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THE MAGUFFIN
The Obscene Oeuvre of David Cronenberg
Kathy Hofmeyr

David Cronenberg, “The King of Venereal Horror”, is a very, very sick puppy. He is also one of the premier auteur film directors of the past thirty years.

His films are weird and wonderful, his topics varied but always bizarre and revealing of the darker aspects of the human condition.

Although his career began in the mid-sixties, Cronenberg established himself as a director in the late seventies with two low-budget gore-fests, ‘Shivers’ and ‘Rabid’. Both films still enjoy cult status, the latter partly by virtue of its star, porn actress Marilyn Chambers. His next film, ‘The Brood’, exemplified the sub-genre of “gynaecological horror”, which features frequently in his work.

He gained a larger following with ‘Scanners’ in 1981 and subsequently went from strength to strength with such cult classics as ‘Videodrome’ (1983), ‘The Fly’ (1986) (where the line “Be afraid. Be very afraid” originated) and ‘Dead Ringers’ (1988), working with performers like Jeremy Irons, James Woods, Christopher Walken, Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis.

In the 1990s he worked again with Irons on ‘M Butterfly’, a heartbreaking and passionate film about a man who unwittingly falls in love with a trans-gender opera singer. He also directed Peter Weller, Ian Holm and the incomparable Judy Davis in ‘Naked Lunch’; Jude Law and Jennifer Jason-Leigh in the massively underrated ‘eXistenZ’; and Holly Hunter and James Spader in ‘Crash’, one of his most significant commercial, if not artistic, achievements.

David Cronenberg certainly comes across as a pretty twisted man. Although the subject matter of his films varies widely and his source material ranges from true stories to plays to novels and short stories to his own warped imagination, there are several elements which can be traced through virtually (if not literally) every single one of his films.

“My movies are body conscious,” he says. “The first fact of human existence is the human body. If you get away from physical reality, you're fudging, in fantasy-land –not coming to grips with what violence does.” His critics would see this as a gargantuan understatement. Cronenberg’s films are frequently, even excessively, graphic in their depiction of the human body, often in the context of (frequently sexualised) violence.

Cronenberg describes humanity as a race of mad scientists, with life as their laboratory and experimentation their fieldwork. The description certainly applies to the director himself. His films have the appearance of scientific experiments or documents. “Since I see technology as being an extension of the human body, it's inevitable that it should come home to roost.”

Technology is absolutely central to Cronenberg’s films, particularly the notion of technology as an “extension” of the body. One can trace the theme of human endeavour to improve quality of life through science (technological or medical) throughout his body of work. The changes the bodies in his films undergo range from hi-tech to extremely primitive, but the idea is frequently the same – whether expressed through diseases, biological engineering, surgery, virtual reality (by means of a distinctly organic-looking device which plugs into the user’s central nervous system via a “bio-port” in the spine), cross-dressing, even deliberately-staged motor accidents. In the age of AIDS and bio-terrorism, Cronenberg has his finger on the pulse of society’s paranoia.

That these attempts to change one’s lot almost inevitably end in disaster could cast Cronenberg in the role of cautionary tale-teller – a strange role for a mad scientist, indeed. However, the scientific cautionary tale (‘Frankenstein’ being the classic example) usually involves the downfall of a scientist who challenges the natural order as represented by God – a motive about as far removed from Cronenberg’s questing nature as anything could be. “You have to believe in God before you can say there are things that man was not meant to know. I don't think there's anything man wasn't meant to know. There are just some stupid things that people shouldn't do.”

Interestingly, Martin Scorsese once remarked that Cronenberg resembled a Hollywood plastic surgeon. Cronenberg consequently cast himself in a cameo as Geena Davis’s OBGYN in ‘The Fly’ and has played a doctor six times since (including a delightful cameo in the popular TV series ‘Alias’).

A writer since his childhood, Cronenberg studied literature at the University of Toronto and in later years adapted several popular novels for the screen: JG Ballard’s ‘Crash’ (1996), Stephen King’s ‘The Dead Zone’ (1983) and William S Burroughs’s ‘Naked Lunch’ (1991). While the filming of novels tends to be a controversial enterprise (you can’t please all the readers all of the time), fans of these books seldom find fault with Cronenberg’s approach. In 2005 he filmed John Wagner and Vince Locke’s graphic novel ‘A History of Violence’ to great acclaim.

Perhaps readers appreciate Cronenberg’s approach to literature for its lack of literalness. With his visceral and visual preoccupations, he has the ability to make visible the texture of a narrative, rather than simply film the plot as written. He doesn’t tamper with those elements readers appreciate most, but lays bare the feel of the novel, almost incarnating those thoughts and emotions the reader experiences while reading the story. While actors may not resemble characters as seen in the reader’s mind, the representations of these thoughts and feelings are clearly – if unconsciously – recognisable.

Cronenberg is quite justifiably accused of explicit depiction of violence. The director, however, sees no problem with this. Virulently anti-censorship, he believes that the responsibility of the artist is to be socially irresponsible. “As soon as you talk about social or political responsibility,” he explains, “you've amputated the best limbs you've got as an artist. You are plugging into a very restrictive system that is going to push and mould you, and is going to make your art totally useless and ineffective.” Cronenberg compares censors to psychopaths, citing them as the two classes of human beings capable of confusing illusion with reality.

Nonetheless, it would be hard to argue that Cronenberg’s violence is gratuitous. However visible it may be, the violence is always motivated – and in his more sophisticated films, he manages to make the audience unnervingly complicit in, even desirous of, its execution. It would be hard to confuse the violence depicted in Cronenberg’s films with reality. This is not the glamorised, slo-mo, beautiful and rich bloodiness of a John Woo film. This violence is gritty, real-time and harsh – designed, perhaps, to come “to grips with what violence does.” Even in the era of CGI, Cronenberg seems to stick mostly to the old-fashioned mechanisms of special effects, editing, makeup, sunken sets, dyes and fake blood, props, wires, prosthetics and stunt players for these representations. The resulting effect is somewhat overblown and cartoonish, but nonetheless effective.

A perfect example is a deleted scene from his most recent release, ‘A History of Violence’ – a dream sequence, which Cronenberg jokes that he uncharacteristically cut (many of his films contain segues between reality and drug-fuelled fantasy or dream-states). In the sequence (without giving too much away), Tom (Viggo Mortensen) blows Fogarty (Ed Harris) across the room with a shotgun after the latter has threatened him and his family. A feature on the DVD shows the setting up and filming of this scene, complete with a trench cut out of the diner set’s floor, in which Harris lies so that a bloody, “shot-through” prosthetic torso can be laid on top of his. The result (apart from the gaping wound, protruding ribs and pools of blood, of course) is that Harris looks slightly shorter than usual, but this is easily remedied by using a high-angle shot that foreshortens the figure anyway. Call me old-fashioned, but give me stagecraft over computers any day.

‘A History of Violence’ is atypically mainstream for Cronenberg, with less gore than usual and a more run-of-the-mill plotline than, say, ‘Naked Lunch’. It is, however, a deeply tragic and affecting film; horrible and beautiful by turns and sometimes simultaneously. As always, the director gets the best from his cast. Even Mortensen, usually rather wooden, turns in a sterling performance to match that of his co-star, Maria Bello, an actress who consistently fails to disappoint.

The films of David Cronenberg are certainly not for everyone. Most of them can be classified as horror, although they are atypical of the genre for their depth, philosophical approach and exploration of human suffering. Some of them are extraordinary works of art, others miss the mark, but all are interesting and deliberately subversive.

“Civilization is repression. You don't get civilization without repression of the unconscious, of the id. And the basic appeal of art is to the unconscious. Therefore, art is somewhat subversive of civilization. And yet at the same time it seems necessary for civilization. You don't get civilization without art.”