David Cronenberg
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(1943 - present)
Three Key Films: Videodrome (1983), Dead Ringers (1988), A History of Violence (2005)
Underrated: Shivers a.k.a They Came From Within (1975). Starting out in art films and television, David Cronenberg decided to work in horror because it was a genre where on could work on a low budget with few content restrictions and still gain attention and commercial success. Shivers got its share of both, being given hearings in The Canadian House of Commons over its subsidized financing and becoming Canada’s most successful taxpayer-funded film to date. The film (produced by Ivan Reitman, of all people) concerns a disease that is a “combination of aphrodisiac and venereal disease”, which spreads through an insular high-rise housing complex via a phallic, parasitic worm that turns all the building’s inhabitants into depraved sex-starved lunatics. This marks the inaugural entry into Cronenberg’s obsessive catalogue of films about the decay of social order, but the ideas and techniques at play are just as fresh, subversive, and unsettling as those in his later, more-acclaimed works. Unlike many other controversial movies of this period, Shivers is just as disturbing as at was upon its initial release, not least of all because of the ways in which the parasite (the story’s protagonist) seems to have a liberating effect on its hosts.
Unforgettable: There’s little that says it better than the exploding head in the beginning of Scanners (1981). Weapons manufacturer ConSec holds a press conference to unleash the power of their latest biological technology, drugged telepaths called scanners. The ConSec scanner representative asks the audience for a volunteer to demonstrate his psychic capabilities and is ambushed by a rogue scanner named Darryl Revok, who overpowers the ConSec scanner and detonates the poor bastard’s brain from deep inside of it. The sequence reads like the official Cronenberg calling card; a moment of shocking, unexpected, visceral violence that is ontological and psychic in nature, framed by an atmosphere of Ballardian clinicalism and Burroughsian corporate control, and involving intense body disfigurement enacted by figures with a unique evolutionary trait. Ejaculatory blood splatter cements the Freudian connection between eroticism and violence. That this violence is realized in the mind- indeed, the physical brain- serves as an elegant demonstration of the way Cronenberg has repeatedly studied the connections between mind and body, two impermanent objects on a constant path of deterioration. Few directors get to pick their most memorable imagery, but it’s fitting that Cronenberg, a man so perceptive about the power of images, is rewarded with one with so many active signifiers of his entire oeuvre.
Dead Ringers (1988)
The Legend: One of the most established voices in cinema, Canadian-born David Cronenberg is perhaps best known as the father of “body horror”. It’s this that will always define Cronenberg the adjective (though it has yet to be established whether this is Cronenbergian or Cronenbergesque), despite the fact that much of his work deviates wildly from the narrow constraints of what these descriptors commonly mean. Even his most mainstream films though involve troubled relationships between humans and their bodies, whether by masking sexual transgression through fantasy (M. Butterfly [1993]), brandishing tattoos as an underworld code (Eastern Promises[2008]), or using disfigurement to signify a history of violence (A History of Violence).
Cronenberg’s thoroughly atheistic view of biology as destiny (and technology as a potential mitigating factor) has lead him to conduct some of the most provocative and challenging works of art in the modern age. Like Dick, Ballard, and Burroughs, Cronenberg began his career filtered through the lens of pulp genre fiction (horror), but he eventually gained commercial and critical acceptance through The Fly (1986) and Dead Ringers. Yet, Cronenberg did not use his cultural capital to cash in. Instead, he made films that were increasingly challenging:Naked Lunch (1991), Spider (2002), eXistenZ (1999); the controversial Crash even received a rare NC-17 rating amidst a cacophony of ire and kudos from various film critics.
As difficult as Cronenberg got though, his films were never difficult to follow. Their demand comes not from abstraction, but from the contortion of expectation. The plots of his films are unhinged and impossible to predict, the audience thrust out of their comfort zone and forced to submit to disarming alternative systems of control. Therein, Cronenberg shows how liberation can be hideous and moribund and how repression can be masked and perfunctory. The only hope, if there is any at all, is in aberration, experimentation- which often proves just as disastrous as the status quo being defied (witness the “liberated” protagonists of Crash, The Fly, Videodrome, and A History of Violence).
Cronenberg, has been repeatedly criticized for being clinical and cold, with little concern for the morality and ethics of his invented worlds. Much of these accusations stem from the popular conceit that a director must always underline a clear position, which Cronenberg would dismiss as a ridiculous notion in a late capitalist world of ambivalence and uncertainty, where mankind does not exist alone, but rather operates in relation to the social and technological world that surrounds him.
At times though, Cronenberg can appear to be more sympathetic to disease, perversion, and psychosis than he is to his characters. But it’s important to note that he tells the stories of his characters as much through physiology and the unconscious as he does through narrative and dialogue. Often tackling what are noted to be “unfilmable” novels (Naked Lunch, Crash, Spider), he is successful where other lesser directors might not have been because he uses the creative liberties of film’s fantasy otherness to enunciate ontological disparities. His films often provide competing layers of reality, not just in his more hallucinatory work (Videodrome, eXistenZ), but also in a film like A History of Violence where Tom Stall’s biography remains wrapped behind an impenetrable series of internal mechanisms. Elaborate gore and special effects, generally only used for spectacle elsewhere, are in these films metaphor, manifestations of the unconscious, and commentaries on systems of control (the body being the ultimate control system with its own inherent constrictions and limitations).
Even sexuality is mechanical and functional. For a director known for graphic and transgressive eroticism (Crash, Videodrome, M Butterfly, Dead Ringers), there’s not a single titillating moment in Cronenberg’s canon, making him that rare talent daring to go beyond the pleasure principle. Desire in his films is always intimately linked with the means of destruction, the dual forces of creation and destruction ever competing at the cellular level, as well as in the nervous system of postmodern culture. There is frequently light in a Cronenberg film, but it is so obscured by darkness that it is barely visible. Therefore, Cronenberg makes a far better diagnostician than a treating doctor. He is the one tasked with the unfortunate function of telling the mind that the body is going to die.
A Dangerous Method starring Michael Fassbender, Keira Knightley and Viggo Mortensen will soon be making the festival rounds and will be released later this year. 
Timothy Gabriele
