The Fly | David Cronenberg, 1986
M. Butterfly | David Cronenberg, 1993
Crash | David Cronenberg, 1996
I've been watching David Cronenberg's filmography from (pretty much) start to finish over the past month or so as a post Halloween project of sorts. No real reason beyond curiosity, really, or more specifically an interest in seeing everything in the context of a progression of ideas. Cronenberg is a guy whose work has peppered my film education for years, from a secondhand VHS copy of The Fly that I bought for 50p at a boot fair in the mid-2000s at far too young of an age to really be watching something so traumatic, to laughing my way through A History of Violence in a GCSE Media Studies class with my friend Robin because we found the "my name's Tom" scene so patently absurd, to becoming obsessed with the frankly incredible French teaser trailer for Cosmopolis just before its Cannes premiere during my final year of university, and so on and so forth. I'd been wanting to revisit a lot of this stuff, and to finally catch up with the few that I'd somehow not gotten around to yet, for a long time, and I'd especially wanted to get a better idea of what Cronenberg is about. The chill of late autumn seems to fit his vibe pretty well, too.
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1. M. Butterfly (1993)
So much all at once, and, appropriately, so well disguised. The weaponisation of cultural stereotypes becomes weaponised love when the stereotype proves impenetrable, but, ultimately, the downfall of Jeremy Irons' French diplomat is not his blindness, but rather the misplaced confidence his blindness facilitates once everything seems to be going his way. An initially meek, easily intimidated man is lent an air of brash hubris by this blossoming romance, as if, for the first time in his life, he feels valued, valuable, a focal point for other people. He's more sociable, he drinks more, he makes rash decisions, he fucks around, he speaks louder and with more authority. His newly-inflated ego clouds his judgment in a way that he can't handle, ultimately destroying him far before the reality of his relationship with "my butterfly" finally and brutally dawns on him.
2. Crash (1996)
Total blankness. I've never read Ballard but I think he's someone whose mindset I can get on board with, and, based on this, Cronenberg is certainly on his wavelength. Sex and destruction, technology and flesh. A soundscape drawn from individual cars, totally at odds with the perceived increase in vehicles on the roads, and whispered, breathy voices, barely audible at all and separate, isolated, alone. A coldness created by metal and glass. Scars and limps point to a violent history, and the intersecting infrastructure of city roads suggests a preparation for an inevitable future. Dense, painful, bleak. The end of the world.
3. The Fly (1986)
The ultimate romantic tragedy, and an idea that Cronenberg would refine further in M. Butterfly. Again, a quiet, meek man is transformed by love, only here it's his lack of rationality that catalyses it when his new girlfriend leaves in the middle of the night to confront an ex-boyfriend who is harassing her. Brundle, believing her to be sleeping with him and fuelled by this imaginary challenge to his masculinity, makes a choice that ultimately destroys him. A surprisingly long-winded set-up introduces Brundle's nervous, charming, neglected personality, making the initially acute post-teleportation changes in his behaviour more pronounced, and making it clear that something is wrong far before this transformation is literalised as something physical.
4. The Dead Zone (1983)
A man awakens from a five-year coma with an unexplained ability to see into people's pasts and futures by touching them, and begrudgingly becomes first a detective, then a political assassin. A fascinating film about power, and one reminiscent of De Palma's Blow Out, in that both are about people who know something that they don't want to know and are forced to act on it out of necessity. Christopher Walken's ex-schoolteacher has to act as he knows that his inaction will have profound consequences: stopping an ice hockey game so the ice doesn't break, catching a mass-murderer to save lives, assassinating a politician to avert a nuclear war, all because he has seen the danger, even if his behaviour makes no sense to anyone else. As well as these averted disasters, Cronenberg shows some of Walken's predictions coming true, too, making it clear that his prophetic visions are indeed prophetic rather than simple hallucinations, removing all doubt and lending his later dilemmas a more troubling sense of moral cost. "If you could go back in time to Nazi Germany, before Hitler came to power, knowing what you know now, would you kill him?"
5. Cosmopolis (2012)
"Look how good they feel". As dense and surreal as Naked Lunch but, I think, significantly more palatable, perhaps simply because DeLillo's control is, to me at least, far more interesting than Burroughs's lack of it. The wilful self-destruction of an immensely powerful man blind to the ramifications such a collapse will create, locked away in a soundproofed car in the middle of gridlocked traffic, talking about buying the Rothko Chapel to put in his apartment and watching increasingly violent protests on the streets of Manhattan from behind tinted glass. Information wielded as a weapon, as a form of control, a form of security, and having it all stripped away in the blink of an eye to leave nothing but chaos and vulnerability — which is precisely what he wants.
6. Dead Ringers (1989)
"You haven't had any experience unless I've had it too." Inseparable twin brothers who live together and work together, both drawn to a patient with a trifurcated cervix and dragged apart by her presence in their lives: Beverly, the meeker of the two, falls in love with her, and Elliot, the extrovert, doesn't want the dynamic to change. But it's so much more than that, of course. Such a complex film, and so well crafted. "We are perceived as one person," but Jeremy Irons imbues them both with so much individual depth, not just in affection or character but in their respective collapses. These are two totally separate, totally different minds. Glass and metal. "Are you afraid that when it came down to it I wouldn't be able to tell the difference?"
7. eXistenZ (1999)
The mind creates the universe and its rules, and conflicting layers of reality and virtual reality blur together in a game world. Gaming is mass-entertainment. Game designers are superstars. "Game Pods" are made from frog organs, free-will is occasionally removed to further the narrative, dream logic and nightmare imagery. Significantly more interesting to me than Videodrome, which is, I think, the closest point of comparison, but perhaps only because we're currently in the process of seeing its prescience come to fruition — or maybe because its mind-altering qualities are both a natural extension of its existence and drawn from the mind of the player rather than an external source. "I actually think there's an element of psychosis involved here." "That's a great sign."
8. A Dangerous Method (2011)
"Never repress anything" seems to be key here, as repression is exactly what poisons Freud and Jung's relationship. The initial frankness and enthusiasm of their discussions paves the way to fierce debate and, ultimately, an intellectual impasse. Neither man wants to cede ground to the other, so they lie, they hold things back, they resist each other's ideas, until they've driven themselves so far from each other that there's no reason to keep speaking at all. Cronenberg has the time of his life illustrating these shifting power dynamics through high and low angles, minute behavioural details, little glances, vocal inflections and, in particular, the oft-noted split-diopter shots, suggesting a constant analysis in progress by a dominant force on the periphery. He's never been one to hold back.
9. Shivers (1975)
The death of civilisation. A Ballardian, self-sustaining apartment block on an island in the shadow of a city, with a supermarket and a doctor's surgery on-site and a bridge serving as the only link to the mainland, falls into chaos when people come out of their homes seeking contact with one another. A warning of the dangers of an isolated high-rise lifestyle, all concrete and fake wood, sold as a commodity on the verge becoming the norm. "I'm hungry for love" as the cry of a monster. Blood trails on blank white walls.
10. Videodrome (1983)
A chance encounter with a hyper-violent TV transmission sets in motion a hallucinatory misadventure for a TV executive. He needs to find transgressive new shows for his network in order to remain in business. "I'm looking for something that will break through." A signal with the potential to change reality, and a conspiracy to open it up to the masses. A chaotic, maddening, visceral film about our obsession with images on screens and their power to manipulate and control individual thought, and one that I could happily never see again. "The monologue is his preferred form of discourse."
11. Scanners (1981)
"You murdered the future." A medication prescribed to pregnant women gives their unborn children psychic powers, and the children are later rounded up to be used as weapons. A short cut to human evolution. Unethical science and corporate espionage conducted in blank-walled, sterile office buildings and remote factories. Mental abilities have physical ramifications: sparks fly as a computer is hacked through a phone line, a man's head explodes; a war is fought and lost and, finally, something entirely new is born from the ashes.
12. Maps To The Stars (2014)
As cold and sterile as Crash, but more openly critical (funny, too) — a mode of Cronenberg that I don't really know what to do with. Contrasting downfalls: a washed up and washed out actress and a bankable child star of a highly successful franchise, linked by the presence of a mysterious woman with burn scars and both haunted by ghosts. Hierarchies of indirect conversation, verdant gardens viewed through glass, a fridge stacked with energy drinks, weird robotic ringtones, mirrors showing reflections that nobody can bear to look at, sterile modern architecture, natural light and decorative dead trees. An obsession with the physical at the expense of the psychological. "Secrets kill." Who'd have thought Hollywood was such a poisonous place?
13. Eastern Promises (2007)
"I need to know who you are." What a strange film. The machinations of a Russian mafia family in London and a midwife's quest to expose the truth about the death of a pregnant young girl. A translated diary reveals buried monstrosities. Rumours of homosexuality as a motive for murder. People play both sides to stay alive. Tattoos as maps of a history and, more importantly, proof of authenticity. There's no reason not to trust these images. An outwardly unusual project for Cronenberg, but one that fits into his interest in identity that echoed throughout all three films he made in the 2000s, and one that works as a reversal of sorts of A History of Violence — how deep can you go before it's too far to escape?
14. A History of Violence (2005)
After interrupting an armed robbery and brutally killing the two perpetrators, a family man and pillar of his community is forced to confront his violent past against his will. An extension and expansion of the themes of Spider, in that the buried past is here forcibly shared by two families (the one he has created and the one he has escaped) rather than experienced solely by one man — and so the collapse of the charade is shared too. How do you protect the unit when you're the reason it's under threat? How do you escape it?
15. Spider (2002)
An objective film about subjectivity. A man is transferred from a prison hospital to a halfway house as a means to escalate his recovery and, once there, he replays events from his childhood that led him to this place. Cronenberg provides no history up front, only a succession of memories as they're lived and re-played by Spider as a way for him to confirm them as a truth, his truth, only for cracks to appear and for the whole thing to collapse under the weight of its artifice. A fascinating, if totally self-contained, film about breaking to rebuild, about healing, about the fragility of the human mind, and one that could only become richer with repeat viewings.
16. Rabid (1977)
A disease comes full circle. A revolutionary surgery leaves the victim of a motorcycle crash with a parasitic new organ and an insatiable bloodlust. A new nature, new instincts, new cravings. She does what her body tells her to and inadvertently unleashes a vampiric plague on society. The most impressive thing here is how quickly the disease spreads without her, from a secluded medical retreat in the mountains to the metropolis of Montreal. Sitting in a shopping mall, she sees a disease-stricken man she's never met violently attack another man, causing chaos, and she never for a second thinks that she's responsible for any of this. Why would she? And so this modern day Typhoid Mary, the only chance at a cure, escapes with the crowd. A city burns to the ground.
17. The Brood (1979)
Maybe the most frightening film Cronenberg has made, and a genuinely traumatic one, too. The collateral damage of a ruined family that unexplainably gets worse and worse. Also, I think, the Cronenberg film with the most single-scene set pieces, singular moments that illustrate precisely what is going on and give the whole thing a chopped-up, almost apocalyptic momentum, careening inevitably towards a conclusion that finally offers some kind of future for this family — but only by severing its past.
18. Naked Lunch (1991)
A real curio, one that I've seen twice now and I can't get my head around any of it. The dreamlike qualities of Burroughs's novel are all present, and it's hard to fault this as an adaptation of such a dense work, but beyond following Cronenberg down an increasingly (and impressively) bizarre rabbit hole, there doesn't seem to be all that much to think about — or maybe I'm thinking too much.
19. Fast Company (1979)
On some level, Fast Company is a loose exploration of the physical dangers that emerge within a battle of egos, but Cronenberg spends far more time on the day-to-day logistics and shady corporate interests that make a race-day happen, rather than how they facilitate this increasingly dangerous rivalry. As such, nothing is ever really explored much beyond the surface, and this fertile idea ends up closer to a goofy b-side to Bronco Billy than to anything else Cronenberg would go on to make.