The Artist as Monster: The Cinema of David Cronenberg 9781442656703

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THE ARTIST AS MONSTER The Cinema of David Cronenberg

David Cronenberg is one of the most fascinating filmmakers in the world today. His provocative work has stimulated debate and received major retrospectives in museums, galleries, and cinematheques around the world. William Beard's The Artist as Monster is the first book-length scholarly work in English on Cronenberg's films, analysing all of his features from Stereo (1969) to Crash (1996). In this paperback edition, Beard includes new chapters on eXistenZ (1999) and Spider (2002). Through close readings and visual analyses, Beard argues that the structure of Cronenberg's cinema is based on a dichotomy between, on the one hand, order, reason, repression, and control and, on the other, liberation, sexuality, disease, and the disintegration of self and of the boundaries that define society. The instigating figure in the films is a scientist character who, as Cronenberg evolves as a filmmaker, gradually metamorphoses into an artist, with the ground of liberation and catastrophe shifting from experimental subject to the self. Bringing a wealth of analytical observation and insight into Cronenberg's films, Beard's sweeping, comprehensive work establishes the benchmark for the study of one of Canada's best-known filmmakers. WILLIAM BEARD is a professor and the film/media studies coordinator in the Film and Media Studies Program at the University of Alberta.

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The Artist as Monster The Cinema of David Cronenberg

WILLIAM BEARD

Revised and Expanded

U N I V E R S I T Y O F T O R O N T O PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2006 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada Revised and Expanded Reprinted 2006 ISBN 10: 0-8020-3569-8 (cloth) ISBN 13: 978-0-8020-3807-4 (paper) ISBN 10: 0-8020-3807-7 (paper)

Printed on acid-free paper Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Beard, William, 1946The artist as monster : the cinema of David Cronenberg / William Beard. - Rev. and expanded. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8020-3807-4 ISBN-10: 0-8020-3807-7 1. Cronenberg, David - Criticism and interpretation. PN1998.3.C79B42 2006

/

791.4302'33 092

I. Title.

C2005-906252-5

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Contents

Preface vii Acknowledgments xiii 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

Stereo (1969) 3 Crimes of the Future (1970) 15 SWrers (1975) 26 Rabid (1976) 49 The Brood (1979) 71 Scanners (1980) 96 Videodrome (1982) 121 The Dead Zone (1983) 165 The Fly (1986) 198 Dearf Ringers (1988) 234 Naked Lunch (1991) 277 M. Butterfly (1993) 338 Cras/z (1996) 379 eXistenZ (1999) 423 Spider (2002) 471

Notes 505 Bibliography 553 Index 563

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Preface

First just a few words about what is not in this book. There is no detailed account of production circumstances, reception history, or 'career history7 in general. I have made no attempt to trace in any depth at all the origins or evolutionary development whereby individual works came into existence, or to examine the technologies of special effects or any other aspects of the filmmaking process. Some of these areas have been adequately covered in existing literature, while others (for example, the very interesting topic of Cronenberg's place in Canadian cinematic culture) remain largely yet to be written. What is here instead is almost entirely interpretation and commentary, detailed exegesis of texts - and that, too, of a particular kind. The world of Cronenberg's films is one in which the boundaries of so many culturally determined categories are routinely transgressed and shattered: sexuality, social identity, accepted behaviour, finally subjectivity itself. The collapse of 'fundamental' boundaries and definitions in these films, and their insistence upon unnerving metamorphoses and mutations that escape all the systems with which we try to contain the unpredictabilities of existence, chimes perfectly with that failure of belief systems and that universal fragmentation and subjectivization of our understanding of the world which may be summed up in the word 'postmodernism/ With the dissolution of so many stable structures of explanation and universal 'truths' has come an atomization of thought and feeling into a concern with the instruments of this transformation towards meaninglessness (especially technology) and with the ground of transformation (the body and subjectivity). Technology, the body, subjectivity: these are precisely the areas upon which Cronenberg's cinema focuses intensely and repeatedly. Add the

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realm of gender and sexuality - also a domain of acute interest in a postmodern environment, and also absolutely central to the world of these films - and you have a filmmaker whose attraction as an object of study for the community of film- and popular-culture scholars is considerable. Cronenberg's films have attracted attention along these lines from a range of outstanding scholars, including feminist/psychoanalytic commentators (such as Barbara Creed), Marxist cultural critics (such as Fredric Jameson), cultural-studies theorists (such as Scott Bukatman), and analysts of postmodern or proto-postmodern film art (such as Steven Shaviro). Interest in his cinema has always run high in Britain, and there are books on Cronenberg in French, German, and Italian. All of this critical literature has seen something in him that has seemed particularly symptomatic of the age, an idiosyncratic but acute reflection of contemporary perspectives and anxieties. Something similar has happened in the area of popular consumption as well, where Cronenberg7s penchant for the strange and the mutated with its accompanying apparatus of special effects and sensation has overlapped exactly with a crucial zone of interest for a certain class of Generation-X viewers in flight from a more mundane mainstream cinema. But some essential aspects of Cronenberg's work are not, I think, very well served by the prevailing discourse. If the technologically saturated world of instabilities of perception and anxieties about the body is a perfect fit for the agenda of postmodern discourse, it nevertheless forms in the work of this artist a ground of exile and loss. For Cronenberg is not a postmodernist but a modernist informed by the conditions of a postmodern age. The very certainties and universalities of which postmodernism has disburdened us are seen very clearly by Cronenberg to be illusions; but they are illusions whose departure has not freed him or his characters in any useful way. On the contrary, it has left them in a condition not simply of disorientation or panic (prototypical postmodernist symptoms) but of despair and suicidal melancholy (prototypical modernist and even traditional-humanist symptoms). In other words, Cronenberg cannot believe in universal subjectivity, but he really wishes he could, and all of his characters' attempts to fabricate some kind of substitute for it are failures, notwithstanding a recurring rhetoric of liberation and redemptive transformation. His films are full of split or scattered subjects, but none of them can survive in what is inevitably revealed to be an emotionally and psychologically dysfunctional status. All of them yearn for a wholeness that can have no place in the

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(post)modern world; and the author, too, must be seen as yearning for a wholeness that he fully understands cannot exist. Of course this condition is precisely one definition of the modernist sensibility. One sees very clearly from the countless interviews given by the very articulate and voluble Cronenberg that he has a strong conception of himself as a modernist artist - and of a particular kind. His twentiethcentury intellectual heritage includes Freud and Sartre, probably Norman O. Brown and Marshall McLuhan, but certainly not Foucault, Althusser, Barthes, or Baudrillard. He has described himself as 'a cardcarrying existentialist/ and declares that art must be courageously transgressive and the artist (by implication) a kind of romantic hero who must brave the awful depths of his own unconscious - in the tradition not only of terrifying modernist writers such as Kafka and Burroughs but also of pre-modernist ones like Coleridge, Poe, and Biichner. The cinema of David Cronenberg is an outstanding example of a body of work, signed by a single person, that manifests an incredibly tight and consistent group of subjects, themes, and attitudes as well as an identifiable style - in other words, all the essential requirements for status as authorial cinema. And it is a body of work that yields large dividends to a critical perspective that tries to identify and trace the different seams of these areas. Most commentators have either mentioned this consistency of subject or taken it for granted, even if their primary interests lay elsewhere. But my own experience has been that to follow the individual threads of Cronenberg's thought and feeling, his narrative and thematic and characterological patterns, is to discover a world whose interconnection and flowering implications are of quite amazing dimensions. Some of these seams have been well mined. The first wave of Cronenberg scholarship talked extensively about the 'mind-body split' in the (earlier) films, and about Cronenberg's particular exploration practically his invention - of 'body horror.' The enquiry as to exactly what anxieties this fascination might be manifesting was later addressed in the scholarly realms of psychoanalytic and gender theory, particularly when so much of the filmmaker's work showed a persistent interest not just in sexuality but in biological reproduction. Then the films' deliberate provocativeness and transgressiveness produced a debate about their political status and effect, accompanied by another variation on the endless argument about the relationship between social and aesthetic values in controversial art. I have happily incorporated much of what prevailing scholarship

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has had to say about Cronenberg, and I have also spent a good deal of time on the literary origins of some of the films (specifically Naked Lunch, M, Butterfly, and Crash). But in all these cases my aim has been to explore what was going on in the films, rather than to place the films in any kind of broader context. The 'great events' of my narrative of Cronenberg therefore occur entirely within the realm of the unique world created by the films collectively. They comprise the changing outlines of such recurring features of the films as scientific and medical projects; 'radical7 experiments and technologies; viscerality, abjection, and transgressive desire; disease and other forms of bodily transformation; monstrosity, what constitutes it and where it comes from; rationality and emotional encapsulation; gender power-relations and stereotypes of gender; male subjectivity and female sexuality; female subjectivity and female sexuality; the thrills and catastrophes of emotional 'liberation7 through sexuality; dereliction, drug addiction, and other bad consequences of unrepression and loss of control; depictions of transgressive creativity that eventually become reflexive meditation on transgressive artistic creation; and the bizarre existential self-invention of all kinds of individuals and groups under intense psychological and social pressures. Cronenberg7s cinema is full of spectacular elements: bodily disease and mutation, creatures, violent telepathy, video hallucinations, drug addiction, car-crash-sex-cults. Much of the fascination his films exert for devotees and commentators alike lies in the way they seem to require viewers to address the presence of these elements and to divine their meanings. But what also strikes me forcefully - and this is an aspect that has gone widely unnoticed - is a huge moral and ethical struggle underlying the surface of the films. Cronenberg's work is relentlessly self-examining and self-prodding, one might almost say narcissistically so. Perhaps the first area it delved inward to explore was that of transgressive desire, what was desired but forbidden, or desired because it was forbidden. But, although much of the rhetoric of both the films and the filmmaker himself offscreen has emphasized this transgression of boundaries as existentially daring and even admirable, the works themselves simultaneously have presented a counterview that showed the human cost of transgression - the cost to others, the ethical cost. To compress brutally what will be an extended and detailed argument, transgression in these works eventually comes to coalesce in some crucial way around the area of male heterosexual sadistic desire. The cost of this desire is that it hurts another (female)

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human being, or simply that it wants to hurt one; it is this cost which finally rebounds upon the (male) subject himself to such an extent that it renders him an ethical monster in his own eyes and a biological monster as a physical metaphorization of his condition; the last stage of this monster-male is one of profound, suicidal melancholy. I see this process as a growth in the films' self-understanding, and as really coming into focus in Videodrome (1982) and the films that followed it. During this period of what is virtually a kind of self-accusation, there is also a strong shift towards depicting the central male's project as something like artistic creation, and - explicitly at last in Naked Lunch (1991) - the male subject as an artist. Hence this book's title, The Artist as Monster. Needless to say, I believe that his work to this date is of sufficient stature and interest to justify a study of this kind; and, moreover, that its stature and interest lie not simply in its congruence with the cultural patterns of our day, but in the density and complexity of its imagined world alone. Following the current practice of most scholarly writing on film, I have pushed the process of aesthetic evaluation rather to the sidelines. Sometimes it shows itself, and sometimes it sneaks in, but for the most part it is something implicit rather than explicit. So perhaps I should just state openly at the outset that I consider David Cronenberg to be not only a really interesting filmmaker but a really good one as well. Like the overwhelming majority of even very good artists, his work has its strengths and weaknesses. In a general sense, the terrific consistency of his thematic concerns has the virtue of sustaining the intensity and concentration of his films, and the limitation of confining them to a relatively narrow and sometimes repetitive focus; and of course individual films are more successful or less. I have tried, through the inclusion in the treatment of each film of detailed remarks on mise en scene, to indicate my sense of Cronenberg's formal, visual achievements as a filmmaker. That I regard him as a compelling embattled investigator of masculine subjectivity and analyst of the role of the artist will be pretty evident in my comments, especially on the films following Videodrome. Also, his skill in eliciting excellent performances from his actors, at least after he got the budgets to be able to do so, isn't much remarked on, though it should be. So: in my view Cronenberg has produced one almost perfect masterpiece of suicidal melancholy (Dead Ringers), one frighteningly chaotic, challenging psychic emanation (Videodrome), one fascinatingly elaborate, oneiric, but uneven evocation of another artist's world (Naked Lunch), one impressively ice-cold savage art-movie (Crash), one su-

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perbly crafted and personalized entry into unfamiliar territory (Spider), a handful of harrowing films that are very successful in their own terms (The Brood, The Dead Zone, The Fly), another handful of vivid, original, unkempt genre pieces (Shivers, Rabid, Scanners), one engrossing experiment (eXistenZ), one ambitious failure (M. Butterfly), and two creditable but immature apprentice art-films (Stereo and Crimes of the Future). By whatever scorekeeping method, this is a fine achievement for any filmmaker. The book is organized very straightforwardly, with a single chapter being devoted to each feature film chronologically, beginning with Stereo (1969) and concluding with Spider. Neither the early short films, Transfer and From the Drain (1966-7), nor any of the television work is dealt with; nor is Fast Company, the formulaic racing film Cronenberg directed in 1979, which is almost completely unchararacteristic and almost completely uninteresting. The chapters vary greatly in length, from relatively short (Stereo and Crimes of the Future) to very long (Naked Lunch), with all the films from Videodrome onwards receiving substantial treatment. With an eye to utility, each chapter has been designed - at least to a limited degree - to stand alone, so that readers may be able to look at chapters on individual films in isolation without becoming completely disoriented. A note on the paperback edition For this paperback edition of the book, I have added two substantial chapters on films released after the writing of the earlier edition: eXistenZ and Spider. I have also included a mini-consideration of Cronenberg's 6-minute film Camera (2000) in a lengthy note attached to the chapter on Spider (note 27). The existing text of the first edition has been transferred more or less intact, with only a few small emendations to update bibliographical information and correct typos.

Acknowledgments

Some of the material in this book has appeared previously, in a different form, in the book The Shape of Rage (ed. Piers Handling) and in the following journals: The Journal of Canadian Studies, Cinemas, Post Script, and The Canadian Review of Comparative Literature. In all cases this material has been rewritten or reorganized and greatly augmented. I would like to thank the University of Alberta for providing two periods of assisted leave during which a substantial portion of the work on this volume was accomplished. Thanks, too, to Audiovisuel Multimedia International Production (AMIP), Paris, for furnishing a copy of Andre Labarthe's film David Cronenberg: I Have to Make the Word Be Flesh; and to Robert Burch of the Department of Philosophy at my home university for consultation and advice on the topic of existentialism. I would also like to express my gratitude to my University of Alberta Film Studies colleagues Wayne Rothschild and Martin Lefebvre (now of Concordia University) for many useful discussions about Cronenberg; to Cronenberg scholar Bart Testa of Innis College, University of Toronto, for a spirited correspondence; to Robert Haas and many other members of the International Society for the Fantastic in the Arts for a very thought-provoking Cronenberg session during their academic conference in 1994; and particularly to the senior undergraduate students in seminars I conducted on Cronenberg during 1993 and 1999 for their stimulating and varied viewpoints and insights. And most of all I must thank my wife Wendy and my children Michael and Anne for their patience and support during the long period over which this book was written.

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THE ARTIST AS MONSTER

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CHAPTER ONE

Stereo (1969) 'Erotic research'

David Cronenberg's first 'feature' film (at 63 minutes it is as long as many B-features) was shot for $8500 on 35mm black-and-white without synchronized sound: directed, written, produced, photographed, and edited by David Cronenberg. Of course to call it a feature is to misrepresent it, because it is actually an art-film, an avant-garde film, an 'underground' film. The latter term is particularly apt: it was widely applied to the radical forms of alternative cinema emanating mostly from New York and Los Angeles during the 1950s and 1960s (Kenneth Anger, Ed Emshwiller, the Kuchar brothers, etc.) whose small, cult-like following in Toronto formed the background for Cronenberg's two even earlier - and unavailable - short films, Transfer and From the Drain, as well as for Stereo and Crimes of the Future.1 But from any angle, Stereo is an unusual film. The dreamlike and disconnected action takes place, probably in some near future, at the hilariously named Canadian Academy of Erotic Enquiry, where a series of experiments in telepathy are being performed. Amidst cool, sterile, brutalist-modernist surroundings isolated from society (a deserted Scarborough College in Toronto) a collection of young people perambulate listlessly or gambol childishly, sit around or make out with each other, dressed in stylized costumes and constantly framed and defined by the architecture and decor. On the soundtrack, in tones purged of all emotion or even interest, a series of voices annotate what is going on in hyperbolically rational/scientific jargon. It is almost exclusively from this voice-over commentary (written, as a matter of fact, after shooting was completed) that one can get any idea of what is going on, for the visuals are often highly ambiguous and directionless. We see a man (Ronald Mlodzik) in quasi-Victorian dress - cape,

4 The Artist as Monster

wing-collar and double-breasted jacket, silver-headed cane - alight from a helicopter and try to gain admittance to a large concrete-andglass facility. Eventually he is let in and shown to his room, filled with craft items in medieval style. Other subjects appear, two women and three men, as well as a bearded and sometimes lab-coated researcher and guide.2 Their costumes all have an antique, again medieval, flavour - the men wearing tights, short coats, and ankle shoes, and the women shifts. Even the researcher wears tights. These figures permutate in twos and threes, taking drugs, playing card and shell games, engaging in various fairly mild erotic encounters, often in laboratory or other mechanical-institutional surroundings. There are male-female and male-male pairings, and one male-female-male threesome that is simultaneously heterosexual and homosexual. Although vaguely or explicitly sexual actions do recur, much of the time the only discernible outward actions seem bland or trivial - no doubt as a consequence of the fact that telepathic relations are invisible. People walk through the grounds, cavort in classrooms and corridors, explore storerooms of chemicals in bottles, eat candy bars or have tea, touch each other affectionately or quizzically, and sometimes appear to be just killing time in completely random ways. There are a number of examples of intercutting between these unfocused scenes and what I take to be 'telepathized' experiences occurring in the minds of the participants, but sometimes there is not much to distinguish what is 'really' happening and what is telepathized. By contrast, there are a number of scenes of a striking and sometimes even shocking strangeness that are, in retrospect, easily recognized as carrying precisely the cold, disturbing Cronenberg touch. In a laboratory or science classroom a barechested young man in tights strips to the waist a blindfolded young woman (a large picture of an open eye is visible in the background), and then moves to a medical torso-model showing the body interior complete with organs, and proceeds to caress this model at length, before moving actually to the woman: Cronenberg's 'medical sex' already fully formed. The subjects toy repeatedly with rubber infant pacifiers. In one scene in a darkened laboratory full of insectly-craning protractor lamps that provide the only light, a male subject takes a pair of scissors and cuts his pacifier up in pieces (high-angle shots over an illuminated table). This is a surreally violent image in itself, but it is amplified in the next sequence when we see an overhead shot of a naked, large-breasted woman silhouetted on an illuminated operating-type table (again in a darkened lab), and a

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male hand comes in and touches the strands of her outstretched hair. The 'operation' on the pacifier has given way to the suggestion of an 'operation' on a nude woman, while the pacifier has been replaced by a pair of breasts; moreover, a regressive attraction to oral/maternal satisfaction has been fended off with a symbolic violence which then translates into the suggestion of sadistic violence against a (maternalsubstitute) sexualized woman. Dead Ringers, here we come. In so many of the scenes, the subjects seem almost like children innocently playing, blankly smiling at each other, engaging in simple games, rituals, or low-key social encounters - and often an aura of 'undergraduate' prankishness and send-up humour is distinctly perceptible. The latter overlaps, too, with the countercultural aspects of the scene: the youthful subjects, the archaic dress-up costumes, the free love, the drug-taking are all quite hippie-like. But this sense of free experimentation is darkened by another sort of experimentation - that of science, which subjects the fuzzy optimistic warmth of 1960s counterculture to the icy embrace of a cruel, technological instrumentalism. This meeting of trust and openness with a reifying 'scientific' manipulation - which in a way parallels the film's conjunction of improvisatory visual stagings and tightly written 'objective' voice-over text - produces a victim and a perpetrator. The victims are the human subjects, and the perpetrators are the scientists (and the frigid modernisms of the environment they have produced). In any case the liberatory and hopeful aspects of the whole project of telepathy go increasingly astray. The voice-over relates how some of the subjects become self-destructive and suicidal. Violence and even horror begin occasionally to intrude on the generally empty and bland visible world in the second half of the film. The Ronald Mlodzik character suffers an agonizing telepathic fantasy of being chased by his researcher and left in a post-assault condition on a shower-room floor. The same character sitting in the forest seems to see a human eye lying in a shallow hole. Later, following a typically anodyne tea party, he grasps the hair of his female companion and pulls her head back sharply. And in the final scene, when one of the female subjects approaches one of the males affectionately and even amorously, he responds by giving her a rough shove, and then slapping her viciously - and it is this image of human (male) cruelty and human (female) suffering that we are left with at the end of the film. Stereo is the first of the long, long line of Cronenberg films in which experiments go wrong, in which their prosocial 'scientific' purposes are compromised by the irresponsible and often

6 The Artist as Monster

sexually tainted or power-hungry drives of their controllers, and in which, after the production of a number of scenes that feed the transgressive appetites of both the film and the viewer, the final spectacle is one of human suffering and death. While the visuals of Stereo, with their arty emptinesses and ambiguities, their intermittent repertoire of avant-gardisms, and their occasional piercing shafts of strange science and sexuality, leave viewers in a good deal of doubt as to what is occurring, the voice-over narrations are giving us a much more structured sense of the situation. The voice, overs are also the source for most of the film's humour, which is rather pervasive. Both the ultra-deadpan verbal delivery and the hyperjargon of these scientific observations ensure that they never entirely leave the realm of satire, although some of the more appalling revelations make any kind of a smile difficult. But their relentlessly parodic nature does not mean that they are without serious substance. To begin with, the disparity between their deliberate coldness of tone and the ethically dismaying aspects of the experiment they are cataloguing is one of the central features of the film as a whole and may almost be said to constitute the moral frame of the action. Also, their content features many striking ideas and perspectives whose originality and idiosyncrasy are also essential to the effect of the film - not to mention the way in which they establish many of Cronenberg's most persistent themes or obsessions. In effect, the highly creative, highly productive, but also dangerously irresponsible, possibly corrupt, and probably 'mad' master-scientist Dr Luther Stringfellow, whose conscienceless manipulations of his human guinea pigs and pompous verbal screens are the target of the film's satire, is also the representative of the filmmaker.3 Not only has he 'set up the experiment,' but the scientist's ideas are his own. And hence the satire is directed at himself - or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the satire is a way of deflecting his own and other people's unease about the destructive and sadistic aspects of the whole project. The more ridiculous the figure of the creative scientist-inventor and the verbal representation of his experiments, the more plain it is that the film itself recognizes and disavows his cruelty and calls its 'scientific' alibi into question. But at the same time, the inventor and his project are both presented, both at the center of the film, and his ideas and actions actually made available for examination by the viewer. In this sense the film itself is disavowing, and it is a form of disavowal that will continue off and on in Cronenberg's work until Videodrome.

Stereo 7 The narration in detail Here, then, is what the voice-overs tell us about the film's action. In the interest of providing a fuller acquaintance with this little-seen film, I will quote extensively. Eight particularly promising subjects have undergone 'pattern brain surgery7 to increase their telepathic abilities, two of them even agreeing to extra modification in the form of surgical removal of the organs of speech from their larynxes and the 'obliteration' of 'large portions of the speech-centres of their brains' as a further stimulus to the development of telepathic communication. To begin with, the group is worked upon individually by the designer of these experiments, the eminent 'aphrodisiast and theorist' Dr Luther Stringfellow (who does not appear in the film or speak on the soundtrack). These 'category-A' subjects have been personally chosen by Stringfellow, in accordance with 'his work in the socio-chemistry of the erotic/ He holds that 'the nature of erotic research requires that the sexualemotional involvement of the researcher with each subject be taken to its farthest possible extreme.' A personal relationship is established with each subject based on characteristic patterns of Stringfellow's brain - a relationship that creates a 'telepathic dependency' in the subject. Later, the individual subjects are weaned away from this dependency on the chief researcher by a process of shared reception of Stringfellow's recorded brain patterns, after which they will be ready to undertake telepathic communication with each other and communal telepathy. But the telepathic community, too, is constructed through dependencies, and through systems of dominance and submission: The dominant personality is responsible for the suppression of the heterogeneous elements which the conglomerate comprises ... As Stringfellow notes in defining the nature of dominance: /rThe will of the newly formed conglomerate must necessarily be a function of the dominant personality ../ [The dominant] subject was ... provided indirectly with certain historical and interpretative data concerning his fellow-subjects. This data would naturally assure the immediate social dominance of the chosen subject within the context of the experimental socially-isolate gestalt. The function of the dominant would then be to select from among his fellow-subjects the one psychically most vulnerable, and by the application of subtle social intimidations, followed by a careful series of potent symbolic gestures, draw this subject into the field of his psycho-telepathic dominance. Once a true conglomerate exhibiting com-

8 The Artist as Monster plete telepathic bonding has been established between this primary couple, the progression towards a larger and more complex conglomerate may begin. 'Erotic research' pursued telepathically beyond the frontiers of ordinary sexuality opens new vistas: These opposite poles of human sexuality are traditionally held to be heterosexuality and homosexuality. Yet this same bipolar structure of sexuality is ignored when the question of normality and deviation arises. The norm is taken to be heterosexuality, and both bisexuality and homosexuality are considered deviations from that norm ... Academy research has established that both heterosexuality and homosexuality are equally what might be termed perversions, relative to the potential human sexual field. In this context, the true norm is an expanded form of bisexuality which we term 'omnisexuality.' The state of telepathically experienced omnisexuality is induced by aphrodisiac drugs that loosen inhibitions, while telepathy itself acts to bring down barriers and dissolve categories: The proper use of psychic aphrodisiacs, such as those being developed by Dr Stringfellow at the Canadian Academy for Erotic Inquiry, is not to increase sexual potency or fertility, but to demolish the walls of psychological restraint and social inhibition which restrict persons to a monosexuality, or to a stunted, bisexual, form of omnisexuality. The telepathist, then, by virtue of the omnisexual nature of his experiential space-continuum, may readily be seen to be the possible prototype of three-dimensional man. Among the curious symptoms of these subjects submitted to surgery, drugs, and emotional seduction and battery are addiction and sensoryintellectual chaos. In the case of the first subject, it is related that Telepathic dependency is an extreme form of psychic addiction. It is essentially an electro-chemical addiction, the dependent surrendering the autonomy of his own nervous system to that of the object of his dependency, and altering his patterns of electro-chemical discharge to mimic those of his object. When the object of dependency is telepathically unavailable for long periods of time, the new nervous patterns suddenly find themselves without a constant source of electro-morphological rein-

Stereo 9

forcement, and severe psychic disorientation begins to manifest itself in the dependent. At its most intense level, a frustrated dependency can result in the irreversible destruction of critical brain tissue. Inasmuch as the establishment of a partial telepathic dependency of the subject upon his researcher is an unavoidable part of the parapsychological-experimental gestalt, the means to maintain this dependency at a controllable level must be considered an organic element forming that experimental gestalt. During the Institute phase of the induced telepathy series, a subject possessed of a statistically excessive dependency-susceptibility quotient wounded himself in the forehead with a hand-drill. The wound, a hole about one-half an inch in diameter, completely penetrated the subject's skull, and seemed to afford him the relief of imagined cranial pressures, temporary euphoria, and electro-chemical dissociation which he sought.

And in the case of the second subject, there is another detailed, dispassionate description: For those of exponentially-maturing telepathic capacities, the question of phenomenological refinement must inevitably become one with the problem of the internalization of the sensory. The telepathist faces the obsolescence of the senses, and the possible atrophy of the human sensorium in all but its most mundane operations. During a certain phase in the telepathist's evolution, the sensory will attempt to internalize to avoid its extinction on the level of intellectuality and emotion. This avoidance could take two forms. One would be the forced psychic ingestion of the entire universe as conveyed in terms of sensory information. This would partially manifest itself in an instantaneous translation into the vocabulary of the sensory of all purely psychic, abstract, or extrasensory phenomena. The second form of avoidance would be the reification of the psychic, the abstract, or the extrasensory, and its subsequent externalization or projection. The process begun by this objectification and displacement of the nonsensory would find a point of equilibrium and complete itself only with the indiscriminate return or internalization of both the projected nonsensory information and its sensory screen, the passive external world as received by the senses. In both instances, the distinction between the sensory and the nonsensory, the concrete and the abstract, the psychic and the physical, would be lost utterly.

Other pathological reactions include this description of one of the female subjects trying to ward off telepathic invasion:

10 The Artist as Monster In order to subvert attempts by fellow-subjects to establish potentially intrusive telepathic rapport, she completely separated her telepathic self from her oral verbal self. The telepathic self functioned as a false self, diverting fellow telepathists from the real or true self, which manifested itself only in occasional deliberately confused verbal utterances. She thus protected her true self from telepathic intrusion by abandoning her telepathic faculty to a false self. Not surprisingly, repeated telepathic probes, undertaken by other subjects, could not discover the true nature of her experiential space-continuum. The danger inherent in the use of schizophrenetic partition as a telepathic-intrusion avoidance device is that the false telepathic self tends to become increasingly parasitic on the true oral verbal self. The true self begins to suffocate, inasmuch as it is starved of contact with the outside, and the false self gradually becomes the only self to interact with other selves. In the instance of our female schizophrenetic subject, the true self began to express its moribund existence through the telepathic emission of violent images of decay, vampirism, disintegration and necrophilia, which sporadically interrupted the functioning of the telepathic false self. The intensity and frequency of this emission of morbid telepathic images rapidly increased, until it began to create the same depressed mode in those close to her.

Eventually, such unforseen and unfortunate byproducts escalate into a catastrophe that is, however, described with typically frigid callousness only as something that may imperil the scientific project: Certain unexpected results, however, threw the future of the project into doubt. When preliminary confrontations between any two subjects were arranged, the subjects not only reported no instances of telepathic communication, but quite emphatically avoided even the most casual sensory contact with each other. At the same time, electroencephalographic probes indicated that such telepathic communication as was denied by the subjects was, in fact, taking place, and at a remarkably high rate of flow. How could such flow exist among strangers? In an emergency program modification, five of our eight subjects were combined in an enforced community study. These five subjects, although psychochemically the least volatile of the group, almost immediately retreated into a state of self-encapsulation, refusing to communicate in any way with either researchers or each other. Before further investigations could be made, two of the five subjects committed suicide in their residences at the institute; another pierced his skull with an electric drill - an act of con-

Stereo

11

siderable symbolic significance.4 Careful separation of the remaining subjects was maintained.

Intimations Considering the content of Stereo's spoken text from the perspective of three decades later, it is simply astonishing how much of Cronenberg's world is already there, in whole or in suggestion. The telepathy experiments prefigure Scanners - which is largely given over to the extrapolation of some of Stereo's ideas in the context of an action-adventure movie. The melding of nervous systems, the distressing nature of telepathic contact (in Stereo 'overwhelming and extremely exhausting ... verging on pain and hallucination'), and of course its potential for destructiveness, will all reappear in Scanners. One scene in Scanners, depicting a circle of 'good7 telepathists linking and focusing their 'scans/ is an actual illustration of Stringfellow's goal of the telepathic community - though it is quickly blasted to bits by shotgun-wielding 'bad7 telepathists. Omnisexuality, and in general the whole notion of human sexuality as not biologically fixed but socially constructed and existentially malleable, is a topic that receives so many restatements in Cronenberg's later films that it is easier simply to list the ones where it does not appear: Scanners, The Dead Zone, and The Fly. Scientific experimentation, and especially 'radical' medical experimentation with an overt or disavowed sexual component, is an even more universal element - entirely missing only from The Dead Zone and M. Butterfly (and perhaps Naked Lunch, where, however, its place is taken by artistic creation) and really central to a number of Cronenberg's most important films, above all Dead Ringers. 'Medical sex' is epitomized not only by the visual scenes of people making out in labs with their sexual appetites mediated by all kinds of bizarre scientific interventions, but also by the satirical oxymoron 'erotic research/ with its suggestively ambiguous multiple meanings, as pursued through a program of distorting drug treatments and maiming surgical operations. Drugs and drug addiction, in Stereo strangely but significantly conflated with 'telepathic addiction/ are themselves another recurring topic in Cronenberg's films, especially the sequence The Fly - Dead Ringers - Naked Lunch, and seem to be strongly linked to the whole experimental process. In the countercultural and 'underground' atmosphere of Stereo, it is easy to make the connection between the exciting explorations and discoveries of science and a liberatory 'experiment-

12 The Artist as Monster

ing with drugs' - and one must note that already in both the 'scientific' and existential /emotional spheres the excitements and liberations are essentially false promises that end in disaster. At a deeper and less distinct level one even sees some of those configurations of transgressive desire and ethical reaction that from one perspective can be recognized as forming the fundamental moral substructure of Cronenberg's work. The master scientist-creator Luther Stringfellow chooses his subjects on the basis of his sexual attraction to them, and then submits them to a process of emotional domination and manipulation, personality-distorting drugs, and punitive surgery that can only be characterized (in this context of 'erotic research') as sadistic in the strict sense of the term - all the while masking the transgressive sexual desire of his project with a curtain of reifying scientific jargon and an elaborate posture of imperious detachment and intellectual pride. (Whether he is deceiving himself as well as the rest of the world is unknowable and ultimately irrelevant.) Stereo unmasks him, through its repeated illustration of the gap between his discourse and his actions and its sly pointers to his hypocrisy, but it does so in a satirical climate that leaves an escape door of humour from the seriousness of both the creator's transgressive desire and its bad consequences. Nevertheless, the spectacle especially of the final scene - of male violence against a woman and of the sadness of the woman's emotional pain - also sets the prototype of that hangover of empathy for suffering that so often follows the intoxicated satisfaction of transgressive appetite, and which is the foundation of Cronenberg the melancholiac. Then the entire process of experimentation and alteration is presented in the polarized terms of a destruction of boundaries and categories on the one hand and a self-encapsulation on the other - and these also are terms that play a central structuring role in Cronenberg's later cinema. Telepathy breaks down dividing walls, erases difference, allows the interflow of thoughts and feelings across the now-ruined divide between self and other, destroys 'the distinction between the sensory and the nonsensory, the concrete and the abstract, the psychic and the physical.' But the response of the human subjects of this experiment is to panic at the loss of privacy and individuality, to flee into secrecy and self-encapsulation from the terrifying removal of the protective boundaries of the self. The lures of new forms of human sociality and communality, of omnisexuality and 'three-dimensional' humanity, move from being bright prospects for liberation and growth to being calamitous mutilations of the necessary conditions of self-

Stereo

13

hood. And so the stage is set for the so-often repeated Cronenbergian drama of the dialectic of control and liberation, a dialectic in which the oppressiveness of over-control gives way to the catastrophe of overliberation, and in which the search for 'improvements' to a repressed and existentially circumscribed condition of solitude and rational constraint create a chaos of unrepression, uncontrol, and unrationality. (All of the latter are soon to be explicitly connected with the body and its exciting and dangerous otherness from ego-rationality; but in Stereo this connection exists only in the schematic form of 'erotic7 telepathy.) To what extent the bad outcomes of these experiments are due to the, as it were, original sin of the sexually desiring and disavowing master scientist is not clear. But it is certainly the case that Stereo does already set the terms of the Cronenbergian dilemma in sometimes startling detail. Mise en scene Two areas of the film's visual approach deserve some further commentary. The first is that aspect of the architectural environment already mentioned, and Cronenberg's photographic treatment of it. The bare slabs of concrete and sheets of glass, the panels of overhead lights, the severe angles, the general sense of emptiness in a context of powerful modernist architectural gestures, all cast a cold and forbidding aura around the proceedings. And Cronenberg's camera constantly frames the locations and the action in abstract ways, and especially in its frequent wide-angle-lens mode exaggerates the sterility and dehumanization. It is an aesthetic that bears a resemblance to the frigid and oppressive worlds of, in their different ways, Kubrick and Antonioni both of whom, incidentally, were highly current at the time of Cronenberg's gestation as a film artist.5 It is also an aesthetic that the filmmaker was to retain in his work, to a greater or lesser degree, for the next quarter-century. In Stereo this architectural oppression is blended into the even more chilly brutalist physical environment of institutional classrooms, kitchens, storage rooms, and laboratories, where stainless steel, Arborite, Formica, tiles, and concrete drain away all warmth. All these elements form the visual correlative of the inhuman depersonalization of the 'scientific' voices and their attitude towards their human subjects. Lastly, there is the inventory of visual avant-gardisms that Stereo turns to at various moments. Here we find slow motion,6 rapid-fire sub-

14 The Artist as Monster

jective montage, extensive very-wide-angle forward tracking shots (or rather, hand-held shots), and conspicuous overhead or low-angle camera placements. There are only two rapid-montage sequences. The first (flashing through the contents of the Ronald Mlodzik character's medievalist room) seems completely egregious in effect, with the technical fireworks ungrounded in anything but technical indulgence. The second, accompanying (again) Ronald Mlodzik's telepathically imagined flight from his researcher-pursuer, at least has the alibi of subjective panic, but also has a kind of arty conventionalism about it. The slow motion, by contrast, is important and formally grounded, because it recurs always in conjunction with a passage of voice-over: when the voice-over begins, the shot suddenly slows, and when it ends, regular motion is resumed. If there is no particular narrative logic to this process, it does at least bring a degree of formal alignment of image and words, and in a number of cases helps somewhat to invest banal images with something of the tension of the texts accompanying them. In later Cronenberg films, some of these techniques survive in vestigial form. Slow motion is used to amplify and ritualize important scenes of transgression and violence in Shivers, Rabid, and Videodrome; and montage flurries survive in abbreviated and relatively unobtrusive form in a number of the films right up to Crash. But for the most part, these formalist visual techniques are quickly abandoned by the filmmaker. Only wide-angle lenses (although again in less exaggerated form) go on to become a bedrock of Cronenberg's visual style - and they always evoke the coldness and objective detachment they do in Stereo, a syndrome that as it evolves over the whole oeuvre takes on the characteristics almost of a philosophical viewpoint.

CHAPTER TWO

Crimes of the Future (1970) 'A new form of sexuality for a new species of man'

Crimes of the future is very similar to Stereo, except for a rather more 'plotted' scenario with a single central character, the use of colour, and a soundtrack filled with buzzing, chirping, and clicking noises. Crimes of the Future manifests the same absence of direct sound, the same formalist approach to mise en scene, the same dreamlike action, the same involuted, impenetrable, pseudo-scientific voice-over narration (though now only by a single voice), even the same central actor (Ronald Mlodzik), and virtually the same running time of just over an hour. As in Stereo, it is impossible to work out just what is going on at many moments. What is clear is that the action takes place in a future that has been devastated by a mysterious disease caused by cosmetics. The disease is called 'Rouge's Malady,' after its discoverer, the 'mad dermatologist' Antoine Rouge, and it has been particularly virulent among post-pubertal females. Indeed, the world seems quite depopulated of women (the cast of the film is all-male, with one late exception). Its symptoms include a 'white, aerated, amorphous effluence emerging from ears and nose,' which signals the last stages of the disease and is soon followed by a syrupy bleeding from the mouth. This white goo ('Rouge's foam') is strangely attractive to the senses; people are drawn to smell and lick it. Rouge's experiments have perhaps themselves triggered this plague, though this remains unclear. Certainly Rouge occupies something of the status of an absconded master-mad-scientist, leaving desolation and dissension in his wake. There also seems to be a dystopian repressive political system in place, and eventually some of the characters form a conspiracy against it - but we are given only the most tenuous and indirect information about these matters. Unlike Stereo, though, Crimes of the Future has something approaching a linear

16 The Artist as Monster

narrative, however obscure certain developments or indeed the general situation may remain. A 'plot summary' is therefore a much more feasible task here than with Stereo, and, since Crimes of the Future is almost as seldom seen as its predecessor,1 an extended description may be useful. The action The hero is Adrian Tripod (accent on the second syllable), an erstwhile disciple of the now-vanished Rouge. Rouge is presumed to have died in self-imposed isolation after contracting the disease himself, although there is some doubt about this (Rouge once remarked that 'Rouge's Malady could not possibly be fatal to Rouge'). Tripod provides the slow, impassive, extremely mannered voice-over narration, which, like that of Stereo, is broken into discrete set-pieces separated by large gaps and couched in a language that is at once coldly detached and absurdly ornate in its phraseology A quirk of this narration is its occasional swerves into the third person, with Tripod referring to himself by name. Dressed all in black with a long double-breasted greatcoat with large lapels, turtlenecked shirt, and high-top boots, and sporting square rimless spectacles and a stylized close-cut coiffure with sideburns, he looks rather like a Dickensian villain of the Heepish variety. Tripod wanders in isolated existential gloom from one strange institution to another in this deserted post-apocalyptic environment, in search of something that he himself cannot identify. He is overcome by a melancholy that stems partly from the sadly declined state of the world, but also from his loss of his mentor Rouge, to whom he was 'preternaturally close,' and his resultant personal solitude. Like the subjects of Stereo, he is suffering from dependency 'withdrawal symptoms' after the removal of the master. And as in Stereo, the architectural environments are abstract-modernist, and their photographic treatment maintains the same oppressively antiseptic beauty - although the earliest settings have at least a degree of warmth and the presence of colour does moderate the chilling effect and add an element of sensual attractiveness. The film begins with the last days of Tripod's tenure at the House of Skin, a kind of prison-hospital for the treatment of sufferers from Rouge's Malady once run by the Master himself. This location features beige brick and blond wood, a kind of Vatican II soft-monastic style, and pleasantly verdant grounds. The last patient is dressed countercul-

Crimes of the Fu ture 17

turally in a green striped jellaba-like shirt and deerskin-brown trousers, and is accompanied everywhere by two lab-coated technicians/ jailers who are Tripod's 'sullen interns' and whose severe institutional dress is modulated by brightly painted fingernails. These three are seen frolicking with a stereopticon and viewing cards and painting the patient's toenails, in scenes that are very reminiscent of the many rather vacant improvisatory moments in Stereo. The patient quixotically pokes at tree branches and goldfish ponds with a croquet mallet, attempts a desultory escape, is laid out on a bed with a tube running up his pants leg while Tripod massages his nipple and expresses 'Rouge's foam' from it, languishes in fetching Mad-Scene disarray while clutching his stereopticon cards possessively, and eventually dies with brown goo running from his mouth. Tripod embraces the corpse in grief, then kisses its mouth erotically and savours the taste of the effluence. Next he visits the Institute of Neo-Venereal Disease (the names are, as in Stereo, aggressively jokey and yet suggestive of the unholy marriage of science and desire). The building offers acres of red carpeting, sweeping curves of plaster and cement, and enormous sheet windows, very similar to the cold institutional surroundings of Stereo but again less harsh in effect because of the presence of colour. Here Tripod encounters another patient, a middle-aged man swathed in a white blanket. This man is a former colleague of his, who has contracted a venereal disease from one of his patients, and is now withdrawn and uncommunicative. Tripod tells us: He was once a fierce sensualist, but he has now become a pure metaphysician. His body has begun to create puzzling organs: each one very complex, very perfect, unique - yet seemingly without function. As each is surgically removed, it is quickly replaced with another, equally mysterious. He has taken to breaking into the Specimens Room and stealing the jars containing these organs. His body, he insists, is a galaxy, and these creatures are solar systems. He becomes melancholy when they are far from him. His nurse says that his disease is possibly a form of creative cancer.

As this narration takes place, we see that the man has with him a collection of specimen bottles, each containing some kind of unidentifiable organ-fragment. Some of these are held up to the light in close-up, their fragments of organic matter held in brightly coloured liquid.

18 The Artist as Monster

Tripod leaves the building, his figure framed by the concrete monumentality of its walls. He next takes a position as a therapist for the Oceanic Podiatry Group (more concrete modernism in the exterior of their building). The unique combination of a poker-faced absurdist scientific and linguistic satire with striking and vaguely disturbing ideas is again well represented in Tripod's explanation (delivered, as ever, in a slow, tentative, rather depressed monotone) of the Group's work: They support their theoretical structure, in part, by a grossly distorted interpretation of the later evolutionary writings of Antoine Rouge. Still, the closeness of certain Rougean concepts is comforting. The technique I am to attempt is the invocation of the genetic history of feet - that is: tentacles, lobed fins, flippers, and so on. By these and other, more esoteric, means, I am to reverse the psychic relapse, now so common, which can occur under intense genetic pressure. I am thereby to encourage patients to bear the burden of a suddenly alien gravity when they would prefer to revert to more primitive oceanic forms.

While this speech is going on, we see one of the OPG employees laying Tripod down on a grassy bank, removing one boot and sock, and performing some kind of manual operation that looks like a combination foot-massage and sadistic chiropractic exercise with an enthusiasm that is comic. Tripod then reciprocates. It is a ritual that is clearly mutually pleasurable, however absurd, and it already indicates Cronenberg's sense that the practices of the human species are self-invented and selfsignifying, that there is nothing 'natural' or 'ordinary' about them. There follows a self-consciously theatrical Pinter-like scene in which a desperately fleeing individual is calmed and given another footmassage by Tripod. The furtive man's foot is discovered to possess six toes (their nails too are painted), and Tripod's 'treatment' affords him some relief; but his trench-coated pursuer appears from the concrete embankment and chases him 'offstage,' where he apparently kills him. Yet another arrival is also offered a foot-massage, and is revealed to have webbed toes, but he rejects Tripod violently in the middle of his treatment and leaves after having tossed a handful of stereopticon cards at him. Everyone is dressed in black. Scenes like these prompted Robin Wood to say of Crimes of the Future that its image track resembled 'the chronicling of a series of somewhat kinky gay pickups.'2 Tripod's next stop is at Metaphysical Import/Export, where he is

Crimes of the Future

19

employed as a briefcased functionary who delivers surreal aptitude tests to applicants for management jobs. The applicants are given clear plastic bags containing a collection of small items - miscellaneous objects, underwear, single socks. They then lay these objects out upon a flat surface in what seems to them a fitting pattern or stuff them into particular plastic bags. The procedure, which resembles a weird Rorschach test, absurdly juxtaposes the intense seriousness and concentration of the applicants with the meaninglessness and triviality of the activity's appearance in the absence of a code. Ever the outsider, Tripod's mock-Byronic lamentations have still a comic edge: It has been simple to remain aloof from the internal workings of this corporation, because as a minor intramural courier I am not required to communicate with the many candidates for executive position with whom I deal. As a consequence, however, I am uncertain as to what constitutes the significance of their incessant exercises and competitions.

The three candidates are, respectively, a conventionally well-groomed and nervous young man, a scruffy and self-confident one, and a counterculturally costumed black man who practises balletic pliers before and after his test. Once again, the locations are red-carpeted modernist interiors, and the ballet-exercise scene takes place in a severely static, geometrical shot of remarkable duration staged in a corridor flanked by sheet-glass windows with black frames. Indeed, the abstract visual modernism of Crimes appears to grow in intensity as the film proceeds. As this final 'exam' is taking place, Tripod reveals: I have been studying the stereoscopic card delivered to me by the man with webbed toes. Though his manner was brutal, the card he left me was both inviting and peculiarly flattering. Yet it was perhaps because of the perverse sexual nature of the card's images, so reminiscent of those which had gained an odd popularity at the House of Skin, which decided me against contacting these 'subtle colleagues/ as they call themselves.

But: As I had anticipated, I have been invited to join a gathering of conspirators. Their purposes are, as yet, opaque to me, as are the purposes of so many others. It is, however, quite clear that they are heterosexual pedo-

20 The Artist as Monster philes, a group specifically outlawed, though increasingly pervasive nonetheless.

Tripod attends this gathering in what looks like a sculptural exhibition at a modernist gallery - certainly the most striking single location of all. Large glass balls are positioned around a chiaroscuro-lit space punctuated by free-standing coloured screens. In this darkened space a group of conspirators slowly assemble, select pairs of white gloves from the salver of a butler-like attendant, and perambulate through the exhibit, palpating the glass balls. The group is led by 'a new master' named Tiomkin, who describes the glass spheres as 'aquaria' ('I cannot deny my attraction to certain of these perverse, multidimensional images,' murmurs Tripod). Tiomkin says they must evolve a 'new form of sexuality for a new species of man, an emergent genetic biochemistry for a most innovatively creative form of life' - words that of course recall ideas set forth in Stereo and that will appear many times in Cronenberg's subsequent work.3 What this 'novel sexuality' is we begin to discover in the next tableau, in the facilities of the Gynecological Research Foundation housed in another modernist glass-and-concrete edifice with acres of unicoloured carpet and strange painted-concrete alcoves and furnishings. The three 'chosen' conspirators (Tripod, the web-toed man, and a third man) arrive here, and have a meeting with the Foundation's 'hired gunman,' whom Tripod's fellow-conspirators murder with his own army-issue heavy machine-gun. Now Adrian Tripod is to be introduced to the subject of his study. She is a research import, brought at great expense from a great distance, across several most contentious borders. The corporation Metaphysical Import/ Export has been involved in the venture. He stresses the complex nature of prematurely-induced puberty/which leaves such a subject vulnerable to Rouge's Malady, and is unable to guarantee that she is not already defective in this respect.

Cut to a shot of a little girl, perhaps five or six years old, sitting on a stretch of the orange-red carpet dressed in a short skirt, tights, and woollen booties with pompoms on them. This 'subject' is now kidnapped by the two fellow-conspirators and taken to an obscure hotel. Outside this building, a brick-and-glass institutional-looking structure, which is described also as the transient hotel where Antoine

Crimes of the Future

21

Rouge apparently spent his final days, Tripod encounters another person with new bodily organs: The concierge speaks about a root-like excrescence which has begun to grow from one of his nostrils. He believes it to be the extension of certain cerebral nerve-cells. A modified antenna, perhaps; a delicate sensing organ, attuned to ... what?

(We actually see this organ pushing through the man's moustache.) Inside the building the conspirators/experimenters have sequestered their prepubertal female. They are attempting to induce puberty 'prematurely' in this subject, by unrevealed means: 'there must be no delay in attempting to impregnate our strange, unfathomable captive/ The last tableau features three barefooted men in a white-painted room with dark blue chairs and curtains, contemplating the girl, who is working at her colouring book in a corner, and still wearing her pompomed baby slippers. Other shots show her striking a kind of 'glamorous pose/ with her hands behind her head and her legs drawn up. Here perhaps we find an echo of Nabokov (specifically Lolita), whose influence on Cronenberg's early writing was much remarked upon by Cronenberg himself. One of the men is left alone with her, but cannot bring himself to approach her and leaves with a gesture of disgust. At last Tripod is admitted, removes his shirt and fixes a scarf seductively around his neck, then sits to contemplate his sexual partner. A final line of voice-over says, 'Adrian Tripod senses the presence of Antoine Rouge/ The little girl licks white goo off her fingers; Tripod smears some on his lips. In slow motion, a blue tear runs down his face. And in the final shot, the girl smiles (invitingly?) into the camera. Unstable sexuality Obviously, Crimes of the future returns to themes of 'omnisexuality' and 'new sexuality/ though its visual depiction of these phenomena is as artily elided as in Stereo. These concepts, or their relatives, return forcefully in many of the subsequent features (Shivers, Rabid, Videodrome, Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch), though their realization there is graphic and concrete, and notably wnverbalized. Similarly, the homoeroticism that Wood discerns in both this film and Stereo (and that Cronenberg has attributed to the influence of Ronald Mlodzik) is a recurring feature of Cronenberg's work right through Crash and eXis-

22 The Artist as Monster tenZ. 4

It is a completely idiosyncratic brand of homoeroticism, certainly not excluding heteroeroticism and, in addition to taking its place in the sexuality of all bodies, featuring a kind of narcissistic sexuality directed to the (male) self's own body. In the absence of women, men are themselves moving into the space of the feminine through such practices as nail-painting and sexual desire for men - though of course these practices are also congruent with homoeroticism per se. In Stereo and Crimes homosexuality is included in and folded back into 'omnisexuality' and 'new sexuality7; but exactly what any of these forms signify is, in keeping with these films' tone and in contrast with the later features, coyly suggestive rather than explicit in any way. Except perhaps for the outrageous (but very gingerly staged) pedophilic final scene of Crimes, there is no sense that these extensions to the realm of 'normal' sexuality are pathological or horrifying. Rather, they are very interesting, titillating but disguised or disavowed through the background discourses of scientific progress and countercultural exploration. What is absent here, and present in the horror features that begin with Shivers, is visceral shock and a sense of the danger, and the sickness, of sexuality that has escaped from containment or 'normality' and become excessive and 'new.' At the same time, it should be noted that 'normal' or 'old' sexuality is really quite rare and fleeting throughout the entire corpus of Cronenberg's work. Uncontained, 'abnormal,' 'new' forms are the dominant categories on display - and they return obsessively and powerfully in most of the narratives. In Stereo and Crimes of the Future sexuality is extensively played with as a concept; and it is the distance at which it is held, the curious detachment accompanying it, that prevents it from becoming the truly explosive and boundary-destroying force it is in the later films. As we shall see, Cronenberg's filmography displays an increasingly more distressed sense that the power of sexuality (and the body in general) to dissolve categories and threaten ego-subjectivity is a power very much to be feared. Simultaneously, the ironic distance that so strongly informs these early art-films is gradually resituated, and its power to protect the feeling subject from horror and despair is increasingly diminished. When, in The Fly, Seth Brundle displays a bathroom medicine chest full of his own bodily organs, which have dropped off in the course of his transformation into something 'new,' we may discern an echo of the specimen bottles in Crimes of the Future - but now the effect is harrowing and pathetic. And when, in Naked Lunch, the 'observational' impulse which is so much in the foreground of Stereo and

Crimes of the Future

23

Crimes of the Future, and so primary in Cronenberg altogether as a symptom of the projects of consciousness, takes perhaps its ultimate form as the artistic impulse, it has become an abject and dismal process of recording the crimes and the dysfunctionality of the self. The body Crimes of the Future introduces the body more explicitly into the Cronenberg world, and in particular the ideas of bodily mutation and disease - once again themes that will recur powerfully throughout the subsequent films.5 The symptoms of Rouge's Malady, and in particular the oozing excrescences, signal an arrival of the 'liquid/ unstructured and unshaped and hence horrific, in