During the mid-‘80s, David Cronenberg sought to prove that
compelling human drama could sit comfortably alongside his trademark extreme
imagery. Take away the horror elements
of The Dead Zone (1983) and The Fly (1986) and you’re still left
with, respectively, the tragic tale of a man readjusting to his life after
spending five years in a coma, and the story of a romance doomed by hubris and
insecurity. Dead Ringers (1988)
demonstrates what Cronenberg is capable of when he actually removes the genre
crutches from his aesthetic. What
remains is a powerful character study that is as gripping and bizarre as
anything the director has made to this point.
Cronenberg’s slow evolution away from straight horror and
into sophisticated tragedy wouldn’t have worked without the support of some
increasingly strong lead performances.
Early on Cronenberg didn’t have the clout to attract experienced actors
to his thrillers, and while he sometimes worked around this in clever ways,
such as by using the setting as the protagonist of Shivers (1975), the depth of his films was more often limited by
the wooden efforts of inexperienced performers like Marilyn Chambers (in 1977’s
Rabid) and Stephen Lack (in 1981’s Scanners). The
Dead Zone and The Fly wouldn’t be
nearly as effective without the respective lead performances of Christopher
Walken and Jeff Goldblum, both of whom found ideal outlets for their halted
line readings and haunted mannerisms as Cronenberg’s outsider leading men.
Impressive as Walken and Goldblum are in their roles, they
can’t hold a candle to Jeremy Irons’ incredible work in Dead Ringers, in an incredibly complicated dual role that finds the
British thespian playing twin gynecologists.
Broadly speaking, Elliot is the more confident public face for the
brothers while Beverly is the shy serious scientist, but there are no
convenient shortcuts for Irons to indicate which twin is onscreen at any given
moment (they dress similarly and their personalities overlap in many ways), and
yet it is virtually always evident within ten seconds of any given scene which
brother we are watching. The fact that Irons
wasn’t even nominated for an Academy Award is a testament to how subtle and
lived-in his work is here; what he’s doing is so believable that it doesn’t
even register as acting (just as the post-production tricks that allow the
twins to appear onscreen simultaneously are so seamless that the viewer doesn’t
even think about them). When the twins
merge personalities in the climax as they fall into a drug-induced stupor, it
is actually jarring to see them looking and behaving identically, despite the
fact that the characters have been played by the same actor for the entire
film.
Just because Dead
Ringers is relatively subtle and mature compared to bravura special effects
extravaganzas like Videodrome (1983)
and The Fly doesn’t mean that it’s
dull. Beverly and Elliot’s professional façade
hides a deeply perverse arrangement wherein Elliot does the work of seducing
many of their patients and then urges Beverly to sleep with them (without
letting the women know that they are sleeping with two men). The brothers’ equilibrium is badly upset when
Beverly becomes romantically attached to a particularly prized patient (Genevieve
Bujold), an actress with a unique cervical condition. When she leaves town for a film shoot, it
sends Beverly into a deep drug and alcohol-aided depression that in turn
creates some public relations nightmares for Elliot. The horror in Dead Ringers is psychological rather than physical, but the
brothers’ ultimate meltdown into sheer aimless desperation is just as
disturbing as Dr. Brundle’s physical deformation in The Fly. Dead Ringers finds Cronenberg working
without the crutch of his biggest trademark – extreme gore – and in the process
making one of his very best films.
Exotic viscera returns with a vengeance in Naked
Lunch (1991), Cronenberg’s bold adaptation of William S. Burroughs’
classic 1959 beat novel. Of all classic
novels, Naked Lunch is surely one of
the least adaptable. Most other “un-adaptable”
novels are tricky to translate to the screen because they rely heavily on
internal monologues that are hard to represent visually. But where something like The Great Gatsby at least has a basic narrative that can be brought
to life by actors, Naked Lunch is a
mostly non-narrative book that often reads as evocatively nonsensical wordplay
that would almost literally be impossible to put on screen. Despite this major obstacle to filmic
adaptation, Cronenberg managed to turn Naked Lunch into his most visually eccentric film since Videodrome.
The special effects team lead by Chris Walas really gets a
workout throughout Naked Lunch, as if
Cronenberg was trying to make up for lost time after the mostly gore-less Dead Ringers. The most prominent and memorable of the film’s
recurring special effects finds typewriters sprouting insect legs and filthy,
talking anuses. This is a frequent
nightmare image of the film’s Burroughs stand-in (Peter Weller), an
exterminator whose drug-induced hallucinations basically provide the film’s
setting. Cronenberg’s script stitches
together elements of Burroughs’ original novel (and some of his other writings)
and his autobiography to create something that more closely resembles a
freewheeling essay about Burroughs than a traditional narrative.
While Cronenberg proves unsurprisingly adept at creating
memorably grotesque imagery, he doesn’t quite nail the tricky dream
structure. Cronenberg’s clinical detachment
is perfectly suited to the story of Dead
Ringers, but he’s ultimately too much of an intellectual to completely give
himself over to the dream logic that a nonsensical trip like Naked Lunch requires. In films like Eraserhead (1977) and Mulholland Drive (2001), David Lynch is able to draw unnerving power
from images that can’t be explained away in any thematic or rational sense, but
Cronenberg is a little too rational to commit fully to Naked Lunch’s weirdness.
When two writers engage in passion while dipping their fingers into the
vaginal crevices of one of the aforementioned insectoid typewriters, the sexual
metaphor is a little too on the nose even though the effect is astonishing. Cronenberg was able to make a nightmare
structure work for the most part in Videodrome,
but that film ramped up to its insanity a little more steadily and also had the
added interest of viscerally confronting the visual medium itself; the
protruding TV screens relate directly to that film’s method of transmission to
the viewer, adding an extra layer of horror.
Of course it makes sense that a surreal film about an author would
feature nightmarish contortions of the elements of his own medium (such as
those aforementioned typewriters), but those are too far removed from the way
that the viewer is actually receiving the art to have the same meta-textual
impact that the video-based imagery of Videodrome
had.
While Naked Lunch
isn’t wholly successful, its failures are certainly not due to a lack of
ambition or audaciousness. This is
unquestionably Cronenberg’s riskiest and most complex project to this point,
and even if Burroughs’ writing still seems un-adaptable after the film, it’s
hard not to admire the director’s effort to achieve the impossible. The visual effects are continuously
astonishing (even by the high standards set by previous Cronenberg films) and
there is certainly never a dull moment.
Weller, in a performance that is no less subtle (and perhaps only a bit
less tricky) than Irons’ in Dead Ringer,
effectively anchors the film with his deadpan, defeated demeanor; even in the
face of the most depraved imagery in the film he maintains a jaded outlook. That attitude, being too far gone to
adequately respond to the extraordinary, is the compelling human tragedy of
Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch.
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