited to finally have the budget to actually afford a score.
Was that as a result of the profitability of Shivers and Rabid?
I think so, after making two movies that actually made money, suddenly I was bankable on a low-budget level. Howard, a person I’d known as a friend, had been involved on “Saturday Night Live” and was one of the nurses in the “all-nurse band” playing the saxophone. But he was also interested in film composing. He had done one movie, a low-budget Canadian movie (I Miss You, Hugs and Kisses -Ed.) before and so The Brood was sort of his second shot at composing. It was very exciting for me, of course, because I could attend the recording sessions and be very involved in the nature of the music and where the music goes. That’s the wonderful thing when you have a real composer: the music will take into account the dialogue. It won’t just be loud over everything, it gets quiet with dialogue and comes up in other places, so it was a very exciting thing for me.
Pretty widely documented as a very personal film, a reflection of a difficult divorce, The Brood feels the most bitter of your films to me.
Yes, it’s the only movie that I’ve done that has no humour in it. I can’t recall one joke–I’ll have to look at it again to be sure, but no, it was a very personal film in a way that most of mine aren’t.
Are you familiar with “The Simpsons” episode that pays homage to The Brood?
You’re serious? (laughs) No, I wasn’t aware of it.
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Scanners (1981) – * (out of four)
Featuring what is probably the worst performance in any Cronenberg film courtesy Stephen Lack, Scanners is one of the director’s most notorious and enduring films (notorious mainly for its groundbreaking splatter effects; it has spawned four sequels), but falls apart from a narrative standpoint. Its tale of prodigal sons, Apollonian/Dionysian conflict, and genetic mutation increasingly pointing to the sort of “smart” genre film that has become Cronenberg’s stock in trade, the picture suffers from an essential discord that defeats pace and deflates any possibility for pathos. The question raised again of the need for Cronenberg to have a compelling actor in his films, the central problem of Scanners (chiefly the ironically-named Lack) is solved over the course of the rest of the director’s pictures: he will never again trust a project to an untested actor and, ironically for the success of this film, he’ll have that power of choice. Redone and tightened recently as Juan Fresnadillo’s mystical Spanish gambling film Intacto (Leonardo Sbaraglia standing in for Lack, Max Von Sydow for Michael Ironside), Scanners and its tale of gifts and reluctant evolution pleases with its gruesomeness (with f/x work by legendary Dick Smith of The Exorcist fame and mentor to Rick Baker, who would team with Cronenberg on Videodrome) and is justifiably memorable for a particularly wet exploding head (as groundbreaking in its way as the shotgun-to-the-head of Maniac). Essentially, though, the film is awkward and, at its worst, listless and meandering. |
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From The Brood, we go on to Scanners.
That was the hardest shoot that I’ve ever had still to this day. Every aspect of it was difficult–the financing was difficult, some of the actors, the antagonism between them, particularly Patrick McGoohan and Jennifer O’Neal. The weather, which was bitterly cold–we were shooting in unheated stages–well, they weren’t really stages, they were just leftovers from “Man and His World,” y’know, [Montreal’s] Expo ’67. And, the fact that it was an era where the money was there before the movie was there–quite different from this era, because of the tax write-offs.
How did that work?
All the doctors, dentists, and lawyers would realize around October that they needed a tax write-off so around November all this money would show up, but you had to shoot the movie by the end of the year. The money had to be spent for them to get their write-off so, basically, I was going into that movie without a script. It was a very complex movie with a lot of effects and a trying set of circumstances. I was writing things at lunch that we would be shooting after, and, of course, we were as is usual shooting out of sequence.
How long was the shoot?
I don’t remember, seemed like forever.
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Videodrome (1983) – **** (out of four)
Home to a phrase that has become a kind of greeting that fanboys offer the director unsolicited, “Long live the new flesh” (the response to which is usually a thin smile), Cronenberg’s Videodrome is an intimate sexualization of the cyberpunk movement married to a premise that is itself a marriage of religion with technology. Far from a theological discourse, however, the picture seems in part a continuation of the cult persona of The Brood: the delicious Miltonic idea that what Adam dreams he wakes to find real. In a compelling way, it can be said that technology is the manifestation of human dreaming and aspiration. From there, the idea as put forth in Videodrome–that technology affects a biological human change (and the technology itself may be biological in its way and biologically addicting–evidenced in the “hacking” of Scanners, the narcotic by-product of Naked Lunch, the “teaching of the flesh” in The Fly, and the literal metal/flesh meld again in Crash and eXistenZ)–is just a minor leap. James Woods as cable programmer Max Renn is a prototype for the kind of protagonist the auteur will favour: paraphrasing William S. Burroughs, he is a man intoxicated by the promise of addictions (and their subsequent mutative qualities) not yet invented. Rick Baker and his special-effects team spent three months working on the film, creating a collection of images memorable and, perhaps most impressively, bent to the service of the picture’s story and mythology. It’s clear in this, the director’s most effects-heavy film to that date, that the F/X in his pictures are not meant as a means unto themselves but, rather, as a storytelling device and, in his best work, as metaphor for his throughlines. |
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Videodrome is a film that has aged remarkably well particularly in light of our current “reality television” craze–do you feel prescient in predicting it to some extent?
Oh God, I don’t think reality television has anything to do with anything. (laughs) You know, I don’t watch my old movies but people have told me that there are a lot of things that Videodrome sort of anticipates, not necessarily for the best, and I’m willing to accept that, but I haven’t really done an analysis.
There’s an image in the American remake of The Ring that recalls Videodrome‘s interactive screen.
Right, right–I think Videodrome was very popular in Japan. It’s interesting to see that I’ve been influential in some ways and they occur in the most unexpected places sometimes.
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The Dead Zone (1983) – **** (out of four)
Ineffably sad, Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone is a delicate structure held true by the unerringly precise performance of Christopher Walken as a man who has lost his life and gained the Cassandrian curse of prescience. The arc of the film is reliant on Walken’s deceptively complicated performance as willing martyr (and thus all the more Christ-like) to a knowledge that can be seen as the human knowledge of mortality: each use of his gift hastens his death. In a way, and similar to Spider, Walken’s performance is the only and best special effect of the film: his ability to convey the essential madness of love in a temporary world (seen not only in Johnny’s story, but also in the story of a serial killer’s mother, a child’s faith in his father’s love, and a general love of faith as filtered through a campaign process) is an achievement almost unparalleled in the actor’s career (though the director will revisit the subject through his own filter in his next film, The Fly). Themes of sexual jealousy and will-to-power are broached tangentially as the “freak” at the centre of the film begins to exhibit the most ideally human characteristics through his mutation–ideas, all, that point to Cronenberg’s frustrations and hopes. Martin Sheen as a presidential hopeful makes it impossible for me to this day to watch “The West Wing” with an unjaundiced eye, and The Dead Zone is a character study of a psychological thriller that, in keeping with Cronenberg’s firm grasp of story and metaphor, isn’t about anything, really, save the crushing disappointment of ambition and the unbearable lightness of being. |
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The Dead Zone is home to, still, one of Walken’s three or four best performances–it’s, with respect to James Woods, the best performance in any of your films until Irons in Dead Ringers and Fiennes in Spider.
Yes, well, Chris… We love each other. We keep saying we’ll do something else, we keep meeting in airports and hotels and such and we always get along. When I met Chris, we were killing ourselves laughing after two minutes. We had a lot of fun. I had noticed Chris in Brainstorm, which came out before Dead Zone, I had noticed that in that movie he sort of gives five performances and not all of them were assembled properly together. I blame the director for that–he was an experienced special effects guy (Douglas Trumbull -Ed.) but not an experienced director and I talked to Chris about it. He asked me: “Do you want me to do just one thing and try to evolve that, or do you want me to try many things?” and I said that I wanted him to try many things and that I’d make sure that an entire performance was there rather than five performances. He’s got a lot to offer in terms of readings and interpretations, but he was depending on me that they would all work. We’d seen what could happen if it didn’t work. That was really interesting to me, you know, I’d never had that kind of relationship with an actor before.
Were you daunted by the task of adaptating a Stephen King novel?
No, not really. I was presented with five scripts that had already been written, one of them by Stephen himself, and I didn’t like any of them. I thought Stephen’s was the worst, I have to say–worst because it was the least like the book actually. I don’t know if he was bored with it, but he turned it into kind of a slasher movie with the lead character being Frank Booth. The script that I liked the best was written by Jeffrey Boam.
He was coming off working on another adaptation, Ulu Grosbard’s Straight Time.
Right, so I said that based on the ones you’ve given me, this is the screenplay and the screenwriter that I’d like to work with. I wasn’t going to adapt it myself–there wasn’t time and for various reasons I felt that it would be better to work with someone who’d already been very engaged in the process. I met Jeffrey and I think did sort of the traditional Hollywood thing which was to really closely oversee the writing of the script, but I didn’t write one word myself.
What did you contribute to the script in the process of overseeing it?
Well, I did offer a great deal, I think, just things like–and there are echoes of this in Spider–the idea that Johnny should be present in his visions, to keep him there and not for them to be disconnected. In the novel, they just sort of run through his head like a newsreel. So I had a big influence on the script, I think. It was my first experience adapting something and it was such a good experience that I’ve never worried about doing it since. I realized that you could make a very good movie that felt very satisfying to you even though it was not your original concept–that the mixing of blood with someone else was a good way to produce something that neither one of you might have done on your own, but rather you produce a third, original thing. I don’t want to overplay the sex and progeny metaphor, but it feels like that… As long as you pick the right partner to fuse with! (laughs) Choosing correctly meant, really, that I could stop worrying about the adaptation part of the process.
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The Fly (1986) – **** (out of four)
One of the saddest explorations of love and loss captured in one of the most underestimated films of the ’80s, Cronenberg’s The Fly is less a remake of the 1958 shocker than an operatic romance grotesque and affecting. Typical of Cronenberg, the picture is less about its special effects (which are amazing and Oscar-winning, courtesy Chris Walas) than it is about his obsessions. It’s an early culmination of sorts of Cronenberg’s auteur hallmarks: sexual evolution, the sympathy of technology and biology, the tragedy of decrepitude among sentient beings, and the primal power of dreaming and ambition. A model of “selfish cell” hypothesis as the prime mover in any discussion of cultural anthropology, the picture is motivated by a bout of sexual jealousy (mad scientist Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) tests his teleportation device while drunk and alone) and concluded by two acts of aborted reproduction. Though the gore is plentiful and gleefully disturbing, each classic set-piece moves the film thematically and narratively: the bar tough’s broken arm a subtle fly at the ritual of masculinity; the “vomit drop” further proof of Brundle’s progressive “disease.” Fascinatingly, Cronenberg uses the video camera in The Fly as almost a commentary on his films’ slippery distance–turning away at a key moment to register the shock of an interested outsider and, in so doing, reflecting the audience reaction to his atrocities back to the self-same audience. The self-reflexivity of The Fly (Cronenberg makes a key cameo in a maggot-delivery scene) marks the picture as the most auto-critical and witty of his films if not his most personal (such distinction remaining The Brood‘s), with Cronenberg’s screenplay (written with Charles Edward Pogue) containing some of the best, most incisive observations of his career to this day. (Brundle: “I’m an insect who dreamt he was a man and loved it. But now the dream is over and the insect is awake.”) Lonesome, desolate, and in its way as noble as the Pyrrhic sacrifice that concludes The Dead Zone (what is more noble, after all, than pursuing love in a finite lifetime?), The Fly is brilliant and alive. |
Speaking of fusion, your next film is The Fly. Finding this film first to be ferociously romantic, you’ve said that this film is more indicative of aging than the AIDS culture.
Yes, I mean, certainly at that point I’d already done two movies that had a sexual disease as the motor driving them so it would not have been unusual territory for me, but the subtext of The Fly for me was stronger, if you will, than AIDS. I mean, there were sexual diseases before AIDS and there will be sexual diseases after AIDS is conquered, but the point is that there will always be more. This is not to say that AIDS didn’t have an incredible impact on everyone and of course after a certain point people were seeing AIDS stories everywhere so I don’t take any offense that people see that in my movie. For me, though, there was something about The Fly story that was much more universal to me: aging and death–something all of us have to deal with.
Life as the fatal sexually transmitted disease.
Yes. The Fly is sort of a compressed version of aging and that’s where, really, I think its emotional power comes from. If you, or your lover, has AIDS, you watch that film and of course you’ll see AIDS in it, but you don’t have to have that experience to respond emotionally to the movie and I think that’s really its power. The love story, obviously, though it isn’t developed hugely, is obviously affecting because of the talent of the performers and of their eccentricity–but obviously the love story does add a certain poignancy.
Was that love story augmented by the off-screen romance between Goldblum and Geena Davis?
Well, yes, certainly, I mean they were both professionals but there is such a thing as chemistry, it’s true, and they definitely had it. When you speak of “romantic,” though, I assume that you’re speaking of romance and not the movement in poetry?
Right–intense love between two people, not “the sublime.”
Good, right–I don’t believe that I’m looking for “the sublime” at all.
Tell me about insects, broader–bugs, really, from your parasites to flies to spiders.
People love to think about alien life forms, they’re fascinated by the possibility of going to other planets and finding alien life, but we have the most alien kinds of life you could possibly hope to find right here on Earth. In fact, it’s probably the only place they are in my opinion–we are alone in the universe and we might as well suck it up and get used to it. So, to see a life form that is so inhuman is very illuminating about human-ness. That’s what’s interesting to me and what I think so fascinates kids about animals in general–here’s life in another form and that’s a fascinating insight into what it is to be human.
You mention Spider and there’s a parallel scene in it to one in The Fly, that of the hero putting a lot of sugar into a hot drink.
Yes, glad you mention that because they have very different purposes. Patrick [McGrath] had written that scene for Spider and I wouldn’t take it out just because people might connect the two, but it really has a different meaning. In The Fly it has a physiological significance where in Spider it has only a psychological experience–for as far as physiology is involved in that, of course. A lot of what Spider does is ritualistic and meant to comfort him.
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Dead Ringers (1988) – **** (out of four)
With Dead Ringers, Cronenberg fashions a single entity from two wholes–a continuation in spirit of The Fly, exploring an idea of imposed order (with its blue-lit examination theatres, sterile red gowns, and polished penthouse surfaces) sabotaged by the ever-present spectre of sexual jealousy and addiction. Insects make a return in Dead Ringers in the form of a specially-commissioned set of surgical steel gynaecological instruments (leading to a medical examination as discomfiting as anything in the director’s oeuvre), illustrating Cronenberg’s juxtaposition of the unassailably human with the indisputably inhuman. Described in two ways in the film–as tools for operating on “women with mutant biologies” and as “tools for the separation of Siamese twins”–the Mantles’ steel insect (and crustacean) parts are canny representations of the concerns of the picture and, ultimately, of the director’s keystone concerns. Jeremy Irons as both halves of the suggestively named Mantle twins (“mantle” being both a cloak of authority and a crustacean’s protective covering) is simply astounding: by the middle of the film, the illusion of duality is seamless, as is, by the end, the somehow more difficult illusion of cohesion. The star of the picture, however, is cinematographer Peter Suschitzky (in his first collaboration with the director, a partnership that has lasted to this day) and his cold colour schemes and smooth movements–the kind of detached remove that fits perfectly with Cronenberg’s sensibilities. With the addition of Suschitzky’s architectural compositions, Cronenberg, with Dead Ringers, becomes the director that Roman Polanski could have been. There is an apocryphal tale concerning conjoined twins Chang & Eng retold in the film: Chang, the weaker of the two, has a stroke in the night and perishes. When Eng awakes to find his brother dead, he dies of fright. The implications of the tale and the ways with which Cronenberg winnows its essence down to a story of a sensitive dependency made fatal by the dreams of the flesh is the very definition of “auteurism”–and the Cronenberg film. |
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I think to this point, Dead Ringers is your most accomplished film technically and emotionally. It is also your first collaboration with DP Peter Suschitzky–why the change from Mark Irwin?
Mark, for various reasons, couldn’t shoot the picture: he’d had upheavals in his life, had moved from Toronto to L.A. or Santa Barbara, and he was in the middle of doing a bunch of stuff and then the movie itself was delayed and I didn’t know when the movie was ever going to happen again. So I had to start looking for another cinematographer and I found Peter. I read about him in a book–do you know that series? It’s a series of books on film. There was one on Joseph Losey, one on Godard, and one called It Happened Here about Kevin Brownlow and his consultant Andrew Mollo and the making of his movie It Happened Here. How he, as a kid, shot this movie with short ends of film that Stanley Kubrick, who was shooting Strangelove, gave them. It’s a very ambitious film made by two very young, inexperienced guys about what if Germany had won the war and England was occupied by Nazis and they made this movie and Peter shot it–or most of it. He had been this young man shooting stills–his father, Wolfgang, was a cinematographer and still shooting well into his eighties. Then I noticed that Peter had also shot The Empire Strikes Back, which was the only one of those movies that actually looked good and it looked really good. I forget exactly how we hooked up, but I remember our first meeting in England and I met Peter and we just totally fell in love and that was the beginning of this collaboration that has gone on.
With the casting of Jeremy Irons, it raises the question for me of what you perceive to be the Cronenberg protagonist.
Well, I don’t. (laughs) I don’t think in those terms. Like I mentioned in our talk at Telluride, you have to realize that you have to separate your process from mine because I’m not analytical in that way–I don’t look at a character and say, “Well, is this a Cronenberg protagonist?” That never happens. Dead Ringers, I remember seeing in a newspaper, a headline saying “Twin Docs Found Dead in Posh Pad,” and I thought, What is that? And it was about twin gynecologists found dead in their apartment and as I delved more into it, and of course there was a novel written about it, an article called “Dead Ringers” written by Laura Rosenbaum in Esquire I think it was. It became a very famous story and I knew that someone would make a story about this so it wasn’t so much the protagonist that attracted me, but that I just knew that there was a great movie in there that I would have to make because it didn’t seem like anyone else was interested in doing it.
You’ve mentioned that the title sequence of Spider is a series of photographs of mold and rust, of decay, that have been doubled in a way to suggest symmetry and, therefore, something animal. It occurs to me that the Mantle twins are also doubled in a way to suggest one animal.
That’s true, that’s true. There’s an interesting symmetry there.
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“Well these are the simple facts of the case–There were at least two parasites one sexual the other cerebral working together the way parasites will–And why has no one ever asked ‘What is word?’–Why do you talk to yourself all the time?”
-William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
Naked Lunch (1991) – ***½ (out of four)
The scabrous, jagged documents of the broken stones and fallen bridges of the twentieth century, to be authentic, must be told in their own repository of archetype and mythology. For as much as Joyce gave the novel a kick in the shorts in the 1940s (spinning the heroes of a thousand fables into the staggering figure of Finnegan), for as much as Eliot exhumed the shrugging shoulders of giants and employed them in a poetic puppet dance for the antebellum wasteland, William S. Burroughs, with his trilogy of sublime, dangerous novels (Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded), provided for the new age a new language of imagery and contradiction that took level aim at bourgeois values while capturing the eccentric author in a furious cell of words. The point at which Burroughs employs his cut-in technique for the marriage of opposites (compare to William Blake’s centuries misunderstood Marriage of Heaven and Hell) is the point at which the author and filmmaker David Cronenberg reach their own parasitic symbiotic equilibrium in Cronenberg’s adaptation Naked Lunch. Paper trails and pseudo-medical babble intersect with images of flesh melting into machine, of imaginable pleasures uncontainable by flesh (“I am addicted to a drug that I fear may not exist and I fear the withdrawal”), and of alien tissue indulged by man and vice-versa. Both Cronenberg and Burroughs are obsessed with the inability of the flesh to indulge in the limits of the human mind’s propensity to dream new addictions, and both are mavericks devoted to the perfidious art of the soft machine–the perversion of light and parchment that rejuvenates science-fiction and horror like a shot of liquid adrenaline to the heart. Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch reminds me a great deal of the Coens’ Barton Fink. It is an examination of the organic relationship of a writer with his tools, a recognition that the destruction of desire is as effective a muse as the object of desire itself (interestingly enough, the obliterated muse is played by Judy Davis in both), and the bald fact that both films remain at root the most personal mission statements of vital cinematic voices. |
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How deeply was Burroughs involved with this adaptation?
He wasn’t, not at all. I sent him the script finally when I’d finished it, I think it was a Christmas and he’d liked it, but you have to remember that Burroughs knew that he wasn’t a screenwriter, didn’t want to be a screenwriter, but he was very happy to have had a movie made of his work. Just because, I think, it was exciting and I think he got his biggest payday probably ever, which is a sad thing to say for such an influential writer. He did visit the set, sort of knocked around, and he saw things like the insect typewriters, which were my invention. I asked him about insects, you know, and he said, “Oh, I like butterflies” (laughs)–so he wasn’t really an insect man. He would always talk about characters having “dead, insect eyes” so for him they were always a very negative thing–he didn’t plug into “insectness” the way I wanted him to, and yet he was very delighted by the set all the same. So other than the huge influence of having been the source of all that material, he wasn’t really involved in the adaptation. I have to say, though, that the biggest boon he could have possibly given the production was permission to use his life in the movie because that really allowed me to write the script. It’s not only Naked Lunch, but it’s the writing of Naked Lunch.
Including the incident of his shooting his wife.
Yes, I asked him, I said, “William, I want to have the scene when you’re shooting your wife, and I want your permission,” and he said, “Absolutely. I don’t separate my life from my work so go ahead.” It’s an interesting statement because Naked Lunch really is about the inseparability of inner reality from outer.
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M. Butterfly (1993) – **½ (out of four)
Germane to most discussions of Cronenberg’s work, there arises a question of primacy in the origin of sexual perversion and action involving a tale concerning a deck of pornographic playing cards related in an Edward Albee play: it asks if the cards and their various sundry carnalities are the root of desire, or are, themselves, merely the echo of instinctual desire. Coupled with the lingering Occidental belief that Asian women have “ancient Oriental secrets” of pleasure to which their western sisters are not privy, Cronenberg’s M. Butterfly bases the fear and romanticization of that which is obviously foreign and difficult to know firmly in carnal night. With a central image of molting dragonflies that lend layers of meaning to the title (based on David Hwang’s Tony Award-winning play, itself centred around Puccini’s “Madame Butterfly”), the tale of French diplomat Bernard Bouriscot (“Rene Gallimard” (Jeremy Irons) in the film) falling in love with Peking Opera singer Song LiLing (John Lone), unaware that the object of his affection is a man, becomes a fable of sexual fantasy molding reality. Cronenberg sees the Asian seducing the Caucasian with the western myth of “Oriental” secrets; Gallimard, like Puccini’s Butterfly, believes in the ideal of an “Oriental” woman and Song LiLing believes in Gallimard’s belief. The question of primacy in the pornographic playing cards returns here–a kind of philosophical “chicken and egg” conundrum that works much better as a tea house discussion (or even as live theatre) than a conceit to carry a film. And yet there is a crystalline moment early in this film that is quintessential Cronenberg: Gallimard comes across an old man catching dragonflies at the edge of a canal. Although they do not speak a word of one another’s language, an exchange results in the gift of a firefly to Frenchman. Untranslated in the picture, the old man’s explanation of his nocturnal task reveals depths of symbolism and structure for which the rest of the film, in its fight against its source material, struggles: “What am I doing? I am capturing the young dragonflies here near the water so that I can feed them to my songbirds. If you catch them right when they hatch, they can’t fly yet–they can only buzz their wings. If you like them, here, I will make this one a gift to you.” |
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There is a scene in this film with a man capturing a dragonfly and giving it to Irons that has always encapsulated the film for me and, at the same time, captured a little of the “otherness” of China.
That was a scene that I wrote for the film, it wasn’t in Hwang’s script. It was when I saw these dragonflies–I’d seen exactly that scene in Beijing so it was found art, as so much of filmmaking is, and there you see a really benign context for an insect. I don’t at all see them as a hideous, threatening thing although people like to in my work because they see them that way, and here the dragonfly represents a kind of beauty, a kind of delicacy.
The Mandarin in that scene, untranslated, suggests that Irons is the dragonfly about to be fed to the songbird before he can fly.
Yes–and more, it represents a kind of exoticism that the main character is attracted by the exoticism of China to the extent that he’s making up a lot of it himself. And his partner, they’re making up a fake version of China in order to allow them to have a love affair–and here you have this tender moment of magical discovery which was really, I guess, a moment of magical discovery on my part when I saw these beautiful dragonflies emerging.
The scene wasn’t shot in China, though, was it?
No, some of the close-ups were shot in Toronto because by the time we got to shoot that sequence, the whole hatching out of the dragonflies was over so we couldn’t reproduce it there, so the close-ups were shot in a tank in Toronto. It’s so great that you mention this scene–this movie got such a rough ride in America especially with The Crying Game, people were saying that it was a Chinese Crying Game but it doesn’t work as well and all of that, but I keep telling people that I get letters from Chinese viewers of the film who really get it and I don’t think that people believe me, so it’s really nice that you mention this. I take solace, too, in that the guy the movie’s about, Bernard Bouriscot, loves the film–he sobs all the way through. But I take the isolation of this scene by you as a great compliment because I want to feel as though I caught some element of the place from an outsider perspective.
Speaking of the Cronenberg protagonist, though, now that I’ve said that I have no idea, it undoubtedly has something to do with someone who is very actively engaged in creating an alternate reality for himself whether it’s through technology or through memory, as in Spider, or through some sort of invented culture like that Boursicot character. So I think because as soon as you have a character doing that it means you’re going to be discussing the nature of reality and the ways that humans create reality for themselves.
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Crash (1996) – **** (out of four)
What if the arteries and veins of a city were the arteries and veins of a consciousness–a machine god of concrete and steel coming to life under what Harlan Ellison once referred to as an “alchemical nuisance,” the florid aerosol, infernal spugnum, and black exhaust of a century-plus of Industrial Revolution. The biggest secret of J.G. Ballard’s much-reviled 1973 novel Crash is that it is a terrifying work of speculative fiction that would be at home in Deathbird Stories. Placing images of interstates, concrete arteries squalid with roaring, puking, metal clots, against images of shattered flesh riddled with surgical pins and rods joining swathes of torn meat, Cronenberg’s adaptation of Crash (like Videodrome and The Brood before it, and eXistenZ to come) is involved in the cult of the “new flesh”–the worship of flesh and blood bound to chrome and steam. At its essence, Crash, like Fast Company, compares sex to the servicing of machines with the offspring of that union something perverse, indisputably vital, and driven by primal hunger. Howard Shore’s astonishingly atonal score paints a strange, Brothers Quay-like mood under Suschitzky’s metallic grey palette, particularly during an inspired scene in an automated car wash where rough sex in the backseat of an eerily familiar 1963 replica Lincoln convertible (“So you’re saying that JFK’s assassination is a species of car wreck?” “The argument can be made…”), echoes the fondling and bathing of brushes and jets. Polarizing and difficult, Crash is theology: a film about supplication, the mythologizing of martyrs fed to the machine (Jayne Mansfield, James Dean, JFK, and so on)–an apocalyptic ride into the heart of faith, sex, and liebestraum. Cronenberg finds in Crash something more alien than insects (recalling the insect-rape of Naked Lunch), brusquely sexualizing automation and steel (something predicted to an extent in Dead Ringers). And in that re-identification of “otherness,” he betrays his awe of humanity. |
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Compare the adaptation of J.G. Ballard to the adaptation of Burroughs.
Unlike Naked Lunch,which was a compendium of a lot of Burroughs’ writings and also his life, Crash was strictly an adaptation of a book, so I felt very different doing it. I kind of avoided doing Crash for a long time because I was afraid that it’d be very difficult–when I started writing it, though, I found to my surprise that it distilled very easily. That once I got into the process it just sort of flowed very easily so in terms of writing it was simple–not in terms of shooting, but writing was easy.
On a personal note, I have to confess that I took my homecoming date to Dead Ringers and a first date later in college to Crash–bad miscalculations, both.
(laughs) Yes, I’d imagine so–not so much a date movie, either of them. If you’d had the right person, though, it would have been a great date. If you’re just looking to get laid, it’s bad, but if you’re looking for a lifelong partner it’s probably a very good test.
Even if you do get laid, it’s probably not the kind of sex you want.
No, that’s true. (laughs)
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eXistenZ (1999) – *** (out of four)
In many ways an updating of themes explored in Videodrome, Cronenberg’s eXistenZ continues the auteur’s fascination with protagonists seeking to redefine their corporeal and existential realities. Hallmarks like addiction, sex, and the worship of technological evolution of the flesh (through a not-ignoble will and ambition) flavour this film as it flavours much of the auteur’s work, but eXistenZ, released not long after the Wachowskis’ anime riff The Matrix, takes on a structure that ambitiously sprawls across multiple storylines, perspectives, and ultimately, realities. His insects metastasized into cars in Crash find themselves amphibians in eXistenZ (Jude Law’s security guard foil: “Oh sure, I suppose making gamepods out of mutated amphibians is perfectly feasible, but does it have to be so dirty?”), with the most memorable scene coming in a Chinese restaurant and the construction of a bone-gun loaded with teeth-bullets. With Jennifer Jason Lee taking the lead as game designer Allegra Geller (the rare female Cronenberg “mad scientist” whose gender is reflected in the design of clitoral nature of her virtual reality game pad), the picture examines the relationship of a creator with the created (less theology than literary theory, really–not Frankenstein, but Gertrude Stein), though its final statement about the dangers of addiction to a consequence-less alternate reality (something that resonates uncomfortably in the popularity of Rockstar North’s “Grand Theft Auto” series) ring hollow in a twist ending that feels unconvinced and de rigueur besides. Still, Cronenberg’s growth in this film is palpable (telling a story about high-technology in a low-technology fashion seems the sneakiest, most effective way to clarify his points about machines and the flesh), an evolution for the filmmaker that will reach maturity in the quiet, devastatingly economical eloquence of Spider. |
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Returning to something you said about the Cronenberg protagonist and the creation of reality, I see eXistenZ as a sort of updating of Videodrome. Can you tell me about the concept of interaction and the image of the flesh socket in both films?
Yes. The image of the socket is not only sexual of course, I mean, in fact, I don’t know if I mentioned this last time but when people ask me how I choose a project, it’s not like I have a list of things that I check off, it’s very much more like I’m walking around with a plug and you keep plugging into various sockets. Sometimes you get a little juice, sometimes you get no juice, and sometimes you plug it into a socket and you get lots of juice. Obviously the sexual imagery is there, but there’s also the looking for a primordial energy source I suppose, that’s there as well.
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