Programme Notes: CineMasters: David Cronenberg

“No! I can take it!”  – Nicki (Debbie Harry), Videodrome

“Don’t you find it hard to take?” – Maury (Guy Pearce) The Shrouds

The work of David Cronenberg is most often discussed in terms of technology, bodies and the intersection between the two – a partnership that can be at once jarring, sensual and violent. In The Fly, the body is transformed irrevocably by technology; in eXistenZ, it imitates and controls the flesh; in Videodrome, bodies and technology are one and the same. But the cause of all this merging, clashing and transformation is a more unpredictable third element: human emotion. Cronenberg’s films are rightly seen as prescient for showing how technology has become increasingly entangled into our lives and selves, but they are also timeless for the way they show humanity as unpredictable, contradictory, extreme to its core.

In many of his films Cronenberg highlights the futile lengths that human beings go to in their attempts to control and sometimes annex their unruly feelings. Extreme emotions are expelled from the human body only to cause problems when they spill over elsewhere. In Videodrome, television is a physical place where Max (James Woods) and Nicki (Debbie Harry) can contain their drive for increasingly depraved experiences – until technology takes on not just the nature of the flesh, but the human craving for sex and violence, to tragic ends. In Dead Ringers, Jeremy Irons’ twin gynecologists Elliot and Beverly Mantle exists as one soul in two bodies, until their joint emotional equilibrium is disturbed by feelings for a third party. An attempt to separate and lead more conventional lives is, perhaps inevitably, fatal.

Cronenberg often explores humanity’s death drive through the depiction of extreme sexual experiences, from his very first film Stereo in 1969, through to The Fly in 1986, up to 2011’s A Dangerous Method. It is the central conceit of the still astonishing Crash. James (James Spader) nearly dies in a car accident, but finds an outlet for his very modern confusion of grief, ennui and sexual urgency by fetishising the very thing that almost killed him. After joining a cult-like group of car crash victims headed by Vaughan (Elias Koteas), James seeks out more and more extreme experiences of sex and motorised violence – but never finds release from his emotional prison. “Maybe the next time, darling,” he whispers to his wife in the wreckage of her car. James knows, and Cronenberg knows, that the only true escapism is death.

In Scanners, one of Cronenberg’s early, schlocky horror films along with Rabid, Shivers and The Brood, emotions are manipulated into a tool of exploitation. Cameron (Stephen Lack) struggles with the powers of telepathy and telekinesis that have rendered him a societal outcast, with nosebleeds and seizures as physical manifestations of his mental trauma. He finds out he is part of a community of super-human ‘scanners’, leading to his powers being manipulated to others’ ends, while he continues to suffer. Even in an admittedly trashy film, Cronenberg’s empathy and humanity are striking. Scanners is most famous for its scene of a head exploding, but as an articulation of the difficulty of communication between humans, it is strangely moving. The scene of Cameron strapped to a bed, in pain as he is forced to telepathically internalise the thoughts of dozens of other people, is particularly resonant in our age of rolling news and intersecting crises. 

In Cronenberg’s later films, the body horror is largely dialled down, but the emotional lives of his characters still wreck havoc on their surroundings and themselves. In Cosmopolis, Robert Pattinson’s billionaire ignites a personal catastrophe from inside his limo, driven by his own impulsivity. The hugely underrated Maps to the Stars is similarly apocalyptic, presenting the (self) destruction of Hollywood as an analogy of Western society. Although one of his most violent films, Eastern Promises concerns the unseen emotional hurricane of Viggo Mortenson’s Russian henchman Nikolai. As the film progresses, Mortenson and Cronenberg gradually reveal insights into his interior life, the reasons behind his stoic nature, and the rumblings of hurt caused by these internal battles. It’s perhaps telling that this relatively buttoned-up film is the result of Cronenberg working for hire on someone else’s story.

Cronenberg’s latest film The Shrouds is a typical emotional maelstrom which reaches towards a new kind of clarity. Vincent Cassel is the entrepreneur Karsh, whose GraveTech invention allows the bereaved to surveil the bodies of dead loved ones as they decay in their graves. The invention is a way for Karsh to connect with his recently deceased wife – a meta analogy for Cronenberg’s filmmaking in the wake of his own wife’s death. Karsh searches for his wife’s life force in scraps and strange documents: trying to find truth in her medical records, and sexual gratification in x-rays of her teeth. He misses the body that he used to “live in” and can no longer access outside his dreams – but pouring his grief into GraveTech, and staring at an image of a skeleton, can’t bring lasting satisfaction. 

Karsh eventually does find human connection, through both the flesh and the mind. In a Dead Ringers-esque twist, he hooks up with her twin sister Terry (Diane Kruger), in a sex scene that is both hot and deeply human; deviant and funny. He also enters a relationship with Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt), a blind woman for whom human touch is essential to intimacy. “May I touch your face? You know, haptic feedback” she asks him at an early meeting. Here, human touch is a palpable human need, cruelly taken away with illness and death, leaving emotions clogged in the body with nowhere to go. Touching, sex and intimacy – the raw elements of life – are blessed relief, a pathway.