This essay was originally written as a term paper for the class on Canadian Cinema given by Professor Douglas at Concordia University. Before publishing it, I had a long, hard think about intellectual property, and about my actual grip on the material that came from my brain, but which I mistakenly offered to academia at no cost at all. I finally decided that I had the final say since I came up with it, and amply cited my sources all the way through. So there. I hope that all idea stealers from all universities eat lead. That said, Mr. Douglas was a mighty fine man whom I never would accuse of any wrongdoing. After all, he is the man who made me aware of a little 1919 Canadian film called Back to God's Country, which featured the fully naked Nell Shipman (!!). Talk about a cool teacher!The Cronenbergian Maieutics
“Your skull is a cage and things are trapped in there that would be a lot better off being set free, so if you can explode that cage, you can also liberate yourself” (Simon: 53). Such a take on Scanners’ cervical explosion by its director somewhat implies a Socratic ideal, however radically it is updated. Freedom of the hidden corners of the mind is its aim and its symbol, the broken head. In fact, Scanners’ exploding head echoes the sculpture from the apartment of Rose’s final victim in Rabid, a modernist work depicting a human head split open. William Beard says that sculpture expresses the film’s view of man as a “schizoid creature whose spirit is at war against its body although they’re irrevocably tied together” (L’Esprit Viscéral : 89) and he goes on to link it to Ben Pierce’s “powerful sculptures” (also in Scanners)1. Departing a little from this lecture and keeping in touch with Cronenberg’s, I argue for a total victory of the body (i.e. bodily instincts and impulses) over the rational mind in his films, be it a liberation or a curse. The filmmaker’s capacity to provide such a victory, supported by an imagery of the broken head, is no less than a bloody version of Socrates’ maieutics. It is the Cronenbergian maieutics: the ability to extract, through the horror genre, the intrinsic and primordial concerns of the mind (mostly the masculine mind) from under the normative façade of our society.
Of course, the dualism between the calm façade and what lies beneath is closely linked to the clash between mind and body in Cronenberg’s work, this façade being no more than the rational self repressing the visceral self. Many critics have pointed to the Cronenbergian architecture as this façade, containing “ the repressed forces of sexuality, passion and desire waiting to be unleashed upon a credulous society” (Handling : 182). In this respect, the opening of Shivers and its praising of the concrete Starliners towers (situated on Nuns’ Island, no less) is brilliantly thought of as a commercial, a way of presenting a sterile and politically correct front to outsiders while hiding the actual goings-on in the building (i.e. the slicing up of Annabelle by Emil Hobbes and the eventual take-over by sex-crazed zombies). Similarly, the Mantles’ cabinet in Dead Ringers remains a mask of professionalism, even during the brothers’ descent into madness. However, this surface becomes scratched during a particularly eloquent rendering of Beverley’s addiction: the camera pans on the wasteland that has become his office, soiling the established order of things by his slippage from the rational world to an alternate drug-induced reality, gluttonously demanded by his aching body. Beard suggests a similar “ironic contrast between the decorative expressions of a society that thinks it is in control and the disorder and violence which break its established order – and its sober sense of esthetics” (L’Esprit Viscéral : 88) in Rabid. He rightfully notes the abstract painting in Rose’s room, which we see before and after the attack on Lloyd: it becomes canted and bloodied whereas it was straight and clean, not unlike the virtuous society that accepted the Keloid institute, now facing the consequences of its beliefs (i.e. Rose’s mutant body). Keeping in touch with Cronenberg’s link between bursting heads and a liberation of the self, his celebration of squirting blood as a bodily manifestation against reason, Beard also includes an example from Shivers in his argument. As in Rabid, where the framing remains the same in the two subsequent establishing shots of Rose’s room, an identical framing device emphasizes the shift from order to disorder during Nick Tudor’s illness. His bathroom, at once clean and sterile, a model of sexual repression (Nick has seemingly ceased sexual relations with his wife while engaging in such activities with Annabelle, from whom he gets the disease), becomes a bloody mess after his passage (he regurgitates a parasite), the sign of an eventual release of Nick’s sexual energies (exemplified by his later attack on Janine).
On many instances, Cronenberg has argued that the ending of Shivers is not at all pessimistic, that it posits a new world order in which social conventions are meaningless and where the visceral self is liberated from a society “that thinks too much” (to paraphrase Rollo Linsky, on Emil Hobbes’ work). Now, if Romero’s zombies are symptomatic of a culture of mechanical consumerism and warmongering, Cronenberg’s zombies are the warm, pulsating counterparts of a cerebral society, a society “of self-repressive passivity and caution” (The Canadianness of David Cronenberg : 119). The horror genre is indeed the perfect vehicle to express hidden and intrinsic passions and, if it is alien to our realist tradition, it is precisely because Cronenberg tries to break down over-reasoning and the notion of a single reality in his films. In his criticism of Kramer vs. Kramer, he indeed rejects a more realist tradition (although it is an Hollywood example) as false, at the profit of the fantastic: “ I had just gone through divorce and I felt that that film was just completely false and that The Brood, fantastic though it was, was much more honest, emotionally and every other way” (Simon: 49). Interestingly enough, narrow-minded critic Leonard Maltin’s review of the film suffers from being embedded in restrictive Hollywoodian realism. “Eggar eats her own afterbirth while midget clones beat grandparents and lovely young schoolteachers to death with mallets. It's a big, wide, wonderful world we live in!” (Cinemania). To take such a film at face value, not to further the reading beyond the surface indeed seems very limitative, a proof of the same ideological selfishness which plagued Fulford in his review of Shivers. Maltin’s use of the words “world we live in” directly clashes with the director’s view that reality is subjective (Simon: 54). It further indicates a limited knowledge of the horror genre itself, which usually prompts a symbolic universe of fear to stand in for our reality. In short, his shutting down of the filmmaker on the ground that his reality is unacceptable (to the politically correct bourgeoisie) somewhat mirrors the actions of the extremist Realists from eXistenZ, who literally shoot down the builder of worlds Allegra Geller (who takes the place of the filmmaker).
Moreover, aside from revealing the hidden side of society, the horror genre also reveals the hidden side of the human body: its insides. Why, may I ask, are the tears shed in melodramatic movies and the emotions associated with them praised while the blood gushing of horror films and the violence from where it stems labeled as disgusting and trashy? I would tend to reject as hypocritical the assumption that movies directly affect behavior, especially when coming from Hollywood, an industry that systematically sees the viewer as passive. Therefore, I am tempted to agree with Cronenberg when he deplores the limited knowledge and acceptance of our bodies, disease and death, all elements deeply rooted in nature, but fought off as the enemies of a Cartesian society. Blood, although it is intrinsic to humanity, is an enemy because it reminds us of our mortality, of our attachment to physical existence whereas tears are of a higher level of consciousness: they represent the transcendence of human emotions2. As Mumford would say, it is abstraction of the human body that maintains the capitalist system in place: it is no longer the philosophical logic that defines humanness and reality, but rather mathematical logic, which exclude the instinctive side of human life at the profit of the mechanical one. An esthetic of consumption3 is the result of this displacement wherein the outer body becomes commercially determined. It is in this respect that Elliott Mantle’s suggestion of a beauty contest for the insides of bodies is the quintessential Cronenbergian irony: it is the disruption of a system that represses humanity as long as it is not completely plastic (in the case of the beauty contest) and calculable (in the case of science, as well as capitalism), toward one that celebrates humanity in its most primal form (here, an aesthetic of the insides, but generally, the release of dormant impulses).
This irony is central to his films as it is reflected in the relation between science and human nature. By its definition, the rational study of nature, science is necessarily contradictory according to the Cronenbergian mind/body dichotomy. It is always through science however, one might say the shortcomings of science, that human nature is revealed: through Hobbe’s blood parasites, Keloid’s neutral skin graft, Raglan’s psychoplasmics, Brundle’s pods…According to Beard, “the parasitic outbreak (or parasitic liberation) is also founded on the excesses of reason. […] Science must be understood as representing reason, and in Cronenberg’s films, catastrophic results stem from rational attempts at improving the human animal” (L’Esprit Viscéral : 75). It would seem that this failure of science necessarily comes from its desire to empirically know human nature and to rationalize it, while it is impossible to do so. In fact, all throughout Cronenberg’s filmography, science finds itself puzzled before examples of extraordinary biology: an unstoppable strain of rabies against which it is powerless in Rabid, the technically impossible triple cervix that challenges the Mantles’ every bit of reason in Dead Ringers, the oxymoronic creative cancer of Crimes of the Future…In all cases, the possibilities of the body overwhelm science to the point where it is absorbed, subdued by this body: Max Renn’s hand becomes one with his pistol in Videodrome, metal and flesh also meld together in Ballard’s leg after a car Crash whereas the whole game system from eXistenZ is made out of living tissues. In fact, this amalgamation is part of Cronenberg’s evolutionary theories. If affirming that “we’ve altered the earth, the magnetic waves in the air, and we’ve altered ourselves” (Kermode: 11) seems quite dogmatic, it nonetheless implies that technological progress parallels human physical evolution. In his films, it is our perceptual apparatus that is at stake, less the fact that “we create our own reality” (ibid), but rather that our reality is modified by our evolving techno-body. Its newfound capacity to completely change the world around us through its literal penetration by the machine is an example drawn from eXistenZ. The displacement of natural sexual desires toward artificial stimulation from the automobile fetish in Crash is also an example of this “reshaping of the human body through modern technology” (Cronenberg speaking through Vaughan). The quintessential example however, comes from his original manifesto on alternate realities, Videodrome. In it, a media prophet not unlike Marshall McLuhan, Brian O’Blivion, equates our perception of reality through sensual experience and its representation on television: “the television screen has become the retina of the mind’s eye”. He even goes on to say that life on television is more real than life in the flesh, breaking down the barrier between two apparently different realities. This barrier is further broken by the apparition of a living VCR (mirrored by the human VCR that Renn becomes) and the fact that the protagonist receives live messages from Bianca and Nicky through the television screen, the retina of the mind’s eye, because of its ability to showcase Max’s hallucinations. Moreover, the invasion of life by technology is also rooted in its implantation in rural areas. Cronenberg’s praise of the United Kingdom’s F1 industry, as a technological asset associated with the countryside, and as an inspiration for eXistenZ’ gamepod farm (within an interview to Positif) confirms what he believes: evolution will not be achieved by de-humanizing the world, but rather by hyper-humanizing it. His subsequent rejection of the megalopolis imagery at the profit of the purely organic (organic game system, organic gun…) when it comes to science-fiction is a further example of this. After all, Cronenberg often reasserts that humanity is not what it was 100 years ago4. In short, it would seem that it had to adapt to an increasingly technological world (especially when addressing the last 100 years4) in which the role of man resembles that of the machine more and more. The physical “revolution” of Cronenberg’s films might seem extremist, but its radicalism is as strong as it needs to be, given the strength of the progress of reason. The body is indeed revolutionary: it is Nick Tudor who kills Rollo Linsky, Max’s grenade-hand detonates Harlan, Allegra’s pods are a reaction against transCendenZ…
Concerning radical revolution let us go back to the notion of creative cancer. In itself, it seems to be a contradictory term. To the rational mind, it means creation through destruction. To Cronenberg, it simply means metamorphosis and awakening. Antonin Artaud once said that the plague and theater are alike. “Theater, like plague, is a crisis solved by death or healing. And the plague is a superior ill because it is a complete crisis after which there is only death or an extreme purification5. […] The theatrical action like that of the plague, is beneficial, because it pushes men to see themselves as they are, […] revealing to collectivities their dark power, their hidden strength, inviting them to face destiny with an heroic and superior attitude which they would never have had without it” (46). Likewise, Cronenberg’s diseases inevitably push men to reveal their true identities as lustful animals. Nick Tudor, a cold businessman becomes a sex beast once he is induced with Hobbes’ parasites. Seth Brundle becomes a brutal macho man (he shreds some guy’s arm in order to claim his girlfriend as sex-object) once he is Brundlefly… When it comes to collectivities’ dark power, Artaud certainly seems to entail a form of revolt. At the very least, it does involve a communal liberation. Now, here is Cronenberg’s take on the revolution of the body. While discussing a passage of The Brood (wherein Hartog (one of Dr. Raglan’s patients), refers to a tumor his mental desires have created as a “small revolution”), he asserts: “rather than actually dealing with the political revolution, I deal with the metaphorical political revolution of the body” (Simon: 52). Interestingly, he also tells us: “we all know there are societies that we felt were better off changed, even though there were civil wars and bloody battles that were required to achieve that” (ibid). It would therefore seem that disease is a revolutionary (communist?) weapon6. Considering that it is deeply imbedded in nature and an enemy of a clean and sanitized society, such a take is consistent with the whole Cronenbergian universe.
As it is within the dominant ideology, the male is closely associated to reason within Cronenberg’s films while the female entails naturalism, motherhood and primitive sexual energy. Is the director such a misogynist then, given that he champions a victory of intrinsic humanity over reason, which constantly fails to control or modify our profound nature (i.e. our female side)? His innocence is indeed somewhat proven by his assertion to the effect that “the most basic human is a female and then the perversion, the late development, is a male” (Simon: 55). Given the inherent logic of his work, the male is bound to eventually lose, as an embodiment of reason. Within the two main, and bipolar, readings of Shivers, concerning the benefits of a sexual liberation, the male is always at the lower end. On one hand, if you consider the parasite a curse, it is Emil Hobbes who is to blame, as a criminal against the established norms. On the other, if you see parasitic invasion as ultimately beneficial, Annabella becomes a wicked messiah7, converting frigid Nick Tudor and his kind. In this case, Roger St-Luc (stripped of his abject sanctity) is also truly liberated of his normative Puritanism by the nurse Forsythe (he initially refuses the sexual contact she proposes him). Discussing Cronenberg, John Waters (who shares a similar fetish for car accidents) points out to a similarity between unnamed sex club and the arms-filled cellar of Starliner towers wherein sexual promiscuity is likewise encouraged, as an alternative discourse perpendicular to traditions of matrimony and repression. The Fly provides further examples wherein the male is inevitably a loser, even more so than the female character, who’s doomed to give birth to a freak. Indeed, it is Seth Brundle’s love for the machine (which itself is a way to counter natural transportation) that causes his demise. It is very ironic that he would become one with the teleporter he wishes to use in order to create an artificial hybrid. Indeed, in doing so, he is disregarding natural birth (the child Quaife is bearing is already part fly, part human) at the profit of mechanical fusion: disregarding nature at the profit of science. This is also a good example of the dreadful consequences of an active, yet purely theoretical knowledge of nature that plagues Cronenbergian men. In fact, the Mantles also collapse because of Claire Niveau’s triple cervix, a scientific impossibility that disrupts their Cartesian worldview and their superficial understanding of femininity (challenged in every way by Claire, the one woman that the twins’ failure to grasp leads to their demise as theoreticians of a restrictive knowledge of the female body). Likewise, Max Renn’s self-confidence, as a man knowledgeable of primitive sexuality and desires, is shattered to bits by his encounter with Nicki Brand. She is indeed the embodiment of what he only seems to know through fiction: raw, masochistic sexual experience. In front of such a display, the shattering of his theoretical (even capitalist – deviant sex is his bread and butter) approach to visceral sex and violence only leads to his emotional breakdown (from lonely macho to dependant victim). Let me use Michael O’Pray’s words (in his discussion of “the damaged men at the heart of Cronenberg’s films” ) to describe Max’s fate: “upon gaining the self-knowledge they [the male protagonists] initially lack, [they] are psychically or even physically destroyed, sometimes both” (10). In fact, O’Pray argues for a clear shift between the “disengaged, passive, ultimately fragile” (ibid) males and “a series of ‘strong’ women characters – committed, at one with their desires, capable of action and often the emotional nexus of the narrative” (ibid). Piers Handling mentions “the radical maladjustment of the male protagonist, particularly his moral failure and, more obviously, that of his relations with women” (187) as a further example.
It would seem that there is indeed something in all of us that needs to be let out. It is something that has been repressed for the sake of capitalism, yet something that is exploited by capitalism. It is something that we all possess, yet that we have not all come to terms with. It is our humanity, an inherent part of nature that tries to live (or dies) in the concrete jungle of modern life. In our quest for the eradication of disease, we have forgotten that we must live with it. In our desire to live forever, we have forgotten to embrace death, a fact just as natural as life. What we fear is perhaps not disease or death. Perhaps it is humanity… In Cronenberg, every rabid zombie bite, every lustful parasite infection, every falling nail and every exploding head is a celebration of life. Because life, disease, and death can indeed be one and the same, his cinema is truly humane. Indeed, whereas It’s a Wonderful Life is simply uplifting, Rabid is truly humanist. Now, let the Christmas movie renting begin!
Notes1- You will probably remember, if you’ve seen the film, Pierce’s studio wherein he and Cameron Vale meet. There is one particularly gigantic sculpture, depicting a damaged human head, not unlike Vale’s…
2- It is interesting to notice that eXistenZ is a mere fantasy provided by transCendenZ (which itself is arguably no more aligned with reality). Now, both game systems are radically different. The former is organic and plugs directly into an anal-like slot within the human body. The latter is plastic (therefore, much closer to a contemporary console) and attached to the head and hand (nervous center and outer perceptual organ). It is aligned with reason, whereas the former is aligned with the body. Therefore, it seems Geller and Pikul’s fantasies stipulate a return to nature (eXistenZ), away from the refuge against it, provided by reason (transCendenZ).
3- The Keloid clinic in Rabid provides the alteration of the body as a commercial exchange. In that respect, the idea of enfranchising this practice is symptomatic of an increased commerce of the body. “I don’t want to become the Colonel Sanders of plastic surgery”, says Keloid cynically. “Why not? It’s one of those brilliant, inevitable ideas” retorts Murray Cypher. Here, capitalism (Cypher) sides with science (Keloid) in order to merge their views of the body as a mere object in a trade. This leads to the abuses suffered by Rose’s body (doubly aligned with nature because it is the female body). The revolt of this abused body provides punishment for both Cypher and Keloid as their capitalist system crumbles under a form of reversed phallocracy. The phallus, the male weapon, becomes, through revolution of the body, the female weapon against male supremacy.
4- “In terms of a physical evolution as a species, everything has changed in the last couple of hundred years since the Industrial Revolution” (Porton: 6).
5- What happens to Max Renn after he shoots himself? Is death the result? Or is it indeed an “extreme purification”, the access to the “New Flesh”? Max’s cancer is indeed creative, but what exactly does it create? Is it a deceptive, hallucination-inducing ill? Or is it a truly evolutionary disease?
6- What of the rabid zombies in Rabid? Aren’t they aligned with 1970’s Montreal separatists? After all, they’re the ones hunted by the P.E. Trudeau stand-in… On Rabid’s rabies, Cronenberg said: “Metaphorically it’s an idea, like Bolshevism or Islam, or any idea that takes hold and infects people” (Simon: 46). Therefore, it really seems to be a revolutionary disease.
7- She is impregnated by God (Hobbes), but it is she who propagates His word through her acts of love.
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