David Cronenberg: Auteur (Part Two)

The premise of Cronenberg’s first feature-length film, Shivers, is the spread of a parasite within an isolated high-rise community that transforms its hosts into sex-crazed, killing machines. Aside from the obvious focus on disease, aging is also addressed as voiced by one tenant who we overhear discussing the topic with a fellow tenant while waiting to see the resident doctor. Once in audience with the doctor, while being examined, the tenant excitedly asks, “You want me to breath deeply?…good shape for an old man, eh?”(27:34) The tenant in displaying his irrational optimism that he might have the inside line for beating the system, demonstrates our common fear of growing old. In The Artist as Monster, critic William Beard further explores our obsession with disease and death:
“What is so disturbing is the complete unknowableness, uncontrollability, and fearful destructive power of the body…The mind, ego-rationality, may seek to inhibit or direct these protean forces of life, it may even succeed to a considerable extent. But what is absolutely certain is that it will not succeed indefinitely. The body will kill the mind eventually; the body’s death will kill the ego-subject. In this respect, in its inevitable decaying and dying, the body is therefore always the enemy in the end.”(31)

Cronenberg continues this look at disease and destruction of the body throughout his career as seen in Rabid, Videodrome and eXistenZ to name a few. It is in his film The Fly that the filmmaker really delves into our fear of aging. The story is of an eccentric scientist who invents teleportation, accidentally fuses with a fly and then undergoes a horrific transformation before finally committing suicide with the aid of his lover. Although often thought to be a film about AIDS, Cronenberg really saw it as being about the natural effects of aging and our reactions to them, “it’s about mortality and the way we deal with it and try to understand it and the philosophies and emotional attitudes we develop towards it.”(Fly Com. 1.00:47)

In the world of Cronenberg, our attempts to confront these basic fears often end in failure at which point we go into a sort of proactive denial through the incorporation of technology. “We have never accepted the world as it is, we’ve never accepted even our own bodies as they are given to us and are constantly not just trying to understand them but trying to understand how to change them, modify them, improve them…”(Rabid Com. 18:55) Both of the deadly outbreaks that are featured in Shivers and Rabid are the result of medical advances intended to improve our ability to fend off our inevitable demise. In Dead Ringers, a film about twin gynecologists who self-destruct and end up killing themselves, Cronenberg uses their custom-made tools as “a physical symbol of the twins’ efforts to deal with reality…by their own attempt to create something that could modify the human body and in that sense, to control it.”(Dead Com. 5:14)

The obsession with modifying ourselves through technology expands to include the re-invention of our environment in Cronenberg’s eXistenZ. In this film that takes place in the not-so-far away future, video games have become even more of a craze than they already are. What is unique about these video games while very fitting for a Cronenberg project, is that they plug directly into the human body. Gamers have ports that are surgically installed into their backs and the flesh-like gamepods are connected by what looks disturbingly like an umbilical cord. Once plugged in, the gamer is whisked into a virtual world that looks, feels and interacts every bit as realistically as the real world.

As stated earlier, while we are unable to accept our bodies, we are also unwilling to be satisfied with our environment. Everything around us is created by us, by technology. The first thing we see when we wake up is a world of our own creation. “We want light at night, we want heat when it’s cold…and so for humans, there is no such thing as a natural environment, we invent our own.”(Rabid Com. 18:55) It is the extreme of this concept that Cronenberg explores in eXistenZ, how far will we go to distance ourselves from what is real in order to shield ourselves from our fears?

Human invention is not the only way that reality is threatened in David Cronenberg’s films. Again and again, he shows how nothing is what it seems and people are not who we think they are upon initial examination. One way this is presented is through characters’ hallucinations. Videodrome’s Max Renn is constantly seeing things that turn out to be not real. As we experience the film from his point of view, it becomes increasingly more difficult to decipher what is really happening and what is just a hallucination. In The Dead Zone, Johnny Smith has psychic visions that seem very real until they are revealed to be otherwise. Naked Lunch runs rampant with hallucinatory scenes brought on by extreme drug use that makes it almost impossible to understand what is really happening to the main character.

Cronenberg brings his most sophisticated approach to this in his later film, Spider. Spider is a man who suffers from what we assume to be schizophrenia, a deterioration of the mind to return to the earlier discussion of disease. The film is about the main character’s attempt to unravel the mystery of his past. This occurs through flashbacks from his point of view but it soon becomes apparent that these flashbacks are unreliable. “Memory is not a static, absolute thing, it’s not like a documentary that you can play at any given moment but actually it’s a volatile, created thing that we’re constantly creating and re-creating.”(Spider Com. 28:46) This holds true for all of us but this combined with Spider’s compromised mental state causes great confusion for what the truth really is.

To be continued...