From Within: The Films of David Cronenberg
By Noah Cowan and Piers Handling
TIFF Cinematheque/TIFF Bell Lightbox 180 magazine
September 2013
Though David Cronenberg has always preferred the original title for his first professional feature (Shivers) to the title applied to the film for its US release version—They Came from Within—the latter is nevertheless an uncannily apt descriptor of the themes that Cronenberg would continue to explore throughout his works. Where many artists of Cronenberg’s generation who were drawn to science fiction sought to explore the mysteries of time and space, Cronenberg has continually been drawn to those of body and mind—to the uncharted territories within the human—psychological, biological and sexual. Whether working within the more explicitly genre-based framework of his earlier period or merging his distinctive vision with those of other ambitious and acclaimed artists (Burroughs, Ballard, Delillo), Cronenberg has remained both remarkably consistent and remarkably fluid in his thematic concerns. Beginning “from within,” his œuvre traces a journey that moves steadily without, to the social and political world in which those inner drives manifest themselves in ever more complex and interconnected ways.
—Piers Handling & Noah Cowan
Stereo
dir. David Cronenberg Canada 1969 65 min.
Cronenberg’s first short feature—filmed on the Scarborough campus of the University of Toronto, in black and white 35mm with no sync sound—is about seven young adults who volunteer for an experiment conducted by parapsychologist Luther Stringfellow (Ronald Mlodzok) at the fictional Canadian Academy of Erotic Inquiry. After having their telepathic potential augmented through brain surgery, the subjects are isolated in a stark, modernist building, where researchers encourage them to enhance their abilities through polyamorous sexual exploration. But as the volunteers abilities develop, their overseers find the experiment slipping ever further out of their control…Making clever use of the university’s brutalist architecture, Stereo features numerous motifs that would reappear in Cronenberg’s later work—sex and sexuality arrogantly overreaching scientists, and speculative visitors of a potential posthumanist future—and announced the arrival of powerful new cinematic imagination.
Transfer
dir. David Cronenberg Canada 1966 7 min.
Made while Cronenberg was earning his BA in English Language and Literature at the University of Toronto, Transfer is a surreal sketch about a psychiatrist and his obsessive patient who have an uncomfortable conversation at the dinner table in the middle of a snow-covered field.
From the Drain
dir. David Cronenberg Canada 1967 13 min.
Two men—purportedly a secret agent and a chemical warfare expert—meet in a bathtub, where they discuss the strange mutations caused by a recent war and have a bizarre vegetative encounter.
Camera
dir. David Cronenberg Canada 2000 6 min.
Commissioned by TIFF to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Festival in 2000, Camera features frequent Cronenberg collaborator Leslie Carlson as an actor who delivers a diatribe against the malicious power of the movie camera while a group of young children film him.
At the Suicide of the Last Jew in the World at the Last Cinema in the World
dir. David Cronenberg France 2007 4 min.
Commissioned for the sixtieth anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival as part of the anthology film Chacun son cinema, the sardonic yet disturbing At the Suicide… stars Cronenberg himself in the title role, holding a gun to his head and preparing to kill himself on live TV, while unseen commentators dispassionately discuss the role of Jews in cinema.
Crimes of the Future
dir. David Cronenberg Canada 1970 70 min.
Close in theme and tone to Stereo—and, like its predecessor, shot on an infinitesimally low budget without sync sound (but in 35mm!)—Crimes of the Future once again stars Ronald Mlodzik as a scientist, here one Adrian Tripod, director of a dermatology clinic called the House of Skin. Tripod is in search of his mentor Antoine Rouge. who has disappeared after a plague triggered by cosmetics has killed all sexually mature women and caused the surviving men to manifest strange growths on their bodies. Once again making clever use of the University of Toronto’s proto-dystopian architecture (here Massey College at the downtown campus), Crimes establishes the figure of the charismatic scientist anti-hero that would become a central motif of Cronenberg’s work throughout the next two decades.
Shivers
dir. David Cronenberg Canada 1975 87 min.
Set in an oppressively modernist Montreal apartment block, Cronenberg’s first professional feature (also released as The Parasite Murders and They Came from Within) chronicles the gruesome consequences that result when a renegade scientist unleashes an aphrodisiacal parasite. As the slug-like organism makes its way through the building, transforming the swinging condo residents into a legion of sex-crazed homicidal maniacs, a doctor and nurse race to try and stop the parasite before it infects the entire city. A provocatively and troublingly ambivalent comment on the sexual revolution, Shivers caused a national scandal upon its release: journalist Robert Fulford attacked the film in Saturday Night magazine, decrying the taxpayer dollars expended upon it; the debate eventually reached the House of Commons, and Cronenberg even claims that it resulted in him being evicted from his apartment by his landlord. Nevertheless, Shivers outlived its controversial debut to be acclaimed as a modern horror classic—not to mention the most commercially successful film ever funded by the CFDC.
Rabid
dir. David Cronenberg Canada 1977 91 min.
Building on the succès de scandale of Shivers, Cronenberg controversially cast porn star Marilyn Chambers (Behind the Green Door) as the star of his sophomore feature, as a beautiful young Quebec woman named Rose who is critically injured in a motorcycle accident. Following an experimental skin-grafting procedure at the Keloid Clinic of Cosmetic Surgery. Rose emerges miraculously restored to her former beauty—with the unfortunate side effects of a phallic stinger that has emerged from an orifice in her armpit, and an insatiable blood lust which turns her victims into rabid, homicidal disease-spreaders. Containing some of Cronenberg’s rawest and most disturbing imagery—as well as an apocalyptic echo of Pierre Trudeau’s 1970 invocation of martial law during the FLQ crisis—Rabid disturbingly develops the filmmaker’s taboo-busting linking of sexuality and contagion, taking the body from object of desire to site of disease to (in the powerful final shot) detritus to be disposed of.
Fast Company
dir. David Cronenberg Canada 1979 91 min.
While certainly the most uncharacteristic title in Cronenberg’s filmography, this no-frills, action-packed drag-racing drama- starring William Smith (later Arnold Schwarzenegger's father in Conan the Barbarian), B-movie exploitation queen Claudia Jennings (her last film before her tragically early death) and Enter the Dragon’s John Saxon—nevertheless brought together a remarkable number of key elements in Cronenberg’s professional and artistic universe. On the first count, Fast Company marked the director’s first time working with many of the people who would become some of his most important collaborators: production designer Carol Spier, cinematographer Mark Irwin, sound recordist Bryan Day, and editor Ron Sanders. Furthermore, the film also attests to Cronenberg’s gearhead enthusiasms, his love of cars and machinery that provides a fascinating complement to his fascination with biological change and sexual transgression. (These strains would later come together, of course, with Crash.)
The Brood
dir. David Cronenberg Canada 1979 92 min.
Nola Carveth (Samantha Eggar) is an emotionally disturbed woman whose repressed history of childhood abuse manifested itself as violence against her own daughter Candy (Cindy Hinds), leading her husband Frank (Art Hindle) to divorce her and take sole custody of the child. Now housed in the Soma Free Institute under the cultish psychiatric care of Dr. Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed), Nola employs Raglan’s “psychoplasmics” technique to externalize her suppressed rage in a hideous form: a swarm of sexless. murderous children that Nola sends after those she feels have wronged her. Shot in Toronto and Mississauga on a budget of $1.5 million, The Brood was Cronenberg’s most sophisticated and expensive film to date, and also one of his most personal: Cronenberg wrote the screenplay following his divorce from his first wife, who had joined a cult and was battling with him for custody of their daughter. Finally garnering Cronenberg a hint of mainstream acceptance, The Brood also marked the director’s first collaboration with composer Howard Shore, with whom he would go on to establish a longtime working relationship.
Scanners
dir. David Cronenberg Canada 1981 103 min.
Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack) is one of the 237 "scanners" in the world: people born with powerful telepathic and telekinetic abilities, who are able to hear thoughts, move objects, and even kill with their minds. Living as a derelict in order to hide his gift, Vale is discovered and abducted by the security firm ConSec, which wants to turn the scanners into human weapons. When renegade scanner Daryl Revak (Michael Ironside) declares war on the firm—announcing himself to the world by making the head of the chief ConSec scanner explode on live television—and recruits his own underground scanner army, Vale finds himself caught between two equally nefarious forces. Cronenberg’s most commercially successful film up to that time, Scanners also saw the emergence of a more politicized element in his work. While the psychobiological horrors in his previous films had been unleashed by isolated, self-conscious elites, in Scanners big business and the military-industrial establishment exploit those whose special gifts have marginalized them: Cronenberg would return to this culture-war theme in such films as Videodrome, The Dead Zone and eXistenZ.
Videodrome
dir. David Cronenberg Canada 1983 87 min.
Anointed by none other than Andy Warhol as “A Clockwork Orange for the eighties,” Cronenberg’s prescient vision of a media age run amok is his most intellectually daring and conceptually rich film, and certainly his most influential. Cocky Toronto cable TV entrepreneur Max Renn (James Woods) has made a name for himself with his sleazy and sensationalistic programming. Searching for new content. Renn discovers a pirate station called Videodrome, which broadcasts sadomasochistic porn and what appears to be real, on-camera torture and murder. Sickened yet fascinated, Renn sets out to find the source of the mysterious channel, which soon plunges him into a clandestine battle pitting shadowy governmental-corporate interests against renegade media warriors in a battle for the public’s minds. Both intellectually far-reaching—Cronenberg evokes the persona and philosophy of Marshall McLuhan in the character of self-styled media prophet Prof. Brian O'Blivion—and funkily local in its affectionately caustic portrait of mid-eighties Toronto media culture (Woods’s relentlessly self-promoting Renn was based on City TV mini-mogul Moses Znaimer), Videodrome also saw the realization of one of Cronenberg’s key concepts-the visionary/nightmarish evolutionary fusion of organic and inorganic, man and machine-in its infamous. endlessly quotable tagline: “Long live the new flesh!”
The Dead Zone
dir. David Cronenberg USA 1981 103 min.
Marking two important milestones in Cronenberg's career—his first film for a Hollywood studio and, apart from the anomalous Fast Company, the first film whose story and screenplay he did not originate himself—this critically and commercially successful adaptation of the bestselling Stephen King novel remarkably saw Cronenberg retaining, and even further elaborating, his unique vision. Christopher Walken gives an excellent, brooding performance as Johnny Smith, a schoolteacher who emerges from a five-year coma to discover that he has clairvoyant powers: he can see the future of anyone he makes physical contact with. Feeling socially and emotionally alienated by his “gift,” Johnny becomes an introverted recluse—but when an encounter with a bellicose, right-wing US senator (Martin Sheen) gives him a vision of an apocalyptic future, Johnny realizes that he may be the one man in the world who can prevent Armageddon. Holding back on the visceral imagery of his preceding films in order to focus on Johnny's mental anguish over his unwanted powers, The Dead Zone sees Cronenberg balancing his cerebral/conceptual approach with a deeper and more empathetic interest in his characters, which would remain very much in evidence in The Fly and Dead Ringers.
The Fly
dir. David Cronenberg USA 1986 96 min.
Cronenberg’s remake of the fondly remembered 1958 creature feature (his second Hollywood film and second adaptation) was his biggest critical and box-office success to date, and remains a signature film in his œuvre. Brilliant, eccentric scientist Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) meets journalist Veronica Quaife (Geena Davis) at a press conference, and soon reveals to her his top-secret project: a teleportation device that can instantaneously transport matter from one location to another. Shortly after he and Veronica become romantically involved, Brundle impulsively decides to use himself as the first human test subject for the “telepod.” The trial is a success—until Brundle begins to realize that a housefly went through the teleportation with him and fused with his cells, which is slowly, gruesomely transforming him into a new kind of organism (“Brundlefly”). A powerful allegory for the physical ravages of disease, The Fly also sees the culmination of Cronenberg’s visionary-scientist archetype in Brundle, with the crucial difference that the site of experimentation is now his own body: scientist and subject have fused into one, and Brundle’s simultaneous terror of and fascination with his physical mutation (and the frightening psychological changes that accompany it) is perhaps Cronenberg’s most moving depiction of the human cost of “progress.”
Dead Ringers
dir. David Cronenberg Canada/USA 1988 ll6 min.
Following his two-film Hollywood sojourn, Cronenberg returned to more idiosyncratic material with this adaptation of Bari Wood’s novel Twins, which was loosely based on the real-life story of twin doctors Stewart and Cyril Marcus, who were found dead in their Manhattan apartment from a barbiturate overdose. Jeremy Irons gives an indelible, critically lauded performance as identical-twin gynecologists Elliot and Beverly Mantle, who share more than just genes: the assertive, confident Elliot regularly seduces his female patients, and when he tires of them passes them on (without informing them of the switch) to the shy and introverted Beverly. When the brothers become involved with troubled actress Claire Niveau (Genevieve Bujold), their symbiotic relationship begins to unravel, with bizarre and eventually fatal results. One of Cronenberg’s most subtle and sophisticated fusions of the cerebral and the physical—the brothers’ complex psychological bond is intimately bound up with their clinical, increasingly disturbing fascination with the female reproductive system—Dead Ringers is also one of his most tragic and emotional works, thanks greatly to Irons’s remarkable double performance.
Naked Lunch
dir. David Cronenberg Canada/UK/Japan 1991 115 min.
Tackling the unenviable challenge of filming cult writer William S. Burroughs’s notorious (and notoriously unfilmable) 1959 novel, Cronenberg combined elements from the book with fragments of other autobiographical Burroughs writings, certain details of Burroughs’s biography, and his own unique imaginings to create this surreal, shocking, hilarious, poetic, conceptually and visually striking masterpiece. Peter Weller gives a deadpan perfect turn as Burroughs alter ego William Lee, a drug-addled insect exterminator in 1953 New York who routinely mainlines his own bug powder with his junkie wife Joan (Judy Davis). After Lee accidentally kills Joan while showing off their “William Tell routine” to friends, he flees to the hallucinatory Interzone, where he encounters giant Mugwumps, insectoid talking typewriters, a doppelgänger of his wife and other assorted oddities, while typing out “reports” that will later constitute a book called Naked Lunch. Paying homage to one of his most profound literary and artistic influences. Cronenberg in Naked Lunch does not adapt Burroughs but rather, as Jonathan Rosenbaum notes, “[absorbs] certain principles and texts from Burroughs into [his own] particular cosmology and style”: the result is simultaneously a brilliant tribute to a great American artist, a complex and disturbing meditation on the process of artistic creation and the sources of creativity, and a stunningly original cinematic tour de force.
M. Butterfly
dir. David Cronenberg USA 1993 101 min.
Adapted from the successful stage play by David Henry Hwang—which was loosely based on the incredible-but-true story of former French diplomat Bernard Boursicot—M. Butterfly stars Jeremy Irons as Rene Gallimard, a French embassy civil servant in Mao’s China in the 1960s. He becomes infatuated with opera diva Song Liling (John Lone), who, unbeknownst to him, is a man masquerading as a woman, both on-and offstage. The two begin an affair that lasts for twenty years, during which Gallimard remains unaware of his lover’s true identity—and of the fact that he/she is acting as a spy for the Chinese government, feeding information provided by Gallimard on American troop movements in Vietnam to his/her spymaster superiors. Though seemingly of a piece with Fast Company as one of Cronenberg’s most uncharacteristic films, this opulent yet intimate period drama in fact speaks to some of the filmmaker’s key themes: transgressive sexuality, the divided self, and, in Gallimard’s seemingly unbelievable inability to recognize the truth about his “perfect woman,” the ability of the mind to transcend (or transform) biological reality.
Crash
dir. David Cronenberg Canada/UK 1996 100 min.
Cronenberg’s masterful, icily fascinating adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s novel was one of the most lauded and controversial films of his career: awarded a Special Jury Prize for “audacity” at the Cannes Film Festival, it was both celebrated and strongly attacked in the press, and ran into trouble with ratings boards in the United States, the UK, and Australia. Toronto film producer James Ballard (James Spader) is injured in a car crash that kills the driver of the other car, but leaves the driver’s wife Helen (Holly Hunter) hurt but alive. Both traumatized yet strangely aroused by the experience of the crash, Ballard and Helen begin a kinky, vehicular-focused affair, which eventually leads them to a strange cult headed by Vaughn (Elias Koteas), who recreates the traffic-accident deaths of celebrities and celebrates the car crash as a “fertilizing rather than a destructive event.” Ranking with Videodrome as Cronenberg’s most radical meditation on the interconnections of body, mind, machine and desire, Crash is also the culmination of that important shift in emphasis the director began with The Fly, absent the villainy of evil scientists, sinister corporations or shadowy government conspiracies. Here, Cronenberg’s protagonists undertake their evolutionary experiments of their own free will, using their own bodies as test subjects.
eXistenZ
dir. David Cronenberg Canada/UK/France 1999 97 min.
In a secluded rural location, journalists and eager gaming fanatics have gathered to witness the unveiling of the new project by superstar game designer Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh): eXistenZ, a virtual-reality experience that requires the user to plug a semi-organic gaming pod into “bio-ports” that have been surgically inserted at the base of their spines. During the demonstration, Geller is attacked (and her master pod damaged) by a would-be assassin working for a shadowy group of “realists” who are out to destroy the gaming industry for its “deforming of reality.” Rescued by security guard Ted Pikul (Jude Law), Geller insists that the two of them play eXistenZ in order to determine if the game has been irreparably damaged. Entering into the game world, the duo soon find that the line between reality and illusion is becoming dangerously blurred. Something of a return to the director’s 1980s work in its reality-warping narrative, ingeniously icky biotechnological conceits and battle between corporate power and an underground army of culture-jammers, Cronenberg’s first original screenplay since Videodrome brilliantly projects that earlier film’s speculations on the relations between body, mind and media into the virtual age.
Spider
dir. David Cronenberg Canada/UK 2002 98 min.
Adapted by Patrick McGrath from his novel of the same name, Spider is told from the skewed perspective of Dennis “Spider” Cleg (Ralph Fiennes), a mentally disturbed outpatient now inhabiting a London halfway house. Aimlessly roaming the desolate streets, Spider finds himself assailed by memories of his traumatic 1950s childhood, including the ostensible murder of his mother (Miranda Richardson) by his father (Gabriel Byrne), and her replacement by his father’s mistress (also played by Richardson). Though presenting yet another of the director’s isolated. alienated protagonists in Spider (wonderfully played by Fiennes) and continuing his fascination with doubling, twisted sexuality and the fine line between reality and illusion, Spider represents another important transitional point in Cronenberg’s œuvre. Though never entirely absent from his previous films (just think of The Brood), Spider’s prominent thematic focus on the family lays important groundwork for A History of Violence. Furthermore, while Byrne’s vicious patriarch fits the mold of Cronenberg’s previous demonic fathers, the greater role accorded Richardson’s victimized wife indicates a new engagement with the feminine that, aside from certain particularly strong female characters (Geena Davis in The Fly, Genevieve Bujold in Dead Ringers, Jennifer Jason Leigh in eXistenZ), had been largely absent from Cronenberg’s work to that time.
A History of Violence
dir. David Cronenberg USA/Canada/Germany 2006 96 min.
Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) is the very epitome of the small-town Everyman: upstanding, friendly, with a beautiful wife (Maria Bello) and two kids. But after he brutally and efficiently kills two stick-up men who attempt to rob his diner, dark secrets from his past begin to come to light—particularly when a hideously scarred gangster (Ed Harris) arrives in town, searching for the long-vanished mob hitman known as “Crazy Joey Cusack” who put his face through the wringer. Both searing psychological thriller and ingeniously subtle social allegory (many critics declared it to be a key cinematic text of the Bush II era), Cronenberg’s most universally acclaimed film is also unquestionably one of the director’s greatest and most complex works. Taking a premise familiar from the western—the former gunslinger trying to live down his violent past—History not only continues the vintage Cronenbergian theme of the divided self, but also vividly depicts how that private split ripples out into the public realm—most notably in the profound upsetting of the Stall family dynamics, as Tom’s wife and children try to come to grips with a husband and father who is a very different person from the one they have always known.
Eastern Promises
dir. David Cronenberg UK 2007 100 min.
Finding a Russian-language diary among the belongings of a young teenage girl who died in childbirth, London nurse Anna (Naomi Watts) learns that the girl had been part of a human trafficking and prostitution ring run by the Russian Mafia. Seeking to locate the girl’s family, Anna descends into the London underworld, where she finds an unlikely guide in Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen), a mob chauffeur who also functions as a part-time hitman and full-time guardian for the wastrel son (Vincent Cassel) of godfather Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl). As Anna’s search becomes intertwined with a brewing internecine mob war, her life becomes ever more dependent on the granitic Nikolai, whose motives and loyalties remain far from clear. Cronenberg’s second collaboration with Viggo Mortensen (who received a Best Actor Academy Award nomination for his performance), this pungently seamy underworld drama continues the intriguing development of the divided-self motif that the two had begun in A History of Violence. Whereas so many previous Cronenberg protagonists had found themselves helpless (even though complicit) in the face of their physical or psychological transformations, Mortensen’s Tom Stall and Nikolai are the deliberate, carefully constructed identities of a forceful and controlling will—but ones that leave the person who bears them equally unsure as to the nature of their “true” self.
A Dangerous Method
dir. David Cronenberg Canada/UK/Germany 2011 99 min.
On the eve of World War I, a beautiful, troubled young woman named Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) arrives at the Zurich clinic of Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) for treatment. As Jung probes Spielrein’s repressed sexual traumas and, despite his professional ethics (and marriage), begins an affair with her, he comes into conflict with his mentor Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen)—and personal and professional loyalties become even more complex once Spielrein transforms from psychiatric patient to practitioner in her own right. Adapted by Christopher Hampton from John Kerr’s book A Most Dangerous Method and his own play The Talking Cure, A Dangerous Method marks Cronenberg’s most explicit engagement with the psychological and psychoanalytical themes that underlie so much of his work. Typical of his later period, however, Cronenberg refuses to allow these concepts to exist in a vacuum: the evolution of Jung and Spielrein’s thinking is shown to be inextricably intertwined with the social relations—personal, professional, sexual, religious, class-based—that define the matrix of their existence.
Cosmopolis
dir. David Cronenberg Canada/France/Italy/Portugal 2012 109 min.
Determined to get a haircut, billionaire asset manager Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson) sets off across Manhattan in the custom-fitted limousine from which he runs most of his personal and professional life. Seemingly oblivious to the gridlock caused by a presidential visit, the massive street demonstrations by anti-capitalist protesters, and his own disastrously spiralling financial fortunes, Packer takes a number of meetings—scheduled and unscheduled; financial, philosophical, medical and sexual—in the back seat as the car crawls across town, towards both the much-desired trim and a fateful meeting with the mysterious figure who has threatened Packer’s life. Cronenberg’s adaptation of the Don Delillo novel is his most assertively conceptual since Videodrome, deliberately eschewing realism in both its constricted, consciously artificial setting and elaborately structured, frigidly declaimed dialogue. Beyond this, however, Cosmopolis may represent the acme of Cronenberg’s exploration of the dialectic between control and chaos: Pattinson's master of the universe, in (absurdly) complete command of every facet of his existence, ultimately uses that control to propel himself towards his own willed extinction.