Understanding Auteurs: David Cronenberg (M. Butterfly and Crash)

Unhealthy sexual relationships have been at the heart of many of David Cronenberg’s projects.  Shivers (1975) and Rabid (1977) both feature alien diseases that are sexually transmitted, while the plots of The Brood (1979), Videodrome (1983), and Dead Ringers (1988) each revolve at least partially around destructively obsessive sexual relationships.  (1986’s The Fly is somewhat of an anomaly in this respect, in that the fairly conventional courtship of its main characters has a loving foundation that is gradually corrupted by scientific mishaps).  Given this pedigree, Cronenberg would seem an ideal choice to direct M. Butterfly (1993), an adaptation of David Henry Hwang’s celebrated stage play about the traumatically passionate relationship that a male French diplomat has with a Chinese opera star posing as a woman during the Cultural Revolution.  Unfortunately the way that the film handles its central relationship is unconvincing and rife with problems of execution.

The major problem with M. Butterfly is the casting of the leads.  Jeremy Irons is solid enough as the diplomat (the French characters in the film are all played by British actors speaking their native tongue); as demonstrated in Dead Ringers, he knows how to play romantic desperation.  But John Lone is horribly miscast as the transvestite opera singer.  Lone is a capable performer, best known for playing the adult version of the titular character in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (1987), but his physical features and his voice aren’t even remotely feminine, which makes it difficult to believe that Irons could be duped into believing that he’s having an affair with a woman.  In fairness, this isn’t a Crying Game (1991) situation where the audience is meant to be shocked by the revelation of the opera singer’s gender – we learn very early on that the singer is actually a man - and part of what Cronenberg is doing here is provocatively suggesting that the diplomat is willfully deceiving himself about the nature of his relationship, constructing a fantasy with the real-world materials available to him.

Still, it doesn’t seem like Lone’s character would be an acceptable enough stand-in for the submissive, self-sacrificing Asian woman that Irons’ character desires.  Intellectually, Irons’ reasons for deceiving himself add up, and are even fairly clearly spelled out in the film’s dialogue.  He’s a western imperialist seeking to dominate an “exotic” Asian woman; he feels bored with his conventional marriage; he feels emasculated by his macho colleagues; etc.  It’s certainly true that human sexuality is socially constructed, and that all of the above factors would contribute to the diplomat’s longing for a stereotypically submissive Asian woman, but there is also a visceral, visual component to sexual attraction that the film fails to account for.  Hwang’s play is based on a true story, but it feels tremendously unconvincing onscreen, largely because it’s impossible to believe that Irons’ character would find Lone to be a suitable receptacle for his specific fetish.  The film is an unfortunate waste of a compelling setting and provocative subject matter, and Cronenberg’s least artistically successful project since Fast Company (1979).

Though M. Butterfly is ultimately a failure, it is one of the more clear explorations of Cronenberg’s major recurring theme, as defined by Sam Adams in a recent article on TheDissolve :  “the relationship between human desires and the structures we build to realize them.”  That theme is pushed to its breaking point in Crash (1996), an adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s 1973 novel about an underground cult of people who are sexually aroused by car crashes.  Rather than attempt to make this absurd fetish appear believable, Cronenberg structures his film as a series of extreme sexual fantasies – or, depending on your perspective, nightmares – related to his characters’ peculiar obsessions.  By removing basically any content that is unrelated to those fixations, Cronenberg has eliminated any obstacle to focusing on his most cherished theme, making Crash something of a Rosetta Stone for his body of work.

Though the characters in Crash spend virtually every scene of the film realizing their most perverse sexual fantasies, they never seem remotely fulfilled by their transgressions.  It is made plain that the characters are not achieving orgasm during these encounters; a repeated mantra is “maybe the next one.”  Though the film is in some ways a work of (or at least a commentary on) pornography, it is pervaded by a sense of melancholy.  As with the William Burroughs stand-in in Naked Lunch (1991), the characters maintain a deadpan cool regardless of how surreal their surroundings are.  These people need to push at the absolute fringes of sexuality to even become aroused, but are so dependent on their fetishistic hardware that they have lost the connection to humanity that might actually make their experiences fulfilling.  Basically the characters are addicts, and Crash throws into relief how important the theme of addiction has been in Cronenberg’s oeuvre.  The TV producer in Videodrome had his porn addiction, the scientist in The Fly was addicted to his experiments, the twins in Dead Ringers developed drug habits, the writer in Naked Lunch was addicted to both drugs and writing, the diplomat in M. Butterfly had his destructive relationship, etc.  Crash takes its characters to the next logical step of addiction.  Their unique obsession makes death and satisfaction seem almost indistinguishable.

Though Crash is in many ways the ultimate expression of Cronenberg’s recurring themes, it is far from his most entertaining or artistically rewarding film.  While Cronenberg’s decision to structure the film as a series of increasingly bizarre sex scenes allows the viewer to focus almost exclusively on the director’s thematic obsessions (and is undeniably a bold artistic stance for a mainstream film), it ultimately dulls the film’s narrative possibilities.  The characters start the film as extreme sex addicts and end it the same way; the only real progression is in the extremity of the sexual situations, reaching self-parody when one character humps another's vaginal-shaped leg wound.  It is important to the film’s message to show that the characters have distanced themselves from emotional  contact, but by removing all traces of recognizable everyday reality from his film Cronenberg limits the audience’s investment in his characters.  Crash is another of Cronenberg’s technical marvels – the scenes involving car stunts are all impressive and regular cinematographer Peter Suschitzky gives the film an appropriately icy goth look – and it is fascinating as an under-the-microscope look at the director’s pet themes, but it’s also too unpleasantly one-note for its own good.

UP NEXT eXistenZ and Spider

Understanding Auteurs: David Cronenberg (Dead Ringers and Naked Lunch)

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.

UP NEXT  M. Butterfly and Crash  

Understanding Auteurs: David Cronenberg (The Dead Zone and The Fly)

By the early ‘80s David Cronenberg had proven that he could handle both highly personal projects and straightforward B-movies.  The cold and largely impersonal Scanners (1981) was a basic genre exercise distinguished only by its high level of gore and the exceptional quality of its special effects, but it came in between The Brood (1979) and Videodrome (1983), two distinctive nightmares whose storylines featured unmistakable autobiographical elements.   The Dead Zone (1983) was Cronenberg’s first major director for hire job, as he’d been commissioned by John Carpenter’s usual producing partner Debra Hill to become the next in a long list of notable horror filmmakers to adapt one of Steven King’s novels.  Had Carpenter handled the same material, with the same cast and crew as Cronenberg, it seems likely that the results would’ve been virtually identical (though Carpenter would’ve used his own menacing synth music rather than Michael Kamen’s orchestral score).  That said, The Dead Zone is Cronenberg’s most conventionally entertaining film up to this point, and it’s almost a relief to see him temporarily stepping away from his pet themes and visual tics.

Cronenberg’s directorial stamp is largely absent from The Dead Zone, but there’s something to be said for staying out of the way of strong source material and simply delivering a solid piece of mainstream cinema.  This may be Cronenberg’s most anonymous filmmaking to this point (with the exception of his work on 1979’s forgettable Fast Company), but it’s also his smoothest and most conventionally satisfying, without the clunky transitions or visible low budget limitations of many of his earlier films.  The Dead Zone is not ultimately as interesting or innovative as something like Videodrome, but it is still stylish and often quite tense.  The horrific moments don’t have the psycho-sexual edge or the strange conflation of biology and psychology that they do in other Cronenberg films, but images such as a man swallowing a pair of scissors are still plenty unsettling.  Cronenberg doesn’t fully translate King’s novel into his own language the way that Stanley Kubrick did with his 1980 adaptation of The Shining, but his take on King is a far more satisfying conventional horror film than contemporaneous King adaptations Salem’s Lot (1979), Creepshow (1982), Cujo (1983), Christine (1983), and Firestarter (1984).

The Dead Zone succeeds where Scanners didn’t both because King is a stronger plotter than Cronenberg, and because the newer film gives the viewer a protagonist to get emotionally invested in.  After a major traffic accident puts him in a coma for five years, Christopher Walken’s main character awakens to find that he’s gained psychic powers.  A character coming to grips with supernatural mental abilities is a pretty standard trope of science fiction, but Walken’s spacy line readings and haunted facial expressions lend a genuine gravity to his situation.  If you removed the sci-fi elements from the plot you’d still have a compelling and moving story about a man trying to come to grips with a world that moved on while he was physically and mentally incapacitated.  It’s this human element, beautifully played by Walken in one of his best performances, which makes The Dead Zone a better film than the intermittently exciting but ultimately empty Scanners.

The Fly (1986) is another adaptation, this time of a famously campy Vincent Price vehicle from 1958.  In this case, though, the source material plays directly into Cronenberg’s obsessions, allowing him to make a highly personal film that also functions as an emotionally engaging and entertaining piece of entertainment.  A combination of the personal autuerist themes of Videodrome and the efficient mainstream storytelling of The Dead Zone, with equal room for a dramatically resonant storyline and the imaginative gore that is its director’s calling card, The Fly is the ultimate David Cronenberg film.

The personal/mainstream synthesis is appropriate given that the film’s protagonist is a hybrid of two different species.  Jeff Goldblum’s scientist has been working on a way to transfer matter from one location to another, but he runs into complications when he attempts to teleport himself and accidentally brings a fly into the teleportation chamber.  Goldblum gradually takes on the physical characteristics of a fly, initially sprouting thick back hairs and eventually reaching the point where he is able to climb around on the ceiling of his lab.

Goldblum’s condition allows for a lot of astonishing makeup effects courtesy of Chris Walas, who has a field day helping Cronenberg achieve the most elaborate synthesis of biology and psychology in any of the director’s films to this point.  The gory effects are extreme enough to upset even the most iron-stomached horror fan, but what’s perhaps most impressive is that Goldblum remains recognizably human and sympathetic even after his humanoid appearance has almost completely deteriorated.  This is Goldblum’s finest performance, and it’s his shockingly relatable reactions to his character’s extraordinary circumstances that give The Fly its surprisingly strong tragic heft. 

It also helps that the screenplay (written by Cronenberg and Charles Edward Pogue) is more focused than any in the director’s oeuvre to this point, with the story revolving entirely around the doomed romance between Goldblum and Geena Davis’ reporter.  The film opens with the couple meeting at a science convention and ends with them battling each other, and not a scene goes by that doesn’t feature at least one member of this couple.  Goldblum and Davis were dating in real life while The Fly was being filmed, and their actual affection for each other translates very nicely to the screen.  As in The Dead Zone it isn’t too hard to imagine a compelling version of this film with the supernatural elements removed to focus solely on the troubled relationship of the main characters.

The Fly remains simultaneously dramatically engaging and viscerally horrific for almost its entire runtime, only faltering slightly during a climax that tips things a bit too far in favor of the special effects and away from the tragic human element.  It is one of the few notable remakes that is unquestionably superior to its inspiration, taking the basic concept of a fun but cheesy camp classic and investing it not with just state of the art special effects but also genuine emotional gravity.  When Goldblum repeats the most famous line of dialogue from the original film (“help me, please help me”) it’s in such a completely different (and much more devastating) context that I didn’t even notice the reference until this viewing, and this was the fourth or fifth time that I’d seen Cronenberg’s version.  Simultaneously offering the most horrific effects, the tightest storytelling, and the most dramatically affecting characters in any of Cronenberg’s films to date, The Fly represents a true evolution in the director’s aesthetic and is his finest film to this point.

UP NEXT  Dead Ringers and Naked Lunch

Understanding Auteurs: David Cronenberg (Scanners and Videodrome)

The Brood (1979) advanced David Cronenberg’s aesthetic by combining his early low-budget horror style with a deeply personal storyline that reflected the writer-director’s real-life familial anxieties.  The film’s notoriety gained Cronenberg a somewhat bigger budget for his next outing, Scanners (1981).  But while Scanners displays an increase in Cronenberg’s technical skill, it is in some respects a step back from The Brood’s ambitious intensity.  A relatively straightforward sci-fi action film, Scanners eschews the psycho-sexual horror of previous Cronenberg projects, and the uncomfortable personal psychological investment of The Brood, and instead applies the director’s customary extreme gore to a campy story about a race of mutants with incredible psychic powers.

The plot revolves around two particularly powerful “scanners.”  Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack) is a derelict who has withdrawn completely from society due to the pressures associated with hearing a non-stop flood of other people’s thoughts.  Where Vale fears his telekinetic and telepathic powers, Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside) embraces them, and uses them to spread terror.  After Revok creates havoc at a press conference intended to demonstrate the scanners’ potential usefulness, a security firm called ConSec captures Vale with the hope that he’ll be able to help them reign in Revok.

It’s a silly premise, but one that Cronenberg treats with grim solemnity.  The humorlessness of The Brood was somewhat more excusable, given how closely that film’s horror was tied to both the director’s real-life situation and his characters’ psychology.  But there simply isn’t much depth to the characters or the plot of Scanners, and there’s really nothing to invest in.  The plotting is reasonably efficient and entertaining, but it’s all fairly mechanical, and lacking in the gallows wit and social commentary that gives the best exploitation films their personality.  (It doesn’t help that Lack is another in a long line of incredibly wooden Cronenberg leading men, though Ironside brings a tangible menace to his villain). 

Scanners lives and dies on the strength of its setpieces, and thankfully it has enough impressive special effects showcases to function as a solid action film.  That said, the film peaks too early with the justly famous scene in which Revok terrorizes a conference room.  Once the scanner has used his psychic powers to pop a man’s head like a blood-filled balloon (in an incredibly convincing effect) there’s really nowhere to go but down – which wouldn’t be such a problem if it didn’t happen in the film’s second scene.  The climactic showdown between Vale and Revok provides another good excuse to show off Gary Zeller’s exquisite special effects, but the conclusion (in which Vale and Revok merge bodies…or something), while superficially trippy, is both muddled and meaningless.

Videodrome (1983) is pretty muddled as well, but here the confusion is purposeful as it is tied to the increasingly warped mind-state of its protagonist.  Max Renn (James Woods), the president of a UHF station specializing in softcore pornography, is looking for programming that will break through to a new audience.  The station’s pirate satellite expert (Peter Dvorsky) stumbles upon the type of extreme programming that Renn is looking for when he unscrambles a transmission of a plotless television show depicting the brutal torture of a series of anonymous victims.  As Renn’s fixation on this snuff entertainment increases, he loses his ability to distinguish between his everyday reality and a series of bizarre, violent hallucinations.

Videodrome succeeds where Scanners doesn’t, because here the horror is inextricable from the psychology of the film’s protagonist.  As he did in The Brood, Cronenberg made his main character both a stand-in for his own real life experiences and an audience surrogate.  The director had been attacked many times in the press for the extreme content of his films, causing a number of personal and professional setbacks.  When Canadian journalist Robert Fulford called Shivers (1975) “the most repulsive film (he’d) ever seen,” it not only made it more difficult for Cronenberg to obtain funding for his future Canadian productions but also resulted in him getting evicted from his apartment due to a “morality clause.”  Virtually all of Cronenberg’s films up to this point had been affected by some form of censorship, with The Brood in particular having to go through a huge amount of edits before reaching a form that the ratings boards found appropriate for public consumption.  Videodrome, which is all about the potential affects of prolonged exposure to the types of ultraviolent content that Cronenberg traffics in, reflects the writer-director’s own anxieties about the morality of his art.  The film doesn’t ultimately come to a clear, coherent conclusion about any of these issues, but because the plot is indistinguishable from the psychology of its protagonist, whose own concerns reflect those of the director, Cronenberg’s abstract themes become viscerally palpable.

The believability of Renn’s hallucinations owes largely to the extraordinary work of effects wizard Rick Baker (who would provide the same services for Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” music video the same year that Videodrome was released).  Even thirty years after Videodrome’s original theatrical release, the practical visual effects feel state of the art and memorably grotesque.  Perhaps there isn’t a single defining gory image in Videodrome to compare to the insane birth scene in The Brood or the head popping scene in Scanners, but there is a bigger variety of astonishing visuals in the newer film.  Pulsating VHS tapes, protruding TV screens, and a vaginal stomach cavity that functions as a VCR are just a few of the memorable sights that appear in Videodrome.

Ultimately Videodrome might have been better off had Cronenberg trusted the surrealistic images to carry the film’s climax.  As it is, too much screen time is devoted to an increasingly silly conspiracy angle involving warring factions who intend to use the hallucinatory signal of the snuff program for vaguely defined political purposes.  This aspect of the plot is justified to the extent that it can be seen as a paranoid delusion of Renn’s, as the reality of anything that happens in the film after Renn originally sees the snuff transmission is questionable.  But for conspiracy stories to really be effective they have to seem at least vaguely plausible, and too much of the latter half of the film is devoted to exposition couched in half-baked philosophizing when the strength of Videodrome clearly lies in its distinctive imagery.

Fortunately there is enough of that imagery on display to make Videodrome the best and most interesting of Cronenberg’s films up to this point.  While the film continues the director’s line of body horror nightmares, it is his first project with clear ambition beyond being an exploitation movie.  Cronenberg had grown in leaps and bounds as a director at this point.  In his earliest films Cronenberg had trouble transitioning smoothly from one scene to the next, but in Videodrome he frequently switches from flat reality to outright surrealism in the space of a scene.  A creepy sex scene between Renn and a masochistic radio host (Deborah Harry) has the two alternating hypnotically between appearing in Renn’s apartment and the orange dungeon where the snuff program takes place, a sequence that has a hallucinatory power (and genuine eroticism) that would’ve seemed out of Cronenberg’s range earlier in his oeuvre.  Where earlier Cronenberg films were largely defined by a small handful of memorably intense images, Videodrome largely sustains its atmosphere of surrealistic dread over its entire 87 minute runtime.  A quantum leap in ambition and a promising sign that its director could be more than just a quality horror filmmaker, Videodrome marks a clear evolution in David Cronenberg’s aesthetic.

UP NEXT  The Dead Zone and The Fly

Understanding Auteurs: David Cronenberg (Fast Company and The Brood)

After establishing himself as a skilled low-budget horror craftsman with Shivers (1975) and Rabid (1977), David Cronenberg took a surprising turn with his third professional feature.  Fast Company (1979) is a drag racing exploitation film following the conflict between a star driver (William Smith) and his sleazy manager (John Saxon).  There isn’t much more to the story than that.  The film packs in all of the expected racing film requirements (copious racing footage, gratuitous nudity, John Saxon) but lacks any of the elements that set the best exploitation films apart from the pack (subversive political statements, offbeat humor, edgy content).  Fast Company is an utterly generic little movie that isn’t notable as a standalone film or even recognizable as a Cronenberg project.

The Brood (1979), on the other hand, is about as Cronenbergian as a movie could possibly be.  The action develops around the Somafree Institute, where psychotherapist Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed) has developed a technique called “psychoplasmics” that allows patients with mental problems to release their suppressed emotions through physiological changes in their body.  Raglan’s prize patient is Nola (Samantha Eggar), a former victim of child abuse who is currently locked in a custody battle with her estranged husband Frank (Art Hindle).  After discovering some disturbing marks on his daughter’s body, Frank becomes increasingly determined to invalidate Raglan’s work and gain custody of his daughter.  As Frank gets closer to discovering the truth behind Somafree’s research, people sympathetic to his struggles are murdered by strange, dwarf-like children that resemble Frank and Nola’s daughter.  It is eventually revealed that these are the psychoplasmic offspring of Nola, who target the sources of Nola’s rage (her abusive mother and neglectful father, a teacher who she mistakenly thinks is sleeping with Frank, etc.).

The sci-fi plot is ultimately as silly as it sounds, but the violence is presented in such a matter of fact way that the film takes on a genuine air of menace.  Shivers and Rabid were both gross and creepy, and perhaps a bit unnerving in their best moments, but The Brood is outright disturbing.  The climactic scene revealing Nola’s psychoplasmic condition is one of the most revolting and fucked-up things I’ve ever witnessed in a piece of entertainment, but Cronenberg’s willingness to go as far as he does gives the film distinction and power.  I generally subscribe to the old Val Lewton idea that what is unseen and suggested is scarier than anything that is shown, but Cronenberg is using viscera and gore here to create images that we couldn’t imagine.  Frank’s disgust with his wife’s physical and mental state is palpable only because we are allowed to see what he sees.

In many respects The Brood is Cronenberg’s most accomplished film up to this point, but it is also certainly his least pleasant.  The filmmaking is smoother overall than in Cronenberg’s earlier horror films – perhaps owing to the director’s discovery of several crewmembers that would go on to be regulars in his staff, such as cinematographer Mark Irwin and editor Ronald Sanders, both of whom first worked with Cronenberg on Fast Company – and the cast is stronger overall than in Shivers or Rabid.  For a movie with such a goofy plot, The Brood isn’t much fun; the film seems to have been an outlet for Cronenberg to take out his frustrations with his real life custody battle and divorce settlements with his first wife, which were ongoing as the film was made.  But it is a powerful, genuinely scary film, and Cronenberg’s most advanced look at the collision of psychology and biology up to this point.

UP NEXT  Scanners and Videodrome

Understanding Auteurs: David Cronenberg (Shivers and Rabid)

David Cronenberg’s name is synonymous with the “body horror” subgenre.  Other directors have earned their reputation with films that focus on the graphic degeneration of the body – Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator (1985) is a classic example of body horror, while Lloyd Kaufman and his Troma Studio acolytes have built an entire quirky universe around punkishly grotesque imagery – but no one has gone as consistently far as Cronenberg in turning psychology into biology.  Few contemporary filmmakers can challenge the Canadian director’s facility for creating memorably extreme visuals, but Cronenberg clearly has more on his mind than appealing to the most twisted fantasies of Fangoria subscribers.  Though Cronenberg is the undisputed master of this tiny subgenre that he virtually invented, he has shown an increasing tendency over the past several decades to step outside of horror altogether, as in his psychologically sophisticated historical drama A Dangerous Method (2011).  Cronenberg’s oeuvre is increasingly difficult to pin down, blurring the line between multiplex, arthouse, and grindhouse cinema in ways that are bound to confound viewers of all stripes.

Considering how adept Cronenberg eventually became at inserting subversive messages and state of the art effects into conventionally satisfying narratives, it seems almost surprising that his early film work is comprised mostly of work-for-hire jobs on Canadian television shows and generically “experimental” short movies.  Stereo (1969) is fairly insufferable even in a condensed “fan edit” posted on YouTube (which cuts the film’s length down by nearly 50 minutes, and adds some smartly chosen ambient background music to the original cut’s mostly silent soundtrack).  Based on the 5 minutes or so that I managed to sit through, Crimes of the Future (1970), which is also currently available to watch on YouTube, isn’t much better.

 Every artist has to start somewhere.  Tedious though Cronenberg’s earliest work may be, it did lay the groundwork for his impressive proper commercial debut, Shivers (1975).  Stereo and Crimes of the Future are both set in what appear to be immaculately furnished, antiseptic facilities.  The action of Shivers is likewise confined entirely to a high-rise apartment building, introduced in a suitably creepy opening credits slide show advertisement.  The comfortably numb, insular world shown off in the commercial is practically begging to be destroyed, and the film wastes little time before disrupting the peace of this yuppie paradise.  Early scenes of a couple of prospective renters arriving at the building are interspersed with disturbing shots of a wild struggle between two apartment dwellers (an older man and a young woman), climaxing in the man cutting the woman’s stomach open with surgical precision and then committing suicide.  Gradually it’s revealed that the man in the struggle was a doctor whose experiments have gone out of control.  Distraught that humanity has become overly rational, the doctor had been implanting organisms in his patients that caused heightened sexual desire.  Unfortunately, the parasite has been turning its hosts into uncontrollably aggressive maniacs who spread their condition throughout the apartment building like a venereal disease.

This Invasion of the Body Snatchers-esque plot is an ingenious premise for a low-budget horror film.  The apartment building setting works as a convincing microcosm of society, even though the film was likely shot on fewer than ten sets.   The script’s structure, which charts the progress of the spreading disease as it works its way through the building (as opposed to following a conventional protagonist) helps cover up the weaknesses of the mostly amateur cast, none of whom have to do too much dramatic heavy lifting.  Cronenberg starts at a high level of tension with the struggle between the doctor and his patient and then just keeps raising the stakes from there, climaxing in a wonderfully insane scene in which an uninfected man is trapped in a pool surrounded by dozens of deranged hosts waiting to turn him into one of them.  The final shot, showing the apartment building’s psychotically smiling residents driving in succession out of the facility’s garage, successfully suggests the beginnings of a world invasion in the most economical way imaginable.  Shivers is a wonderful case study in how to get maximum impact out of a minimal budget, and it is one of the most clever horror films of its era.  Though it isn’t as politically bold as George Romero’s initial zombie films, as relentlessly scary as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), or as technically assured as Halloween (1978), Shivers is nonetheless a terrifically resourceful horror film, and a fine proper start to David Cronenberg’s feature film career.

Cronenberg followed up Shivers with another film about experimental surgery leading to the spread of a devastating disease.  But while Rabid (1977) is as logical a follow-up to Shivers as is imaginable, it somehow lacks the inspiration and conviction of its predecessor.  After a woman (Marilyn Chambers) is injured in a brutal motorcycle accident she is taken to a plastic surgery facility (the nearest proper emergency room is too far away) where doctors hope that an experimental skin grafting technique will allow her to survive.  While the transplants keep the woman alive, they also have the inexplicable side effect of creating a weird vaginal orifice under her armpit, from which a phallic stinger emerges, allowing her to feed off the blood of other people while turning them into rabid zombies.  The disease quickly spreads beyond the facility and into the nearest major city, causing mass panic as the military is called in to try to contain the outbreak.

Taking the disease out of the plastic surgery center distinguishes Rabid from Shivers, but Cronenberg didn’t have the budget and/or the technical skill at this point in his career to convincingly depict a city-wide crisis.  While some of the film’s flaws can be charitably blamed on lack of funds or experience, it frankly seems that the script was a bit underdeveloped as well.  The nature of the disease simply isn’t very well established before the action spills out into the city, with too much of the time in the plastic surgery facility devoted to a succession of similar kill scenes.  While Chambers’ condition is uniquely grotesque, her victims’ eventual zombie-like state is strictly generic.  There are hints of socio-political commentary in the military’s poor handling of the outbreak (recalling Romero’s 1973 film The Crazies), but these never amount to much.  The acting is also a serious problem in the film.  Chambers makes for a passable scream queen, but Frank Moore, as her character’s concerned boyfriend, is wooden even by the low standards of horror film protagonists.  Cronenberg gets some mileage out of simply going farther than other filmmakers would dare to go – a scene where a man goes home to find that his infected wife has slaughtered their baby is seriously hardcore – but his ideas aren’t particularly well thought-out or executed throughout most of Rabid.

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