Features

First It Controls Your Mind,
Then It Consumes Your Body...

the films of David Cronenberg

cosmetic surgery by Paul Broome

David Cronenberg has regularly courted controversy throughout his film-making career, but it wasn't until he turned his hand to adapting J.G. Ballard's classic novel Crash that he became a household name - thanks mainly to the overzealous campaigning of a few career-motivated Members of Parliament. A scare mongering smear campaign which completely backfired when Crash was finally passed uncut with BBFC certification, and led directly to the film reaching twice as large an audience as was originally predicted.

It's possible that Crash is the first time you've heard of Cronenberg - but it's probable that you've at least seen three or four of his other films and just haven't realised it.

STEREO (1969)

Shot in black and white, Stereo was Cronenberg's first major project as a student filmmaker in Canada. It's an incredibly embryonic film, which introduces two of the director's most enduring subjects - sex and the human body (or more accurately, the human flesh). Filmed as a pseudo-documentary, it's set in the fictional Canadian Academy of Erotic Inquiry and follows the activities of the mysterious Dr Stringfellow's research program. It features subjects who possess telepathic abilities which can only be utilised during sexual arousal.

The film is a bit of a chore to sit all the way through, having no linear plot as such, but it was certainly indicative of what was to come.

CRIMES OF THE FUTURE (1970)

Taking the approach of his first film and pushing the barriers back a little further, Cronenberg's second feature finds us in the company of one Adrian Tripod (kick-starting one of the director's trends for bizarrely named characters). Set in the distant future the flesh has became something of a temple, and dermatology has become one of the strongest religions. Tripod is a follower of Dr Antoine Rouge, of the Institute of Neo-Venereal Diseases. In this future world, all women who live through puberty develop a grotesque disease referred to as Rouges' Malady - which results in them secreting a brown syrup-like liquid from every conceivable orifice. A sickening trend has developed in the form of an addiction to licking the liquid from the dying victims.

Just as difficult to endure as Stereo (indeed, Cronenberg himself has commented that "I would imagine a double-billing of those two would take a lot of sitting through"), Crimes Of The Future is one for the devotees only.

SHIVERS (1976)
(aka: THE PARASITE MURDERS/THEY CAME FROM WITHIN)

Cronenberg's first jaunt into commercial cinema brought him his first notable success. The film can be viewed on two levels: as a deeply disturbing tale of sexual horror (with it's obvious STD connotations), or just as an out-and-out gruesome monster movie. The film is set in a modern apartment complex called Starliner Towers. One of the tenants, Dr Emil Hobbes, has created a new parasite in the hope of providing the human body with its own 'self-repair' system (the parasite will seek out the malfunctioning organ in the body, and synthesise itself to take its place) - only it doesn't quite work. Instead the parasite acts as an intense aphrodisiac and turns its host into a sex-crazed murderous zombie. From its source - Hobbes' young libidinous mistress - the parasites soon spread from host to host and infect the whole complex.

There are many memorable scenes in the film - not least concerning the phallic parasites crawling through plug holes and leaping from washing machines. Though it's the typically downbeat ending that rounds it all off nicely.

RABID (1977)

Cronenberg continued the 'sexual plague' theme in his second major feature. This time a young girl (played by porn star Marilyn Chambers) badly injured in a motorcycle accident is patched up by celebrated plastic surgeon Dr Dan Keloid using new techniques; which have the unexpected effect of the girl developing a strange penile growth in her armpit which she uses (again, during sexual arousal) to feed her new-found subconscious craving for blood. By the end of the film she has infected the whole city of Montreal with a vicious plague.

The film is kind of an elaborate footnote to Shivers, just upping the odds a little from a couple of hundred victims to a couple of hundred thousand.The acting is still a little shaky, although Cronenberg at least gives his stars a chance to develop some depth into their characters - there's a human quality present in Rabid which was completely lacking in Shivers (indeed, Cronenberg's habit of dealing with the reality of the flesh first, and detaching himself from the human emotion of sex and disease is the main criticism which is still being levelled at his work - Crash in particular) but it still works as little more than an imaginative out-and-out blood-happy horror film. And it's definitely one of the most original vampire films ever conceived.

FAST COMPANY (1977)

I mention this film only because it deals with another of Cronenberg's fascinations - that of drag-racing. Maybe it provides some kind of link to Crash, and why he was drawn to the project? It certainly has very little in common with the rest of his films. A curiosity piece.

THE BROOD (1979)

The moderate success of Shivers and Rabid and rising interest in Cronenberg's work meant that he could, for the first time, afford to take onboard an actual name to his new project. Oliver Reed stars as Dr Hal Raglan - the founder of the Somafree Institute of Psychoplasmics (cool, huh?). Psychoplasmics is the science of transforming all your psychological problems into a physical form, resulting in a change in your body ...or something.

One of his patients, Nola (Samantha Eggar) has mastered this technique and is externalising all her neuroses in the form of a gang of psychotic mutant dwarves. The hooded dwarves then run around killing anybody Nola has ever had a grudge against. When it looks as though her ex-husband (Art Hindle) is going to win custody of their young daughter, The Brood kidnap her and take her into their folds.

The film was obviously made as a catharsis for the director's own divorce and custody battle, but again functions extremely well as a gross monster movie. The scene where Nola 'gives birth' to her latest psychosis, from her Psychoplasmic external womb, and then proceeds to lick it clean is particularly vivid. But it's Oliver Reed's performance which - surprisingly - wins the day.

SCANNERS (1981)

"Ah! The one where the bloke's head explodes, right?" Yep, that’s the one. Scanners is a kind of mainstream big brother to Cronenberg's first film Stereo. Again it features subjects with artificially-induced telepathic abilities - this time the ability has resulted from the use of a drug known as Ephemerol, given to pregnant women in the 1950's.

Atthe film's opening we find one of the most powerful Scanners, Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack), as a down-and-out wandering around a shopping mall - oblivious to his talents, and driven mad by the voices in his head. Dr Paul Ruth (Patrick McGoohan) rescues him, and administers a dosage of Ephemerol, which stops the voices. Meanwhile, the rest of the Scanners have formed two groups - the good ones and the bad ones - the evil group is headed by Darrell Revok (Michael Ironside) and the rest of the film basically builds to head-to-head confrontation between Vale and Revok, which provides pyrotechnics and spurting fluids by the bucketful.

Another real roller coaster of a movie, and Cronenberg's first 'action' movie (there's some great car chases and spectacular crashes) Scanners - like its predecessors - is now looking and sounding a little dated, but if you can overlook the fashion sense and Lack's patheticlead performance (he was cast purely because of his eyes, and not his acting talent!) then it's still a great piece of entertainment.

VIDEODROME (1982)

Another of Cronenberg's best known movies, Videodrome features James Woods as Max Renn - a seedy producer for a small cable channel, interested in bringing the viewing public only the most crass and exploitative programmes he can find. He stumbles across Videodrome - a snuff-TV show - and has to have it.

Meanwhile strange things are happening to him - his TV is mutating and a large vaginal slit keeps opening up in his stomach (you know, the usual stuff) - reality is beginning to slip. Cronenberg took his concepts to new levels with Videodrome, Renn changing into a man-machine killing hybrid (a theme which would rearise in similar fashion in the Japanese Tetsuo films - which Cronenberg greatly admired). There is hardly any plot beyond this, but at the same time there's a barrage of subplots and extraneous characters and conspiracies which help to bend Renn's reality in their own way. As usual, Cronenberg crams a whole career's worth of concepts into ninety minutes. The whole thing sticks together a bit loosely, and is most memorable for certain finely-crafted scenes - most notably Renn's (and Cronenberg's) rallying cry: "Long live the new flesh!"

THE DEAD ZONE (1983)

The only one of his film's which he didn't have a hand in writing, Cronenberg's adaptation of Stephen King's The Dead Zone is at first glance the least Cronenbergesque of all his films.

Although there are echoes of Max Renn and Cameron Vale in Christopher Walken's portrayal of the film's protagonist (Johnny Smith), the plot doesn't feature the barrage of concepts and subplots which Cronenberg usually assaults the viewer with. Instead the film is a slick, finely crafted and faithfully downbeat piece of cinema - and, while it's one of the best of all the King-associated movies, it's also Cronenberg's most disappointing. Far from developing The Flesh, it actually hides all the intrigue and interesting stuff behind its spooky nonsense and the typical King two-dimensional bad guy.

THE FLY (1986)

It's not often that a remake of a film comes to be regarded as the definitive version, but that's exactly what Cronenberg's reworking of The Fly has become. Takinghis influence directly from the original short story by fellow Canadian George Langelaan (which appeared in Playboy magazine in 1957), rather than from Kurt Neumann's 1958 adaptation, Cronenberg transformed the scientist-turned-monster plot of the original into a hugely emotional and visually stunning experience.

Jeff Goldblum turns in an outstanding performance as Seth Brundle - the scientist who manages to build a functioning teleporter, but suffers an unfortunate accident when testing the machine, and finds his physiology merged with that of a housefly. His subsequent transformation into the new hybrid - Brundlefly - takes place over the bulk the film, and is slow and harrowing.

The final scene - with the hideously mutilated monster (now also merged with the machine itself) begging his love (Geena Davis) to put him out of his misery without any words - is the most emotionally affecting scene in any so-called horror film. This was the film which raised Cronenberg from being a major league horrormovie director, to being a major league movie director.

DEAD RINGERS (1988)

While the bizarre visions of twisted flesh and the vivid gore is largely absent, Dead Ringers is possibly the most overtly Cronenbergesque of all his movies. Jeremy Irons turns in the Dead Ringersperformance of his life (he was later to thank Cronenberg in his acceptance speech when he won the best actor Oscar for Reversal Of Fortune) as two identical twins - award-winning gynaecologists, not without their mental (and sexual) problems. The film is both disturbing and compelling, as we follow the twin's slow downfall towards its ultimate and unavoidable end - with Genevieve Bujold serving as the third corner of the eternal triangle.

What starts out as the typical 'the unloved, clever twin becomes jealous of his sibling's successful love-life' type story, turns into something far more original, and much more unsettling.

NAKED LUNCH (1992)

Cronenberg had harboured a desire to adapt Burroughs novel for the screen for over a decade, and surely there could be no director more suited to the task. From the sprawling chaos of the book Cronenberg dragged the bare bones of a plot, then from his own imagination and Burrough's real-life he added the extra elements needed to flesh out the project. The result was a work which should be viewed completely separate from the novel, and which takes us on one of the director's most outrageous trips to date.

Endless interpretations can be drawn from the giant centipedes, the sedate Mugwumps, and the endless reels of bizarre imagery which spew forth over the two hours of the movie - but it's best not to try and analyse the whole thing too deeply, as you'll only end up confusing yourself! A great trip of a movie, with some excellent performances.

M BUTTERFLY (1993)

Again, something of a departure for the director. This is a very affecting film (based on a succesful Broadway play) about a man (Jeremy Irons) who falls in love with a woman, before discovering - years later - that the object of his desires is actually a man. It was overshadowed at the time by Neil Jordan's The Crying Game - but is actually a much more beautiful piece of cinema, and is highly recommended.

CRASH (1995)

How long did we have to wait? Too bloody long, that's how long. Quite how Crash managed to stir up the controversy it did, is hard to see. The most notorious release since Natural Born Killers, and still banned in this country by at least two local councils - why? Who knows.

The story (based on the novel by JG Ballard) runs basically like this: Ballard (James Spader) is a sexually obsessive movie producer, who lives with his equally sexually obsessive wife Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger). After he is involved in a horrific car accident with Holly Hunter and her husband (who dies instantly), he finds himself sexually drawn to wrecked cars, scarred crash victims and to the power of the crash. Hunter introduces him to a seedy collection of misfits, all of whom seek their kicks from watching and being involved in collisions. One thing leads to another, and the film ends with Ballard and Catherine pushing their obsession closer and closer to the edge.

Now, although Crash is full of sex and action (more sex than crashes, as it happens) - this is not the kind of film you would watch for kicks. This is a Cronenberg film, first and foremost. If you found Dead Ringers or Naked Lunch dull and tedious, then you are not going to enjoy Crash! It's fairly obvious to see why your average conservative cinema go-er would be upset (and even appalled) at what goes on (there's one throwaway scene where Ballard is having sex with his wife while she asks him to fantasize about engaging in anal sex with another man, which caused at least twenty people to walk out of the cinema when I saw the film) - but to say that it could possibly be a corrupting influence on the moral fabric of society is preposterous! Anybody who actually sits down and watches this film will go away with any one of three feelings about it: they will either love it, hate it because they think it's boring (which it isn't), or just think it's stupid (which it is in places) - but nobody who sees it will think it deserves to be banned.

When it comes down to it, it's a visually stunning film, with some fine performances - most notably from Spader and Unger - and even if it does all hang together a bit loosely (the relationship between the crash and sexuality is never fully explained), in my eyes it is still nothing less than a great film.

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