The Artist as Monster: The Cinema of David Cronenberg 9781442656703

Citation preview

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.

This page intentionally left blank

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

This page intentionally left blank

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

viii

Preface

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

Preface ix

(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

x Preface

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)

Preface

xi

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-

xii

Preface

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.

This page intentionally left blank

THE ARTIST AS MONSTER

This page intentionally left blank

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

Stereo

5

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, insides of the body onto the outward scene. This is the realm that Julia Kristeva has called the 'abject/ a conceptual field of some importance to the scholarly study of modern horror, to which I will turn in the next chapter. But it is noteworthy that this abject substance (Rouge's foam) is simultaneously a sign of disease and impending death on the one hand and an object of compulsive appetite on the other. Bodily desire and disease join hands for the first time in Crimes of the Future, and of course their partnership is to have a sensational future in Cronenberg's work. The 'new organs' of the madman at the Institute for Neo-Venereal Disease and the concierge at the Gynecological Research Foundation are puzzling, of indeterminate function. That they are somehow related to sexuality and to sexual disease or pathology is indicated by the names of the institutions 'housing' them - though this relation is entirely obscure and not at all discernible in the organs themselves or their hosts.6 The paradoxical and unthinkable interconnection of the body and the mind (or the self, or the soul) is apparent in the transformation of the first subject from 'sensualist' to 'metaphysician' (with the products of his metaphysical state being new bodily organs), and in the characterization of the second subject's nostril root as an organ of the brain and of apprehension. The 'mind-body' perspectives broached here lay out very clearly the landscape for the following features. 'Creative cancer/ the description applied to the disease of the patient at the Institute for Neo-Venereal Disease, is a particularly acute pre-echo of a subject that will preoccupy Cronenberg in several later films (Videodrome and The Fly most notably). In this phrase is captured the profound ambivalence of the films towards all that is bodily and 'new/ and ultimately it applies to the whole area of artistic creativity as well.

24 The Artist as Monster

Rouge's Malady, the plague which devastates the earth, has been caused by cosmetics. Here is an archetypal Cronenberg 'mind-body' scenario: the mind's attempt to remodel the body (cosmetics) results in the body's revolt (Rouge's Malady), which in turn begins to affect the mind (the melancholy 'metaphysician/ the solitary metaphysical angst of Tripod, all the other manifestations of psychological disturbance in the film). In this respect, Crimes of the Future prefigures Rabid, where again a disease essentially triggered by cosmetic activity (plastic surgery) devastates society and produces in its victims a foamy discharge from the mouth. It may also be noted that Rouge's Malady is a disease essentially of and for women: the onset of puberty and cosmetics as a signifier of the desire to be more sexually attractive. Crimes of the Future also inaugurates that attachment of catastrophe to the woman that is another foundational feature of Cronenberg's cinema - especially that of the first horror features. A disease or pathology suffered by or carried specifically by woman is central in Rabid and The Brood, and is seen in more indirect forms in virtually all the later films. This is one feature of Cronenberg's work that has attracted the label of misogyny though it is hard to see Crimes of the Future as misogynistic in any substantial respect when it is entirely empty of sexual females. Style One might also note a degree of escalation from Stereo in the level of violence: the occasional outbursts of interpersonal violence in Stereo (men slapping or shoving women) are here replaced with sinister figures of aggression and actual homicides. But neither in horror nor in violence does Crimes of the Future go much beyond its predecessor. Crimes'rs violence is staged with parodic theatricality and, moreover, all occurs ostentatiously and even comically offscreen (and is in many cases followed by equally caricatured reactions of horror on the part of Tripod). As in Stereo, the obscure verbal meanderings of the narration and the equally obscure meanderings of the narrative itself are presented with amused detachment, and humour once more goes hand in hand with a kind of enervated alienation. The most upsetting aspects of the film spring from the cool, formalist, and dehumanized style of both architecture and photography. But both films remain neater, less problematical works than Cronenberg's subsequent full-fledged horror films, if only because they are easier and safer in their attitudes. The psychic malaise depicted in both films is partly comic and also partly self-indulgent, so

Crimes of the Future

25

that despite its disturbing overtones it encourages in the viewer a detached and ultimately comfortable standpoint. Shivers, in most ways a crasser film than either of its predecessors, is an artistic step forward for Cronenberg simply because it confronts its subject, and begins to experience its own feelings, more directly and powerfully. Obtrusive avant-gardisms have been cut back in comparison with Stereo: much of the art-cinema aura resides in the quieter realms of location, wide-angled abstract compositions and long takes, and obscurity of narrative. There are no flashy montages, and the only survival of slow motion is in the shot of Adrian's blue tear (a pretty touch, but one of the few in the film that does verge on the gratuitous). Instead, the obvious effects have migrated to the soundtrack, a collection of muffled clicks, roars, burbles, and birdlike screeches that stops and starts with the suddenness of the slow-motion effects of Stereo. Altogether, to a degree significantly in advance of its predecessor, Crimes is a feast for the eye, a clear foundation of the coolly beautiful yet disturbingly empty visual environment that plays a part in every Cronenberg film up to Crash (where it reaches a kind of apotheosis). In the end, both films have a quality that is unique, in Cronenberg's cinema and elsewhere. If they are in some respects artistically immature, they are original and consistent in both subject and aesthetic. Their creator was soon to leave this world behind forever. For those who are interested in Cronenberg's cinema they will always retain the interest of origins, but even for those who are not they may cast their own aesthetic spell.

CHAPTER THREE

Shivers (1975) 'A perfectly good parasite'

Nothing in Stereo or Crimes of the Future could have prepared their viewers for Shivers. Of course there were relatively few viewers of this description. The small art-house audience Stereo and Crimes of the Future had gained in Britain was largely of the auteurist persuasion, as were a relatively small number of appreciative Canadians. And as a matter of fact these groups responded quite favourably to Shivers, even if they must inevitably have been somewhat startled by Cronenberg's move to the 'straight' horror feature. More important to the filmmaker's immediate career was the reaction of a powerful and articulate portion of the Canadian cultural establishment. Robert Fulford's scandalized review of the film in the respectable Canadian monthly Saturday Night had quite an impact at the time, and its ripples continue to eddy through the Canadian pond even to the present time.1 Numerous thematic and stylistic features are carried over from the earlier films, but Shivers is a radically different kind of film. It is a 'mainstream' commercial feature, rather than an art-film, and moreover of a particular genre, and the province of a particular audience. The genre is the low-budget horror movie, whose characteristics centrally include graphic, sensational depictions of violence and sex-plus-violence; the audience is that which patronized drive-ins and second-run fleapits. Both were as low on the 'respectability' scale as it was possible to go without descending to outright Triple-X porno films. The shift away from the register of 'art' is decisive, however much evidence of aesthetic care or thematic complexity Shivers may display in its realization. At the same time, Cronenberg could feel that Shivers was in some respects a logical consequence of Stereo and Crimes of the Future, as in this early interview:

Shivers

27

CRONENBERG: There is a certain violence in Stereo and Crimes of the Future. INTERVIEWER: It is more suppressed. CRONENBERG: It is, but both those films are about repression as well. In that sense making Shivers was a very liberating and very cathartic experience for me ... I felt that the films were very connected ...2

In this context, Cronenberg obviously did not see himself as having moved from 'art' to 'trash' quite so clearly as many observers (particularly in Canada) did. The film was originally called The Parasite Murders,3 a title that points up the importance of the little 'creatures' who are at the centre of the narrative. The parasite-creatures are described as 'a combination of aphrodisiac and venereal disease' by their creator, crazy university professor and medical researcher Dr Emil Hobbes. He has developed them both for medical reasons and to counteract humanity's excessive cerebralism and estrangement from the body. They proceed to run amok in a modern apartment complex on a Montreal island. The film documents the gradual spread of the parasite 'disease' from Hobbes's first experimental patient, Annabelle, to the rest of the inhabitants of the complex. The parasites, originally conceived as a substitute for ailing body organs, and then converted into stimulators of desire, transform their hosts into raving sex maniacs. If there is a central character, it is the apartment's resident doctor, Roger St Luc, who investigates the incidents and later becomes, together with his nurse/girlfriend Forsythe,4 the last target for the parasites. But although St Luc has a certain protagonist-like function, most of the movie's time is spent with the many secondary characters affected by the plague. Those who play important roles include the married couple Nicholas and Janine Tudor (the former an early parasite sufferer, the latter baffled and upset by his strange behaviour), Janine's friend Betts (who lives alone and klatsches with Janine about her worries), and Hobbes's associate Rollo Linsky (who discovers Hobbes's intent and tries to help St Luc). There are many other characters whose narrative importance is more marginal, but who are introduced in one or more scenes with some detail of characterization or iconography to make them stand out (for example, the manager of the complex, the lobby security guard, the older woman attacked by a parasite in the laundry room, an old man named Brad who has abdomen parasites and is examined by St Luc, and a traditional French Canadian couple of retirement age). In this respect Shiver s's real protagonist is collective - the inhabitants of the complex and,

28 The Artist as Monster

by extension, modern urban North Americans in general. The major dynamic of the narrative is the exponential spread of the parasites through the whole complex, with many 'attacks' depicted, followed later on by the victims attacking as yet uninfected inhabitants, until every person living in 'Starliner Towers' is transformed. The end of the film shows the inhabitants leaving the complex in an orderly procession of vehicles to 'infect' the rest of Montreal with parasites. An index of the film's generic affiliations is its similarity at a number of key points to specific existing horror movies. The idea of an alien agent working to transform human nature into something resembling itself, and spreading itself through a kind of epidemic multiplication, is recognizable from the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers.5 Also, more specifically, the narrative situation of a hero and heroine (in Shivers St Luc and Forsythe) on the run from ever-more-ubiquitous horrifically transformed people until they are the last two 'normal' ones left, and then the revelation that the female has actually already turned into one of 'them' (a revelation signalled at the point of a kiss between the two), is an element of distinct resemblance. There are also very perceptible echoes of George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1969) in the conversion of ordinary citizens into ravening Other-creatures mindlessly seeking to 'devour' any not-yet-Other people they encounter. Specific images from Shivers sometimes recall moments from Night of the Living Dead - for example, the 'respectable' middle-class little girl who, with her mother, is transformed into a red-mouthed devourer. And, more extensively, the penultimate scene of Shivers, where St Luc escapes from the complex's swimming pool onto the grounds, only to encounter swarms of slow-moving, murmuring, zombie-like creatures, is unmistakably 'from' Romero's film. Both Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Night of the Living Dead are canonical horror films: indeed, the latter is the canonical modern low-budget horror film. Enter the visceral body Shivers is notable even now for its intense preoccupation with the visceral and the sexually violent, and it set a benchmark for physical disgust that has arguably never been surpassed in Cronenberg's work. The parasites themselves are extremely transgressive in their appearance and activity. They are about eight inches long, with an elongated pear shape, the thin, rather hose-like end of which seems to contain a kind of orifice. Seemingly boneless, they muscularly writhe and creep,

Shivers

29

and are also able to launch themselves through space. Their movements, especially when in contact with an adjoining surface such as human skin or viscera, are accompanied by highly organic sucking and smacking sounds. A dull red flesh colour, they are explicitly visceral, and they evoke simultaneously the phallic and the excretory. They grow in people's abdomens (where they can sometimes be seen to writhe graphically under the skin) and are passed through mouth-tomouth contact; they also fly at faces and attach themselves, leech-like, to bare flesh, leaving massive blotches and burns. In one scene a parasite slithers up the drain into a woman's bath and crawls into her vagina; in another, a man slowly extrudes one, turd-like, through his mouth; and in a third, the most bloody in the film, a character has his face covered by them and, screaming in welters of blood and scorched skin, tries to pry them off with pliers. These are images - and ideas that are as deliberately repugnant as they can practically be made to be. The parasites are the first major occurrence in Cronenberg's work of that domain of the body interior and what comes out of it that Julia Kristeva has termed the abject.6 Feces, sexual fluids, blood, and spittle, all things expelled - 'ab-jected' - from the body interior are culturally constructed as disgusting, as is the apparatus of sexual reproduction in females and by extension the female body in general,7 and (most abject of all) corpses. Body boundaries, on the other hand, contain and repress the abject, and indeed the 'clean and proper body' is the polar opposite of the abject body in Kristeva's thinking - and it is 'one's own clean and proper body' as opposed to the frightening otherness of the insides of other people's bodies. The controlling boundaries of the body surface are then mirrored in prohibitions and laws, as the abject body is expressed in the 'dangerous' realm of appetite, in everything from dietary laws and sexual prohibitions to table manners and protocols for sneezing. Sexuality itself, and particular sexual organs and sexual congress in their body penetrations and fluid exchanges, are thus innately abject, as are the disfiguring inscriptions of bodily disease and decay. Voila Cronenberg, or at least Shivers, where the boundaryless body interior in the form of the parasites (sexual and diseased) erupts with maximum disgustingness into an arena of bounded repression and control. Certainly the modern horror film exists as a home for, and indeed is largely defined in terms of, such transgressive abjection, and in foregrounding it Shivers is in one sense doing no more than marking itself

30 The Artist as Monster

as of the genre. On the scale of violence, some slightly earlier horror films (e.g., Night of the Living Dead, The Last House on the Left, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) have exceeded Shivers in the psychological realm, and many subsequent ones (random example: The Evil Dead [1983]) have surpassed it in explicit physical horror. The parasites represent by far the most graphic and extreme example of Cronenberg's recurring representation of the body as an arena of horrifying un-control, and their impact cannot be explained away by pointing to their parodic excess and overtones of frat-house 'gross-out' humour, nor to the stance of witty detachment that characterizes much of the film. Ultimately, the film is not at all simply comic in the way virtuoso exercises in 'over the top' violence have sometimes become in the past couple of decades. The writhing creatures, of and from the viscera, signal a peculiar effort to press exactly upon the point of greatest anxiety and disgust. And the film's insistence in connecting sexuality with disease, and in conducting so forcibly a diseased-sexual assault upon 'ordinary' people, has given rise to numerous accusations that it displayed 'disgust at the body' and especially 'sexual disgust.'8 An environment of repression Cronenberg's typically articulate analysis of Shivers (and he has been called upon to defend this film more insistently, perhaps, than any other) invokes the Cartesian mind/body split to present not a simple process of monstrosification in Shivers's narrative, but rather a dialectic of forces of equal weight, and equal undesirability.9 Certainly it is ugly and horrifying to watch the behaviour caused by the parasites, and even the parasites themselves. But this action takes place in a context: a context of sterile modernist abstraction, of highly ordered and organically evacuated living conditions, of frigid instrumentality in social life. Star liner Towers, on its own island 'far from the noise and traffic of the city' (as the promotional voice-over at the beginning proclaims) is a citadel of twentieth-century Cartesian order. Laid out in architecture of rectangular functionalism and decorated in clean and tasteful elegance, it is a microcosm of the modernist urban aesthetics of middleclass materialism. There is a promise of control, of the complete absence of anything unwilled or invasive: Explore our island paradise - secure in the knowledge that it belongs to you and your fellow passengers alone.

Shivers

31

and most succinctly: Sail through life in quiet and comfort. Cronenberg's camera treats this environment, and to a degree also the people who inhabit it, with an answering visual aesthetic of detached formalism, evident in many static, sometimes empty, abstractly balanced compositions. But in contrast to Stereo and Crimes of the Future, where the same aestheticizing coldness reigns and where the repressed returns only in a muted and displaced fashion, the Other of Shivers's kingdom of rationality is depicted with insistent and graphic explicitness. We may say, then, that thematically the parasite plague arises from, or at least is presented as a didactic contrast to, the social and individual repression of the body and desire. Narratively, of course, it originates in Hobbes's project to use his scientific and medical knowledge to change the world, specifically to change how people are constituted psychologically through a medical intervention. For Cronenberg it is not the Faustian megalomania or the practical prospects of attempts to redesign human nature that are alarming. It is rather the perpectives they reveal of the dominance of the body and the insecurity of subjectivity itself that provoke anxiety. What is so disturbing is the complete unknowableness, uncontrollability, and fearful destructive power of the body (and the unconscious) vis-a-vis the rational ego-subject - and vis-a-vis the moral sense attached to that human subject. The mind, ego-rationality, may seek to inhibit or direct these protean forces of life, it may even succeed to a considerable extent. But what is absolutely certain is that it will not succeed indefinitely. The body will kill the mind eventually; the body's death will kill the ego-subject. In this respect, in its inevitable decaying and dying, the body is therefore always the enemy in the end. (That it supports and makes possible the mind throughout life is a perspective Cartesianly not entertained.) One might add that the (dead) body always in the end wholly inhabits the realm of the abject - in Kristeva's catalogue of abjection the corpse reigns. The nexus of sex, disease and death in Cronenberg is quite in keeping with Kristeva's typology. Even worse than these bodily horrors, perhaps, are the spectacles of human damage that result, the way in which compassion and moral sympathy are routinely outraged by a domain of appetite and other bodily fiats. Instinct and appetite, belonging to the body because outside the rationality of the ego-

32 The Artist as Monster

subject, are magnetic but incredibly dangerous. Although appetite is various, it is ultimately reducible to the field of sexuality (the body) and desire (the psyche) - the former the space of gender difference, of physical intimacy, and of birth; and the latter the occasion of egoconfusion and ego-dissolution, of demonstrations of the ego-subject's contingency and permeability. Tainted science The 'experimenting' scientist of Stereo and Crimes of the Future returns in Shivers. Here, as elsewhere, science represents a rationalist attempt to intervene in the 'natural' progress of human life - but for Cronenberg there is no such 'nature': all of our projects and meanings are existentially determined by ourselves. The Cartesian ('scientific') project of instrumentality is necessary and inevitable, and its emotional concomitant is found in that aspect of the mind/body duality that conceives of the mind as the 'self and the body as the 'other/ Science in its broadest sense then produces two kinds of problems. Either it successfully excludes the body and produces a cold, sterile, overcontrolled technological environment such as Starliner Towers or the buildings in Stereo and Crimes of the Future; or it is infected by desire / the body and produces mad scientific projects that heedlessly endeavour to direct the biological/instinctive realm with dreadful outcomes. It is of course primarily important that so many of Cronenberg's scientists are medical doctors of some kind, intervening not simply into the world of external phenomena but into the human body, where what they find, what they were really looking for, is desire and death. For the scientific projects actually depicted in Cronenberg's films are almost never purely rational or altruistic; they are almost always tainted and disavowing. The scientists of Stereo and Crimes of the Future are irresponsible and protosadistic, Hobbes is a comically stylized dirty old man, and the imperious scientists of The Brood and Scanners are power-hungry. In Dead Ringers, Cronenberg's most concentrated and maturely developed investigation of this theme, the entire scientific enterprise (now exemplified in gynecology) is rooted in sexual desire and sexual anxiety, and constitutes an attempt by the ego-self to find a 'safe' channel for these threatening psychic forces through sadistic and (literally) instrumentalized desire-disguises exercised precisely on the female objects of desire. In Shivers the sexualized nature of the scientist's motive is spectacularly clear, and the 'Cartesian' contrast between his role as

Shivers

33

manipulator of rational structures and his role as sex maniac and producer of squishy body-parasites is cartoonishly schematic. In this context the Hippocratic ambition to deliver humanity from repression and body-alienation cannot be anything but derisory, 'mad/ Prior to that point in Cronenberg's work (namely, Videodrome) in which the scientist-function begins to become allied with the protagonist-function and both to be centralized, the disastrous transformations and the suffering their projects create fall basically on the heads of others, while the scientists remain in some way aloof or separated from the scene. Sometimes (and Shivers is an example) the scientists themselves die as a result of their actions, but they are basically not of very much interest as guinea pigs or self-victims. Instead, it is larger social units, a more extended and various cast of characters, that experience these effects. At its purest, this configuration takes on the form of a 'plague': some scientists somewhere do something 'radical7 and soon all kinds of people at a distance are suffering the consequences. This structure is visible to a greater or lesser degree in all of Cronenberg's films through Scanners, and may be seen sticking its head up again in Crash and eXistenZ. It is one of the things that encourages an interpretation of Cronenberg's cinema as being about the dire impact of technology on poor ordinary lay-subjects, casualties of the blind, deluded, or uncaring actions of technocratic elites. But Cronenberg's fundamental viewpoint is both more idiosyncratic and more complex than such a familiar outline would suggest. He is more interested in neuroses and anxieties, repression and unrepression, the adaptability or unadaptability of people to 'strange' circumstances, than he is in any social analysis, and particularly any socio-political analysis. The issues of science and technology in his films are thus less social issues than they are private and personal ones - even if the private and personal are extended across social groups. Moreover, there is never any social or political 'moral' of his films: the notion that the lessons' that any of them might be teaching might be to change laws or social attitudes or otherwise try to address problems in an ameliorative way is a ludicrous one. You can't fix human nature, that is the moral of the early films (which in the later films is amended to 'you can't fix your own nature'). In any event, the results of sex-crazed science are never straightforward or unambigious - and certainly not in Shivers. Cronenberg has said in interviews that he 'identifies with the parasites' and that 'the ending of Shivers for me was a happy ending.'10 (In this respect the

34 The Artist as Monster

filmmaker simply takes over Hobbes's project: his aim too is to crack his characters out of their ego-isolation and make them more attuned to their bodies.) The parasites may be stomach-turning and frightening, but their effect on people is not simply to turn them into monsters. People as well as architecture and decor can be too controlled and emotionally denying, and their transformation by the disease does the same work dramatically as the transformation of Starliner Towers does iconographically. The inhabitants of the complex, contained in their separate little boxes (apartments) and living hermetic lives whose preservation from mess and bother is extensively guaranteed in the fulsome sales pitch for Starliner Towers that begins the film, are extracted from their sealed containers and mashed vigorously together in a way that annihilates all previous social distinctions and prohibitions pertaining to age, gender, consanguinity, and class, as well as all conventions supporting the independence or separateness of individual subjects. The film's action is virtually a systematic abolition of Difference. One barrier after another is overturned, one 'outrage' after another performed, until nothing of 'normality' remains. Minor characters, such as the smarmy apartment manager (Ronald Mlodzik in his last appearance for Cronenberg), the tuxedoed waiter, the diffident and fastidious old French-speaking couple, and the mother and child in the elevator are clear symbols of ordered normality pushed energetically into excess. The overthrow of rational caution, conventions, categories, boundaries, good taste, and everything that is part of the machinery restricting human animality is accompanied by a typical horror-movie sense of liberation as all prohibitions are liquidated. In Shivers the liberation is emphasized by the expressions of eager lust on the faces of the marauders, the gleeful exploitation of what is from a certain standpoint just one big party, and especially by the orgiastic slow-motion climax, in which the last man is initiated into the fraternity of excess. But, again, the syndrome is not a simple one, and our pleasures are counterbalanced by other feelings - and these include not only a cautious fear of that excess, but a sense of what essential human values are being trampled in the process. Beginning with a sex murder Shivers is suspended across the polar oppositions of a complex series of related dichotomies. An aesthetic opposition of cold detached order

Shivers

35

versus hot engaged chaos is one aspect; another is the psychological opposition of ego-rationality versus body and desire. And yet another is a moral aspect. The terms of this moral opposition are transgression and remorse, appetite and disgust, violence and pathos. Here we must revisit the question of the film's treatment of sexuality. First on the side of sexual transgression, of unbridled appetite, of violence, we can examine some individual scenes. Perhaps the most powerful of Shivers's many shocks is the first: the murder of Annabelle Brown. Its shock value derives partly from its positioning at the very beginning of the film, before any kind of narrative context has been established, before the viewer is able to gain any bearing on the action. But even more astonishing is the scene's brutality and explicitness, and above all its intermingling of sexuality and extreme violence. Everything is done to present Annabelle as an object of transgressive male sexual desire, and in particular to enact a scenario of sexual assault in the following sequence: rape, murder, mutilation of the corpse - ending in suicide. It is a striking feature of this scene that, narratively speaking, there is nothing sexual in Hobbes's attack. He is merely attempting to kill the parasite he has invented and housed in his young lover, and prevent the spread of an epidemic that has been the catastrophic result of his misguided project. Admittedly, the viewer discovers these facts only later. But as the sequence unfolds, and even upon subsequent viewing when the viewer is in complete possession of the narrative facts, it is apprehended as a sexual assault from the viewer's standpoint. Indeed, it is staged as such for the viewer (the heterosexual male viewer exclusively, no doubt), for whom it has virtually the status of a pornographic fantasy. Both characters in the scene, in the absence of narrative context, appear as 'universal7 types: the rapacious old man, his quarry the young girl. Annabelle wears the uniform of a private girls' school: it is a costume, and it signifies her as a 'schoolgirl/ too young to be an 'appropriate' sexual object, especially for an old man - and ipso facto a kinky turn-on. At the same time, the woman we see appears too old to be a schoolgirl, and this emphasizes the 'fictional' or pornographicfantasy-sketch traits of the scene. (These terms are of uncertain status in the diegesis, however: we later discover that Annabelle was - perhaps even still is? - attending a girls' school when Hobbes met her, so the costume is 'really' hers; and she is identified as being nineteen years old, that is, not below the age of consent, though perhaps she was when Hobbes began his liaison with her.) We see Annabelle hid-

36 The Artist as Monster

ing, cowering, fleeing, at last being caught. She is thrown upon a couch, where she appears to make a gesture of sexual welcome, but is met by Hobbes's violent assault. Her strangulation is presented with a particular emphasis on her bucking torso and pelvis, her legs thrashing and spreading, her underwear visible beneath as her short skirt rides up. Again, these elements exist for the heterosexual male viewer's 'pleasure/ not the male character-participant's. Hobbes then (1) places a strip of tape across her mouth (an action that symbolically reifies the female); (2) lays Annabelle's body on the dining room table (sweeping its contents onto the floor in a further gesture of recklessness); (3) rips open her blouse (baring her breasts); (4) stripped to the waist himself and wearing a surgical mask, takes up a scalpel and cuts open her abdomen (a low camera angle allows this to be presented unambiguously but not with complete explicitness); (5) pries open the wound with a slight tearing sound (blood begins to pour down the side of the torso); (6) pours acid into the wound (a crackling sound is heard and smokey fumes rise from the body); and (7) slits his own throat with the scalpel. This is Cronenberg's idea of 'playing doctor/ The sadistic transgressiveness of the whole spectacle is beyond question, and is only heightened by its intercutting, at first, with the excessively 'nice' visit of a model young couple to the manager's office - a derisive idealization along the lines of the voice-over commercial we have just heard. The post-homicide 'operation' is then intercut with Nicholas Tudor's bathroom convulsions and nastily laconic breakfast with his wife. This trio of intershuffled scenes is in fact a kind of quick spectral analysis of male-female relations, and of ways of representing them: absurdly innocent (the couple shopping for an apartment), theatrically sexual, male-predatory, and violent (Hobbes and Annabelle), and restrainedly, 'realistically/ anxious/hostile (the Tudors). As the film proceeds this range of behaviours, and representations, will be extrapolated and enlarged. But the Hobbes/Annabelle scene is a blatant provocation, arousing transgressive male desire and virtuous horror together, and setting the tone for the exposition of a sexual appetite that is repeatedly 'perverted/ 'sinful/ 'outrageous/ 'bad/ Monstrous sex This sexuality is specifically connected also with the parasites, and with the disgust they arouse; so that there is, in a sense, already an inbuilt punishment for predatory and transgressive sexuality in the

Shivers

37

film. This idea, of a simultaneity of appetite and fear, of transgression and punishment, seems to me an important (though latent) one in Shivers, and one that consistently recurs, with growing self-consciousness, in the later films. The axiomatic association of transgressive sexuality and wormlike parasites is of course continued throughout Shivers, and reaches its culmination, perhaps, in the extraordinary, thematically explicit scene that precedes the revelation that Forsythe has been 'taken over' by parasites. Forsythe herself assumes the predominant role of 'female object of male desire' rather dramatically when she performs a diegetically unmotivated striptease for the apparently unaffected St Luc (and of course primarily for the scopophilic film viewer), and carries that role through a variety of situations, including two sexual attacks by parasite-crazed men. After St Luc has 'rescued' her from a second sexual assault in the underground parking lot, and they have reached what seems like sanctuary in the basement of the complex, Forsythe delivers the following remarkable speech: Roger, I had a very disturbing dream last night. In this dream, I found myself making love to a strange man. Only I'm having trouble, you see, because he's old and dying, and he smells bad, and I find him repulsive. But then he tells me that everything is erotic, that everything is sexual. You know what I mean? He tells me that even old flesh is erotic flesh, that disease is the love of two kinds of alien creatures for each other - that even dying is an act of eroticism. That talking is sexual. That breathing is sexual. That even to physically exist is sexual. And I believe him. And we make love beautifully.

Here sexuality transcends aggressiveness to enter those realms of Otherness that Stereo and Crimes of the Future had been gesturing towards with their ideas of 'omnisexuality' and 'new forms of sexuality/ In those films, however, these notions were only tenuously connected with ideas of bodily monstrosity, diseased mutation, and physical death. The drilled heads in Stereo and the 'creative cancers' and 'rootlike excrescences' in Crimes are merely hints at what in Shivers has become an explicitly monstrous phenomenon. For immediately after Forsythe has finished the speech just quoted, she leans forward to kiss St Luc, then arches her back, hisses, and opens her mouth for us to see, in horrified close-up, a parasite emerging from her esophagus into her mouth. The speech itself, for all its disturbing images and ideas, is per-

38 The Artist as Monster

haps recuperable into an ideology of at least partly desirable sexual liberation; but the image of the parasite is not recuperable at all: it can only provoke revulsion. Immediately thereafter, St Luc punches her on the jaw and binds her mouth with a white cloth, which quickly develops a parasite-bloodstain. For the remainder of this part of the film, she remains groggy and half-carried by St Luc (almost as if drunk), in a state of fetching dishevelment, and sporting the bloody mouthbandage: as much an image of transgressive male sexual fantasy as Annabelle had been. There are other scenes that depict women under attack, convert them to sexual spectacle in conditions of uncontrol. The most spectacular example is Betts and the parasite in the bathtub that swims into her vagina. Though this is presented in (for this film) an indirect rather than an explicit way, the idea alone is inevitably powerful enough to cause audible reaction in even hard-bitten horror audiences. And the ultimate effect of that parasite is to transform Betts into, as it were, the monster of aggressive female sexuality that Barbara Steele (with her Italian horror movie credits by the dozen) already archetypally invokes, her 'sisterhood' with Janine amplified into a transgressive lesbianism. Other scenes are more marginal. The markedly respectable middle-class mother on the elevator (her white-dressed elevenish daughter as well) is seen 'all mussed up' and sexualized. The old woman in the laundry room is first seen writhing on the floor during the parasite's attack, and later decked in makeup and evening dress issuing a come-hither to St Luc as he walks down a hallway. Thrashing legs in particular seem to be something of an obsession: Annabelle, the laundry-room woman, and the mother in the elevator are all rendered voyeuristic objects at the height of frenzied reactive bodily movements as their skirts ride up their legs.11 In the case of the old woman in the laundry room, as in a number of others involving males (e.g., Brad and the incestuous patriarch), the notion broached in Forsythe's dream-speech of the sexuality of old age and decaying bodies, the notion of 'having some trouble' with it, is to some extent illustrated. If Annabelle and Forsythe-with-parasite constitute 'classic' erotic fantasy-objectifications involving the subjugation of young women, those involving the middle-aged or older women have an equally transgressive force in sexualizing women who are not 'normally' (i.e., in mainstream male fantasy) seen as sexual. There is a strongly ambivalent quality, though, about this latter sexualization, which partakes of that connection between sexuality and disease/death on which we have already remarked.

Shivers 39 Ethics There is, then, a catalogue of scenes in Shivers that present aggression and violence against women for the (male) viewer's sexual pleasure. There is also a representation of sexuality itself in terms of bodily monstrosity, of disease and alarming mutation, of a virulent plague whose primal site is the viscera. Indeed, these two phenomena (related to each other) could be said to constitute the film's 'hot button/ which is pushed repeatedly and with maximum 'sensational' effect. And yet there exists simultaneously with this wild picture of transgressive desire another perspective on sexual relations in the film. It presents them, more 'naturalistically' and less 'sensationally/ as a subset of human relations in general, and subject to an ethics of human conduct. From this perspective, a pattern emerges - a pattern in which men are arrogant and narcissistic and at the very least fail in their obligation to women, while women are sensitive and other-directed, but are neglected and mistreated. In short, (most) men are guilty and (most) women are not. The juxtaposition of this perspective with the film's 'sensational' presentation of women as the objects of transgressive desire constitutes the moral dichotomy I have referred to. Hobbes's abuse of his professional position to make sexual advances to young girls is a clear example of guilty maleness whose conformity to old stereotypes of patriarchal sin is emphasized by his age and social standing - and Hobbes's structural importance to the narrative as the 'originator' of the parasites (and thus the action as a whole) should not be overlooked. But more crucial and pervasive in this context is the behaviour of the film's two principal sets of male-female couples: Nicholas and Janine Tudor, and St Luc and Forsythe. We meet the Tudors before the appearance of any of the other major characters (unless the absconded patriarchal 'creator' Hobbes is deemed to be a major character). As characters, they are probably the most fully realized, recognizable, and naturalistic of any in the film (again, one can make this statement because of the relative 'flatness' and parodic qualities of the nominal protagonist St Luc). Indeed, Janine is undoubtedly the film's affective centre. While much of the social activity in the complex is presented to a degree satirically, and thus whatever sticky fate individuals meet is often held at arm's length, it is difficult to contain Janine Tudor's distress in this way. Her trajectory through the narrative is that of an almost unbroken series of new sufferings, and this virtually soap-opera status might be thought of as another satirical

40 The Artist as Monster

portrait; but too many of her scenes belie such an interpretation. There is nothing comic in the brutality with which she is snubbed by Nicholas in that first breakfast scene. Her fear that her husband's strange symptoms - physical and psychological - might stem from a literal cancer whose existence he might be trying to conceal and disavow is quite recognizable as the kind of fear actual people suffer under such circumstances, and there is nothing to laugh at in that. When she finds him collapsed in front of an open refrigerator in their darkened apartment, when she tries to comfort and minister to him, when she is rebuffed with hostile indifference and then suddenly finds herself the object of his inflamed desire, when altogether she tries to accommodate to all of her husband's 'unreasonableness' out of a compassionate awareness of what he must be going through himself, she is not just a pathetic figure but an admirable one. Her pain is difficult for the viewer to avoid or discount. Nor is she in any way 'exploited' as a female object-of-desire by the film (unlike, for example, Annabelle, Forsythe, or Betts) - unless it is in the very scene of her sexualization by Betts's kiss. Although she is confused and distracted during this scene, and once again the victim of an unwanted sexual advance, there is nevertheless something appropriate in her recuperation to a lesbian sexuality after the heterosexuality of her marriage has been so comprehensively damaged by her husband. Nicholas is an interesting figure. His principal characteristic is that of narcissism. In his first shot he is looking into the mirror. He probes his abdomen with obsessive interest; his relation to the parasites in his torso is one of fascination, protectiveness, even love. Although he has been having an affair with Annabelle, from whom he has 'caught' the parasites, throughout the film he displays no appetite for sexual contact with anyone (except for the one scene in which he is swept with a sudden lustful desire for his wife), and instead appears absorbed with almost onanistic concentration upon himself, his own body, his own parasites, and scarcely even notices other people. This inner-directed behaviour is unique among parasite-hosts in the film. His distraction even becomes evident at the office, where his secretary is maternally concerned about his health and assumes he has an ulcer (like so many other insurance executives, no doubt). Both this diagnosis and Janine's worry, that he is seized with a terrible anxiety about the probably cancerous growths in his body, could not be more mistaken. Nicholas's self-absorption and hostility towards sympathetic inquiry from Janine is again 'recognizable': it corresponds to one way alienated husbands

Shivers

41

can behave towards their wives. So that his detachment and hostility, like Janine's distress, can be read as it were literally, and without reference to the parasite-narrative - or at least it is recognizable if read in this way. What is understood in this 'literal' reading is that the Tudor marriage is a sick one, all right, but that its sickness has nothing to do with parasites from a horror-movie narrative. The husband has withdrawn emotionally from the relationship, and has been having an affair; he is distracted, obsessed with his own body and its requirements and appetites. The wife is upset and anxious, and her wrong diagnosis may screen a worry not only as to the husband's physical health, but as to the health of the marriage - a worry that would be justified, since Nicholas has indeed been unfaithful. The picture presented here has no sympathy to extend to the husband: his behaviour is callous and dismissive, or else actively reprehensible. His one expression of 'affection' for his wife (and it is not affection but parasite-driven appetite) culminates in a demand for sexual compliance, stated as a marital right, and includes physical brutality: You will make love to me, won't you Janine? You're my wife. You start it, I think Fve forgotten how to. [he starts to undress her, she resists, he slaps her] Make love to me, Janine! You're my wife!

Janine, by contrast, is portrayed as a caring and vulnerable person mistreated by a male, and is able to get attention and sympathy only from a female friend, Betts. It is not that the film observes the Tudor marriage with extraordinary insight or that its parties are figured with unusual depth or detail in absolute terms; what is significant is that this is the case relative to the horror-narrative taking place around it, and as a counterbalance to the often derisory portrayal of other characters in the film. And in this 'realist' environment, as opposed to the gaudy and sometimes almost cartoon-like excesses of the horror-narrative, women are not fetishized erotic spectacles to be savaged but rather human beings ignored and mistreated by the men close to them. An inadequate hero To a lesser degree, this general statement applies even to the couple of St Luc and Forsythe. Forsythe certainly does play a role as sexual object for the heterosexual male viewer, in virtually her every appear-

42 The Artist as Monster

ance in fact. But just as in the opening murder scene Annabelle is a sexual object for the film but not for her male murderer, so Forsythe, despite her apparent status as St Luc's 'girlfriend/ is not really a sexual object for him. In a particularly marked fashion, he evades her initiatives to kiss and caress, studiously ignores her striptease, and in general refuses to respond to her in any way with overt sexuality notwithstanding her invitations to do so.12 This is quite in keeping with the presentation of St Luc as a figure of exemplary detachment and control - the film's ultimate rational ego-subject perhaps. It is therefore equally fitting that he should occupy, however inadequately, the role of protagonist and last victim of the parasites. His character is in any case preferred ironically (i.e., critically) by the film. His principal attribute is a kind of politician's all-purpose, rather fake-sounding, heartiness and confidence. His self-assurance is, in fact, excessive from the start, and it is not too long before viewers begin to look upon him as something of a fool and even as one of the butts of the film's wicked sense of fun. But his very self-confidence marks him as (at least the closest thing in this film to) the character who unravels the mystery, conducts a battle with the forces of evil, and reinstates order at the end. Of course the narrative resists this 'solution' entirely, and leaves this character-position hanging out to dry. St Luc fails to perform the role of protagonist as he should: he does not avert or contain the disaster, he does not escape it himself. Since he functions as an exemplar of the principle of ego-control (as against that of the body and desire), his failure has obvious thematic relevance. After slipping away from so many of Forsythe's advances, he is nailed down at last by her parasite-passing kiss in the pool at the end, amidst scenes of communal celebration; and this time he will stay sexualized. This certainly represents an inversion of the more common pattern of sexually pursuing male and elusive female.13 But it also evokes a satisfaction in the male-voyeuristic viewer: throughout the narrative this character, on those occasions when he has acted as the ego-stand-in for the heterosexual male viewer, has behaved with frustrating indifference to the available sexual favours of Forsythe - now that viewer is avenged. In this final conflict, the viewer takes the side of Forsythe against St Luc. Part of St Luc's inadequate masculinity in the roles of both master-of-the-narrative and sexual-stand-in lies specifically in his failure to protect Forsythe. As the film jumps from one scene to another of the epidemic's spread through the complex, the most recurring

Shivers

43

thread is that of St Luc and Forsythe in flight from the danger. St Luc's specific role, as male hero, is to 'save' his female companion from assaults by sex-crazed monsters. Forsythe is in fact assaulted twice (and again, this is only to be expected of her specifically given her status as fetishized female object of desire). The first time, when a roaming sex-zombie forces his way into her apartment while she is domestically cooking supper for her man, she fights him off with the carving fork. The second, when she is assaulted in the underground garage by the security guard (formerly a 'nice' reader of Harlequin romances), St Luc apparently does save her, by shooting the assailant twice in the back with marked brutality. But he has not really saved her, because, as becomes apparent later, this is the point at which the parasites enter her. If the victory of the parasites over Nicholas Tudor was a kind of symbol for Janine's loss of her husband, their victory over Forsythe represents her triumph over St Luc, and the film's and the viewer's triumph over that frustrating and inadequate figure. Forsythe, meanwhile, does not fall definitively into either of the categories of character outlined above. Rather she seems to occupy both at different times: she is at some points a fantasy-object and at others a more 'human' character. She seems also to run the gamut in herself of various female roles with respect to men: for instance, nurse/professional person, girlfriend, cook, 'girl Friday,' vulnerable rape victim needing to be rescued. To a degree she personifies the whole problem of female sexuality for the film. She is both attractive and sexually alive, possessing a sexual appetite; she also has a 'human face' - if not to the same degree as Janine Tudor. After filling all the female roles just listed, she delivers the speech about omni-eroticism, with all its disturbing overtones of disease, decay, and disgust as well as its 'liberal' welcome of Otherness. (This philosophy of sexual liberation is not only compromised by its association with the parasite inhabiting her, but also by its foundation in a rape from which the male has failed to save her.) And then of course she subdues St Luc's resistive, self-controlled anti-sexuality in the swimming pool. The sexuality she represents (in the imagination of the film's male sensibility) seems appealing and appalling in equal measure. A positive response to her is greatly aided by the inadequacy in so many respects of her male counterpart, St Luc, and hence the inadequacy of the principle of ego-control for which he stands. In any event, this bifocal perspective is very revealing of the film's starkly varying attitudes towards female sexuality.

44 The Artist as Monster Grand dichotomy

We may say, then, that Shivers is not so much ambivalent as it is dichotomous in its sexual politics. As a horror film, and in conformity with Cronenberg's notions of the artistic activity whereby it is the artist's duty fearlessly to plumb the transgressive depths of his being, the film displays predatory, sadistic male sexual fantasy in some 'sensationally' explicit ways. The numerous depictions of sexual assault, murder, and violation all fall into this category. These depictions are also associated, as all forms of liberated sexuality in the film are, with the disgusting and predatory parasites. On the other hand, the more the film approaches a 'naturalistic' realm (non-generic, non-ironic), the more clearly there is an assignation of moral and ethical responsibility - and that responsibility shows men as guilty to a greater or lesser degree. This is what may be called the film's 'human' realm, as opposed to that realm of irony, pastiche, abstraction, and generic meta-conventions, where mad scientists, parasites, and quasi-pornography rule. In Shivers the dichotomy between these two realms - not thematic at all, but rather affective - is not resolved or balanced, or even, really, acknowledged. In this respect the film remains unselfconscious, or perhaps unselfknowing. In Cronenberg's subsequent films, the breach between the 'human' and the transgressive, though not healed at all, will become more and more clearly articulated and understood; and there will be a greater and greater emphasis on the human cost of transgression. Nevertheless, Shivers has stated the problem far more directly and dramatically than its predecessors ever did. It enunciates with much greater force the peculiar fascination with transgressing both ethicalsocial and ego-boundaries, with the potential Otherness of the body, and with the indigestible mixture of attraction and revulsion, existential courage, and moral anguish which that transgressive bodily realm inspires. The bewilderment with which the filmmaker greets these prospects is evident in the wildly divergent reactions towards each side of the boundary: the human/social is cold and empty (the architecture, St Luc) and also empathetic and suffering (Janine Tudor); the female/sexual is seductive and inflaming (Forsythe, Annabelle) and also disgusting and horrifying (the parasites, the abjection, and automatism of their victims). In this context, Forsythe's dream-narration is a locus of particular intensity. Here we encounter one of the most articulate statements of a recurring idea in Cronenberg's work: a definition of horrific Otherness which attempts to embrace its difference, a stance

Shivers

45

towards the complex of the body/desire/decay/death which states the case of that complex as against ego-rationalism as strongly as possible. Monstrosity is not monstrous to the monster; bodily decay and dissolution is not destructive to the organic agents of that process: 'disease is the love of two kinds of alien creatures for each other/ This viewpoint postulates a kind of zero-sum economy whereby a debit in one part of the equation (disease, dissolution, death in the realm of the 'autonomous' ego-subject) is recovered as a credit in another part of the equation (the health of 'alien creatures/ the success of cancer cells). A sign in Rollo Linsky's office reads: 'Sex is the invention of a clever venereal disease/ and he himself, paraphrasing Hobbes's original medical project, says: Breed a parasite that you implant into the human body cavity; it hooks into the circulatory system, and it filters the blood just like a kidney does. So what if it takes a little blood for itself once in a while? ... Instead of a diseased kidney you have a perfectly good parasite.

Even when the parasites have been converted to personality sexualizers, even when they run rampant through and between humans and annihilate their ego-rationality, they remain 'perfectly good parasites/ Whatever is destructive to the ego-self is to the benefit of the bodilyOther. The strongest inflection of this perspective is seen in its association of the Other, the killer-of-the-self, with sexual desire: 'even dying is an act of eroticism/ Nor is the identification of Eros with Thanatos of that oblivion-seeking Romantic Liebestod variety: it is not some nameless enveloping darkness that will extinguish the self - it is crawling parasites and virulent cancer cells. At base, not only cancerous or parasite-transformed body parts are troubling (one should perhaps say panic-inducing): 'ordinary' or 'healthy' body parts are equally so. It is the mere existence of body insides, the organic foundation of life itself, that is the source of anxiety and fascination. The smooth outer body is (to repeat the figuration deriving from Kristeva and elaborated by feminist psychoanalysis) a space of rational control and unproblematic instrumentality, masculine; the inner body is unfixable, fluid, secret, evading knowledge and control, feminine. The outer body and the rational faculty, the masculine ego-subject, is Self; the inner body with the instincts and passions attributed to it is Other. From this perspective 'perfectly good' internal organs already are parasites. The transformation of this 'normal' vis-

46 The Artist as Monster

ceral inner body into a site of mutation and disease is merely a symptom of its status as Other to the imagining consciousness. Again, sexuality, and the visceral attraction of the female fall naturally into this space as well. Whenever ego-rationality thinks it can manipulate and reformulate this space, as in Hobbes's project or any of the other scientific adventures in Cronenberg's films, the unconscious and the body are merely goaded into monstrous external life, with results disastrous to ego-rationality. Shivers, through the massive escalation of excitement and incipient panic conveyed by its graphic depictions of viscerality, sexuality, and disease, defines Cronenberg's landscape in a foundational way. The air of naughty humour, of satire and clever detachment, carry over recognizably from Crimes of the Future, and the same mood is found in Rabid too. Certain moments in Shivers are so exuberantly sketched as to be outright comical. One thinks for example of the scene in which the parasite that Nicholas Tudor has vomited over his balcony rail lands on the clear plastic umbrella of a pair of old ladies out for a walk, and they mistake this mess for a disoriented and now deceased bird. Rollo Linsky's cheerfully coarse manner, the phallic pickle he eats in his first scene, and the even more phallic eel that appears in his aquarium as he is telling St Luc about Hobbes's true motives on the telephone (and as Forsythe is performing her striptease for St Luc), are further examples. It is a mistake, however, to think the film is only or even basically detached or amused: compassion and sadness may be rendered less visible by the derisive humour, but they are there nevertheless. They are, moreover, early harbingers of a central and inexorable movement in Cronenberg's films away from detachment and towards grief and despair, as also away from any notions of the possible friendliness or liveableness of the Other and towards a recognition of its poisonous destructiveness. In Shivers, St Luc is riotously immersed in the waters of parasite-sexual Otherness, and this outcome is felt by the film (and the viewer) to be rather a good thing. In The Fly (to take an almost random example from the uniformly depressive later films) the protagonist - a far more sympathetic and 'human' figure than St Luc - is transformed into a horrifying inhuman monster and begs to be killed, and this outcome is felt by the film (and the viewer) to be deeply pathetic and indeed tragic. Mise en scene Some attention needs to be paid, lastly, to the cinematic style of Shivers.

Shivers

47

The film's basic visual stance (and it is to remain a distinctive feature of all Cronenberg's films) is one of a strongly composed, static, wideangle viewpoint. This viewpoint is in no way complicit with the satirical or derisive elements of Shivers: rather it adds a kind of cold, highmodernist seriousness and fastidiousness that casts an almost disapproving light on these hijinks. In this dominant mode, the director's camera is inevitably calm, formally objective, and detached. It is a stance that conveys aesthetic distance and a sense of the inability (as well as the unwillingness) to interfere. These are qualities emphasized also in the musical score:14 moments conveying the progress or extent of the damage, or foretelling it, will frequently be accompanied by serious or melancholy music. Perhaps the most characteristic shot in Shivers - and it has its equivalents in Rabid and The Brood - is a long shot of the exterior of the complex by night, in which the chaos and violence we know to be going on inside are distanced into a formal composition: both the building and the shot itself are clean, balanced, hard-surfaced, with an attractiveness at once ironic, sinister, and sad because it is so removed from the realities within. An utterly contrasting visual technique is employed for the horrific moments of parasitic attack and other assaults. Here there are flurries of wild hand-held movement, staccato editing, and (very occasionally) slow motion. It is a style of the utmost energetic disorder, and it is associated exclusively with violence, or the threat of violence. It is difficult not to see in this dichotomy of styles a distinct parallel to the film's thematic dichotomy of ego-rationality and body. The ruling style of formalist detachment is the view of ego-subjectivity and control; the frenzied visual mess of the action scenes corresponds to the chaotic and violent world of desire and the body. One might say further that the mise en scene is always used to add an extra dimension or create a meaningful context for the action. The stylish elegance of the settings is continuously played against the horrors of the drama, in a dialectic of style and content that repeats in the realms of setting and narrative the dichotomy of shot types just described. The approach is exemplified in the brilliant floor-level shot of the clean, antiseptic bathroom into which Nicholas Tudor stumbles after having his seizure by the fireplace: retching convulsively into the tub, he dribbles blood onto the toilet seat, pulls down a pair of neat, symmetrically arranged towels to wipe his mouth, and finally lurches out again, leaving the shot as it began except for the disarray of towels and a solitary stain of blood against the white porcelain of the toilet.

48 The Artist as Monster

This shot, small and relatively unimportant as it is, can nevertheless stand as an example of Cronenberg's deftness and subtlety in handling the visual apparatus to create a particular aesthetic viewpoint on the events of the narrative. With its fixed Ozu-like camera angle, its beginning and ending in unpopulated space, its use of doorways to frame and conceal the action by turns, and its progression from order to disorder within the context of a detached formal composition, the shot is an anthology of cinematic virtues and an index of the director's control and restraint. Innumerable examples of a similar nature might be adduced, wherein Cronenberg makes creative use of the indirectly lit corridors, glass-and-marble lobby, noirish underground garage, and elegant apartment furnishings of the complex. In general the overt artiness, the echoes of fifties and sixties underground cinema, which had been so much to the foreground in Stereo and Crimes of the Future, are now subdued - subdued but still perceptible working under the surface of mainstream-narrative visual grammar and procedures. Cronenberg the visual artist will be a relatively subtle presence in the films up to Videodrome: his presence in Shivers takes the form of a tight, sharp, clean presentation of events, an unobtrusive sensitivity to setting and details of wise en scene, and that atmosphere of coolness and detachment which offsets so strikingly the sensationalism of the subject.

CHAPTER FOUR

Rabid (1976) 'I really like seeing these movies'

The similarities between Shivers and David Cronenberg's next film, Rabid, are extensive and unmistakable. Once more there is a medically sourced plague that turns people from normal citizens into ravening maniacs. This time the plague has not even a tinge of the ambivalence that Shivers''s sexual transformation contains. Instead of an aphrodisiac-plus-disease, the virulent rabies-like pestilence is disease pure and simple. Its symptoms are ugly: rheumy eyes and puffy yellowish complexion, green froth foaming from the mouth, and (shared with Shivers) a gleeful and vicious appetite for flesh. Moreover, after a brief stupor and a somewhat more extended period of raging violence, the victims invariably go into a coma and die - if indeed they are not shot down like mad dogs by police or soldiers beforehand. As in Shivers, the field of action spreads from the confines of a self-contained institution (Starliner Towers in the previous film, the Keloid Clinic for plastic surgery in this one) into the community at large. One might even say that Rabid's narrative is a continuation of that of Shivers: here is what happens when the plague gets to Montreal. The cause of the plague is again medical experimentation. Dr Dan Keloid performs radical and untried plastic surgery upon a young woman, Rose, who has been critically injured in a motorcycle accident and cannot be taken to a large hospital in time to save her life. This, we are given to understand, is the only means available to treat the terrible and otherwise certainly fatal injuries to her abdomen and chest. Ignoring warnings from his wife and fellow-surgeon that 'terminal cancer' is a risk, Keloid proceeds with the operation. But although Rose lives, there is a quite unforseen side-effect of the treatment. Waking up after weeks of unconsciousness, she discovers that the only nourishment

50 The Artist as Monster

her body will accept is human blood, and that she has developed a completely new organ for extracting it - a kind of organic spike that 'lives' behind a puckered fleshy orifice in her armpit, and which she can drive into her victims while embracing them. In effect she is a vampire. Her food sources then develop their own catastrophic side-effect: terminal rabies, which they spread to others by biting them in uncontrollable raging fits. Once again, the mindless and compulsive behaviour of the 'monsters' and the epidemic nature of the condition recall Night of the Living Dead, as well as Shivers. Transgressive desire In Rabid there is again that trangressively desiring medical 'operation' on the female viscera that we have already seen in Shivers and that once more reflects the way in which 'scientific' projects in Cronenberg are distorted by or are simply masks for sexual desire. There is, however, no suggestion that Dr Keloid's reasons for operating are being twisted by a personal appetite at the prospect of cutting into the torso of a sexually attractive young woman.1 Once again, it is the viewer whose 'pleasure' is being served in this fashion - it is the film that is acting transgressively rather than the character. The sequence depicting Rose's operation confines itself to the removal and storage of strips of skin to be used as grafts, but Keloid's voice-over speech reproduces that combination of coldly technical language overlaid upon the body of desire that has been a feature of the films ever since Stereo: We're removing full-thickness thigh material from the patient's thighs, as per normal graft-aquisition procedure. However, before applying grafts to the damaged areas of the patient's breasts, abdomen and so on, we're going to treat them so that they become morphogenetically neutral.

Keloid goes on to describe the ability of this 'neutral' tissue to transform itself into any specific body tissue and compares it with human embryo tissue;2 he also talks about the 'possibility that carcinomas will form when neutral field grafts are used internally.' It is the thighs, breasts, and viscera of the woman that have somehow become the focus of this medical experiment, and 'creative cancer' is already lurking in the wings. What is striking in this respect about the films of the 1970s, and especially Shivers, Rabid, and The Brood, is the process of disavowal of desire

Rabid

51

that informs their characterization of the male originators of these 'operations/ All the medical projects carry disastrous consequences including for their perpetrators. The unwillingness of the films to assign commensurate blame for the disasters implies a 'fairness' and a kind of philosophical resignation in the narratives and the overt thematics of the films. These things happen, the films seem to say, but it's not really anybody's fault. The process doubles or disavows the activities of desire: transgressive sexuality arises in the narrative, but its origins in the narrative are obscured by the idealism of its producing scientists and the innocence of its female carriers. At the same time, this process is nested in the larger shell of a doubling or balancing of the activities of the films themselves: they display transgressive sexuality, but the display is accompanied not just by appetite but also by an awareness of the destructive human consequences of transgression. The films indulge 'sick appetites,' and are also sickened by them. But this dualism does not appear as yet to be very well understood by the films themselves. A layered heroine A similar dualism is to be found in the film's central character, Rose. She is both the film's traditional horror monster (she attacks people with an unholy mutant organ, causing a terrible epidemic killing-disease) and an innocent victim of circumstances who suffers as much as any of those she infects with plague, in the end dying exactly as they do. She goes through most of the film bewildered and frightened. It is a long time before she understands that she is the cause of the epidemic, and when she begins to do so she is afflicted by guilt, although she is prevented by terror and isolation from simply surrendering herself. In these respects she hardly resembles the typical homicidal monster of a horror movie. Nevertheless, she does fill that place in the narrative. Moreover - and this is crucial - she is played by Marilyn Chambers, one of the first superstars of porno movies, here trying to move into a role that is at least to some degree more mainstream than usual. Since Marilyn Chambers is always-already a presence of sexual transgression,3 Rose takes on this quality as well - and it is allied immediately with raging aggressive appetite and spectacular disease and destruction in a way exactly parallelling the same cluster of associations in Shivers. But it is extremely strange and somehow characteristic that these dichotomous qualities, innocence and transgression, should occupy disconnected levels of the

52 The Artist as Monster

film. Diegetically, Rose is basically innocent and suffering and humanly sympathetic. Supra-diegetically, Marilyn Chambers is creating havoc with her horrifically powerful sexuality. What we are seeing here is a configuration that repeats the dualistic use of female characters in Shivers as objects of desire and as human subjects. The film presents Rose/Chambers alternately or even simultaneously as a cartoon-like or pornographic sex-object and as a more complex naturalistic character. The latter manifestation is always the narrative's 'official' presentation of this figure; the former is always covert and unacknowledged. The film looks at the body of this object of desire, delves into it, produces a 'creative cancer' sexualized mutation inside it, and turns the body into a compulsive, uncontrolled and uncontrollable sexualized weapon (whose effect is to turn others into equally uncontrolled bodies). Simultaneously it presents a human subject whose 'responsibility' for this spectacle of desire is absolutely minimal and whose human condition is indeed presented with an almost melodramatic pathos. As is the case in Shivers, what is unusual here is not the 'desire' half of this dualism, but the 'human' half. Most of the B-grade horror movies that Shivers and Rabid instantly resemble are characterized by the wholesale willingness to reduce characters simply to carriers or symptoms of desire, to flatten them into various spectacles of abject sexuality or violence. The fact that Cronenberg's horror movies are similarly willing to undertake this reduction, and to offer these spectacles, is exactly what produces the resemblance. One of the things that distinguishes Cronenberg's work from its generic siblings is the fact that even early works like Shivers and Rabid - and obviously later works like The Fly or Dead Ringers - present something other than a spectacle of desire or horror, and in particular present an empathetic perspective of human sadness and suffering. As Cronenberg's films follow in succession, it becomes a more and more essential quality of them to centralize this compassionate perspective, to track down its relation to the spectacle of desire and question its inability simply to supplant that spectacle, and ultimately to identify the configuration desire/compassion as a site of melancholy and paralysis. The attacks (1) In Rabid further perspectives in the dichotomy of transgressive desire and human responsibility are suggested in the scenes depicting Rose's

Rabid

53

actual attacks, which carry consistent but often diegetically unacknowledged sexual overtones. A systematic examination of them will reveal the range of the film's play around the borders of, or in the alternation of, transgression and moral responsibility. The first attack, on fellow-patient Lloyd Walsh, begins with his discovery of her thrashing around convulsively in her hospital bed, her breasts uncovered. Chambers's bare breasts are certainly a sexual image - though, as with the sexual display of Annabelle in Shivers, the narrative context lacks overt sexuality. But metanarratively (again as with the Annabelle scene) there is a kind of male-sexual-fantasy skit going on, with Lloyd as the male viewer's stand-in: man accidentally comes upon beautiful young woman semi-naked in a hospital room; his safety as a voyeur is guaranteed by the woman's unconsciousness; when she does awaken, she begs him to hold her because she is cold - another opportunity for covert sexual satisfaction. But here the male-fantasy aspects of the scene begin to be dissipated, and then reversed. Lloyd through his embarrassment makes it clear that there is a sexual display, and that it is inappropriate because of the woman's distracted condition. His behavior is conscientious: he offers to fetch medical staff and only reluctantly embraces her. The male voyeur is frustrated and rebuked by this development. But scarcely can this change of direction be registered than Rose strikes with her armpit spike, and the scene once more is sexualized (again metanarratively), and in an unexpected way that reverses the roles of sexual attacker and victim. The embrace becomes wild and convulsive, punctuated by gasps and moans, which then subside into quiet whimpers and shudders as Rose soothingly strokes Lloyd's head with post-coital tenderness. What is striking here is that the predatory-male viewer is first encouraged, then shamed, and finally punished with a sexual assault upon his erstwhile agent. The last reversal occurs as Keloid examines the unconscious Rose in her bed, when one of the nurses offers the theory that the wounded, nowamnesiac Lloyd had sexually molested Rose while she was comatose (I've seen things like that happen before'). The male viewer, perfectly capable of getting scopophilic pleasure from the unconscious Rose's exposed body, is now indignant that Lloyd has been unjustly accused of a similar offence, when the 'real' attacker was the female. The next attack, on a farmer, is also a punishment for sexual interest on the part of the male - but this time it is the character who is interested rather than the male viewer. The circumstances are inhospitable to sexual fantasy. It is cold and wet, and Rose is in a barn trying unsuccessfully

54 The Artist as Monster

to nourish herself with cow's blood. The barn is old, messy, and dirty, harshly lit with bare light bulbs, a completely opposite milieu from the clean and soothing comfort of such environments as Starliner Towers or the Keloid Clinic. Rose has just vomited up the cow's blood when a drunken and leering old man enters and staggers towards her with lecherous invitations. The male viewer certainly repudiates this figure as an ego stand-in, and his person, his manner, and his sexual advances are alike presented as disgusting. The situation repeats that conventional moment in so many mainstream narratives depicting a sexually aggressive male who is unwanted (not so much by the female target as by the audience) and bad, and whose punishment is promised and delivered for the viewer's pleasure. As the farmer lurches into an embrace, Rose stabs him in the eye with her spike - a fitting punishment for his ogling assault. This attack differs from the first, in that here the viewer knows what is coming and greets it with enjoyment. Sexual voyeurism and sexual fantasy are not only excluded but explicitly disclaimed and punished. The male viewer, accustomed to such volte-faces and hypocrisies, is quite prepared to feel indignation towards the farmer in this scene while in effect sharing his attitudes completely in others. What is interesting, at least to a degree, is the way in which male sexual appetite is diegeticized and thematized here. Rose's next victim is not male at all, but female. She is Judy Glassberg, a habitual patient at the clinic. In the scene that introduces her, she says to a nurse: Daddy didn't think the new nose was different enough, so Fm back for more alterations. I keep on saying it looks exactly like his, and he says That's why I want you to change it/

She is also carrying a copy of Ernest Jones's Life and Works of Sigmund Freud, and, gesturing to it, she adds a commentary on what she has just said: T'm terrified to find out what it really means/ (Incestuous desire of the father for the daughter seems the obvious explanation.)4 Judy is next seen relaxing in the clinic hot tub in the middle of the night when Rose is up and looking for food. Rose, complaining that 'my body aches all over,' simply descends into the hot tub with her clothes on (a flowing white dress), ignoring Judy's expressions of embarrassment and unease. Wearing a skimpy blue bikini and in a sprawling spread-legged posture suggesting sensual languor, Judy is a sexualized figure here though once again not narratively and not for her 'partner' Rose, but

Rabid 55 only for the male heterosexual viewer. Rose's approach and attack here are resolute, self-possessed, and commanding, a contrast with the first two and the next one. She is, more than in any of the other attacks, truly the 'male7 in this coupling; although as a sexual spectacle for the male viewer the scene more resembles perhaps the lesbian' conventional pornographic skit. Iconographically, the statuesque, blonde, Nordic Chambers and the smaller, dark, Jewish Judy make a striking contrast. Judy is drowned as well as infected, it would appear, although the decoupage of the scene, with its quick montage of thrashing close-ups and its final slow-motion rendering of Rose's blissful inclined face, is ambiguous. Later Judy's body turns up, stored in the freezer and horrifically posed with open eyes and mouth, as a shocking image of sexual transgression. This image is the closest thing in Rabid to the images in Shivers of explicit violence against females for the male viewer's sexual pleasure. It is an image of the abject aftermath of a sex murder - though again we may note that this is not what has occurred narratively. It is, as in Shivers, the film's sex murder rather than any of the characters', a fact that is only emphasized by the fact that it was plucked from its diegetically unimportant place in the film itself and installed on the film's poster and, later, video box-cover. It is undoubtedly the ugliest and most powerfully transgressive image in the film, though brief and curiously detached from the narrative. And like so many of the images of horrific bodily damage in Rabid, it is Rose's doing. Its metanarrative sexualization rings yet another change on the spectrum of sexuality and sexual violence associated with Rose's attacks, while at the same time existing like them in a space of ethical ambiguity. The attacks (2) The next attack, on Keloid himself, is similar in its visual depiction to the one on Lloyd. It is preceded by a scene in which Keloid comforts Rose in his most sympathetic and reassuring manner, and encourages her to confide her anxieties about her physical condition. There are some new ambiguities here. When Rose collapses onto Keloid's shoulder in distress, the viewer flinches in anticipation of another attack, only to discover that this is an ordinary frightened person seeking reassurance, not a vampire on the rampage. This is the moment that best brings but the deep ambivalence of attack-as-embrace latent throughout the film, especially since at the end of the scene she does attack him through an embrace. Rose makes an anguished assessment

56 The Artist as Monster

of her bodily mutation (Tm hideous, doctor - I'm a monster'), which Keloid of course takes as a metaphorical reference to some cosmetic unsightliness resulting from her operation, rather than in the literal sense intended by Rose and understood by the viewer. With considerable diffidence she shows him her armpit orifice - at its most vaginal, or perhaps anal, in this scene - and after she is allowed to conceal it she again relaxes, in a manner recognizable from any intimate medical examination. That very intimacy brings out the ambiguity of male doctors' examinations of female patients, namely, the institutional power relations and the constant lurking possibility of covert sexuality and sexual aggression (this theme gets a very thorough and explicit workout indeed in Dead Ringers). Keloid seems quite innocent of any such intent, but it lurks nevertheless, is not impalpable to the viewer, and is associated with the coming attack. Notable too is Rose's answer to Keloid's expectation that she feels weak after the operation and her rejection of intravenous nourishment: 1 feel strong. I feel very strong/ The assault itself carries exactly the same suggestion of intercourse as the one on Lloyd, with rhythmic spasms, whimpers and cries, climax and subsidence, followed by tender head-stroking. The reversal depicted in this scene - wherein active power is transferred from the patriarchal doctor to the female patient and passive subservience is transferred from the object of examination to the examiner - ends with the spectacle of the sexually powerful female consuming the male like a black widow spider. The remainder of Rose's attacks are elided in their presentation, as the film shifts more of its attention to the activities of the victims and their victims, but it is worth cataloguing them within this thematic typology and with a view to arriving at some sense of the sexual and moral standing of the attacks as a whole. The next to suffer is a truck driver named Smooth Eddy, who picks up Rose as she is hitchhiking along the highway in tight jeans and high boots. Eddy is helpful and supportive, offering Rose some of his 'steak on a bun,' and soothing her with offers of soup at the next stop when she is unable to tolerate the sandwich and vomits it up by the roadside. He is later seen dazedly talking with a policeman and sporting a decorously bleeding puncture under his right ear. The attack itself, like all the remaining ones, is not seen. The sexuality of the two characters remains very much unstated, and there is in particular no suggestion that Eddy is behaving in a sexually unwelcome way or even that he has a sexual interest in Rose (once more, it is the heterosexual male viewer who

Rabid

57

most plainly has that). The offer of soup even carries overtones of mother-like care - a faint feature also of Lloyd's and Keloid's attitudes towards Rose before their attacks. Of course some sort of embrace is necessary for an attack to take place, and it is hard to imagine how Eddy could have gotten the side of his face next to Rose's armpit in an utterly unsexual situation. In complete contrast is the next attack, which most explicitly 'places' the assault in the context of Rose's sexual allure and connects the 'punishment' of the attack to the exercise of a sexual appetite. Now she is in Montreal, staying with her friend Mindy, and suffering racking abdominal convulsions in her need for blood. Her condition begins obliquely to suggest that of a drug addict - with its compulsive ingestion, attempts to 'kick,' withdrawal symptoms, and guilty relapses.5 (It is a condition to which Cronenberg will return more directly in later films.) For the first time she premeditates an attack, and must therefore choose a victim. Her decision is to seek out the (morally) lowest form of the human species she can easily find: if anyone must suffer it ought at least to be someone doing something indefensible. Thus it is that she buys an admission to a porno movie theatre (the 'Eve,' with a pair of spread inverted female legs forming the V). The assumption is that mere attendance at such a film supports a presumption of guilt - a train of thought understood all too well by the male viewers of Rabid, especially anyone attracted to the film by the presence of Marilyn Chambers. Rose's appetite will be slaked upon someone indulging a sleazy appetite of his own; there is a kind of 'natural justice' in this. The social dynamics of porno-movie viewing in a theatrical setting are deftly recognized: the attendance of an attractive, unaccompanied young woman at this venue is an event so rare as to be prodigious. Rose, understanding this well, can broadcast come-hither signals without even trying. She has the status of a choice piece of meat sitting down in an arena of starving carnivores. The man who soon responds to her presence is a beautifully apt specimen. Thirtyish, bald but with a finely trimmed beard, leisuresuited, and wearing a saturnine and somewhat haughty expression of sexual self-confidence, this nameless person is an even more delectable target for sexual punishment than the drunken farmer. Rose's come-on is diabolically refined. In an artless tone she whispers: I really like seeing these movies, but men always bother me. I guess I'm a little paranoid.

58 The Artist as Monster

And when he offers to sit next to her so other men will think she is accompanied and not disturb her, she nestles her head against his shoulder as he puts his arm around her neck. Despite the heavy redolence of sexuality in the place, and in the activity of the man, the scene itself presents no sexual spectacle to the male viewer.6 There are instead delicious levels of irony for the viewer who can somehow avoid implication in the activity of sexual voyeurism (I say 'somehow/ but once again this kind of disavowal, inconsistency, and doublethink is a much-practised skill of almost every viewer). In any event, what is enacted is a male fantasy in which you, the heterosexual male, are attending a porno movie when what should happen but Marilyn Chambers comes in, sits near you, declares a guileless interest in watching sex films, and soon is cuddling up to you. As the man is just sliding his hand inside Rose's blouse, there is a close-up of her armpit spike unsheathing, and a cutaway. When the scene resumes, a .slow track across the glazed faces of the moviegoers ends by travelling past the yet-more-stupefied face of the man and onto a close-up of the erstwhile-groping hand showing a puncture wound. As with the leering eye of the farmer, so has the offending organ of this male sexual predator been punished with didactic justice. Notwithstanding the pleasures of irony, the scene is made at least somewhat more 'difficult7 for the male viewer, who will find it hard to crow too loudly over the fate of a male cinematic voyeur while himself actually watching a Marilyn Chambers movie. In any case, the scene makes it clear that Rabid is not a film that shares the assumptions of the average porno movie, and is quite prepared to turn its wrath grimly on viewers who might wish to see it simply in that light - whether as sexual spectacle, violence/horror spectacle, or any combination of the two. Rose's next attack is on her best friend Mindy, and, alone among all of them, is utterly devoid of sexual overtones of any kind. Moreover, it has a peculiar moral horror attached to it, since Mindy is not only a personal friend, but has been characterized as a particularly sympathetic and caring person. Her treatment of Rose is truly motherly, as she constantly soothes and ministers to her, applying compresses to her feverish forehead and tucking her into a bed covered with pinkand-white-checked sheets that carry a strong iconic suggestion of childhood and innocence. Like a good domestic caregiver, Mindy extends to Rose - as a loved one who is ill - the opportunity to regress to a childlike state of dependence and freedom from any responsibility or worry It is a position Rose would desperately like to be able to

Rabid

59

occupy; but she cannot. The compulsiveness and predatoriness of her behaviour are emphatically underlined in her victimization of Mindy, and the contrast between her role as vampire-monster and Mindy's guileless virginal kindness (and indeed Rose's own similar qualities of innocence) is a mirror of the film's larger equivocations regarding the protagonist's monster/victim status. At one point Rose bursts out in distress, 'Oh, Mindy I don't want it to be you!'; to which Mindy replies with typical compassionate obtuseness, 'Who else should it be but your best friend?' When her boyfriend Hart at last finds her, Rose is dressed in black, kneeling by Mindy's prostrate body with her spike exposed and her forearm across her face like a Bela Lugosi Dracula - absolutely at her most 'monstrous.' But the anguished quarrel that ensues, and Hart's accusation that she is the cause of the plague now overrunning Montreal, prompts her to move for the last time into the status of 'victim.' She conceives a suicidal 'experiment' whereby she will choose a stranger, suck his blood, and then wait for him to resume consciousness: if he is rabid, he will attack her and she will die too. It is completely characteristic that the stranger she chooses is a young man, and that her method of approach will be to encourage a pick-up - characteristic because it restores and perpetuates the heterosexual ground occupied by so many of the attacks, and because it intensifies the ambiguities and the currents of destructive power moving in both directions between the sexes that have underlain this whole crucial engine of the narrative. The nameless young man picked up by Rose has very few lines of dialogue and hardly any screen time; but his appearance (according to, say, an Eisensteinian typology of faces) immediately speaks niceness, intelligence, sensitivity. He is the obverse of the man in the porno theatre, Rose's other pick-up victim. The handsomely furnished lobby of Mindy's apartment building, and then the stylishly decorated room ('his place') to which the couple repairs, are also diametrically opposed to the saturated atmosphere of sleaze in the porno theatre. Moreover, the scene achieves a degree of grandeur, even, through the positioning as a prominent element of decor of a massive sculptural head cleft from the cranium through the face and lying on its side on the floor throughout the action. It is the culmination and symbol of all the splittings and doublings - of meanings, of motivations, of moral perspectives - animating the film. Rose's last victim is in no way deserving of his fate; yet his awful transformation and eventual death will be paid for with that of Rose herself, who, in the end,

60 The Artist as Monster

can scarcely be said to deserve her fate either. This action takes place on the field of heterosexual encounter, and it is perhaps in summation of all the encounters and all the attacks that the film presents this one as an unfathomable combination of sympathetic humanity and dangerous appetite. Female monster and human subject The specific nature of Rose's bodily monstrosity once more invokes the sexual realm without being literally sexual. The retractable armpit spike has routinely been spoken of as phallic or penis-like/ and insofar as it is a protruberant organ, located in a 'groin/ which grows 'erect' and achieves penetration during a quasi-sexual attack, it is plain that the description is appropriate. The implication of this perspective is thus that the attacks are rapes by a female, and it certainly heightens the component of sexuality in Rose's assaults. At the same time, when the spike is retracted the orifice may be described as vaginal, so the organ is actually bisexual, or perhaps 'omnisexual' (Wayne Drew aptly calls it 'a vagina with penile extension').8 In endowing its female protagonist with an assaultive capability that is usually biologically the preserve of males, and in presenting her as following the appetite it symbolizes in a series of sexualized predatory attacks, the film may be represented as expressing a horror of aggressive female sexuality,9 or even female sexuality as such. Rose's victims in the film are in effect penetrated by a vagina, and from a male heterosexual standpoint her organ may well function as a fitting symbol for a fear of female sexuality. Most ominously of all, an encounter with Rose introduces a contagion that first overthrows ego-rationality to enthrone rabid bestial compulsiveness and then kills. For male heterosexual viewers, then, Rabid's message might be translated as 'sex will kill your self,' or just 'sex kills.' But Rose's spike is not exactly the regulation vagina dentata (indeed, the specific anxiety it inspires may lie closer to a fear of needles and their sharp puncture of the body envelope than to an explicitly sexual anxiety). The organ is, rather, a vagina that acts like a penis, aggressive and penetrating. Again, it allows Rose to act like a male. It thus allows the spectacle of a female - moreover a female sexually charged for male viewers, Marilyn Chambers - behaving in ways normally reserved for the sexually transgressive males who both view this film and (in the form of characters) act as ego-stand-ins for male viewers. In short, Rose/Chambers acts both as an erotic fantasy-spectacle

Rabid

61

for heterosexual male viewers and as a punishment for those same transgressive desires in the same viewers. Simultaneously her vulnerable humanity (overlapping with the traditional role of innocent, victimized young woman) reproaches male viewers who wish to look upon the character exclusively as a sex object and/or a monster. So that although it is not incorrect to speak of the film's fear of female sexuality, or of its presentation of female activity as horrific, the fear and horror are accompanied by a number of offsetting qualities that render the male viewer's experience of this sex/horror film far more complex than a simple description of it as misogynistic might imply. To sum up, what the film does is to juxtapose conflicting perspectives on the female. She is the product (though more indirectly than in Shivers) of instrumental male ego-agency infected with desire as symbolized in 'radical' medical procedures. She is also a fantasy-projection of male desire and its accompanying fears. In both guises she is the nemesis of ego-subjectivity itself, because desire invokes the cluster of consequences loss-of-control/disease/chaos/panic/death. At the same time, the character has another, this time independent, function: she is an injured passenger in a road accident, not at all responsible for her condition, behaving in ways quite consistent with ethical normalcy in a highly abnormal situation, and finally as much a victim as anyone in the narrative. There is nothing dangerous or frightening about her rather she inspires sympathy and compassion. Switching between these two facets of the character allows the film alternately to transform the 'human' female into a dangerous expression of desire and to confront the fantasizing male viewer enmeshed in erotic/horrifying spectacle with the vulnerable 'human' female as a rebuke to his reifying and fetishizing activity. From this latter perspective, Rose may act as a vampire towards her food sources, but the male viewer is metaphorically every bit as much a vampire with respect to the film's spectacle of female sexuality and violence. In any event, even at this early stage of Cronenberg's work we may see the suggestion that however transgressively exciting women are, however dangerous, however horrifying, it is none of their doing. These are all processes happening in the male head (and especially the male authorial sensibility of the films), not in the historical world. This seems to me a perspective always present in Cronenberg's work, though it is often obscured through the difficulty the authorial sensibility appears to have at first in separating what is its rational apprehension and what is the apprehension of its desire. It is only with Videodrome that Cronenberg's films

62 The Artist as Monster

achieve a coherent, or at least what appears a fully self-conscious, articulation of this idea. The protagonist problem The mention of Videodrome, the film in which Cronenberg first really 'solved' the problem of the protagonist, reminds us that Rabid is the filmmaker's first attempt to address that problem. None of his earlier films had had a classical protagonist, though Shivers had at least flirted with the tools of developed characters and characters occupying protagonist-like positions in the narrative. Given that one of the subjects Cronenberg was to find most compelling was the question of ego-subjectivity, the identity of the self as a thing in some way separate from the body, and the fear of the loss of that ego-self through the activities of the body/desire/death, it is surprising in hindsight that the filmmaker should have taken so long to arrive at a workable protagonist. Certainly the bumblings, anomie, or satirical shallowness of the various male characters in Shivers fell far short of what was required to embody the Cronenbergian ego-subject. Rabid, The Brood, and even Scanners all fail to establish a male protagonist of sufficient complexity and/or narrative agency to fill the part. In fact the weakness of male protagonist-figures in the first three features is a striking aspect of these films. The first magnet for Cronenberg was desire and its relation to ego-subjectivity. Those two components could be translated on the one hand into 'sex/disease' and 'science' respectively, and on the other into 'female' and 'male.' And in this configuration, it was always the male ego-rationality studying the object of male desire and anxiety, namely 'female/disease.' But what Cronenberg had to say about the male-female relation could not really be said - at least not at first - in the conventional language of male and female central characters in relationship to each other. In the first place, there are no successful male-female sexual relationships in any Cronenberg film before Videodrome, and all the ones in subsequent films are deeply problematic to say the least. Then the early features have an impossible time trying to imagine a male protagonist who is capable or effective, or a female protagonist who is not threatening in some way. Female characters cannot escape from the dualism of Cronenberg's creative imagination, where they are either fantasy objects of desire or simply female-gendered human beings (most often sympathetic, very often victims of men or social institutions). As we saw, Shivers assigned most of its

Rabid

63

female characters into one category or the other, or else to a chameleon-like schizoid alternation (as in the case of Forsythe). Both categories in themselves excluded the female characters from playing a truly central narrative role - though it might be added that males were also excluded through another process. In Rabid this schizoid state is embodied in the character of Rose, who is made throughout the film to oscillate between object of desire/anxiety and human subject. In the light of the emphatic and highly consistent way in which Cronenberg's films eventually settled on a particular narratively dominant male character, it is extremely interesting that his first attempt at a protagonist should be female. In placing Rose, the monstrous-feminine/ suffering-woman, in the position of the character around which the narrative is organized, and through whose sensibility (to some extent at least) we are asked to interpret the action, Cronenberg has carried his dualism regarding women to the centre of the stage, though apparently without a full recognition of its components. In Rabid (as indeed in Shivers) the male sensibility, the cognitive or studying sensibility, takes up the position of the film's overt authorial voice, and stands outside the narrative except in fragmentary ways - for example, the embodiment of its instrumentality occurs in the scientist. The 'male protagonist' (Hart in this case) is actually an empty shell whose lack of instrumentality, and also inadequacy to perform heroic narrative functions, is almost didactically insisted upon. Meanwhile the film's object of study, or more accurately its object of fascination, is desire / the body itself: a female who arouses male desire and threatens male ego-subjectivity, a physically attractive and physically dangerous female, Rose. But as we have seen, the simultaneous rational recognition that women in the real world are every bit as 'human' as men, and that in particular the film's male sensibility is ethically bound to acknowledge that humanity even amidst its own paroxysms of desire and fear, leads to the split depiction of Rose as monster and person. Rose, then, has some of the functions and some of the privileges of a protagonist. Merely through narrative positioning she invokes a degree of viewer identification, and that identification almost always has the effect of demonstrifying and rehumanizing her. Although Rabid has as high a quotient of irony and corrosive humour as Shivers, it increases that element of pathos which attached to Janine Tudor in Shivers and adds a note of elegy, even tragedy, that is missing from the earlier film. We cannot react to the destruction of Rose with the same equanimity with which we behold the inhabitants of Starliner Towers

64 The Artist as Monster

at the end of Shivers, where the unsympathetic and the sympathetic characters alike have not apparently undergone any change for the worse through parasite infection. This remains true despite the fact that Rabid's depiction of catastrophic social transformation is often as satirical as Shivers's: the loss of detachment is among other things a by-product of Rose's status as protagonist. Rose's isolation and bewilderment, her dawning realization of the inescapable horror of her condition, and above all the devastating final depiction of her in death, all have an affective charge of sadness and grief that are quite new in Cronenberg's work. At the end of the film Rose's body, its clear eyes wide open and its blonde hair moving slightly in the breeze, has achieved iconically the seraphic peace and untrammelled beauty that it so often approached but never securely found during the action of the film. Now that she is removed from desire and has escaped the pinion of the film's male obsession with her female bodily sexuality and contagion and monstrosity, the sacrifice of her human self may be understood more piercingly, the innocence of her soul more unambiguously symbolized by the fairness of her countenance, the loss she represents more poignantly felt. In this scene of Rose's death we find the first powerful expression of what will become another of Cronenberg's central tropes: dereliction. Rose's body is seen lying in a dingy back alley, surrounded by plastic garbage bags, tugged on by a scavenging dog. Then she is picked up by the white-suited sanitation workers cleaning up the human detritus of the epidemic along with all the other refuse, and dumped into a garbage truck, where she is turned over into the mass of waste. 'Waste' is indeed the operative word here, waste and loss. The contrast between Rose's appearance and that of her derelict surroundings, the emphasis that she has passed from being something so valuable to being something so worthless, is brutal and desolate. It might be argued that Cronenberg's beautification of Rose (and of Chambers) in death is both sentimentalizing and eroticizing in the line of all the beautiful dead (or dying, or crippled, or blind) females throughout Romantic tradition; and it would be idle to deny that this strain of elegaic purity is the direct result of evacuating the character of the living, organic sexuality that threatens the male sensibility. Even the dim recognition that this innocent woman has been the victim of (our and the film's) filthy male desire is in keeping with the Victorian tradition of pious self-laceration. A darker shadow yet is cast by the thought that this image of the dead Rose - a dead Chambers - looks, in

Rabid

65

the movie's persistent context of sex and death, altogether too much like another image of a sex-crime victim. Like Judy Glassberg, Rose is in no sense this literally, diegetically; it is outside the story, in some world of the film's direct address to the viewer, that this connection occurs. To the very end, Rabid prevaricates on, and disavows, the whole question of transgressive desire and human subjectivity. But it remains true that in Rabid the latter human realm is greatly expanded from what it was in Shivers, and it is in the experience of the protagonist-persona of Rose, and our emotional sympathy for her, that this happens. So that at the end of the film, Rose herself - now indeed deprived of her troublesome characteristics - is enabled to stand in for death and loss as a universal characteristic of human experience in Cronenberg's sensibility. I have already used the word 'grandeur' to describe the scene that narratively prepares for this one, and it is a grand and elegaic note that the film finds in this last view of its protagonist. There is a sudden sense of moving to a sharper and deeper level of feeling here, a first touch of the resounding chord of sorrow and despair that will come to dominate his later films. The powerless male But the question of why this protagonist is not male when its originating sensibility is so fundamentally so has not been fully addressed. Elsewhere I have argued the notion that Cronenberg's sensibility has certain 'Canadian' characteristics according to a certain model of Canadianness.10 Prominent among these characteristics is a rejection of - or sense of exclusion from - the dominant American cultural model of heroic individual male action. Passivity, ineffectiveness, weakness: these are all qualities recognizable in the male protagonists of a broad strain of Canadian literary and cinematic fiction. These terms are perfectly apt to describe the failure of the early Cronenberg hero to act like a hero, and to perform the narrative tasks of a hero. We have already observed the marked inadequacy of St Luc to do what a hero should do in Shivers, and also the film's satirical insistence upon the distance between his pretensions and manner on the one hand and his effectiveness on the other. In Rabid something similar happens, except that the male figures of agency are perceptibly removed from the realm of caricature upon which they constantly border in Shivers. Hart, who is emphatically placed in the position ofjeune premier right from the pre-credit sequence, and who even bears some slight respon-

66 The Artist as Monster

sibility for the narrative predicament (he was driving the motorcycle), is virtually defined as a character who is not around when you need him. He is not feeble, or incompetent, or cowardly; but he cannot master the narrative in the way that is expected of him. To a degree this perspective is actually masked by his recurring absence from the scene but this absence is certainly insisted upon. He is in shock from the accident when Rose is taken into the clinic and operated on; when she feels her new hunger months later he has of course gone back to Montreal to wait; when she feels her new hunger and makes her first attacks he is not there, and when she calls him he doesn't hear the telephone ring; then when he finally does get to the clinic she has already left, and he is prevented from leaving to look for her by the rabies quarantine. When he finally does at last come face to face with her, it is only to find her as a predator in flagrante delicto bending over Mindy's body The separation of the 'heroine/ very much in distress, from the 'hero' who is conventionally supposed to rescue her is repeatedly asserted by Rose's frantic attempts to reach him, and by the flood of personal reproach she returns to his accusation of monstrosity when he finds her with Mindy. One anguished and hysterical scene is all the couple is allowed before Rose pushes him away and he falls down a flight of stairs and is knocked cold. This last development is somehow typical: it could happen to anyone; but how characteristic, and humiliating, that it should happen to Hart. The interval of unconsciousness is enough for Rose to enact her suicidal 'experiment.' Hart's last, again entirely typical, position is to hear Rose's death over the phone - and the agony of his powerlessness to save her, or even to be there, is so great that he smashes the instrument to pieces in a gesture of impotent agony and rage. Hart is a clearer representation of this figure - the well-meaning, unculpable male who occupies the position of hero but is unable to fulfil its dictates - than St Luc, and in The Brood Cronenberg will return to the type with even greater emphasis. What is it that prevents males from assuming real narrative centrality in these films? Why are powerful males pushed to the margins as shadowy, elusive patriarchal scientists, and the centre of the narratives occupied weakly by these 'nice,' well-intentioned, ineffective characters? I believe it is because the authorial sensibility sees power - narrative and artistic - as invested in the objects of desire, namely sexual females, while being unable as yet to accept responsibility as the originator of the texts' desire and, simultaneously, rejecting the heroic male mythology of Hollywood narrative. Cronenberg has several times suggested that the scientists of all

Rabid

67

the films from Stereo to Scanners are stand-ins for the author. But they are stand-ins by virtue of their distance and detached manipulation. It took a while for Cronenberg in effect to realize that he as filmmaker was not just the experimenter, but also - in a finally much deeper, agonized, and helpless way - the subject or ground of the experiment as well. This dawning realization is what enables the arrival of the truly central male protagonist in the later films. But at this stage, the desiring male cannot be at the centre of the narrative. He is either at the edges (or in the past) as a 'mad scientist/ or else is central but purged of desire and also of agency. The weak central male is not desiring, and therefore not responsible for the catastrophes set off by desire (again, represented by its female objects). Instead, he represents the ethical ego-rationality of the authorial sensibility, that aspect of the film's imagination that is appalled by desire and harrowed by its repercussions. But this figure, exiled from male desire's power as well as its sinful transgressiveness, is thereby exiled also from narrative power and effective instrumentality. He is equally exiled from the ability to retrieve or redeem the situation by Cronenberg's ('Canadian') scepticism regarding the mythology of success and the dominant structure of 'classical' narrative as a series of problems to be solved. Even after Videodrome, when the male protagonist has been at last definitively articulated and made into the landscape of the narrative, the films are unable to imagine such a scenario of success. The individual male ego-self cannot improve the situation - the situation defined as a dichotomy between rationality and desire, mind and body, in which mind is sterile and dessicated and body is potent and horrifically destructive. Power is invested only in desire, the body, disease, and death. The male ego-self, if it remains uncorrupted by desire and thus undestroyed (as in Shivers, Rabid, and The Brood),11 can only look on in distress at the spectacle of the narrative. In the later films, the male self is entirely implicated in, indeed the very home of, desire; and if this allows the male self a certain narrative agency it also predicates its utter failure and destruction. Ultimately, there will emerge more fully and articulately an opposite of desire that is not simply 'rationality' or even 'the symbolic,' but that has an affective charge equivalent to the destructive charge of desire/abjection. But in Rabid, and especially in its final scene, the melancholy that suffuses so much of Cronenberg's later work is just taking its faltering first steps, and under the circumstances it must attach itself to the figure of Rose herself, the female monster as human subject.

68 The Artist as Monster Humour

The sharp perspectives of irony, the sardonic sense of humour - these are qualities never completely absent from any Cronenberg film, but they are most to the foreground in the early work. Several scenes in Shivers, and to a certain degree its whole central action, rely on 'gross-out' humour of a kind familiar from other down-market horror movies. In Rabid, Rose's monstrosity is never really played for laughs, but there are other features of the film that draw out the satiric instincts of the filmmaker, to such an extent indeed that one might suggest that it is Cronenberg's funniest film. Some of the humour seems expressive of the filmmaker's high spirits and zestful irony, but the rest has a deeper relevance to the underlying themes of the film. The more playful examples include the subtle jokes about plastic surgery and health in general; the deft employment of radio and television news announcements in the background (here expanded from their role in Shivers); the foreign porno movie's dubbed soundtrack, which serves as a deadpan counterpoint to the scene in the cinema; and the beautifully executed shoppingplaza scene in which Rose is approached by an absurd young swinger on the make. More characteristic - and more disturbing - is the appalling humour of the more violent scenes. The rabid farmer attacks an order of fried chicken and then the people in the diner with equal gusto - and the scene is then amusingly twisted in a radio news report: The man, now identified as 43-year-old Fred Atkins of Camelford, went berserk during an argument over who was to be served first and bit the counter girl on the arm.

Keloid goes rabid amidst the familiar medical rituals of an operation ('give me something to cut with, nurse'). A functionary from the mayor's office is interrupted in the middle of his bureaucratic excuses for not taking the epidemic seriously by a gang of rabid construction workers who assault his car with a jackhammer, in a satiric paraphrase of civic politics and municipal labour unrest. Mindy's polite embarrassment at the spectacle of a sick-looking woman on the subway is subverted when the woman dives hungrily at another passenger. A cop in the shopping plaza accidentally machine-guns Santa Claus. The shooting of the crazy who attacks Hart's car is done with the boredom of casual routine. The humour of these scenes is derived from a lunatic

Rabid 69 exaggeration of ordinary situations, and a contrast between 'normal' and 'insane/ This division is, of course, another version of the grand dichotomy over which Cronenberg's work is built: between control and uncontrol, rationality and desire, the symbolic and the abject. Mise en scene Once again Cronenberg's mise en scene functions to enrich the meaning of the film. The settings, far more numerous and varied than in Shivers, operate in the same metaphoric manner. The Keloid Clinic, with its neat rooms and corridors and sterile medical facilities, the happy-looking home where Hart's confidant, Murray, finds his family destroyed, the bustling festive shopping mall that explodes into violence, the nighttime city street dominated by a colourful neon restaurant sign where a soldier snipes down crazies - all of these and other locations offer an ironic contrast between the decorative expressions of a society that thinks it is in control and the messy and violent evidence that order, and its concomitant aesthetic clean lines, are precarious things indeed. When Rose's attack on Lloyd is discovered, the cheerful yellow-andwhite abstract painting on the wall of her room in the clinic has been knocked askew from its rectangular 'rightness' and is disfigured by an anarchic red smear of blood - now, in effect, a new piece of abstract art more expressive of the real state of things than it was before. The mayhem throughout the city late in the film is intercut with scenes of Mindy affectionately tending Rose with cold compresses and suggestions that she should just rest and not worry; and the melancholy irony of these motherly attentions - so tempting in their offers of escape into childhood and innocent suffering, and so impossible to accept - is subtly emphasized by the clean and pretty pink-checked sheets of the bed Rose lies in. And on a more abstract or philosophical level, the large spherical sculpted head split in two, which adorns the apartment of Rose's last victim, seems to express the film's vision of man as a schizoid creature whose head is at war with his body and is yet inescapably connected to it. (Incidentally, this object is a clear foreshadowing of Ben Pierce's powerful sculptures in Scanners.) Cronenberg's increasing skills as a filmmaker, also ensure that Rabid has the crisp excitement of a well-told story. The control of the narrative impulse via editing (i.e., parallel montage) has already been mentioned, but in addition it might be remarked that the action sequences

70 The Artist as Monster

are filmed with greater finesse and restraint. The spectacular car crash created when Lloyd attacks his cab driver is breathtakingly staged and edited - no more perfect morsel of action cinema exists. In all the details of story construction and cinematic technique, Rabid represents an advance in control and refinement over Shivers, and is perhaps Cronenberg's most compelling film as pure narrative prior to Scanners. Certainly the film is still not completely satisfactory in the realm of performances, and one must recognize that Chambers and some of the other actors have weak and unconvincing moments. On the other hand, in the realm of B-horror movies this is usually part of the territory, and the acting here isn't remotely any worse than in the comparable films of George Romero, Tobe Hooper, or Larry Cohen. Above all, though, it is the greater fundamental seriousness of Rabid, especially in the characterization and ultimate fate of its protagonist, that marks the film as an advance for Cronenberg.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Brood (1979) 'Go all the way through it to the end'

After Shivers and Rabid, Cronenberg's next film presents a very different aspect. It afforded him his first opportunity to work with stars of international reputation (Oliver Reed and Samantha Eggar), and it had a bigger budget than either of its very cheaply made predecessors. But in other respects the film is on a much smaller scale than Rabid or Shivers. For the first time, Cronenberg moves away from the social sphere and almost wholly into the personal one, concentrating on a private calamity. And this move is accompanied by a major shift in tone. The Brood is less colourful, less ironic, far less B-horror-movie-generic, more serious and concentrated, more bleak, more anguished. Its characters and personal relations have more 'depth' and 'roundness/ its observation of complex psychological situations is subtler and more inflected. Indeed, what it presents is a blasted psychic landscape where suffering and loss are everywhere and where there is no prospect of relief - in the past, in the present, in the future. Off-screen reasons for the project's special intensity come from the filmmaker's own testimony: Cronenberg has volunteered that it is a version of the traumatic experience of divorce from his first wife and anxieties over the custody of his daughter Cassandra.1 The Somafree Institute of Psychoplasmics, developed by psychiatrist Dr Hal Raglan, treats patients by encouraging them to give bodily expression to subconscious anger, and the results vary from sores and cancerous growths to 'the brood' of Nola Carveth - actual childlike creatures produced by her body that are the walking incarnations of her inner feelings. Raglan encourages his patients to 'go all the way through' their emotions of hurt and rage 'to the end/ The carrying of psychotherapeutic methods to their logical extreme results once more

72 The Artist as Monster

in the creation of an anti-rational destructive force that strikes without thought or inhibition, and another form of calamity is set loose. In this film (as in Stereo) there is no physical, technological intervention that creates or catalyzes the incursion of the uncontrollable body. Instead, the means is a form of discourse, an internal revivification of primal psychic wounds, a kind of assisted auto-suggestion. This is certainly medical science, but it is not exactly technology - at least not in the sense of the word that implies any kind of machines, hardware, laboratories, material science. Unlike in Shivers and Rabid, this time the victims are not randomly chosen. They are either the therapeutic subject himself ('Dr Raglan encouraged my body to revolt; now I've got a small revolution on my hands, and I'm not putting it down very well/ says one patient with psychoplasmically induced cancer of the lymphatic glands), or else, in the most advanced case, the objects of the patient's subconscious hatred - Nola's mother and father, her daughter and her supposed sexual rival. In a literal and significant way, the murderous attacks of the brood and the movie's horror in general is kept very much in the family. The terrible actualization of the process of therapy is enacted against parents by their child and against a child by her parent (with a single exception to encompass sexual, and also domestic, jealousy). The film allegorizes a personal drama, and carries a recognizable private conflict, domestic and generational, into the amplified metaphorical conventions of the horror genre. The Brood shows the same dichotomy of viewpoint as Shivers and Rabid - the dualism of boundary-destroying desire and human subjectivity. But in The Brood this dualism takes a very different form because desire is not transgressively sexual, but rather fixed primarily on the emotion of violent anger and secondarily on the bodily mutations produced by that anger. Indeed, the word 'desire' itself seems less apposite here, although the convulsive movement towards boundarylessness and a destruction of order remains the same. The 'appetites' of Shivers and Rabid, with their literal or metaphorical sexual basis, are replaced by outbursts of pure murderous rage. The principal examples of this violence, the assaults of the brood-children, use vicious battery with mallets or ornaments - no penetration or ingestion, indeed no visceral component. The bodily symptoms of Raglan's patients are indeed visceral, and they repeat from the preceding features the insistence on disease. But there are only three patients: two are marginal characters, and the third (Nola) is not revealed in bodily mutated form until near

The Brood

73

the end of the film. However, as the film rises to its climax, that third mutation begins to assume the grand and resonant and horrifying dimensions of 'desire' as it is seen in the plagues of Shivers and Rabid, and as it will be seen in the deep and central mutations of most of the later films. Nola's mutation is the production, by means of an external womb, of the 'brood/ literally the children of her rage; and in the scene at the end of the film where she gives birth to one of them the film finally enters completely into the world of the visceral transgressive body - and returns also to the theme of the power and the horror of the abject female body. Moreover, the whole 'revolt of the body' is founded once more upon a catastrophic medical project. But it may be said that, in comparison with the preceding horror films, and with many of the later films, The Brood offers a less encompassing and invasive 'desire/ places less emphasis on this fundamental Cronenbergian force, and, by largely desexualizing it, noticeably changes its character. At the same time, the other side of the duality - the 'human subject' side - is expanded and deepened. Just as The Brood spends less time on the level of fantastic genre-horror, so it spends far more time and invests more fully in the level of realist fiction. The histories and motives of the characters are examined in much greater detail, their thoughts and feelings as 'human subjects' are mined more thoroughly. The balance between the presentation of compulsive transgressivity and abjection on the one hand and ego-rationality and subjectivity on the other is tilted firmly in the direction of the latter. This complexification and humanization is true of minor characters such as Raglan's patients Jan Hartog and especially Mike, it is emphatically true of Raglan himself (who is given both a more central role and a far more extensive characterization and rationale than Hobbes or Keloid), and it is true for the primary participants in the film's family drama. The area of the 'human subject' in all of the films has precisely been the area of pathos and grief (Janine Tudor in Shivers, Rose as frightened and confused person in Rabid), and its strong amplification in The Brood leads to a film that is suffused with pathos and grief, and hardly at all warmed by the liberation of desire. Family histories The family relationships in The Brood are very complex and suggestive. Virtually every simple description of a relationship, every moral judgment rendered by one character (family member) about another is con-

74 The Artist as Monster

tradicted or made ambiguous by something else in the film. Nola's accusation that her mother, Juliana, beat her as a child is contradicted by Juliana's testimony that she didn't, that Nola 'would wake up and ... be covered with big ugly bumps,' and that Nola has distorted the truth. Nola also accuses her father, Barton, of 'pretending it wasn't happening.' One is at first inclined to believe Nola and not Juliana. But given Nola's singular ability to embody her feelings (the brood), and given also her five-year-old daughter Candice's bodily reaction to traumatic shock (she develops bumps on her arm), it is conceivable that Nola could have given herself those 'big ugly bumps/ and interpreted her feelings literally in retrospect in such a way that she remembers psychological injuries as physical ones. The ambiguity of the situation is entirely appropriate to the tangled emotional underbrush of family and relationships, and to the Marienbad-like memories of them. Similarly, the responsibility for the breakup of Nola and Frank's marriage (which occurred well before the beginning of the action) is first assumed to be Nola's. Indeed, the narrative privileges Frank as the central character, whose motives and gradually growing understanding of the situation are broadly shared by the viewer, and this configuration helps to endorse Frank's angle on things. In Frank's view Nola is deeply disturbed and possibly violent, Raglan is irresponsible and dangerous, and the sooner he can rescue his daughter from Nola and get himself clear of the whole situation into something normal, the better it will be. But after a while the distinct moral opposites of Frank's good sanity and Nola's bad craziness become smudged as other elements come into play: Frank's unwillingness to face the seriousness of the situation and his unrealistic desire to avoid messy or unpleasant emotions, Nola's real suffering, her need for emotional support, and her attempts to confront the experiences that have made her disturbed. The family histories of Juliana, Barton, and little Nola and of Nola, Frank, and little Candice are suggested by fragments of testimony and evidence rather than being presented in clear, factual terms, and in this way attain an aesthetically fruitful ambiguity and complexity. The terrifying appearance of two wartlike excrescences on Candice's arm at the end of the film in the wake of her horrific experiences suggests the future in the same evocative manner. This expressive gesturing towards the unexplained - and probably unexplainable - past and future is accomplished structurally through a narrative that covers only a few days but crams into them events indicating a chain of obscure necessity stretching backwards and forwards and determining the lives of those caught in its web.

The Brood 75 The suffering of a child The first sequence of the film, is startling and powerful: a therapy session presented without introduction or explanation in which the abject male patient suffers a vicious emotional attack from a scornfully dominant man representing himself as the patient's father but who is clearly the therapist: I guess you're just a weak person. You must have got that from your mother. It probably would have been better for you if you'd been born a girl. Then we could have named you Michelle. You see, weakness is more acceptable in a girl, Michelle ... oop, I mean Mike. I keep forgetting. Wait a minute. Why don't I call you Michelle all the time? That way I wouldn't have to be so goddam fucking ashamed of you and your weaknesses. I could just think of you as a girl all the time, by your frocks and your dresses and your frilly socks and your frilly scarfs, and you could be you could be daddy's little girl, and I wouldn't have to be so [shouting] fucking ashamed of being seen with you in public, would I, eh? [in a low voice} What do you think of that, Michelle? Sound like a good idea?

Eliciting the patient's anger, forcing it out of him really because he is soft-spoken and downcast, the therapist (it is Raglan) encourages the patient to show him his feelings, to 'go all the way through it to the end; come out the other end; don't stop in the middle' - whereupon Mike's skin breaks out in running sores. We have been introduced to Psychoplasmics and its somatic wonders and horrors. But we have also been drawn vividly into a realm of traumatic psychological suffering rooted in family oppression (and also into the world of gender construction, though the eventual relevance of this is more subtle). This first vivid taste of suffering and its somatic symptoms also situates this central feature of the film in the realm of childhood. The patient is a grown man, but the suffering Mike was first a child and in a sense will always be a child. The world of emotional suffering and traumatic shock that is the essence of the film keeps returning to pain suffered by children at the hands of their parents. 'Good' parents, and to an extent even 'bad' parents, also suffer grief and guilt at the apprehension of their children's suffering,2 but it is the awful spectacle of the suffering child that remains fundamental. Mike suffers at the hands of his father; and then, as we are drawn into the narrative proper of the film, we also discover Nola's suffering at the hands of

76 The Artist as Monster

her mother, and above all Candice's suffering at the hands of her mother, Nola. Although considerable sympathy is extended to all the participants in this Atridean tragedy, the most painful focus of involvement for the viewer is five-year-old Candice. Mute and defenceless, she is the personage who most clearly demonstrates the helplessness of the characters in a situation they cannot control or even understand. Candice suffers terribly at the hands of the brood, being beaten by these strange little monsters, witnessing the death they wreak, being forced to live with them, and finally almost being killed by them herself. Her response is silence and blankness of expression, a quiet but deep trauma tization, and finally the development of physical symptoms of mental stress in the form of 'big ugly bumps' on her arm. Candice's experience is a heartbreaking one for the viewer and one without hope or consolation. Unlike Rabid, The Brood contains no elegy or cathartic release at its finish - merely an image of Candice deeply bruised and shocked in spirit, staring straight ahead in huge close-up. The film's monsters are children too. The brood of Nola's parthenogenetically produced creatures are children, the essentialized suffering of Nola as the child she too still is, or rather the repressed anger of that child. For it is anger that is repressed, and knowledge of reasons for anger, rather than other emotions. In the session with Raglan in which she unearths her profound disappointment and, ultimately, anger with her father for his not having defended and protected her as a child, Nola says at the same time, poignantly 'I love you daddy/ and 'I wouldn't want you to think that I don't love you/ Her brood subsequently beats her father to death, at the very moment when he is most full of grief for the death of his wife and the disaster of his family. So these children are one-dimensional creatures, connecting only with primal rage and not with other, even diametrically opposed, feelings that might simultaneously exist in the patient. They are, as befits creatures of pure angry emotion, mindless, genderless (without sexual organs), inarticulate, seeing only in black and white, and short-lived (they have a camel's hump or gas tank of nutrient matter that keeps them alive for only a relatively brief time).3 Perhaps the latter characteristic can be viewed as a therapeutically beneficial one, since the anger that inspires the creatures can be expressed in this bodily form and left to die, instead of remaining internal and festering - except that Nola's rage seems to keep reappearing, new

The Brood

77

brood-children are born; the process has no apparent end in the form of a beneficial outcome. But there is a kind of poetic confusion here. The brood are the product of the child Nola's rage; they are the child Nola's way of striking back at her parents. But they are also 'bad kids' (to quote the terrified little boy who runs out of the playschool as the teacher is being beaten to death). They are children who do not repress or internalize, but act out in the most uninhibited fashion, and the effect of their acting out is uniformly, horribly destructive and moreover serves to replicate the family malady for another generation. The bumps on Candice's arm are testimony to that. Will she too grow up to beat her child? If she does, the reason for her compulsion will have been clearly shown. This is an appalling thought, but the logic is difficult to resist. So the child is the victim - but the child is also the perpetrator. Childhood trauma is caused by 'bad' parents; but it is also perpetuated by 'bad' children. This doubled or reversible view is perhaps the reason for the pronounced and repeated comparisons of Candice and the brood children. Candice is repeatedly seen in a red winter parka with hood. The broodchild who kills Juliana and Barton (if indeed both murders are perpetrated by the same creature) is dressed in a very similar red parka.4 The resemblance is unconsciously underlined by Frank when, after being attacked by the creature who killed Barton, he returns home and for an instant mistakes the figure of Candice huddled in fear in the corner of the bedroom for another brood-creature. In many long shots of Candice in her parka she looks exactly like a brood-child. In fact the likeness is presented explicitly in the telephoto long shot, after the murder of Ruth Mayer at the playschool, of Candy and the two homicidal broodchildren walking hand-in-hand down the snowy highway with their backs to the camera: they are three peas in a pod. Then Raglan articulates the point towards the end of the film when he tells Frank that the brood won't want to let Candy go: 'In a way, she's one of them/ Of course Candice in herself hurts nobody, she is the purest kind of victim; yet the iconic and thematic resemblance between her and the 'bad children' is too extensive for comfort. And this is the essence of that 'poetic confusion.' Suffering children turn into angry and violent children; Nola the abused child turns into Nola the abusive mother. At certain points the film is simply unwilling (or unable) to distinguish between the two sides of this dynamic; suffering and violence simply seem to be interchangeable.

78 The Artist as Monster Male failures So Candice's mother turns into Nola's mother, an abusive mother. But Candice's father also turns into Nola's father. Barton, an almost wholly sympathetic figure, had been unable to stop Juliana from beating Nola (this is, for the moment, to accept Nola's story of her childhood without reservation). A figure of inaction in the narrative of Nola's childhood, he is an equally ineffective figure in the present tense. He blusters and yells at Raglan when he is barred from seeing Nola at the clinic, and later marshals Frank to visit the place at night and 'kick their ass.' But what Barton actually does is to get drunk and succumb to a wave of sadness and regret, caressing the police outline of Juliana's body on the floor and collapsing on the bed in tears, where he is attacked by the brood-child.5 In a sense, Barton is disabled by the spectacle of suffering and by the dilemma of divided loyalties. He is hardly to be blamed for being killed by the broodling, but it is typical of his presence in the story that he should not be able to master the narrative in the present any more than he had been able to in the past. And this is the role that Frank is fated to take also. Raglan, in the therapy session that reveals Nola's feelings about Barton, describes Frank's actions in attempting to keep Candy away from Nola as 'doing what a good father should do/ 'protecting his little girl.' But that is just what Frank cannot do: he first fails to understand what has happened during Candice's weekend visit to Nola at the clinic (he knows she was beaten, but not that she was attacked by something monstrous); then he fails to encourage her to remember and speak about her experience when Juliana was murdered (he is clearly uncomfortable with the police psychiatrist's suggestion that he do this, and in effect avoids doing it); he assures her that the thing she saw at Juliana's is dead and will never hurt her or him or anyone again (a pathetically false prophecy); he is not there to save her from abduction from her school and imprisonment in the brood's dwelling place; and finally he cannot protect her from the trauma of a hideous mass assault by the brood. And these substantial failures are accompanied by a number of minor lapses that seem to follow him everywhere. The kindergarten teacher reveals that Frank has missed the last two parent-teacher meetings; he always seems to be late in getting Candy to school; even his building project (he is a house restorer, significantly) is far behind schedule. Rather more seriously, he leaves Ruth Mayer babysitting Candice and promises her he'll be back in forty-five minutes, but returns only after

The Brood

79

many hours, having left her exposed to a poisonous and ultimately fatal phone call from Nola. In a larger context, all of his running around to lawyers and witnesses to try to get some dirt on Raglan and keep custody of Candice comes to nothing, and he progresses through a series of quite inadequate theories of what's really going on at Somafree and in his wife's treatment until the very end. And in addition to all this there is his emotional and physical diffidence and fastidiousness. He seems so often to be disgusted, to be prudish and backing away, whenever the messy evidence of the abject is at hand. He is repelled by Mike and all the 'crazies' at the Somafree Institute, made nervous by the police psychologist, revolted by the sight of Hartog's cancerous neck and also by his strangeness, of course appalled by all the bloodshed - and his gagging aversion to Nola's mutated reproductive capacity precipitates the final violent climax. It is of course highly hypocritical of viewers to judge Frank negatively for this set of attitudes when, in all likelihood, they share many of those attitudes themselves. It is still disconcerting, though, to find this male centre of the action so easily put off, so queasy. In none of the failures just catalogued is Frank seriously culpable, and in some of them it would be ridiculous to assign any blame to him at all. Nevertheless, the pattern is there: he is a male protagonist who cannot act effectively, who cannot protect his child, who cannot master the narrative as a male protagonist ought to. And it is the same pattern as that which characterized St Luc in Shivers and Hart in Rabid. Again there is no one and nothing to blame for this failure, and one must ask why Cronenberg keeps returning to this male figure who is placed at the centre of the action but seems constitutionally unable to function within it as he is 'supposed to.' In Shivers and Rabid it was, we have surmised, because the films were not able to accept responsibility for their outbursts of destructive desire - not, at least, on the level of the film's 'human subject' or 'realist fiction' plane. St Luc in Shivers, Hart in Rabid and, now, Frank in The Brood stand virtually helpless as disaster overtakes the women in their lives. Simultaneously, these women are dichotomized into 'human subject' victims and monstrous, dangerous sites of desire and abjection. In Rabid, Rose is both victim and perpetrator. In The Brood those functions are repeated, but divided: Candice is the victim, Nola the perpetrator - except that Nola began as a victim herself and is thus again both victim and perpetrator. Weakness and inability of the male, splitting of the female into victim and monster, that is the picture.

80 The Artist as Monster

This failure by the male protagonist to, as it were, guarantee the human subjectivity of the women they are supposed to protect is not only a failure to protect them from suffering; it is also a failure to prevent them from turning into boundaryless monsters. Forsythe in Shivers, Rose in Rabid, become monsters of sexuality. Although The Brood has sexual desire almost removed from the equation, it would not be inaccurate to speak of the brood-producing Nola as a 'sexual monster' because of her unbounded/mutated mothering of monstrosities. Meanwhile, Candice is also, at least in a sense, turned into a 'monster' through suffering and bodily mutation (once again her iconic resemblance to the brood underlines this aspect). It is as though in the dichotomized Cronenberg world at this stage, protagonist-like male characters in the narrative must automatically take up the role of rational ego-subjectivity against the incursions of desire and abjection. In a struggle to preserve the values of 'human subjectivity/ they repeatedly fail. But this failure is enacted on the terrain of the female. That is, it is the female who is the 'victim/ who is propelled across the boundaries into chaos, appetite, and abjection, and also who suffers through the loss of 'humanity/ The males can only stand impotently and watch, their every effort to avert the transformation futile. In this scenario that is, inside the narrative - the males are blameless, or virtually so. But/or whom are the females monstrosified, and turned into creatures of desire and abjection? The answer is, of course, for the (male) controlling sensibility of the films - and perhaps for the viewer. The mechanism of turning the nominal representative of the film's sensibility, namely the male protagonist, into a guiltless figure while the film itself continues ('guiltily') to be pulled towards the spectacle of the female object of desire succumbing to chaos/abjection/sexuality must be read, again, as a strategy of disavowal. And the progress of the later films in resituating the source of desire into the male protagonist must equally be read as a refusal to disavow. But The Brood takes at least a step towards the responsibility that the earlier films had avoided. For Frank does perform one effective act he strangles Nola at the end of the film. Though this is positioned narratively as an act of human salvation (it saves his daughter from being torn apart by the enraged brood) consistent with Frank's 'disavowing' role as a decent man of goodwill and compassion, it is also an act of desire. Under the spur of anguish, as his daughter's screams come from the attic, Frank too finally gives concrete expression to his inner feelings, and his anger too takes on a concrete and monstrous form.

The Brood

81

Although he needs this extreme provocation, and although Nola is crazily repeating to him, 'Kill me, kill me, kill me,' he does finally commit the act with a feeling of rage.6 But the film remains 'doubled' on this topic, as on so many. Frank kills Nola in an act of passion, but he only does so as a last means of preventing a worse horror, the death of his daughter. So he is complicit with desire, but he is not complicit. Then, having saved his daughter and at last established himself as a 'man of action' after so many ineffectualities, he reverts notwithstanding to the role of the father who has failed to save his daughter: as he and Candy drive away at the end of the film, his reassurances ('Let's go home, Candy') are as false as they ever were, for Candy remains catatonically mute and now manifesting the bodily mutancy of emotional trauma. This masculine and paternal failure, this 'weakness,' recalls the (literally) blistering attack on male weakness in Raglan's first session with Mike. The angry, castrating patriarchal power of Mike's father and his stand-in Raglan is a model of paternity that the film wants to condemn. It prefers instead the 'human' and 'decent' paternity of Frank and of Barton. But this kind of fatherhood is also, in the terms of Mike's father, 'weak/ and is in fact, as we have seen, powerless. Masculine and paternal power, it would appear, can only be destructive and tyrannical. The only way to avoid tyranny is to be 'weak.' The vacant role of powerful patriarch falls to the catalytic outsider Raglan, whose exercise of power has consequences as dire as those of any 'real' powerful father. As a result, there are no Good Fathers, no fathers who are both good and powerful. Female power Indeed, the whole institution of masculine power appears to be in crisis in The Brood, because the traditional roles of the genders have been reversed. It is Frank and Barton who are nurturing and compassionate and 'weak'; and, as the role-playing Raglan says to Mike, 'weakness is more acceptable' in a female. In Barton's case, the 'female' quality of sentiment and recollection is even a contingency of his death: his sorrowing drunken nostalgia renders him incapable of defending himself against an assault carried out with glass-ball ornaments like the one in Citizen Kane - he is killed by Rosebud. Meanwhile the women, or at least some of them, are assuming the power. If Barton is a passive father, then Juliana is very much an active mother in the business of exercising power over the child. The moment of her death is preceded,

82 The Artist as Monster

as Barton's is, by a backward look over her family history: she is showing Candice old photographs of herself and little Nola. The one picture we see (called 'my favourite' by Candy) has little Nola in a hospital bed with her mother beside her. Neither one of them is smiling, and the image has an oppressive and even sinister quality.7 Juliana explains to Candice that Nola was in the hospital because of the 'big bumps/ and that none of the doctors could explain why. The viewer eventually comes to the conclusion that, directly or indirectly, it was probably Juliana who put Nola in the hospital. This is the parental power that causes Mike to break out in sores, and it is exercised by a mother. Of course the strongest example of parental potency is offered by Nola herself, in her function both as abusive parent (this is not a good description of Nola's behaviour, but it is a perspective entertained by the viewer for much of the film) and above all as the monstrous mother of monstrous brood-children. It is in her monstrosity, in her as the source of violence and chaos and abject mutation, that the film most clearly shows its generic affiliations with the horror genre, and in this picture of Nola as the empowered monster, The Brood resembles Shivers and especially Rabid. Some commentators have been quick to criticize the politics of this depiction of gender. Robin Wood says: 'The Brood is concerned with the oppression of women, the repression of the woman's "masculinity," the secret, internalized rage that this repression produces. It then proceeds to attribute this not to the patriarchy but to the fact that Nola's father was weak: it was all the fault of an aggressive mother. The implication is clear: patriarchal dominance is "natural," any deviation from it will result in disaster.'8 Barbara Creed too points out how matrilinear the 'disease' of abuse, bodily disfigurement, and ultimately monstrous parthenogenesis is, and asserts that the film renders the whole notion of female power, and especially the female reproductive capacity, as monstrous: The idea that woman should give physical expression to her anger is represented as an inherently destructive process ... The disease which is passed from mother to daughter is the disease of being female - an abject creature not far removed from the animal world and one dominated totally by her feelings and reproductive functions.'9 It is hard to see how the film can be said to regard as 'natural' the kind of patriarchal dominance depicted in its very first (powerful and impressive) scene; and equally hard to see how Nola's bodily symptoms (the brood) are in themselves any more destructive than, say, Jan Hartog's cancerous lymph nodes. One might also add that parental oppression in The Brood operates not simply along female lines,

The Brood

83

but along same-sex lines. The boy child, Mike, is oppressed by his father; the girl children, Nola and Candice, are oppressed by their mothers. And it must be emphasized how careful the film is to anchor the monstrous bodily powers of Psychoplasmic subjects in suffering, as a reaction to personal suffering. Females may be the principal ground for this destructive bodily mutation, but they are so by virtue of their oppression. The point is underlined when we recall that Mike's open wounds render him 'female/ as does his father's castrating attack: suffering genders the subject 'female/ no matter what sex he is.10 At the same time, it is undoubtedly true that there is a particular monstrosity, a particular monstrous power, that comes to bloom specifically in Nola at the end of the film, and that throughout the film the most extensive nexus of pathology is female. The explanation for this coincidence of femaleness and monstrosity may indeed lie in the structures of the male personality and patriarchal culture as theorized by psychoanalytic theorists from Freud to Kristeva (and, in the context of the horror film, Creed). But the explanation for why it should take the particular form it does in Cronenberg's case must come from a close examination and comparison of the internal dynamics of his films. Already in 1979 in The Brood, we can see that it is not simply destructive powerful sexuality that is invested in the female, but all sexuality. (Also that it is not simply female power that is oppressive, but all power.) The realm of the body and of desire belongs to the female. And there is no good, non-destructive, healthy body or sexuality, female or male - and anyway these things hold no interest for Cronenberg. A syllogism will show the connection: (1) desire is female; (2) sooner or later the boundarylessness of desire is destructive and monstrous; (3) the female-as-desire is destructive and monstrous. The first term of this syllogism is very much a determinant of the whole, and within a context of male heterosexuality it is not unexpected. Certainly the view of the world inherent in the syllogism is irrational and from a human standpoint noxious. But from a human standpoint the films recognize it as noxious, too. The detailed characterization of Rose in Rabid as an unlucky victim, as much to be pitied as any of the film's victims, provides just this viewpoint. And so does the careful construction of Nola's childhood and her adult suffering as rooted in that childhood. Admittedly, Nola is moved by rage, by the wish to hurt and destroy, and this gives her actions an intentionality that Rose's lack entirely. But then Nola is quite unaware of the terrible acts her brood

84 The Artist as Monster

perform. Nola's anger towards her parents, and towards her supposed sexual rival Ruth Mayer, may be ugly and at least in some cases terribly disproportionate or misplaced - but whose unconscious rage is not? In this sense, the deaths of her parents and of Ruth Mayer are not her fault; she doesn't even know about them. Even the beating of Candice, which takes place before the action opens, is the result of a passing annoyance in Nola to which the brood overreact, because proportion and judiciousness are exactly what they lack. She is not responsible. Nola the monster Well, she is and she isn't. Here the film shows the same curious dualism in assignment of responsibility as it does with Frank's homicidal entry into desire. One side of the dualism is represented in this contextualization and humanization of the 'monster'; its other side is the side of desire and monstrosity. Nola the human subject is not so responsible, but Nola the monster is. The absence of sexual desire and the wish to provide a greater proportion of 'realist fiction' serve to keep the monstrous to a minimum; but there is still also a wish to invest Nola with destructive agency and to draw on the power of boundaryless horror to dramatize that agency. There really is only one scene in which Nola enters into the world of body-horror, and that is the climactic scene. It takes up relatively little of the whole film, certainly in proportion to the amount of attention it has drawn. In it Nola crosses over from the world of the human subject - even the crazy human subject - into the realm of the monster. If one looks at the staging of the scene, with its highly stylized movements and poses and lighting, one sees the film changing registers completely, moving from realist fiction into the ritualized exaggeration of horror. Nola's gesture of sweeping open her gown and holding its folds high in a protracted dramatic tableau, amplified by a brilliant toplight suggestive of the stage, strikes a note of grandeur and terror: she seems like the priestess of some awesome rite. (One thinks of all the moments of horror in Cronenberg's films that have a ritualistic grandeur - their apotheosis, perhaps, occurring in the extreme theatricality of the operating-room scenes of Dead Ringers.) Now she is no longer recognizable as the 'human subject'; now she is the monster. And so it is fitting that at this moment she should take on the qualities of desire and abjection. Her bare body is now exposed, her 'monstrous' external womb is visible. As she bites it open, dark blood

The Brood

85

and fluids spill graphically onto her naked thighs. She begins to lick the newborn creature clean.11 When Frank reacts to this sight with revulsion, and she sees that she is rejected, she becomes enraged. Now she seems conscious of what the brood is doing, now she says, Td kill Candice rather than let you take her away from me/ and when Frank tells her the brood will actually kill Candice and begs her to 'make them stop/ she continues to smile crazily and to let the brood run rampant. Her knowledge and volition of the brood's violent acts - now her violent acts - suddenly appear for the first time and finally de-complexify her, deprive her of her humanity, make her a monster. And now that she is a monster Frank can strangle her - an act that, however much the narrative tries to qualify it differently, takes on overtones of a sex murder in this arena of femaleness and abjection. Nola's 'Kill me, kill me7 even for a moment conjures up the terms of a sadomasochistic sex murder, where the female invites the male's sadistic desire: a theme that will rise into prominence in the films beginning with Videodrome. Creed comments at considerable length on the film's horror of the female reproductive capacity, of the spectacle of birth itself, its viscerality and body-interior abjection evoking deep fear and horror in the male.12 Certainly it evokes disgust in Frank, but the film's attitude, I would suggest/is not so straightforward. In the scene of Nola's monstrosity there is a more effective than usual element of that identification with the abject that Cronenberg has so often pointed out:13 the cancer that is creative, the disease as a success story from the disease cell's viewpoint, and also the abjection of body viscera as something natural. Indeed, The Brood's climactic monstrosity has always seemed to me far less horrifying than those of, for example, Shivers, or Videodrome, or The Fly, simply because of its closeness to the universal qualities of mammalian birth. In particular, the images of Nola licking the bloody newborn infant - the very images that push Frank over the edge into visible revulsion - present a spectacle that is as much one of touching maternal tenderness as it is of the abjection of birth. Creed, drawing on Kristeva, claims that this abjection in itself is enough to render Nola horrifying, and that its setting of her in the realm of the natural renders her 'impure' and 'debased.'14 I am suggesting, however, that its depiction is not only as something monstrous, but also as something loving' and 'natural' - and though the latter may be culturally coded as horrifying in some respects, in others it is culturally coded as 'good.' The contrast set up in the scene between Frank as possessor of the Kristevan 'clean and proper body' and Nola as the

86 The Artist as Monster

possessor of the abject maternal body is qualified by the knowledge that the 'clean and proper body' is powerless, and it is only by wading into abjection, strangling the half-naked Nola with her infant still in her arms - that is, forsaking the clean and proper - that Frank can do anything. The scene is the self-conscious horror-genre climax of the film, and it does represent the climax also of female desire/abjection as a destructive force; but it is more complex and nuanced than the simplest readings will allow. Killing women We can, however, return to that aspect of the scene which I earlier characterized as having some resemblance to a sex murder. There are three murders of women in the film (Juliana, Ruth Mayer, Nola), and in fact all of them may be described as sharing in this pornography of sexual violence. None of them is anywhere near as explicit an evocation of desire in the form of transgressive sexual violence as the examples in Shivers (above all the murder of Annabelle), and indeed to label them in this fashion may seem a complete mistake. But when violence is so explicitly the 'carrier' of desire in this horror film, when the prevailing sensibility is so clearly male-heterosexual, and when the depiction of murderous assaults on females and subsequent female corpses so insistently emphasize states of boundaryless terror and death, the whiff of sadistic male desire is difficult to ignore. The open staring eyes, the contusions and pools of blood, the splayed limbs: they all signal the obliteration of the subject and the reduction of the female to simply a body with no control of itself. As in the preceding films, this desire is not attached to characters in the narrative: Nola's broodlings have no sexual motive and are not suitable points of identification for the sexual voracity of viewers, and even Frank's murder of Nola is narratively without sexual appetite. Rather, as before, the spectacle of transgressive sexual violence floats clear of the narrative and goes directly from the film's controlling centre to the voyeuristic viewer without any acknowledgment of its presence. But it must be emphasized that its presence is faint, especially in comparison with its boldness in Shivers, Videodrome, Naked Lunch, or Crash.15 The murders of Juliana and Ruth Mayer both follow (directly or shortly) after scenes in which their 'human subjectivity' has been emphasized - indeed after the main or only scene featuring each character. Juliana's visit with Candice, one of no doubt many sad, lonely,

The Brood

87

whisky-sipping afternoons with her granddaughter as they look over the photographic records of earlier family disasters, creates an element of sympathy for this woman, notwithstanding whatever acts of parental abuse she may have committed in the past. Similarly, Ruth Mayer's niceness and sympathetic understanding are evident from the start, and this impression is only confirmed when Candice and then Frank draw her rather reluctantly into a family dinner. It is true that she and Frank are, in a very tentative and preliminary way, checking each other out - and thus that Nola's jealousy is not 100 per cent unjustified, just radically disproportionate - but we are never far from the sense that Ruth is merely a virtuous innocent bystander, dragged into this dreadful mess, and suffering this appalling fate, purely out of bad luck. Both killings, then, are strongly imbued with sadness and loss, and in both the emphasis on a violation of childhood innocence heavily interferes with any possible sadistic appetite. Juliana's murder has Candice sitting in the next room, and then traumatically beholding the corpse, while Ruth's death is almost the most harrowing in the film because of its environment of screaming playschool children and the cruelly ironic children's paintings and implements (Frank covers the corpse's battered head with a happy drawing that has 'WE PLANT PUMPKIN SEEDS' printed on it in a childish hand.) As for Nola's murder, it is so closely connected (and indeed intercut) with a plot emergency - the brood's assault on Candy - that viewers' quite different, urgent, attention to Candy's peril is a massive distraction from any voyeuristic transgressive pleasure - although at the same time it does help them encourage Frank to do the deed. The placement of the assault, again, beside the suffering of a child - and in the closest proximity so far - disables the viewer from any oblivious surrender to sexual transgression. Indeed, this examination of all three murders (the three most intense nodes of horror-violence in the film)16 serves to confirm the general sense that in The Brood the pleasures of unbounded desire are powerfully inhibited, and that both the instrument and the purpose of the inhibition is to bring 'human subjectivity' into a position more central and determining than in any Cronenberg film so far. Raglan The character of Raglan also marks an enlargement of the figure of the controlling male scientist who invents and initiates the experimental

88 The Artist as Monster

medical project. This figure has been a constant in Cronenberg's work right back to Stereo. All of the characters occupying this place are in some sense detached from the narratives whose events they have so strongly determined by their experiments. Moreover, there is something ironic or even comical about every one of these scientific projects, and the scientists themselves. The outlandish or over-appropriate names the scientists all bear is a further invitation to consider them ironically. But since these scientific-medical projects are all projects of desire, or projects that release desire/abjection/disease, and since they all lead to violence, suffering, and death, they are also central to whatever in the films is not ironic and detached. As we have seen, boundaryless chaos is not primarily funny even in Shivers, and the human cost in this film and in Rabid is a matter for sorrow rather than any kind of amusement. What then is the purpose of casting the 'radical7 scientific project in this kind of ironic light? Cronenberg has said: 'My role in Stereo was as Dr Luther Stringfellow, the absentee scientist who actually set up the experiment, because, in a sense, I had set up the experiment. In Crimes of the Future I am Antoine Rouge, the absentee mentor who has died and is reincarnated as a little girl/17 Following this suggestion, Hobbes and Keloid and Raglan are also stand-ins for the author, at least in some measure. It is the author, or shall we say 'the controlling sensibility of the films/ who is the radical-scientificmedical originator, just as it is the author who is the deus absconditus of the fictional text. In the narratives of Stereo and Crimes of the Future, the controller is literally absconded. In the subsequent films his representative is present to a greater and greater extent, though in Shivers and Rabid still marginalized. But in all these cases his absence or marginality is accompanied by the cloud of irony that we have just mentioned though that has seemed to be evaporating at about the same rate as the figure's presence as a character in the narrative has increased. This combination of absence/marginality and ironic detachment seems, like the dichotomized spheres of 'monstrosity' and 'humanity' in the films, to be an instrument of disavowal. Admittedly there is always at least the suggestion that there is something sinister and dangerous about these figures, that their activities are harmful and even wrong. But the playfulness and humour surrounding the experimental processes of the films has been a method of lightening, or distracting from, the responsibility for the ever-increasing weight of human suffering that the loosing of desire has caused in the narratives. The controlling sensibility wants to retain a detachment from the consequences

The Brood

89

of its transgressive acts, because it is simultaneously sensitive to 'human subjectivity7; but such a detachment is becoming more and more difficult. (Ultimately in Cronenberg's work, the role of experimenting scientist gives way to the role of tortured artist, a figure whose presentation is the opposite of detached and playful.) Now, in The Brood, the radical-medical-scientist grows suddenly in stature and seriousness. There is nothing whatever amusing or ironic about Raglan, nor about his project. Instead they are intense, serious, powerful. The casting of Oliver Reed in the role of Raglan, and Reed's charismatic performance - the first of any kind in a Cronenberg film strongly underline this fact. Now the scientist is not absent or even marginal, but very present and important. His role as creator is emphasized in the detailed power and seriousness of the therapy sequences, including the one that opens the film so astonishingly. His project is, in a way almost as direct as Hobbes's in Shivers, to release desire. To 'go all the way through to the end' and 'don't stop' is precisely to push through and dissolve boundaries, prohibitions, inhibitions. The result its dangers strangely not foreseen by the originator - is a completely boundaryless state, because removing some of the boundaries but not all is not a viable aim. At the same time, Raglan's medical aim - to help people in disabling emotional trouble - is a laudable one. Although there is still the sense that unexamined curiosity and a hunger for fame and power have corrupted his enterprise, that enterprise is still far more justified than those of his Cronenbergian predecessors. (But unleashing the body is always disastrous, whether the motive is trivial or serious.) The patriarchal quality of the role, its endowment with qualities of maturity and gravitas, and especially of the potency and dominance that adhere to this archetype, is equally augmented - and especially emphasized when Raglan from the outset takes the role of surrogate father. And he is in a way the father of all the bodily mutations in the film, including the brood-children. The contrast between Raglan's strength and authority and Frank's weakness and ineffectiveness is startling. Raglan begins the film as exactly the dominant, powerful father that Frank is not. Though the primary effect of the therapy session with Mike is to outline what a father ought not to be, there is no denying the impressiveness of his power, and this imposing but monstrous picture is then softened as we understand that Raglan the therapist/father is also there to help the patient/child. Whatever the catastrophes that follow Raglan's intervention in the lives of his patients, there is no disputing that he is effec-

90 The Artist as Monster

tive: when he intervenes something certainly happens. Of course in the end it's something bad, but it is something. When Frank attempts to intervene, nothing happens. These two are like positive and negative poles of masculinity and fatherhood. And in the scale of charismatic appeal, Frank's cautious good intentions and diffidence are no match for Raglan's confident daring. At the same time, the disasters that accompany Raglan's initiatives are so horrifying that the film, and probably the viewer, has to prefer Frank. In these two figures we can see a model, clearer than any that precedes it, of the double bind that will be presented so often in the Cronenbergian world. Ineffective, diffident, impotent inaction or powerful, disastrous action, these are the choices. They correspond, of course, to the grand opposites of 'human subjectivity' and desire. The subject (except it is not yet the individual subject, only the philosophical stance of the film as a whole) can attempt to repress and resist desire, or it can give it rein. There is no middle ground, because unrepressing desire only a little bit, or trying to limit and control it, is futile: once desire is out of the cage it eats everything. Repressing desire is almost impossible, but to the extent that it can be done the repression carries with it isolation, impotence, a slow pallid wasting-away. Unrepressing desire, on the other hand, is not so difficult, but it is inevitably horrifying and catastrophic. In the films before The Brood, strangely absent and ironized male figures release desire, which creates monstrosity and suffering. Beginning with Shivers, repressed male figures begin to appear in places in the narratives that would normally be occupied by protagonists. They represent the repressing option, which is also the attempt to avoid the suffering created by desire; but they do so ineffectively, palely. They are didactically unable to stem the tide of unrepression, and moreover they stand bizarrely isolated as males, watching the horrific pageant of female monstrosity with anguish but without effect. With the arrival of Raglan, Cronenberg's world at last achieves a male perpetrator who is actually visible and present. Raglan's character, along with that of Dr Paul Ruth in Cronenberg's next film, Scanners, forms a kind of transitional stage in the evolution of male characters in his work. These two are the fullest realizations of the powerful patriarch who emerges as a counterpoint to the weak 'male leads' of the early work. Later on, with the emergence of a protagonist who unleashes desire, and who is the site of that unleashing, this patriarchal scientist-originator will become more marginal again, or will have his function completely subsumed into that of the newly cen-

The Brood

91

tralized male protagonist. His stature as a separate character reaches its apex in The Brood and Scanners. Horror and melodrama In an interview, Cronenberg makes a pair of interesting comments on The Brood as a formal structure: 'The Brood is the most classic horror movie I've done: the circular structure, generation unto generation; the idea that you think it's over and then suddenly you realize it's just starting again. That's classic horror-movie structure.' And a moment later: 'The core of The Brood is the most melodramatic, the most soapoperatic, the most obvious of my movies. It could have been a diseaseof-the-week movie/18 As Robin Wood and others have shown, the 'modern' (i.e., post-1960s) horror movie has very often taken family trauma as a source, making the always-fertile connections between horror and a Freudian perspective on human fears and compulsion more articulate and freer-flowing.19 'Family melodrama/ too, is an established genre, both in popular novels and in a movie tradition that extends from the days of Griffith to contemporary television movies and soap operas. Here we might recall Cronenberg's often-repeated remark that The Brood is his Kramer vs. Kramer. The Brood combines these two genres of horror and melodrama with peculiar intensity and force, and adds yet another catalytic element in its foregrounding of psychotherapy and of family issues that are such familiar contents of such therapy.20 At the centre of melodrama is suffering, repression, disavowal, and the return of the repressed in some hysterical form. Geoffrey NowellSmith, in a brief but influential essay, speaks of the ideological work of melodrama as perpetually failing, and of the sign of that failure as a certain 'excess/ In the films of Vincente Minnelli that he takes as his exemplary texts, this excess is often visible in the compulsive flowering of mise en scene - in colours, shadows, decor, camera movements that are too strong, too expressive, or somehow misplaced. These, says Nowell-Smith, are the films' hysterical symptoms: 'the film itself somatizes its own unaccommodated excess/21 This offers a beautiful insight into the visual operation of much film melodrama of the fifties and sixties, and indeed of a more general cinematic condition whereby unacknowledged or otherwise buried feelings symptomatize themselves in images or sounds. In The Brood, 'unaccommodated excess' is present in the same way: the narrative is unable to accommodate the

92 The Artist as Monster

failure of mothers to nurture and fathers to protect their children, and unable to contain or repair the suffering of those children or to stop a self-replicating mechanism of destructive family relations. And here, of course, there is nothing metaphorical about the somatization: this rupture in the order of family life realizes itself precisely in somatic bodily outbreaks. The film's mise en scene is functioning (as we shall see shortly), but in a somewhat different way from Minnelli's. The melodrama of The Brood somatizes its condition, not in the fashion of 1950s melodrama, but in the fashion of 1970s horror film. It somatizes its terrible emotional distress and its moral horror as monstrosity. Again, this somatization is not simply metaphorical, as it is for example in Wood's account of the Monster, but literal. The product of suffering and repression is not - or not directly - a quasi-supernatural homicidal monster, but rather skin ulcers, cancerous nodes, and an external womb that will give birth to somatic creatures. It is true that the brood-children graduate immediately from being somatic symptoms to being horrormovie monsters; and it is also true that Nola as their mother does finally become a monster, or the Monster, as well - The Brood is also, and primarily, a horror film. But its literalization of the process of bodily symptoms arising from emotional suffering, and its investment with the issues and practices of medicine and above all psychotherapy, mark it as a unique blending of genres and strategies of articulation. This melodramatization of a horror-movie project enables the film to examine personal trauma and personal grief, to feel them, while retaining the tools of shock and horror that are so important to Cronenberg as instruments of 'breakthrough.' In later films such as Videodrome, The Dead Zone, and The Fly, he was to follow this productive path with even greater force. Mise en scene In this deeply felt and very personal project, it is not surprising to find some significant changes in Cronenberg's visual style and mise en scene. The look of The Brood is in many respects quite different from that of the previous films. The overall hue is darker and more organic. Browns, yellows, pale greens, and blues replace the brighter, sharper colours of Shivers and Rabid. The lighting moves further towards chiaroscuro - though never at the expense of clarity. The decor and settings are markedly different. In place of the clean modern blankness of the buildings and rooms in the previous films, here there is an older, more

The Brood

93

obviously lived-in environment. Juliana's house, with its brocaded furniture, wooden door frames, and pastel-lime walls, is as coolly attractive as any of the locations in Shivers or Rabid, but it is older, more graciously refined, and more human. Frank's house, although more modern, has a degree of clutter and natural energy. This choice of sets is also seen in such secondary locations as Jan Hartog's residence (old dark wood, leaded glass, and dull plastered walls), and the office of Frank's lawyer (an old room modernized by furniture and the presence of huge potted plants). Although the main building of the Somafree Institute and Candice's school both show Cronenberg's earlier predilection for cold modernist settings, the interior of the school is not as sterile as its facade. Somafree also combines big, daring lines and spaces with a lot of more 'natural' pinewood panelling, and includes, as a kind of pendent repressed 'other,' the primitive wooden shed where Nola and the children stay. This shed is the setting for the climax of the film, and its unvarnished wooden walls, makeshift wooden beds, and bare-bulb or candle lighting amidst natural darkness and forest surroundings create a strong sense of organic simplicity - it is by far the most different setting in all of Cronenberg's work to this point. This is the birthplace and home of the brood, and one is inclined to say that the primitiveness of the environment is as typical of the dark unconscious as the clean modern blankness of Shivers and Rabid is of consciousness and rationality. In addition, the photography is somewhat changed. There is the same - and perhaps even an augmented - sense of clarity and detachment in the sharply focused and often north-lit images, and as great a fondness as ever for low-angle shots. But the film's deep-focus, slightly creepy emptiness is also combined with wintry lighting and the bleakness of the landscape to produce a feeling of coldness and hopelessness. In this film the sun never shines, and if it does (as in the scene where Frank is taking Polaroids of Candice's bruised back as evidence that she's been beaten), it is used ironically rather than to express joy. In this on the whole rather bleak, grey, and frozen environment, the scenes of violence stand out once more as centres of visual energy (this specific dichotomy of styles particularly foreshadows The Dead Zone). The murders are all expertly, incisively staged, but the first is perhaps the cinematic jewel. The whole scene turns visually on the inherent contrast between the bright and cheerful kitchen and the disorder and violence being visited upon it. Moreover, 'child' is an idea that pops into the viewer's mind, not only because whatever came through the

94 The Artist as Monster

little chute had to be small, but because of the milk, the orange juice, the cereal, which are spilled on the floor. Somehow this location is appropriate for the violence of a monster-child, appropriate also for the vengeance of a child (little Nola) who once ate her breakfast in this same room. In the same way, the scenes of Barton's murder (the parental bedroom) and Ruth Mayer's murder (the playschool) both carry a stamp of childhood experience and family memory. There is nothing forced or overtly virtuosic about any of these scenes; but they are cinematically exciting within the aesthetic bounds of the film, and again stand in contrast to the cold, slow bleakness of most of the movie. The therapy scenes are just the reverse of the murder scenes, although their content is often 'hot' too. Steady crosscut close-ups, often featuring slow tracking, are a feature of all these scenes. Instead of action and movement, there is stasis. The parties are seated immobile opposite each other. Nola, indeed, never moves throughout the whole film.22 Slow intensity in the context of a kind of theatrical tableau is their characteristic quality. The Brood is the first Cronenberg film to feature any performances of stature. The earlier films had not been very ambitious in this respect, and had been content to present details and small moments of observation.23 (Eventually, Cronenberg was to become an extremely fine director of actors - as the superlatively good performances from such gifted actors as James Woods, Jeff Goldblum, and Jeremy Irons demonstrate, and as virtually every role in every film from Videodrome onwards will also attest.) Oliver Reed and Samantha Eggar now bring ordinance of a larger caliber into play, and they are both very effective. It is true that Art Hindle is still rather pale and recessive in the role of Frank; but then that is not just a problem with his performance, but also the aim of the film. Cindy Hinds, without doing any kind of 'acting' at all, is very touching as Candice. The secondary but still considerable characters of Juliana (Nuala FitzGerald) and Barton (Henry Beckman) get solid realizations, and the marginal 'grotesque' characters of Mike (Gary McKeehan) and Jan Hartog (Robert Silverman) bring a resonance and power that is new to these recurring features of Cronenberg's cinema. Silverman, in fact, establishes for himself what will be a repeated secondary role as a character who 'knows about the body,' and particularly its destructive capabilities (he will reappear as the sculptor Ben Pierce in Scanners and then, after a long lapse, the Interzone habitue Hans in Naked Lunch, and later still the 'Irish' storekeeper in eXistenZ).

The Brood

95

The presence of such strong and nuanced performances is just another indication of the degree to which The Brood presents a complex human landscape. As we have seen, 'the human' for Cronenberg means 'a place to suffer7: monsters rage and devour, but human subjects are victims and casualties. This is true both with individual characters and in the narratives as a whole. The hopelessness of the determining situation is complete in this film; there is no amelioration and no exit - not even the death (often self-inflicted) that will provide a way out for the central characters of later movies and that was the heroine's fate in Rabid. The Brood ends, rather, with a powerful image of the suffering of a child and a promise of much more suffering to come - and with the image of an anguished parent who can do nothing to avert that suffering. The film expresses a cold, sad helplessness at the end of the road, a flat, defeated finality. Is it necessary to point out how unusual this emotional paradigm is for a horror movie, or indeed any kind of commercial film? There is a bleak determinism in The Brood that is visually manifested in its cold settings and which it is hard for even the most self-preserving viewer to dodge - and that determinism will, after a short break for Scanners, return to take up the seat of control through Cronenberg's work for the next fifteen years.

CHAPTER SIX

Scanners (1980) 7 was exploding heads just like any other young, normal North American boy'

Despite its many similarities to his earlier films - indeed despite the fact that most of it is so characteristic that it could have been made by no one else - Scanners is a new kind of movie for Cronenberg. Less obsessive, less body-oriented, and more interested in straightforward excitement and conventional plot, Scanners is closer to the common notion of good entertainment than anything else of Cronenberg's. The film chronicles the adventures of thirty-five-year-old telepath (or 'scanner') Cameron Vale. Beginning as a derelict confused by his own gift, he is rehabilitated by psychopharmacist Dr Paul Ruth, and enlisted by him on behalf of the private security organization ConSec, as an underground agent trying to penetrate a sinister rival scanner organization headed by the megalomaniac Darryl Revok. He stumbles into yet another, benevolent, group of scanners and teams up with Kim Obrist, the woman who leads it; together they discover Revok's devilish scheme to create a new generation of scanners (using Dr Ruth's drug Ephemerol, administered to pregnant women) and take over the world. Ultimately, Vale confronts Revok and learns that Dr Ruth is the father of them both. He also learns that the scanner phenomenon was initially the side effect of Ruth's pregnancy-period tranquillizer Ephemerol. In the last scene, Vale and Revok fight a spectacular scanning duel, and Vale survives by destroying Revok's mind and inhabiting his body. The extraordinary complications of the story (three scanner groups, two sinister organizations, two double agents, crucial information buried in the past and not revealed until late in the film, etc.) are not made easier to comprehend by Cronenberg's elliptical narrative style: action comes first and explanations are almost always deferred until later.

Scanners

97

Sometimes the film gives the impression of a sketch-like improvisation in plot construction: do anything, but just keep things moving.1 Driven by plot On a microscopic level, one need only look at the handling of many of the scene-to-scene transitions to find some of the levers in the operation of this forward-driving narrative machine. So many of these transitional edits serve as direct, amplifying links where the last moment of the first scene builds a question or expectation that is immediately answered or fulfilled in the next shot: from Vale's unconscious body with a tranquillizing dart stuck in the hand to his bandaged hand in Ruth's laboratory; from Ruth's revelation to the ConSec board that he has a secret scanner agent to the lab where Vale is being indoctrinated; from the villainous ConSec security chief Keller's assurance to Revok that Vale is 'very weak' to the scene where Vale demonstrates his newly focused scanning powers in a contest with a yoga master; from the little drug vial bearing a chemical logo that Vale extracts from one of Revok's assassins to a shot of the same logo on the big Biocarbon Amalgamate factory sign-board; and so on. Many of the culminating lines have a wholly conventional plot-driven stamp ('Someone at ConSec is a traitor!' 'Ephemerol is creating new scanners!') Onwardrushing scene linkage, revelations of sensational plot complications, teasing the viewer by withholding information: all of this is classical narrative construction of the purest kind. But of course this microscopic level involves tactical, rather than strategic, narrative construction. That is, these transitions, these revelations and withholdings, work by providing strong forward drive from one scene to the next or a strong stimulation of curiosity, on the 'micro' level. 'Strategic' construction would concern itself with overall ('macro') story shape and would need to pay more attention to the details that Scanners often elides. In this respect one can say of the film, as of this narrative strategy in general, that it sacrifices a detailed realist plausibility to the 'effectiveness' of its individual moments and covers the sacrifice with momentum and a constant succession and variety of incident. On the macroscopic level, the narrative makes massive leaps. Vale begins as a derelict bum of thirty years' standing who is kept from any kind of integration into or even understanding of society by the 'noise' of other people's thoughts, which he can't keep from penetrating his own and, as he says, 'drowning' him. Within a short period of time,

98 The Artist as Monster

after Dr Ruth has given him the injections of Ephemerol that temporarily suppress his scanning ability, he simply pops out as a perfectly regulated (if somewhat naive) individual who shows no damage or even eccentricity as a result of his traumatic life. On only one subsequent occasion do we see him oppressed by intrusive Voices7 from outside; otherwise, they give him no trouble. Perhaps this immunity is a by-product of the process whereby Vale learns to control and direct his scanning powers, but who knows? Certainly there is nothing so mundane as an explanation for why he should be 'cured' in this way. Not only is he not a complete casualty, but soon afterwards he has mastered enculturation sufficiently to pose as a rich art-snob with an apartment in Paris, and not long after that he is demonstrating enough computer training to access a database. Similar questions might be asked about how Daryl Revok got from being a severely disturbed mental patient in a straitjacket to being the CEO of a corporation in a power suit. At times the explanations provided for events do not even make sense - as in Revok's assurance to Vale near the end of the film that he has been 'taking care of him' all the time, when what we have seen is a barrage of violent assaults by Revok's soldiers, any one of which might have filled Vale with buckshot. Indeed, the plot seems to proceed almost oneirically at times. And if Scanners did not show such strong connections to the conventional adventure film, where plot is the principal dynamic engine, one would not be raising such boring questions. Cronenberg's next film, Videodrome, has a 'macroscopic' plot that makes Scanners look like Middlemarch with respect to realist narrative intelligibility and accountability, but since Videodrome is couched in the terms of a delirious hallucination, one doesn't think of applying such criteria. None of Cronenberg's films show much interest in the creation of 'well-crafted' plot. Some of them (e.g., Rabid, The Dead Zone, The Fly) are in fact quite 'well constructed,' but that never seems particularly an aim. The plots are simply there to encase (sometimes literally) the guts of the films: the perilous terrain of subjectivity and desire, of selfhood and abjection - and it is on this level that the essential movement of the films is enacted. Looking at Scanners in this light shows that there is such a movement in the film, and that from the perspective of this movement the disconnective and implausible leaps of the plot are just the kind of illustrative shortcuts or narrative economies they are in all of Cronenberg's films. Revok's and Vale's leaps respectively from madness and dereliction to power and control dramatize psychic and emotional transformations, and they may be fitted into

Scanners

99

the schema of Cronenberg's developing cinematic world. Vale is, for instance, a kind of optimistic development and augmentation of Frank in The Brood; and he is also a kind of happy prototype for the fully fledged protagonist of Videodrome, who, however, when he was finally built, crashed and burned in a very decisive manner. So it would be nice if we could look at Scanners in this fashion, oneirically. But the film's pronounced tilt away from the interior drama of horror and abjection, and towards the exterior drama of action and bounded narrative, discourages such a viewpoint. Scanning: a clean kind of monstrosity The 'monstrosity' in Scanners is telepathy, scanning. The premise of the story can be succinctly summarized by the phrase 'if thoughts could kill/ and that encapsulation is enough to identify the film with Cronenberg's established concerns. Telepathy is also the subject of Stereo, and a number of the details characterizing its presentation in Scanners are inherited from the earlier film. In Stereo the telepathic experience is 'overwhelming, exhausting, akin to pain7; in Scanners, 'the scanning experience is usually a painful one, sometimes resulting in nose bleeds, earaches, stomach cramps, nausea, sometimes other symptoms of a similar nature/ In Scanners, as one might expect after Cronenberg's three previous features, there is an emphasis on the physical nature of telepathy, a phenomenon generally thought of as purely mental. For the scanner there is the danger of having no privacy and no self: untrained, 'naive7 scanners are tormented by the trespass of other people's voices in their heads. In this sense, Scanners explores the fear of the collapse of boundaries of mental and corporeal self-containment, and the fear (experienced in different ways by both the scanner and the scannee) of losing one's self, being engulfed, taken over. The film indulges a fascination with transgressive mental (or mental/physical) invasion: the appetite to invade and the fear of being invaded. Only very briefly is there an example of telepathy as a communicative or sharing activity. This is presented in the rather hippie-love-in or grouptherapy-like communal scans of Kim Obrist's set, and it is presented in what one must classify as an easy sentimental fashion for two minutes before it is shot to pieces by Revok's assassins.2 No: scanning is a weapon (even if used in self-defence), or a tool of espionage and subversion. But exactly what scanning is is not clear. Scanners are able to

100 The Artist as Monster

hear people's Voices' - that is, their thoughts in some kind of quasiverbal form, and they can put irresistible suggestions into the minds of others. But they cannot actually 'read' their minds. For example, when Vale and Obrist scan the assassin in the record-store basement, they can force him to put down his gun, but they must extract information about Revok in some kind of 'outward' fashion (in this case a bottle with the Biocarbon logo on it). This confirms Ruth's didactic affirmation that 'telepathy is not mind reading, it is the direct linking of two nervous systems separated by space,' implying a connection more biological than cerebral - once again, familiar Cronenberg country. Its mental or 'thought' component is never defined, and all that one can say is that scanning is as much a bodily function as a mental one. This is simply to restate the former proposition: scanning is the form the monstrous takes in Scanners. The psychosomatic foundation of The Brood finds a continuation here: what bodily horror there is comes directly from the psyche. Scanners pushes the already relatively 'cleaned up' bodily horrors of The Brood further away from the explicit intensities of abjection in, say, Shivers or Videodrome. In The Brood there is an opening scene featuring the abject body of Mike, and a concluding scene featuring the extremely abject body of Nola; in between, abjection is mostly displaced into homicidal battery and quick shots of strange little childlike creatures. In Scanners there is a scene of abjection near the beginning where Revok causes a ConSec scanner's head to explode, and a concluding scene featuring the abject bodies of Vale and Revok; in between abjection is mostly displaced into assassinations and scenes of combat (there are, for example, nine gunshot killings in the film). True, the exploding-head scene ratchets up the degree of shock the movie is willing to employ very early on, as it were setting a standard of violence and abjection which the viewer must remain retrospectively aware of thenceforward and marking the film as seriously transgressive. But the abject effects of being scanned turn out to be often rather discreet ones: trembling and a facial expression of anguish, in less extreme cases a look of nausea and a spot of blood at the nostril. True, when Revok's soldiers murder Ben Pierce, Vale fights back by hurling them telekinetically through the air; and when a similar hit squad attacks the communal scan-in of Obrist's group, the attackers actually burst into flame. But these violent effects are not visceral, they are perhaps not even horrifying at all; rather, they take their place in the action-landscape of an action movie. Disease is also missing, as it was not even from The Brood. Ruth calls

Scanners

101

the scanning facility 'a derangement of the synapses/ but that is as close as the film comes to representing any kind of malignant physical transformation. On the contrary, the scanning facility is characterized more fully as a 'gift/ certainly as a 'power/ its owners as potentially 'brilliant7 and 'spectacular/ Scanning may not be healthy, exactly, considering its symptomatic side effects and the tyrannical purposes it may be put to, but it is certainly not diseased, either. This clearly represents a departure from all but one (The Dead Zone) of Cronenberg's films all the way from Crimes of the Future to The Fly. An even more surprising absence from the scanning syndrome is anything sexual. One might imagine that the notion of a profound invasion, an enforced intimacy, through the medium of a mental touching carefully defined as physical and bodily would inevitably result in Cronenberg's world in a highly sexualized form of transgression. 'Mental rape7 it may be, but there appears to be no dimension of sensual, or sexual, satisfaction on the part of the attacker. This is doubly surprising when Stereo had already introduced the notion of an eroticized telepathy and notions of the trans- or omnisexuality it might foster. Instead, transgressive pleasure is once more displaced firmly into violence, simply into an imperious enactment of power over another. And even this potentially transgressive power is to a large extent 'redeemed' by being presented it as also potentially a power for good. Scanners emphasizes the difference between scanners who are helpless victims of their facility and those who can focus and control it. Either you are an untrained scanner, and you are invaded by the minds of others; or else you are a focused scanner, and you invade the minds of others. Revok is a psychotic megalomaniac, but the film's hero, Cameron Vale, is set up as an almost didactically inverse counterpart. After an initial scene as a derelict, picking up the remains of other people's hot dogs at a mall food-floor, he is forcibly subdued and brought to Ruth's laboratory. Throughout the whole of his training by Ruth, his clothing is a pure, radiant white - a white that goes well beyond any diegetic medical-patient necessity to assign Vale the role of new, stainless hero. It emphasizes his youth and innocence, and aligns him with the fabular tradition of protagonists who are specially, magically endowed, and who set out on a quest to fight the lord of evil. Although Vale's wardrobe changes over the film, and moves towards a range of light earth tones, he never loses this quality of brightness and specialness (partly this is a byproduct of Stephen Lack's iconic presence). In this way, Vale is actually constituted as a good scanner: one whose scan-

102 The Artist as Monster

ning powers will be diverted from self-destruction, and focused towards the destruction of things that need to be destroyed. And even though his noble quest, undertaken in fealty to the patriarchal creator and saviour Ruth, is poisoned with lies and manipulations, it retains its idealistic quality right through to the end of the film. Monstrous art

The monstrous mind of the controlling scanner, instead of simply tormenting itself, throws itself into the minds of others and subjects them to its will. Perhaps we can see this scenario as an analogue of Cronenberg the monstrous artist who 'ab-jects/ throws out, an inner condition of hyper-sensitivity and of horrific obsession. It is a comparison that is not really encouraged in a wholesale way by Scanners, except in one byway of the film: that of the scanner-sculptor Ben Pierce. Pierce is inserted into the story in typically perfunctory fashion as one who 'may or may not be affiliated with Revok's group/ but who might provide Vale with a clue. That he does; but his real function is to present a portrait of the artist as a figure who as a matter of psychic survival regurgitates the horrific contents of his mind in his art. After trying, at the age of ten, to murder his whole family, Pierce was institutionalized, but finally released, as Ruth reports, on account of 'rehabilitation through art/ Cut (dazzlingly) to a series of shots of Pierce's sculptures on view at the Crostic Art Gallery. These present a spectacle of mental torment through images of a wrenching ugliness, violence, and horror. A patient (his head a plaster cast of the artist's, on his face an expression an openmouthed utter damnation) is suffering the nightmare operation to end all nightmare operations in Cronenberg. He is surrounded by monstrous figures in surgical attire who are clearly torturing him: an alien Mugwump-like surgeon with hypodermic in hand, an assistant with horrible screaming pig's head, two other monstrous figures with syringes. Other sculptures feature a similar bald, open-mouthed, abject artist-figure with red strings coming out of his head attached to a collage of thick ugly faces, and the large white figure of a man wrapped in what looks like a winding sheet and revolving on a platform inside a cylinder of barbed wire. Later on at his studio, sitting inside a gigantic sculptural head whose interior is decorated with visceral-coloured brainfolds, Pierce says 'It's my art that keeps me sane/ and as he does so eerily taps his forehead in such a way that his sanity is entirely in doubt. Pierce (played by Robert Silverman with an amplification of the unnerving

Scanners

103

weirdness he brought to the role of Jan Hartog in The Brood) is no sooner introduced than he is killed off by Revok's soldiers/and in effect exists only to allow this very disturbing art, and this very disturbed artist, to be put on view in the film. Pierce and his sculptures wear the label of catharsis and 'rehabilitation/ but their extremity is such as to raise severe questions about the whole process.3 The implication that the horrific artworks in the film are an analogue of the horrific artwork of the film is an idea that may be applied to virtually all of Cronenberg's work: their horrors are all produced supratextually, not by the characters to whom their invention is ascribed, but of course by the author, the filmmaker. The subsequent films articulate this viewpoint with ever-proliferating nuances of understanding, until finally Naked Lunch devotes itself almost wholly to fusing the production of monstrosity with the production of art. Masculinization and the recuperation of desire But this is really to jump too far ahead: Scanners does not actually enter this territory except parenthetically. What it does do is to make another attempt to locate, and in fact to recuperate, abjection/desire in relation to the ego-subject and consciousness. This attempt masculinizes the territory: Vale, Revok, Ruth are the three most important characters; and all the subsidiary characters are male as well, with the single exception of Kim Obrist. This character, played by a beautiful minor Hollywood star (Jennifer O'Neill) who gets prominent billing, seems like a kind of honorary male, 'one of the boys/ whom the film absolutely refuses to constitute as a site of desire, and who in this context really does look like the token woman in the resolutely unsexual activity of scanning. Inertness and a sense of routine are not what one expects from the leading female in a Cronenberg film, but those are the qualities hovering over this character. As in all the earlier films, the originating scientist/inventor is male. Ruth's drug is intended for pregnant women made uneasy by growths in their bodies, but these pregnant women, including the first and most important one, Ruth's wife and Vale's and Revok's mother, are all missing from the film. These absent women, mothers of the 'monstrous' scanners, are the only trace of those women who in the earlier features somatize the abject foundations of male desire as diseases and mutations of the female body. (We still may note the phantom of earlier forms: here Dr Ruth, through an invention of medical science, catalyses the concep-

104 The Artist as Monster

tion and birth of a 'monster' in a woman, exactly as Dr Raglan does in The Brood.) But now the site of monstrosity moves from these absent mothers to their male children. Vale and Revok are the principal monsters of the film, and if the idealistic quest and the 'good power' markers attaching to Vale disguise this monstrosity, then just as surely the sneer, the megalomania, and the hole he drilled in his head as a young mental patient4 reveal it in Revok. In the end, of course, both monsters have their monstrosity made bodily visible in the climactic scanning 'shootout/ which features horrifyingly engorged subcutaneous blood vessels, hands and torsos bursting into flame, and blanked-out or exploding eyeballs. What emerges from this duel is a fusion of the two men. Cronenberg's own assessment of this scene makes it more interesting than perhaps it actually is: 'Cameron Vale survives as a mixture of the good guy and the bad guy. I was suggesting that this new creature was a blending of the two brothers, that they had fused/5 Revok's face emerges from under a coat huddled in the corner and says, smiling and in a deepened version of Vale's voice, 'We've won, Kim we've won.' Whiteout, end of film. It seems to me that there is nothing ambiguous about the content of this development. It is a victory of Vale over Revok that ends with his transferring his mind to Revok's body during the destruction of his own: Vale's body is gone and so is Revok's mind. The moral fusion suggested by Cronenberg would have added something that would have either deepened the film or rendered it nonsensical, but would in any case have gone against so much of the straightforward and unambiguous fabular thrust of the film. Nevertheless, however imperfectly worked out, the fusion of the two characters does remain as the culminating event of the story - and it remains also as a pendant to the big final conversation between Vale and Revok in which the latter reveals so much of the crucial 'preaction' of the film and reverses so many of the assumptions of both Vale and the viewer. The complexity introduced here may well sit oddly in the context of the action-movie backbone of the film, and indeed can appear as a kind of last-minute twist without sufficient foundation in the corpus of the narrative. But this change of focus, and also the notion of a true fusion of the brothers rather than a victory for one, does open a prospect towards the resolution of some of the dichotomous tensions that have formed the basis of Cronenberg's work. As Revok represents the destructive and tragic outcomes of boundaryless 'monstrosity,' Vale represents a hope that it need not be destructive.

Scanners

105

We must return to the question of what scanning is, what this force is that is divided into good and bad, conveying destruction to the self or to others, rendering the possessor derelict or powerful. Among other things, scanning is a form of consciousness. Scanners are people with twisted and enlarged consciousnesses - a form of consciousness, moreover, not confined in the mind or the body. The 'Cartesian' status of this consciousness is scrambled by its non-separateness. Thus, again, it not only unites consciousness with the body, but with the bodies of others, it ab-jects itself into others as an alien substance that has gone through the barrier of the body, causing nausea and distress. In a move that shows how radically Cronenberg is prepared to shuffle the constant terms of his central concerns, it is almost a kind of consciousness as abjection, instead of consciousness as enemy and resister of abjection. To depict consciousness as abjection is to emphasize a situation in which desire enters consciousness and brings with it its boundaryless power. In scrambling the Cartesian schism it opens the way to a possible healing of that schism. All that is visible in 'naive' scanners is the scrambled state: a babble of psychic noise created by permeation of the boundaries of the self in which ego-identity is lost. But when the boundary-destroying power that now exists in consciousness (or scrambled with consciousness) is brought under control, the possibility is created of subduing desire to consciousness, of bringing into existence a creature in whom the power of the body and instinct is no longer excluded and at war with consciousness - healing the schism. The deformity of consciousness is now its talismanic power; as Ruth says in his first session with Vale: Why are you such a derelict? such a piece of human junk? The answer is simple - you are a scanner, if you don't realize. And that has been the source of all your agony. But I will show you now that it can be a source of great power.

And yet it is clear how much must be left out of the picture if such a psychically Utopian goal is to be reached: those essential aspects of Cronenberg's world, sexuality and the abject mortality that imagines the body in terms of an alien organism, often diseased or mutated. The process of bringing the body under the control of consciousness is, in fact, essentially identical with the process of expelling sexuality and bodily mortality and substituting for them consciously wielded power. Here, those 'bad7 aspects of desire are reconfigured not as the deep

106 The Artist as Monster

insidious effects of sexuality and bodily abjection, but as violent physical aggression. The most monstrous monster is not a threateningly abject female (as in past films), or an anxiously abject 'enfemaled' male (as in future films), but a tyrannical assassin with megalomaniac dreams of social conquest. At the same time, the possibility is created for a virtually complete redemption of the monster, and recuperation of desire, through the conscious decision of a master scanner to use his power for moral and ethical ends. This truly idealistic outcome finally brings 'the body7 under the power of 'the mind/ bring the boundaryless back within bounds. It is obvious why Cronenberg would want to bring this kind of fusion about. The questions then are 'Does he believe it?' and 'How much does the picture have to be distorted to achieve this end?' The optimism of Scanners - and it is wildly optimistic compared to all the other features, if not at all necessarily to more mainstream narratives is, I believe, fragile but genuine. But it is fragile, because too much does have to be distorted. There is (in the context of Cronenberg's work) something fundamentally uncharacteristic, and therefore distorted, about the displacement of sexuality into transgressive non-sexual violence. The result is like a kind of puritanism - overfamiliar from Hollywood's many examples of the same displacement, where action and violence, exteriority, substitute for interior drives and anxieties - and at the dark end of that road a kind of fascism. In Videodrome, where sexuality makes a gigantic re-entry into Cronenberg's world, the desexualized (or rather antisexual) figures of Barry Convex and Harlan are once again those who have taken control of the power of monstrosity, and again their agenda is the fascistic one of Daryl Revok. But neither in that film nor in any subsequent one is there an example of a figure who (like Vale) takes control of this power successfully for ethical or prosocial ends - quite pointedly the opposite in fact. In the absence of the sexual, mastery of the forces of desire can only be imagined now as predatory. And the 'whiteness' of the character of Cameron Vale, its adventurously innocent and do-gooding qualities, stick out like the essentially flat, wish-fulfilment strategies they are. The exclusion of females from the landscape of Scanners is what allows the 'monstrosity' of Vale, Revok, or any scanner to be focused, turn itself from horrified and horrifying abjection into power. Males fighting males, males fusing with males, the desire and anxiety arising from bodily difference pointedly absent along with disease and visible mutation - Scanners has stacked the deck in order to achieve its extreme

Scanners

107

equanimity relative to Cronenberg's other films. But with equanimity comes the loss of the dimension of 'human subjectivity/ The pain, the sadness, the depressive melancholy attending such destructions in earlier films (especially The Brood) are almost wholly in abeyance here. The historical Daryl Revok, Ben Pierce, and a few other yet more marginal characters such as the weeping ConSec guards do not add up to anything like the kind of human loss constituted by virtually all the casualties in The Brood. Indeed, there are no characters at all in Scanners who have the 'roundness' of so many in the preceding film. But then, as we have seen, 'human subjectivity' is virtually defined in Cronenberg as a place of emotional suffering. The emotional suffering is almost gone in Scanners - and so are the people. What remains (apart from the forward drive of the narrative) is an almost abstract chess game at the thematic level whose purpose is to position the volcanic forces of the unconscious at the disposal of ego-consciousness. The hero in transition Nevertheless, there are traces and implications of a broader battle occurring underneath this flat or abstract surface. Neither Vale nor Revok is constituted as a 'human subject' at all fully (the movie deprives them of any detailed history and presents them exclusively in contexts that are at once abnormal and highly conventionalized). But at the end of the film they become landscapes at least of physiological pain and abject transformation. Any person under scanner attack begins to show signs of 'femaleness': a hysterical shaking, a piteous expression of fear, bleeding from an orifice (the nose), the same nausea of anxiety that Ephemerol was designed to remove - and in the most extreme cases, bodily 'wounds' of the kind that gender the subject as suffering and female.6 Moreover, the scannee is being invaded, in a psychological (or physio-psychological) sense penetrated by the will of the attacker. During the final confrontation of Vale and Revok, extraordinary things happen to both of their bodies, things we have already labelled monstrous and abject - and may now also label as 'enfemaling.' The movement of the ground of the abject and 'female' onto the male body represents a crucial movement in Cronenberg's work. Of course in the earlier films there was plenty of male abjection - Nicholas Tudor's belly-parasites in Shivers, all the rabid males in Rabid, pustulent Mike and cancer-gilled Jan in The Brood. What is most remarkable about Scanners in this respect is that the male body is for all intents and

108 The Artist as Monster

purposes the only ground of enfemaled abjection. Here the spectacles of abjection are overwhelmingly male: the exploded head, the weeping tough guys, the panicked yoga master, the crazed Pierce, and in the end the flaming and sizzling bodies of Vale and Revok. At last the female body's 'monstrosity' is not made to carry the whole burden of male anxiety. Again, the rigorous exclusion of sexual desire has rendered the ground, as it were, safe to experiment upon: the burden of male anxiety in Scanners is a long way from being as great as it is in Cronenberg's other films. The conflict between males and males is a 'clean' conflict of the drive for domination, not the hidden and tangled conflict between males and the females of their imagination who are nothing less than the sites of their most profound demasculinizing and desubjectifying anxieties. But before Scanners, the male who suffers these anxieties is not in the film; he is hidden above the film, he is making the film, he is him for whom the film is made. Now the male has at last entered the film, even if the price for his entrance has been the banishment of the anxieties. In this respect Scanners represents a moment of transition from the stage of passive and avoiding males who were the nominal protagonists of Shivers and especially Rabid and The Brood to the stage of truly central, and truly agonized and 'enfemaled/ protagonists of Videodrome and the films that followed it. It is fascinating to examine the intricate nature of this transition, which contains some features reflecting the earlier model and some foreshadowing the later one. As we have seen, the earlier protagonists could not act effectively. What a contrast there is between these figures and that of Cameron Vale in Scanners. Vale begins in a state of powerlessness - or at least an inability to control what power he has and to take charge of his own life that in some respects is far more dire than that of his predecessors. As the film progresses, he is endowed with the ability not only to control himself and his astounding potentialities but to fight and win an extended battle with deadly external forces. As no other Cronenberg protagonist does, he really succeeds in mastering the narrative, just like the hero of a Hollywood action movie. Moreover, he does so through the device of drawing on extraordinary powers based inside the body, and obscurely rooted in the process of maternal reproduction. His acquisition of the special scanning ability as a fetus in utero points to the origin of these 'monstrous' powers in the mother's womb, and thus connects Vale and all other scanners with the 'monstrosity' of female

Scanners

109

reproduction as seen in films as different as The Brood and Dead Ringers. This power, deriving from the body and primally outside the symbolic order, immediately distinguishes Vale from his predecessors, who are cut off from the potent body and trapped within the futile impotence of ego-rationality, and endows him with the ability to act effectively, heroically. Yet, how strange it is to root this power in the pre-symbolic realm of the body and female abjection, in the boundaryless world of desire, and then to realize it in a way so cut off from sexuality, female or male. The male figure is centralized and empowered, but the powers that (as it were) legally derive from the female body have their origins disguised and obscured and admitted only through a late plot revelation that can scarcely be digested, the better to bring them under the (male) order of boundaries and control. The male is the site of this power, and also (through the 'father' Dr Ruth and his hubristic experimentation) also its initiator and manipulator; and he can become so - he can only become so - because of this elision of the female. The moment of Vale's masterful and synthesizing success in Scanners is transitional because it cannot survive long in Cronenberg's world. It represents an instant of amazing but very temporary confidence in a world where constitutionally the body cannot be either excluded or mastered, appearing for a moment between the different but equally depressive and resonant notes struck by The Brood and Videodrome. The longing to 'heal the split' through some violent and combustive unification of opposites, as happens when Vale and Revok duel to extinction/fusion, will be seen again in Cronenberg's work, in Videodrome and The Fly and Dead Ringers. Its 'nuclear' violence is a symptom of a problem so deep and endemic as to resist any attempt at untangling: only an explosion may destroy the log-jam. At base it is an act of desperation, not a rational decision but a leap of faith (though in the context of Scanners's energy and optimism, perhaps it is better described in this film as an act of giddy impulse). The 'something different' that will emerge from the fusion may be the theoretically healed and whole superbeing Vale/Revok of Scanners - but in the long run it is much more likely to be the horrific Brundle/fly of The Fly or the pathetic suicides of Videodrome and Dead Ringers. No wonder Scanners treads this ground so lightly, flashing its resolution so sketchily that viewers are liable to misinterpret it and are probably not even sure what exactly they saw. Another trace of this transitional process is found in the specific ico-

110 The Artist as Monster

nography of Vale's fusion with his other. The fusion is intended (if we can accept Cronenberg's testimony) as a kind of augmentation or making-whole of partial, incomplete principles. And yet the images attending specifically Vale's battle are strangely ritualistic and sacrificial. As Revok unleashes a powerful scan upon him, he undergoes a kind of 'agony' and redemptive translation.7 In the first stages he is marked by the engorging and eventually bursting veins, and by an expression of wide-eyed fear and suffering; but then his appearance of mental anguish is transformed into one of acceptance and, eventually, serenity. This calmness, this embracing of martyrdom it almost appears, is accompanied by the appearance of a hole over his heart that fizzes blood, the ignition of small pyres of flame in the palms of his hands (which he extends to the sides, palms up, in a Christ-like gesture), and eventually by an envelopment of his whole torso in flames. Giving his body over to the flames, he passes over into Revok's body, a transfer that is signalled by the bursting of his eyeballs and the blank whitening of Revok's, who screams and grimaces like a devil being cast out in exorcism. The strongly religious flavour of this imagery, its iconography of a ritual sacrifice or martyrdom, adds an uplifting quality to what might otherwise be a scene of undifferentiated horror. At the same time, it would seem that so great a transformation of evil into good, so profound a leap of faith, is a miracle and must be accompanied by the posture and imagery of miracles. Another way of describing this scene is to say that Vale's body dies and his soul passes into Revok's body. In a sense Vale commits suicide by uniting himself with the 'bad other.' In doing so he suffers a kind of death, but it is a death that is not a death because the life is reconstituted in a 'different' realm. This too is religious in its outlines - but it also conjures up the image of Max Renn at the end of Videodrome. Max also dies ritualistically accompanied by a pillar of flame, and dies thinking he will be reunited with the woman he yearns for in some other realm, the realm of 'the New Flesh.' The difference between the endings, of course, is that Scanners allows Vale his transformation, but Videodrome presents Max as a pathetically deluded casualty who is committing suicide. Ruth In The Brood Dr Raglan is the metaphorical father of his patients and their monsters; in Scanners Dr Ruth is their actual father as well. Once more Cronenberg has obtained the services of an actor of authority and

Scanners

III

charisma - in this case Patrick McGoohan - to enlarge and strengthen the character of the patriarchal doctor-scientist and to render it a strange mixture of the appalling and the admirable. But now the mixture has shifted noticeably towards the appalling side of the scale. 'Ruth' is his name (a woman's), but 'ruthless' better describes his behaviour. Dressed invariably in black (in the laboratory scenes with the white-costumed Vale his didactic iconic opposite), and usually positioned in a dark environment, Ruth 'sings' in McGoohan's resonant and hypnotic voice, radiates command in every situation. And the record of his actions is damning. Let us just consider what facts we know about him. As a psychopharmacologist, he develops a tranquillizer for pregnant women suffering from anxiety or mood swings.8 What led him into psychopharmacology-obstetrics, one wonders? The same principle, no doubt, that led Hobbes in Shivers to implant a sex-parasite in a nubile young woman, that led Keloid to operate on Marilyn Chambers's viscera, that led Raglan to make the mutant mother Nola his star pupil, and that later leads the Mantle brothers in Dead Ringers to make gynecology their life's work. Occasionally inside the character, but always in the film's controlling sensibility, it is the obsession with the female sexual-other and the need to channel desire by controlling or manipulating this object of desire using 'science' as a defensive mediation. Here the obsession exists only off-screen - well off-screen - but it is still obscurely in place, leading the mad scientist to his errors of hubris and desire. Ruth uses his own wife as an experimental guinea pig, not once but twice. His experiment produces the 'monsters' of his two sons, not as an uncontrollable amplification of the intended product (as in Shivers and The Brood), but as an unintended by-product (as in Rabid). Discovering them to be 'difficult' children, he apparently forsook his nurturing parental function immediately and moved further yet into the mode of detached and controlling scientific curiosity, accompanied by a continuing excitement of discovery. We cannot tell whether he was aware of the side effects of the drug on his sons before pressing forward with the advertising campaign and distributing the drug to hundreds of patients at large. But there is no doubt that his first move upon discovering it was to try to control and develop it. To this end he was quite willing to sell his interest in the drug company he founded to manufacture Ephemerol (Bio-Carbon Amalgamate) to a big weapons-and-security company (ConSec) after convincing it that scanners might have a weapons and

112 The Artist as Monster

surveillance application. So it seems to be Ruth who first conceived the idea of using scanning as a weapon, and he continues to occupy a place in the ConSec boardroom right into the present of the film. His role in Daryl Revok's institutionalization is again unclear; but the fact that he has access to the film-recording of Daryl's treatmentinterviews places him once again in the position of supervisor of his son's treatment (as well as filmer of it - echoes of Michael Powell's Peeping Tom). But perhaps his cruellest act as a parent is to condemn Cameron Vale to decades of dereliction simply in order to 'keep him on ice.' As Revok says: It wasn't until ConSec had trouble putting me away that they thawed you out. You've been monitored every day of your life, allowed to live like garbage, scum. He knew where you were, but it wasn't until he needed to that he reached down and hauled you out of the slime.

Never acknowledging his parenthood of Cameron, Ruth continues to manipulate him by 'rescuing' him from a plight for which he, Ruth, was wholly responsible. He then plays on the gratitude and loyalty this elaborate lie has evoked in Vale to use him as an undercover agent, putting him into situations of great risk without any consideration for the harm that might befall him. It is implied that something like this has also been his modus operandi with Revok and with all the other scanners (his metaphorical children). He says rather smugly to the evil security chief Keller, 'I have a way with these - creatures.' That appears to be the extent of his recognition of his fatherly position. Taken altogether, this paints a picture of a man of truly frightening unscrupulousness and dishonesty - and in the context of his own family, a true incarnation of the Bad Father. And yet Ruth is given a small portion of redemption, right at the end. When he discovers that the 'Ripe' program is deliberately giving Ephemerol to vast numbers of pregnant women he is appalled and tries to stop it. The shock of the discovery throws him into a kind of daze, partly arising from his recognition of his own guilt, and he sits murmuring crazily to himself as Keller walks in and shoots him in the head: It mustn't happen again. It's always been there, lurking inside me, spoiling my joy, rotting my successes, [in a sing-song voice] Cameron. Oh, Cameron. I have a way with you, Cameron. [...] This isn't the same thing, you understand. Not the same thing at all. It's different. The first time was an

Scanners

113

accident. Fortunate for some, unfortunate for others. The Ripe Program is cold and cruel. Very, very cold, [he puts his hands over his ears, and speaks in a small, frightened voice] And very cruel. [Keller shoots him]

This change of heart, this small acknowledgment of responsibility for the whole predicament of the film, is strikingly similar in its placement to Raglan's in The Brood - and similar, too, is the way both men must die for their sins in the end. But Ruth, as dominating and charismatic as Raglan, is much worse as a human being and as a 'father': 'cold and cruel' is an apt description of him. Still, Cronenberg feels the need to give, in this small way, a human dimension to this figure, to emphasize that the instigators and perpetrators of catastrophe in his world are not simply one-dimensional ethical write-offs, any more than the people embodying 'monstrosity' in his films are. (Indeed, this is the deepest scene of the film emotionally - showing only how flat the rest is.) Ruth sells his invention and himself to a violence-brokering security firm, utterly unconcerned about what might be done with this power. This connection of the patriarch-inventor with the world of malignant corporate power is made for the first time here (it is further enlarged in Videodrome). Previously the 'scientist-father' was associated with institutions, but exclusively of a medical-scientific kind - institutions of the body, in fact. It is a genuine change to find the bodily experimenting master scientist connected to the steely pursuit of power and money in the predatory corporation whose stereotype is invoked in ConSec (though there are faint pre-echoes in Raglan's stony-faced power). Certainly yoking the two connects the Bad Father with the (male) social order of capitalist institutions and systematized power structures and positions him further from the (female) order of abjection and desire. In all of Cronenberg's films up to this point, masculinity has taken the dual configuration of powerful transgressive patriarch and dutiful ineffective young hero - perhaps we might say of castrating father and castrated son. Now Scanners depicts a scenario in which the son (or actually the split or twinned son) obtains the phallus, comes at last into possession of what the father has wielded. But this power, whether that of patriarch's 'radical' experimentation and invention or of the protagonist's (in)ability to intervene decisively in the narrative, is an instrumental and social power throughout. It is in any event not connected with the inner power of desire and the abject feminine. Even in Videodrome and The Dead Zone, which contain new examples of the Bad

114 The Artist as Monster

Father (Barry Convex in the former, the maniacal politician Greg Stillson in the latter), this identification of masculine power with the 'outside' and the social is consistent. What is present only in Scanners is the transferrence of this power to the protagonist. Max in Videodrome, Johnny in The Dead Zone (and indeed all the later heroes as well), carry on the tradition of the instrumental, masculine Cameron Vale (or Daryl Revok) only partially, but finally inhabit fully that of the abject, female 'monsters' of the preceding films. Only the ultimate ineffectiveness of the male - and now 'enfemaled' - protagonist is carried over from the features before Scanners. Again, Scanners stands as a lonely exception in its empowerment of the protagonist. Dereliction The theme of dereliction makes its first appearance in Scanners. In Shivers and in most of Rabid the ravages of the body, its uncontrollable overrunning of order and structure and differentiating identity, were represented in the plagues that spread through the social environment. As Cronenberg's work places more and more emphasis and centrality on the personal sphere, dereliction arrives perhaps as a kind of replacement for that social disorder - a personal disorder instead. So in Rabid, although the social landscape is still primary, there is new emphasis on a central character, Rose; and while disaster in the social landscape is signalled by widespread drooling mania and martial-law shootings, disaster in Rose's personal environment is expressed as an image of dereliction - in the concluding shots where she has become, literally, garbage. The Brood moves decisively into the personal sphere. Correspondingly, the social 'plague' is much reduced in scope and cannot really be said to be social at all; meanwhile, there is at least a hint of dereliction in the iconography of the 'brood shack,' with its unfinished planking and air of battered desuetude, as the home of monstrosity. But Scanners depicts for the first time in some detail what will become one of Cronenberg's most pointed motifs in subsequent films. The opening scene of the film shows Vale in a condition of dereliction: unshaven, poorly dressed, weaving slightly as if drunk or doped, picking through the leavings of other people's food - no doubt if film could convey olfactory information he would smell bad too. His dereliction is an index of his inability to control himself, to manage his psychic forces, and specifically to master his scanning powers. Dereliction is the condition of abject helplessness before the uncontrollable power

Scanners

115

within. It is also specifically defined as identityless: Vale says he can't 'hear himself or 'hear his own voice' because of the intrusion of other voices and minds. Conversely, as Vale emerges from his 'drowned' state into control over his mind and personality, his dereliction disappears: he immediately appears clean-shaven and neatly dressed, and later his power over himself (and over others) is consistently signalled by expensive clothes and an impeccable level of personal hygiene. In fact, it is very interesting to see the way in which this rise from uncontrollableness to control presents itself also as a rise in class. Called upon to go 'undercover' as a wealthy art collector, Vale suddenly sports a posh-looking camel's-hair coat and fine leather gloves, and resides in a luxury hotel and even after he forsakes that role his wardrobe rarely strays far down-class (nor do we see him living anywhere else). Similarly, Revok's practised mastery of his extraordinary powers has also deposited him in a land of upper-class imagery. His first appearance (when he explodes that head) is as a corporate executive. And so are a number of his subsequent ones - for example, in his meetings with Keller, where he is primarily characterized by his business overcoat and briefcase. This iconic role is most strongly underlined in his last and most extensive appearance, when he is seen in the role of CEO of Biocarbon Amalgamate, resplendent in his executive office expensively appointed with tiled floor, huge granite coffee table, and objets d'art (one of which Vale uses to smack him in the face). In that scene he has shucked his jacket and is down to his vest, his tie is loosened and his sleeves are rolled up, and he is pouring himself a whisky and unwinding after a hard day's work destroying people - the archetypal shark of the corporate world. The iconography of course connects Revok, and the whole notion of using scanning as a weapon of aggrandizement, with the corporate predators at ConSec, and moreover connects both him and Vale with the larger world of male social power. Again, what is intriguing is the way the psychic transformation has metaphorized itself as a class transformation. The other derelict figure of the film is Ben Pierce. Even after his release from a prison for the criminally insane, Pierce lives in an almost unsocialized condition. His studio-house is a barn-like building, without interior walls or partitions, open and unfinished, strewn with odd items of furniture and, of course, the massive detritus of his sculptures.9 Pierce's manner, too, has the hostile and disturbed quality of a certain kind of social derelict. His, indeed, is the only still-partially-derelict per-

116 The Artist as Monster

sonality that we see in the present tense of the film, since Vale is subdued and 'cured7 before we ever get to meet him properly, and Revok's deeply disturbed behaviour is only visible in a historical film of his former self. The upsetting weirdness of Pierce's behaviour recalls not only (as mentioned) Robert Silverman's unsettling performance in The Brood, but also that of that film's other male psychoplasmics-sufferer, Mike. But whereas Mike's unsettlingness arises from his emotional abjection and his pleas to Frank to 'be my daddy' ('Want me to bleed for you?'), the scanner Pierce's discomfiting quality carries a threat of anger and aggression as well as the embarrassment of imbalance. Once more, Pierce's role as artist, and stand-in for the film's artist, endows his persona with extra weight and makes the connection between dereliction and the state of monstrous artistic creativity. We might also recall that the derelict-looking 'brood shack' was another site of monstrous creation. Ultimately, as Cronenberg's work moves more intensely into the personal landscape, dereliction will receive an even more insistent and clearly articulated form - in Videodrome, The Fly, Dead Ringers, and Naked Lunch. From the beginning it is associated with the state of identitylessness and uncontrol, and also with the power of disorder and abjection to subdue consciousness. In Scanners dereliction is the initial condition, and control and consciousness come to dispel it. There is a transformation towards ego-empowerment as boundaries, containment, a differentiation between self and other, inside and outside, are introduced. In other films, especially the later ones, that movement is exactly reversed: dereliction becomes a kind of goal towards which the film progresses, a process of transformation as decay in which it is consciousness and identity that are expelled. Mise en scene Scanners is certainly Cronenberg's most optimistic film. He jocularly remarked to an interviewer not long after it was made: 'I'd remarried; I'd had another kid, and was feeling much more optimistic about things in general. I was exploding heads just like any other young, normal North American boy.'10 But in a later interview, talking about the fact that the film was shot in a Canadian winter and that that climatic severity was essential to it, he described it in a different way: 'It was meant to be very deadly - a cold, harsh, nasty film.'11 Viewing Scanners in the context of Cronenberg's whole career span, it is easy to lose track

Scanners

117

of this perspective. Some of the 'nastiness' is evident in the margins of the otherwise very 'clean' and good Vale character: the seductive pleasures of using scanning as a weapon seen on a number of occasions, but perhaps most clearly in the scene where Vale, under experimental conditions, sends a yoga master's heartbeat into fibrillation and won't let up because he's enjoying the power so much. And generally speaking, as we have seen, scanning is represented as aggression. But perhaps the film's dimension of coldness, harshness, and nastiness is most clearly visible in its mise en scene. The cold, aggressive modernism of architecture and decor is more pronounced here than in any of Cronenberg's films so far. It is even more oppressive than in Shivers - where, however, it fulfils a much more important thematic role as a point of opposition to and provocation of bodily chaos. In Scanners there are many settings that display the inorganic hard-edged geometry of modernism: the red and chrome and lightbulbs of the opening scene in the shopping mall, with its chase amidst the converging lines of an escalator; the stainless steel, glass, and cement of the two subway sequences, where much emphasis is placed on the gleaming, evenly striated aluminum subway cars as they rush up to and past the lens; the aggressively unadorned art gallery whose bareness contrasts with the expressionist anguish of Ben Pierce's sculptures. The centre of this aesthetic, and also its most striking realization, is to be found in the corporate environment of ConSec and Biocarbon Amalgamate. Consec in particular never deviates from the impression created by the first establishing shot of its headquarters: against a totally cold and clear blue Canadian winter sky, its massive white signpost sits in the foreground, its pure white rectangular office towers rise with anonymous power behind. The use of a markedly wideangle lens here (as in so many of these modernist tableaus) adds a razor-sharpness of focus, an exaggerated linear perspective, and an alienating sense of space and hard lines to a shot that is itself a cold and forbidding modernist composition. Inside the building the feeling is amplified. The rooms and corridors are dominated by unpainted concrete, pearly greys and whites, and very hard, clean textures. What I can only describe as a cool chiaroscuro bathes the conference room, with walls lit up and faces often shadowed. 'Cold and cruel,' again this phrase describes the entire corporate environment - its projects and its appearance. But in Scanners this ultra-controlled and cerebral environment is not

118 The Artist as Monster

placed in opposition to the organic chaos of the body. The body, as we have seen, is hardly present in the film - or rather, it is strongly present, but in the almost unrecognizable 'cleaned-up' and highly mentalized form of scanning. To be sure, there are examples of a less aggressive, more humane' kind of decor in the film: the old brick warehouse where Dr Ruth takes Vale, Ruth's 'psychic gymnasium' where Vale scans the yoga master on a worn floor mat amidst unpainted ceiling beams, Ben Pierce's farmyard-barn of a studio, and the house inhabited by Obrist's group. These settings, darker and more human if not always welcoming, repeat to a degree the Brood syndrome by looking older and more lived-in, relatively full of character, and not so monolithically antiseptic. The 'old brick building' has now been established as the home of the scientist-inventor. There are several establishing shots of the exterior of Ruth's laboratory, low-angle pans across its outer walls, that set an iconic pattern to be repeated in the 'pirate' video laboratory where Harlan captures the videodrome signal, and also in Brundle's lab in The Fly. Darkened brick further adds to the dark weight of the Ruth character, and (along with some of the features of the Somafree Institute in The Brood) signals a departure from the placement of the project of 'science' in the over-clean obsessive-compulsive modernist setting. That dehumanized modernist aesthetic is now emphatically associated with predatory corporate inhumanity instead. By 1980, such an association had an established pedigree in North American cinema. In films of the mid-1970s such as The Conversation and The Parallax View, paranoid fears about surveillance, conspiracy, and murder practised by utterly unscrupulous and manipulative corporations went hand-inhand with depictions of those corporations' physical environments in terms whose coldness and inhumanity reflected their indifference to human suffering. In a sense Scanners simply repeats this familiar trope of the evil corporation and its menacing and dehumanized iconic depiction - though Cronenberg's agoraphobic wide-angle sharpness and emptiness are more extreme than most examples. The sense one has that this entity is a kind of importation for Cronenberg, a transportation of his highly personal scientific institutions into the realm of an existing convention, adds perhaps to the feeling that Scanners has drawn closer to a more mainstream form of cinema. The wide angles, however, do remain a personal imprint. Ever since Stereo Cronenberg has shown a fondness for this device, and it is one stylistic feature that has persisted right through his career. As always,

Scanners

119

the exaggerated perspectives and the depth and sharpness of focus of wide-angle lenses have cooled off the mise en scene, especially in contrast to the 'warm' shallow focus typical of longer lenses. This is the mode that Cronenberg uses for depicting 'the world/ especially the world of science and instrumentality - and one might extend this territory to include what is male, social, 'outside.' When the body (or sexuality, or abjection, or violence) enters his films, the viewpoint changes: the lenses get longer, the shots get closer, the editing becomes more active. And indeed, in the realm of 'human subjectivity' there are plenty of portrait-lens close-ups of characters who live and suffer in this wide-angle environment. The colour schemes also tend, broadly, to observe that dichotomy of cold and warm: so many times the architecture or decor in wide-angle shots is bleached or muted or bluish in colour, while of course the body's colours are richly grounded at the red end of the spectrum. (Costumes fall into this pattern as well, although they cannot be matched with lens typology because they must persist through different shots and scenes.) Repression and transgression have each their own visual style: the former cool and controlled and denatured, the latter hot and engaged and messy. The fact that the 'repressed' style is the basic or default style at least through Scanners is suggestive, I think. And in Scanners the conflation of corporate and scientific projects, and the relative absence of desire and abjection, leads to a situation in which the wide-angle antiseptic modernist aesthetic is more dominant than in any other Cronenberg film. (Beginning most clearly in Videodrome, camera movement arrives in some force as another potentially warming element in Cronenberg's cinema, another mediator of repression - but now to accompany an appalling process of the abjection of an at-last central male protagonist.) When Scanners was released in the United States in 1981, it was so successful that for a week it was actually the biggest box-office draw in the country, and its success transformed Cronenberg's career. The film spawned three sequels, and even today has enough legs' in the cultcinema realm to leave its mark on two ongoing websites.12 More importantly perhaps, projects like The Dead Zone and The Fly - major studio releases with big mainstream stars - were now within Cronenberg's reach. Scanners, despite its verve and flair and imagination, still contains elements of the 'low-budget' and even the 'Canadian lowbudget' syndromes. The frailty appears not in scenes of action or special effects, all of which look highly professional, but rather in some of the acting: Stephen Lack's iconic appropriateness not always compen-

120 The Artist as Monster

sating for his awkwardness with dialogue; Michael Ironside as Revok not yet quite on top of his considerable talent; the actor playing Keller pronouncing his own boss's name incorrectly two separate ways and never actually getting it right. These take us back to the days of unimposing performers in some major roles in Shivers, Rabid, and The Brood. But this is the last time such intimations of poverty will ever show themselves in a Cronenberg film. Scanners may not be the best or the most characteristic Cronenberg movie, but it made him a major filmmaker.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Videodrome (1982) 'Why would anyone watch a scum show like Videodrome?'

Videodrome is David Cronenberg's epistemological break film: the film that decisively reconfigures the basic dramatic structure of his films. For in this film, still one of Cronenberg's boldest and most risk-taking, there is finally a shift of the ground of the action into the male protagonist, a centralization of this masculine figure who can now properly represent the masculine sensibility of the film. The marginalization or diminishment of this figure in the earlier features looks in retrospect like a kind of evasion - or, to be more charitable, perhaps simply a stage in the filmmaker's continuing hunt to discover the ground zero of desire and prohibition. Now, that centre is at last discovered to be not the sexually transgressive woman, nor the inventor-father, nor unfeeling and predatory elements of society (although all of those forms are importantly present in Videodrome), but, rather, the self. And the appetites and anxieties, with their bodily mutations and diseases, finally unfold in and enact themselves on the self, and the self's body. The self is the monster. Cronenberg has said that Videodrome is 'a first-person film,'1 and this idea is the key to the film. The protagonist, Max Renn, is present in every scene of the movie, and again to quote Cronenberg, 'We get no information that Max doesn't get himself.'2 President and part owner of a Toronto independent television station (Civic-TV, Channel 83) specializing in sensational programming with heavy doses of sex and violence, Max encounters test transmissions of an experimental show called 'Videodrome' consisting of nothing but sadistic torture and murder. But, as he only gradually discovers, the Videodrome signal induces powerful and complex hallucinations that are often impossible to distinguish from non-hallucinatory reality. These hallucinations -

122 The Artist as Monster

entering the film most unmistakably and shockingly when Max sees a gigantic quasi-vaginal slit appear in his abdomen - intensify and proliferate until they dominate Max's life and cut him off from outward reality. And while this process is going on, he is being pulled confusingly by a whole array of different influences. These include radio poppsychologist sex-siren Nicki Brand, who introduces him to the exciting and frightening realm of sadomasochistic pleasure while watching Videodrome torture; the video pronouncements of 'media prophet' Professor Brian O'Blivion, who preaches that television has usurped reality and, as inventor of the hallucination- and tumour-causing Videodrome signal, has fallen victim to its destructive effects; the current owners of Videodrome, a corporation called Spectacular Optical, which wants to use the device for political ends, has covertly introduced Max to the signal, and 'programs' him to become an assassin and to give them his television station; and O'Blivion's daughter, Bianca, who is dedicated to spreading her father's gospel of transformation-through-television, and 'counter-programs' Max with the transcendent idea of 'the New Flesh' as an apotheosis of the psychological changes occurring in him. In the end, a hopelessly scrambled and anguished Max, on the run from police and immersed in ever more powerful and confusing hallucinations, fires a pistol bullet into his brain - though he may think that by doing so he is entering into another, utterly transformed, realm of existence. Notwithstanding the external forces apparently initiating the Videodrome signal and later attempting to manipulate Max like a marionette, the precise characteristics of his hallucinations are all embodiments of his personal inner conflicts, somatizations of a (malign) psychic condition, as in so many of the earlier films. More overtly and explicitly than ever before (except perhaps in the quite different context of Shivers), the problem is sexual. It is a problem of transgressive sexual appetite, explicitly sadistic sexual appetite, which produces excitement and feelings of liberation, then harm and guilt, and finally complete psychic chaos and self-destruction. In this respect, Videodrome is a self-accusatory film, far more so than any of Cronenberg's previous films, and setting the pattern for many of his later ones. At the same time, the film remains ambivalent, perhaps even confused, on this question of who or what bears the responsibility for all these dreadful outcomes. Certainly the presence of unscrupulous powerhungry institutions like Spectacular Optical, of crazed intellectual idealists like Brian O'Blivion, and of an entire society whose basic reality

Videodrome

123

is becoming vicarious suggests that the fate of the individual subject Max Renn is not of his own making. And yet even clearer is the outline of a transgressively desiring person whose appetites, combined with his inadequate understanding of their real nature and potential consequences, precipitate disaster. Altogether, the film undecidably dichotomizes the source of disaster: it is politicized (externalized), and it is sexualized (internalized). The split is epitomized in the mechanism by which the hallucinations are created: the Videodrome subsignal, transmi ttable under any picture, is one cause; but so is the presence of sadistic sexual appetite in the viewer. And yet as the film moves along, it gravitates more and more towards a primacy of the personal and the psychic. The first-personness of Videodrome is not only relative to Cronenberg's earlier films, it is absolute. The film moves far beyond the conventions of identificatory protagonist-oriented narrative to a submersion in the central character's increasingly fevered and disconnected hallucinations. It is not just Max Renn who becomes delirious, boundaryless, fantastically beset - it is the film. Cronenberg has always expressed his allegiance to the romantic-existentialist-modernist idea of the artist as heroic and transgressive explorer - explorer especially of the inner sources of transgression. His admiration especially for William Burroughs has always been expressed in these terms, and his attempts to emulate Burroughs have led him to create works that seek a direct, oneiric connection with unconscious instincts and associations. Videodrome is, along with Naked Lunch, certainly the best - most extreme and virtuosic - example of this phenomenon. The film's absolutely unobjective plunge into the realm of bodily disorder, identity chaos, bewildering transformation, and abjection signals a new commitment by Cronenberg to this principle of blind truth to the imagination, an embrace of fundamental disorientation as the price for a direct connection with the unconscious, and a discovery of a new path to the goal of artistic honesty. Not only does Videodrome restage Cronenberg's eternal mind/body problem, it represents a massive return of all the primal forces that were, to a greater or lesser extent, excluded from Scanners: sexuality, the visceral body, disease, abjection, monstrosity. No Cronenberg film contains an image more shocking and disturbing, more indicative of the filmmaker's particular brand of transgressive assault, than Max's gigantic gaping, pulsating torsal vagina, into which he immediately inserts, and loses, a pistol, and which is brutally penetrated twice more

124 The Artist as Monster

later. The subsequent re-emergence of the pistol as a 'Fleshgun' is an equally graphic assault, as is the extended, horrific 'cancer-death' of Barry Convex. Fundamentally, these provocations are demonstrations of Cronenberg's seriousness. We are far from the elements of 'grossout' horror humour in Shivers and Rabid here, and almost as far from the adventure-story thrills of Scanners.3 Videodrome's political and social implications, taken up and augmented from Scanners, are also much more serious: deep and widespread, offering a kind of postmodern paranoid model of manipulation of helpless private individuals by predatory corporate forces under conditions of universal technological penetration and colonization. At the same time, the protagonist whose psyche and body become the uncontrollable landscape of transgressive sexuality, boundaryless transformation and abjection, and murderous violence becomes also in the end the foundational example of Cronenberg's many suicidal melancholiacs. Driven further and further from stable identity and meaning, sinking into chaos and dereliction, experiencing the inexorable crumbling and collapse of his personality in a torrent of bewildering, irresistible images and compulsions, Max Renn becomes that figure for whom his life is impossible, his self is impossible. And this is the figure we will see again and again in Cronenberg's subsequent films: in The Dead Zone, in The Fly, in Dead Ringers, in Naked Lunch, in M. Butterfly. The Videodrome of theory Videodrome has attracted perhaps more commentary than any other Cronenberg film to date.4 Its thematization of media as an ubiquitously intrusive and identity-threatening force, of the transformations enabled and threats posed by information overload, of the dissolution of borders between simulacra and the real and between spectacle and the body, of the politics of image manipulation, of sexuality and subjectivity as unstable cultural constructions is irresistibly attractive to postmodern cultural theorists. Marshall McLuhan is of course the starting point for Cronenberg here (and Brian O'Blivion is clearly a 'radical' pastiche of McLuhan as a 'media prophet'), but scholarly commentators have immediately gravitated to Foucault, Debord, and especially Baudrillard as providing models according to which the film can be explicated. Indeed, this is putting the cart before the horse, since the project of so much theoretical writing in the field of popular culture is not to use theory to explicate texts, but rather to discover texts that will

Videodrome

125

illustrate theory. In this respect, Videodrome is an object of almost pornographic appeal for scholars seeking an explicit textual embodiment of some of the most powerful contemporary currents of cultural theory. Virtually all commentators emphasize the film's paranoid dimension of social manipulation and mind control, which connects individual anxieties about identity engulfment and transformation through media images with political analysis that asks questions about who wields media power and to what ends. The individual subject displayed widely in theory is a creature whose sphere of private identity is initially constructed exclusively by cultural impress, and then has its illusory unified autonomy both violated and dispersed by postmodern technological imbrication and media bombardment in a system of late-capitalist material exploitation. In this context/the loss of the unified subject is both necessary and inevitable. Since its private autonomy was always a disguise for hegemonic social currents operating the subject in puppet-like fashion through the mechanisms of ideology, its claim to authenticity is always-already false, and its destruction is hardly to be lamented. Simultaneously, the uncontainable and ungraspable explosion of technology in general and information systems in particular floods this falsely autonomous subject so drastically that inevitably the dispersion of its unified identity must finally penetrate even its false consciousness, until it understands that it is dispersed. The 'crisis' or 'panic' (Kroker) that results from this loss of identity is, however, mitigated by the very dispersion of the subject whose 'depth7 is now removed and whose present 'flatness' is affect-impaired. In this scenario, we are all identityless and panicked, but we have long since ceased thinking that the situation that rendered us so is fixable or even understandable, and in our scattered and overstimulated numbness our identityless panic is as shallow as our excitement or pleasure, so instead of despairing we might as well just go to a movie. And if we should encounter Videodrome there, our recognition of our own condition in that of Max Renn will also be only another spectaclestimulation. Max's experience in the film certainly dramatizes a radical loss of subjective identity at the hands precisely of the technological, materialist, and media-intensive forces that are the primary carriers of social postmodernity Moreover, it replicates the postmodern condition in which the outside world is diminished or effaced through incomprehensibility and its place as a focus of attention and anxiety is taken by the body But to suggest, as most commentary seeking to claim

126 The Artist as Monster

Cronenberg as an exemplary postmodernist does, that his films observe these transformations from the near side of the postmodern divide is, I think, a mistake. His films, and especially Videodrome, certainly display a highly sophisticated awareness of the pressures of the postmodern condition - of their insidious ubiquity and inescapability. But Cronenberg is not at all convinced that unified subjectivity is a false and undesirable construct, and he is not at all sanguine about what state will follow its loss. And if he has been looking for alternatives to it ever since Stereo, he has yet to imagine one that works - or, to put it more strongly and accurately, one that is not catastrophic. He is more aptly described, in the term he has increasingly adopted in his self-commentaries, as a (pessimistic) existentialist, who recognizes that technology plays a strong role in the way we define ourselves out of the emptiness, but for whom that existential self-identity is still unified, and still of absolutely basic importance. But such a perspective has no attractions for commentators seeking to situate Cronenberg in the middle of the postmodern stream. For Fredric Jameson, Videodrome not only is an exemplary postmodern text drawing the shallow, irridescent powers of popular narrative into the vacuum left by the death of high modernism, but also embodies a regime of cultural peripherality amidst a global system where centralized categories of meaning have dissolved. It is not surprising that a prominent Marxist cultural theorist has an exclusively political perspective on the film. From one angle, the film can be seen 'as an articulated nightmare vision of how we as individuals feel within the new multinational world system'; meanwhile, of the 'sexual nightmare' of Max's ventral vagina, Jameson merely says that, 'corporeal revulsion of this kind probably has the primary function of expressing fears about activity and passivity in the complexities of late capitalism.'5 In one capsule description, the film is 'this titanic political struggle between two vast and faceless conspiracies (in which the hapless Max is little more than a pawn).'6 This is certainly to privilege the political text and subtext of the film, and to read its private horrors as entirely determined by socio-political (and in fact socio-geopolitical) forces. Scott Bukatman more straightforwardly integrates the film into a line of media theory that includes McLuhan and Debord and culminates in Baudrillard, where old oppositions between history and spectacle, reality and virtuality, self and the world, have disappeared. He also (rightly) invokes Burroughs, preacher of the image as virus and of a paranoid world where this virus is deliberately used by predatory powers to exer-

Videodrome

127

cise mind-control over addicted/infected individuals. The result is the transformation, the scattering, the dissolution of the subject. The subject is in crisis, its hegemony threatened by centralized structures of control, by a technology which simultaneously alienates and masks alienation, by a perception of its own helplessness/7 In this scenario, Max is simply the designated victim. Certainly his own psychosexual anxieties play a part in his reduction, and destruction; but really it could have been any of us postmodern transformed subjects in a cultural environment where we are destined to function as 'terminals/8 Steven Shaviro is more attuned to the dimension of suffering and abjection, and his incisive study proclaims that 'Cronenberg's films display the body in its crude, primordial materiality/9 A passionate defender of postmodern anti-holism, Shaviro finds in Cronenberg's obsessive corporeality and palpitating abjection a strange site of resistance to ideology and power: 'By insisting on the gross palpability of the flesh, and by heightening (instead of minimizing) our culture's pervasive discomfort with materiality, Cronenberg opposes the way in which dominant cinema captures, polices, and regulates desire, precisely by providing sanitized models of its fulfillment/10 For Shaviro, Cronenberg is not simply an illustration of postmodern media theory. Rather, 'the brutally hilarious strategy of Videodrome is to take media theorists such as Marshall McLuhan and Jean Baudrillard completely at their word, to overliteralize their claims for the ubiquitous mediazation of the world/11 But the difference between Cronenberg and (for example) Baudrillard is Cronenberg's insistence on the palpability of mediated experience: 'To abolish reference and to embrace "virtual reality" is not, as Baudrillard imagines, to reduce desire to a series of weightless and indifferent equivalences. The more images are flattened out and distanced from their representational sources, the more they are inscribed in our nerves, and flash across our synapses/12 At the same time, however, Shaviro wants to claim Cronenberg as a Shavirian postmodernist, one who welcomes the destruction of stable categories both as a strategy of resistance and as an introduction to new forms of ecstatic experience where the extremes of bodily experience share a common ground. 'To the extent that the flesh is unbearable, it is irrecuperable. The extremities of agony cannot finally be distinguished from those of pleasure/13 This is a credo of jouissance in abjection, and there is no doubt that Cronenberg's films often occupy a terrain where the extremities meet, where the body's abjection in pleasure or in pain is the site of a new and transformed kind of identity and experience.

128 The Artist as Monster

But it is my contention that this new space, this transformed identity, is in the end irredeemably destructive and impossible. What happens to Max Renn is 'unbearable' indeed, and indeed it cannot be borne not even by any drastically altered subjectivity or 'New Flesh/ Its foundation in and relation to the 'extremities of pleasure' (here, sadomasochistic sexual pleasure with Nicki) is not in any way functionally useful or progressive when it leads to ethical chaos, an absolute loss of boundaries and identity, and finally a melancholy so fundamental that suicide is the most positive option. Shaviro is right to disalign Cronenberg from the 'weightless' virtuality of Baudrillard's (or for that matter Bukatman's) scattered subjectivity. Where he is wrong, I believe, is in thinking that Cronenberg has no nostalgia for the old unified subject.14 'Nostalgia/ to be sure, is not at all the right word to describe the horror and despair dramatized in the protagonist of every film from Videodrome to M. Butterfly in response to the dreadful leaching-away of stable personal identity. The fact that these identities were not so stable to start with, or that they were beset with serious and fundamental problems, or even that their sense of self was not rooted in any kind of existential truth, is ultimately irrelevant, since their last state is always much, much worse than their first. The paranoid view But let us first pay what is due to the paranoid postmodern scenario. The Videodrome signal, co-invented by Brian O'Blivion, is taken over by Spectacular Optical, to be used for political purposes.15 Spectacular Optical is to some degree an extension and continuation of all the previous institutions in Cronenberg's films, from Stereo's telepathic institute onwards, and has particular affinities with the menacing corporate anonymity of ConSec in Scanners. Both Spectacular Optical and ConSec are powerful organizations engaged in military and scientific development with conspiratorial overtones, and both of them have co-opted the inventions of the films' idealistic scientists (O'Blivion and Paul Ruth respectively). The extent of Spectacular Optical's manipulation of Max is extreme: in order to ensure his exposure to the Videodrome signal the organization has actually gone so far as previously to plant an employee in Max's business - his favourite technician and trusted right-hand man, Harlan. Having deliberately messed up his nervous system with the Videodrome signal, the organization goes on to record the exact pattern of his hallucinations with a special helmet as a key to manipulating

Videodrome

129

him more precisely - programming him to murder his two partners at Channel 83 and to attempt the murder of their enemy Bianca O'Blivion. Spectacular Optical is actually far more frightening than ConSec, since it is planning to use Videodrome-relayed mind control to undertake large-scale social engineering of a hard-right-wing variety. It is particularly sinister in the wide reach of its influence. 'We make inexpensive glasses for the Third World and missile-guidance systems for NATO/ says Barry Convex, Spectacular Optical's Chief of Special Programmes and the suave, flinty-eyed personification of its power. This multinational aura, remarked by Jameson and others, derives also from the Asian appearance of the victims on the Videodrome program, the suggestion that signals emanating from Pittsburgh are rerouted through Malaysia, and Marian's political speech that pits the North American world against the rest. Also conjured out of these shadows is the sense of First World capitalist domination and exploitation of the Third World in particular.16 It is not clear (as so many things in Videodrome are not) whether the corporation intends to use the signal to 'program' viewers to perform robotic acts, as Max is programmed, or whether the idea simply is to send out the signal with the Videodrome torture-and-murder show and give cancerous brain-tumours to all the morally unfit people who will watch such a show. It is also not clear to what degree the corporation is pursuing material goals and to what degree ideological ones. Some of their actions appear inexplicable. How is it going to help Spectacular Optical to have Max Renn kill his partners, for example? He is certain to get caught almost immediately (except that he forestalls capture by his suicide), and will hardly be in a position to 'give us Channel 83,' as the 'cassette' he is programmed with repeatedly tells him to do. And how is a signal that gives anybody watching a fatal tumour, even when attached to a test pattern, going to perform any comprehensible social control? But the very darkness of Spectacular Optical's purpose, and even its apparent nonsensicalness, merely adds resonance to a paranoid perception. The notion of exercising 'control' through the Videodrome signal that acts like a 'virus' and infests the host body is certainly a conception deriving from Burroughs, as Bukatman and Griinberg both observe.17 Burroughs, possibly the most paranoid important writer in recorded history, elaborates theories of evil mind-control emanating from such diverse sources as creatures from outer space, seeds of alien infection preserved in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the U.S. government, drug dealers, and commercial advertisers. In fact, no distinction

130 The Artist as Monster

is made between these sources - they are all part of the same conspiracy. Moreover, the gateway through which evil enters the individual is need and appetite - for drugs, for sex - which reifies into images of violence and abjection. It is this same pattern that is repeated in Videodrome: a virus-like presence introduced into the brain and body of the viewer, entering through the portal of a transgressive and addictive sexual appetite, initiated by shadowy organizations situated somewhere in the world of corporate capitalism and military power but disguised as something more quotidian, which will subject individuals ruthlessly to horrific cruelty and manipulation. But these predatory corporations exploiting and discarding individuals have only a limited half-life in Cronenberg's work. It is true that the medical institutions from Stereo all the way to Dead Ringers are manipulative and very often destructive of their 'patients/ It is really only in Scanners and Videodrome, though, that the predatory corporation as such emerges. In all the films after Videodrome, with one exception,18 it is either absent or (as in Dead Ringers) has reverted to its more specialized medical form. The exception is Naked Lunch, Videodrome's twin among Cronenberg's films; and here it has returned in the most virulent and sadistic form ever. But Dr Benway and Interzone, Inc. are, first, even more deeply imbedded in untrustworthy first-person hallucination than any of the organizations in Videodrome and, second, very much projections of a Burroughsian paranoia of apocalyptic dimensions that are impossible to separate from a specifically Burroughsian world, and whose status is most likely delusional even according to the film itself. What does Interzone, Inc. want, supposing there even is such a phenomenon outside William Lee's scrambled perceptions? It wants to make Lee suffer, it wants to make everyone suffer. It exemplifies Burroughs's description of all persecutors as 'control addicts/ The pleasures of sadistic domination are right up front, and material gain may or may not be somewhere off in the background. In other words, the predatory corporation here is a blind for the subject's generalized sense of persecution and victimization, and also, I would argue, for his sense of guilt. But in Videodrome, as in Scanners, the predatory corporation really is plotting against individuals to exploit them for material ends. And consequently the film really does present a picture of the invasion, and indeed rape, of the individual and the collapse of his subjectivity as importantly grounded in the public social realm of hegemonic capital power. Moreover, the means whereby this depredation takes place is specified: the control of mass-culture images in gen-

Videodrome

131

eral and appeals to the 'lowest' appetites of the 'lowest7 mass audience in particular. Then the film is clearly also fascinated by the addictive and transformative power of a non-predatory media. This fascination is expressed primarily through the character of Brian O'Blivion, and the institutions and disciples (his daughter Bianca above all) he has assembled around him. O'Blivion's central idea is that television images are so widespread and penetrating that they have become indistinguishable from reality and have begun to replace it. As Shaviro says, this is a wicked joke at the expense of McLuhan before and Baudrillard after the fact. What takes O'Blivion out of the McLuhanite realm and into the Cronenbergian one is the alarming literalness with which he presses the notion of the physical effects of television and the substitutableness of video existence for real existence: The television screen is the retina of the mind's eye. Therefore the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore television is reality, and reality is less than television.

O'Blivion is quite enthusiastic at this prospect, and his religious fervour to advance the process is evident in his establishment of the Cathode Ray Mission, a Salvation Army-like video soup kitchen where derelicts are parked in front of televisions to 'help patch them back into the world's mixing board/ Such sentiments could hardly be more in tune with the Baudrillardian sense that virtuality has supplanted history and simulacra the real. In fact, O'Blivion himself embodies (though one should say 'disembodies') the notion of virtual existence, since he is physically dead and exists only in the form of videotapes, and video hallucinations. 'At the end/ says Bianca, 'he was convinced that public life on television was more real than private life in the flesh; he wasn't afraid to let his body die.' He greets even the fact that Videodrome creates a lethal brain tumour with what one may call professional optimism. His status as 'Videodrome's first victim' is something to be proud of; the growth in his head is in any event not a cancerous tumour, but 'a new organ of the brain.'19 He exclaims: I think that massive doses of the Videodrome signal will ultimately create a new outgrowth of the human brain, which will produce and control hallucination to the point that it will change human reality.

132 The Artist as Monster

That change will be 'the next phase in the development of man as a technological animal/ and will culminate in the translation of rnan entirely into the video world - as indeed is already the case with O'Blivion himself. Here, even more explicitly, is the disappearance of history and the real. What kind of existence O'Blivion might have if his daughter stopped playing and distributing his tapes is not addressed. In fact, all questions about this 'next phase/ this transformed realm of 'human reality' - and this is also the road that Max is to take - are unanswered; and there is very little to prevent the straightforward conclusion that all these notions are delusions to cover over the anguish of identity loss and the prospect of death without any kind of resurrection. Private transgression So in Videodrome we have a free-floating technology that transforms object-relations and identity and dissolves reality in hallucination; and we have a powerful and predatory organization that co-opts the technology for its own sinister purposes. Such a configuration is in keeping with Burroughs, with Baudrillard, and with Jameson all at once: a paranoid scenario involving the subjection of individuals to multinational corporate and political ends through the means of technology. But why is the consequence of the Videodrome signal a cancerous tumour? Why does the film so emphatically present Max's infection with Videodrome as a consequence of his desire for more sexually transgressive programming, and even more as a consequence of his arousal by the spectacle and practice of sexual sadism? And why are its principal subjective symptoms the appearance of a large vagina in his abdomen together with other images of a markedly sexual, and transsexual, nature? What relation do these symptoms have either to the identity-dissolving consequences of media marination or the hegemonic schemes of capitalist predators? Surely a numbed, pallid, zombie-ish compliance, an emptying out of the psyche, would be a more appropriate state for a media-saturated perfect consumer.20 Here we may turn again to Burroughs, with his obsessive connection between transgressive personal behaviour and persecuted victimization. Burroughs has a very complex reaction to his need for two forbidden pleasures, heroin and homosexual sex - both of which he feels at some level are destructive. Psychologically, he disavows the horrific aspect of transgression by deflecting it into a paranoid conspiracy theory, in which phantasmagoric agents of evil from inhuman viruses to

Videodrome

133

human 'control addicts' have infected him and are forcing him to do evil things. Powerful self-interested institutions like corporations are part of the conspiracy, but so are the transgressive urges he feels within himself. Here is a pattern we can discern in Videodrome, which similarly splits the cause of evil between external organs of power (Spectacular Optical) and internal transgressive urges (sadistic sexual enjoyment). Indeed, one might even say that the film's uncertainty about the relation between those two causes, although it is covered by the hallucinatory uncertainty of everything, is also inherited from Burroughs. It is also noteworthy that the infecting, destroying image-virus that Burroughs speaks of so often in the 'Nova Trilogy' is an image of 'rage hate fear ugliness' as exemplified in atrocities of violence, very often sexual. This viral image is very close indeed to that of Videodrome, especially where Burroughs depicts the controlling functions of sexatrocity snuff movies,21 or speaks of the activities of some recipients as 'motivated by torture films.'22 The specific imagery, however, is all Cronenberg's. The cancerous brain tumour is a repetition of tropes from Crimes of the Future, Rabid, and The Brood - which will be terrifyingly expanded in The Fly. In Videodrome, as an integral part of the shifting of attention and responsibility at last onto a central male protagonist, Cronenberg's uneasinesses (stretching all the way to terror) about the explosive transgressive power of sexuality come truly into focus for the first time. And it is this dynamo of trouble that separates Videodrome from the affectless identity-dispersion of postmodern archetype and also from Burroughsian paranoia. For Cronenberg's version of the Burroughs scenario invests far more in the guilt-driven mechanisms of personal responsibility than it does in the paranoid mechanisms of socio-political manipulation - this is true of Videodrome and even more deeply and self-knowingly true of Naked Lunch. The intensity of the sex scenes with Nicki, the way in which Max's anxiety about his situation is so insistently triggered by sexual transgression, and then of course the ever-growing reliance on a purely subjective viewpoint, all combine to propel the affective centre of the film into Max's private quagmire of desire and guilt. The relentless movement of the film is inward. Spectacular Optical's project and motives become more and more opaque, and are finally irrelevant; at the end Max is alone with his gun, his personal organic television set, and his image of Nicki, while Spectacular Optical has evaporated. Similarly, the 'organicization' of technology - the 'breathing' cas-

134 The Artist as Monster

settes and TV sets - acts to transfer technology into the intimate and personal realm of the body. These palpitating, fleshly devices may be seen as a pointed manifestation of that project of the sexualization of science that is integral to Cronenberg's work from beginning to end. And we should not miss the fact that Max is the first 'scientist' in the film - and the first who has moved from a peripheral to a central position in a Cronenberg narrative. It is Max's entrepreneurial search for a more overtly sexualized and transgressive content for his station that is the true beginning of everything in Videodrome. True, O'Blivion and Spectacular Optical had invented and developed the Videodrome signal first, and therefore replicate (for the last time) the older pattern in which distant or absconded patriarchal males originate the cause of bodily mutation - a configuration that becomes even clearer when O'Blivion and Convex appear as twin father figures. But this does not obscure the fact that what we first see is Max experimenting and searching for something new, and doing so, to an important extent, out of hidden and disavowed sexual motives. At last, a truly central hero Max is not only overwhelmingly the centre of Videodrome, he is Cronenberg's first really three-dimensional character, and he signals a definitive turn in Cronenberg's cinema to narratives that fix on deeply examined individual human subjects, rather than on remarkable situations peopled with flatter characters. Comparing Max to earlier protagonists such as Rose in Rabid or Cameron Vale in Scanners will illustrate this point immediately. At the same time, the intense interest hitherto displayed by Cronenberg in important secondary characters (e.g., Raglan's patients in The Brood; Paul Ruth, Darryl Revok, and Ben Pierce in Scanners) is here invested in the protagonist. This confident, aggressive, entrepreneurial hero is a startling contrast to Cronenberg's earlier central males. Even Cameron Vale in Scanners, who does master his narrative and is central to it, begins in a condition of lostness and dereliction and can never be described really as an initiator, acting throughout under conditions determined by either Ruth or Revok. But the trajectory of Max Renn's career, upon inspection, simply inverts the success story of Cameron Vale's. Beginning as resourceful, controlling, even powerful, he progresses through escalating stages of disorientation and anxiety to a state of lostness and dereliction worse than that from which Vale emerged. As Max is track-

Videodrome

135

ing down Videodrome, following up clues from Harlan and program distributor Masha Borowsky and O'Blivion, the movie momentarily starts to look like a detective story, a plot movie. But the film then demonstrates Max's utter inability to master this narrative, to control its outcome in any way. Max's posture and attitude of mastery is savagely demonstrated to be illusory, and in the end he is as helpless before the forces of the body and desire as any of his predecessors. Indeed he is in a far worse condition because, if their passivity did not prevent or repair disaster, Max's actions cause it: he is a murderer of innocent persons as well as guilty ones. And if his predecessors had to suffer the anguish of their impotence in protecting the females they love, Max stands convicted in his own conscience of actually abusing the ones he loves. Of course, notwithstanding his sins against others, Max is himself the principal ground of horrifying mutation and abject monstrosity - of suffering - in the film. He becomes (as we shall see) in every sense the 'female' in the film, and the monster. In stepping away from the sidelines his predecessors remained on, in stepping forward to occupy this agonized role, Max embodies a great act of courage in the evolution of Cronenberg's work. After seeing his fate, one can, as it were, understand retrospectively the caution, the deflection of responsibility, the safe impotence of the earlier heroes. If this is the result of action, it is better not to act at all. (This is an option Cronenberg will try to return to in his next film, The Dead Zone, only to discover anew that it is unworkable too.) Part of Max's commanding facade is the control he assumes over transgressive sexual desire: he will stir up and gratify the appetites of his viewers while himself remaining, if not completely unaffected, then a detached epicure fully the master of his own appetites. The film reveals this attitude to be a false one, rooted in arrogance and disavowal. Interviewed on the 'Rena King Show' on the subject of Channel 83's offerings ('everything from soft-core pornography to hard-core violence'), Max is glib: RENA: But don't you feel such shows contribute to a climate of violence and sexual malaise? And do you care? MAX: Certainly I care. I care enough, in fact, to give my viewers a harmless outlet for their fantasies and their frustrations. And as far as I'm concerned that's a socially positive act.

At the same time, what Max is actually looking for is something that is

136 The Artist as Monster

precisely not 'harmless/ Even before he sees the first Videodrome show, he complains to his partners about the slick and arty 'Samurai Dreams' series offered to them by Hiroshima Video company: I don't know. Soft - something too ... soft about it. Fm looking for something that will break through - something ... tough.

The Videodrome show is certainly something 'tough/ But even while pursuing his interest in it Max is unwilling to admit that this transgressive dynamite will have any actual effect, either on him or on its larger audience. Instead, he will consume it, and broadcast it for consumption, acting like the daring 'pirate' that he (and his hacker-techie Harlan) conceives himself to be, taking what he wants but never having to pay. Although he is anxious to distribute transgressive programming, he nervously refuses Masha's invitations to move into production, and she responds by saying he lacks 'a philosophy' - that is to say, the courage of his convictions. Later she suggests that if he did make his own programs, they might resemble Videodrome. Altogether, Max's actions reveal, underneath a surface of confidence and power, a picture of inconsistency, moral uncertainty, disavowal, and un-self-knowledge. Sadistic male desire: Nicki Max's sexual response to the torture and murder on the Videodrome show begins the process of his education, bringing what is latent to the surface and demonstrating logical consequences in a way that will batter and finally destroy him. His first sight of Videodrome is quickly followed by his first meeting with Nicki Brand. He encounters her on the 'Rena King Show,' where she is wearing a sensational red dress and expounding on society's condition of excessive stimulation and craving for stimulation. Even as she says these words, however, she is manifesting herself as an active participant in the process ('I admit it -1 live in a highly excited state of over stimulation'). Unlike Max, she does not deny her complicity with transgressive desire. Instead, she startlingly indicates the straight path of action and fulfilment rather than Max's devious one of nervous rationalization and disavowal. With dreamlike directness this overtly sexual woman both defines and instantly fills the position of entirely willing masochistic sex partner that is logically implied by Max's sadistic interest in Videodrome. Max's relationship with Nicki thematizes and, again, centralizes

Videodrome

137

transgressive sexuality. The earlier films (up to The Brood, since Scanners avoids the area) were, as we have seen, very much impelled by the sexual female, whose exciting and frightening sexuality was expressed by a form of bodily monstrosity. The transgressive sexuality of the films themselves, though, was displaced onto a supra-diegetic plane: the sadistic or homicidal attacks on females in Shivers and The Brood, and by Rose in Rabid, existed as unacknowledged spectacle for covert enjoyment. Meanwhile the diegeses struggled to endow these same sexually monstrosified or abjected females with at least some sympathetic and non-spectacular qualities of the 'human subject/ The male function was similarly split between the 'nice/ ineffective qualities of the 'heroes' and the at least sometimes sadistic transgression of the film's masculine controlling sensibility. Videodrome again demonstrates its 'epistemological break' status by for the first time locating sexual transgression in the male protagonist, and by clearly labelling it as sadistic. Now the schizoid nature of the earlier films becomes the schizoid nature of the hero - aligned at last with the controlling sensibility. Max's excitement at the sadistic transgression of the Videodrome show and of Nicki's masochism is the film's; and so is his hesitation and doubt, his recognition of the cruelty and human suffering it entails. Once more it is a female who attracts the masculine sensibility across the divide of transgression, who is the catalyst setting off the explosion of transgressive excitement and its catastrophic consequences. But now that male sensibility is located at the almost solipsistic centre of the film (Max), and its sadistic desire is demonstrated to exist prior to the catalytic transgressive female. Max shows instant fascination with the Videodrome show before meeting Nicki, so that she is, if anything, the result of Max's sadistic desire rather than its cause. Max can say to himself, his partisans can say on his behalf - and finders of misogyny in Cronenberg can repeat - that he would never have entered this territory if he had not been seduced into it by Nicki. But as the film proceeds it more and more dissolves Nicki into an effect of Max's psyche. And in the bottomless quicksand of the film's oneiric and hallucinated narrative, the 'reality' of her status at any time of the action is in doubt. I have heard viewers suggest that everything in the film after Max's first viewing of the Videodrome signal is hallucinated: in that case Nicki would be entirely a hallucination (as would the O'Blivions and Spectacular Optical). If that seems an extreme interpretation, one might at least agree that there is something very strange, unstable, and fantasy-like about Nicki right from the beginning. She

138 The Artist as Monster

appears in that five-alarm red dress and creates the most sensational and deliberately provocative effect. But in her next scene (at her radio station), she is decked out in teal and puce, her flamboyant hair done up in utilitarian fashion, and she is dispensing pop-psychic advice to a hysterical caller.23 Next, she is at Max's apartment shuffling through his videotapes asking if he's got any porno, homing in on Videodrome with enthusiasm (despite his nervous disclaimer that 'it ain't exactly sex'), inviting him to 'take out your Swiss Army knife and cut me here - just a little,' and showing him three cuts on her neck inflicted by 'a friend.' Max is disbelieving, then reluctant, but when he at last acts out his (and her) fantasy the results are startling. He enters into a whole territory of profound sexual feeling buried within himself suspected, perhaps, but never experienced. It is precisely the realization of a fantasy whose possibility was always prohibited, tremendously exhilarating and moving. Its depth and intensity are signalled by the appearance of the first obvious hallucination. As he exquisitely pierces her earlobe with a pin, and they make love, we see them locked in sexual embrace within the reddish-orange-and-black 'Videodrome' torture chamber, the soundtrack emitting vast sighs and breaths, the camera moving sensuously.24 In her next appearance she suggests she would like to appear on the Videodrome show. 'I was made for that show,' she says (he replies 'nobody was made for that show'). Then - in the most objected-to scene in the film - she deliberately burns her breast with a cigarette. This atrocious act of mutilation draws an instinctive outcry from Max: 'Nicki, don't!' But once again she beckons him across the boundary of prohibition, and he goes again, however reluctantly, to the sadistic font of pleasure. After suggesting she was 'made for that show/ all of Nicki's subsequent appearances are in the video domain, where her status is as hallucinatory and Max-invented as anything in the film.25 I have recounted Nicki's early appearances in such detail because I want to stress how much she has the status of a fantasy at every stage of her existence. Deborah Harry, the actress taking the role, injects an overt provocativeness, a 'hard sexiness,' into her persona (and a kind of ironic artifice carried over perhaps from her off-screen role in the pop band 'Blondie'). She is, as it were, already like a pornographic fantasy from the moment of her appearance, before she even does anything.26 Her subsequent actions in behaving, more and more, exactly and explicitly as an improbable projection of sadomasochistic desires merely carries her further along the same path. Again, she is more like

Videodrome

139

the consequence of Max's transgressive desire than the cause of it; in retrospect it is as if she never really had an independent character, as if she was always a fixture of Max's psyche. This quasi-fantasy status is of course enabled and encouraged by the hallucinatory uncertainty of the narrative (Nicki is improbable as a 'realist' character, but as Max's fantasy she is entirely probable). And then her passage from a stillpossibly-realist status to a clearly-hallucinated video status is made easier and smoother by such a starting point. For how else to explain her transformation from exciting and alarming provocateuse beckoning Max into his own undiscovered country of transgressive sexuality to the childlike, mother-like, soothing figure beckoning him into the undiscovered country of the New Flesh and death? These are events in Max's head, Nicki is an event in his head; and her metamorphosis through various forms of exciting, frightening, reassuring, and guiding stimulus is an index (if not indeed simply an embodiment) of Max's feelings about his own desire and where it takes him. Nicki is precisely Max's sexual fantasy because she invites his sadistic sexuality, and thus seems to offer a way through the wall between the female as sexual object and as 'human subject.' She can be a sexual object - moreover the object of sadistic impulses - while retaining at least a notional human subjectivity that, far from suffering at the hands of sadistic male desire, freely welcomes it herself. Moreover, in her final transformation into comforter and reassurer, in her simultaneous conflation with Bianca O'Blivion (she appears in this new form after Bianca has 'reprogrammed' Max) as co-priestess of the New Flesh, she seems to show the way out of the hell of transgression as she has previously showed the way into it. Follow your desire 'all the way,' as she tells Max to do in the final scene, and you may end up somewhere so different that you will be saved. Following transgressive desire has brought liberation, then a kind of abject perdition: perhaps it will yet bring a new liberation. It is a fervent hope - but it is also a hallucinated wish fulfilment and there is no reason to think it is not a delusion. Sadism escapes its bounds What is not a delusion - because its appalling emotional effects are extensively depicted - is the fact that transgression has turned from exhilarating and liberating self-truth into horrifying self-truth. Sadistic joy, the unleashing of repressed desire, has - as ever in Cronenberg uncontrollable unintended consequences. Its first anarchic act is to

140 The Artist as Monster

burst out of Nicki's world into other parts of Max's life - and to involve the other women in his life. Both Bridey and Masha are women for whom Max feels no conscious sexual attraction, notwithstanding the intimations of sexuality that hover around Bridey's quasi-maternal, quasi-wifely 'girl Friday' attentiveness and especially the older Masha's jaded European appetites. They are both people for whom he feels some attachment, not least because they both feel some attachment for him; they are both female 'human subjects/ Yet each of them becomes alarmingly implicated in Max's sadistic fantasies/hallucinations. Bridey is perhaps about to discover some of the compromising aspects of Max's 'Videodrome' life as she pokes around his apartment. In response he hallucinates slapping her brutally across the face - except that in mid-slap she turns into Nicki, the willing sexual masochist. Now he slaps 'Nicki' again, only to find her turning into Bridey once more. He is appalled by what he has done, apologizing abjectly (Bridey doesn't know what he is talking about, since he has hallucinated everything). This point is made equally graphically in connection with Masha. The soft-porn show she is peddling, 'Apollo and Dionysus,' is absurdly veiled in the cultural respectabilities of its classical setting, while her garishly ornate clothing and jewellery are likewise meant to attract but seem outdated. The film cuts from the second of Max's torrid sex scenes with Nicki to the preposterous shakings and clankings of a belly dancer in the Turkish restaurant where Max meets Masha - a setting that seems to reflect Masha's style - and the jolting contrast emphasizes the distance for Max between her and Nicki. Yet a connection is made almost instantly as Max lights Masha's Turkish cigarette and a close-up signals his memory of the cigarette with which Nicki had burned her breast the night before. Max flirts easily with her ('We can take a shower together any time you say')27 in a way that shows his confidence in controlling the situation. But when he is hallucinating a whipping session with Nicki while wearing the Spectacular Optical helmet, Nicki is unaccountably replaced as his victim by Masha; and upon awakening in the next scene, he finds Masha's dead body bound, gagged, and bloody from his whip - in the bed next to him. Masha, like Bridey, is substituted for Nicki in a moment of sexual anger/aggression, and the substitution is unwilled in both cases, showing that the wall of repression separating anarchic desire from rationality and ethics has broken down, and the contents of the two compartments are running uncontrollably together. Now the fantasy of

Videodrome

141

the willing masochistic female (Nicki) is replaced by the nightmare of the female who does not wish to suffer (Bridey, Masha) but who is the innocent victim of the male self's sexual transgression in a spectacle of moral atrocity. The male's enfemalement But this is only a small part of the Passion of Max Renn. If the first sexual effect of the Videodrome signal is to lead Max across the border of prohibition into sadistic pleasure, the next is to reverse the current and render him not the agent of sadistic aggression but its recipient. When, under the male eye of Brian O'Blivion (and, as it later transpires, the male manipulation of Convex and Harlan), Max sees a giant orifice open up in his abdomen, all positions are inverted. The piercer is pierced, the wounder wounded, the phallic male invaginated. Shaviro puts it succinctly: 'You macho asshole, now you know what it's like to be a cunt';28 and, as Bart Testa points out, Max's role simultaneously shifts from programmer to programmed.29 In all its forms, however, the slit signals a transformation from activity to passivity, from control (or the illusion of control) to helplessness and confusion, from male to female. As in Barbara Creed's model, Max's enfemalement is a monstrosification; and as in Carol Clover's, it places him in the position of suffering and victimization. Thus, in Creed's sense Max has become the film's abject female monster, while in Clover's he has become its hysterical female victim.30 What Max has visited upon him is, in the sexual arena, an enforced occupation of the masochistic position (only without any masochistic enjoyment). As Nicki is pierced, burnt, whipped; as Bridey is viciously slapped; as Masha is gagged and whipped - and as Max has perpetrated all these things for, or as a by-product of, his own male sadistic pleasure - so is he invaginated, raped, manipulated, and programmed by sadistic males. This whole process may be described as a hysterical (even a somatized) realization of his own fears of the moral consequences of his unleashed transgressive desire. Here the diametrical oppositions of abject desire and ethical ego-subjectivity enact themselves yet again, now upon the (proper) terrain of not only the psyche but the actual body of the first-person male. That these punishments are retribution for transgressive masculinity is evident in the whole 'soft'/'tough,' 'breakthrough' vocabulary that Max uses to define the aims of his porno search. These are terms not only describing mascu-

142 The Artist as Monster

line potency in the oppositions of flaccidity and erection and the desire to penetrate, but the entire female /male gender map. Certainly 'toughness' is aggression and transgression, and 'softness' is passivity and restraint. Max wants to be tough; he first fantasizes toughness and then is drawn into acting tough; and then his toughness is made soft and penetrable through physical and emotional enfemalement. As Nicki is the 'external' source leading Max towards sadistic behaviour and enjoyment, so the 'external' sources depriving him of control, making him female, and punishing his transgression are male. Brian O'Blivion, inventor and 'prophet,' acts as initiating host and guide for Max's Videodrome experiences in hallucination. He is the first personage to address Max from his own television set (a classic paranoidschizophrenic symptom, we might recall), and his appearance and tone of voice are always unsettling to say the least. Notwithstanding his visionary fervour, O'Blivion is for Max always a harsh presence, whether piercing Max's spectatorial distance by direct address, talking in a frightening fashion about his brain cancer and apparently collaborating in his own murder, or telling Max 'your reality is already more than half Videodrome hallucination.' The apex of what we may call O'Blivion's assault occurs in the scene of Max's bodily transformation. After talking about how Videodrome will create new organs of perception and control hallucinations to the point where it will 'change human reality,' he says: After all, there's nothing real outside our perception of reality, is there? [laughs harshly} You can see that, can't you?

What Max then sees is his abdominal slit. O'Blivion, therefore, is not only instrumental in the creation of Videodrome, but also in its creation for Max; and it is O'Blivion who presides over the specific nature of Max's subjection to hallucination, to his enfemalement. In this respect it is possible to speak of O'Blivion as another of Cronenberg's 'inventor-fathers,' and particularly as a kind of father to Max. Of course he is literally a father as well, to Bianca; and his role as foundational and departed patriarch is emphasized in her devotional zeal to his memory. But this visionary father has, like his predecessors, produced a catastrophic effect on his 'son.' There is nothing tender in his expressions to Max, and despite her redemptive rhetoric Bianca does not hesitate to reinfect him with Videodrome signals and later quite calmly turn him into a 'New Flesh' robot of destruction. In other

Videodrome

143

words, there is much harm and no benefit to show for the O'Blivion side of the patriarchal inheritance. Again, the phrase from Scanners, 'cold and cruel/ seems to apply to this father-figure. The castrating father: Convex Scanners twins its hero; in Videodrome, the hero is decisively singular, but the surrounding cast is twinned. Nicki and Bianca are paired and contrasted figures in the female realm, and so are Brian O'Blivion and Barry Convex in the patriarchal realm. Scanners had already divided the instrumental older-authoritative-male realm into the inventing and experimenting Ruth and the exploitative and inhuman ConSec. Now Videodrome repeats the process, only with an individuated and forcefully presented controlling executive figure. Barry Convex, as visible head of the demonized corporation, brings the distant, cold centre of power into the personal and individual plane and enables it to be felt more directly as paranoid persecution. Convex is by far the most terrifying of Max's manipulators - and this is not simply because he is the perpetrator of the most horrific attacks. Rather, it is because he personifies the reversal of power and control from the confident ego-subject Max to other forces that he is helpless to control. The fantasy-ideal masochistic Nicki is one such force, corresponding as it were to Max's most deeply buried id-like appetites. Barry Convex is another; and what he represents is the castrating father of the superego. Convex is a realization, almost, of that cruel and castrating father of Mike's whom Raglan played in the first scene of The Brood: the father whose savage pleasure it is to reduce his son to smallness, impotence, and femaleness. What really endows Convex with the power to do this is not simply his age and position, but the knowledge of Max's guilty secrets, the knowledge of his moral turpitude and cowardice and unfitness. The fact that Convex has on tape Max's 'dirty' sadistic fantasies as recorded by the Videodrome helmet is what allows him to open Max up - with ghastly literalness, like a tin can - and insert through this wound of vulnerability the cassette that will control his actions. In this dreadful and oppressive scene, Convex burrows with terrible ease through Max's defences of denial, disavowal, and theatrical bravura. CONVEX: Why would anyone watch a scum show like Videodrome? Why did you watch it, Max? MAX [quickly]: Business reasons.

144 The Artist as Monster CONVEX: Sure. Sure. What about the other reasons? Why deny you get your kicks watching torture and murder?

Then he says: 'I want you to open up, Max. Open up to me/ And as a powerful wind blows towards him, Max's shirt buttons pop and his slit appears, open and throbbing. This involuntary 'opening up' is like a sadistic rape: after O'Blivion has opened up Max's vagina, Convex forcibly penetrates it. In this scene (and it is the same scene in which Max discovers Harlan's treachery and also suffers his revulsion and contempt), Max is visited by all the forces of his own conscience in enlarged and monstrous form. The nervousness he had betrayed in first encountering the Videodrome show, his hesitation with Nicki, his gliding-over of objections to Videodrome from Harlan and Masha, his remorse over the hallucinated aggressions against Bridey and Masha - all of these have united in a judgment of Max that is also at some level a self-judgment. Just as Nicki is more plausible as a fantasy of Max's than as a 'realist' character, so the persona of Barry Convex has features that are strange and incongruous in a 'chief of Special Programs' for a corporation that is in effect planning to take over the world, and which call his 'realist' status into question. In the first place, the Spectacular Optical office where Convex meets Max is a down-at-the-heels little store in a rather seedy part of town, with a front room in which dowdy underclass customers are attended to by a comically mannered salesman, and a backstage area that looks like a boiler room. Nothing could be further from any preconceptions of the offices of an omnipotent evil corporation or from, say, ConSec headquarters in Scanners. When Convex, alone and looking rather incongruous in these shabby environs, unveils the hallucination-recording helmet, he pulls this impressive and frightening device out of an old cardboard box that looks like the container for some garage-sale piece of junk. Then, later on, the reprogrammed Max hunts down Convex to kill him at a Spectacular Optical trade show. This is taking place in a big hotel, and is indeed somewhat more opulent and pricey than the spectacles-shop; but it is of a surpassing spangled kitschiness that looks phoney and, in a larger sense, cheap. The gathering is full of crass area-sales representatives and their wives, whom Convex (before Max shoots him) is addressing with an equally crass small-time familiarity. 'Well, you know me!' he shouts (voices from the audience shout back, 'Yeah, we know you!'), and then with heavy jocularity, 'And I sure know you - every one!' He introduces the product line ('The Medici Line,' with its bizarre Renaissance motifs

Videodrome

145

and slogans), and comments, 1 think that even Pete oughta be able to sell the hell out of a classy campaign like that!' Who is this rube? one asks. Any resemblance to a high-ranking, frighteningly powerful corporate executive is certainly invisible now. Of course, scenarios can be invented to 'account for' the shabby store, the glad-handing sales pitcher (e.g., Spectacular Optical's sinister plans are so deep that they descend to, and are disguised in, the most mundane places and activities). But it is much easier to account for them, as for Nicki's implausibilities, by situating them in Max's disordered personal desires and fears. From this perspective, Convex looks sleek and all-powerful to Max - as well he should given his status as the projection of Max's castrating superego-father. But for the rest of us he is a smaller and shabbier figure - or, these momentary flashes indicate, he would be if we could see him undistorted by Max's perceptions. Harlan

Nicki may be seen as a projection of Max's buried transgressive sexual desire; Convex a projection of his dread of superego punishment. And now we may add the strange and difficult-to-read character of Harlan. Harlan is perhaps the only person in the film with whom Max seems to have real two-way communication based on mutual affection and respect, although even here the relationship exists within a boss/ employee structure with Max holding the ultimate power, and of course later Harlan turns out to have been manipulating Max. If Bridey and Masha embody buried and ambiguous sexual feelings towards women who are not basically objects of desire for Max, then Harlan may be seen even more markedly as an object of repressed homosexual desire. Cronenberg describes Harlan as 'deliberately seductive in his cute little way,'31 and when he comes to Max's apartment to corroborate Max's Masha hallucination he is nervously flirtatious: 'Well, here I am, patron ... camera, flashgun. What's up - you wanna be a centrefold?' This coy sexual joke, delivered as Harlan has been summoned to Max's apartment in the middle of the night, is followed by Max's invitation to 'photograph what's in my bed,' a request incredulously repeated by Harlan. The homoerotic implications are hardly dissipated by the angry exchange that follows, full of 'fuck you's and 'asshole's and other potential sexual double entendres: MAX: I'm not just fucking around here, do you hear me?

146 The Artist as Monster HARLAN [with a force he can't quite sustain]: Well, fuck you! Fm not just a servo-mechanism you can turn on and off when you want to. You want me to fall out of bed at 7 a.m. and act like an asshole, you tell me what Fm doing it for. Otherwise, I'll see you during office hours, patron. MAX: You're right. Fm running like an express train here, I don't know how to stop. Meet me at the lab in an hour ... I'll tell you everything, I promise. HARLAN [tentatively]: Fm sorry if I freaked out, patron, [he puts his hands on Max's sides] I don't work with you just for the money you know. MAX: I know that. Piracy is never just for the money, is it?

The final display of affection is the closest the two characters come to expressing a mutual attachment directly. What is underlined is how much buried emotion is present in the relationship - and how much that emotion resembles a homosexual attraction that neither party seems to recognize.32 In Harlan's case, repression of (homo)sexual desire has led to a profound sexual loathing, manifested clearly in his diatribe against the (hetero)sexual perversions of the Videodrome show and its devotees. His denunciation of sexuality is phrased in the terms of mess versus order in a kind of Fascist sublimation of aggressive (i.e., sexual) unconscious impulse into idealistic terms: North America's getting soft, patron - and the rest of the world is getting tough, very very tough. We're entering savage new times, and we're going to have to be pure and direct and strong if we're going to survive them. Now you, and this ... cesspool you call a television station, and your people who ... wallow around in it, and your viewers, who ... watch you do it - you're rotting us away from the inside. We intend to stop that rot.

This phobic revulsion at (hetero)sexual gluttony and voyeurism may seem very far from Max's experiments in sadism, but in fact Max's lack of sexual awareness and Harlan's sexual repression find an echo in each other. Certainly Harlan's adoption of Max's 'soft'/'tough' vocabulary is startling, and his bitter, nauseated condemnation of Max's sexual indulgence is, like Convex's similar reactions that will follow momentarily, a dramatic reflection of Max's own unresolved feelings of guilt. Like Nicki's masochistic enthusiasm and Convex's vengeful power, Harlan's betrayal seems very much like a projection of Max's inner feelings, and Harlan another imaginary inhabitant of Max's psyche - one in whom

Videodrome

147

unexamined feelings of trust, affection/ and homosexual attraction, when juxtaposed with overt hetero-sadistic Videodrome-desire, metamorphose into punishments from the superego. The Fleshgun Max's hallucinations provide him with a vagina; but they also provide him with a 'new7 penis. This is the Fleshgun, tool of assassination and finally suicide. The Fleshgun7s antecedent is the pistol that Max inserts into his abdominal orifice in a completely unexpected and shocking fashion. As he sits in front of the TV shirtless and wearing the gun's shoulder holster, watching O'Blivion's cassette, he begins to scratch the pink outline of what will become the slit (he has previously described it as 'a rash or something') with the tip of the pistol. And it is almost in response to this scratching that the slit does fully incarnate and open. The gun, then, invokes (or helps to invoke) the slit; and when the slit appears, Max's first action is to slowly, painfully, but determinedly insert the pistol all the way into it. If the slit is invaginating and enfemaling, the handgun is a masculine and phallic aggressor - an emblem, in its ugly promise of violence, of transgressive maleness. Its act of penetration is a sadistic one, if only because it is a pistol, not a penis. And thus it realizes its role in the film as symbol of the sadistic sexual desires that Max wishes to realize, and that are realized upon him. After Convex has brutally inserted the 'programming' cassette into Max's belly, the idea of a rape that has impregnated its victim begins to suggest itself. The 'child' is the compulsion planted in Max to kill his partners. But the form in which it emerges, physically, from his belly, is that of the Fleshgun: the pistol that Max (not Convex) had inserted and inseminated himself with. This Fleshgun-child - clearly male - is dragged from the viscera in great anguish, dripping with bodily slime; it then fixes itself horrifically to Max's grip by organic-mechanical steel cords that burrow through Max's hand and arm. But who is the father of this child? Convex may claim partial paternity (the cassette seems to have made the pistol into the Fleshgun), but so may Max himself (his 'little' gun replicates itself in a larger, more independent, organic gunthing). Again, the origin and authorship of monstrosity and horror is split unreadably between the paranoid external control-power and the psychic faults and imbalances of the self.33 Subsequently the pistol appears either as unaltered pistol or as

148 The Artist as Monster

transformed Fleshgun, as the film oscillates unpredictably between hallucination and something closer to 'actuality.' What we see when Max shoots his partners is the 'real' pistol, although the murder is clearly dictated by the cassette-program and thus within the realm of the Fleshgun. This double killing is an act of violence without any sexual dimension: what began, perhaps, as Max's sadistic impulse rooted in the pleasure of torture and murder has been converted by Convex and the patriarchal-corporate principle into simple utilitarian homicide. This desexualizing transposition of transgression away from sexuality towards depredation is reminiscent of what happens to the telepathic facility in Scanners (except that in Scanners there is no counterbalancing sexual dimension). The cassette's next 'instruction' is to kill Bianca O'Blivion. Max finds her alone in the Cathode Ray Mission at night, and when he withdraws the still-concealed hand to shoot her it shows the Fleshgun, not the pistol. As he hunts her down she counters by inducing a hallucination of her own. Max encounters a television screen that shows Nicki being murdered on the Videodrome show. That image is then replaced by a blank (noise-filled) screen that begins to distend into a growing pillar, ending in the shape of the Fleshgun; then the noise-screen turns flesh-coloured, develops veins, the entire gun-tipped pillar now explicitly resembling an engorged penis. This organ then ejaculates a charge, shooting Max three times in the abdomen. He staggers, falls to his knees, looks up to see the television screen now appearing in the form of his own naked abdomen, pierced with three bleeding bullet-holes. It is difficult to interpret this phantasmagoria with any certainty. We may say at least that the Fleshgun has shot Max himself. But it is Bianca's Fleshgun, and in shooting him the gun has inflicted a wound that is a kind of counter-piercing to the monstrous vagina - a painful treatment to heal the initial 'wound.' Once more, the weapon, the aggression/ transgression Max is wielding, is turned on himself. Although the result is to 'reprogram' Max to employ Videodrome weapons against Videodrome itself, the tone of this new programming is evangelical, redemptive. As Max, now lifting a Fleshgun-free fist into a salute, intones after Bianca, 'Death to Videodrome, long live the New Flesh,' his expression is that of a sinner saved, a damned soul redeemed. We are certainly not finished with the Fleshgun, however, which now appears when Max goes to the Spectacular Optical trade show to assassinate Barry Convex. Although it is seen in monstrous-organic form, it seems to shoot real bullets. But the hallucinatory status of its

Videodrome

149

effects in Max's perception is evident as we witness the 'cancer-death' of Barry Convex - an obsessively explicit moment of regurgitory violence and horror that, however, Max cannot 'really' be seeing as he is already heading out of the building. This use of the pistol is just as brutal and ugly as the earlier one; and in fact, after raising it in salute and shouting Bianca's slogan ('Death to Videodrome ...I7), Max once more thrusts it guiltily into his jacket, as he had after murdering his partners. Convex may be a villain and Bianca may have at least the appearance of a saviour; but who are the good guys and who the bad guys now seems a meaningless distinction when these scenarios are playing themselves out in the deluded fantasies of the utterly helpless and pathetic Max. All that is left is for Max - again under the direction of a hallucination that cajoles and instructs him - deliberately to turn the Fleshgun on himself. When it shoots it will not translate Max into some realm of the New Flesh, but merely put a bullet in his skull as any pistol would. It is a logical end point. Max began as a sadistic phallic male and was transformed into an invaginated recipient; now he has moved from being a homicidal pistol-wielder to being a suicide against whom the pistol is wielded. Female metamorphoses As these male aggressive and transgressive impulses are systematically realized and just as systematically reversed and turned against the male, so the female principles in the film are undergoing similar metamorphoses. Nicki's status as masochist fantasy-object always contained an element of the dominating: part of her fantasy role is to take the initiative, to guide Max across the barrier of prohibition and inhibition. This dominant, guiding role is shared by Bianca, who leads and instructs - and manipulates - Max in a 'sacred' and non-sexual sphere just as Nicki does in a bodily and sexual one. Although there is never any indication that Bianca ever acts for Max's benefit, she does, after the 'reprogramming,' assume a solicitous and caring tone ('that's better - so much better'), and her role is nominally always a ministering, redemptive one. What is more striking is Nicki's gradual evolution from flaming 'bad girl' to Max's private voice of wisdom, consolation, and reassurance. As a video hallucination, her tone becomes startlingly more intimate and personal, more regressively primal. 'Come to me, Max - come to Nicki - don't keep me waiting,' she says in pouting, sexually in-

150 The Artist as Monster

fantilized tones. But it is Max who is infantilized, and the sexualfantasy-masochist-child-woman takes on more and more the voice of a mother - a mother who knows, and forgives, and cherishes, all her child's secrets and weaknesses. At the end of this scene Nicki's lips fill the television screen, which then begins to bulge outward in appeal and expectation until Max does what 'it' wants and thrusts his head into it. This extraordinary image is truly surreal, and like so many sexually surreal images is full of contrary suggestions that somehow seem to unify themselves in the image. Max thrusts his head into the soft, engorged Nicki-mouth of the screen, a penis into a waiting vagina. At the same time, she is 'giving him head' (except it is he who is giving his head to her). At the same time, as whole-man penis, he is returning into the mouth-vagina, through the uterine canal to the womb. And, perhaps most vividly of all, he is an infant at the soft breast (which is, however, the mouth that is sucking Max rather than vice versa).34 Throughout this and the subsequent scenes in which Max responds to Nicki's 'come to me' call, he experiences the joys of surrender: a surrender that was in the first instance a surrender to his own long-prohibited desire (with Nicki the dominant masochist and Max the reluctant sadist). As the film progresses, Max becomes more and more passive and dominated. But if one aspect of that dominated passivity is the horrific possession by the paternal male principle (Convex and O'Blivion), another is the pleasurable possession by the maternal female (Nicki and Bianca). And if, when Convex makes him a child, it is to punish and disempower and intimidate him, then when Nicki makes him a child it is to soothe and nurture him, and to shelter him from the savagery of the paternal superego. Hence, in the final scene, Nicki speaks as a wise and benevolent controlling voice, a lover-mother's voice, and beckons him to go through abjection (the pistol shot, the exploding-viscera television) to a higher 'oceanic' union with the mother in death-oneness-abjection. One result of Bianca's 'white magic' has been to remove Nicki from Videodrome sadism into some less transgressive-sexual realm. The first step of Bianca's 'reprogramming' of Max is to show him Nicki on a video screen, not as a willing masochist but as a murder victim of Videodrome ('They killed her, Max'). The effect of this shift is to transfer Nicki from the 'sexual object' category to the 'human subject' category of Bridey and Masha, where she takes no more pleasure in sadomasochistic ugliness. Instead, her child/mother, infantilized/infantilizing qualities ('Come to Nicki') are mobilized for the 'white,' de-bodied purposes of a New Flesh that is no flesh.

Videodrome

151

From paranoia to melancholia I have suggested that the film moves from a set of external causes for Max's predicament to a more internal set, and that the hallucinatory narrative itself has the strong tendency to bring everything back into his private perception. This idea may now be phrased differently: in the search (Max's, the spectator's) for a cause and an explanation of what is going on, there is a movement from a state of paranoia to one of melancholy. The paranoid explanation is that spectral forces of control are plotting against him and manipulating him. The melancholy explanation is that the kind of meaning inherent in a paranoid explanation has collapsed, that explanation itself is delusion, and that his plight is the result of long-suppressed fissures in his psychic makeup whose inevitable end point is simply a conviction of hopelessness and loss. T am an unworkable, impossible subject' is the melancholy message; or, in the words of Joan Frost at the end of Naked Lunch, 'All is lost, all is lost - it's all I ever write.' Videodrome journeys from paranoia to melancholy, and so does Cronenberg's work as a whole, which has progressed gradually ever since Shivers from the social realm to the personal, and which will continue to move relentlessly inward in such later films as The Fly, Dead Ringers, and Naked Lunch. The subject's (and the film's) melancholy look inward discovers disorder, imbalance, mess. The outward sign of this condition, to an increasing extent at this stage of Cronenberg's cinema, is dereliction. Videodrome displays this sign to a greater extent than any previous Cronenberg film, and does so in the detailed and meticulous, and yet dreamlike, fashion that characterizes the film's narrative and especially its wise en scene. Max's apartment is already cluttered at the beginning of the film, and as the film progresses that clutter comes more and more to express the state of Max's personality. Almost his first act upon waking up in the morning (in the opening scene) is to glance idly through some black-and-white still photos of naked women from 'Samurai Dreams' while eating the remnants of an old pizza; accidentally smearing tomato sauce on one of the photos, he wipes it off absently on his housecoat. Here already we have an event whose iconography strikingly foreshadows the events of the film. The orange-red tomato sauce is the Videodrome-visceral colour, staining the arousing photograph, adding colour to it but in a careless, uncontained way that testifies to Max's sleazy, proto-abject appetites and attitudes, and characterizes these in terms of mess and piggish manners.

152 The Artist as Monster

Max is constantly smoking - a 'filthy habit7 even before it became carcinogenic, and here beginning its career in Cronenberg's cinema as a sign of slack and dangerous indulgence (flaring into the hotly transgressive in the breast-burning scene). The Hiroshima Video outfit is at the seedy Classical Hotel, where people are yelling at each other early in the morning and the rooms and their fittings are run down. The similar qualities of the Spectacular Optical shop have already been mentioned, but to that location may be added the 'pirate's lab' at Civic-TV, which has an old and run-down quality, and where, after being 'programmed' by Convex, Max crawls out into a paint-peeled hallway littered with flakes of fallen plaster. The Cathode Ray Mission is a facility for street people and other derelicts, and its main ward is full of battered screens and graffiti. Bianca says to Max, 'You look like one of father's derelicts' - an impression that has become overpowering by the end of the film, which takes place in a condemned hulk. The junk lying around in Max's apartment, in the Classic Hotel room, in the lab, and in the Spectacular Optical shop seems to accrete into an evergrowing pile that finally swallows Max. Videodrome maintains, in spite of and at the same time as its terminal, suicidal melancholy, the desire to convert what seem to be catastrophic transformations into positive evolutions. O'Blivion is convinced that his brain tumour is not simply a death sentence but rather a liberating advance. Max, too (under the influence of his 'reprogramming' by Bianca), wants to believe that his chaotic abjection is something promising, 'the New Flesh/ It is a thread that appears repeatedly in the later films, all the way down to Crash's car-sex-Liebestod-suicides. This is the Cronenberg who keeps looking for the exciting salvational possibilities of 'emergent evolution' in 'omnisexuality/ 'new organs/ 'useful parasites,' 'creative cancers,' 'transformation,' 'the New Flesh.' But all of the mutations, transformations, and metamorphoses that occur have catastrophic outcomes in the most straightforward sense, and this pattern refuses to go away no matter how much energy is put into efforts to interpret disease, loss of self, and death in terms of some hazy redemptive new reality. Subsequent films (The Fly springs immediately to mind) are even more depressive in this context than Videodrome, but no film demonstrates the syndrome more overtly than this one does. The concluding scenes, with their simultaneous emphasis on the language of redemption and salvation and on the iconography of loss and death, are a final mighty effort to recuperate Max's suffering into something not so bleak - or not so clearly, totally bleak - as in fact it is.

Videodrome

153

Nicki's words 'You have to go all the way now' are a repetition of Raglan's mantra from The Brood: go with your boundary-destroying, Otherevoking feelings, don't resist them but enlarge and amplify them, and the new reality you reach will liberate you. But we have seen what such prescriptions lead to in The Brood, and it is hard to think that Max's boundarylessness will have a positive aspect no matter what Raglan or Nicki say - and no matter what Cronenberg may say, considering the spectacle of horror that inevitably follows such a giving-way in virtually all of his films. Perhaps I am being stubborn in resisting the film's insistence that, you never know, there might be something good going on here. Max's end point seems to me clearly that of a destroyed subject, a terminal deluded scramble, a flat sad recognition of unfixable contradiction and impossibility, a suicidal failure. Certainly nothing in the other films - especially the later ones - does anything to dispel this feeling. At least until Crash, Cronenberg's films get sadder and sadder, more and more foreclosed and walled-in, as time goes by. And Videodrome is, in this dimension as in so many others, the key film. Hallucination and cinematic narrative The hallucination-controlled narrative of Videodrome is highly unusual in mainstream cinema, really recalling aspects of the alternative or anti-narrative of abstract, modernist art-films rather than something you would expect to find in a horror movie. In this respect Videodrome exemplifies perhaps better than any of his other films Cronenberg's often anomalous position between 'serious' art-cinema and 'shallow' commercial genre-cinema. Some films of the historical avant-garde (Un Chien Andalou, say) contain transgressive violence and sexuality, and surreally disrupted and 'unreadable' narratives; but none of them could open in a commercial theatre without calling attention to their claims for a more elevated artistic status than the average piece of hack-work. Videodrome, though by any standard a strange and disorienting film, conceals its modernist 'difficulty' beneath the superficial wrapping of the horror and fantasy genre - or at least it could be marketed under such a label without getting many objections that this obvious piece of 'art' was being misdescribed as 'trash.' Admittedly, the film failed in its first release perhaps exactly because of such a false description; and its subsequent success as a cult film rests upon a reclassification of the film as 'not-commercial-mainstream,' an unusual movie for select fans rather than formulaic junk for the herd-like

154 The Artist as Monster

masses. Even after this description-shift, though, Videodrome still doesn't look like an art-movie. Nevertheless, the extremity of its formal experiments needs to be acknowledged. Videodrome proceeds in a subtle and unusual way to undermine the conventions of 'classical realist' cinematic narrative. Examining its status as a 'first-person' film will demonstrate something of what I mean. Because the camera photographs objects and not thoughts or feelings, cinema (like theatre) has what one might call an innate third-person bias, and must work harder to create something like a first-person narrative. Simply showing what is seen by a single pair of eyes has long since been proved clumsy, unconvincing, and unworkable in any general way. Instead, the familiar (classical) 'firstperson' cinematic narrative is full of eyeline matches and point-ofview shots that serve to locate the viewer broadly in the protagonist's position, while at the same time also locating that protagonist as a 'third-person' entity in the world, another object in the world of objects seen by the camera. Moreover, in most cases, the 'first-person' film is not at all interested in undermining viewer confidence in the (realistfictional) 'actuality' of what is going on in the narrative in order to promote a radically subjective view. Videodrome establishes the standard identification practices of the cinematic apparatus at the outset (i.e., 'objective' shot of Max, 'subjective' shot of what Max is seeing, both shots having the same 'actuality' status), and continues to use them to some degree right to the end of the film. But whatever viewer confidence is conventionally brought to the film and sustained by these means is first undermined and then shattered, as Max's perceptions of what is happening to him diverge more and more wildly from anything that could 'actually' be happening. Dream-subjectivity and phantasmagoria have certainly been introduced into realist narratives - but always accompanied by markers of their non-realism, usually various forms of optical and auditory distortion. In Videodrome, there are often musical or soundtrack cues accompanying the most fantastic hallucinations, but visually all the 'impossible' things are presented in a manner indistinguishable from any run-of-the-mill details of setting or behaviour. So although the experience is subjective, the apparatus is third-person. When Max hallucinates a huge slit gaping and palpitating in his abdomen, we see this slit not in a point-of-view shot, but in a shot-counter shot vocabulary: shot of Max's face looking down at his body in disbelief, then a shot of Max's torso (or whole body) taken from some 'objective,' non-

Videodrome

155

Max's-point-of-view position. Any distinction between subjective and objective introduced by the 'first-person' editing conventions is lost, and we as viewers are now hindered rather than helped by the apparatus to make that distinction. The result is to disorient the viewer thoroughly, to blur and even erase the borders between objective external events and those of a subjective delirium. This is perhaps at once the film's boldest and its most elegant formal stroke: to represent the fantastic elements of the narrative as straightforwardly and literally as the most prosaic.35 Eventually, and by dint of constant hard work, the viewer can piece together a crude partial map of which of Max's perceptions that we're sharing he is hallucinating, and which are 'actually' occurring - and the film does even give some deliberate clues about this (e.g., alternating the Fleshgun with the real pistol). But vast tracts of the film remain unmapped, and it would be a foolhardy spectator who would claim to know 'what happens' in Videodrome from any viewpoint that is not that of the utterly scrambled Max. And however much Max's condition is the result of manipulation and introjection, the film relentlessly pushes us back into Max's bizarre psychic landscape. The more one tries to disentangle the events of the film, the more they resist disentanglement. Trying to determine what is the 'real' or 'objective' status of most of the main figures (Nicki, O'Blivion, Bianca, Convex) is a hopeless task. Is the non-hallucinated Nicki really a radio personality? a sexual masochist? a person who wants to appear on the Videodrome show? Is there really a Brian O'Blivion who appears on TV talk shows posthumously? who established a Cathode Ray Mission to help derelicts with video transfusions? Is there really a manipulating, 'programming' Barry Convex acting for a vast sinister organization? One's first answer to all of these questions is in the affirmative, but one's last answer may not be. Indeed, the process of questioning finally calls even their very existences into doubt. The first 'definite' hallucination features Max and Nicki 'in' the Videodrome torture chamber. But the status of that location may be imaginative rather than hallucinatory - that is, viewers may think that it is only Max's, or the film's, 'poetic' visualization of a state of feeling rather than a literal belief in Max's mind. Only when cassettes begin breathing/the TV set starts talking to Max, and the slit appears are we clearly in the realm of the hallucinatory. After this, it only seems to us that we can tell 'real' from 'hallucinated/ The blank literalness of at least some of the subsequent hallucinations eventually tells us that we

156 The Artist as Monster

can't trust the 'actuality' of what is happening, and that moreover some of the things we have already assumed to be 'actual' may not have been. Enumerating the 'untrustworthy' aspects of the story retrospectively, we finally can't stop anywhere before the very beginning of the film. The opening sequence has a videotape of Bridey addressing Max in his sleep and protesting that she is not a dream, and his reaction is to roll over and (apparently) go back to sleep•- encouraging the thought that the whole film might be taking place in a sleeping mind.36 Of course Videodrome never proposes this literally; it merely creates a climate of uncertainty and suggestion, an instability and dreamlike associativeness that permeate the film. Then so much of what is passing by on all levels of the film suggests a status removed from actuality. The names of the characters, for example, have a satirical or allegorical facticity that threatens the realist envelope: Nicki (cut neck) Brand (burnt breast); Brian O'Blivion (the seer); Bianca (white, pure) O'Blivion; Barry Convex (the lens-salesman).37 The names, also, of so many of the film's organizations have an oneiric connectivity: C-ivic TV, C-RAM radio, C-athode Ray Mission (CRM); the Japanese Hiroshima Video company. The strange medieval-ness of the O'Blivion study, with its heavy furniture and tapestries and statuary, is a disorientingly exotic element, especially in juxtaposition with the very contemporary inner-city poverty surrounding it and providing its clientele. The almost comically strange Renaissance motifs of the Spectacular Optical trade show have a similar effect, as does Masha's Eastern European Turkish-Greek flavour. The videomonkey organ-grinder derelict near the end of the film, who tries to get Max to contribute some spare change for the privilege of (as it transpires) watching his own life as a police case on TV, is another bizarre symptom of what seems to be a basic underlying condition of associative delirium. Mise en scene Colour The deep subjectivity of the film is achieved not just by passing onto the viewer Max's inability to tell hallucination from fact, and not just by the uncanny way in which the other characters seem like projections of aspects of Max's mind. The subjectivity is also, in a subtle but insistent fashion, greatly strengthened by the whole raise en scene. The

Videodrome

157

colour scheme and the photography have a subdued richness new in Cronenberg's work. The dominant hue is a kind of earthy, dried-blood orange-red - a visceral colour that invades the outer world as a fine counterpoint to the way Max's feelings take on physical shape. It is, primarily, the colour of the Videodrome show, with its clay wall and scantily clad victims in red or orange shifts; and it is found in a multitude of other places, from the pizza stain smeared over the nude photograph at the beginning of the film to the rusted hulk of the condemned ship at its end. Red and yellow suffuse the scenes in Max's apartment, especially when Nicki is present; and it is associated with her later in the film (she wears a red dress, and her hair is orange-red when she appears as a video image). The hallucination helmet pulsates in 'Videodrome' orange; Max sports an orange-brown cowhide jacket in the later scenes. Reds are combined with black in the torture chamber, and that combination also appears in the most surprising places: in the red-lined black briefcase belonging to the Hiroshima Video salesman, for example; in the medieval furnishings of Brian O'Blivion's study; and in Max's black gun in its red case. Max's nighttime apartment throbs with organic shadows and coloured lights, creating an atmosphere of Sternbergian sensuality unprecedented in Cronenberg's work, while the pervasive camera movement evokes a sense of immanent and emerging feeling. There is an opposite set of colours, too - though by comparison they are almost non-colours - representing the rational or desexualized, non-body world. The charcoals and greys of Max's costume, particularly in the first part of the film, signify his repressed and self-deceiving conscious self (but note his black dressing gown with red pinstripes expressing his private 'secret' life). The spiritual O'Blivions also lack strong colour. Bianca dresses in neutral shades, and O'Blivion's television image is washed out. Bridey too stays away from warm colours and is wearing charcoal in the scene where Max 'slaps' her. The 'Rena King Show' and the C-RAM studios are presented in dull blues, teals, and greys, and there is even a tiny motif of pastel stripes linking the TV talk-show decor and Nicki's costume at C-RAM. Convex is invariably in charcoal or grey business suits. The Spectacular Optical logo is in cool, bright yellow-greens, and there is much pale green and off-white to be seen in corridors and on walls in public places throughout the film. Harlan, as in so many other ways, lies in between and sends conflicting messages: he wears a kind of army-surplus khaki down vest (colourless) over a red plaid shirt (the body). There is in fact

158 The Artist as Monster

a kind of regimen of opposition between the visceral 'Videodrome' pigments and these denatured blacks, greys, whites, and various pale shades. Max's apartment, for example, looks grey and colourless by day (and is decorated with wall art that is exclusively black-andwhite),38 but comes alive at night during the scenes with Nicki, where it develops organic pools of colour and shadow that are in extraordinary contrast to its daytime appearance. And Max graduates from his charcoals and greys to the brown organic cowhide jacket for his first meeting with Nicki and for the last big chunk of the film. In a broad sense, one can speak of this war between colour families as a battle between an 'interior' that is visceral, sexual, and abject on the one hand and an 'exterior' that is rational, instrumental, and repressive on the other. In the end, in the final scene in the ship, the 'Videodrome' colours are omnipresent, signifying the completion of Max's journey from ego-instrumentality and repression to ego loss and damnation. Seeing

Another important motif that is largely conveyed by mise en scene is that of seeing. The idea of the video image is of course central to the film. The first thing we see is a TV picture; Bridey and Nicki are first introduced on television screens, and Brian O'Blivion exists solely as an image, as does Nicki later in the film. Video images are transmuted from passive to active things and change their viewers from active watchers to passive victims; and finally video and actuality become impossible to tell apart. In fact, most of the Video' hallucinations have no perceptible connection with video images: they are simply seen, by Max and by us. The seeing motif is echoed in the name and activities of Spectacular Optical (and Barry Convex), whose misattributed trade slogans - 'Love comes in at the eye' and The eye is the window of the soul' - are both literally applicable to Max's situation and heavy with cruel irony when we consider what it is that 'comes in at the eye' and what transforms 'the soul' in this film. The Spectacular Optical shop sells eyeglasses, which Max tries on in another weirdly dissociative scene. Convex walks in while Max is comically modelling a pair, tells him ironically, 'You're playing with dynamite,' then gives him extensive advice on what kind of frame would suit his face ('something more spidery').39 Max is again playing at seeing, also trying on a quasi-theatrical 'disguise,' but the consequence to himself will not be in any way playful or merely theatrical. Convex in the end gives him something really 'spidery' - the hallucina-

Videodrome

159

tion helmet that looks like an insect's body fitted over Max's head. Like a set of super-Videodrome-spectacles, it records the scenes of sadistic torture seen by Max's (mind's) eye. Glasses are important and so is glass. The two nominally have only a slender connection (you see through both of them), but in Videodrome slender connections like this are exploited and enlivened as everything flows into everything else. Max's apartment has a series of thick, ridged, pebble-glass windows around its door (signifying Max's myopia?). On two separate occasions, Max goes, in an odd, marked fashion, to the big window in O'Blivion's study overlooking the mission, looks through the curtains, and says 'nice view.' The windows of both the Spectacular Optical shop and the Cathode Ray Mission are smeared with grime (Max smashes the latter window brutally on his way to kill Bianca and later in the scene rips down a pane of brown paper to find the Nicki-image being strangled). The door to Max's bedroom is made of clear glass - decorated with red paint. Micro-motifs

Glass and doors are in fact associated throughout the film, and doors themselves constitute a motif. Metaphorically, Max passes through one door after another into new realms of experience. The door imagery begins when Max visits the second-rate hotel where the Hiroshima Video delegation is staying. Down the hall, a man is pounding on a door and shouting, 'Open the door! You know I love ya! Open the door for fuck's sake!' Max knocks at the door in front of him, and when it is opened the chain lock breaks off. Obviously there is going to be trouble going through doors in this film - first they won't open, and when they do they can't be locked again. After he has killed his partners, Max ducks out the back door into an alley where, very strangely, some workmen are transporting a number of glass-windowed doors from one place to another. The doors, like Max's whole experience, are unhinged; by this time his movement into new worlds is without any context or referent he can discern. Looking for Bianca to kill her, he ignores the 'Closed'40 sign on the front door of the Cathode Ray Mission, and makes his way through the garbage in the back yard to break in at another door. In the scene of Marian's death the explosion of his 'hand grenade' blows a hole in the wall - a new door - through which Max leaves. On his way to the hulk in the film's final section, he has to squeeze through a fence gateway labelled 'Keep Out.' The last door, on the ship, has 'Con-

160 The Artist as Monster

demned' written on it. Max ignores all these warning signs - as he ignores the posted sign in Marian's lab, visible in the first scene where he watches the Videodrome show, saying 'DANGER' in Videodrome orange-on-red. Max looks (through glass, at Videodrome); then he acts and moves (through doors, into sadism and murder). The looking is dangerous and the action and movement are fatal; in this way also the film characterizes the 'transformations' that are undergone as wholly disastrous: Max should Keep Out, and in the end he is Condemned. The film is filled with almost abstract visual tropes whose effect is sometimes purely connective, and not metaphorical in any broader sense. A good example is the motif of a hard black surface striated with piping or slats. Its most striking appearance is in the metal floor-pallet in the Videodrome chamber. But it may also be seen in the patterning on the panels of Max's big black console-TV set - the source and setting of so many of his hallucinations. The motif is echoed in the hard black striations on the plastic cases of video cassettes (both TV and cassettes become 'organicized' and pliable as well), and again on the black plastic front of the Videodrome helmet. Videodrome torture comes in various forms, but prominent among them are whippings. The scene of Max's Videodrome-helmet whipping of Nicki - or Masha - allows us to get a close look at the implement, which is black leather, with striations, and shows in its coiling suppleness a resemblance to the 'organicized' cassettes and TV set. During Bianca's 'reprogramming' of Max in the Cathode Ray Mission, the television set she unveils, and that shows Nicki (strangled with a whip) and then 'shoots' Max, is 'his' television - only now in organic brown rather than black. (Max's pistol has made a similar journey from metallic black to organic brown in its Fleshgun form.) And it is this same now-brown console-set of Max's that he finds in the deserted ship, on which Nicki and his own suicide appear, and that finally explodes in an avalanche of visceral organs. The trope of striations appears also in Max's 'visceral' black-and-red dressing gown, and in the venetian-blind shadows that begin to appear in his apartment after he has encountered Videodrome. Strangely and illuminatingry, not just a general similarity of seediness and dereliction but a particular iconography characterizes both the Cathode Ray Mission and the Spectacular Optical shop: their locations are equally down-class, and the latter's clientele appears almost as far down the social scale as the former's; moreover, both their premises are decorated in pale blues and greens and both feature partitions for individual service. This resemblance is so extensive that it must be deliberate, and in any case it fur-

Videodrome

161

thers the suggestion found everywhere else in the film that these oppositions (O'Blivion/Convex, Nicki/Bianca, Cathode Ray/Spectacular Optical) are dream-phantasmagoria inhabiting a single psyche whose polarity is liable to reverse or collapse at some fundamental level. It is the multitude of cross-references of this kind that sets the final stamp on Videodrome as a dreamlike subjective experience. Chainsmoking Max's first word to Nicki is 'Cigarette?' In most scenes between these two, they are both smoking. Nicki burns herself with a cigarette and offers it to him to burn her again. The cigarette in the next scene links Masha with Nicki. In many of Max's scenes of solitary meditation on the attractions and transgressions of what he's been getting into he is sucking on a cigarette. All of these moments add up to an association between smoking and transgressive behaviour that recalls Bukatman's statement: In Cronenberg's world, smoking, drinking or sexual activity produce disastrous consequences.'41 The cigarette motif resurfaces, along with so many others, in the final scene - and there all the cigarettes have been smoked, the package is empty. The curtains Max pulls aside and looks through in Brian O'Blivion's study bear a chain-link pattern. Then Max lingers by and skirts around a chain-link fence outside the Cathode Ray Mission on the night he goes to kill Bianca and is reprogrammed. And there is another chain-link fence guarding the waterfront where Max goes at the end of the film, and which he has to squeeze through. In the fashion of all these motifs, each new iteration adds to the sense that they are all the same. The chain links recall the chains in the torture chamber and on the ship. At the same time they are, like doors, a barrier that Max breaks through. The repeated motif of 'breaking through' - it is the same breakthrough Max was looking for in his search for transgressive programming - is recalled in this transgressive movement through doors and fences and windows and screens into forbidden ground that will be destructive to Max. Even microscopic details like the bag of (Videodrome-)orange Cheezies and the green bottle on the table in the Hiroshima Video room have associative connotations. The patterns are so dense and so subliminally presented (this is by no means an exhaustive list) that the entire film seems to float in them, taking on a somnambulistic air that calls the reality of everything into question. The final scene

The culmination of this imagistic atmosphere comes in the superb final scene - still one of the finest things Cronenberg has ever done. As Max,

162 The Artist as Monster

weary beyond measure, the perpetrator of four murders whose significance for him would in a court of law be interpreted as clear insanity, arrives at the waterfront in his cowhide jacket, the dawn is breaking with a cold, grey beauty. He makes his way to the rusting ship's hulk; it is utterly dead and old and forgotten. He pulls open the iron door reading 'Condemned' and goes inside. The colours are those of the Videodrome torture chamber - orange, rust-red, and excremental brown - absolutely visceral but translated now into the death-like dull brutishness of ancient cast iron. It is a place of ultimate desolation and death - the death of everything that had once been alive and throbbing - Max's death. Inside the compartment is the recapitulation of the whole film in terms of dereliction and uselessness and final decay. The gargantuan hanging chain and coiled ship's rope recall the chains and ropes of the torture chamber; an old iron-banded frame bedspring recalls the rectangular grate on the chamber floor. Max walks past these things and flops down on a wretched stained mattress: the mattress of his apartment on which he and Nicki made love. His hands encounter an empty cigarette package (his brand, Nicki's 'brand'), and a green bottle like the one on the table in the Hiroshima Video hotel room (the most amazing stroke of all, this, because of its marvellous triviality - everything is coming back). His life is finished. Max Renn, the confident, dynamic entrepreneur with everything under control and the world on a string, is a derelict and a murderer and an outcast - and shortly to be a suicide in this deserted garbage bin. The whole scene, with its perfect balancing of objective tragedy and subjective release, its majestic marshalling of so many of the film's reverberating ideas and motifs and its expressive flowering into the flames of both funeral pyre and phoenix is an overwhelming conclusion to the film, and as great an individual piece of cinema as I know. Reflexivity, art To a greater extent than any previous Cronenberg film, Videodrome introduces an element of reflexivity. Max's profession as televisionstation owner and programmer is clearly an echo of the business of making films (even though Max refuses to get into production himself, and has 'no philosophy'). The content of Channel 83's programming is sensational, like the content of Cronenberg's movies. Max has to endure a degree of public censure for this, as Cronenberg has had to (especially in his native Canada). From this perspective, the 'Rena

Videodrome

163

King Show' cross-examination is an ironic reworking of a specific situation Cronenberg has found himself in more than a few times. Max's glib comebacks about violence, sex, and imagination are later pinpointed as such by Bianca. Cronenberg has talked on occasion about catharsis and vicarious outlets for dangerous aggression; and it is a joke at his own expense to have Max say that his programs are harmless or beneficial and then have him, in effect, eaten by his own television set. Far from being a 'harmless outlet/ the Videodrome show (which Max wants for Channel 83) encourages the impulses it is supposed to ground, to the point that they completely unseat volition and obliterate all moral control. This is made especially clear when Max visits Bianca towards the end of the film to kill her, and he numbly repeats his self-introduction almost word for word: MAX: I run Civic-TV. I was on a talkshow with your father. BIANCA: So it was to be you after all. YouVe come to kill me. MAX: No. I'm Max Renn. I run Civic-TV I don't -1 don't kill people. BIANCA: Oh, but you do.

Here, Cronenberg, lifelong battler against censorship, is adopting exactly the censor's viewpoint - as he has pointed out himself.42 But the question is much more complex than that. The reflexivity of Max Renn's profession and his tastes is another facet of that selfcentralization, that acceptance of responsibility for transgressivity, that I spoke of earlier in this chapter. The absent scientist who in earlier films had set up the experiments, and who was the stand-in for the absent scientist making the movie, is present not just in the traditional form in the person of Professor Brian O'Blivion, but also in Max, the person who searches for transgressive images to display. This scientist has now begun to become an artist. Max is not quite that yet, but he is an important first step on the road to such later artist-creators as Beverly Mantle in Dead Ringers and above all Bill Lee in Naked Lunch. The essential aspect of that artist-figure is that he is one who transgresses into the realm of the body and desire in a process of trying to 'break through/ find something 'radical' and 'new.' That was the sin of the mad scientists in the earlier films, it is the sin of Max Renn, and it will be very emphatically and articulately the sin of the writer in Naked Lunch. 'Sin' may seem like an odd word to use, but it is exactly in the terms of a moral transgression that Max is punished. He sins not simply against social and cultural conventions but against the lives of others -

164 The Artist as Monster

especially against women, whom in the indulgence of transgressive desire he reduces to objects. Desire, the boundaryless body, transgression, the search for 'breakthrough' - these elements that were formerly associated in Cronenberg's films with scientific 'experiments7 are now, beginning with Videodrome, newly linked to self-knowledge and the artistic creativity that has its source in the self-knowledge of transgression. If this equation holds, artistic creation and sexual sadism are very close to each other; and knowing yourself, having the artist's courage of truth in self-knowledge, is knowing yourself to be a sadist. When you 'go all the way through' your primal, instinctive inspiration, this dreadful scene is what you discover, and it is what converts the transgressor, the creator, into a melancholiac. Underneath Max's pathetic fate, then, lies an anxiety about the sadism of the artist, his sinfulness, his compulsion to go into that realm of abjection and desire that will cut him off from the compassion and humanity that are essential to his constitution as an ego-subject. It is in this context that Videodrome is a replication of the censor's viewpoint. What is the power, and what the responsibility and the consequences, of art - not so much for the audience, but for the artist? But such considerations are far from the surface of the film. Max's disaster may be a major step forward in the centralization of the Cronenbergian cluster of obsessions because it makes the self the focus of the guilt feelings associated with transgression, but it is still quite a distance from a full resituation of these obsessions specifically into the realm of artistic creation. Videodrome's awful intimation about the sadism of the artist is deflected because Max is situated to one side of the creative process: he will not produce, he 'has no philosophy,' he is a coward without the courage of his desires (and the true artist must have this courage, even if it is catastrophic to himself and others). It is only, really, in the retrospect possible after The Fly, Dead Ringers, and Naked Lunch that one can place Max as the pioneer of Cronenberg's martyr-artists. The melancholy and martyrdom of Cronenberg heroes becomes their sacrifice to the consequences of transgressive art: Max, and the protagonists who follow him, must suffer and die because the artist ('Cronenberg') follows his deepest instincts to their ends and is appalled by what he sees.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Dead Zone (1983) 'The house is on fire!'

Cronenberg's first post-Videodrome film represented a new departure. For the first time (since the bland, utterly un-personal Fast Company), he used another writer's script - and a script that was adapted from a Stephen King novel. The Dead Zone, with its production by Lorimar and Dino De Laurentiis, its cast of Hollywood stars in primary roles (Christopher Walken, Brooke Adams, Martin Sheen) and even supporting ones (Herbert Lorn, Tom Skerritt), its pre-sold bestseller adaptation, and its mainstream distribution, appeared to many onlookers at the time as a decisive move into the mainstream. This was the first Cronenberg film (again excepting Fast Company) that wasn't in some way 'weird' or obviously unusual and personal. Certainly coming after the wildly unusual and personal Videodrome, The Dead Zone could plausibly appear in this light. Here there are no sex-parasites, cancers, mutations, exploding viscera, crazed doctors, insectoid manifestations, or even trifurcated uteruses - only a melancholy story of star-crossed love with an added dimension of paranormal psychology. But a close examination reveals that The Dead Zone, despite some uncharacteristic aspects, remains firmly within the orbit of Cronenberg's established interests. Indeed, its unique angle of view provides a perspective in which the concerns of the other films are illuminated in a new way. The protagonist, Johnny Smith, is the centre of the story and it is through his eyes that we apprehend the action. This narrative strategy is clearly carried over from Videodrome, which was the first Cronenberg film to use such an approach. Johnny is a junior-high-school teacher in a small New England town, engaged to another teacher in the school, Sarah Bracknell - the two have an idyllic romantic relationship. But a terrible road accident puts Johnny into a coma for five years, and when

166 The Artist as Monster

he awakes Sarah has gotten married, and borne a child, to someone else. His job is also gone, and he remains very weak and partially crippled. The general picture is that his life - a normal, unassuming life with work, a prospective marriage and family - has simply been rubbed out. In the place of that normal existence he is given a life that is blighted and enfeebled, but augmented also with a new dimension. For when he awakens from the coma he discovers that he has acquired the power of second sight. Grasping the arm of a nurse who is attending to him, he 'sees' that her house is on fire and her child in danger. This is only the first in a series of Visions' that reveal traumatic events in the past or the present (and, later on, the future) and that make Johnny into an unwilling media freak. The spectacle of a confrontational news conference gives his mother a fatal stroke. Sarah appears again, but only to enact for a single day his fantasy of their life together. He helps the local sheriff solve a series of sex murders. But with each new episode, the visions are weakening him and bringing him closer to death. Escaping to a new town, he discovers in a vision that the state senatorial candidate will be elected president and start a nuclear Armageddon. He decides to assassinate the politician, is shot down, and dies in Sarah's arms after having ensured the destruction of the madman's career. The option of repression Cronenberg's films have repeatedly staged a battle between two sets of forces: on the one hand rationality, caution, control, repression; on the other hand liberation of sexuality, bodily abjection, transgressivity. After, in Videodrome, wading into the horrific delirium of unleashed instinct, contemplating the spectacle of doors of the unconscious opened and primal impulses followed to their sources, Cronenberg in The Dead Zone is trying out the option of repression. From a certain angle, the film is undeniably optimistic. The visions that overwhelm Johnny are his monstrosity, the special horrifying legacy of an accidental intervention not his own. But instead of simply devouring him without benefit to anyone (what happens to the protagonists of Videodrome and The Fly - and for that matter Dead Ringers and Naked Lunch), this monstrosity is actually helpful to others: it saves the lives of children, young women, and ultimately millions of citizens. Uncoincidentally, this beneficence of monstrosity occurs in an environment, and a psyche, from which sexuality has been purged or repressed (a similar

The Dead Zone

167

pattern is discernible in the desexualized Scanners, where scanning ability can potentially be used for good). But this (relatively) optimistic model goes with a protagonist, and a narrative landscape, that is repressed and frozen. It can only exist because he has renounced happiness, sex/the body, desire, the Other. The Dead Zone's protagonist is clearly a 'human subject' from the beginning, but one whose decency and goodwill have been removed from the ineffective margins of narratives dominated by horror raging out of control to the centre of an almost horror-less narrative that concentrates on the sadness of his exclusion. Like Max Renn, Johnny is isolated, self-defeating, and ultimately suicidal, but the contrasts between these first two Cronenberg male central protagonists are otherwise very strong. Unlike Max, Johnny has not started from a position of (false) self-confidence and instrumental activism. Rather his hermetic, passive, and depressive instincts remain in control from beginning to end. Where Max's fantasies are sadistic, Johnny's are masochistic - scenarios of deprivation, exile, helpless suffering and loss. Max's besetting sin is manipulation and heedless appetite; Johnny's is self-pity. Johnny, unlike Max, refuses to open doors and follow impulses. On the contrary, he is always trying to postpone, to deny. The outstanding feature of this character is his niceness and decency and self-effacing humility; and the outstanding feature of the film (in Cronenberg's canon at least) its quietness. Repression and avoidance are at the centre of the film. Everything got loose in Videodrome; now everything is shut down again. The whole film seems to take on a pallid quality. Violence and viscerality are at a minimum,1 the entire production is muted and damped in action and image. Colourless landscapes, leafless trees, grey skies, pastel interiors, drab wardrobes, pale sad faces - these are the dominant tonalities of The Dead Zone. Indeed, it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the whole film is without primary colours. In place of horror is pathos, a certain selfconscious use of bittersweet melancholy, an emotional indulgence in pity and sympathy for a poor soul whose sufferings are undeserved and concomitantly a formal modulation away from the horror-scenario and in the direction of the melodrama-scenario.2 The film foregrounds to an unprecedented degree the qualities of pity and compassion whose presence in earlier Cronenberg films was often drowned out by loud bodily horror. But if unrepression doesn't work in Cronenberg - as the flanking examples of Videodrome and The Fly demonstrate almost didactically -

168 The Artist as Monster

then neither does repression in The Dead Zone. Johnny Smith cannot avoid the Cronenbergian dilemma. To shut down and retreat into a shell proves unworkable even on this most minimal survival-mode scale. Certainly the destructive energies of primal appetite and abjection are muted and reduced by such a strategy, but they are not excluded. Johnny's Visions' are precisely the incursions into his psyche of those forces whose power he is attempting to escape; and each incursion leaves him more ravaged, more spent. Between the sadness he feels in being cut off from sexual fulfilment and the dreadful mental and physical depletion sustained in experiencing the traumatic visions, Johnny is forced to squeeze himself emotionally into an evershrinking space, to the point where the prospect of a sacrificial death looks like a kind of deliverance. The relative closeness of The Dead Zone to the world of mainstream cinema scarcely interferes with the film's renewed display of the imagistic powers Cronenberg had discovered in Videodrome. That film's hallucinatory delirium allowed for a free-associational inventive freedom in settings, costumes, decor, objects, and colour that of course cannot be matched in a less radically subjective project. Certainly The Dead Zone, as a narratively 'realist' mainstream film, avoids the wholesale distortions of the naturalistic visual environment seen in Videodrome or Naked Lunch. But it does nevertheless present a strong system of repeated images that speak indirectly to the predicament of the central character: houses and roads, fire .and winter cold, the consistencies and contrasts of wardrobe and setting. These infusions of meaning into mise en scene give depth and nuance to the narrative: Cronenberg here 'realizes' the screenplay of another in a way that is not far distant from the creative strategies of Hollywood genre-cinema metteurs en scene like Sirk or Minnelli; but at the same time he brings these strategies to bear on a project that he can align on a fundamental level with his own developing concerns. Repressed and depressed In one respect The Dead Zone represents a return for Cronenberg to the world before Scanners: a return to the 'nice,' passive, ineffective heroes of Shivers, Rabid, and The Brood - though Johnny Smith is much more substantial and complex as a character than his predecessors. He is not only inoffensive and well meaning but shy, sensitive, and vulnerable. His introverted, self-denying character is attracted to romantic dreams

The Dead Zone

169

and poetic melancholy. Christopher Walken presents the right sallow, fragile physical type, with a darting yet tentative manner. The Dead Zone depends on Walken's specific physiognomy and presence as much as Videodrome did on James Woods's, and almost as much as Dead Ringers does on Jeremy Irons's. His pale face with skin like parchment, his large staring eyes, even his twitchy actor-mannerisms, contribute essentially to a complex realization of the character.3 He looks and acts like a very intelligent, very repressed person, and his psychic (dis)ability is physically echoed in a painful, lurching limp. The first time we see him, Johnny is teaching Poe's The Raven to his juniorhigh-school pupils, not so much describing its operation as entering into a kind of vicarious early-adolescent discovery of this purple romantic idealism-and-despair ('Pretty good, huh?/ he says with a diffident smile after reading a particularly gloomy passage).4 This describes his disposition quite well: soft, romantic, sensitive, idealistic, and yet almost melodramatically aware that life does not reflect this sensibility - and therefore pessimistic. Certainly spontaneous action is the last thing Johnny wants to get into. A key moment occurs just before the accident. Johnny has romantically swept Sarah off for an afternoon at the amusement park, only to become disconcertingly and prophetically ill on the roller coaster. Standing on her porch in the cold rain, he rejects her invitation to stay the night. 'No, better not... some things are worth waiting for/ he says, looking sad and defeated, and moments later adds, Tm going to marry you, you know/ He wants Sarah, but in the context of a safe, permanent, institutionalized relationship, not on the basis of an impetuous instinct or indeed any kind of act. He can never have what he, himself, personally and poignantly wants. It is a signal of this mood that Johnny should be far more taken with The Raven's swooning immersion in the pain of loss than by any prospect of a romantic union - that he should be attracted to that state of loss even at a time when it there is no 'reason' to be, and that after the accident he has simply come to occupy a state to which he had always been drawn. And his shying-away from premarital sex then becomes simply another indicator of a self-denial in which Johnny feels himself to be always already a 'tragic/ or at least a pathetic, subject. Viewing it in the context of Cronenberg's other films, we can see how Johnny's 'chivalrous' refusal of sexuality is positioned as a refusal of the body, of appetite and transgressivity. Clearly this refusal is an attempt to avoid the dangers of these uncontrollable forces, to seek

170 The Artist as Monster

protection for ego-subjectivity in the values of restraint, sensitivity, and compassion. We have seen how fellow-feeling ('human subjectivity') has operated as a counterweight to mindless transgressive appetite in every Cronenberg film since Shivers. Now, Cronenberg offers us a protagonist who is utterly committed to these values. Whereas his predecessors in Rabid and The Brood stood, as it were, off to the side, as appalled spectators of the destructive ravages of unleashed appetite and the body's chaos, Johnny Smith is placed at the centre of the film's action. Centralized in this way, he can maintain that progress in selfconsciousness of which Videodrome was the first great leap - and in relation to which the earlier, marginal, male characters represented disavowal. For Johnny's refusal and caution and niceness are now the subject of the film; and their struggle to impose a stable narrative of the world and his own life, and their relation to the avoided 'deeper' pull of transgressive appetite, is a perilous and ultimately unsuccessful one. The film has a great deal of sympathy for its protagonist. Indeed, its affective attachment to him and his travail pushes it into the realm of sentimental melodrama, an extended spectacle of passive suffering. But this 'tear-jerking' indulgence in sympathy does not prevent an insight into the character's weaknesses and failures, and to the degree to which his condition is a self-constructed one. Actually, the film - like Videodrome - is elusive about what or who is responsible for the tragic predicament it unfolds. The culprit is fate, bad luck, a physical accident: a truck hits Johnny because driving conditions are poor and the truck driver was nodding off.5 But also, Johnny is responsible. He has insisted on driving home in dangerous conditions - why? One can almost say, to escape Sarah's sexual proposition, a delicate and loving proposition from a woman with whom he is deeply in love and hopes to marry. It might be said that this is a much too drastic and (fictionally) inappropriate 'punishment' for so mild a 'crime' - an act of shyness, really, at most a nervous failure of courage. But this refusal is too closely connected with Johnny's whole postponing and self-repressing personality, whose cautious strategy can be seen as self-protecting. And in a Cronenbergian context, the suggestion of sexuality, however discreet and tentative, is enough to indicate a realm of cataclysmic power. Opening the door to sexuality (for example, in Videodrome or The Fly) ushers in catastrophe; on the other hand, as The Dead Zone shows, closing the door in its face results in an equally catastrophic outcome. The eighteen-wheeler is not 'sexuality' (if such a designation is to be attempted, it would be, as we shall see, 'maternality'), but its

The Dead Zone

171

connection to the realm of (repressed) sexuality is too strong to be ignored. Behind the pitying, and even self-pitying, melodrama of victimization and suffering there is another drama - a drama of the sad consequences of personal choice, the failure of a survival strategy based on the cherishing of humanity and normality and the exclusion and denial of 'inhuman7 desire. But the 'normal' life of domestic happiness and security the hero wishes for is not really normal at all - it is an idealization. Even Johnny sees this fact, at least subconsciously: he cannot believe that he will ever really feel safe and loved. Instead, in his heart he believes himself destined for isolation and loss. The objective correlative of this inner desolation is an answering outer desolation marked onto the cinematic landscape. The fateful accident occurs in a chilly, nocturnal rainstorm that obscures the vision. When Johnny wakes up five years later, it is winter - and it remains winter for almost the whole of the rest of the film. Snow and freezing mud, dense grey skies, barren leafless tree branches, a killing, all-penetrating cold: these are the regular conditions whenever the characters move out of doors or even glance through windows. Only towards the end of the film, when Johnny has begun to come to terms with his plight, does spring begin to arrive in a tentative and partial way. For most of the time the lifeless and hostile climate is simply the environment, an expression of the condition of the protagonist. It represents not only his objective predicament - maimed and deprived by an accident both physically and emotionally. Even more pervasively, it represents the barrenness that ensues from his cautious, passive, pessimistic temperament. The monstrous hot viscerality of sex, diseased mutation, and raging organic mortality are what have heated Cronenberg's films; and in their absence the temperature drops and everything withers. Johnny has done his best to shut down these appetites and excitements so often on view in Cronenberg, and to a large extent he has succeeded. Instead, he is freezing to death in an arctic wasteland, the cold pallor of his face mirroring the cold blankness of the dead white landscape and the empty grey sky. The failed ideology of family Johnny's desires for normality are those provided by dominant ideology: he believes, or thinks he believes, in family, home, and relationships as a bulwark and a haven. Shelter is what he is looking for - shelter from a terrifying emotional insecurity, and also from the

172 The Artist as Monster

threatening internal chill just mentioned. But the facts of his family, home and relationships are otherwise. Neither of his parents is educated or refined in any way: they seem to be 'ordinary' rural folk without much knowledge of or interest in the outside world. His father is a gentle, self-effacing type, who clearly loves his son and his wife and does what he can to help them, but whose demeanour in the face of so much disaster suggests a modest disbelief in his own powers to effect any great change in anything. One can see him as a role model for Johnny, the sort of man who gives offence to nobody and is always kind and reliable, one who accepts whatever life dishes out without complaint or rebellious impulse, and for whom resignation is almost an instinct. Johnny's mother is an altogether more powerful personality. She is an intense, slightly deranged religious enthusiast, with a frail figure, nervous private smile, and luminous dislocated gaze. Her rustically accented language is full of archaic biblical phraseology, and always conveys a kind of evangelical ardour (at Johnny's bedside after he reawakens from his coma she crows, The Lord has delivered ya from yer trance!' and responds to his question about Sarah by saying, 'Cast her from yer thoughts, John - she's turned her back on ya and cleaves unto another man, a husband/) She is, or borders on being, a constant embarrassment, the trial of which both her husband and her son bear with patience. Johnny's feelings about her are complex and precise, though rendered by suggestion and without any kind of verbalization. She gives him pain, she is impossible; but she is his mother who loves him deeply and whom he loves deeply in return. His feelings about her are founded on contradiction - not to the degree of the abused child who must love the abuser, but in a smaller version of this contradiction that exemplifies a widespread syndrome among children who feel deep love and deep aversion simultaneously. Not the least of Johnny's sufferings is occasioned by her collapse and subsequent death. His visit to her in the hospital, where she deliriously tells him not to track mud through the house and calls him a good boy, is among the film's most pathetic moments. He is piercingly moved by her, and also moved by his father's love; but what is most piercing is their mability, their failure amidst such profoundly good intentions. Johnny has good parents, even the best parents, but it is their frailty that is emphasized - their incapacity to provide the shelter and protection they obviously want to give their son. Then there is one strange particular about Johnny's road accident. The eighteen-wheeler that hits him is driven by a negligent male, but it

The Dead Zone

173

is explicitly a milk-truck. And in the mother-conscious world of The Dead Zone, it is very tempting to interpret this fact as an emblem of maternal nurture that, however, maims the recipient. This may seem a bit slender; but what is striking is that the information about the truck's contents is so unnecessary, and the contents themselves so incongruous. Why should we even know what the truck carries? And if we are to be told, then why milk? From a slightly different angle, it is also fitting that Johnny should be squashed by a milk truck - as opposed to, for example, a whisky truck - when Johnny's cautiousness and aversion to intoxication is, as it were, milk-drinking. (One notes then that the milk truck follows the roller-coaster ride where intoxication is interrupted by inner trauma, and the two combine to 'produce' the coma and the paranormal monstrosity.) And a milk-drinking male is also in some sense a 'mama's boy' The impressions of a good and well-intentioned but somehow inadequate family are carried over into the physical environment of the family home. It is poor and small, and crammed with one might say homely things. It is rooted in age and tradition and use: wood-burning stoves and kerosene lamps reveal its history, plaster ceiling-mouldings and wallpaper preserve the rural fashions of decades past. After his mother's death it is left to Johnny's father to decorate the rather bedraggled Christmas tree with confessions of failure to maintain properly the symbols of hope and faith amidst adversity. This house is trying to be warm and secure, but it seems so fragile and impoverished. It feels like a very uncertain barrier against the deadly winter outside: its walls are too thin, its stability too precarious. In a word, it resembles Johnny's own state. There is a wish to partake of an ideal world where parents love and nurture children, where the home is a stout fortress against the dangers of the outside, where children grow up to be fine upstanding people and marry the girl more or less next door, living happily ever after while recapitulating the ideal for another generation. But the wisher is not strong enough, or lucky enough, or magical enough, to make the wish come true; and what remains is a kind of faded outline, a sad pantomime of former hopes. This outline and pantomime are discernible in Johnny's gentle, melancholic disposition, and in the house too, which expresses both the desire and the failure to make everything right. This poor house has not enclosed and nourished the emotional health of its occupants quite sufficiently. The family inside have suffered casualties, and these are visible in turn in the pathetic fragility of the house itself. It is not

174 The Artist as Monster

Johnny's fault, any more than it is his parents' fault, that their hopes come to naught. But at the same time it is clear that the philosophy on which they have based their lives does not work very well - and that Johnny's selflessness and passivity are not simply the marks of a saintlike victim, but rather of an individual who is attempting to play a losing hand. The failure of an ideal domesticity - this could stand as one capsule thematic description of the film. The domestic ideal represented by Johnny's parents is one failure. But more present to the narrative is, of course, the failure of Johnny's relationship with Sarah. As we have seen, Johnny pushes sexual attraction to one side in favour of the perfect, total domestic relationship ('some things are worth waiting for ... I'm going to marry you, you know') - which is, however, in the future. This postponement then leads to the destruction of the possibility of realizing the ideal. (Sarah, by contrast, wants to take what is to hand and when Johnny is in his coma she again takes what is to hand and marries another man.) Almost as soon as the film makes us aware of this ideal hope, it destroys it. The rest of the film is then a spectacle of Johnny's exclusion from this dream. But this torture is insufficient. Johnny must be given an actual taste of exactly what he has lost. And so Sarah, in what may be thought a questionable act of compassion, decides to take herself and her small child over to Johnny's house one day for a session of lovemaking and domestic coziness. Johnny's father returns in the evening to find Sarah cooking a meal. As they sit around the dining-room table, Johnny dandles the baby on his lap and his father sighs contentedly and says, 'It feels good to have a family eating around this table again.' A poignant moment, because of course it isn't a family, only the mirage of a family. Johnny is presented with this perfect king-for-a-day realization (of course a longer period might have tarnished its perfection) only to have it jerked away from him. Once more the domestic ideal has crumbled, once more the film offers the renewed, and now more painful, spectacle of exclusion. Sarah's new husband, Walt, seerns like a nice enough guy ('I think you'd like him,' Sarah says in telling Johnny about him), but he certainly doesn't have any especially prepossessing qualities. In fact, his first appearance in the film occurs when he knocks on Johnny's door in the new town Johnny has gone to live in, campaigning for Greg Stillson's senatorial bid. The demagogic populist Stillson has already been identified to the viewer as unscrupulous, violent, and dangerously unbalanced, so it is disconcerting to find Walt, and a minute later Sarah

The Dead Zone

175

too, going door to door for him. It indicates that neither of them is as discerning as they might be - and even that they are both slightly obtuse. That is really too strong a description, but this couple, who do in fact occupy the position of domestic bliss, stand in their somewhat fat-faced contentment in stark and unflattering contrast to Johnny's ultrasensitive suffering. And this is simply the culmination of the suspicion that Sarah has never really been 'worthy' of the grand romantic passion that Johnny has cherished for her, or at least that her idealism has never matched his in intensity. He is left alone in the privileged position of chief sufferer, a role whose fervid aura of martyrdom is rooted in repeated manifestations of exclusion, of lack, and of stigmata-like hysterical symptoms (the visions). Johnny's wracked devotion to these sufferings, combined with those diffident strategies of postponement and self-frustration, are what prompts a description of him - and to an extent of the film - as masochistic. The visions The scenes representing Johnny's visions are in strong contrast to most of the rest of the film. Where the surrounding text is drab and depressed, the visions are dramatic and violent. Moreover, they have a thematically inverse relationship to their surroundings: that is, if the action as a whole represents Johnny's acceptance of his fate and his repression of desire, the visions represent a bursting out of feeling. Certainly their literal diegetic function is essential to the film's surface (The Dead Zone's thumbnail-sketch description: a movie about a psychic), but their status as a metaphor for the protagonist's neurosis is just as essential to its substructure. In the first place, the visions are triggered by a strong touch - most typically a handclasp, sometimes a grip around the wrist or on the shoulder. Johnny's malady may be said to be isolation, exclusion, an inability to feel connected; also, in a pathological sense, a fear of contact, a reluctance whose basis is a belief that attempts to connect and belong must always fail. Touch, then, is an apt detonator of repressed fears and wishes - which is how the visions may be described in this context. At the same time, that touch is not a sexual or even a sensual one at all. Each vision is preceded by anguished flinching by Johnny, as though he were being pierced by knives; and each one leaves Johnny harrowed and drained (Tt feels like I'm dying, inside,' he says of their effect). They are assaults upon Johnny, so ravaging that they undermine his

176 The Artist as Monster

already fragile health and threaten to kill him. Certainly they are, as he angrily tells Sheriff Bannerman, the very opposite of a 'gift/ But where do these assaults come from, and who or what is doing the assaulting? 'Some freakish condition created by a traumatic head injury7 - this merely accidental-physical explanation is sterile and boring. It is also undermined in the narrative itself, by way of the strange and unexplained 'spell' that Johnny has on the roller-coaster ride with Sarah on the afternoon before the accident. Of course the violent ups-and-downs of the ride might make anyone sick, especially someone as cautious and devoted to the safe and predictable as we discover Johnny to be. But he does say as he climbs shakily off the ride, Tunny, it never used to bother me' - and in the end there is no firm explanation, literal or metaphorical, for why this moment should occur when it does. What is clear is its foreshadowing of the later Visions/ In the midst of his exhilaration, Johnny suddenly becomes sober and then alarmed, snatches his glasses from his face, and stares away in anguish. It is the first appearance of that look with which we will later become so familiar, the look of Johnny in extremis, on the rack of some frightful inner horror. There is no explanation at all of what he saw or felt at this moment, but its very arbitrariness and unexpectedness connect it with the accident and the ensuing visions. Then the sombre mood still infects him as he drops Sarah off at her home: it is directly tied to his refusal of her invitation to stay the night, and thence to his presence on the dark and wet road at the time of the accident. All of these factors suggest unmistakably that whatever it is that causes Johnny's later visions cannot be ascribed simply to the crash, but in some sense predates it. This pre-establishment implies that Johnny's 'gift' (actually his curse) is somehow innate to him, rather than being a forcible introjection from outside. In fact, it is another instance of the film's equivocating stance on this subject. Just as the accident itself is on the one hand accidental, but on the other a consequence of Johnny's rejection of Sarah's invitation, so his paranormal powers are on the one hand the result of an accident and a coma, but on the other of something that was already there before the accident. From the standpoint of the latter perspective, then, the assaults have their origin inside the self. A barrage of violent, cruel, overwhelming images emanating from within a subject whose whole tenor is one of caution and self-abnegation, particularly in the sexual realm: this scenario bears the stamp of a familiar pattern - repression and the return of the repressed. The repression is of sexuality, of ambiguous family feelings, of anger and

The Dead Zone

177

deep anxiety. What Johnny fears in these areas of repressed emotion danger, volatility, brutal disruption - is precisely what explodes unstoppably into his being during his fits of second sight. These paroxysms engage him in areas that he would avoid if he could. From a certain standpoint they might be viewed as therapeutic, in that they force him to confront realities from which he is fleeing. But in truth they never really rise beyond the status of neurotic symptoms, and Johnny never achieves a self-knowledge that could help him - unless selfmartyrdom in the service of an unfelt social good can be seen as an actually effective solution. Crucially, these cataclysmic visions of violence and death occur (in every case but the last) in some meaningful relation to the family - that domestic sphere containing Johnny's profoundest hopes and disappointments. The house is on fire The first vision, occurring as Johnny grasps the arm of an attending nurse at the clinic, catapults him (and us) into a child's bedroom engulfed in fire - it is the nurse's house. The images are extraordinarily colourful and violent, especially compared to the drabness of the surrounding 'real-life' scenes. The nurse's daughter cowers and screams as gaily printed wallpaper and cute stuffed animals are consumed by flames, the fish tank boils and explodes, and Johnny himself is seen lying in the child's burning bed with a look of horror upon his face. 'Your daughter is screaming!' shouts Johnny to the bewildered nurse, The house is on fire!' As with the later sex-murder vision, the scene is brilliantly staged through the device of putting Johnny physically in the place of catastrophe: he turns his face from the nurse by the hospital bed to (in reverse angle) the inferno of the child's bedroom, simultaneously occupying both spaces. But there is one curious and telltale aspect of this scene that may seem out of place. This is its lead-up and sudden arrival in an atmosphere of foreboding and then shock. As the nurse walks through the room replacing the linen, and then places a cool cloth on the sleeping patient's fevered brow, the cutting and the music convey a palpable aura of suspense: something dangerous is about to happen. Then, as the nurse compassionately - one might say maternally - pats his forehead, the arm of the unconscious man suddenly comes up and grasps her wrist in an iron grip; a reaction shot shows her shock and gasp of alarm; another shot of Johnny shows his eyes opening and staring

178 The Artist as Monster

straight ahead, as though mindlessly and automatically. Meanwhile, on the soundtrack his hand slaps! dramatically onto her arm, and the music bursts forth in menacing brass chords. This whole staging is precisely one that signals the arrival of the monster in a horror film. It needs to be emphasized that these aspects of shock (for the viewer as much as for the nurse) have no basis within the story, and are in fact counter-realist. If Johnny is asleep he will not know that the nurse is even there; and his abrupt seizing of the nurse's arm cannot be plausibly motivated by anything other than the film's desire to create exactly this startling conventional effect. What this tells us is that Johnny is the film's monster. The burden of this vision is that the child is in mortal peril and the house is in flames; and these facts are in hysterical contrast to the soothing ministrations being dispensed by a mother who is, as it were, doing the wrong job. The movie certainly does not suggest that this woman is at fault. But there is nevertheless a juxtaposition of motherly solicitude with fiery chaos - one that rather echoes Johnny's general family neurosis. His mother is loving and tender, but also haywire. Then there is the straightforward and telling dichotomy of 'the home is safe and stable' versus 'the home is collapsing in flames.' The mother's sympathetic attentions are of little use as they are directed; meanwhile the panicking child is in mortal danger. This cool, damp cloth isn't putting out the fire. The wintry climate is also 'contradicted' by this flaming vision. The cold desolation of Johnny's repressed and blighted emotional landscape is now invaded by its hot, sharp, explosive antithesis. Not that the vision consists of an unrepression, or of the return of exactly what is repressed - rather, in a more general and metaphorical way, the fear of what is violent and uncontrollable returns as a vision of something that is violent and uncontrollable, and that threatens the child who is the analogue of Johnny himself, as it is destroying the house that is the analogue of Johnny's house. Looked at in this light, the vision represents a psychic somatization of Johnny's anxieties - a hysterical symptom. The next two visions are not so spectacular, but they continue the pattern. Touching the hand of his physician, Dr Sam Weizack, Johnny sees a scene from Weizack's childhood. Weizack's young mother is hurrying him to safety amidst the chaos of a Nazi attack, and Johnny knows - as Weizack himself does not - that the mother survived. As German soldiers arrive in tanks and armoured cars on the heels of retreating Polish cavalry, houses explode and burn in the background. In Weizak's office, Johnny shouts, The Wolf is loose!' and then The

The Dead Zon& 179

boy is safe/ Again, The house is on fire/ but the child is saved. This scene, whose thematic and narrative interest is the least of any of the visions, receives a realization that is very conventional in comparison with the others'. Nevertheless, what the vision reveals is the traumatic separation of a parent and a child: another scenario very appropriate to the emotional landscape the protagonist and the film are traversing. The loving mother who loads her child onto a departing wagon so that he will be safe from harm, braving the pain of separation, has no flaw as a parent: her sacrifice was successful. And her son appears not to have suffered any functional penalty as a result: Weizak is an ideally warm, sympathetic, and self-assured doctor. Yet there is one curious empty spot here, too. Weizak is shaken by the news that his mother is still alive. After Johnny tells him he knows where she now lives, Weizak calls her at her home in Philadelphia. But when she picks up the telephone he bails out and hangs up. T just couldn't talk to her ... it wasn't meant to be' is his cryptic explanation. This echoes the other expressions of a fatalistic resignation in the film, notably Sarah's question 'Why did it have to happen like this?' and Johnny's answer, 'Bad luck/ But in Weizak's case there is no irrevocable deed, no insuperable barrier. There is just a strange conviction that separation was 'meant to be,' a belief that there is, as it were, too much invested in it for it to be repaired. And this is again rather analogous to the sense one has from the very beginning of Johnny's large investment in self-denial. Then, at a news conference prompted by the burning-house vision, an aggressively sceptical reporter volunteers himself as a guinea pig. We see nothing of Johnny's vision here; the film's attention is on the scene as a public occasion staged for television. The TV reporter, wearing a black leather jacket and looking predatory, signals to his cameraman as he walks aggressively up to the front of the room to debunk this impostor. Sitting next to Johnny, in front of microphones and TV cameras, he asks nastily, 'Is my house on fire, John?' Johnny grasps his hand and says: What do you want to know? You want to know the future? You want to know if you're going to die, is that it? You're going to die, I'm going to die. You want to know if you're going to die tomorrow - is that right? You want to know why your sister killed herself?

Now the reporter wants to retreat, but Johnny's hand grips him strongly. The dialogue goes like this:

180 The Artist as Monster REPORTER: All right, what are you doing, let go. JOHNNY: It's not all right. REPORTER: That's OK. JOHNNY: It's not OK.

At last, pulling away with a violent jerk, he shouts, 'Let me go, you fucking freak!' The scene carries a certain satisfaction for the viewer, since it offers a spectacle of mean-spirited aggression and of righteous victory over the bully by the frail Johnny. But it is noteworthy that the indirect glimpse we get of the reporter's inner life shows yet another dreadful tear in the fabric of family. The answer to the question 'Is my house on fire?' is 'Yes, it is/ And it is in viewing this scene on television that Johnny's mother, gasping 'You're hurting my boy!/ falls to her knees and suffers her fatal stroke. Sex-killing The most compelling vision of all occurs midway through the film, when Johnny agrees to help Bannerman, the sheriff of Castle Rock, find a serial sex-killer. Johnny at first refuses Bannerman's request: after his experience with the reporter and the death of his mother he has retreated further into himself, embittered and in no mood to display his 'gift' for the crass delectation of strangers. It is Sarah's 'domestic' visit that opens him up to some extent. Notwithstanding her message that their intimate time together can never be repeated, he feels (one imagines) more organic and real and less cut off. As a result, he can for a moment act. But in this action he finds himself coming face to face with exactly those aspects of the world and himself that are most frightening to him, and in the end his old will to passivity is strongly reinforced. In no other section of the film is the freezing harshness of the physical environment quite so powerfully stressed. Perhaps the strongest single shot in the film occurs as Johnny revisits the scene of an earlier crime - a dank, black, stone sewer tunnel illuminated by car headlights. Johnny fails to get a vision from the old clues. It is the dead of winter and the dead of night, and the strongly geometrical composition suggests that the tunnel is a metaphorical road, a dead end. Death and cold and desolation speak so strongly from this image that it might be said to be the most nihilistic point in the film's process of expressing inner feelings in terms of setting and climate. Then a new homicide

The Dead Zone

181

finds them at a park bandstand in the middle of the night; Johnny takes the corpse's hand and finds himself witnessing the crime as it occurred. Once again the mise en scene places him physically in the landscape of his vision. He appears in the shot with the murderer and the victim, the contrast between the snowy white daylight of the assault and the nocturnal blackness of his 'actual' place echoing that between the burning house and the cool hospital room in the first vision. When the killing is over, Johnny babbles to the sheriff, T stood there and watched him kill that girl ... I did nothing ... I stood there.' After witnessing the murderous sexual assault of a man upon a woman, Johnny's first outward reaction is one of self-reproach. This scene and its aftermath contain absolutely the film's only moments of sadistic transgressivity The wintry environment of the murder ensures that all parties are chastely bundled up against the cold: the victim in particular is a little blimp of protective covering featuring overcoat, woolen toque, scarf, mittens. The murderer knocks the young woman unconscious with a punch, and as she lies on her back on the snow-covered gazebo floor rips open her coat, her blouse, and her brassiere, exposing her breasts. He then opens his own monstrous black rubber greatcoat, removes a pair of scissors from a special inside pocket, and stabs her to death (the camera viewpoint here, incidentally, is roughly that of the victim). The exposure of naked female sexual flesh certainly carries a charge, and it is an especially shocking one in view of the metaphorically repressed atmosphere of the film and the protagonist generally, and the literally covered-up winter bodies of the scene's participants in particular. For just a moment we glimpse again the transgressive sexual violence of the murder that opens Shivers, and once again that transgressivity is juxtaposed with a surrounding spectacle of repression and neutralization of appetite. But whereas in Shivers this shocking scene sets the tone for the jamboree of unrepression that is to follow, in The Dead Zone it is only a momentary flash that subsides quickly into the film's pervading surface of relative respectability. Indeed, its memory is soon eclipsed by the greater shock of the following scenes, showing the suicide of the murderer in his own house, with his own mother guarding the door. At first an anonymous presence whose face cannot be seen, the killer reveals his own identity (to Johnny, to us) in a gesture of unveiling that follows and echoes his unveiling of the nakedness of the victim. It is Bannerman's young deputy, Frank Dodd, a marginal presence in several earlier scenes and mostly notable for his sceptical remarks about Johnny's psychic abili-

182 The Artist as Monster

ties. Bannerman drives to Dodd's house to confront him, and Johnny goes along to watch. As he stands outside the house alone, Johnny, in an odd and striking moment, sees Dodd in an upstairs window and is seen by him before Dodd pulls the blind. Then the film goes inside the house to watch Dodd's solemn, ritualized, horrifying suicide. Naked, he dons his big black 'murder' coat; he goes into the bathroom alone and shuts the door; he removes his 'murder' scissors from a jar of coloured disinfectant; he kneels in the bathtub, and with almost priestly gestures lays out the scissors like a sacred instrument on a flat surface at the head of the tub; he then props the scissors in the faucet and rehearses a downward movement of his open mouth onto the upturned point. At no time does he show any sign of panic or even anxiety, merely a calm, serious determination. The film then moves back to watch the actions of Bannerman, Johnny, and Dodd's mother in the rest of the house. When it returns to Dodd for one last look it presents the locus of horror for the entire narrative: his corpse, still twitching, eyes rolled back, bloody scissors protruding from the open mouth. The sharp metal point piercing the softest and most vulnerable tissue at the back of the mouth and throat - it would be an indelibly gruesome image even in the goriest slasher-movie. Here it carries a unique force. This is the hideous image of self-punishment that displaces, and replaces, the horrible pleasure of the sex murder: frightful sadistic violence supplanted by even more frightful masochistic violence. The house and the mother Two other features of this episode are of great interest: Dodd's house and his mother. We have already seen the way in which the house can become a powerful metaphorical presence in the film, in the touching debility of Johnny's family home. But there is in fact a whole network of imagery centring on the house, of which Johnny's house and Dodd's are only the most articulate examples. The house is one of the protean recurring images through which the film communicates Johnny's psychological condition and his emotional understanding of the world. Versions of this wr-house are omnipresent in the film from the opening credits onwards. It is two-storeyed, wood-faced, usually with a picket fence and gate, often with a porch; it may be bigger or smaller, richer or poorer, in better or worse repair, but it is not particularly new. Virtually every house in the film is a repetition of it. The very first images of the film, during the credits, show two of these houses - white, gabled,

The Dead Zone

183

multi-storeyed - neither of which ever appears in the film itself. Johnny's own house differs from the exterior of this archetype in being smaller and single-storeyed: it is too poor to have the size and expanse of the master-image. But the 'central' house appears in different forms as Sarah's verandah-ed house, the Weizak Clinic, the nurse's burning house, the Dodd house, the house Johnny moves away to, Roger Stuart's mansion, and even the public building where Johnny is to assassinate Stillson; and we may also see its skeletal characteristics in the white-painted, antiquely embellished wooden gazebo with pointed roof where Dodd murders the waitress (a house without walls and invaded by snow). What the buildings essentially signify is the sense of an old, heavy past, associated especially with family. The house is a thing that Johnny cannot escape wherever he goes - it is his past, his childhood, his sense of the fragility of things and of the inadequacy of love and good intentions. Once more, a deterministic sense of entrapment or impotence is inscribed on the physical environment of the film. This aura is at its least insistent in the clean and solid Weizak Clinic, where the guiding spirit is the sane, kindly Dr Sam Weizak. And it is at its most overpowering in the chaotic and quasi-derelict home of Frank Dodd, where decaying emblems of childhood and too-close family embrace proliferate like rank vegetation, and the dwellers are a sex killer and his crazed, protective mother. This house carries the signifiers of inadequacy in Johnny's family home to monstrous proportions. Again the poverty and dilapidation are present, but now magnified by a disorder that threatens to engulf the place: bags of refuse, old pieces of furniture, disused picture and door frames sitting askew. The wallpaper is of a disturbingly organic colour and pattern, old and stained as well. Generally the impression is claustrophobic, especially in the entrance hall and stairwell. Dodd's own room carries a strong charge. Its wallpaper, again stained with age, depicts a wild-west scene, a cowboy riding a bucking bronco. In the middle of the floor sits a child's frayed and mildewed riding-horse, with Dodd's policeman's gun-belt, with pistol and cartridges, hanging around it. The room is full of the utterly personal and idiosyncratic detritus of male childhood and youth. Among the bizarre items decorating the room is what appears to be a wolf's head mounted on the wall (The wolf is loose!') Everything here shows signs of neglect and disorder.6 Not for the first or the last time in a Cronenberg film, a domestic environment of physical dereliction signifies a sick subject dwelling within. This spectacle is

184 The Artist as Monster

touching and disturbing in its intimacy and its evidence of loneliness and self-encapsulation. The presiding spirit of this house, Dodd's wild-eyed mother, is an equally important presence. Nervous and hostile, she attempts to bar the door to Bannerman, and then confronts Johnny with the aspect of a caged animal. Her speech is uneducated ('He ain't here') and her manner harsh. When she grabs Johnny, he discovers psychically that she knew about her son's killings but did nothing. Her response is to denounce him shrilly as 'the devil, sent from hell/ and to fetch her son's pistol to shoot him. She in fact wounds Johnny before being brought down by a bullet in the abdomen from Bannerman. In her death-posture she extends a blood-covered hand to the collapsed Johnny through the wooden stairwell railing. As the Dodd house is a nightmarish version of Johnny's house, so is Mrs Dodd a nightmarish version of Johnny's mother. Mrs Dodd's underclass rural directness of speech, with its unpolished usage and even its instinctive reaching for religious imagery in moments of crisis, recalls Mrs Smith - and so does her feverish, haunted gaze, which is partly occasioned by the troubles descended upon her child. And in both mothers, the suggestion of an almost demented intensity coexists uncomfortably with obvious love and devotion towards their sons. In King's novel, Mrs Dodd is, so to speak, the author of her son's psychotic rage, through her horrific sexual punishment (crimping his penis with clothespins) of his 'dirty' thoughts when he was small. Nothing so specific is articulated in the film, and indeed it is difficult to construct even a sketchy narrative of the mother-son relationship from what is essentially a snapshot of their situation. All that we can see is an atmosphere of crazed closeness, a shutting up inside the house and a shutting out of the world in an environment whose obsessiveness is marked by its dereliction, in which mother and son are too symbiotically attached. The figure presented in the movie resembles the 'archaic mother'7 the possessive, devouring mother who opposes the physical separation of the child, and who represents for the child the threat of wholesale psychic incorporation. In one variant she appears specifically to the male child as a castrating figure. As Barbara Creed and others have pointed out, this monstrous maternal figure is a regular feature of a certain strain of horror cinema (Psycho is the archetypal example, setting the pattern for such subsequent films as Carrie, Friday the Thirteenth, Mother's Day, and others).8 The castrating mother of course punishes the sexuality of her son, and in the horror-movie model this

The Dead Zone

185

punishment gives rise to the son's psychotic violence against women, which is simultaneously his internalized-castrating-mother's rage against sexual arousal by another woman and his revenge against the sex that has oppressed him.9 This is precisely the model of Psycho - and also of King's novel. The less specific characterization of Mrs Dodd presented by the film is productive in that it makes the mother-son relationship more ambiguous and encourages the connections to the ambiguous relationship of Mrs Smith and her son. The Dodd situation acts in every way to intensify and grotesquely parody the Smith situation. Mrs Smith's hint of harshness and censoriousness is amplified in Mrs Dodd's harpy-like anger; the mildness and passivity of Mr Smith becomes the complete absence of any Mr Dodd;10 Mrs Smith's distracted deathbed misapprehension of her grown son as a little boy is echoed in the unchanged little-boy's environment inhabited by Dodd in his home right up to the present; Mrs Smith's stroke suffered at the spectacle of her son's victimization by the outside world of press and public becomes Mrs Dodd's death (shot in the womb, so to speak) in the midst of an intruding police hunt for her son. (And the similar unsettling vividness of both women is emphasized in the very strong effect created by the actors in what are basically one- or two-scene cameo parts - two splendid veteran Canadian performers, Jackie Burroughs and Colleen Dewhurst.) The evil Doppelganger All this parallelism (of houses, of mothers) has the effect of strongly encouraging a similar parallel between Johnny and Dodd - people who on the surface appear to be opposites. Johnny is a sensitive, polite schoolteacher who would never hurt a soul and never even 'take advantage of a woman, let alone assault her. Dodd is a psychotic police officer who stabs young girls to death. And yet Johnny feels an element of complicity with Dodd. All the covert resemblances - mothers and houses, but also solitude and the strange private glance exchanged through the window as Johnny arrives with the sheriff - become markers of Dodd's status as a nightmarish double of Johnny. In particular, the murderous, predatory relationship with women is almost didactically contrasted with Johnny's 'honourable' reluctance and then his official exclusion from Sarah's life. And then the whole Dodd episode is, in a sense, the 'consequence' of Sarah's fantasy-wife visit.

186 The Artist as Monster

Dodd represents what Johnny fears he might be if he ever stopped repressing - everything that is repressed in Johnny returns in an appalling acted-out form in Dodd. It is worth noting that the film deliberately brings these figures closer together than they are in the novel, where Frank Dodd is an older man, a crossing-guard universally regarded as kindly and harmless. Here, Dodd is instead a kind of sardonic anti-Johnny, the same age but darker, more good-looking, more dangerous - more sexual, whatever his twisted private debilities.11 So, especially, Dodd represents the sexuality Johnny is struggling to keep out of himself, which, when it appears in Dodd, appears as the most overtly monstrous transgressive violence. In The Dead Zone the central male is not a sadistic sexual predator (as the central male sensibility of the films was repeatedly in Shivers and Rabid, and as Max discovers himself to be in Videodrome) - but he is very specifically afraid of becoming one. Here the dualism of 'human subjectivity7 versus transgressive desire is replicated in the dualism of Johnny's romantic, idealizing, avoiding love for Sarah versus Dodd's sick sexual violence. The Dead Zone sits securely on the 'human subject' side of that fence, but it can see over onto the other side, and what it sees is Frank Dodd murdering women, his sickness forged in an inferno of domestic closeness not altogether different from Johnny's. Dodd's intolerable criminality arises, in a sense, from the same lies of childhood, the same motherly love that oppresses, as Johnny's sad self-denial, and is in fact the other side of the same coin. At the same time, the exhausting effort of excluding sexuality and sadistic pleasure drains Johnny directly, and indirectly gives rise to the explosions of repressed terror in the visions, which drain him further. A good exit Until now, Johnny's visions have had an ever-worsening effect on him, even though they may have been socially helpful in an objective sense. The Dodd episode leaves him in a state of despair and gives rise to his most concerted effort simply to avoid life. He moves to another town and refuses to leave his house to work (he tutors at home). As ever, his psychological problems assume a clear physical aspect - he looks consumed by an inner malady. His closet is overflowing with letters from strangers who want him to use his powers to fix their lives (once more the film combines an outer cause - the world will not let poor Johnny alone - with an inner one - the bulging closet is a frightening image of

The Dead Zone

187

a mind simply refusing to deal with business and letting it pile up monstrously). But Johnny's human feelings draw him back into life. He cannot resist an appeal from a distraught father, Roger Stuart, to help his 'troubled7 son, Chris. And in the Stuart mansion -the largest and most opulent of all the film's houses - Chris's own room becomes a huge, affluent restatement of Dodd's 'little-boy' bedroom. The wallpaper is again striking, but what is most similar is the collection of boys' stuff all over the place, and especially the large, prominently displayed Indian headdress that is like an answer to Dodd's cowboy gear. This is, this connection hints, another childhood sanctuary that is no guarantee of happiness or psychic safety. But there is no mother in this house, and this fact is perhaps connected to the fact that this child may ultimately escape. Johnny's ensuing vision is of Chris and some friends, in full playing gear, crashing through the thin spring ice at a hockey practice organized by Chris's rich father (who turns out to be rather obsessive and controlling, and pretty clearly the source of his son's problems). And this time it is not of the present or the past, but the future - it is an event that has not yet occurred, and that Johnny in fact partially prevents (he persuades the boy not to go, but the father is arrogantly sceptical and proceeds with the practice). Tragedy ensues, but Chris's life has been saved - and moreover in his nurturing emotional connection to the boy Johnny has perhaps also saved him from some of the consequences of his falsely protective domestic surroundings. This is understandably interpreted by Johnny as a positive development. The ice is melting because it is spring: winter is beginning to relax its grip at last. Renewed activity breaks into Johnny's hibernation in the form of workmen across the street putting up a campaign sign for senatorial candidate Greg Stillson. Sarah shows up once more: she and her husband are Stillson boosters. And Stillson is the subject of Johnny's most portentous vision yet - as president some time in the future, he is pushing the button to launch Armageddon. In every way Stillson's connection with Johnny is one of reawakening life, action, and a positive feeling for other people. He is associated not only with energy and constructiveness in the spring (the workmen and the giant billboard Stillson-face that gradually takes shape in front of Johnny's window like his fate), but also with Johnny's compassionate young 'project' Chris (Johnny first meets Stillson at the Stuart house) and with Sarah (who is actually working on his campaign). If Johnny is a kind of Florence Nightingale and ultimately Christ-like figure, sacrificing

188 The Artist as Monster

himself for others, saving the world, then Greg Stillson is his diametrical opposite: the selfish, power-hungry man who will sacrifice the world for his own megalomaniac pleasure. Dodd is one kind of Johnnyopposite, one with a disturbing resemblance; Stillson's difference is complete. It is really strange how Stillson's bluffness, positive energy, and outgoing good humour become negative qualities in this movie. They are, of course, the precise opposites of Johnny's introversion, sensitivity, and inability to act. And as Johnny's proper habitat is winter, Stillson's is spring. The sky is almost always oppressively grey in this movie; there is no sunlight to brighten the desolate winter landscapes. Stillson brings a wonderful, cheering sunlight to the film, and even speaks forth its effect as he is leaving the Stuart house at the end of his first scene: he walks out of the house onto the front step, looks around, and booms, 'My God, what a glorious day!' These liberating positive associations are of course not indications of Stillson's (evil) nature, but rather of his role in Johnny's internal drama. Once again, the film shows its practice of making the protagonist's inner dilemma the mainspring of everything and of marking an internal thematic element onto the outer, visible world of events. For Stillson is essentially Johnny's salvation, as well as the occasion of his death (almost the same thing). One way of describing Johnny's disease is an unwillingness and/or inability to get out of the self, to exist in the world outside his imagination. His visions have forced him to practise a kind of interventionism, but their status as attacks that he suffers is the opposite of empowering, and each one weakens him and drives him further inside himself in a defensive reaction. But now the combination of predicting the future and saving Chris's life with the dual arrival of Sarah and Stillson shows him a way out into the world, and then directly through and out of it. In the tradition of the 'nice' heroes of Rabid and The Brood, Johnny has difficulty acting effectively. Now Stillson gives him the push he needs to act effectively, just as Nola had done for Frank at the end of The Brood. For Stillson is the next Hitler (a comparison drawn explicitly in the film), and in killing him Johnny will be doing an incalculable service to humanity. And unlike in The Brood, with its miasma of personal jealousy and nuclear-family anguish, in The Dead Zone this deed is framed as an act of disinterested philanthropy, not vengeful or passionate at all. Nothing could be more outside than Stillson or the threat he represents, and he therefore represents a perfect escape from the paralysis Johnny is experiencing. Since killing Stillson will probably result in his

The Dead Zone

189

own death (in fact Johnny is counting on it), Johnny is also extricated forever from his impossible position. The opportunity is almost too convenient, a kind of solution specifically designed to meet Johnny's predicament. He can be good and act at the same time, and he will be out of it and not have to deal with those contradictions any more. In the end he dies in Sarah's arms (she whispers 'I love you' into his ear), having ruined Stillson's career and in the event not even having had to commit homicide, sure of posthumous glory in the eyes of those like Weizak and Sarah who know his motives. It is a sort of happy ending, even if its premise is one of a prior absolute defeat. Melodrama and gender What this combination of positive narrative and thematic closure with the sacrificial death of the protagonist recalls is the genre of melodrama - and in particular the tradition of self-sacrificing women's melodrama stretching right through film history until after the Second World War. The 'solution' to Johnny's problem is reminiscent of the Pyrrhic victories achieved by the heroines of so many women's pictures over the decades12 - protagonists who, like Johnny, have to overcome unresolvable (and unacknowledged) contradictions through the 'transcendence' of self-sacrifice. In these films, the female protagonist renounces an impossible wish - for marriage, for romantic love, for children, for something she wants most deeply and centrally - and as a recompense for her heroic act of renunciation she receives moral credit and uplift, a spiritual sublimation of earthly desires. Often the narratives inflict not simply a sacrifice but even a kind of erasure of the protagonist (a fatal disease, a fading out of the scene) as a kind of radical cutting-the-Gordian-knot solution to an insoluble problem. Moral stature, service to others, a sense of honourable martyrdom are her rewards for having to give up ordinary human satisfactions. This substitution is invariably a case offaute de mieux: the wish really is impossible, the spiritual reward the only kind of positive return that can be managed. Strictly speaking it is a stratagem, a lie that will make the intolerable tolerable. Contemporary analysis decodes this scenario as the expression of ideological failure and recuperation - in the case of women's melodrama clearly in the arena of gender. What are we to make of The Dead Zone's alignment of its story and its protagonist with women's melodrama? In the first place, we might recall Cronenberg's own comment that the film 'had a lot of femaleness

190 The Artist as Monster

in it, and not just because it's more emotional.'13 I take this to mean that 'femaleness' equals passivity and self-sacrifice, and also suffering and compassion for suffering - a certain softness that contrasts with 'masculine' hardness, aggression, machinery. It is also an equation of maleness and sadism, femaleness and masochism. Johnny Smith is 'feminine' because his temperamental reaction to the predicament of being an impossible Cronenbergian male is self-denial, a clinging to 'decency,' an ethical fastidiousness, a sublimation of personal desire into social and personal benevolence. We are dealing here with two diametrically opposed cultural constructions of femininity. One of these aligns the female with nature, vitality, fecundity, and the body (in relation to this the male occupies the spheres of culture, instrumentality, and technology). Especially as an apprehension of the male unconscious, this female becomes also irrational, devouring, uncontrollable, boundaryless (the male correspondingly is rational, discriminating, controlling, and law giving). This female is also the object of heterosexual male desire, an opposite that excites and alarms. In the horror film generally, and in a number of spectacular examples in Cronenberg's work, this highly sexualized female is the monster, Creed's 'monstrous feminine.' But in Cronenberg this female is also the target of sadistic desire, a monster who, to varying degrees and generally in a progressively increasing fashion, is seen to be monstrous not on account of any innate qualities but simply by virtue of the way she excites male desire. The second model of femininity is very different. This is the conception of the female as cultural, refined, spiritual, educative, socialized, and repressed - the more kindly, the morally superior, the less aggressive and more sympathetic sex. Against this weaker but more human figure, the male is brutish, instinctual, violent, acquisitive. Her self-sacrificing goodness is met by his selfish aggression; and, in the sexual sphere, his predatory appetites are wickedly practised upon her vulnerable and affronted body. It is in reaction to this 'good female/bad male' model that the patronizing but also somewhat masochistic male remedies of masculine 'decency' and 'chivalry' develop. Clearly it is the latter model that operates in The Dead Zone. The suspension or freezing-out of sexuality means, above all, the absence of the sexual 'monstrous feminine.' The male subject, unpolluted by sexual desire, may therefore be governed by the chivalrous codes whereby 'civilized' men try to be 'worthy' of women. At the same time, this male subject has entered the realm of the good-feminine, and it is but a

The Dead Zone

191

short step to move him over the line into the feminine position itself the position of goodness and vulnerability. Johnny's poetry-loving delicacy, his shy reluctance, his rejection of the body and its coarseness all feminize him. When he becomes the helpless victim of a series of brutal assaults - first the truck, then the visions - this martyrdom is equally feminizing. And at the opposite pole to all these qualities is Dodd's male sadistic violence, which represents exactly that sinful tendency which Johnny is attempting to exclude and to flee. In Cronenberg, to act at all is ultimately to destroy something, or to create the conditions of destruction. Archetypal male activity is destructive; in the sphere of sexuality it is sadistic. The dawning recognition that this is so 'enfemales' (renders paralysed and vulnerable) almost all of Cronenberg's male protagonists eventually - it is coterminous with their eventual suicidal melancholy. Johnny is unusual, and 'female/ because he does not have to progress towards this position, but begins there. The entire narrative, therefore, is merely an elaboration of an existing condition, an illustration of suffering, a kind of passive marking-time until the inevitable expiration. There is of course another facet of the enfemalement of the Cronenberg protagonist, rooted in the first model of femininity outlined above: the conversion of the rational male ego-subject into the monstrous abject 'female' body that carries within it mutation, disease, and mortality. In Johnny Smith's case, bodily abjection does not occur; the body is kept out of the picture to the utmost extent possible. What does occur is another form of abjection - this time not in the Kristevan but in the dictionary sense - helplessness, victimization, prostrate suffering. Its physical manifestation is not an explosion of the body into tumescences and cancers,14 but rather a bodily diminishment, a wasting away. And this dessicating de-fleshing occurs, again, on account of the absence of sexuality and the body. It also occurs (in another feminizing gesture) as a result of paranormal attacks of hyper-sympathy, which punish Johnny through an enforced empathetic suffering with the traumatic life-threatening emergencies he apprehends in others. Johnny is the monster of this film, but his monstrosity is in fact a kind of anti-monstrosity, consisting of a reified hypercompassion and a decorporealized abjection - again, both feminine according to the second model. In this context, Johnny's passive and receptive 'female' qualities are contrasted with the active 'male' qualities of the sexual-sadistic Dodd and the outgoing manipulator, controller, and actor Stillson, twin models of masculinity to avoid. In terms of its emotional charge, The Dead Zone moves repeatedly

192 The Artist as Monster

away from horror and into pathos, exactly in tune with its 'feminized' and melodramatic generic affiliation. Again and again, the film very deliberately stages the spectacle of Johnny's sad helplessness. The pathos is of an innocent victim who cannot resist his fate, and who perhaps would not even if he could. Perhaps the most intense moments of this kind occur in the sphere of disappointed love. When he wakes from his coma and is told that he has lost Sarah, Johnny almost theatrically covers his face with his arms and turns away from everyone; again, when Sarah comes to the door of his new house, after making a supreme effort not to show her his suffering he again hides his face as he slumps against the door frame and can only wave away young Chris's expressions of concern - another theatrical gesture. Then of course there is the ultimate, almost Puccini-esque, pathos of the death scene, in which he lies supine and fatally wounded, tears rolling from his eyes, at last ideally positioned to whisper 'goodbye' to an equally lachrymose Sarah. In addition, this spectacle of suffering is staged through the eyes of others: Sarah as she twice gasps and has to turn her head away from the battered Johnny (in the hospital bed after the accident, and then mortally wounded at the end), Bannerman and Weizak as they come upon the ravaged and diminished Johnny in his different lairs. This is 'tear-jerking' indeed: the perfect unfairness and the onesided economy of suffering together with the film's eagerness to embrace and stage this spectacle demonstrate a willingness to accommodate the pitying affect and to forsake the harsh and violent that is certainly new at this juncture of the filmmaker's career. I might also briefly remark here how 'Canadian' the hero is - I would say certainly the most 'Canadian' of all Cronenberg's post-Scanners protagonists. This is ironic in view of the fact that the film is specifically set in the United States, unlike so many of Cronenberg's massmarket features, which are quite content to set themselves in Toronto or Montreal, or at all events in some unspecified North American locale that could be either country. But the weather is Canadian, and the character's diffidence and 'niceness' and paralysed introspection are stereotypically Canadian, as is its contrast between outer drabness and greyness and inner anguish. Elsewhere I have argued that all of Cronenberg's cinema is animated by a particularly Canadian dualism and immobility;15 but certainly The Dead Zone most pointedly represents the 'Canadian' solution of overconscious inaction (its opposite: the 'American' solution of unreflecting action), and also the 'Canadian' outcome of paralysis and internal wasting away.16

The Dead Zone

193

Mise en scene

The visual world of the film steeps everything in meaningful imagery, without ever departing from the broad path of 'commercial' classicism. Some of the most important spheres of that imagery - climate, houses have already been mentioned. But it is worth pointing out some of the others, as well as demonstrating the degree to which even minutiae of iconography contribute to the film's density of cinematic meaning. Against the image of the house, which prominently opens the credit sequence, is the image of the road into which the credit sequence modulates. After the houses, and intercut with autumnal landscapes, no fewer than seven separate still shots of roads dominate the sequence, their dramatic stature emphasized with flattening telephoto lenses. The road never seems to actually come from or go anywhere, just to exist as a separate image of transit, the definitive image of open space that corresponds to the closed space of the house. In fact, this image plays relatively little part in the film as it unfolds; but it does occur powerfully twice. The first of course is the scene of the accident, the moment that crystallizes and fixes Johnny's life as foreclosed in one direction (his 'normal' life) and opening inexorably into another (his 'paranormal' life). It is odd that an image implying travel and movement should be used in this way to embody an idea signifying in some way its opposite: for the road precisely knocks Johnny off the road his life is supposed to take. His road becomes a dead end; all movement along it is interdicted. At the same time, the image does have an appropriate resonance. The road now signifies a destined path, an inescapable way, fate. And this notion of fate carries with it the corollary ideas of helplessness and resignation. As we have seen, these in turn can be traced into Johnny's personality even before the accident, so that this principle of self-prohibition 'produces' the accident, and then the accident 'produces' the prohibition - and the road is the spot where they meet. The second powerful 'road' image is that of the black stone tunnel, already described. Again it is literally a transit-way from one place to another, but really it is a dead end - and this time literally, too: a place that leads to death. Now the road is not only cold and empty and without a proper destination, but also enclosed by a monstrous black encircling roof and sides. This is a destiny of overpowering cruelty, where death reigns and only cold and dead traces of former life remain (cigarette butts smoked by the murderer as he waited for the victim).

194 The Artist as Monster

Through enclosure the road has become more like the house; and in the scene that follows - the gazebo murder scene - the house becomes more like a road in its openness to the icy winter. At this meeting point where road and house join in an atmosphere of cold and death, we find Johnny's demonic alter ego, Frank Dodd. The sense that the world represents a place where Johnny is fated to encounter the same dire scenes, the same impossibilities, is underlined by a consistent manipulation of the environment of places and things. These are houses and roads and climate, but also rooms and clothes and even particular image patterns or compositional features. One highly consistent element is the employment of green as a dominant colour for interiors. Johnny's family home has pastel yellowish-green wallpaper in the kitchen, pale green trim in the living room. A number of rooms in the Weizak clinic, including Johnny's hospital bedroom, have a basic wall colour of pastel green. Then the Dodd house is dominated by a drab, slightly darker green on walls and ceiling. The house Johnny moves to has a big green front door. Even the pure-white 'housely' gazebo has strips of green trim. In addition, Johnny's Volkswagen Beetle is a pale yellow-green, and he is often seen in a pale or drab green shirt or raincoat. Of course these elements coexist with other decor elements of different colours, and the effect is very subtle. But the insistence on this shade across a number of significant locations is, I feel strongly, more than just some accidental by-product of an art director's tendency towards a consistent look.' This is particularly so because the colour green automatically associates itself with organicity and nature and positive growth. That these associations should now be connected with interiors - and especially the interiors of various forms of the house instead of the outdoors and nature is utterly appropriate when The Dead Zone advances a schema whereby houses represent life and nurture and the outdoors is lifeless and frozen. At the same time, this is not a full-blooded green, but a pale and recessive hue, corresponding admirably to the weak and fragile power of the house and its domesticity to nourish effectively. The Dodd house has a stronger and now specifically organic green (though it is still drab and decayed) emblematic of its status as the dwelling of the nightmarishly twisted and intensified family, with correspondingly crazed and perverted forms of domestic nourishment. Johnny's pale-green clothing and car simply convey that he carries this atmosphere with him. A more extensive examination of Johnny's wardrobe reveals other

The Dead Zone

195

things as well. In addition to this drab and lifeless green, Johnny dresses predominantly in equally drab greys, pale blues, browns, and maroons. His favourite indoor style is a wool cardigan and indeterminate slacks, his constant props are spectacles and cane: it is an image of premature age or mature resignation that reflects Johnny's fear of and sense of exclusion from the active processes of life. Once more repression, and the desire for a controllable life, is a keynote in this choice of dress. Nestled in his repertory of dull, self-effacing clothes, one maroon-coloured - that is, viscerally related - sweater keeps reappearing discreetly. But there is one particular item of clothing that is not very discreet, and that might almost be said to incarnate this unwelcome arrival of the body: a rust-red, brown, and white-striped terrycloth dressing gown whose pattern almost resembles that of bacon strips. It is a rather ugly garment, but its principal characteristic is its aggressive use of Visceral' colours, in startling contrast to the bloodless and controlled colours Johnny usually wears. So although the film contains almost no actual viscera (in comparison with other Cronenberg films), the dressing gown signals their presence, as it were, offscreen. The gown makes its first appearance in the scene immediately following Johnny's first vision - a nice confirmation of the linkage between the visions and the body. After particularly harrowing experiences Johnny is seen at home looking exhausted and racked with pain - and wearing the robe. It not only makes him look like an invalid (which he is in the psychological sense even more than the physical), but it conveys that sense of visceral revolt with all its overtones of instinctive and uncontrollable inner convulsion that features so prominently in Cronenberg's earlier work. It takes a rather quick eye to note the telling fact that Frank Dodd owns a very similar dressing gown, which may be glimpsed hanging on a peg in his bathroom behind (underneath) his black murder-coat when he dons it to commit suicide - another motif doubling Johnny and Dodd, and one that now connects the horrors of Johnny's 'bodily' suffering as a result of the visions with Dodd's monstrous and perverted sexuality. Further, fainter echoes of the motif may be seen in the viscerally patterned or coloured couches that are seen in Johnny's second house and in Roger Stuart's house, or the dull-red-and-something striped ties worn by some of the characters at certain moments - touches that also signify the hovering presence of the visceral in a world that is striving to be free of it. Even Stillson sports a version of the pattern in the red-and-black-striped pyjamas he is wearing as he presses the nuclear

196 The Artist as Monster

button in Johnny's vision. But really the 'bacon' dressing gown's closest wardrobe relative is the coarse wool coat, with its rough, broad cross-hatching (cream-white on dried-blood brown), that Johnny's mother is wearing on her first appearance in the hospital room. These two garments - Johnny's dressing gown and his mother's coat signify above all a rawness of feeling, a dangerous inner anguish, that is explicitly seen nowhere else in the movie. The clothing counter-colour to both the drab earth tones and the fleshly bacon-gown is black. There are two striking black coats in the film. One is Johnny's black winter overcoat, which he wears invariably with the collar rather theatrically raised. When it is combined with his black gloves and cane, it confers on Johnny a strong dramatic presence: he becomes more authoritative, more of a force to be reckoned with. This is of course diegetically simply Johnny's winter coat, but it becomes also in a broader sense his costume for the Dodd sequences the black tunnel, the gazebo, and the Dodd house. Notwithstanding his self-reproaches of passivity, his figure standing spread-legged in the gazebo has a certain iconic power, as though he is watching over the spectacle from a controlling perspective. He is also wearing the coat as he remonstrates aggressively with Roger Stuart to prevent him from going to the hockey practice, and in the midst of this scene he uses his cane to smash a glass table-top ornament in a low-angle shot of imperious violence. The coat, then, is associated with Johnny as a figure of power - specifically the power conferred by the visions. It is a dramatic and even awesome power, presented with a degree of selfconscious theatricality, though restricted to moments of transforming paranormal possession and, of course, ultimately one that wastes and depletes Johnny. The other black overcoat is of course Dodd's murder-coat. In typical Dodd-like fashion, this monstrously doubles a characteristic of Johnny's (Dodd even wears it with the collar turned up during the murder, where we can see its similarity to Johnny's coat with turnedup collar as he stands next to Dodd, witnessing the killing). Where Johnny's coat looks soft and richly textured, Dodd's is horribly smooth, with a dull, matte-black shine. It is too big, it hulks and oppresses, and it emits repulsive squeaking and crunching sounds as he performs his hideous rituals in it. It looks like, and perhaps even is, a fireman's coat, rather similar to the one worn by the fireman who delivers the nurse's daughter to her from her burnt-out house - very useful in a context where 'the house is on fire' (if Dodd's murders are

The Dead Zone

197

seen as a self-preserving response to a domestic calamity). And of course it can ward off not just heat (and cold) but also liquids, and has an obvious benefit in Dodd's abattoir-like 'working7 conditions. Like Johnny's overcoat, this is also a coat of power, but again monstrously amplified and perverted. The two overcoats stand, moreover, in a proportionate relation to the two dressing gowns mentioned above: both Johnny and Dodd wear black coats on the 'outside/ and have fleshcoloured dressing gowns on the 'inside/ It would be a mistake to interpret the film's cornucopia of micromotifs - the catalogue of which has certainly not been exhausted here too heavy-handedly. Indeed, merely to describe them is often to betray the nuanced minimalism of what are usually the lightest brush-strokes of mise en scene. In most cases they are not coarsely emblematic at all, and in some perhaps they are in fact almost accidental byproducts of the production process or behavioural custom. Even the strongest and most consistent motifs, such as houses and climate, are not so overpoweringly inflected as to draw overt attention to themselves. What they are in the aggregate is atmospheric and suggestive. But the atmosphere and the suggestion are entirely consistent with the film's thematic substructure. Moreover, this weaving of numerous visual tropes and motifs into a thick imagistic fabric of meaning is a process that has progressively distinguished Cronenberg's cinema from the beginning. It rises to a condition of untranslatable and probably unfathomable density in Videodrome - and now, in the much 'straighter' and undelirious Dead Zone, it continues in a more modest but still very complex way.

CHAPTER NINE

The Fly (1986) 'I am an insect who dreamt he was a man'

Although The Dead Zone was not particularly successful at the box office, Cronenberg nevertheless seemed to have melded to some degree into the mainstream of Hollywood production. For a full year he continued his involvement with Dino De Laurentiis, writing screenplay revisions for what would eventually, after he relinquished it, become a mega-budget science-fiction action movie, Total Recall. He was also offered Flashdance, Witness, Top Gun, and Beverly Hills Cop (a truly surreal exercise is to try to imagine any of these movies as a Cronenberg film). His next completed project, The Fly, seemed to underline this movement into the mainstream: as with The Dead Zone, the script was originally written by somebody else (Charles Edward Pogue, who shares the final writing credit with Cronenberg);1 again the whole project was an adaptation (this time a remake, actually, of a 1958 kitsch classic from the Golden Age of B-grade Hollywood horror movies); again the cast list was dominated by stars (Jeff Goldblum, Geena Davis); again the film was produced by an American company (Brooksfilms) and released by a major distributor (Twentieth Century Fox, who had turned out the original). And then Cronenberg's Fly was a big box-office hit, the biggest he has ever had. As with his other big hit, Scanners, the ultimate badge of its popularity was the production of a sequel - again with no involvement by Cronenberg. And yet The Fly has so many purely Cronenbergian characteristics that any notions of 'tainted authorship' quickly evaporate. Indeed, one hardly knows where to begin in charting the elements familiar from other Cronenberg films. A bold and brilliant scientist (here the protagonist, Seth Brundle) invents a spectacular new device (an apparatus for teleportation in this case) that can revolutionize human life. It back-

The Fly

199

fires, and destroys its intended beneficiary (in this case himself). The device is linked with the liberation of anti-rational, interior, visceral forces (here 'the flesh') that appear to alleviate a condition of overrationality, self-control, and solitude (the shy and solitary Brundle embarks on a romantic relationship with a journalist, Veronica Quaife, and it is she who inspires him to the crucial insight that allows his machine to work on living forms). But, through an unpredictable 'accident/ the liberation goes too far, and produces a monster (drunk and jealous, Brundle overlooks a fly in the teleportation process and is genetically fused with it). The monster ('Brundlefly') represents the grotesque embodiment of long-repressed desires and fears (Brundle becomes first overtly obsessed with sex and power, then, in a galloping acceleration of the 'fly' condition, is devoured and transformed by it). The condition takes the form of a horrific physical metamorphosis, one that is associated with the most extreme otherness, loss of identity, and finally with death (Brundle slowly and in stages turns into a flycreature; the change is explicitly described as a cancerous disease). The ending is one of unrelieved hopelessness and loss. The Fly shows a particular continuity with Cronenberg's two previous projects, Videodrome and The Dead Zone. First and foremost this is seen in a return to the structure of the central male protagonist who takes conflicts and horrors into his own psychological (and physical) life. Here the experimental scientist-inventor is not some distant figure who manipulates people and then stands back to watch, but now is the protagonist himself. The plague that he unleashes does not swallow up whole populations (Shivers, Rabid), or even small numbers of experimental subjects (The Brood, Scanners), but only the central character himself. In fact, The Fly surpasses even Videodrome and The Dead Zone in its encapsulation of the whole problem - origin and consequences - in a single subject. For whereas both of those films assign a significant portion of responsibility for the catastrophe to agencies outside the protagonist (the O'Blivions and Spectacular Optical in Videodrome, bad weather and a sleepy truck driver in The Dead Zone), in The Fly there is no one at all to blame but the inventing, experimenting, self-teleporting, solitary male, Seth Brundle. Monster protagonist After the restraint and sublimation of The Dead Zone, the fate that overtakes the protagonist here sets a standard of awesome punishment

200 The Artist as Monster

which surpasses even that of Videodrome. His personality becomes twisted, then his body begins to change in disgusting ways, and finally even his species mutates into something wholly monstrous. The means of this dreadful alteration is linked once more with disease and the progress of a malign revolution of the flesh that ends by utterly drowning the ego-subject. In the course of all this, The Fly returns again to the visceral horrors of the body - to an extent that equals and arguably surpasses any other Cronenberg film. The concluding sections of The Fly in fact even achieve a horror-velocity that propels them out of the distinctively Cronenbergian orbit of surreally jabbing revulsion and into exuberant gore-fest realms. But The Fly has far more invested in the humanity of its characters, and far more to lose when that humanity is destroyed, than any modern carnival-of-abject-excess horror movies have - and indeed far more than Cronenberg's own earlier 'gross-out' horror films. Perhaps the clearest indication of this is the fact that this horror movie, by the end full to overflowing with physical disgust, can operate equally essentially as a love story. In The Fly Cronenberg returns, in the most obsessive and analytical fashion yet, to the concept of human identity and the forces threatening it that he had first opened seriously in Videodrome. The monstrous otherness that had occupied a crucial position in his cinema since the beginning, in the form of mutation and disease and abjection, is subjected to an intensive personalized examination. What constitutes a human subject and what constitutes a monster? where does monstrosity come from and how does it proceed? - these are central questions of the film. As with Videodrome and The Dead Zone, it is an investigation that requires a fully realized individual subject to be erased - a mind and a personality whose prior existence must be established so that the full extent of loss may be understood and felt. Ultimately, then, the film's dramatic project is to observe in the most microscopic and unflinching way possible the utter destruction of a human subject by the forces of an inconceivable otherness. This otherness is given the most alien and disgusting organic form the film's imagination can devise: an insect. It is a process that encompasses every anxiety from existential depression to phobic hysteria, and that contains no particle of hope or compensation. It is also a process that is first apprehended as external and accidental, but finally as innate and determined. And the end product is a particularly acute and dreadful form of the melancholy foreclosure that is becoming a more and more fixed feature of Cronenberg's cinema.

The Fly

201

Seth Brundle is a fascinating new entry into the gallery of male protagonist-figures that have assumed centre stage in Cronenberg's work since Videodrome. One is immediately struck by his resemblance to so many of the 'recessive' Cronenberg protagonists in the past. We see him in the first sequence of the movie trying to pick up Ronnie at a Bartok Science Industries cocktail party, using a distinctly nerd-like series of come-ons, inviting her back to his place to see what he's working on ('something that will change the world and human life as we know it'), using his espresso machine as bait, and eventually crashing out a chorus of 'Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing' on his not-too-welltuned piano. Ronnie's first take on him is that he is a loser ('I bet you have a really neat jukebox in here too someplace'), and that assessment is only revised after he demonstrates his teleportation device. He is a brilliant scientific mind, but his knowledge of people and the world is old-fashioned and naive. He lives alone in a huge warehouse-room, a guy who clearly doesn't get out much, who is shy and 'nice.' At one point he actually says to Ronnie, in a matter-of-fact tone, 'I don't have a life.' His wardrobe consists essentially of five identical sets of dark grey tweed jackets and dark slacks, with a conservative burgundy tie to go with them. His whole self-presentation is the opposite of aggressive or self-confident masculinity - instead he cultivates a childlike aura of innocence and vulnerability. What this general picture recalls is the well-intentionedness and harmlessness or vulnerability of so many earlier Cronenberg protagonists. As we have seen, in Scanners and The Dead Zone Cronenberg invested what had hitherto been an ineffectual male protagonist with powers that had hitherto resided in the 'monstrous' (female, sexual) body. This empowerment was, however, represented as desexualized, somehow 'innocent' or reluctant, and never as predatory. In Videodrome the character is sexualized (indeed given a form of the monstrous female-sexual body), but simultaneously dfsempowered. Now, in The Fly, the desexualized male protagonist undergoes a process of sexualization - a process that at first seems to empower him, but that ultimately has the same effect as it has on Max Renn in Videodrome: to render him disoriented, desubjectified, at last utterly abject and pitiable. The Dead Zone had shown the dire fate awaiting him who tries to preserve rational ego-subjectivity, human 'decency,' against the onslaughts of the body and desire. The Fly then systematically demonstrates how even the most worthy and virginal (i.e., non-promiscuous, non-predatory) entry into the realm of the body and sexuality leads to

202 The Artist as Monster

infection and death. That is, Seth is a Johnny Smith who said 'yes' to his girlfriend instead of 'no/ Both options are fatal, but Seth's fate is undoubtedly much worse than Johnny's. In any case, Seth's virginity aligns him much more closely with the equally virginal Johnny than with the sexual explorer Max in Videodrome. So, like The Dead Zone, The Fly chronicles the methodical destruction of a nice guy. But Seth is also the powerful, inventing 'doctor/ and is capable of a profound intervention into 'normal' life - except that the 'normal' life he intervenes into is his own. The central male's good intentions and his dangerous intentions, his passivity and his aggressivity, are thus housed in one persona - and the film represents therefore Cronenberg's strongest attempt yet to integrate the warring forces of his imaginative world into a single psyche, and to banish as much as possible the displacements and disavowals of earlier films. Moreover, by uniting the creating figure with the monster figure, the film opens up further still the road that will lead to the identification of creativity and monstrosity in Naked Lunch - reflexively, the identification of the artist who creates the movie with the monster whose crime and agony the movie displays. The exciting and horrifying otherness that was at first automatically connected with the female object of desire in Cronenberg's work has now fully migrated into the male self. The Fly is actually a didactic demonstration of this: Ronnie is a psychically well-balanced, normallyfunctional person who, in a loving way, initiates Seth into the domain of sexuality and 'the flesh'; it is Seth who subsequently turns into an insect as the result of some secret innate otherness that has been released by this process. The female object of desire is still the catalyst in the production of monstrosity, but she is not monstrous herself - he is the monster, and his monstrosity is innate. This monstrosifying of the male central character - going all the way back to Scanners - has an analogue in the 'realist' (i.e., non-horrorgenre) outlines of the films. This can be quickly seen by simply taking away all the paranormal or monstrous aspects of these narratives: what you are left with is a series of men who are introverted and emotionally cut off, unsuccessful in their attempts to break out of isolation, and finally suicidally melancholy figures of loneliness and loss. In The Fly this final condition is expressed as one of irresistible and irreversible disease and decay, a catastrophe that looms up and devours the protagonist like mortality itself. In Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch, and M. Butterfly this isolated end-state is just as annihilating, but is (in

The Fly

203

the absence of the extra-normal conventions of the horror genre) articulated more literally' as a kind of psychic impossibility: the Cronenberg protagonist is constituted of such disabling contradictions that he is impossible. In Videodrome, The Fly, Dead Ringers - even in M. Butterfly - the same skeleton-scenario has been enacted: an encapsulated protagonist is drawn from his shell by some form of relationship with a woman, momentarily flourishes, and then is destroyed by something that has been loosed in that breaking down of the barrier of solitude. At the same time, the process whereby this emotional exile is drawn into a real, reciprocal relationship with a woman and is freed from his prison of isolation is a more substantial and convincing one in The Fly than in any other Cronenberg film. For awhile - if only for awhile - the male subject breaks out of his monastic state of personal repression and enters into an emotional dialogue with the heroine that is simultaneously the most unexpected and unprecedented thing (from the standpoint of the Cronenberg world) and the most familiar and even commonplace (in the context of 'normal' commercial-cinema narrative). Seth asks Ronnie with surprise, Is this a romance we're having?' (the viewer answers loudly in the affirmative); Ronnie describes them as being like an old married couple'; the film itself was widely described as being 'a love story.' It is necessary to reiterate how extraordinary a development this is in Cronenberg's films, which both before and since have been rooted in the feeling that such relationships cannot exist for the films' protagonists. This is particularly striking after The Dead Zone, where the essence of Johnny Smith's exquisite torment is that a 'normal' domestic life of love, sex, and family is dangled enticingly in front of his nose and then forever denied to him. (The deluded and corrupted Max in Videodrome can only distantly glimpse such prospects.) The state of exclusion from this best-publicized form of close human contact seems like a condition of life for the Cronenbergpersona. It is not too surprising to find as a consequence that the films routinely idealize and romanticize this yearned-for but forbidden country. Only in The Fly is there a fully realized romance, wholly participated in by the protagonist.2 But of course it is very temporary. Rationality and crazy flesh There is a relationship between Seth's scientific inventiveness and his sexual backwardness. Science, cerebral vitality, is (Freudianly) what

204 The Artist as Monster

Seth has turned to as a sublimation of and compensation for stunted human and especially sexual relationships. (Of course the film really tells us nothing about this - all we get are the stereotype of the brilliant introverted nerd and Seth's statement, 'I haven't got a life' - but these, together with the situations of other Cronenberg protagonists, are enough to construct a model.) Not only is the scientific enterprise in itself a rational and abstract one, a 'Cartesian' attempt to rise above the body, but Seth's particular scientific project has as its aim the nullifying of physical limitations and the transcendence of bodily frailty. The product of his hermetic, sublimated scientific life is a teleportation machine. He says he developed it to free mankind from the unpleasant physical effects of movement: he himself suffers badly from motion sickness. In effect, it is an attempt to deny the body its innate instability and discomfort, and is of course also reflective of Seth's psychological attempt to keep the tactile, contingent world at bay (the identical suits, the virginality, the domestic solitude, etc.) and to live instead, cerebrally, in the stable world of abstractions. What the invention ends up producing - in as systematic an inversion as can be imagined - is precisely the opposite of its initial aim: a state in which cerebration, abstraction, and finally ego-identity itself are lost in a cauldron of overwhelming bodily instabilities. Brundle's computer analyses the thing to be teleported, memorizes its molecular structure, dissolves the object and reconstitutes its molecules exactly in a different place. The object having been teleported is not itself, then, but rather a 'perfect' reproduction. In effect, Brundle has invented a fantastically elaborate cybernetic substitute for a simple physical phenomenon - motion. The notion of an artificial reconstitution also suggests the substitution of reason and calculation for the physical and the instinctive. That this is another of Cronenberg's mindbody metaphors becomes even clearer when it is revealed that although the machine can teleport Ronnie's sheer black stocking (and here is evoked an idea of the body and of sexuality), it cannot reconstitute living things successfully. A baboon is spectacularly and disgustingly turned inside out by it. 'The flesh' has something rationally impenetrable about it. And because the computer knows nothing except what Brundle tells it and is hence nothing but an extension of him, and because he knows nothing about 'the flesh,' the device suffers his limitation. Only after Brundle begins an affair with Ronnie does he learn enough to reprogram the computer. His inspiration comes directly from a tender postcoital scene in which, pinching him playfully, Ronnie says:

The Fly

205

I'm gonna eat you up! You know, this is why old ladies pinch babies7 cheeks. It's the flesh - it makes you crazy.

Brundle proceeds to teach the computer to 'be made crazy by the flesh/3 It is his own craziness, of course, that is communicated to the machine; and the catastrophes to come, although they have their realist diegetic alibis, are the product of that craziness. But the initial result of this new knowledge is favourable: another baboon is successfully teleported. In a word, at first Brundle's invention is sterile; it cannot encompass the living world, and particularly the world of the body, appetite, sexuality. It might be said that the offspring, the invention, is only a success, only really existent, after its 'fertilization' by knowledge of the flesh. And this notion of fertilization immediately conjures up a whole series of perspectives. In the first place, the telepods, as commentators have regularly remarked, look like giant eggs.4 But the eggs will not hatch live beings until they are, as it were, fertilized by Ronnie's sexual input (transmitted to the pods' 'mother,' Seth). Here the paternal and maternal sex roles have been reversed - at any rate scrambled, in the surreal way typical of so many Cronenbergian phantasmatic sex-confusions. And this reversal or confusion is oddly echoed in several other details about the 'parents.' Ronnie is the professional with the office job, the career ambitions, the calculation and manipulation of opportunities (her surreptitious taping of Seth's project exposition, her negotiations with him and with her editor Stathis Borans about her marketable story), and is moreover the one with the greater sexual experience, who takes the sexual initiative. Seth, meanwhile, is the shy, inexperienced stay-at-home (his lab and his dwelling are the same space) who makes coffee and cooks steaks (Brundle cooks teleported and non-teleported portions of meat and offers them to Ronnie for her judgment), and whose grand project is to produce these egg-things. Even in the Mulveyan terms of apparatus and gaze theory, it is Ronnie who manipulates the camera and microphone, Seth who is the one-to-be-lookedat. As Helen Robbins has pointed out, there is a narrative about reproduction going on here in which the male is attempting to appropriate the maternal function. She uses the term 'womb envy,' and argues that 'Seth's teleportation pods, with their frankly uterine shapes and vulviform glass doors, are clear womb simulacra; the lingering shots of his naked fetal crouch in the transmitter pod figure his teleportation project as an attempt to give birth to himself/5 Certainly, Seth at first regards himself as 'reborn' through the teleportation project, and

206 The Artist as Monster

preaches its renewing power to Ronnie with evangelical enthusiasm (her response: 'Don't give me that born-again teleportation crap!'). But the introduction of 'the flesh' into this abstracting scientific project creates the conditions not only for organic 'birth' but also for organic mutation, disease, and death. Once more we find the oldest Cronenbergian scenario: the sexualization of science, the conflation of rational-manipulative projects with libidinal ones. But in The Fly the terms are different. In place of the disavowing sexual sadists whose overtly detached and objective experiments were seeking to cover up their guilty desiring complicity, we now have a naive scientist whose genuine detachment and objectivity is in fact the limitation of his scientific endeavour. And his innocent recognition of - and equally innocent attempt to supply - what is missing from his project is in fact an idealistic effort to bridge the mind-body gap and create a working model in which both the rational and the bodily will be included and balanced. The sexuality of the project is now not a disfiguring stain on scientific activity, but rather the catalyst of genuine creativity (and this again looks forward to Cronenberg's later formulation of artistic creativity as catalyzed by something sexual and transgressive). When Seth's newly sexualized experiment in fact works, it represents a moment in which the grand dichotomy of mind and body, rationality and appetite, is for an instant healed - exhilaratingly. In the end, however, the importation of the body into the rational enterprise cannot be only healing and fulfilling, but must also be tyrannically invasive and horrifyingly boundary- and identity-destroying. And the hysterical product of making science sexual, of 'making the computer crazy with the flesh,' is also the terrifying technologizing of the body - making the flesh crazy with the computer. This reversible process is beautifully captured in another of Cronenberg's acutely surreal images: as Brundle rolls over at the end of his first lovemaking with Ronnie, he gets a spiked microchip imbedded in his back - and this wound is later the first site of his fly-transformation, as bristling black hairs emerge from the spot in place of microchip pins.6 (The very end of the process occurs in Brundefly's ultimate fusion with a telepod.) For the moment, though, Brundle's condition is one of bliss. He has found a companion, he has found a sexual partner, and he has made an astounding scientific breakthrough. But immediately, within minutes even, unclouded happiness gives way to sexual jealousy as Ronnie runs off to confront her old boyfriend Stathis Borans who (himself motivated by sexual jealousy) is making a nuisance of himself. Brundle

The Fly

207

begins to lose his self-possession, and thus starts down the road to loss of self. Drunk literally with the wine of celebration, and subject now to the unfamiliar turmoil of sexual possessiveness and threatening egowounds, Brundle decides quite arbitrarily to go through the teleportation process himself. Overlooked by him (though not by the un-neurotic teleported ape with whom he has been conversing), and insinuating itself into the telepod with him, is a fly. The process fuses the two organisms, although the fact is not apparent to anyone for some time. The fly is of course the representation of that monstrous otherness that Brundle has admitted to his soul in opening himself to human and sexual contact, to 'the flesh/ Once more it is asserted that there is no real alternative to solitude and rational sublimation, as unsatisfactory as the latter condition may be. Human closeness, romantic attachment, sexual intimacy are all seen as leading inexorably to visceral horror - a combination of sexual alienation, fear of the sexual other (which is both woman and the feelings woman arouses in the male self), sexual guilt resulting from these feelings, fear of loss of control and loss of self, terror of the spirit's subjugation to and foundation in the body, and its inevitable dissolution in bodily decay, disease, and death. This is the state of 'flyness/ Its status as the emblem of otherness is perfectly signalled by its insectness: no animate life form inspires a more revulsive and alienating set of instinctive responses in humans. The process of transformation is complex and extended, and may be divided into three stages. The first is a transitional period where Brundle misreads the earliest 'fly' symptoms as heightenings of his human powers; the second coincides with the recognition of his state and the continual growth of 'fly' characteristics; the third arrives when Seth's self has finally been obliterated by 'flyness/ Flyness (1): a drug high In many ways the most intriguing of all is the first stage, in which the changes are relatively subtle, and are interpreted by Brundle not as disease or otherness but as a positive growth and a form of selfrealization. The first symptoms (apart from one ambiguous shot of hairs emerging from his microchip wound) are indeed simply those of subjective exhilaration. Brundle sits in a cafe with Ronnie, heaping spoon after spoon of sugar into his cappuccino and, in a tour-de-force speech, babbling breathlessly about self-realization.

208 The Artist as Monster SETH: So, I asked the computer if it had improved me, and it said it didn't know what I was talking about, and that's what made me think very carefully and why, and Fm beginning to think that the very process of being taken apart and being put back together is like - coffee being put through a filter. It's somehow a purifying process, it's purified me, it's cleansed me, and I'll tell you, I think it's going to allow me to realize the personal potential I've been neglecting all these years that I've been obsessively pursuing goal after goal... [spoons in more sugar] RONNIE: Do you normally take coffee with your sugar? SETH: What? huh? You know, I just don't think I've ever given me a chance to be me - but, of course, interestingly, at the exact same moment that I achieve what will probably prove to be my life's work, that's the moment when I started being the real me finally, [spoons in more sugar] So, uh, listen, ah, but, not to wax messianic, but it may be true that the synchronicity of those two events might blur the resultant individual effect of either individually - but it is, uh, nevertheless also certainly true that - I will say now, however subjectively, that human teleportation - molecular decimation, breakdown and re-formation - is inherently! purging! [he bangs on the table for punctuation, the coffee cup trembles], it makes a man a king! From the moment I walked out of the pod I felt like a million bucks, you know I think I am gonna have a canelloni after all, waiter! I mean, what an accomplishment, but what have I really done? All I've done is say to the world 'Let's go!, Move! Catch me if you can!' Waiter! [bangs on the table] Jesus Christ! [bangs on the table again}

For a moment we see him poised vertiginously between personal fulfilment and the slide to destruction. Already, however, the transformation has gone too far, because if the untransformed Seth was perhaps too recessive, this Seth is too demonstrative and overbearing. Of course in view of his double (science-project and love-life) success, some gushing out of happiness is perfectly forgivable and even endearing. But this mad rush of words, this wheels-spinning self-absorption and even self-infatuation, is unsettling. The new and improved Seth already looks like not an improvement, and the old Seth's identity is already moving into the shadow of eclipse. Brundle is soon comparing this emotional rush with the effects of a drug - and in fact the world of the drug user is soon being evoked in many details. The scene quoted above is a kind of buzzing, overgrown caffeine-sugar high; what follows becomes an analogue of more serious personality-distorting drug addictions (cocaine, perhaps). Cronen-

The Fly

209

berg's use of drug addiction as a metaphor for the collapse of the controlling ego and the loosing of all kinds of destructive monsters of disorder may also be seen, much more fully articulated, in Dead Ringers and Naked Lunch. No doubt the connection may be traced back to William Burroughs, for whom drugs and drug addiction were not only a way of life but a powerful allegory of humanity struggling against oppressive forces of ugliness and pernicious control. But for Cronenberg there is a kind of panic at the onset of the drugged state, a sharp fear of loss of control, which never afflicts Burroughs, an old habitue for whom drug use is just a (dire) condition of life. In The Fly, Seth's drug high quickly becomes synonymous with false consciousness, a delusion of power and control arising from some foreign substance in the nervous system that is sending false signals to the brain and producing a distorted view of the world. If at first this 'drug' seems to have liberated some long-repressed need in Seth, and to be perhaps accomplishing some desirable rebalancing and compensation in an overdamped personality, that impression is fleeting and always accompanied by misgivings on the part of the viewer (who knows where it is coming from). What is being engineered out is a part of Seth's 'niceness'; his new confidence and masculine assertiveness empower him while making him less sympathetic, making him to a degree not-Seth. And then of course the drug that is physically coursing through his veins, speeding him up, making him more exhilarated and certain of himself is ...fly-DMA. Hypermasculinity The person Seth now becomes has an entirely significant relationship to the person he was. The confident, outgoing, energetic new-Seth is, in effect, the person the shy and introverted old-Seth always wanted to be, or despaired of ever being. 'I just don't think I've ever given me the chance to be me/ he says, and identifies this new-Seth as 'the real me.' It is the fantasy-come-true of the socially backward kid in school, the bookish boy with low self-esteem, the victim of macho bullies, the guy who can't get a girlfriend. And he identifies the cause or symptom of this sad asocial condition in his scientific pursuits ('all these years that I've been obsessively pursuing goal after goal'). What is emerging here is a personality that is closer to the archetypes of masculine confidence and dominance than any Seth has ever possessed. The new domain of masculine sexual power into which Seth is mov-

210 The Artist as Monster

ing is only indirectly on view in this scene, as an attitude of energy and confidence - but the process is also advancing in the realm of the body, and indeed has been for a little while. As he begins a sexual relationship with Ronnie, he sheds his body-nullifying grey tweed jackets and appears naked. And the body that emerges from under the clothing is heroically masculine. This is not so apparent in his first lovemaking scene, but it certainly begins to be visible in the scene of self-teleportation. Here, in an action enabled and structured first by his sexual experience with Ronnie and then by his sexual jealousy of her (that is, made up equally of sexual tenderness and sexual anger), the naked Seth crouches in the telepod revealed in an almost Greek-heroic masculine beauty, bathed in the pure white radiance of the telepod lights. Of course he must, diegetically, always have possessed this beauty. But we never saw it, and in an important sense it did not exist - or if it did exist it was in the form Seth speaks of in the babbling scene: a neglected inner potential, a 'real me7 never allowed out. In any event, it has the effect of a revelation: the male equivalent of the legendary traditional scene in which the dowdy bespectacled secretary takes off her glasses, lets down her hair, and is revealed as a stunning beauty. And we may note that this bodily 'transformation7 (like the microchip wound) begins before the teleportation, before any diegetic fly-splice. The next development carries Seth much further down the same road. It occurs in the amazing scene that follows his reunification and reconciliation with Ronnie following his teleportation, her return to find him sleeping, and their subsequent lovemaking. She awakes later and discovers him performing a breathtaking series of gymnastic exercises and bravura feats of strength. Now the newly-sexual-masculine Seth has become not just a man (in a sense that he never was before) but a superman - masculine, and then hypermasculine. Moreover, there is no ambiguity about the libidinal charge that this development carries. As the bare-chested Seth displays his muscular prowess, a notall-that-fully-dressed Ronnie watches him with astonishment, and a sexually pleased smile steals onto her face: this is a turn-on. When he is finished he stands sensually glistening with sweat, his always full hair now standing freely away from his head in a majestic leonine corona. Ronnie drinks all this in, then walks over to him and puts her hands on him. After the coffee-bar scene and a street-market shopping scene in which Seth buys Ronnie a heart-shaped gold necklace (a symbol of his love that she wears throughout the remainder of the film), the

The Fly

211

following scene finds the couple at the end of a marathon lovemaking session - though maybe we should just say 'fucking session/ because the physical compulsiveness of what is going on is what is emphasized now instead of lyrical tenderness. Ronnie calls it quits, but Seth is 'not ready to quit yet/ and continues to ask for more. Now fly-signs are beginning to appear more insistently - and now they are no longer simply emblems of supermasculinity but also of ugliness and monstrosity. Ronnie (in a moment of sexual intimacy, of course) finds coarse black hairs growing from Seth/s microchip wound. When she expresses concern, he at first says, 'It happens when you get older/ and then, Well, I've never been hairy enough, you know what I mean? Always too ... boyish? [still panting with excitement, pulling Ronnie to him} I'm looking forward to a hairy body. It's one of the compensations of old age, come here.

These monstrous growths, then, are still forms of SetiYs new masculinity. What this moment does is simultaneously to emphasize the underdeveloped or adolescent form of Seth's earlier masculinity, and to equate his new 'mature' masculinity with monstrosity, with flyness. And now a distinct splotchiness has begun to appear on his face. This is another coarsening of Seth's 'normal/ 'human' body. But it also carries a hint of the side effects of steroid use, a doubly fitting impression when Seth appears to have grown new super-muscles and to have become some kind of drug user.7 At the same time, he is developing another appetite - for sweet foods. We see him spooning down quantities of Oreo ice cream directly from the carton. It is, as we start to figure out, a sign of the fly's attraction to sweets - as his strength is a version of the fly's enormous strength-to-weight ratio. (And obviously this is not going to help his complexion, either.) Now, in an amplification of his ever-more-insistent sexual appetite and his drug-addict's sense of exaltation, Seth insists that Ronnie should teleport herself too, and thus rise to the same plane of elevated existence he sees himself as occupying: Ronnie! I feel incredible, I hardly need to sleep any more and I feel wonderful, it's like a drug, but a perfectly pure and benign drug. The power I feel surging inside me ... and I won't be able to wear you out anymore, we'll be the perfect couple, we'll be the Dynamic Duo!

212 The Artist as Monster

Ronnie, however, is not high on fly-DNA, she is sane and 'human/ She rejects this proposal and reacts to Seth in some measure as the jerk he has become. At the same time, she recognizes there is something wrong with him; he is not behaving normally. In response to her refusal to join him in (the delusion of) grandeur, he responds angrily with drug-addict lines like 'You're a fucking drag, you know that?' and 'You'll do anything to bring me down.' Megalomania and moving down-class Seth's temper has changed. Now he is more self-centred; satisfying his new appetites (sex, food) has become a compelling imperative; he is moving into Ubermenschlichkeit and egomania. And we can recall his testimony of feeling purified - now interpretable as a protoNietzschean, proto-fascist purification and transcendence of old fallible humanity. Accusing Ronnie of being 'too chickenshit' to become a sexual superwoman, he heads out to find another woman, 'somebody who can keep up with me.' More clearly than ever, Seth's new-found condition is associated with sex, stoned sex, and narcissistic hippie heightened consciousness - all, of course, beheld by Cronenberg in the sour morning-after light of the following decade. On his way out the door, Seth delivers an egomaniacal sermon of Herrenrasse superiority: You're afraid to dive into the plasma pool, aren't you? You're afraid to be destroyed and recreated, aren't you? I bet you think you woke me up about the flesh, don't you? But you only know [jabbing the air imperiously with forefinger] society's! straight line about the flesh! You can't penetrate beyond society's sick! grey fear of the flesh! [he turns and strides towards door, turns back, makes a histrionic gesture] Drink deep! or taste not! the plasma spring, you see what I'm saying? [he turns away, grabs his jacket to put over bare chest, turns back again] I'm not just talking about sex! and penetration, I'm talking about penetration beyond the veil of the flesh, a deep! penetrating! dive into the plasma pool! [he jerks open the door and leaves]

He plunges, however, not into the plasma pool but into the urban jungle of streets in the wrong part of town. He strides along the crowded pavement at night, goes into a bar where bearded guys with trucker caps are shooting pool and arm-wrestling. Here he effortlessly assumes the argot of the lumpen denizens, arm-wrestles on a bet a

The Fly

213

beefy beer-drinking sub-proletarian8 (snapping the bone right out of his arm), and picks up his winnings: the man's trailer-trash girlfriend, Tawny. Taking her back to his place, he runs up several flights carrying her in his arms, teleports himself again to get another 'hit/ and fully acts out the part of the stud.9 When Ronnie turns up in the morning and suggests to him that he is not well, he smashes a piece out of the wooden doorframe with his bare fist ('Do you know any sick men who can do that?'). At this stage, Brundle occupies the polar opposite position of masculinity to the one he occupied previously - now he is a Real Man. All of this represents not only a movement towards stereotypes of power-masculinity, but a precipitous descent in terms of 'good taste/ and in terms of social class. Forsaking the fastidious and well-behaved world of the repressed middle-class intellectual, Brundle plunges into a nightmare of crude appetite and tasteless indulgence. The initial phase of otherness is a loss of standards, the disappearance of politeness and 'decency/ Brundle, a nice, sweet, considerate man, turns into a degenerate hippie drug-addict macho redneck with delusions of grandeur. This is what happens when you 'let go/ What we are seeing here are the beginnings of another revenge of the superego, like Max Renn's punishment for being sexually 'bad/ Here the superego manifests a puritanical attitude for which decorum and self-possession are inseparable from the concept of the ego-self, and for which physical sloppiness, junk-food bingeing, 'a lack of self-respect/ 'self-indulgence' are early signals of the emergence of a corrupt and ill-mannered Mr Hyde whose lurking existence must always be circumscribed through vigilance and self-control. Certainly Brundle's transformation from a polite, well-controlled person who keeps his distance to a sexcrazed punk who picks up women in cheap bars to (eventually) a thing that vomits slime onto its Twinkies is a form of punishment quite in keeping with obsessive Calvinist dichotomies of uprightness and sinfulness. The sin of sexually 'letting go' proliferates into a letting go in all the other areas: social manners, eating habits, substance abuse, personal hygiene, housekeeping (garbage starts to pile up around the place) - and also a dreaded falling out of the middle class into an underclass gutter. And this death-spiral into sleazy low-class obnoxiousness and dereliction is inexorably set in motion with the very first move across the line from encapsulated self-repression and selfoppression.10 Because, behind the sexual prohibition that has been contravened lies a more general prohibition: against pride, confidence,

214 The Artist as Monster

self-esteem. In this wr-Seth we can detect further echoes of the selfdenying, self-censoring Johnny Smith, and the fly that Seth turns into is thus, as it were, another version of what this recessive male is afraid of becoming if he stopped denying and censoring himself. (Ultimately, these fears become inseparable from those of the Cronenberg-arh'sf, who is compelled to not self-censor if he is to be a real artist, and must therefore suffer the monstrosification that results from the removal of the prohibition: this is the skeleton-scenario of Naked Lunch.) Flyness (2): shame Brundle recovers his modesty in the second stage of his flyness. It returns when he is forced to identify his transformation as a movement in the direction of decay and death. Hitherto Brundle has mistaken the powerful flexing of the muscles of the body and appetite as a growth of ego. But really they are the manifestations of a false ego - not 'the real me7 but a set of characteristics that are alien and other to the really real Seth and that will end by consuming and extinguishing the real Seth. And that essential Brundle is (as he had always intuited) truly apart, truly impossible - in the end truly abject and monstrous and pathetic. The ultimate sign of this abject, pathetic monster is its loss of self, the dissolution of its weak true-ego in an otherness whose source is that very wellspring of the body that the first Seth had tried to repress and the 'reborn' Seth had deludedly welcomed as a liberator. Earlier I said that Brundle is depicted as admitting monstrous otherness into himself. But in fact, The Fly makes it clearer than any previous Cronenberg film that the otherness is actually inherent in the self, only latent and buried; and that the inauguration of sexual expression and emotional intimacy merely uncovers and frees what was always there. When Brundle's fingernail pops off and a milky white liquid spurts from the uncovered end, realization comes to him with horrible suddenness. This surreally shocking image evokes a whole cluster of associations. The swollen finger is like a penis, the explosion of liquid an ejaculation. But there is something wrong with this finger (penis), it is not supposed to be doing this, the ejaculate has pus-like overtones and so the image becomes one of sexual disease. Helen Robbins comments: The image is overloaded with visual double entendre, suggesting simultaneously the two furtive adolescent rites of masturbation (the finger's phallic shape) and pimple squeezing (the splat of goo that Brundle wipes off the mirror with a tissue)/11 The mention of adoles-

The Fly

215

cence hits the nail on the head. Adolescence is the agonizing time of sexual maturation combined with a crisis of confidence and even of identity that is evoked in these stages of Seth/s adventure. It had begun as a strange and sudden bodily transformation - the arrival of mature masculine musculature and sexual desire, spurred and inflated by the revelation that he could be the object of desire for the person he was attracted to - accompanied by an equally sudden transformation of self-esteem. But (as it were) surrounding this peak of victory is a valley of lonely adolescent misery, marked by shame and self-loathing and a clear understanding that no girl could ever be interested in him. Beforehand, this pathetic nerd-loser is the Seth that Ronnie recognizes at first sight. Now, as his false self-confidence evaporates, he is wiping goo off the bathroom mirror after indulging in the compulsive shameful-masochistic pleasures of masturbating, pimple-squeezing, and/or - we shouldn't forget - biting his nails (an uncool nervous habit he has had all through the film). And his condition does uncannily resemble that of the tortured teenager invaded by new hormones: bodily change and an intense neurotic focus on the body, eating junk food, not cleaning up your room, biting your nails, bad hygiene, bad complexion, maybe using steroids and working out, obsession with sex, mood swings, and on and on. The bursting finger is also the pustulent bursting of Seth's false selfconfidence. His recognition that this is his true and innate condition corresponds entirely with his escalating transformation into a physical presence that is repulsive. His complexion becomes increasingly mottled (another analogue of 'pizza face' acne). Ronnie tells him outright: 'You look bad. You smell bad/ If Seth's transformation into a sexual and scientific success represented the shy introvert's fantasy, then his transformation into an embarrassingly offensive bodily presence is that same introvert's nightmare. When Ronnie visits him for the first time after the collapse of his ego-fantasy, she finds him utterly uglified, leaking disgusting bodily fluids through his shirt. When she tries to give him a hug, he shies away, saying, 'No, please, you're so pretty' (that is, 'you're too pretty to touch anything as disgusting as me'). He explains what happened in these terms: 'I was not pure. The teleporter insists on the pure and I was not pure.' In this context, the impurity is not only genetic but moral. It is the solitary defeatist's conviction of sin, the obverse of the egomaniac's obliviousness to everyone but himself - and it is also a punishment for sexuality. The most disgusting revelation of this scene with Ronnie is Brundle's vomiting a stream of

216 The Artist as Monster

corrosive enzyme over his donut. Ronnie flinches and gasps, and Seth says piteously (as though recognizing for the first time this action that has become typical for him), 'Oh, that's ... disgusting' as strands of drool hang from his mouth. He has, in effect, committed a horrendous social gaffe in front of a well-mannered young woman he loves. At the same time, this vomit is more thick white fluid, and so we have another ejaculation here - one rendered with even greater sexual shame than the bursting finger. The insect Other/self Now let us backtrack for a moment to Brundle's discovery of the explanation for his transformation. Trying to find out what went wrong, he asks the computer to rerun the teleportation sequence; this is visualized on the monitor as a series of pictures going from macro (an outline of Brundle's body) to micro (cellular- and molecular-level pictures of the reconstituted creature). As Brundlefly is formed, a ghastly transformation occurs at the most basic level of being: the cells and forms take on terrible insect-like characteristics. Seth looks at the computer's graphic presentation of his own essential innermost self and sees something horrific and alien. He himself is Other at the most primary integral level. This is a frisson-generating moment, one that situates the film in a tradition of alien-self horror and science fiction, and that emphasizes the point that what is truly horrific here is not outside but inside. Not only the film's evocation of drug-addiction can be traced to Burroughs, but also its idea of insectness. Burroughs makes powerful, swingeing use of the insect metaphor to describe what is loathsome and destructive in the human personality - seen by Burroughs as an invasion of a controlling, self-replicating, colonizing evil.12 Among truly innumerable examples, one may cite the terrifying Insect People of Minraud (the most violently predatory beings imaginable), or countless phrases such as 'the first stirrings of hideous insect life,' Vile addictions and insect lusts/ 'insect pleasures of the spine,' 'the crushing weight of evil insect control forcing my thoughts and feelings into prearranged molds of control,' 'insect hairs thru gray-purple flesh,' etc., etc.13 And one may see the entire spectacle of The Fly, the seizing and emptying out of humanity by a dreadful force of otherness, as in some degree a kind of realization of a scenario played out on a smaller scale over and over again in Burroughs. But the world in even the most

The Fly

217

oppressive of Cronenberg's films is not so relentlessly, horrifyingly hostile as it is in Burroughs: there isn't the same desperate daily and hourly struggle to survive wave after wave of awful feelings, a universal extreme pressure that distorts everything into alienation and a kind of everyday nightmarishness not really cushioned by Burroughs's ubiquitous irony Characters as three-dimensional and as narratively conventional as Seth and Ronnie are literally inconceivable in a Burroughs fiction, and so is anything remotely like their courtship, romance, and tragic sundering. The invasion of the insect in The Fly may recall Burroughs, but it is taking place in a fictional environment where such an event is a far more singular occurrence, and a far more volcanic eruption in a far more recognizable landscape. Just in passing, we may also briefly remark the film's gross resemblance to Kafka's most famous short story, The Metamorphosis' - that is, man turns into insect - especially when Kafka is among the small collection of modernist writers (including Burroughs, Nabokov, and Samuel Beckett) whose names Cronenberg mentions on multiple occasions. Perhaps the resemblance is a little more than gross, if we recall that for Gregor Samsa too the transformation is a cause of embarrassment and shame. But The Fly's primary insect-affinities are with Burroughs. Disease Of course the process of bodily transformation extends far beyond the emotional realms of agonized adolescence. We may note, first, that the basic event of the scenario - the genetic splicing of a man and a fly takes a rather idiosyncratic form. The result is not a new creature, monstrous but complete and stable. Instead, what is produced is a new monstrous creature who is continually changing into something else14 and this change is always away from the human and towards the fly. Also, although this process is supposed to be a metamorphosis, it is rendered less as a transformation into a new form than as a corruption and decay of the human self. This is what enables the story to be an analogue of human illness, dissolution, and mortality. The very first symptoms of change, which coexist with the previous megalomaniac phase, are the fibre-bristles on the back and a certain splotchiness of complexion. This process of increasing discoloration and lumpiness is instantly associated with the idea of disease. As the process escalates, there is a greater and greater emphasis on decay, corruption, and

218 The Artist as Monster

decomposition, which produces extreme physical revulsion both in the viewer and in Brundle himself. Fingernails, teeth, ears, and other unspecified body parts actually fall off or come out (Brundle stores them in his bathroom medicine chest); the process of bodily dissolution is as horrifying and disgusting as Cronenberg can make it. A number of commentators have maintained that Seth's 'disease7 strongly suggests AIDS.15 Certainly it is difficult to ignore the connection of liberated, and then frantic, singles' sexual activity followed by a slowly wasting fatal disease with AIDS - especially in a film released in 1986. Cronenberg himself, confronted with the interpretation, usually says that it's not his own, and points genially to the sexual 'diseases' filling his work back to Shivers (well before the arrival of AIDS), as well as to syphilis as a centuries-old scourge that to an even greater extent deprived its sufferers of their identities.16 My own feeling is that, notwithstanding its sexual connection and its social currency, AIDS doesn't work particularly well as the 'actual' disease lurking offscreen - if only because Brundle's condition falls so firmly into the line of Cronenberg's procession of horrifying diseases, many of them also explicitly tied to sexuality in some way. The disease the film actually points to specifically is cancer - normally thought of as an 'invisible' internal disease whose outward manifestations are indirect (a drastic thinning and self-consumption, for example). And in fact the idea of cancer as a disease that progresses by the multiplication of abnormal cells and the transformation of normal cells into abnormal ones, has an appropriateness not only to the idea of fly-cells replacing and taking over Brundle-cells, but also to the notion of secret otherness released from dormancy and inexorably devouring and replacing the self. But in The Fly it is as though the internal cancerous process were made manifest and visible. Brundle's forceful assertion 'I won't be just another tumorous bore, talking endlessly about his hair falling out and his lost lymph nodes' definitely identifies his state with that of a clinical cancer patient. Clearly cancer means something to Cronenberg - it is mentioned by name or imbedded in the thematic landscape throughout his work, and constitutes for him what Wayne Drew has aptly called 'that perpetual nightmare in Cronenberg's films.'17 The cancerous throat-'gills' on Jan Hartog in The Brood and Barry Convex's violent 'cancer-death' in Videodrome are the most explicitly abject examples. Then, of course, the idea of a 'creative cancer' is articulated in Crimes of the Future, Rabid, and Videodrome. Seth's transforming 'disease' may be seen (with

The Fly

219

these examples and that of the venereal-disease parasites of Shivers) as yet another version of 'creative' disease: at one point he tells Ronnie, 'I seem to have been stricken by a disease with a purpose/ Cancer also represents something growing inside of you without your knowledge, a revolting (in both senses) transformation of yourself into not-yourself through a bodily process that is undetectable until it is too late. The process of Seth's 'cancerous' transformation is one that Cronenberg regards not simply with horror and sadness but as the realization of his deepest and most persistent fears. Bad transformation

What happens to Seth Brundle must be the ultimate refutation of Cronenberg's own often-stated attitude of dispassionate curiosity about the visceral, the 'abnormal/ and the un-human. Certainly he has sought to deal with this range of connected threatening ideas with 'scientific' detachment. He testifies to a boyhood fascination with insects and reptiles, and with internal anatomy, and recalls finding those things, which others reacted to in horror, 'beautiful/ This viewpoint has its correlative in The Fly in Seth's attitude of cynical detachment to the transformation he is undergoing. As he puts his newly fallen-out teeth in the medicine chest, he bids them an ironic farewell and characterizes them as now 'only of archival interest/ He describes the disease to Ronnie in these terms: I know what the disease wants.18 It wants to change me into something else. That's not so terribly bad, is it? Most people would give anything to be changed into something else.

Then he invites her to video-record his demonstration of flyness, a stomach-turning display of external (vomit-performed) predigestion that he accompanies with an explanatory narrative which nastily parodies that of a children's science-show host. But Brundle's flyness is emphatically not a subject for interested detachment. Events become more and more horrifying until the moment of transition to the final stage, where, after Ronnie rips his jaw off, his skin falls away, his facial features fall apart, and the insect appears. This insect is totally and unambiguously monstrous and other in the most terrifying sense: of our Seth, of his own Seth, there is no trace remaining. Flyness may well be 'interesting' from one (detached)

220 The Artist as Monster

standpoint: look at all the things he can do, he's tremendously strong, he eats enormous quantities of sweets, he walks on the ceiling; later look what's happening to his skin and hair, look at how he regurgitates enzymes onto his food. But at the deepest, most final and meaningful level it is awful, nauseating, unbearably sad. Brundle's confusion and embarrassment as Ronnie witnesses the effects of his transformation; the lostness and fear in his voice when his ear falls off ('oh ... my ... ear'); his wish for his child to be preserved ('all that's left of the real me') and his piteous acceptance of Ronnie's decision to abort ('too bad, too bad') - all of these things represent the pathos and the awfulness of the deterioration and death of a human being and are as far as possible from the stance of curious detachment. This inability to be at all detached or other-centred about what is going on is the subject of that very striking scene in which the diminishing remnant of Brundle is trying to articulate his position. Between gasps and wheezes, Seth struggles to convey the unthinkable strangeness and horror of his own disappearance: SETH: You have to leave now. And never come back here. Have you ever heard of insect politics? Neither have I. Insects ... don't have politics. They're very ... brutal. No ... compassion. No ... compromise. We can't trust the insect. Fd like to become the first insect politician. You see Fd like to, but, oh!, Fm afraid. RONNIE [crying]: I don't know what you're trying to say. SETH: I'm saying ... [he snorts, moves forward, Ronnie backs up, he snorts again and writhes} Fm saying Fm an insect, who dreamt he was a man - and loved it. But now the dream is over, and the insect is awake. RONNIE [denying it tenderly and tearfully}: No, no, Seth. SETH: Fm saying ... I'll hurt you if you stay.

Seth would like to be an insect politician - that is, he would like to be able to perform some mediating function between humanity and insectness. But he can't, because insectness is so intractably and horrifyingly evil in human terms that it cannot be mediated. There may be shades of humanity, signified by various degrees of trust, compassion, compromise - but there are no shades of insectness. And whereas humanity is measured precisely in the degrees of these qualities of 'decency,' insectness is marked only by the predatory instinct to destroy. Here is an echo of that 'male' quality of evil-desire, sadistic pleasure, sin, that appears in all forms of transgression throughout

The Fly

221

Cronenberg's work. Instead of respecting and loving Ronnie as a 'human subject/ Seth will hurt her in an act of predatory aggression. The insect is a predator, the insect makes subjects into objects, both inside the self and in its relation to the outside world. Most pathetic is the spectacle of Seth's acceptance of the proprietary qualities of his inner insectness, its prior and fundamental nature ('I am an insect who dreamt he was a man') - the ultimate expression of the proto-adolescent defeatedness, self-limitation, and conviction of sin that we have seen in the 'human subject7 Seth from the beginning. 'I am an insect who dreamt he was a man/ This striking line echoes the ancient Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu, whose doubting moment of existential insight also involved an insect dreaming he was a man. Jorge Luis Borges relays the story in his essay 'A New Refutation of Time': 'Chuang Tzu, some twenty-four centuries ago, dreamt he was a butterfly and did not know, when he awoke, if he was a man who had dreamt he was a butterfly or a butterfly who now dreamt he was a man/19 Recalling also that at one stage the film's script contained the transformation of the maggot Ronnie is pregnant with by Seth into a beautiful butterfly-child,20 we may perhaps see what kind of possible positive outcome of insect-transformation Cronenberg might have entertained momentarily. But Seth turns not into a butterfly but into a fly, and the maggot remains a nightmarish phenomenon: in the finished film there is no form of the insect but a horrific one. As we observed in connection with Videodrome, traces of the wish to find a positive aspect of horrific transformation may sometimes be found in the Cronenberg literature. This is particularly the case in politically conscious writers for whom hardly anything could be worse than the mechanisms of social and psychological control built into the status quo. Once again it is Steven Shaviro, in his always stimulating commentaries on Cronenberg's cinema, who leads this charge, looking at the body in general, and in particular this bodily change into something else/ as at least offering an escape from domination. Although he says that Seth's process of transformation is 'more and more intolerable/ and that finally '[t]his excruciating materiality cannot be redeemed, this contaminating alterity cannot be assumed or possessed/21 Shaviro is ultimately unwilling to resist the siren song of something - anything - that escapes the Foucauldian mechanisms of social control. Flyness now starts to look like a good thing: Such insects [as flies] form immense crowds without adopting rigidly

222 The Artist as Monster hierarchical structures ... The next time you see flies swirling over a piece of dung, reflect upon what Agamben calls the doming community/ one not grounded in identity ... So cultivate your inner housefly or cockroach, instead of your inner child. Let selectional processes do their work of hatching alien eggs within your body ... We have come to understand that such alien [insect] splendor is precisely what defines the cruelty and beauty of our world.22

But however exhilarating such plunges into the abyss of identitylessness are, it would be a mistake to attribute this kind of pleasurable excitement to Cronenberg. Perhaps for Shaviro 'the extremes of agony cannot finally be distinguished from those of pleasure7;23 but it is really difficult to imagine Ronnie, or the abject remains of Brundle begging for death, or the sensibility that controls the film agreeing with the proposition that things aren't so bad because at least Seth has escaped the structures of power and social control. In The Fly, Cronenberg at last separates himself totally from the idea - now clearly seen as false and self-deluding - that this catastrophe has a good side, or may perhaps lead to some new development that after all might be an improvement in some way. And this unflinching gaze at perdition, this iron sense that there is no way out, is something that will now stay with him in the films that follow. Meanwhile, the elements of pathos and melodrama that marked The Dead Zone reappear - although in hyperbolic forms that could only exist within the genre of horror. Even more than The Dead Zone, The Fly is built around a love story; and the blossoming and then the gradual, awful eradication of this love story provide a basic stratum in which pathos is produced, so to speak, naturally. The most affecting moments in the film are (as in The Dead Zone) those that most pointedly focus on the pathetic suffering of the abject protagonist and on the tearful sadness of his lover who so deeply pities him. Here again is the spectacle of the defeat and destruction of that innocent and well-intentioned protagonist, a man who never meant any harm and whose dreadful fate is a realization of his own intimations of unworthiness and limitation. Brundlefly's false-cynical detachment and irony are eventually as corrosive as his enzyme projectile-vomit, but the bitterness and loathing they scarcely conceal is mostly directed at himself; and in the end they too give way simply to loss and sadness. All the powerful streams of pitying affect coalesce indistinguishably into that condition of terminal melancholy that is now becoming ever more established as the end

The Fly

223

point of the Cronenberg narrative. In The Fly this feeling simply pours out unstoppably: the film is emotionally big, even overwhelming. The scale of feeling is certainly amplified by the infusion of so much physical horror in the final scenes, but this juggernaut of abjection always moves under the banner of lost humanity and of lost love. Female Ronnie If Seth becomes a battleground of conflicting forces that carry gender affiliations, something similar also happens to Ronnie - though in a far less extreme and dramatic fashion. As the narrative proceeds, she is gradually deprived of her 'male' independence and self-reliance. Her professional project of creating a saleable narrative from the scientific adventures of Seth Brundle just melts away, its active and controlling component replaced by enervating helpless pity. Now, instead, she is in tears at the horror of what she is seeing, a weeping woman repeatedly and extensively viewing the pathetic suffering and mortal decay of the man she loves, and simply of a good person. In this respect - the woman crying at the spectacle of the man's suffering, and so helping to produce the tears of the viewer - The Fly even exceeds The Dead Zone in one dimension of 'tear-jerking/ At the same time, she moves from her active 'paternity' of Seth's project to a passive maternal position of sympathy for his condition: instead of being her 'wife/ Seth is now her child. And now, instead of aiding and catalyzing Seth in his project, Ronnie needs help herself, and seeks it from a (previously discredited and cast aside) traditional male, Stathis Borans. Stathis is her 'old boyfriend,' marked by an overt and aggressive (and explicitly sexual) style of courtship greatly contrasting with Seth's, which Ronnie the independent modern woman had rejected. Certainly the film never endorses his style of masculinity; but it is there when Ronnie needs it, both during the worse stages of Seth's transformation and during the final scene when Stathis actually has to enact the traditional role of male rescuer of a distressed female. The character's status as a kind of deliberately contrastive model of masculinity is underlined by the curious facts that he bears the same initials as Seth Brundle and that he has a half-professional, half-personal relationship with Ronnie that strangely echoes Seth's similarly mixed one. Stathis is not a very masterful male rescuer, when one considers the deeply disconcerting scene with the abortionist and Brundlefly's easy victory over him in the final scene -

224 The Artist as Monster

and above all his abject mutilation-by-fly-vomit there. But he does get the job done, and Ronnie does get rescued. Her new 'female7 status as 'the one who needs rescuing' is perhaps most strongly marked - and in fact almost parodied - in the scenes that cast her in the role of the 'girl' being watched and carried off by the lovestruck 'monster' Brundlefly. The very specific gothic-horror overtones of the abduction position Ronnie as the female object in a generic narrative. Brundlefly looks down on Ronnie departing after being unable to tell him she is pregnant, hearing her insist to Stathis that she wants an abortion now. The image of the excluded, watching monster, framed in low angle behind the rooftop battlements against the night sky, is an archetypally gothic one - and so are the subsequent scenes of his crashing through the wall, sweeping up the girl, and making off with her to his lair, where he ties her up and is about to do something terrible to her out of his monstrous love. The monstrous feminine Ronnie becomes 'female' in another sense that we have not yet encountered in The Fly. Both as the competent and controlled reporter-lover and as the weeping and sympathizing woman who needs to be rescued, she is a female 'human subject/ But she also, if only momentarily, occupies the other Cronenbergian 'female' position: as the horrifically maternal, 'monstrous feminine/ abject female body. Here she temporarily resembles the mutant-mothers familiar from earlier (The Brood) and later (Dead Ringers) Cronenberg films. Ronnie, fertilized by a monster, will become the mother of a monster, and, by producing a monster from her own body, will herself become an object of horror. As in The Brood, there is the suggestion that pregnancy is another form of malignant tumour - something foreign and awful growing inside you.24 Ronnie repeats obsessively, 'I don't want it inside me! I don't want it inside my body!' - while in the very uncomfortable scene in which Ronnie and Stathis visit a doctor to procure an abortion, Stathis can only describe the fetus stumblingly and embarrassedly as 'deformed.' This is a marginal strand of the film, a kind of by-product of the central situation of Seth's monstrous mutation; but it does provide these troubling feelings and situations, and one indelibly revulsive scene - the dream sequence in which Ronnie gives birth to a giant maggot. Here we have a scene of fear and disgust at the abject monstrosity of

The Fly

225

female reproduction, combined with an expectant mother's hysterical pregnancy-anxiety, that for a moment surpasses anything in Rosemary's Baby. As a morsel of horror, and as a piece of fictional construction, the scene is brilliant. It follows directly upon the scene in which Ronnie has revealed to Stathis (and to us) that she is pregnant by Seth, and said she doesn't know what she wants to do about it. Cut to Stathis's car pulling up outside a hospital, Ronnie getting out and then being wheeled down a corridor to an operating theatre, where her abortion takes place under the direction of a doctor played by Cronenberg himself. The scene is highly plausible in every respect, its presentation in no way differing from the exposition of the most 'ordinary' moments in the film. Ronnie is understandably very upset from the beginning, and becomes more and more hysterically reluctant to continue the process to its end. Assured by everyone that it will all be over in a minute, that there's nothing to worry about, that she's in the hands of friends and caring professionals, etc., she goes through with the procedure amidst blood-spattered sheets and tubing, only to be hear from the physician, as a kind of afterthought, 'Hold on a minute - there's more in there ... I mean a lot more.' With the encouragement of the cool and routinely reassuring Dr Cronenberg, who presses professionally on her abdomen and exhorts her to push, she gives birth amidst screams to a squirming, jerking, mucous-dripping, segmented white sausage a foot and a half long. The medical assistants move from murmurings of sympathy to gaspings and gaggings, and the doctor turns his face away in disgust from the object he has delivered. Cut to Ronnie waking up from her nightmare, terrified. The scene's progression from the expository to the oneiric and from reportage to screaming panic is masterful and deadly, and shows that Cronenberg's ability to integrate the cinematic worlds of objectivity and hallucination (in this case, dream) has lost nothing since Videodrome. We should note how Cronenberg's personal presence in the scene inflects this spectacle of horrifying birth. Of course the stroke is selfconsciously witty - and, like Max Renn's TV-talk-show interview, witty at Cronenberg's own expense. But there is also an astonishing literalization of the metaphor of creation here. Here Cronenberg the artist-obstetrician25 oversees the birth of a new child - and what emerges is something so appalling and repulsive that even the artist can't stand it. Of course the diegetic mother is Ronnie, and the diegetic father is Seth - Dr Cronenberg is only assisting at a process that has its determining origins somewhere else. But this is only to replicate the tradi-

226 The Artist as Monster

tional Romantic notion of the artist's role as a conduit through which pass creative forces he has no direct knowledge of or control over - a notion that Cronenberg has more or less endorsed throughout his career. It is as though the squirming parasite he had sent up a woman's vagina in Shivers is now returning from the same place, much enlarged and with its twisted frat-house prankishness dissolved in fear and loathing, literally into the hands of the one who put it there. (As a matter of fact, the resemblance between these two 'parasites' is quite strong: the 'maggot' in The Fly has almost the same slightly conical shape, and certainly its spastic movements are similar.) In any event, we have an image of Cronenberg alarmed and disgusted at his own creation. Moreover, it is also an image of Cronenberg 'playing doctor' in every libidinal sense, but horrified by the sexual secret he sees and is pretending to be in control of. Altogether, the placement of the artist in the scene balances the 'monstrous feminine' horror of abject sexual reproduction with the 'monstrous masculine' horror of artistic conception and gynecology/obstetrics, and represents another confession of whose neurosis this really is. Male sickness, female health And, putting aside all the more arcane concepts of gender-structure for a moment, we should remember that in one very obvious sense at least The Fly is about a man who is pathetic and monstrous and a woman who is sane and functional. Her fears and reluctances are rational ones. She is afraid to go through teleportation, afraid to have Brundlefly's child. In the context of this film, these are utterly 'normal' fears of the Other, and of unbalanced excess. While Seth is first too far in one direction (asocial, hyper-rational), and then too far in another (megalomaniac, hyper-bodily), Ronnie stays in the sane middle. On the other hand, she does not turn away in disgust from Brundlefly. Instead she sticks with him, continues to love and pity him as long as this is possible. She even embraces his pus-soaked body at a point when virtually anybody else would be gagging. This signifies her moral and emotional courage, the depth of her love. Like The Dead Zone and Dead Ringers on either side of it, The Fly is a story about a deranged and dysfunctional man and a sane and strong woman. Seth's final, abject desire is to dilute the portion of fly in himself by an addition of more human material (a suggestion of the serenely crazy computer). Thus he conceives the demented and predatory

The Fly

227

project of fusing himself with Ronnie in another dual teleportation. This project is simultaneously the last desperate effort of a drowning man and an act typical of the predatory fly - the fly that will 'hurt' Ronnie. As such its purpose is as mixed and twisted (as 'impure') as the man-fly who imagined it. As, before, the teleported and improved Seth and Ronnie would have been 'the perfect couple, the Dynamic Duo/ now the genetically spliced Seth and Ronnie and fetus will be 'the ultimate family - a family of three, joined together in one body/ Both attempts to draw Ronnie into the craziness of Seth's flesh and his computer are pathological and lunatic in their excess, in their failure of a 'human subject' perspective. Ronnie, the remaining human subject, must not be sucked into this male-strom. Instead, the most appropriate union - the union lying at the logical end point of the process and producing the maximum of monstrosity - is between Brundlefly and his machine. As Brundlefly is setting up the procedure, he (or rather, now, 'it') becomes more and more monstrous, shedding skin and revealing ever more horrifically the exoskeletal insect within. But what follows is even worse. The triple 'impurity' of a man crossed with a fly, and then a man-fly crossed with a thing of metal and glass, demonstrates with ultimate force the horror of boundarylessness, the intolerable awfulness ensuing from the transgression of categories and structures. 'Brundleflytelepod/ trailing flesh-cables, with hairs and unrecognizable organs growing next to clunking masses of metal, is a creature too abject to live - an 'abortion/ With whatever it might have for a mind it begs for death, and Ronnie's last act of charity is to blow its head off. Mise en scene The Fly does not feature quite so dense a network of visual tropes and imagistic metaphors as The Dead Zone (not to mention Videodrome), but it does continue to demonstrate how thoroughly the filmmaker injects the meanings of his scenario into the physical attributes of the world that can be seen by the camera. There is a cleanliness and simplicity in the film's basic photographic stance, as well as a camera style relying on wide-angle lenses and careful camera movements at particular moments; and these qualities are highly characteristic. But the film's visual illumination of the world of the narrative is not so much a matter of photography as it is of other aspects of mise en scene such as costume, setting, and props - art direction or production design, one might say.26 Seth's wardrobe, for example, carries forward the princi-

228 The Artist as Monster

pies so regularly seen in Videodrome and The Dead Zone, whereby the protagonist is what he wears. Seth's changing internal condition is reflected in his clothing. This is clearly seen - indeed it is foregrounded and thematized - when Ronnie discovers his closet full of identical anonymous grey jackets and black trousers. This wardrobe exactly embodies Seth's cerebral 'scientific' marginalization of the body, as well as the qualities that we understand as giving rise to or growing out of that attitude: his discomfort with physicality and with his own body and his social backwardness, especially around women. Indeed, he himself describes the identical and colourless wardrobe explicitly as an attempt to get away from any and all forms of external distraction: he won't have to spend time thinking about what to wear - and by extension, he won't have to be aware of his body, his appearance, his physical existence in the world. But his wardrobe equally reflects his inner condition when, after he has entered the realm of fleshliness and sexuality, he switches out of this costume into another - a brown leather jacket. This is appropriate in every way: it is more informal, it is more macho, it is more organic, and it is picked out and bought for him by Ronnie. It resembles and corresponds exactly to the cowhide jacket adopted by Max in Videodrome when his body starts getting out of hand. It is the costume specifically of Seth's false-confidence phase, and of Seth as a masculine-sexual being. Already in the scene where Ronnie is picking it out and buying it for him it becomes a prop in the jealous tantrum Stathis throws in the department store, which contains dialogue such as the following: STATHIS [holding up the jacket]: Yeah, yeah, I think he'd look great in this. Hm? Hm? I mean, for your Time Magazine cover you've gotta look good, right? RONNIE: Don't you get it? I am finally onto something that's big. Huge. STATHIS: Yeah? What? His cock?

Finally, the jacket is seen at its most appropriate in the landscape of inner-city streets and bars into which Seth descends looking for quick sex. Seth's next 'new' garment is a dull red shirt with broad, slightly fuzzy, pink and black squares in a tartan-like pattern - almost a kind of lumberjack shirt, and again very much in contrast to his earlier wardrobe in being more relaxed and personally expressive. The dried-blood colour is very visceral, and it and the pattern specifically recall similar

The Fly

229

items of clothing in The Dead Zone (Johnny's dressing gown, his mother's coat). It is almost a shock to see Seth wearing it after all the earlier scenes in which he is wearing colourless clothing. The shirt makes its first appearance in the scene in which the baboon is successfully teleported, and Seth is of course still wearing it when he decides later in the evening to teleport himself (with the fly). Nothing could be clearer than the significance of this garment, signalled by both its placement in the narrative and its colour. It arrives just as Seth succeeds in 'fleshifying' his project, and it resembles flesh - one might call it his 'flesh shirt.' The leather jacket is abandoned once Seth's megalomania passes (in fact he stays indoors after this), but the shirt is the clothing of his descent into abjection. It finds its apogee in its second (and last) big scene, where Ronnie finds Seth supported by canes and vomiting on his donuts. Here, large milky-white wet stains cover the shirt and testify to a body that has become not only misshapen but monstrously porous with an inappropriate and disgusting liquid. After one scene (containing the sarcastic 'science documentary') in which he wears a white T-shirt, Brundlefly is for the rest of the film unclothed - or rather, his bulbous, spectacularly fleshly fly-body is his clothing. In short, he progresses from colourless anonymous formal outfits signifying a repression of the body to a more fleshlike wardrobe that embodies first his masculine sexuality and then the devouring and abjecting growth of this bodily power, and finally to a (monstrous and increasingly monstrous) body pure and simple. Again, nothing could be more schematic than this progression; but the film's employment of these visual elements never obtrudes and always remains within the envelope of realist plausibility. Perhaps the film's most extensive visual activity is in the realm of setting and props. The principal set is Seth's apartment/laboratory, situated in an old warehouse in what seems to be a deserted part of town. The building, like all the surrounding ones, is made of dark brick with dirty cream wooden window frames. This iconography reproduces almost exactly that of Paul Ruth's private lab in Scanners and Marian's private lab in Videodrome. Cronenberg obviously means something by this obsessive, particular repetition - especially when, in earlier films, the scientific endeavour goes on in the much more stereotyped environments of rectilinear techno-modernist buildings and rooms. Now, the oldness of these buildings, their darkness and heaviness and proximity to the idea of dereliction seem to suggest that the scientific enterprise is being imagined somewhat differently. The secrecy and

230 The Artist as Monster

illegitimacy of the projects in Scanners and Videodrome are certainly apposite to their somewhat furtive and clandestine settings. In The Fly there is nothing particularly reprehensible about what is going on; but there is a sense of its taking place in a secluded private world that is very much not a part of the outside social world - and this seclusion corresponds exactly also to Seth's social recessiveness. Now that the protagonist is also himself the scientist, it is appropriate that he should also live in this space. The first time we see the place is when Seth brings Ronnie there after the Bartok Industries reception. It is, in every sense, 'his place7 that they are going back to; and Ronnie's first reaction to it is very negative. Seth says apologetically, It's cleaner on the inside' - a remark with lots of overtones. Meanwhile, the roads are dark and empty, the buildings are dark and empty; this looks like a rather creepy and possibly dangerous part of town that has slipped into neglect. The buildings are warehouses: that is, they are functional places of work. But what work is going on in these warehouses? Seemingly none. Of course work is going on in Seth's warehouse, but it is very un-warehouselike work. Access to Seth's apartment/lab is across a loading dock, up a lumbering industrial elevator, down a murky corridor flanked by thick strands of insulated electrical wiring, and through a heavily squeaking, clanking sliding door. Inside, the space is indelibly idiosyncratic. First of all, the space is huge and whole. Its utilization of an industrial venue is doubly 'inappropriate' - first as a location for high-tech scientific research, and second as a private dwelling. But this inappropriateness is also a form of appropriation - and like so many other similar appropriations, acts among other things as a style statement. In particular, the space recalls an artist's loft, as well as the 'artist's-loft' statements being made by plenty of condos with no artists living in them. Actually, there is an artist living in this one - or rather a scientist who is the closest approximation yet in Cronenberg's work to an artist-protagonist. The connection I am making here - warehouse-loft-artist - is really very tenuous. But there is something so personal about this space, about its embodiment of Seth's very particular combination of traits; and that notion of a personal authorship is strengthened by its isolation and 'inappropriateness.' And when Ronnie starts talking about 'designer phone booths' there is another flash of connection. This big, open space is divided into 'rooms' by shelving and equipment, and contains such expressions of 'humanity' as the piano and the big espresso machine; there is also a kitchen. Other domestic items

The Fly

231

are fully integrated into the laboratory space. The bed is a make-out couch with a sleeping-bag on it - very solitary-male-minimal. But the couch is of an orange-and-brown striped material, while the sleeping bag is a dull red colour: both suggesting the body, certainly in contrast to the colourless inorganic qualities of the scientific elements in the room. The one piece of 'comfortable7 furniture is a startling red-leather stuffed chair. This highly visceral item, recalling a similar couch in The Dead Zone, is another of the 'hot spots7 in Cronenberg's damped-down mise en scene, a marker signifying that the body is always there, lying in wait, even in the most repressed environments. This chair has many visual uses in the film, including as an alarming presence looming in the foreground of shots as Seth works himself up into a fit of jealousy and decides to teleport himself, and as the venue for the coupling of Seth and Tawny The 'laboratory7 features of the space, though, are really the dominant ones. The pods themselves have already been discussed, though perhaps we may remark what a brilliant visual emblem they are, in their combination of the aforementioned 'organic7 qualities with an opposite tactile sense of dull matte-black steely coldness and a kind of sinister military massiveness. 'Military7 is also a word that springs to mind with respect to the large computer housing - again a hulking metal structure dominated by smooth flat steel plating painted matteblack and signifying brute power rather than techno-slickness. Connecting the telepods are great snaking lengths of fat cable, also in flat black, once more combining the qualities of a massive dead weight of technology with a clear suggestion of the organic and the visceral. (A similar note is struck in the dramatic strands of insulated cable running along the passageway outside the main room.) The lighting in the main space is equally striking and spartan. Mostly, scenes are illuminated with strong top-lighting, where notwithstanding the diffusion of light in dust motes throughout the space there is a strong sense of purity and cleanliness - and also creating a feeling of grandeur and danger. This pure and strong white light finds its locus classicus in the radiance that pours from the floors of the telepods, casting everything inside in a dramatic clarifying glow, receiving a further sudden augmentation with the lightning-crack that accompanies the moment of teleportation, and finally billowing from the receiving telepod on clouds of steam or dry ice as the door is opened to reveal the 'new7 creature. Later, as Seth mutates further and further towards bodily monstrosity, the pure white top-light in the whole living and working

232 The Artist as Monster

space is replaced by a more organic program of illumination, where pools of shadow and coloured light (blue, orange) coagulate asymmetrically around the room. It is a transformation strikingly similar to the one that overtakes Max Renn's sterile grey space in Videodrome when sexuality and bodily transformation invade his life. To begin with, this space is 'cleaner inside/ notwithstanding its slightly haphazard qualities of male solitude, because of its strong sense of repressive techno-cerebral endeavour: it is clean because its large emptiness is still apparent, and because what is in it is so functionally bare and so industrial. But as Seth mutates, so does the space. Its lighting - and consequently its texture and colour - changes, and so also do its organization and functionalism. Or rather, its organization and functionalism begin to decay and disappear, just as the rational-human Seth does. This dissolution takes the form of the most spectacular example yet of that growing expression of chaos in Cronenberg's work ever since The Brood - dereliction. Gradually, garbage begins to accumulate and proliferate, mostly in the form of half-used and discarded food and food containers. Donuts, jelly rolls, aluminum cake plates, Orange Crush tins, and other detritus of junk-food bingeing are spread out across furniture and floor in an ever-rising tide of chaos. This spectacle again recalls the movement downwards in terms of class and taste that we have already observed in the 'macho' phase of Seth's metamorphosis. Once more, loss of identity, loss of rationality, is equated with a 'letting go' where indulgence in the lowest and most banal appetites is an index of the failure of crucial mechanisms of self-in vigilance and control. Instead of being 'cleaner inside/ the space becomes 'dirtier inside/ its empty cerebral austerity now filled up with clutter and junk. This transformation in Seth's space, like his changing costume, is another visual representation of the transformation-towards-disorder of Seth himself. It is a metaphor of self-dissolution in terms of a chaotic environment - or rather a once-ordered environment allowed to slide into chaos - that will be magnified further yet in Dead Ringers. Much of the film is spent in the environment of Seth's apartment-lab. Certainly no other locale can compare to it in terms of screen time. But it is worth casting a brief glance at Ronnie's apartment. Here, soft colours (robin's-egg blue, cream white, a collection of beiges) invest a kind of Englightenment / Robert Adam style of interior decoration, creating an almost Jane Austeny impression of balance and ease. There are lots of books and bookshelves, the furniture is smart but unpretentious, plants further relax and naturalize the place. Moreover, the dom-

The Fly

233

inant lighting is a kind of warm, incandescent-lamp soft yellow. All this is in the greatest contrast to Seth's environment, with its big open space, hard surfaces, and starkly dramatic overhead halogen track lighting (as it were). Only one item clashes with the mood of unselfconscious equilibrium - a tall planter about the size of a coat rack or birdcage stand, formed of two large red twisting strands of wood or plastic. This startling item resembles nothing so much as a massive length of entrails: it is perhaps the most dramatically Visceral' piece of decor in all of Cronenberg. Its counterpart is the red leather chair at Seth's; but Ronnie's planter makes an even more forceful impact because of the soothing nature of its surroundings. Obviously, it represents the intrusion of the body as something powerful and alarming into Ronnie's environment, Ronnie's life. The final scenes of The Fly explode visually in a way that has become rare in Cronenberg's films. The garish lighting, the flashes of lightning and spark-showers, and the general sense of expressionist monstrosity all go beyond the relative restraint and subtlety that have come to characterize the filmmaker's mise en scene. Perhaps, though, this is simply to reiterate the fact that The Fly is closer to mainstream horror than most of Cronenberg's films, and certainly most of his recent ones. The film is perhaps the high-water mark of Cronenberg's relationship to this genre. In subsequent projects, as we shall see, he begins to move in the direction, not exactly of restraint, but of an utterly personal brand of the unnerving that more and more avoids overtly shocking demonstrations of violence and gore.

CHAPTER TEN

Dead Ringers (1988) 'Why don't you just go on with your very own life?'

I've had a response to the movie that I've never gotten from any of the other films. I went to one of the first public screenings in Toronto and one guy, a doctor, said, 'Can you tell me why I feel so fucking sad having seen this film?' I said, 'It's a sad movie.' Then I heard from someone else that a friend of his saw it and cried for three hours afterwards. So I thought, 'That's what it is. That's what I wanted to get at.' I can't articulate it. It's not really connected with gynecology or twinness. It has to do with that element of being human. It has to do with this ineffable sadness that is an element of being human.

David Cronenberg1

Dead Ringers is a story of identical-twin and almost symbiotic gynecologists Beverly and Elliot Mantle (both played by Jeremy Irons). Beverly begins a serious relationship with a woman, Claire Niveau (Genevieve Bujold), and tries to establish an independent life. But neither he nor, ultimately, his brother can cope with the strains that the desire to separate introduce, and both twins end in drug-addiction and suicide. The film marks another transition for Cronenberg. It is his first feature film to forgo the supernatural or hypernatural aspects attaching to horror and science fiction.2 Except for one sequence carefully sealed off in a dream, there are no monsters, no hallucinations, and no special effects. Of Cronenberg's subsequent films, M. Butterfly and Crash continue in this vein; and if Naked Lunch reverts to a world of monstrosity and hallucination, that reversion is to some extent covered by the fact that the film is 'adapting7 William Burroughs's canonic book, and that the whole enterprise is coloured by a sacral high-modernist tinge. Indeed, in retrospect Dead Ringers may be seen as a crucial step carrying

Dead Ringers

235

Cronenberg from the realm of genre-cinema to the realm of art-cinema - especially when his two previous projects, The Dead Zone and The Fly, had such strong genre affiliations (Stephen King adaptation and classic horror movie, respectively). Certainly it was a change that many commentators greeted with relief, since they were no longer required to clamber over quite such a substantial barrier into the low-culture environment of horror; and more than one critic was heard to talk of Cronenberg's new 'maturity/ Dead Ringers perhaps is Cronenberg's most mature film - arguably it is his masterpiece - but this maturity has nothing to do with a forsaking of the louder forms of horror. Cronenberg's characteristic horror is still there in this film, with its crazed twin gynecologists and its 'mutant women7; and whatever had made his earlier films uncomfortable for viewers reappears here in every form but that of low-culture genre conventions and special effects. Dead Ringers is just as 'offensive' and 'tasteless' as any previous Cronenberg film, only these transgressive qualities are now more conceptual than visual. The film takes up once again all the most important themes of Cronenberg's ongoing project. It returns pointedly to the fragile and unstable central male subject. This subject's desires for mutually exclusive things, its pathology, and ultimately its impossibility are captured in the metaphor of twinness. The question of otherness arises powerfully again, too. In the first place, the sense of the subject's alienation from his own body, the sense that it is the site of strange and compelling and uncontrollable things, is incarnated in the syndrome of identical twins who are fascinated, attracted to and repelled by each other, and are rendered fundamentally uneasy equally by the necessity of their relationship and by fears of its dissolution. Then bodily desire, the attraction to the sexual other together with the strong accompanying anxieties, and the whole panorama of female 'monstrosity' from this perspective, is revisited in the form of infertile - and, more extremely, 'mutant' - women existing simultaneously and unstably as objects of desire and objects of study for the male self. The film also constitutes the most extensive and articulate examination in all of Cronenberg's work of that fundamental strategy of covering or substituting for perilous desire with the controlling rationalities of science - gynecology becoming the most essential, the most perfect, of Cronenbergian scientific projects. In short, once more we have the fundamental Cronenberg scenario of the male scientist-inventor attempting to remake the world of the body; and the perception of female sexuality and bodily otherness as a form of 'monstrosity' or

236 The Artist as Monster

'mutation' that becomes the terrain of the male scientist's displacing and disavowing endeavours. The film's centralization of the scientist, and the ultimate relocation of the idea of bodily monstrosity from the female to the central male, repeat the configuration of the films since Videodrome. As the chapter epigraph suggests, Dead Ringers reaches an intense pitch of piercing affect that is unmatched even in the sad universe of Cronenberg's work. Its special depth of feeling arises from a number of sources, but crucial among them is the manifold emphasis upon biological origins and birth, upon motherhood and infancy (or even preinfancy), upon bonds and instincts that seem to stem from the very beginnings of preconscious existence and apprehension. Now the desire for the female other is compounded with the longing for (re)union with the mother. Here Cronenberg has uncovered a source of melancholy ultimately a source of elegaic suicidal determinism - that strikes through the subject's more contingent and more superficial anxieties to a bedrock feeling of incompleteness and loss. This is a broad emotional condition that is, to varying degrees, perceptible in all the films since Videodrome (in other words, in all the films that centre themselves on the inner experiences of a male protagonist); but again it is in Dead Ringers that it receives its most powerful and focused expression. The narrative is in effect a twinned love story - the love of Beverly Mantle and Claire Niveau and the love of the twins themselves. Both of these love stories are fated to end badly: each contradicts the other, and each is impossible in itself. The pathos that attached itself to the spectacle of doomed love in The Dead Zone and The Fly now has its opportunities doubled, and not even in either of those films are there more scenes of emotional agony, and such a pervasive sense of loss. But in the end it is only secondarily the loss of another's love that is being lamented. Primarily it is the loss in and of the self - a recognition of the constitutional contradiction and impossibility of the Cronenbergian male subject. And never has death seemed so clearly the only alternative or solution to the dreadful melancholy ache of incompleteness: of all Cronenberg's suicidal films, this is the most comprehensively, seductively, convincingly suicidal. Dysfunctional males The Mantle twins, if we think of them as a dualized version of the Cronenberg protagonist, form yet another stage in the filmmaker's

Dead Ringers

237

obsessive attempt to get to the bottom of the complex and subtle - and highly idiosyncratic - condition of masculine life in his imaginative world. For one thing, they represent the clearest expression yet of the view that the 'problem7 belongs to the male subject, and ultimately to the male artistic sensibility, and not to some malignancy of the outer world: the male subject is the author of his own catastrophe if anyone is. There are no oppressive corporate institutions, then, as in Videodrome, and not even any disastrous accidents, as in The Dead Zone and The Fly - only the bizarre twins with their utterly unique methods of dealing with sexuality and the outside world. Their project, to investigate women's sexual organs as a scientific study, is more plainly than ever presented as the result of a particular male neurosis. It is not even disguised or metaphorized. Seth Brundle's teleportation machine may be emblematic of an attempt to substitute ratiocination and technology for a bodily phenomenon, but the Mantle brothers' 'radical gynecology' doesn't make any substitutions. It simply peers directly into women's private parts and tries to reify every surge of sexual desire and psychic uneasiness into the ordered and camouflaged environment of 'science/ bringing a new dimension to the term 'intellectual excitement/ The Mantles are already 'crazy with the flesh/ It is not women, not 'mutant women/ and not (as we shall see) the particular 'mutant woman' Claire Niveau who destabilize them and turn them into dysfunctional human wreckage: their catastrophic condition is innate and omnipresent, 'just waiting to hatch out' (to use the Burroughs insect-virus metaphor from Naked Lunch). In each of the three preceding films the male protagonist becomes the monster. In Dead Ringers the twinned protagonist is ipso facto already the monster.3 But the film replicates the pattern of the others: this 'exotic creature' lives in a state of enclosed symbiotic balance that in itself recalls the initial state of his predecessors, and moves, via an attempt at liberation from this enclosure through a relationship with a woman, to a disastrous imbalance ending in death. Instead of marking the conflict inside the protagonist's psyche onto his mind and/or body as hysterical 'sensational' symptoms (hallucinations, visions, transformation), that conflict is institutionalized in the narrative by means of assigning a separate character or persona to each block of psychic characteristics. From this perspective, the twins are a single personality with schizoid features of contradiction. The dialectic between the Elliot-principle and the Beverly-principle is between rationality and emotion, detachment and engagement, control and 'letting go' - these

238 The Artist as Monster

antinomies also repeating the emotional condition of the heroes of the earlier films. Both the unity-in-duality and the separateness are emphasized in Cronenberg's own comments: They form as children a complete unit, in the way a man and a woman might, that excludes everyone else. Not just women. They're utterly into themselves and as a result have great difficulty connecting with anyone outside/ And: 'The Mantle twins are mated halves of one organic unit/4 Beverly versus Elliot The symbiosis of the couple is complex, but quite strongly marked and legible. So: Elliot is the external ambassador, the public-relations person, the speechmaker and grant-getter and report-writer, the sybarite who watches Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous and appreciates good wine and Italian furniture, the unflappable social smoothie and Don Juanish sexual manipulator, the leader and organizer. Beverly is the shy domestic recluse, the researcher, clinician, and surgeon, who is forever slouching around the house in old pullovers, who detests having to put on any kind of performance, is nervous, moody, and unhappy and eventually falls in love, and who feels oppressed in the relationship (with Elliot, that is) and makes an attempt to get out. Claire tells Elliot the two are easy to tell apart: 'Beverly is the sweet one and you're the shit/ Elliot is the 'male' and Beverly the 'female': their names indicate this fact, as does their division of duties in the professional menage and the almost caricatured assignment of psychological gender characteristics (calculation/feeling, order/mess, materialism/idealism, abstraction/involvement, power/work, sadism/masochism, detachment/caring, 'shit'/ 'sweet one').5 Cronenberg has talked about this himself: 'In Dead Ringers the truth, anticipated by Beverly's parents - or whoever named him was that he was the female part of the yin/yang whole ... The idea that Beverly is the wife of the couple is unacceptable to him/6 During his drunken outburst at the banquet, Beverly's complaint takes the form of the housewife's lament over division of labour ('I slave over the hot snatches and Elliot makes the speeches').7 So there is a sense in which Elliot is the husband and Beverly is the wife; and Elliot is the one who attempts to achieve a kind of sexual realization of this configuration. Actual women for him seem very much a kind of medium through which to achieve an ever-greater intimacy with his brother. This is seen both in the scheme (set up and run by Elliot) in which the twins will share women and share their experience of women, and later in Elliot's

Dead Ringers

239

suggestion to Claire that she should be the lover of both of them - but most pointedly in the scene in which Elliot encourages his girlfriend Gary to dance with Beverly, and then presses himself against her back, to make a tripartite entity in which Elliot is embracing Beverly through the medium of a woman. Beverly, meanwhile, shows little or no interest in any arrangement of this triangular kind. Indeed, the whole narrative turns upon his attempt to escape from this kind of situation and establish an independent relationship directly with a woman. Another configuration sees Elliot in the role of the adult or even the parent, and Beverly in the role of the child, the 'baby' brother. Here Elliot's sangfroid is contrasted with the range of Beverly's mannerisms that are childlike (tentative, secretive, transparent, unprotected) or even fetuslike (he is always hugging himself, pulling his knees up, trying to shrink into a fetal curl). Homosexual desire Elliot, in the unsympathetic role of glib, manipulative, and materialist 'evil twin,' is an elusive subject. His compulsion to use (in themselves superficial and instrumental) relationships with women as an important bond indicates an attempt to maintain a fundamental and instinctive connection with Beverly at the level of desire. The dancing scene mentioned above is the clearest expression of the syndrome. This image, of Elliot and Beverly pressed together across the medium of a woman, is almost a tableau of how Elliot would like things to be. Bearing in mind that in the book on which Dead Ringers is 'based' one of the brothers is homosexual, and there is a direct sexual encounter between the two, the question arises as to whether the twins' intense connection and in particular Elliot's desire is not homosexual.8 And in fact a number of things make additional sense if we read Elliot in this light.9 If Elliot feels a powerful sexual attraction to Beverly, but feels also how impossible such a desire is - because Beverly will never reciprocate and because Elliot too finds the idea unacceptable - then the entire edifice of his concern for style and appearances, and also his womanizing, becomes a form of displacement or sublimation. The most fundamental desire is inappropriate and must be concealed and disguised: voila Elliot's performativeness, his manipulativeness, his dismissive quasi-indifference towards women (they are not what he really wants), his overinvestment in organization and rationality, indeed his superficiality Then too, the collapse of Elliot's

240 The Artist as Monster

personality when Beverly's crisis has destabilized the elaborate structure that was serving as a circuitous conduit for Elliot's love is felt as an abandonment of artificiality and the arrival of some previously unseen substratum of genuineness and substance. It is a collapse into surrender to Beverly and finally into the position of Beverly's sexual victim in the medical arena that has served both the twins as the instrumentalized landscape of desire. If (as we shall see) for the Mantles to perform an operation on someone is a form of having sex with them, then when Beverly medically eviscerates Elliot at the end of the film it is from this perspective a profound act of desire. And if Elliot yearns for a sexual union with Beverly, but also has a lifetime of medical displacement and instrumental thinking behind him, no wonder he looks so contented at last during this appalling scene. But if we read Elliot's character as formed in part by a sexual desire for Beverly, then the film itself becomes as disavowing as Elliot. Perhaps a homosexual Elliot is too blunt a tool of analysis: constituting Elliot in this way solves some interpretive problems, but it creates others. It may be preferable to think of Elliot's desire rather as a yearning that is so deep that it impinges on the sexual, but that cannot be contained within that category. From this standpoint, a complete fusion at every psychological and emotional level is what is wished by Elliot; and sexuality is, as a site of desire, an instinctive pathway for him to choose. Then, the twins' whole psychology and predicament is rooted in their heterosexuality, with its gynecological-obsessive outgrowth. Elliot's narcissistic attempt somehow to incorporate his sexual desire with his wish to simultaneously be Beverly is illustrated in the brief scene in which Elliot, in a hotel room in another city, summons identical-twin call girls, and says to them: 'Listen, so that I know which one of you is which, I'd like you,... Coral, to call me Elly, and you, Mimsey, to call me Bev.' Again, in his visit to Claire's makeup trailer, Elliot tries to heal what is becoming a serious problem by reinstituting a three-way relationship in which she will sleep with both brothers - an idea that is rejected by Claire and almost certainly would have been rejected equally by Beverly. This narcissistic bond sought by Elliot, in which the (twin) self is made the object of desire, is useless and even repellant to Beverly, for whom the deep heterosexual attraction to Claire is precisely a means of establishing an independent, non-Elliot relationship. If Beverly is afraid that he is too indistinguishable from his twin and does not have a self of his own, Elliot is afraid of exactly the opposite, that he is too different from Beverly and may be required to develop his own independent self ('Am I

Dead Ringers

241

that different from him?' he asks Claire plaintively). And this fear of Elliot's is ultimately even deeper and more desperate than Beverly's. Far more than Beverly, Elliot is conscious of his own incompleteness. Shifting balances Beverly's 'independent7 personality is certainly not a strong one. The spectre of separation from Elliot creates intense anxiety in him; indeed he cannot endure either the prospect of the old life with Elliot (no Claire) or the new life with Claire (no Elliot). (This is the 'Cronenberg state' in a nutshell.) Neither does he have any means of 'solving' the problem. He does not even attempt to solve it, but falls immediately into the non-solution of drug abuse (unlike Claire or Elliot, he cannot control his use of drugs, he cannot control anything), which is in effect merely a form of avoidance and finally surrender and defeat. It is Beverly who becomes the drug addict, becomes unstable and 'mad,' who loses control of both himself and the Mantle brothers enterprise. Beverly is the one who becomes obsessed with 'mutant women' and has the bizarre instruments made up, who starts mainlining drugs during office hours and assaulting patients with the Mantle Retractor, and who almost kills a patient on the operating table. In the end, this 'genuine,' 'baby' half of the Mantle personality is not capable of leaving its controlling, detached 'older' brother: the attempt produces overwhelming fear, drug addiction, personality collapse. At the same time, these events reveal a new Elliot, one might say 'the real Elliot.' Although he asserts, with customary confidence, that he will sort out Beverly's drug addiction (first by organizing his detoxification, then by 'getting in sync' and becoming an addict himself), his 'leadership' in this crisis of personality is ineffectual, and he simply slides into subservience. In the end, in fact, he takes up Beverly's role as the disorganized and helpless casualty while Beverly assumes the directing role of Elliot, setting schedules for drug use and drug withdrawal, and finally decreeing a surgical separation. Elliot follows Beverly into oblivion and finally goes to his death at Beverly's hands without a word of complaint or remonstration. At the moment of his death, he is content because he and his brother really are in sync, they are almost identical to each other and are living in a symbiosis or union whose satisfaction is so great that the catastrophic side effects (drug addiction, utter wreckage of their public lives, finally even death) are not too high a price to pay.

242 The Artist as Monster

All this confirms that, contrary to first impressions, Elliot is the subordinate one and Beverly the dominant. The film articulates this in its comparison of the two brothers with Chang and Eng, the original Siamese twins. The comparison is first implied in Beverly's nightmare, in which the brothers are Siamese twins and Claire is physically separating them with her teeth. But it is Elliot who points specifically to the Chang and Eng parallel, as he watches Beverly, at his most infantile, destroying himself with drugs: ELLIOT: Don't do this to me, Bev! BEVERLY: But I'm only doing it to me, Elly. Don't you have a will of your own? Why don't you just go on with your very own life? ELLIOT: Do you remember the original Siamese twins? ... Remember how they died? BEVERLY: Chang died of a stroke in the middle of the night. He was always the sickly one, he was always the one who drank too much, [quoting} When Eng woke up beside him And found that his brother was dead, He died of fright Right there in the bed. ELLIOT: Does that answer your question?

This is Elliot's confession that he cannot exist without Beverly. It also identifies Beverly with Chang, 'the sickly one/ 'the one who drank too much/ and this seems an appropriate comparison, when the sickly Beverly is at death's door on account of taking too many drugs. Yet in the final scenes, where the twins are almost (but not quite) indistinguishable, when Beverly 'separates' the two of them by disembowelling Elliot, Elliot is specifically named as playing the role of Chang (the weaker one who dies first), and Beverly is now Eng (the stronger one who survives but then dies of fright - or in this case grief). Beverly is of course already the primary subject narratively by virtue of his greater centrality in the story and, in a narrative sense, his greater agency. The emotional turmoil written on his face and body makes him the dramatic centre just as Elliot's calm demeanour and controlled behaviour push him towards the dramatic periphery. It is true (in a multiple sense) that Elliot 'acts' while Beverly 'suffers.' But in the end it is Beverly's feelings that control the viewer's affects, Beverly's decisions and actions that determine the course of the story. In this respect, Dead Ringers invokes once more the comparison of melo-

Dead Ringers

243

drama, soap opera, or 'women's picture' - but with Beverly in the role of the suffering female protagonist. Cronenberg's remark, 'I felt, when I was working on the movie, that I made it primarily out of the female part of myself,'10 seems apt in this regard. It suggests a connection with that other 'female' film, The Dead Zone, as well as with the more pathos-driven moments of The Fly. In all these cases, it is the spectacle of suffering and the destruction of helpless protagonists that gives the films emotional power. Perhaps even more than The Dead Zone, it is proper to describe Dead Ringers as a 'weepie/ a 'women's melodrama' with and for men. The movement of the male twins into the 'feminine' position of helplessness and suffering is in fact a striking feature of a film that so strongly emphasizes the maleness of its protagonist-subjects and their masculine-instrumental strategies in constituting women as the objects of desire/investigation through the mechanism of gynecology. The male project to lead, organize, objectify, and control ultimately fails the Mantles completely (a failure seen most clearly in the growing ineffectualness of Elliot), and they are driven ever closer to the 'female' core of their emotional constitution (represented by Beverly). And the male perspective that sees female difference as threateningly other, as 'mutant,' is so completely inverted that at the end of the film one of the twins is surgically enfemaled (Beverly carves out a womb in Elliot's abdomen) and the other seeks to join him in the space of femaleness (the dead Beverly curls fetally across Elliot's 'womb'). This evocation of a kind of male yearning-to-be-female is crucial to the film's establishment of its affective course, and suggests a primary loss underlying the male drama it enacts. The sadistic catalyst and sexual jealousy Let us look for a moment at Beverly's involvement with Claire. What is it about this relationship that makes it different from the other sexual liaisons into which he has been enticed by Elliot? For it is Elliot who runs the scheme to seduce patients and to 'trade women/ he who emphasizes how the 'science' of gynecology can act as a cover for skirtchasing: ELLIOT: If we didn't share women, you'd still be a virgin. You'd never get laid on your own. BEVERLY [rather petulantly]: Well, I don't get out much.

244 The Artist as Monster ELLIOT [laughing]: Listen, the beauty of our business is that you don't have to get out to meet beautiful women.

Elliot is also the one who understands and expatiates upon the sadistic role called for by Claire Niveau's masochistic invitations. Beverly, with his 'female' masochistic passivity, is reluctant to act sadistically, even in play. But he is eventually taught by Elliot, who, having impersonated Beverly in the first place, has already had sex with Claire and is now pushing Beverly to follow in his footsteps: ELLIOT: Well, if you don't go and see her ... I will. And I'll tell her I'm you. And I'll do terrible things to her. BEVERLY [with unwilling interest]: What sort of terrible things?

The next shot cuts to the sex-bondage scene between Beverly and Claire. This very intense scene of sexual intimacy and its tender aftermath is the foundation stone of their relationship. Especially so for Beverly. For while Claire is quite candid and at ease about her extensive sexual activity, and seems to have integrated her sexuality into her personality quite functionally, Beverly retains qualities of the shy sexual recluse notwithstanding his earlier Elliot-run adventures, and his eventual sexual awakening reveals a massive substructure of hidden neurosis. Here we may recognize the very familiar Cronenberg pattern of the passive and even virginal male - particularly as in the two preceding films, The Dead Zone and The Fly - for whom the arrival of sexual epiphany (or in The Dead Zone its non-arrival) is such a major event in both positive and negative dimensions. The first cause of Beverly's deeply stirring attraction to Claire - her three-headed cervix - will be addressed more fully later in a general consideration of how the strangeness of sexual difference informs the Mantles' gynecological project and how the idea of mutancy is particularly dementing for Beverly. What I would like to point to here is its second cause: the invitation to sadistic sex. For Elliot, Claire's taste for masochistic sex is just another theatrical opportunity. Claire the actress will play the part of the masochist and Elliot the actor will play the part of the sadist; and the relative substancelessness of this performance will be mutual and familiar.11 In contrast to Elliot, Beverly has no interest in Claire as an actress, is a poor actor himself (always signalling a lie, grotesque in his script-reading scene with Claire),12 and has little appetite for Elliot's role-playing. And so for Beverly the sadomasochis-

Dead Ringers

245

tic sexual game with Claire is not quite a game. Instead it touches a sensitive spot, the sensitive spot, in his own sexually disturbed temperament, and connects his primal wound (source of his internalizing and 'masochistic' personality) to an instrument of outward expression - a sadistic acting out of pain that begins in this scene and extends all the way to his production of the sadistic 'instruments for operating on mutant women/ The gateway to de-encapsulation, the liberating and then destructive catalyst, takes the precise form of a masochistic woman issuing an invitation to the central male to become a sadist with her, exactly as in Videodrome. It is fascinating to observe how Cronenberg reaches for this particular apparatus even in connection with the sensitive and 'female' Beverly. The result is like a melding of the aggressive-sadistic male of Videodrome (actively exploring the world of transgressive sex and finding an aggressive-masochistic woman more transgressive than he is) and the recessive males of The Dead Zone and The Fly (whose friendly girlfriends simply try to take them to bed). The Cronenberg male subject continues to evolve as the same characteristics and transformational events are continually shuffled and recombined and deepened. However muted the sadism in the lovemaking scene of Dead Ringers, it is there, and it takes its place among the signal events that inaugurate the disintegration of the subject's personality. And if the invitation to be a sexual sadist is somehow connected with the loosing of the forces of desire in a repressed and encapsulated male personality, then its subsequent catastrophe of imbalance is somehow connected with a moment of sexual jealousy. In The Dead Zone the hero's chastity coupled with his accident and coma make him a permanent onlooker to the intolerable spectacle of the woman he loves happily married to another man. In The Fly, no sooner does the virgin Seth have sex with Ronnie than he suffers the sting of jealousy - and this is presented as a factor that influences him to teleport himself alone (with the fly, which itself might in this context seem a little metaphor of sexual imbalance). Now Beverly's sexual liberation with Claire carries with it the same backlash of dependency upon another person (or removal of encapsulated mdependence), emotional vulnerability, and lack of control. And the panic that this state escalates into when Claire leaves town for a few weeks distils into racking attacks of sexual jealousy. Exactly because it is an outgrowth of feelings of vulnerability and weakness, this state seems more 'natural' to Beverly than the sadistic one - although the two are linked, since it is the state of maddened jeal-

246 The Artist as Monster

ousy that prompts him to create the sadistic surgical instruments. But in both cases what is striking is the continuity with the two or three preceding films of the factors surrounding the male subject's crucial transformation and its relation to sexuality Another fine mess We must return now to the perspective of the brothers as different aspects of a single personality, and that single personality as another version of the Cronenberg protagonist. The symbiotic character Beverly/Elliot has the vulnerable, emotional Beverly - the 'essential' (but buried) ego-self, imprisoned and yearning for release from encapsulation but unable to deal easily with the outside world, longing for completion in a relationship with a woman and also fascinated and tormented by the difference of female bodies and the mysteries thereof - overseen and managed by the detached, calculating, performer-fabrication Elliot, who ensures the viability of the twin unit in the outside world, negotiating its professional and social success, channelling deeper emotional and sexual desires into superficial instrumental/predatory relationships, and interested narcissistically only in preserving the symbiotic union. The cold rationalism and alienated sensuality of the Elliot-self represent an unsatisfactory management for the weeping, suffering, sensitive Beverly-self: Beverly-underthe-direction-of-Elliot is unhappy and wants to be 'itself/ But such an independence, such an escape of the feelings from selfencapsulated 'rational' control, is simply not possible in Cronenberg's world. In the films between The Dead Zone and Dead Ringers the road to de-encapsulation always runs through a wish for a 'normal' heterosexual relationship, wherein sexual desire opens the sealed ports of the personality and enables an emotional intimacy However emphatically desirable, from every point of view, a close, loving sexual relationship might be for the heroes of The Dead Zone, The Fly, and Dead Ringers, some catastrophe always interposes itself between each protagonist and this goal. In The Dead Zone the source of the catastrophe is occluded through its disguise as a road accident. In The Fly the 'accident' is much more explicitly connected with the protagonist's agency - his feelings, in particular his inability to cope with released sexuality. In Dead Ringers there is no accident at all. (Or perhaps one must say it was the 'accident of birth,' a phrase that takes on a new resonance in this film.) Rather the barrier to emotional communication is

Dead Ringers

247

inscribed in the nature(s) of the protagonist(s): the (primary) affective self is simply unable to maintain an existence independent of the (secondary) protective instrumental self. What in the earliest Cronenberg features took the form of a panic in the face of contagion and the mutated-monster-female-other is re-presented as a panic in the face of those same forces now understood as fears inside the self. The ego-self - sanity and identity - now stands threatened by a frightening, self-dissolving power that lurks perpetually (perhaps dormant, but always there) in the shadows of its own psychic environment. And yet the artificial stabilization of the emotional waters, only possible in the frozen isolation of encapsulated life, makes existence flat and empty. This picture is complicated by problems of conscience arising from an awareness of the essentialness of transgressive desire both to the psychic vitality of the self and to the practice of artistic creation (this is the landscape upon which are played the dances of sadism and masochism, of guilt and punishment). But in general it may be said that every life (that is, the life of every Cronenberg protagonist) is a struggle or dialectic between these two tendencies: to shut down and be desolated but survive, or to open up and be enlivened but destroyed. In Dead Ringers this dialectic of forces within the personality is emphasized by giving each 'side' its own persona; at the same time, the inextricability of those forces from each other is asserted by making the personae twin, and by the narrative demonstration of their inability to exist separately. The conflict is more clearly than ever contained and played out within the personality of the individual subject. And the resulting psychic landscape is one on which are enacted great struggle and suffering, a powerful drama of vulnerability and pain and destruction. Indeed, within a psychological context it is hard to imagine a greater or more catastrophic upheaval than this one that results in the ritual disembowelment/suicide of the self. Cherchez lafemme There is no accident in Dead Ringers, but there is an intervention or a stimulus. Once again, it is the arrival of a woman that begins this catalytic development. But the existence of sexual otherness and the problem of how to deal with it have always been of central importance in the way this (dual) personality has been constructed; and here we may look more extensively at the essential topic of their profession, gynecology The film's first two scenes, depicting the Mantle brothers in

248 The Artist as Monster

1954 as newly adolescent boys, show the formation of the strange and unique psychological mechanism whereby they will keep this disturbing problem at arm's length. As the first scene opens they are already revealed as intellectually precocious children (prim and bespectacled) who seek to encompass potentially troublesome facts by placing them within the purely rational constructs of science.13 Sex is Topic Number One in this regard, and the film opens with one of the twins offering an explanation for its existence:14 TWIN A: Fve discovered why sex is. TWIN B: Fantastic! TWIN A: It's because humans don't live underwater. TWIN B: I don't get it. TWIN A: Well, fish don't need sex, because they just lay the eggs and fertilize them in the water. Humans can't do that, because they don't live in the water. They have to internalize the water. Therefore we have sex. TWIN B: So you mean humans wouldn't have sex if they lived in the water? TWIN A: Well, they'd have a kind of sex - but the kind where you wouldn't have to touch each other. TWIN B: I like that idea.

They go on immediately to chat about SCUBA (Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus) gear. Living underwater, in an isolated realm where sexuality is impersonal and unthreatening, is now introduced as a kind of phantom metaphor for the Mantles' future strategy of existence. They will be self-contained, and they will live 'under the water' in their blue-and-grey offices and consulting rooms and adjoining apartment (Cronenberg has described their environment as being like an aquarium).15 There they will practise gynecology, where their desiring fascination with women's sexual organs will be at once physically direct and omnipresent and at the same time objectified and immobilized in an 'underwater' setting in which everything is controlled and impersonal. Meanwhile their own boyhood sexuality, however intellectualized, is still the engine of desires and compulsions, so they proposition a neighbourhood girl in the following fashion: TWIN A: Rafaella, will you have sex with us in our bathtub? It's an experiment.

Dead Ringers

249

RAFAELLA: Are you kidding? Fuck off, you freaks! I'm telling my father you talk dirty. Besides, I know for a fact that you don't even know what fuck is. [she leaves] ONE OF THE TWINS [puzzled and disappointed]: So different from us. And all because we don't live under the water.

Right from the beginning, the gap between their psychic needs and inclinations and their discomfort as social beings is disastrously wide, and something very complex and artificial will have to be designed to bridge that gulf created by their alienation from what is 'natural' (and this scenario recalls Brundle's substitution of teleportation for 'natural7 motion). The next scene shows them having taken the decisive step: they are 'dissecting' the viscera of a plastic model Visible Woman with instruments of their own invention (including an early form of the 'Mantle Retractor' made out of Meccano parts), and prescribing 'interovular surgery': already fully formed Boy Gynecologists. Thinking about the body The 'sexual science' of gynecology is also a crystallization of the larger problem of mind and body, always hovering over Cronenberg's work. The filmmaker comments on this very succinctly: 'Gynecology is such a beautiful metaphor for the mind/body split. Here it is: the mind of men - and women - trying to understand sexual organs.'16 What is striking about this remark is the way in which it identifies the 'body' half of the dichotomy with sexual organs, rather than, for example, with blood vessels or muscle tissue. Sexual organs exemplify specifically a bodily function that intrudes itself very loudly into the realm of the 'mind' in the form of desire; so that what Cronenberg is pointing to is really an element that disrupts any kind of clean division of the self into mind and body. We may go on most of the time breathing and circulating our blood and operating our internal organs without any of this fundamental bodily activity impinging upon conscious awareness. But in the case of sexuality, as in the case of disease or the apprehension of mortality, the body's functions do 'radically' interfere with the operation of any kind of pure Cartesian mind. (And it may be noted in passing that this 'radical' interference is reproduced in the 'radical' that is, sexualized or body-obsessed - projects that the interfered-with and now tainted rational subjects come up with.) So we are not confronted with any necessity to rationalize the completely unconscious

250 The Artist as Monster

workings of the body, only those that forcibly bring the body to the attention of consciousness. Sex and disease are therefore 'problems' in a way that breathing and circulation aren't (unless breathing or circulation are malfunctioning). Some people perhaps are able to incorporate sexuality and even mortality into an integrated personality, where they will take their place among the unconscious and automatic workings of the body without upheaval and anxiety, and hence be 'naturalized' but assuredly not Cronenberg. The problem would not exist in the form that it does, however, if it were not for Cronenberg's obsession not simply with sex, disease, and death, but equally with the notion of a pure consciousness. That is, an outlook that postulated the human psyche as always and everywhere a 'mixed' entity, one informed in its very essence with 'bodily' instincts and functions, would not find itself in the tormented state that envelops Cronenberg's films. It is only the concept of a pure rational consciousness separate from the body that enables exactly this kind of panic at the continual reminders of the 'foreign' body's threat of chaos and identity loss and its ultimate sovereignty. What we are seeing, then, is a process of psychic polarization, in which rational consciousness is apprehended in a particularly rarefied and 'untainted' way, while the intrusions of the 'body' onto its terrain are correspondingly dramatically fetishized and pathologized as alien and monstrous. The fundamental presence of a separate, rational, controlling, and understanding self is a First Cause necessitating the reification of anything that contradicts or destabilizes that self into a category of grotesquely fascinating and frightening phenomena. Hence the procession in Cronenberg's work of hyper-rationalizing and emotionally timid males, and hence also the equally recurring confrontations staged between these males and the most lurid forms of bodily abjection and psychic disruption. Even more than the protagonists of Cronenberg's previous films, the Mantles and their profession embody exactly a 'beautiful metaphor' for this condition. That it is somehow innate or pre-constitutive is evident from the childhood scenes of Dead Ringers, where the boys start out as hyper-rational and emotionally alienated, and as drawn with this particular acute curiosity to questions of sexual difference, which they characterize as pathologies. The strangeness of this whole condition is marked in the unique twinness of the male a twinness that is even analogous to the schizoid rationality/panic of his outlook. Girls are 'different from us/ and when this difference is multiplied through abnormality into an additional difference from

Dead Ringers

251

the difference, the resulting 'other' of the female patient is seen as the appropriate obsessive object for the twins, who are different not only from, women but from everybody: twinned, encapsulated, selfcontained. Gynecology Medical science is a constant magnet for Cronenberg, and we have seen how his films are full of crazed doctors and operating-room nightmares. In Dead Ringers this fascination reaches a new intensity of focus. Gynecology, already a 'sexual medical science/ is further sexualized and pathologized through its adoption by psychosexually distorted men who become doctors. Their distortion is, again, emblematized in the fact that they are twins; and the physical pathologies (from common infertility to rare abnormalities) they pursue in their medical practice are precisely the equivalent of their own strangeness and alienation. In other words, the pathology lies primarily in themselves; and their fascination with the pathology of others (or one should say of the 'other' female) is at base a kind of self-reflection. The Mantle brothers' gynecological clinic institutionalizes their particular neurotic strategy of situating a sexual obsession inside a technorational obsession. Their personalized 'radical' techniques are symbolized by the Mantle Retractor, an instrument for ensuring the continued exposure of the female viscera during surgery.17 The more one contemplates the Retractor, the more crude and monstrous it seems. It is roughly similar to a sliding shoe-measurement template, with a pair of adjustable brackets on either side that physically stretch and maintain a very large abdominal incision. When a supervising surgeon sees the med-student Mantles employing it during a training dissection, he reacts with disgust and says harshly, 'Well, it may be fine for a cadaver, but it won't work with a living patient, I can tell you that!' This is taken by the brothers (and to some extent even by the narrative) as a narrowminded rejection of progressive technique, and indeed the following scene finds them as brilliantly precocious undergraduates already being lionized for their invention - now described as 'the standard of the industry' - and receiving a gold-plated version of the instrument as a trophy. But it is far from clear that the surgeon's scathing comment is not at least in some sense justified. Even employed as it was intended, the Retractor carries a transgressive charge because of its size and the near-obscenity of the gaping breach it makes in the containing and hid-

252 The Artist as Monster

ing wall of the (female) body interior. Later on Beverly, during the delirium of his anguished obsession with 'mutant females/ attempts to use one for an internal examination - the very thought of which makes the mind recoil. And in retrospect the Retractor undoubtedly seems like the prototype for unequivocally monstrous techno-sexual devices: Beverly's Instruments for operating on mutant women/ But the Retractor above all symbolizes the whole project that gynecology in general, and the Mantles much more acutely, undertake. Especially to the male perspective, the sexual difference of the female body is that the sexual organs are Inside/ anyway: penetration of the 'secret places' of the female is precisely sexual intercourse. The idea of penetrating and exposing women's bodily difference (but far more fully and more 'safely' with instruments rather than penises), of exposing what is hidden and may not be seen, of actually physically looking at and touching the mystery is at the centre of the Mantles-asgynecologists. Again, this is clearly a substitute for 'normal' sex; but it also a kind of grand symbolic victory for the (male) instrumentalizing and displacing strategy in general, a kind of exalted and heroic rationalization of transgressive urges. The Mantles have succeeded in institutionalizing their scheme for ministering simultaneously to desire and panic. Moreover, their outrageous occupation and outrageous strategy have not merely been tolerated, but actually rewarded and solemnly acclaimed by society. There is a fillip of surreptitious excitement at this spectacle of official recognition. In this process gynecology becomes not only the means of distancing the psyche from disturbance, postponing or cancelling a reckoning with sexual feelings; it is also, inversely, a means of permitting and authorizing the (often transgressive) fascination with sex/body/otherness/death. The gold-plated Mantle Retractor trophy presented to the young medical students is like an Oscar recognizing the success of their personal, radical form of displacement. Dead Ringers not only anatomizes the hushed-up and disavowed scandal of gynecology - exemplified in the general male reaction to the profession as 'icky' and Cronenberg's difficulty in getting the project made18 - but situates it in the whole vast tableau of medicine as a human endeavour in terms that are audaciously dramatic. The tremendous symbolic (not to mention actual) importance of the medical impulse and the medical spectacle, the issues of life and death it raises in a social and cultural sphere, and also the intense meaning it holds for the obsessively displacing Mantles and for the filmmaker too are

Dead Ringers

253

expressed in the awesome, sacral ritualism with which the operatingroom scenes are staged. What is also being celebrated is the sacred mystery of woman's sexual difference, and the penetration of that difference by the eyes and instruments of men who have elevated sexual desire into a sanctified quest under the banner of medical science. All of the operating-room attendants, headed by the surgeon (invariably Dr Beverly Mantle), are clothed in astounding red gowns with flowing robes, copes, and mantles (the name affinity is surely not accidental) whose Catholic-religious overtones are daringly obvious. Beverly, the Chief Priest or Cardinal, his arms raised, is ritually vested by his acolytes. The broad wimple, hat-flaps, and veil-like surgical mask reveal only the eyes (and Beverly's large eyeglasses)19 and totally envelop the ecclesiastic in abstracting and symbolizing raiment. The operating theatre itself has never been more 'theatrical.' The spectacle of the operating procedure is dramatically staged, with radiant top-light surrounded by rich shadows, and the scene presented for view through a large window outside which an audience sits, being guided through the procedure by the hermeneute Elliot with the aid of a video monitor that displays inside-the-body close-ups. (The pageant is not only theatrical but cinematic, with its oblong viewing window and video screen.) The already ritualized actions of real-world operating rooms are now dramatically heightened. The red blood of the human body, the red blood of fertility and birth, the enormous daring and risk and superbia of the human mind in thus intervening in the natural process are all abstracted into scenic elements of costume, decor, and lighting, and elevated into a grandiose ceremonial wherein doctors are Princes of the Church of the Science of the Body, and it is very much an open question whether their ritual is a holy or a blasphemous one. There is also an elaborate verbal-visual play on words and images. The priestly Beverly stands over the red-covered altar of a woman who is both sacrificial (sexual) victim and reproducing-body-to-be-redeemed, peering through a microscope-like viewfinder and manipulating a pair of iron rods that extend to either side at a 45-degree angle and penetrate into the viscera through metal collars.20 The tall, arched-over, hooded head and face and the long, straight, articulated arms-plus-rods call up the image of a Praying Mantis, especially given the entire predatory dimension of the gynecological and female-surgical activity - and also Cronenberg's ubiquitous insect affinities. Then of course the overpowering religious overtones present us with a Praying - or Preying Mantle.

254 The Artist as Monster Mutant women The Mantle Clinic deals not just with women but with 'abnormal' (i.e., infertile) women. Its aim is to restore 'unnatural' female sexual organs to a condition of 'naturalness/ and to return to them their role as the home of life. But to the Mantles even normal women are abnormal by reason of their bodily difference from males. From this perspective, all women are mutants. The idea of women as childbearing and childnurturing is extremely important in the film, but there is something about this 'natural' function that also appears very strange and arousing/appalling to the Mantles - and, in a less focused and obsessive way, to the rest of the male sex. At the same time, the discovery of extra irregularities, as it were, simply heightens the stimulation. If women's difference is exciting, then really different women are really exciting. This erotic fascination with something defective or unnatural (and hence 'mutant' and monstrous) is clearly shown in Beverly's profound excitement at finding that Claire's uterus is trifurcated. He describes this extra, extraordinary, difference as 'fabulously rare' - obviously a high compliment. When he is temporarily 'abandoned' by Claire and acutely threatened by her absence and the prospect of her loss, he reacts by inverting this special excitement and now cruelly emphasizing the monstrosity of its object. He starts ranting about 'mutant women'; in a convulsion of hurt and jealousy he accuses Claire's (male) secretary of 'fucking a mutant'; later the most powerful symptom of his demented state is his creation and fetishization of the frightening 'gynecological instruments for operating on mutant women.' What is so deeply upsetting him is not really something about Claire, but something about himself. He is driven back onto the primary sources of pathology and unhappiness in himself. At first these seem to him the maddening intractableness, unknowableness, difference of women. The difference that has given rise to the Mantle Retractor again stimulates the invention of instruments that are now quite explicitly sick. But what the woman-other has essentially done is to demonstrate the incompleteness of Beverly's masculine self. The Mantle brothers' first childhood apprehension of the female as monstrous and mutant was an inseparable outgrowth of their own isolation and inability to communicate. In truth what is 'wrong' here - what is incongruous, dysfunctional - lies entirely in the Mantles themselves, whose sense of alienation and discomfort simply seizes on and projects itself into the analogous qualities of strangeness it finds in the 'different'

Dead Ringers

255

female. It is this early foundational practice that is being reversed as Beverly's personality starts to disintegrate. What Beverly has crashed into is his own pre-existing and virtually innate 'sickness/ demonstrated to him in the events that have first drawn him away from his instrumental shell (Elliot), then led to the scarifying instabilities of his relationship with Claire, and at last shown him the impossibility of both his independence and his dependence. The Mantles' project to make whole infertile or 'unnatural' women is founded upon their own incompleteness, their own 'unnaturalness.' And since it is Beverly who is the feeling, the creative, the essential Mantle, it is he who first initiates and then is engulfed by the failed attempt to compensate for or make whole that condition. The instruments The 'creative' Mantle now creates the horrific fantasy-instruments. When Beverly takes the plans to the sculptor Anders Wollek to have them cast in surgical steel, Wollek assumes they are artworks. But Beverly insists that they are tools, 'necessary' for his work. What is deranged about them is that they are for actual use, not imaginative contemplation, that they are tools, not art (and here Cronenberg is doubtless also pointing to the difference between his films and what his films would be if what they depicted were actually happening). These instruments, fetishized by Beverly as he has previously fetishized the Mantle Retractor, become the most acute and scandalous proof that his mind is sick. One look at them and everybody recoils, everybody understands immediately that here is a dangerous madman (they are a clinching detail in the procedure to get the brothers 'defrocked' as surgeons, and they show Claire immediately how far gone Beverly is), because everybody immediately recognizes them as weapons. Of course actual surgical instruments are also weapons in that their purpose is to pierce and cut and clamp the body. Surgery itself is a form of assault - an assault also upon an abnormal and mutated body - and like all of Cronenberg's mad-doctor scenarios Dead Ringers draws upon widespread existing anxieties in this domain.21 Specifically, these instruments make manifest what was always latently true about the Mantles' project of gynecology, namely, its distorted perspective and sadistic desires. These are 'medical' instruments with which to commit sex crimes. Beverly attempts to use the Mantle Retractor for an internal examination, suggests during it that the patient might have had inter-

256 The Artist as Monster

course with a large animal, and brings in his instruments for an operation during which he goes completely berserk. When Claire finds the instruments there is a thrill of fear that she might actually be their target - and indeed in Beverly's twisted thinking she logically would be, given the importance of her 'mutancy.' (The moment recalls the awful prospect laid out in The Fly when Brundlefly warns Ronnie, 111 hurt you if you stay/) Again, what all this is inscribing is the sadism always lurking in the Mantles' project (and also the source of this sadism in a sad and pathological condition of confusion and suffering). In keeping with the direction of the whole film (and the trend of Cronenberg's cinema in general), these sadistic weapons are not used upon a woman, they are used upon a mutant self - as seen when Beverly enfemales/ kills his twin and describes the action as a separation of Siamese twins. The instruments may not be artworks for Beverly, but they are for Dead Ringers. They become the last intense focal point of the film's exposition of sexuality-as-science, sexuality-as-science-as-sickness, and now sexuality-as-science-as-sickness-as-art. They are the 'final versions' of the antique instruments so strikingly featured in the opening credit sequence - one might say that the first set of instruments opens the parenthesis of the film and the second closes it. And those first instruments are a mixture of medical instruments and instruments of torture.22 Finally, in the intricate psychic environment of the film, the two categories are the same, and it is the film that proffers them in the same register. In its own fetishization of these (and the other) instruments and in its simultaneous recognition of their dimension of ugliness and pathology (their dimension as weapons and as reflections of sickness and aggression in the wielder), we may discern the sad, awful state of pain and contradiction, the awareness of the impossibility of this desire, which underlies the narrative and the film itself. Art as monstrosity Dead Ringers takes another step along the road of the metacommentary in Cronenberg's films about the nature of the artwork and the process of artistic creation. Already in the cruelly manipulating scientist-patriarchs of the earliest films there was a version of the artist placed within the narrative (and we may recall Cronenberg's own frequent reminders of this and of his own sense of identification with these figures). Then at a certain point this artist-figure began to be incorporated more centrally into the narratives of the films. The title characters of Scanners embody

Dead Ringers

257

the artist's visionary powers, and so in different ways do the heroes of Videodrome and The Dead Zone. In all these cases, the powers were in some measure involuntary, and their side effects painful to the owner. In The Fly, Seth Brundle is explicitly a creator, and once again devoured by his own invention. The 'artist' in all these cases was a monster, and his creativity was inseparable from his monstrosity. Now in Dead Ringers, the Mantle brothers are 'radical' innovators, their creation the Mantle Retractor has been gold-plated and made into a piece of sculpture, and Beverly's new inspirations are first mistaken for and then purloined and actually exhibited as artworks. If they are artworks, what do they express, and what kind of an artist has created them? Narratively, they are created by a mad 'scientist' and express a sadistic desire to cut into women's sexual organs. Here is a project not so far removed from that of Dr Hobbes in Shivers, and really quite similar to Max Renn's sadistic fantasies in Videodrome. Max is appalled by the damage his fantasies might inflict on actual women, and Beverly is crazy with suffering (and both characters turn their 'creations' on themselves at the end), but the fact remains that artistic creation is more or less equated with a male sadistic impulse towards females. This is particularly clear in Dead Ringers when the art objects themselves take the form of sex weapons. Beverly becomes an artist when he becomes crazy (and again we might recall the resemblance between himself and Cronenberg in the operating-room scenes, the last of which has him running mad). Cronenberg has repeatedly returned to the existential-romantic definition of the artist as a pathfinding, transgressive figure delving into hidden or repressed realms where others do not wish to go - and this concept is visible in Dead Ringers's portrayal of the 'radical' gynecologist penetrating the forbidden realm of the female body. But how amazing it is that the artist's project is identified not, in the traditional way, with existential bravery and daring, but rather with something sick and out-of-control. The artist is a demented gynecologist with a weapon, a torturer, a crazed-with-the-flesh transgressive maniac. Nor is this horrible condition some kind of unlucky by-product or occupational hazard - it is what makes him an artist. Again, the artist is a monster, and not a monster by reason of his status as artist but rather an artist by reason of his monstrosity. In Naked Lunch Cronenberg will return to this topic of the artist's transgressiveness, of the artist as onewho-wants-to-hurt-women, in a much more detailed and encompassing way. But it is already astonishing that Dead Ringers presents its equation of artist and twisted male with sick desires, and of the art-

258 The Artist as Monster

work and bizarre sex weapon, so overtly. In all these films Cronenberg, the artist who has created these artists and this picture of (his own) art, is front-and-centre in recognizing the pathology of the 'artistic7 condition. And all of his artist-protagonists end in a sad recognition of their own transgression and/or their own impossibleness. Once more, the creator-monster Beverly redirects his multiple compulsions away from the female other to the otherness of his (twin) self, which is at last recognized as the true source of the compulsion to create and to hurt. Claire

The principal 'mutant woman' of the film is of course Claire. The film's own distance from any sense that this character is freakish or repugnant is (or ought to be) clear. She is strong, intelligent, sympathetic, attractive. True, she is female and Other, and thus fascinating to the twins' (and the film's) neurosis. Also she is infertile, her uterus is abnormal, she takes drugs, she is promiscuous, she has a taste for masochistic sex, and she does not hesitate to obey the imperatives of her career instead of sacrificing it to Beverly's enormous emotional needs. What needs to be stressed here is that despite all these things she is without doubt the healthiest, the 'wholest,' and the most admirable character in the film. Every scene she appears in demonstrates some new evidence of her perceptiveness, her wit, her self-knowledge, her courage. She represents Beverly's only chance for a life outside encapsulation, as Beverly recognizes; it is emphatically not her fault that in the end Beverly really has (and had) no chance for such a life.23 The quality of Claire's 'mutancy' is a complex one. Her bifurcation is the cause of her infertility; her infertility is a cause of her own unhappiness; and Beverly responds very strongly both to her 'mutancy' and to her unhappiness and human vulnerability. The foundational scene of their love, the most powerfully intimate and moving between them, begins with an act of intense sexual union involving bondage with surgical tubing - a form of 'operation' in which her body is penetrated. One recalls that in the second childhood-prologue scene, the Visible Woman model also has extremities tied with surgical tubing and pinned to the table. Beverly's coupling with Claire using exactly these props indicates the degree to which he is acting out a deep and long-standing sexual desire, one that reaches back to the roots of his childhood formation of the sexual 'problem.' We have already remarked on the sadistic-masochistic elements of this scene - how they

Dead Ringers 259

repeat a theme in Cronenberg's handling of sex, and reproduce a script of transgression/permission and guilt/forgiveness. This invention, here as in Videodrome, of a woman who wants the hero to be sadistic has the status of a fantasy ethically enabling him to act out the transgressive desires he has been repressing (or, in the case of Beverly, displacing into 'radical' gynecology). But this release of transgressive sexual energy also causes the welling-up of broader and deeper feelings (we might simply call these 'love') - the profound relief of a connection to another human being, an emotional liberation from encapsulation.24 Hence, the sadomasochistic encounter of Beverly and Claire is transformed into something almost devoid of predatory overtones, but rather tender and intimate and mutually vulnerable. And so the relationship with Claire teaches Beverly not only how to be a sadist who realizes his desires within acceptable bounds, but also, even more importantly, how to realize the emotional masochism of his 'female/ 'interior' nature by expressing it and acting it out and sharing it with another. After a typically ironic acknowledgment of the 'game' they are playing ('Doctor, you've cured me!'), Claire utters a deeply felt confession of pain: CLAIRE: I'll never get pregnant. I'll never have children. When I'm dead, 111 just be dead. I will have really never been a woman at all - just a girl. A little girl. BEVERLY: You could always adopt a baby. CLAIRE: It wouldn't be the same, it wouldn't be part of my body. BEVERLY: That's true. CLAIRE: Don't tell, please don't tell anybody about me. Please don't tell. I'm so vulnerable. Fm slashed open. BEVERLY [tenderly]: Who would I tell? Eh? [kisses her] Who would I tell?

(The answer to the last question, of course, is Elliot; and in refusing to tell Elliot when he asks, Beverly inaugurates the process of division of himself from his brother.) The 'slashed open' woman is a particularly resonant and powerful concept in the film. Claire is 'slashed open' like every woman, in her physical-sexual characteristics, as a crude description of her female body Moreover, she is the universal female patient, slashed open upon the operating table. In this she also resembles the old engravings seen in the credits, repeatedly of women slashed open, anatomy-book style, to reveal inner sexual organs and

260 The Artist as Monster

children in wombs. Here the connection is made between the woman's revealed body and the baby's beginning and refuge, and here also Beverly discovers his desire to be Claire's child. The word 'slash' suggests a violent act of aggression, and it is the oxymoronic sense in which Claire's slashed-openness implies both a sadistic penetration of the body of the other and a masochistic emotional vulnerability that answers exactly to Beverly's neurotic contradictions as male gynecologist and 'female' sufferer. For Claire's sexual masochism equals Beverly's emotional masochism, and she allows him to be not just a child but a 'female': suffering, inarticulate, interior (like a woman, Beverly too has everything 'inside/ just as Elliot is all surface). Just as Beverly is both sadistic (penetrating gynecologist/surgeon/ lover) and masochistic (abjectly emotional, undefended, 'female'), so is Claire both masochist and sadist. Perhaps it is somewhat overforceful to describe her prying, questioning, penetrating attitude as 'sadistic,' but she certainly does perform the operation of 'opening up' Beverly. She is simply inimical to all of Beverly's (and indeed both the Mantles') secretiveness, equivocalness, repressing, and avoiding instincts. She presses him on the subject of his brother and drags some of the intensely uncomfortable facts about their status and 'arrangements' into the open.25 For example, after Beverly accidentally mentions his brother, the conversation goes like this: CLAIRE: I didn't know you had a brother. BEVERLY [pause]: Yeah. We're not very close. CLAIRE [very sharp, she senses something right away]: 'Beverly/ that's a woman's name. Why did your mom give you a woman's name, I wonder? BEVERLY [defensive]: It's not a woman's name, it's spelled differently. CLAIRE: Right, but it's still a woman's name. Does your brother have a woman's name too? 'Merian/ spelt with an 'e' and an 'a'? BEVERLY [extremely nervous]: What are you trying to suggest? That I'm gay or something? That my mother wanted girls? [violently] What the fuck is this bullshit psychoanalysis!?

The force of his response suggests that these questions (gayness, whether the twins were given feminine names faute de mieux) are ones that he himself has entertained - and certainly that his too-close relationship with his brother is a hypersensitive point that has troubled him greatly. Claire's opening up of Beverly is both what he fears and what he desires. It de-encapsulates him, it begins to separate him from

Dead Ringers

261

Elliot, it brings everything that was buried and repressed out into the open. And on her side, the basis for this connection is her yearning for motherhood. She can share this secret with her doctor, her gynecologist (she keeps calling him 'Doctor7 ironically, but as with many of her ironies there is an underlying substance); at the same time, in his undefended childlikeness he presents himself as her child (the child she cannot have and desires for her completion), at her mercy. Her impossible longing for motherhood (impossible because she is 'mutant') is the exact parallel of Beverly's impossible longing for wholeness, or 'oneness' rather than 'twoness' (impossible because he is twin). And so both of them are 'mutants' - he because of his twinness, the alienation that has given rise to his obsession with gynecology, and in general his crippled personality. Claire's 'fabulously rare' dysfunctional uterus echoes the Mantles' 'fabulous' twinness, the sign of their dysfunctionality both separately and together.26 Maternity The idea of maternity pushes itself strongly and rather unexpectedly into the relationship of Beverly and Claire, and stirs up all those associations with maternity that have percolated through the film since the powerful credit sequence with its dissected mothers and infants. The Mantles' pursuit of gynecology is understandable as an attempt to disguise sexual desires, and to find in its sadistic instrumentality an outlet for alienated desire; but we need a different explanation for their specialization in fertility. Why should reproduction enter into this scenario? The immediate thought is that conception and birth are indissolubly tied to the notion of identical twins; identical twins are a 'fabulous' phenomenon of reproduction, a biological accident. Twinness is thus associated simultaneously with something natural (conception and birth) and something strange and 'mutant' (their unique difference from others). For the Mantles to study female pathology and infertility, and to try to bring forth fertility from this 'mutant' feminine environment, is to study and symbolically enable their own origins. And this dimension forms the other side of the coin to their instrumental sadism - a kind of muffled longing for that very reproducing female body that has provoked their anxiety and defensiveness. This body is not really the lover's body; it is the mother's body - more precisely, their mother's body.27 So the mother whom the Mantles are trying to restore is their own

262 The Artist as Monster

mother. The credit sequence - and it must be repeated how impressive and reverberating this sequence is - emphasizes, along with the instruments of surgery/dissection/torture, twins in their mothers' wombs. The Mantles dissect reproducing women to find themselves, specifically to find the origins of their own 'monstrosity7 or twinness. It is a crucial point, then, that the Mantles' actual mother is completely absent from the film. Their father and any other possible siblings (there's an unthinkable thought) are also missing, but in the context of femaleness and maternity and gynecology it is the mother whose absence is most important. In the opening shot, the boys are apparently exiting their family home; presumably their mother is there, inside it. And in the 'birthday party' scene near the end Beverly says that 'mummy forgot to buy ice cream/ So it is not as though the twins somehow don't have a mother: these scenes and the credit sequence affirm on the contrary that they do or did have one, and that she was even (as it were) particularly essential because of their twinness. The problem is that she is not there. When Beverly falls in love with Claire, it is because she has come to occupy a powerful symbolic position for him. From one perspective the extremely intimate and empathetic relationship of him and Elliot performs the function of completing each personality fragment. But in fact even when symbiotically paired the twins are not complete. There is something missing - otherwise Beverly would not be so unhappy and looking for an escape, otherwise their profession and strategies for living would not be so odd. The encapsulation promoted and managed by Elliot paradoxically has the effect of institutionalizing the twins' incompleteness. Hence, perhaps, the bizarre and disassociated quality of Elliot's attitudes towards women and his displacing attachment to slick furniture, clothes, wineglasses, and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. All the emotional force of a feeling of incompleteness falls upon, and is expressed by, Beverly. Claire then comes to seem to Beverly very strongly, at least for awhile, the thing that is missing. At first sight this is simply an escape from encapsulation, a relationship with another human being (Elliot precisely isn't another human being). But Claire is not just any other person, not even any other sympathetic female with whom a sexual relationship can provide a deep level of intimacy. She is a patient, a woman with a trifurcated barren uterus, a woman whose qualities of composure and self-confidence conceal a deep 'impossible' need for a child, and also a 'slashed open' woman wanting to be tied up with surgical tubing and 'operated on' in every

Dead Ringers

263

sense. If her masochism draws upon Beverly's repressed sexual appetite, her frustrated longing for maternity calls to an even deeper need in him. In so many ways, Claire begins to seem like the missing mother, the one whose absence has condemned Beverly to a condition of incompleteness. Now she is back, now Beverly can (re)unite with her and become whole again. The anxiety and yearning of the male subject It is at this juncture that the perspectives of psychoanalysis and gender theory become particularly useful. A number of scholars working in this field have been drawn, understandably, to comment extensively on Dead Ringers.28 For the film expresses with great poignancy some of the most fundamental anxieties of the human, and especially the masculine, condition. According to Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, subjectivity is founded in the separation of the child from the mother. Its institution is accompanied by a great pain of loss, and upon that loss - in the case of the male subject symbolic castration and the beginnings of the 'oedipal trajectory' - is built the foundation of the Symbolic order (Lacan): language and the Law, and all forms of instrumental displacement and sublimation. In addition, anxieties and feelings of loss arising from the male infant's separation from the mother produce the subsequent neurotic symptomatology wherein the female body is recast as monstrous, uncanny, terrifying on account of its difference and especially its 'castrated' lack. But at the same time, that body is also the body of the mother, the primal home that recalls a state of oneness and completion. Barbara Creed says: [T]he mother's body [is] an object of terror from which the male subject wishes to separate himself. It is her body which serves as a constant reminder of the anguish associated with separation; consequently, it is in her body that he displaces his fear of castration ... It is the body of the mother, the maternal figure, that most clearly represents the body of separations, the body which reawakens in the male subject his unconscious anxieties about separation. But the mother's body also represents simultaneously a desire for reunification, a reassurance that total symbiosis and unity are possible.29

The dual aspects of fear of bodily difference and longing for reunification well encompass the Mantles' strange and seemingly contradictory

264 The Artist as Monster

compulsions. The female 'other' is the source both of anxiety at loss and of erotic fascination. Kristeva's analysis of abjection30 explains how this contradiction and connection is structured. Female reproduction is situated firmly in the realm of the abject body of blood, feces, fluids, and other expelled things - strongly coded as polluted and disgusting. This boundary less realm stands in polar opposition to the male world of 'pure' signs and meanings and categories (which has been ritually purged); at the same time, its chaotic anarchy forms an erotic lure to the repressed and Symbolicized subject. So for the heterosexual male the mother, and by extension the female, is impure and erotically desirable; and sexual appetite is the appetite for the prohibited boundaryless and preSymbolic. To complete the picture, it is the mother who institutes the separation, and who establishes the independent subjectivity of the child by demarcating the zone of the child's own 'clean and proper body' (in contradistinction to everything abject). A 'normal' completion of the oedipal trajectory would find the male subject able to achieve a broadly functional subjectivity by sublimating primal loss into a participation in the social and cultural structures of the Symbolic 'big other' (Lacan), while substituting a wife for the lost mother in the realm of sexuality. Nevertheless the female, and especially the reproducing female, remains a reminder of the first great loss, inspiring both anxiety and yearning. Subjectivity, then, the sense of identity, is founded in the loss of the mother. A fundamental component of 'what-I-am' is 'a-person-whosemother-is-gone.' Dead Ringers finds a bizarre but profound metaphor for this one dimension of subjectivity - the dimension of loss. Moreover, in a Lacanian context it might be said that subject-formation occurs when the self splits (the so-called mirror phase) into one entity that attempts to mimic the models presented for appropriate subjectivity by society and another that observes the behaviour of that mimicking entity with some degree of dissatisfaction from (as it were) within. These split halves of the self may plausibly be represented by Elliot and Beverly respectively. In the Mantles, subjectivity is equated with twinness: what the Mantles are as subjects is identical twins. And this splitin-two is above all a reflection of their injured and crippled state. They are the strange and unique phenomenon they are on account of something to do with their conception and birth, their mother. Somehow in the womb they were one - one with the mother and without differences either from one another or from her. Their separation from that mother

Dead Ringers

265

has created a split psyche that is in some important way disabled, functional only in a displacing and fetishizing and internally fractured way: an index of the wound of separation. Their specific coping strategy is a mirror of their condition, with its obsessions with sexual difference (horrifying and compelling female 'mutation'), grotesque applications of the Symbolic ('radical' gynecology), and defensive tactics of distanciation (Elliot's regime). In some cases the subject's inability to cope with primary separation leads to an extreme introjection, described as narcissism. From one perspective at least, the Mantles' extreme reliance upon each other, and their reference and subordination of everything to their unique twinness, may thus be called narcissistic. Creed refers to 'the reassuring display of their own self-image in the ever-present identical image of the other [brother],'31 and remarks that the narcissistic pairing Beverly/Elliot also attempts to compensate for the loss of the mother, of 'completeness,' by taking up different sexual roles (the 'female' Beverly and the 'male' Elliot) in an attempt to produce a complementarity standing in for the lost oneness. To subjectivity rooted in separation from the mother, and narcissism as a denial strategy to cope with the pain of that separation, another term can be added: melancholy, the condition of permanent sorrow in which the wounded subject never ceases to mourn for the loss of the mother.32 The term is absolutely essential in describing Cronenberg's work at least since Videodrome - though the degree to which it is strictly applicable in, say, the Kristevan sense,33 varies from film to film. In Videodrome we have seen how, among so many oddities, the maternal also thrusts its way oddly in: Max's regression into a passive and finally suicidal state of melancholy is accompanied by the maternalization of the important women figures in the film. In the melancholy Dead Zone, too, mothers play a significant role, and Johnny Smith's condition is related in some degree both to the death of his mother in particular and to the poignant contradictions between real and ideal mothers in general. Dead Ringers, the saddest of all Cronenberg's sad films, actually offers a detailed realization of melancholy as a condition of chronic and incurable emotional trauma stemming from feelings of incompleteness and loss - of the mother. Here is one answer to the question of the man quoted at the beginning of the chapter: 'Can you tell me why I feel so fucking sad?' All men have lost their mothers, all men are melancholy; the difficulties of substituting a real woman for a lost ideal are very widespread; and as bizarre as the story of the Mantle brothers is, it is in some measure the story of many, many men.

266 The Artist as Monster

Beverly's desire to separate from Elliot and unite with Claire, then, represents a desire to counter these conditions of wounded subjectivity, narcissism, and melancholy, and to return to some time before the primary split, in fact to an imaginary prenatal time of union with the mother. It is somewhat confusing that he wants to separate from Elliot in order to undo a prior separation from the mother, and that he wants to get away from 'himself and unite with Claire in order to be fundamentally one; but in a context where twinness equals dysfunctional subjectivity and Claire is the phantasm of the lost mother, that is how it is. Beverly seizes at this apparent escape from split and incomplete subjectivity and compensating narcissism (he will separate from Elliot) and also from melancholy (Claire will undo the loss of the mother). But it is not very long before reality intervenes. In the first place, Claire is of course not the lost mother but.another actual human being, complete with her own independent existence. Claire cannnot simply give up everything else in her life in order to act as Beverly's universal, always-present pre-oedipal mother (thus her departure to go on a shoot plunges Beverly into severe anxiety, and seems to re-enact the first loss of the mother a second time). But even if she were prepared to devote literally every moment to him, she could never truly embody this delusory figure, who in order to fulfil Beverly's emotional fantasy would need to house him in her womb. To some extent Beverly always realizes that such a path is impossible even in fantasy, since Claire's womb is trifurcated and cannot house anybody, just as Beverly is twin and cannot be reunited with anybody in his 'own' person (in other words, the distorted nature of the project is inscribed in the distorted natures of the participants). For a time he can disavow this knowledge and pursue the phantasm of Claire-the-lost-mother because it has such power. As the realization grows, his first response is a drug-addicted flight from understanding or any kind of thought, and then, as the pressure grows unceasingly, the 'sick' response of the instruments and the ravings about mutant women. At last he cannot evade the recognition that any actual union with Claire will be real and not imaginary, that it can never fulfil the 'oceanic'34 yearnings motivating it. But it is not only the finally inescapable understanding that the lost mother and lost oneness can never be attained that derails Beverly. It is also the simultaneously growing realization of how essential his own split and sick subjectivity is to him. As we have seen, it is not Elliot who panics at the prospect of a separation but Beverly: he is the one who wants to leave,' but the thought also fills him with terrible anxi-

Dead Ringers

267

ety. Because of course what is there, actually, outside subjectivity? The Beverly/Elliot subject is split in two, cut off from others, engaged in a grotesque regime of displacement and fetishization, and gives daily and hourly proofs to the ego-sensibility (Beverly) of its limitations and unworkableness. But the 'cure7 - healing of the split, a return to the plenitude of preconsciousness with the imaginary mother, becoming unborn - is even more comprehensively impossible than the profound desire for it is compelling. There is nothing outside subjectivity, particularly not for the Mantles with their extremely elaborate and bizarrely idiosyncratic 'radical gynecology' scheme to keep the world at bay. Under these circumstances, self-encapsulation is all there is. And so Beverly sees finally that all he has is Elliot, what he is is Elliot. At the end of the process of delusory hope of escape and tragic understanding of impossibility, the film reasserts the solitary essentialness of the sick and split self. At last the twins totally regress and implode into their own private history, their own subjectivity: their familiarity and closeness, the sense that they have always been together and always must be, the enormous and detailed experience they share. Beverly's unhappy and attempting-to-escape persona collapses and disintegrates; Elliot's negotiating and managing persona sees it has nothing left to manage or negotiate and collapses in sympathy. As he regresses and dissolves his adult instrumental self, Elliot becomes more like Beverly (in the end he even surpasses Beverly in the qualities of helpless childlikeness and emotional 'femaleness/ and at last is enfemaled in the operating chair). The split self indeed begins to meld into a unity, but it is a unity of 'giving up' and 'letting go' of the project of having a life. From here it is a very short step to suicide. Drug addiction, letting go, suicide The Mantles' drug addiction and the spectacular dereliction of their surroundings is of course another of Cronenberg's images of this 'letting go.' Beverly's drug habit begins when Claire unearths evidence of the strange game he is playing. The longer their relationship persists the more truths have to be disavowed, the more necessary becomes an avenue of oblivious escape, and the worse the drug habit and the damage it does to functionality gets. Then when Claire's status as actual person rather than phantasmatic ideal makes itself manifest as a physical absence, Beverly is caught definitively between the abandoned shelter of split subjectivity (Elliot) and the failure of the fantasy-substitute

268 The Artist as Monster

shelter (Claire). This crisis produces a total panic and a complete collapse, the successive horrors of which are presented in vicious and agonizing detail. The receptionist walks in while he is sticking a needle in his arm; he begins to assault and insult his patients; he designs the instruments and finally tries to use them during an operation. Such a wholesale breakdown cannot be managed by Elliot. He tries to get things back in order, but the old regime cannot be reinstated. Only one option remains: for Elliot also to give up and let go. As is quite appropriate following the abdication of the managing and organizing self, all the outward trappings of the Mantle practice now fall into staggering chaos. Most astonishing is the transformation of the cool, 'submarine/ and ultra-organized consulting rooms into a gigantic knee-deep garbage heap. This is indeed a kind of nightmare image of the organized world instituted for and by the subject fallen into utter ruin. The state of drug-addicted dereliction seems to represent a fixed spectacle of horror for Cronenberg as a sign of personality and identity collapse. Perhaps this fascination derives from Burroughs, whose accounts of days and months spent as a heroin user 'on the nod/ staring at the toe of his shoe for hours at a time, fill his letters and other writings. But Cronenberg's version has a peculiar feature, which we have already noted in connection with The Fly: the strange emphasis on junk food as an accompaniment to the junking of a life, or as an equivalent to the drug 'junk' (i.e., heroin). There is a special flavour of fascinated horror in The Fly's presentation of Seth's addiction to ice cream and donuts and orange pop, as though the cancerous transformation of a human into an alien body was somehow metaphorically captured by the transformation of a lean and properly managed body into a degenerate body through the 'abuse' of junk food. Already near the beginning of the film the Mantles are eating delivered pizza (albeit of a 'gourmet' variety) in the dinner-table scene where they discuss Beverly's first visit to Claire. This may look like just a neutral detail - but the recollection of Max Renn's morning-after pizza, whose sauce he smears on a semipornographic photo, and which seems a tell-tale sign of Max's dangerous carelessness, rings an alarm bell. But the real arrival of junk food in Dead Ringers doesn't happen until the brothers sink into their mutual drug addiction.35 Talking about his conception of the existential problem of why to keep on living in the face of death, Cronenberg uses a striking phrase to capture the notion of simply giving up on life: 'If death is inevitable, it means that everything that comes before is irrelevant and trivial and meaningless. Why should you be alive up to

Dead Ringers

269

your death? You might as well die right now, or go to bed and eat ice cream/36 Going to bed and eating ice cream pretty much is killing yourself, in this view; certainly Cronenberg is not thinking about an Oblomov-like retreat from everything as a life strategy. But the tinge of moral condemnation detectable in The Fly is not so evident in Dead Ringers. The film's 'eating ice cream' scene is the 'birthday party' scene (itself a prelude to the killing of Elliot), where the brothers scoop up handfuls of iced cake and drink orange pop. The spectacle here is one of the most heart-rending in the film, as the twins - deeply stoned, with a corpse-like yellow pallor, dressed in suit jackets, underpants, and socks - mumble about putting their lives back together while it is utterly obvious to the viewer (and at some level to the brothers too) that this will never happen. BEVERLY: So on Monday, we kick, right? We agreed. We have to start to pull things back together then. ELLIOT: Oh yes. On Monday we definitely kick. BEVERLY: How about some cake? ELLIOT [flashes a truly sickly smile}: I could go for that. [Beverly goes over to the bookcase; there is a burnt-down candle and the remains of an iced cake on top of the books; he picks up the cake with his bare hands, breaks it in two large pieces, and gives one to Elliot] ELLIOT [with childish enthusiasm}: And some orange pop. [Beverly goes in search of it] Some ice cream. BEVERLY: We haven't got any ice cream, Elly. Mummy forgot to buy it. ELLIOT [quickly very upset, in tears]: I want some ice cream. BEVERLY [hands him some orange pop}: Happy birthday, Elly. ELLIOT: It's not our birthday, Bev. BEVERLY [with a weak but seraphic and loving smile}: Yes it is. ELLIOT [taking a swig of pop, and with flecks of icing on his lips, tenderly}: Happy birthday, baby brother.

The elegaic tone struck here is maintained right to the end of the film, with ever-growing intensity. Now the 'giving up' on life, the 'letting go' of control, is seen in a particular light - as a reversion to childhood. The birthday party without guests, celebrated alone by the twins who are the only audience for their own hermetic ceremony, calls up the realization of how so much of the twins' life has been like this, just the two of them. It is accompanied by the usual provender of a kids' birthday party: cake with icing, orange pop. There is no ice cream, and one

270 The Artist as Monster

of the twins shows a desperate unhappiness on account of it (simultaneously that of a cranky, overtired child and of a heartbroken dysfunctional adult). But 'Mummy forgot to buy it/ This is such a sad line not only because it clearly shows how the brothers have regressed, but most poignantly because if these are children and this is their birthday party, where is their mother? Beverly and Elliot are now exactly presented as motherless children - neglected, abandoned, motherless children. They are like Hansel and Gretel in the forest, only this pair will not be rescued by luck or cleverness or magic. Instead, they will huddle in each other's arms and die. The scene carries devastating power because it connects the melancholy of primal abandonment with the elegaic sense of a subjectivity that fails, but which is all there is. It is a culminating moment in a life spent by the twins since the very beginning looking for their mother, looking for explanations for their own origins and instincts and strange subjectivity. 'Happy birthday, baby brother' is piercing because it introduces the word 'baby' at a moment when its accumulated subconscious meaning is at its peak (the twins are 'babies' and have a baby's dependence upon an adult nurturer - who does not exist), and because Elliot's protective 'big brother' persona is so utterly destroyed and can only be referred to in this tenderly ironic way. In truth the big brother is gone, the mother is gone, and the self's (huddling twin) existence is about to go. At the bottom of this well, Beverly is still foggily trying to separate himself from Elliot, to kill his subjectivity, in the hope of breaking out, or returning, to Claire. Hence the operation to 'separate the Siamese twins' - the surgical operation with gynecological instruments for mutant women to kill the twin-entity of subjectivity by remaking Elliot's body into the mother's. (Simply to state the different elements of this project is a dizzying index of the psychic currents it expresses.)37 The brothers say tender farewells to each other, and Beverly dissolves the entity of subjectivity. But this entity, the relationship of the twins, cannot be put aside. It is miserable and dysfunctional, but in the end the self has been through too much with it, has grown too familiar and attached to even its misery and loneliness and freakish internal contradictions. The tremendous pity that suffuses this and the final scene of the film is the self's pity for its own mortally wounded condition. It is exactly a kind of profound 'self-pity.' It is often said that most suicides occur not at an intolerable stage of depression or pain, but rather at a stage when the suffering being finally surrenders to its failure, softens, and replaces bitterness with pity. If this is true - and

Dead Ringers

271

certainly it is the feeling of Dead Ringers at least - then suicide is an elegaic, even luxurious, giving-way to feelings of loss and defeat, an uninhibited embrace of the lost child within and a relieved laying aside of the harsh necessity to be an adult subject, split and alone. Beverly's pity and love for Elliot, and Elliot's for Beverly, their mutual reversion to helpless abandoned childhood doomed to extinction, captures the dysfunctional subject's 'giving up' and 'letting go' in an atmosphere of elegaic pity for the failed self that is the necessary precondition to suicide. Of all Cronenberg's suicidal films (Rabid, Videodrome, The Dead Zone, Dead Ringers, M. Butterfly, and in an honorary way The Fly), this is the most comprehensively and concentratedly, as it were the most systematically, suicidal, the closest to a wholesale submersion into a suicidal condition and state of mind. After seeing the final scenes of Dead Ringers, viewers are as close to understanding why a man would want to kill himself, and in exactly what mood he would do it, as they are ever likely to get outside their own experience. Following the dreadful, tender, awe-inspiring scene of the 'separation operation,' the newly 'freed' Beverly awakes to discover what he has done the night before, saying at first, 'Elly, oh, I had this horrible dream.' He catches a glance of but cannot look directly at Elliot's disembowelled corpse in the operating chair, and begins to chant in an obsessive quiet sing-song voice, 'Elly-Elly-Elly-Elly.' Again, the sense of a lost child is very strong. Shaving and dressing, he descends to the bleak windswept plaza outside the apartment building (it is almost shocking to be outdoors, in daylight, shocking that there even is an outside world) and approaches a phone kiosk. He dials Claire's number, her voice is heard to answer, he drops the phone and walks back into the apartment building. Then follows the film's final sequence, a succession of slowly tracking shots dissolved together, showing the scene of the brothers united in death. This is a scene of compelling power, borne on a brimming and overflowing wave of sadness. The Venetian blinds (so often a backdrop for the events of the twins' private life together), the bloodstained instruments, the coagulated candledrippings and used hypodermic, then ever-closer views of the dead twins (Beverly now curled upon Elliot's carved-out abdomen) positioned in a poetic tableau of finality - these shots drift and dissolve past the viewer's eyes in a growing crescendo of elegaic pity and sorrow, amplified to a pitch of released feeling by Howard Shore's wonderful music. Here is the completion of the film's circle of birth and origins with the attempt to return to origins in death. The film's

272 The Artist as Monster

sadness in the end encompasses not just the permanent crisis of the Mantle twins' masculinity, and not just the universal melancholy of the lost mother, but the whole tragic spectacle of frail and vulnerable human subjectivity. At the final fade, the end-credits unroll over a black screen behind which the music repeats the theme of the opening credits - and when they are finished the screen comes to rest on a single antique engraving of a pair of infant twins, still with umbilical cords. The reappearance here of the music (and finally of an engraving) of the opening credits brings home how fully the film's mood was struck and has been subtly maintained since the very beginning, and how, in retrospect, the unity and inevitability of the tragedy we have just witnessed has been inherent in the whole feel of the film. For the opening-credit sequence already vibrantly evokes this tone before we have had a chance to know anything of the story, and it is only at the end that we are able to account retrospectively for the feelings it aroused. In these very first moments of the film the mood is struck with astonishing affective force: the old engravings shine forth sombrely against a sea of red, accompanied by Howard Shore's music. The engravings alternate instruments (male, sadistic) with dissected women and fetuses or babies (female, masochistic). Their 'pastness' simultaneously signals both qualities - primitive (pre- or proto-scientific) cruelty and savagery on the one hand and the mother-and-unborn-self whose life lies in the (pre-historic, pre-subjective) past on the other. These are of course the conflicts within the film's central character(s). The image of a pair of twins in the womb - the one that returns to conclude the film - has a particular tenderness, even (or especially) when set next to the 'cruelty' of their visibility through dissection. As for the music: just as Bernard Herrmann understood Psycho better than anybody - understood it as fundamentally a foreclosed and deeply sad work and not nearly so much a sensational thriller - so Howard Shore understands Dead Ringers better than anyone, and in something like the same way. The maintitle music is, as Royal S. Brown has pointed out, profoundly sad while remaining in the major mode; thus it replicates or rather prefigures that balance of defeat and tenderness that is the film's affective centre. Reportedly, Cronenberg's response on first hearing this music was: That's suicide music. That's the suicide. You've got it.'38 Actually this music, although hinted at in various places through the film, only returns during the end-credits after the suicide; and yet its role in indi-

Dead Ringers

273

eating to the viewer exactly what emotion to feel, and in foreshadowing the film's end so powerfully, can scarcely be exaggerated. In turn the end, when it arrives, is felt so much more fully on account of the music and the final engraving to have been inevitable, inscribed in the nature of things, already foreshadowed at the very beginning. Mise en scene The film supports its schema with a complex mise en scene that illuminates the story expressively in a fashion parallel with the music, though of course much more intricately. In the first place, Dead Ringers almost never goes outdoors. Literally only a small handful of scenes, most of them minor linking sequences, occur in the open air. The 'interiorness' of the whole film is signalled in this way, and particularly the psychological and emotional encapsulation of the Mantles. Even the 'public' scenes take place inside. The operating-theatre settings are heavily draped, bunkered down by walls and ceilings and heavy surrounding shadows. And of course the final phase in which the twins hole up in their offices and apartment, claustrophobically engulfed by their own garbage, represents a culmination of this tendency of the whole film. The consulting rooms, called an 'aquarium7 by the director, are described in different terms by the production designer, Carol Spier: 'Actually, our colour scheme was bruise colours. So all the colours in it are all colours of bruises: purples and greens and mustards and greys - lots of grey, everything was grey/39 Small items of decor carry an additional resonance - for example, the little halogen desk lamps have shades resembling glowing green cervical diaphragms. At the same time this world, hermetically submarine and unhealthily, organically bruised, conveys a strong sense of order and cleanliness. Of course any professional office will do this, but in the context of Cronenberg's dialectical visual world, this setting once again recalls the rational effort to impose order on the world - and of course here reinforces the sense in which the Mantles' profession is doing just this. Much more striking in this respect, because more extreme, is the decor of the adjacent living apartments. Pierre Veronneau has commented on the role of both settings: 'Whether in the twins' apartment or their consulting rooms, the grey and blue tones that dominate the image, and the Cartesian order of the Italian furniture and accessories, create a rigorous, even clinical - certainly stifling - imagery that renders even more striking and perceptible the redden-

274 The Artist as Monster

ing emergence of abnormality/40 The overpowering coldness and control especially of the apartment, with its hard and sharp lines of darktinted metal and glass and its black Venetian blinds over enormous windows looking out across vistas of huge blank modernist office blocks, clearly signals the hand of Elliot. Elliot sits here in his navyblue blazers or black silk dressing gowns, an elegant wineglass in his hand, beadily viewing the television screens that always seem to be showing Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.41 The bathroom, often illuminated only by the unearthly blue-white glow of lights coming from beside the mirror and through glass shelves, is another characteristic space - again very cooly submarine and the locale of several mirrorscenes. Everything in the apartment is very expensive and in the best of aggressive-minimalist taste; but its inorganic and hysterically overordered quality is actually frightening. (Sometimes Elliot even seems to take his cold and hard environment with him into the outside world - this is particularly true in the awards-banquet scene, with its almost horrific stainless-steel and marble staircase. Or perhaps it is simply that it is the ordered 'big other' external world itself that Elliot has distilled and appropriated for his own style.) Meanwhile Beverly perches unhappily in the unhomey domestic environment wearing pepperand-salt pullovers and usually surrounded by a small modicum of disorder, and soon shows his preference for Claire's apartment, whose decor is the absolute antithesis: cream-coloured upper walls and ceilings, extensive dark wood panelling and furnishings, fronds, chinoise art objects and paintings, an 'older' provenance altogether. This is an organic environment, with a degree of 'natural' mess or at least absence of the severely regimented, frigid high modernism of hard surfaces, sharp edges, and cold hues of the Mantle premises. Claire herself is usually in white, as opposed to the darker formality of Elliot's dress or the rumpled earth tones of Beverly's. There is an aesthetic war between opposing moral and emotional forces going on here whose terms stretch back to the Cartesian modernist architecture of Stereo and Crimes of the Future, on the one hand, and the dark woody textures of the 'brood shack' in The Brood, on the other. Its climax and aftermath are visible in the wreckage of dereliction that overwhelms the Mantle Clinic near the end of the film: a horrifying image of the destruction wrought upon the 'controlled' world through the process of 'letting go.' The film concretely visualizes both states: the world of encapsulation and control is unlivable; the abandonment of it is worse. The film's patterns of lighting are also revealing and expressive. The

Dead Ringers

275

Mantles' environment is dark in its domestic settings, evenly lit but cool and controlled in their offices, starkly chiaroscuro in the operating room. Claire's world is characterized instead by an open luminosity, and at first this is a great relief. If the Mantles' darkened, over-ordered privacy had seemed entirely oppressive, and Claire's more natural and whiter shades of light liberating, now the liberating/Claire light begins to lay Beverly bare and defenceless, and the darkness of the Mantle apartment starts to look like shelter. Even before Claire's departure, when Beverly's relationship with her first shows signs of seriousness, there is an alteration of the lighting conditions at his office: in the scene immediately following his quarrel with Elliot about Claire, he is at his desk talking to an insistent patient ('We don't do husbands'), and is illuminated with a big, blank square of outdoor light through the large window. The effect is subtle, but it prefigures the condition Beverly will face as he continues to try to separate from Elliot and unite with Claire. The first strong example of this occurs when Claire leaves him to go on a job: he is flooded and attacked by a harsh sunlight conning through the door she opens to depart. This shot, with its very wideangle lens and severe compositional angles, introduces a new inflection that inverts the earlier dark/light hierarchy of values. Thereafter, again and again Beverly is blasted and withered by pale daylight, his strength seems sapped by it as, in his condition of misery and helplessness, he is repeatedly placed near a sunlight-admitting window. This occurs as he telephones Claire on location, as he sweatily shoots up during office hours, and most strikingly of all as he attempts to detox under the tutelage of Elliot. In the latter scenes he is in the Mantle apartment, but sitting (or huddling, or fetally curled) next to the Venetian blinds drawn to let in sunlight. Only after he has given up Claire and relapsed into craziness and then mutual addiction with Elliot does he escape this light and move back into a now ever-darker and more junk-crowded 'home' environment. His trip out to the telephone kiosk after Elliot's death (to phone Claire) is the last blast of this withering light - now unambiguously cold and empty in reflection of its incapacity to do anything good for Beverly The entire schema pits dark against light in a set of parallel connections that also includes inside against outside, encapsulation against escape, narcissism against longing. Beverly tries to get away from Elliot to Claire, but Claire's welcoming light turns hostile when Beverly discovers that she cannot fulfil his emotional yearning and he cannot escape from himself. Once more the situation is concretely visualized, and once more the mise en scene actu-

276 The Artist as Monster

ally shows how the first state is unsatisfactory and the second is worse. It might be noted that the Venetian blinds of the Mantle quarters, so often present and emphasized in important scenes, seal off the light or admit it, and become a mini-symbol of the entire situation: no wonder a shot of these blinds is included in the final post-mortem sequence, and no wonder it has such an emotional effect. Finally, Dead Ringers takes a step towards art-cinema (or back towards it, if one considers Stereo and Crimes of the Future as art-cinema). The sense that this is also a step away from genre-cinema has already been mentioned: the mere absence of the extra-natural qualities of science-fiction or horror narratives brings the film away from the 'popular/ And now that they are no longer marked so strongly by 'popular' codes, Cronenberg's peculiar uniqueness and obsessiveness and intensity start to look not only anti-popular, but anti-classical - and hence more like non-mainstream, alternative, personal, or in a word artcinema. This register shift is also visible, though, in the visual style of the film. This is very clear in the most daringly stylized (and dazzling) images of the film: for example, the operating-room sequences, or the first shot of Beverly's canopied hospital bed seen in radiant geometric solitude, or the ritualized shot of Elliot prone on the operating chair rising up hieratically into the frame. But even in the more traditionally Cronenbergian elements of 'rational' decor, there is a new sharpness, almost a hyper-refinement. The 'Italian furniture' syndrome takes on an inhuman polish that is of course partly an embodiment of the inhuman principles which that decor embodies, but is also, in its hard, shining, deeply glossed way, an aesthetic statement that the film itself is making. At these moments Dead Ringers looks very much like a certain variant of alienated high-modernist art-cinema, expressing both its alienation and its faultless and airless perfection in the very same style choice. Again, to an extent this strategy has always been present in Cronenberg's work, and perhaps it is the arrival of Peter Suschitzsky as cinematographer that pushes it over a certain line. But one can say with confidence that nothing in Cronenberg's work to date looks quite as sensuously cold and perfect and alienating as the Mantles' apartment, and that when Cronenberg arrives at a kind of logical totalization of this style in Crash, the mind's eye flits back to Dead Ringers as a crucial step along the road.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Naked Lunch (1991) 'It's a very literary high'

From the first moment anyone started asking him questions about himself as a filmmaker, David Cronenberg has talked about William Burroughs as a model and influence, and as early as 1981 expressed the desire to make a film version of Naked Lunch} So when this event at last came to pass ten years later, no one having any kind of interest in Cronenberg could have been very surprised. Burroughs's book was published in 1959, and within a few years (especially after winning a landmark censorship trial) became a benchmark for transgressive modernist writing that challenged and outraged its readers. Naked Lunch has no coherent narrative or even narrative line. It is a disparate series of sketches or 'routines' (as Burroughs referred to them), populated with flat, stylized characters, regularly modulating into modernist poetic diction, and suffused with cruel humour and a savage satirical edge. In effect, it is a collection of separate fragments, ranging in length from a handful of pages to a couple of dozen, sometimes treating loosely related situations, sometimes with recurring personages, but really giving the impression of having been individually composed and thrown together in a collage-like manner - which indeed was the manner of the book's initial writing and later assembly. Some of the sketches take the form of monologue or dialogue scenes, so there is a dramatic dimension to much of the writing. But altogether it is difficult to think of an extended work of prose fiction less amenable to any kind of staging or adaptation. It is misdescribed as a novel, and the adjective 'unfilmable/ often applied to it, is transparently accurate. Surprisingly, however, there have been a number of projects to film the book, including an abortive one by Burroughs himself in collaboration with Brion Gysin and Antony Balch only a few years after it was published. There was no rea-

278 The Artist as Monster

son to suppose that Cronenberg could have expected to succeed in this task, and he himself said that a literal filming (whatever that might have looked like) 'would cost $400 or 500 million... and ... be banned in every country in the world/ and would probably be 'a very nasty kind of soft, satirical, social satire of the Britannia Hospital variety, with no emotional content and without the beauty, grace and potency of Bur roughs's literary style/2 Adaptation and biography In the event, Cronenberg's film spends no time at all trying to adapt Burroughs's book to the screen. All that remains of Burroughs's Naked Lunch are a handful of passages, transcribed directly - though of course in a different narrative context than the book offers (the book has no continuous narrative context). Some character names survive, though the characters they are assigned to in the film have different functions than they do in the original. Of the common characters, only Dr Benway has a complex function in both book and film - and again, his role in the film is vastly different. The film's protagonist is William Lee; the book has no protagonist. The character William Lee (also a nom de plume of Burroughs himself) does indeed occur in the book; but there he is a kind of blank witness or agent in a few parts of the book and so flat in characterization that he is scarcely more than a name one of the many cartoon-like personages inhabiting Burroughs's 'routines/3 Typically, passages written directly or delivered as dialogue 'routines7 by different characters in the book are in the film put in the mouth of Lee, who recites them to other characters. Sometimes a line of dialogue or a momentary situation from the book is visible in the action. In addition, the film's opening sequences have a basis in Burroughs's short story 'Exterminator!'; other elements derive from his early unfinished novel Queer and from other early materials not published for many years (many now anthologized in the collection Interzone)) yet others may be seen as reflections of passages from Burroughs's 'Nova Trilogy' (The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express). The vast majority of the film, including most of the characters and all the narrative action, is whole-cloth invention. In truth, the resemblances between the book and the film in the area of content are slight. Indeed, even to call the film Naked Lunch is highly misleading and might have given rise to outraged objections if the filmmaker had not had the imprimatur of Burroughs himself.4

Naked Lunch

279

Instead the film offers something quite different - namely a narrative of the writing of Naked Lunch. Cronenberg has made an interpretation of the book's underlying impetus, and of Burroughs's psychological problems arising from drug use, homosexuality, the act of writing, and the death of his wife - none of this at all explicit in Naked Lunch the book - and made a movie of that. In outline, what emerges is a story about Bill Burroughs's agonized journey, through drug addiction, wife-killing, homosexuality, and exile, to the profession of writer. Here, actual historical events are distorted, recast, and often difficult to recognize (though one can certainly piece some of them together), and are more in the nature of a poetic reduction of quasi-history into a delirious and dreamlike allegory. In September of 1951, while they were residing in Mexico, Burroughs shot his wife Joan fatally in the head while drunkenly attempting to play 'a game of William Tell' with her. After travels to South America and a stay in New York, he went in 1953 to live in the international quarter (the 'Interzone') of Tangiers, where he worked on a set of disconnected writings that were later to become Naked Lunch. All these things have their equivalents in the film. Its protagonist Bill Lee is a stand-in for the historical Bill Burroughs (and is played by Peter Weller with Burroughs's own flat and affectless countenance and voice and omnipresent fedora); his Beat friends Martin and Hank are versions of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac; Burroughs's drug-addicted residence in Tangiers during the writing of the book is depicted as literally a prolonged hallucination; during this period he takes a young Arab lover named Kiki, just as Burroughs did; and above all his 'accidental' shooting of Joan is imported into the action and made into a central event - even though Joan the person and the manner of her death are completely absent from both Naked Lunch and Burroughs's other writing of the period, even the letters. Moreover, there is hardly a character in the film who does not derive in some way (sometimes very tenuously or almost unrecognizably transformed) from a literary or biographical source in Burroughs. But Cronenberg has scrambled these events thoroughly and added many wrinkles of his own. In response to the wild and fantastical aspects of Burroughs's writing, with its science-fiction and horror-conspiracy elements, Cronenberg re-enters the world of cinematic special effects - immediately after having exited it in Dead Ringers. The film is full of 'creatures': giant speaking beetle-crabs that later meld with typewriters to become fleshy insectoid machines; seven-foot silver-

280 The Artist as Monster

white reptilian 'Mugwumps7 with multiple head-penises; a huge monstrous centipede with the face of a man. All these creatures, and other related 'effects' material in the film, are by-products of hallucination, here induced by 'invented7 drugs that stand in for their real-world equivalents of various opium derivatives and hallucinogenics. These drugs - insecticide powder, ground-up centipede, Mugwump-jism are connected with the very things that their effects have caused the subject to hallucinate. Although crucial aspects of this environment come straight from Burroughs7s writing (insects, Mugwumps, drug addiction) or from his life, their realization is entirely Cronenbergian both on the level of 'creatures7 (the 'bug-writer7 realm especially) and on the level of philosophy (the film's idea of artistic creation). Hallucination as action The action takes place in New York City in 1953, where Lee is an exterminator who becomes addicted to pyrethrum insecticide as a drug. He hallucinates a giant beetle with a speaking dorsal anus that tells him to kill his wife, then 'accidentally7 shoots his wife after taking a more powerful drug made from giant centipede. He then 'flees7 to 'Interzone/ a version of Tangiers - but at a number of moments it is clear that Inter zone itself is a self-projected delusion, and that Lee has in fact never left New York. In Interzone, now 'inspired7 by insectoid and other creature-typewriters, he plunges into the utterly strange and fevered activity of becoming a writer. But this activity is experienced by Lee as some kind of obscure espionage drama, in which he is 'filing reports7 to shadowy controllers on the nefarious activities of 'Interzone Inc.,7 while at other times he relapses into panicked disorientation or crushing loneliness. Here also he encounters another version of his wife Joan (played again by Judy Davis), but this time she is a writer, Joan Frost, married to another writer, Tom Frost - both of them anglophone emigres, and almost certainly dreamlike versions of Jane and Paul Bowles, with whom Burroughs was friendly in Tangiers. This kind of hybrid of a historical personage with a psychological projection of the protagonist's inner anguish is very typical of Cronenberg's method, and is simultaneously emotionally disturbing and narratively uninterpretable. Indeed, it is most often quite impossible to say or even guess what is 'really7 going on in the film: everything has been reduced to the disordered mental landscape of a drug user with very peculiar idiosyncrasies. All that we can tell in the end is that in some way the

Naked Lunch

281

writer discovers the falsity of all his alibis and self-projections, and recognizes the source of his profession as a desperate response to an inner condition of self-deception, guilt, and torment. But in spite of the difficulties the film's narrative presents, it can still be said to have a continuous and in the end coherent theme and basic action, and is of an entirely different species than Burroughs's collection of brilliant shards. In place of the book's disconnected, only locally narrativized stream of consciousness, the film presents a first-person delirium - a delirium deriving from a conflation of Burroughs's confessions-of-adrug-addict with a reading of Naked Lunch's discontinuities as the products of a radically (drug-)altered consciousness. So what is modernist fragmentation in Burroughs becomes radically subjective drughallucination in Cronenberg; and the book's non-narrative becomes the film's almost-unreadable narrative of delirium. A massively hallucinated world populated by bizarre and fantastic physical manifestations, a world made up of the delirious Impossible' perceptions of a central character through whose experience we see almost everything, a narrative environment in which the viewer lacks crucial information as to objective events: what all these characteristics forcibly recall is Videodrome. In fact, Naked Lunch and Videodrome are sibling films in the Cronenberg canon. Videodrome's systematic representation of hallucinations within the realist apparatus of mainstream cinema and not as carefully marked-off subjective Visions' is once more adopted in Naked Lunch. Although (as with Videodrome) it is finally impossible to say exactly how much of the film is fantasy and how much is 'real,' there are moments amidst the hallucination of Interzone that refer explicitly to the 'actual' events of which most of the surrounding scenes are the purely subjective experience. And there is one extended sequence of this kind: the visit of Martin and Hank in which they sort out the manuscript pages of Naked Lunch and leave Lee to his drugs and hallucinations in Interzone until such time as he has finished his book. This completion, we may infer, coincides with Lee's re-shooting of Joan and his entry into Annexia at the end of the film. These latter events are no less hallucinated than anything in Interzone, and they may not be read literally under any circumstances - so that the film never really exits from the world of Naked Lunch fantasy. But the film has by this point endorsed the subjective 'imagined' to such an extent that its status if anything surpasses that of the 'actual/ and the fact that the work resolves itself only on the former level and never reenters the world of Martin and Hank is merely the final insistence on

282 The Artist as Monster

the primacy of the subjective and of writing. There is no question, therefore, of the subordination of the private, the delusional, the hallucinated to the realm of objective occurrence, nor of the subordination of writing to living: quite the reverse in fact. This installation of artistic (re)creation as an event on the same level of ontological importance as those proto-experiences that have preceded it and formed its basic materials, this insistence that artistic activity is not secondary but as primary as life activity, shows the degree to which Cronenberg is serious about his ideas of art and his vocation of artistic creator. Moreover, the practice of art is the realization of guilt and the obsessive, regurgitative repetition of the sin that occasioned it and the realization of damnation that followed it. Not only does Videodrome have a dreamlike insistence and grip in the midst of a sea of rational incoherence, but it is a work where style steps into the gaps created by narrative obfuscation - it is woven in a dense fabric of imagistic tropes, fragmentary cross-references, and contextless repetitions. Naked Lunch, too, has this kind of density, and a really complete reading of it would require a small book, since virtually every scene contains some kind of imagistic connection, reference, marker, or metaphor, usually imbedded somewhere in the mise en scene but sometimes also in the performances or the action. If Naked Lunch lacks something of the astonishing febrile intensity and out-of-control wildness of its predecessor, it identifies the world of hallucination and monstrosity even more pointedly as a by-product of personal transgression, and now connects that transgression explicitly with the practice of artistic creation. Cronenberg's Naked Lunch, then, has two fundamental characteristics: first, it is the story of an artist, and an investigation of what an artist is and how he gets to be one; and second, its events are deeply subjectivized through their experience as the drug-hallucinations of the protagonist, and have an oneiric instability and uncertainty that constantly challenges the viewer trying to 'read7 the film. Burroughs, writing, and crime One of the crucial elements of Cronenberg's interpretation of Burroughs-the-artist is a notion often expressed by Burroughs about the literal danger of the artistic imagination, or at least the especially corrosive and ugly aspects of Burroughs's own artistic imagination. The kind of writing Burroughs was discovering in this period, with its frag-

Naked Lunch 283

mentation and heterogeneity of forms, has as one major basis the 'routine' - a kind of dramatized funny dialogue sketch or story implying a narrator, but whose humour is almost always destabilized by the horrific cruelties and monstrosities it contains. This wild humour skates repeatedly over the line into nauseated disgust and is liable also to disappear suddenly as it modulates into poetic or denunciatory seriousness. It is also dialectically torn between scathing satire of the rapacious depravity and hypocrisy of the human animal and an equally caustic but much more disturbed sense that Burroughs himself is rapacious and depraved, and even that the wildness of the satire is a volatile and incoherent defence mechanism springing from the author's desperation at his own behaviour and feelings. Hence Burroughs's sense that the 'routine' was something different from ordinary writing. In a communication to Ginsberg at this period, he spells this out: What distinguishes the routine from writing, painting, music? It is not completely symbolic but subject to slide over into action at any time. (Cutting off finger joint, wrecking the car, etc. In a sense, the whole Nazi movement was a great, humourless, evil routine on Hitler's part.) Routines are uncontrollable, unpredictable, charged with potential danger for Lee himself, and anyone close to him is liable to be caught in the line of fire. I mean the so-called innocent bystanders. Actually there are no Innocent bystanders/ In the immortal words of Huncke, 'We are all guilty of everything/

Of all forms, the routine is closest to bullfighting. The routine artist is always trying to outdo himself, to go a little further, to commit some incredible but appropriate excess. A routine, like a bullfight, needs an audience. In fact the audience is an integral part of the routine. But unlike a bullfight, the routine can endanger the audience.5 The art material is thus only fitfully under the control of the artist, and its basic element - the most ugly and damaging impulses in the author's psyche - are unstable and dangerous because they continually threaten to move from the world of imagination into the world of action. This kind of artist is always in danger of moving from entertaining and enlightening his audience into preying on it, psychologically maiming or destroying it, even murdering it. Of all the important reconfigurations and interpretive leaps that occur in the film, perhaps the most unexpected is the importation into

284 The Artist as Monster

the action of the character of Joan and the connection made between her death and the activity of writing. Cronenberg's literary source here is the introductory essay Burroughs wrote for the very belated 1985 appearance of his early novel Queer. The manuscript of Queer (never really finished) dates from 1953, soon after the publication of Junky and well before the completion of Naked Lunch. Burroughs's introduction attributes both the novel and his subsequent career as a writer to a repression/displacement of his feelings about his wife's death: When I started to write this companion text to Queer, I was paralyzed with a heavy reluctance, a writer's block like a straitjacket: 'I glance at the manuscript of Queer and feel I simply can't read it. My past was a poisoned river from which one was fortunate to escape, and by which one feels immediately threatened, years after the events recorded. -Painful to an extent I find it difficult to read, let alone to write about. Every word and gesture sets the teeth on edge/ The reason for this reluctance becomes clearer as I force myself to look: the book is motivated and formed by an event which is never mentioned, in fact is carefully avoided: the accidental shooting death of my wife, Joan, in September 1951. Why should I wish to chronicle so carefully these extremely painful and unpleasant and lacerating memories? While it was I who wrote Junky, I feel that I was being written in Queer. I was also taking pains to ensure further writing, so as to set the record straight: writing as inoculation. As soon as something is written, it loses the power of surprise, just as a virus loses its advantage when a weakened virus has created alerted antibodies. So I achieved some immunity from further perilous ventures along these lines by writing my experience down. I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan's death, and to a realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing. I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from Control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.6

Here, Burroughs identifies his writing as an involuntary psychological defence mechanism, a compulsive narrativization of ugly impulses as a means to ward off their realization in more concrete ways that might

Naked Lunch

285

'surprise' him. The killing of Joan stands as the traumatic defining case of such an ugly surprise - and also of the routine's danger of slipping over into the real world and really harming someone. Burroughs also interprets Queer's protagonist as haunted and driven by a precognition, and the author by a suppressed postcognition, of the terrible event of Joan's death. The novel itself shows nothing of this process: without the introduction no one, I believe, could arrive at such an analysis of it. Cronenberg takes from Queer the bare mechanism of the protagonist William Lee, but also Burroughs's interpretation of the character in the introduction: The event towards which Lee feels himself inexorably driven is the death of his wife by his own hand, the knowledge of possession, a dead hand waiting to slip over his like a glove. So a smog of menace and evil rises from the pages, an evil that Lee, knowing and yet not knowing, tries to escape with frantic flights of fantasy: his routines, which set one's teeth on edge because of the ugly menace just behind or to one side of them, a presence palpable as a haze. ... [A]s I walked down the street [just hours before the shooting of Joan] ... a feeling of loss and sadness that had weighed on me all day so I could hardly breathe intensified to such an extent that I found tears streaming down my face ... This heavy depression and a feeling of doom occurs again and again in the text.7 Cronenberg's Lee also feels himself driven and controlled, is also subject to desolating moments of terrible unexplained sadness, also attempts to reconfigure the horror of this condition in 'routines' and theatricalized behaviour. And above all Cronenberg makes explicit the connection between this suffering and writing, really the centre of his film. Again, none of these crucial features is clearly visible in either Naked Lunch or Queer (notwithstanding Burroughs's claim that the 'heavy depression... occurs again and again in the text' of the latter). They all derive from Burroughs's extra-textual post facto remarks of 1985. Cronenberg the self-conscious artist The question of his standing as an 'artist' has always been in the forefront of Cronenberg's presentation of himself and his work.8 He has many times told the story of his initial ambition, as a university under-

286 The Artist as Monster

graduate student, to be a writer. His most powerful influences were Nabokov and Burroughs, with mention also of such names as Kafka, Beckett, and Henry Miller. When he switched to filmmaking, according his own account it was partly because of an inability to escape these dominant literary influences in the realm of the written word. However, as a practising artist in the world of cinema, his models (he says) were not art-filmmakers like Antonioni or Fellini, but rather these same writers. In fact, it is perhaps closer to the truth to say that although (as I argue in the chapter on Stereo) Cronenberg at first relied almost of necessity on the cinematic example of underground film of the 1960s, he still preferred to take as models for the role of artist to which he aspired writers such as Nabokov and Burroughs. Stereo and Crimes of the Future are clearly art-films in their rejection of conventional narrative and in their 'underground7 if not exactly avantgarde tone, and as such they broadcast the ambition of their maker to be an artist. Cronenberg's problems in this sphere began when he shifted from making self-consciously clever and visually modernist little uncommercial anti-narratives to making blood-soaked and creature-filled low-budget horror movies suitable for playing at drive-ins and fleapits to audiences of the very lowest common denominator. In person, the thoughtful, literate, articulate Cronenberg was an excellent match for the stereotype of an artist; but the maker of Shivers, Rabid, The Brood, and Scanners could have no resemblance whatever to that stereotype in the superficial observation of cultural commentators looking for overt markers of 'seriousness' and 'difficulty/ This was especially true in his native Canada, where Cronenberg got caught and temporarily shredded in the concentrated fire of a general high-low cultural snobbery and the more specific passions of cultural nationalism, with its polarities of bad American cinema (trashy commercial genre-movies) and good Canadian cinema (worthy uncommercial 'stories of our own7). But however low he sank on the cultural scale, his own assessments of his career always reasserted the claim to artistry, to seriousness and importance of aim, to membership in the guild of literary modernism. In justification of working in 'commercial7 cinema, he could (somewhat defensively) cite Nabokov's jaded enthusiasm for the exhilaration of 'philistine vulgarity,7 point out that even Fellini and Antonioni had hits, or soberly note that he could never emulate Kafka's career ('to die unpublished is something you can't do in filmmaking7).9 The utter self-consciousness of this pursuit of the status of artist is conveyed in

Naked Lunch 287

the worry he felt in adapting a popular novel for the screen in The Dead Zone: 'I was aware of the whole concept of me as a writer/director - an auteur in the French sense. I could have driven myself crazy wondering what the French critics would think of me doing something I hadn't written myself, and based on someone else's novel/10 By the mideighties Cronenberg had won a Genie (Oscar-equivalent) from the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television,11 and over the next halfdozen years received major retrospectives in Toronto, New York, Paris, and Tokyo, together with many other honours and a burgeoning international literature about his work. Even the huge commercial success of The Fly did not interfere too much with this process of growing acceptance as a serious artist. In Canada, Cronenberg had mysteriously metamorphosed from a national embarrassment into 'Canada's great film artist/ Then in 1990 he was ordained a Chevalier de I'ordre des arts et des lettres in France. Coming not long afterwards, the adaptation of Naked Lunch - an authentic masterpiece of modernist literature as taught in university English courses - with the approval of the author was the final unmistakable sign that Cronenberg really was an artist like Nabokov and Burroughs, his ultimate vindication and the proof that his image of himself was true. (When the film received widespread praise from critics and performed well at festivals but then disappointingly at the box office, Cronenberg's resemblance to a 'film artist' became even clearer.) In one interview during the production of Naked Lunch, Cronenberg more or less spelled out this idea; after expounding at length on the differences between himself and Burroughs, he says: 'But there is a similarity: the similarity is that we both wear our Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters medal proudly/12 The transgressive artist-hero What kind of artist exactly did Cronenberg set himself to become? It is significant that the same handful of names, and not others, come up in his discourse about the artist: among modernists, never painters (or filmmakers!), always writers; and among modernist writers, never Joyce or Eliot, always Burroughs and Nabokov. No doubt the appearance around I96013 of both Lolita and Naked Lunch was crucially timed for Cronenberg (who entered university in 1963 and would have been at his most intellectually receptive in these years). It is the oppositional aspects of these writers, their 'difficulty' and the affront they propose to 'normal' society, that surely draws Cronenberg's attention - particu-

288 The Artist as Monster

larly Burroughs, a homosexual drug-addicted violent outrager of bourgeois norms. The heroic artist, plunging into worlds not visible to the culture at large, daring to adopt a subject and a language that does not pander to the shallow conformities of everyday life, daring also to confront a more painful and frightening insight into human life and personal experience, is the larger model here. This is nothing like the ironic and detached postmodern persona of the artist: rather it is firmly modernist or, more narrowly, romantic-existentialist. But peculiar to Cronenberg's reading of this model is that sense of the transgressive, the horrific, even the sinful, that is embodied in Nabokov and especially Burroughs, together with their different styles of playfulness, insouciance, or detachment of tone in the face of this awfulness. Accompanying all this is the artist's condition of isolation, his differentness from others that places him as an 'outsider' in society. Cronenberg specifically identifies both Burroughs and Nabokov as 'aliens/14 and clearly he feels that he shares that status.15 The artist's difference has to do not just with his willinginess to do and say things that others shy away from, but with the particular nature of the special insights with which he is endowed, or cursed - once again, their rawness, their unacceptableness, their horror. The longest and most elaborate quotation from the book in Cronenberg's Naked Lunch is the famous 'talking asshole' routine.16 Lee recites the story of 'the man who taught his asshole to talk/ As this story progresses, the asshole talks more and more, the man cannot silence it, and it tells him 'It is you who will shut up in the end/ which indeed he does as his mouth is overgrown with a sticky transparent jelly,17 and finally his brain is taken over and extinguished. Cronenberg says: 'The talking asshole, and I mean no disrespect here, is Burroughs himself, in the sense that's it's the part of you that you don't want to listen to, that's saying things that are unspeakable, that are too basic, too true, too primordial, and too uncivilized and too tasteless, to be listened to, but are there nonetheless.'18 Moreover, 'if you're a serious writer, questioning, probing the status quo is what you do - you have to do, you're not worth anything if you're not.'19 (We may note in passing how restrictive this definition is: an art that seeks, for example, to be serene or celebratory will hardly qualify.) The artist who points out inconvenient truths, the 'talking asshole/ is not likely to be popular. But in Cronenberg's case (and Burroughs's too, though somewhat differently), the artist's attitude towards his own work and what inspires it is more complex than the model of an indelicate blurter-out of embarrassing facts would imply. For the trans-

Naked Lunch 289

gressiveness in his films is not simply something that he bravely recognizes but that society is too timid to look at. Rather the transgressive appetites he feels and perspectives he is drawn to are felt by the artist himself to be terrible and dangerous - to himself and to others. Avatars of the artist The notion that art is dangerous is always present in Cronenberg's work, if we call the projects of science in the early films 'art/ From this perspective, art in Shivers is designing visceral sex-parasites and sadistically implanting them in the bodies of others, creating a landscape of maniacal sex-zombies whose activities can be consumed by viewers in an 'outing' of repressed transgressive desire, while the whole undertaking is regarded by the film's authorial sensibility as an exercise in the most admired traditions of modernist transgressive art. In Rabid, art is giving porno goddess Marilyn Chambers a 'creative cancer' bodily weapon that once more transforms the landscape into a spectacle of frenzied, violent abjection. In The Brood, art becomes explicitly 'going all the way through' your transgressive feelings. Here the transgressing monsters are deliberately created and their creation requires talent (Nola is Raglan's 'star pupil'). Conceiving, gestating, and giving birth to them is a creative labour like the artist's, in a literalization of metaphors often used to describe artistic creation. The brood-children are thus works of art; but their function is not to soothe the savage breast or hold the mirror up to nature but rather to beat people to death with blunt objects. And the brood are of course ultimately the children not of Nola's rage, but of Cronenberg's - though the film never signals this. In each of the first three features, then, the creative process, with its products, is extremely dangerous and destructive; it makes people into ravening beasts or homicidally assaults them or both. But this activity is not as yet clearly identifiable in the texts as that of artistic creation, or of the effect of works of art. Scanners is the first film to present this idea even indirectly. With their unusual sensitivities and their access to and command over the involuntary processes of the psyche, scanners are like artists as conceived in the romantic-existentialist mould; moreover, they possess 'outsider' status by virtue of the helpless suffering their gift (initially) causes for themselves. Once more, artistic creativity is essentially dangerous: scanners begin in a condition of trauma and progress to the stage where they can use their powers to drive others to madness or

290 The Artist as Monster

suicide or bodily combustion. The secondary character of Ben Pierce makes the connection with art directly, since he actually is a sculptor. It is noteworthy that in his first-ever picture of an artist qua artist, Cronenberg presents a figure who is the opposite of detached and experimenting - the opposite, that is, of the distant, manipulative scientist. Instead, Pierce is consumed by inner torment to the point of madness, and his horrific artworks represent a desperate attempt simply to get some of the awful ideas and feelings overwhelming him outside his head where they cannot hurt him so much. The ironies of this 'rehabilitation through art' are acid. And certainly Pierce reinforces the general notion of scanner-artists as martyred by a powerful state of chaos within themselves. Yet among its many optimisms, Scanners is also optimistic about the practice of art, since it suggests that the artist can learn to control his powers instead of being devoured by them, and holds out at least the possibility that he can use them for good instead of only as weapons causing harm. Nevertheless, even here art is the ability to focus your inner trauma so effectively outwards that you can explode the head of your viewer. Videodrome takes the (for Cronenberg) revolutionary step of making a major investment of the film's sensibility in the character of a central protagonist; and this immediately has a profound effect on the representation of experimentation/creativity and on the related question of what the 'trouble/ the horror, of the film is and where it comes from. Now the idea of art as a brave and dangerous act of transgression receives a quite new, and much more forthright, expression in Cronenberg's world. Max Renn's profession of TV-station owner in search of 'radical' transgressive programming situates him uncertainly both as producer and consumer of images of sex and violence - and in the end both as perpetrator and victim of their consequences. Indeed, the whole question of who the artist is here is muddied by the film's schizoid narrative that is alternately or simultaneously paranoid and confessional. Brian O'Blivion is the inventor who enables the problem to happen and is instantly recognizable as a proprietary Cronenberg mad scientist, and Barry Convex is another patriarch-perpetrator, while both Nicki and Bianca often seem to be 'creating' the situation more than Max is. But the real explorer and experimenter in the film is Max. Like the Cronenberg scientist, he is searching for some kind of 'breakthrough'; and again like him he is trying to do this at arm's length (he refuses to actually produce transgressive programs himself). But in opening up and exploring forbidden desire even to the extent that he

Naked Lunch

291

does, Max is drawn into the overpowering maelstrom of unleashed forces that constitute the transgressive realm. These take the principal form of terrifying hallucinations - visions whose similarity to the artistic imagination seems very clear in a retrospective viewpoint from the other side of Naked Lunch, and whose effect is to transform and monstrosify his apprehension of his own body. He moves from the polarity of male ('scientific') detachment and domination to that of female abjection and powerlessness, and in occupying the latter world with identity-destroying intensity becomes Cronenberg's first really fullfledged model of the dreadful sins that may be committed by and martyrdom that may overtake the transgressive artist. Now to be an artist is to follow your sadistic impulses; to hurt those whom you love; and to see your body metamorphosed into a gaping wound or a terrifying organic weapon-thing. Videodrome struggles to understand the relation between private transgressive appetite (sadistic sexual fantasies) and the public production/reproduction of this appetite and the domain of violence it opens up (the Videodrome signal with its appalling hallucinations and 'programmed' acts of homicide); but the climate of delirium and instability on both sides of the camera is so extreme that the film is unable and perhaps unwilling to think through its implications fully Nevertheless the crucial step has been taken. Videodrome unites the experimenter with the experimented-upon, and (in a more indirect way) it presents the artist as the victim of the same 'daring' and 'transgressive' insights and desires that make him an artist in the first place. He doesn't simply imagine or write about monsters: he is a monster. Moreover, the medium through which everything occurs is the video screen, close relation of the cinematic screen of Videodrome and every other Cronenberg film. Images produce and contain bodily abjection, sexual violence, and self-dissolution: images kill. The Dead Zone presents another portrait of the artist. Cronenberg remarks about the protagonist, Johnny Smith: '[H]e has the seeds of being a visionary, which might as well be the archetype for an artist, the same as the scanner was ... He is an outsider even though he looks like a normal guy, but he knows he's not. He's cut off from the life he thought he had.'20 Even more than in Scanners, the artist's visions are horrific, and they leave him wasted and riven by the visionary experience. But Johnny remains cocooned in repression: sexuality and abjection are not the depths of his own nature into which he has penetrated. Notwithstanding the meaningful links between him and the sex-killer

292 The Artist as Monster

Dodd, the incursions of horror come from outside, from the experience of others. So that although Johnny is martyred by his awful vision as fatally as any of Cronenberg's quasi-artist-protagonists, in this 'whitened' version the special gift that isolates and destroys the artist also has an unambiguously positive function. Here, the artistic visions are involuntary, traumatizing, fixed on catastrophes that are happening or will happen - but they are useful and beneficent because they save people and prevent harm. Art is dangerous here - but only to the artist, not to society, which it can warn of danger and preserve. Perhaps because Johnny has renounced the body and desire, and stays the repressed and self-denying melancholiac, his insight into transgression and catastrophe does not infect him, but is merely visited upon him. Now the melodramatic pathos of the 'female' sufferer that the artist again experiences does not extend to hallucinating a giant vagina in his abdomen as a punishment for his own sadistic desire. The Fly returns to the connection between the practice of art and scientific experimentation. Here for the first time is the triple conjunction of central male subject, inventing scientist, and catastrophically creating artist. Although Seth 'plays' his computer's keyboard in much the same spirit as he does his piano, the artistic function is even less explicit than in the preceding films. Seth's teleportation project has certain artistic overtones from the beginning (it is not for nothing that Ronnie compares the telepods to designer phonebooths), but it takes on really basic similarities to the Cronenbergian idea of art only when it becomes radicalized and sexualized. The transgression of boundaries, the 'breakthrough,' comes only after the scientific project - and the scientist - has been 'made crazy by the flesh.' Now Seth becomes the romantic-existentialist artist by plunging into the dangerous depths of his body to discover and bring to the surface his own desire. In doing so he makes himself into a monster: when science becomes art it becomes much more unstable and transformative, especially to the artist. Here, to become an artist is to turn into a fly. In the now familiar (Videodrome, The Dead Zone) fashion, the creative explorer ends in abject pathos, martyrdom, and melancholy loss of self - the central and most comprehensive victim of his own self-exploration. Even here, though very faintly, there is a hint of the anxiety that the monsters dredged up from the desire/abjection wellspring of creativity will enact some sadistic or violent impulse: Seth tells Ronnie that the monster he is turning into will hurt her. Dead Ringers's thematization of artistic creation has been discussed at some length in the previous chapter. But

Naked Lunch

293

we may just briefly recall that in that film artworks are instruments of sexual torture, and the artist is a deranged sadist seeking to cut open and penetrate women's bodies out of a frenzied desperation springing from incomplete subjectivity and the maddeningly frustrated search for imaginary unity in the body of the mother/Other. Again, the scientist (Beverly Mantle) becomes an artist exactly at the point where his project becomes unhinged, out of control, and destructive. And once more the male's sadistically dangerous creative work is used masochistically, melancholically, and fatally on the 'enfemaled' self. Naked Lunch, overtly dedicated to all the questions of artistic creation, returns to this arena with all the powers of its attention, and is so forceful and penetrating on this subject that it stands as a kind of final formulation and summation of all of Cronenberg's feelings on the matter. But this investigation is inflected, one might even say distorted to some extent, by its specific embodiment in the life and work of William Burroughs - or rather, in Cronenberg's idea of that life and work. Burroughs Agonistes Burroughs is as a model for Cronenberg for many reasons, including the daring and stylishness of his modernist literary methodology and, crucially, his 'outlaw' status as an artist. Burroughs the scion of a wealthy commercial family who dropped out to become a drug addict and homosexual; Burroughs the seeker for truth in exotic and disreputable places, 'down and out' in Mexico, South America, and Tangiers; Burroughs the radical iconoclast and scourge of conformist values; Burroughs the quarry of censors and police - these are important features of the model's makeup. But the most important factor of all is the savagery and deliberate offensiveness of much of Burroughs's material: its 'unspeakable,' 'primordial,' 'tasteless,' and also dangerous qualities. Sadistic homosexual voracity, misogyny, a cornucopia of the most ugly and repellant physical phenomena, human relations as pure depredation and pitiless bestiality, an obsessive return to the lowest and most 'inhuman': these are some of the basic materials of Burroughs's Weltanschauung. The 'naked lunch' is exactly the cannibalistic consumption of people by people, an undraped delineation of the Sadean exercise of power as the prime motivator for human action, a sense that desire itself is 'inhuman' in its instinct for the most predatory, the most degrading, the most transgressive. It is easy to compile a quick dossier showing the regurgitative pro-

294 The Artist as Monster

duction and obsessive return to scenes of violent depredation and sexual attraction/disgust in Burroughs's writing of the Naked Lunch period.21 Here are some almost random examples: He is hanged by reverent Negroes, his neck snaps with a squashed bug sound, cock rises to ejaculate and turn to viscid jelly, spread through the Body in shuddering waves, a monster centipede squirms in his spine. Jelly drops on the Hangman, who runs screaming in black bones. The centipede writhes around the rope and drops free with a broken neck, white juice oozing out. ('Words/ Interzone, 136-7) Two Arab women with bestial faces have pulled the shorts off a little blond French boy. They are screwing him with red rubber cocks. The boy snarls, bites, kicks, collapses in tears as his cock rises and ejaculates. (Naked Lunch, 78) In the terminals of Minraud. Saw the white bug juice spurt from ruptured spines. In the sex rooms of Minraud. While you wait. In Minraud time. The sex devices of flesh. The centipede penis. Insect hairs thru grey-purple flesh. Of the scorpion people. The severed heads. In tanks of sewage. Eating green shit. (The Soft Machine, 95) Penis flesh spreads through his body bursting in orgasm explosions giant cocks ejaculate lava under a black cloud boiling with monster crustaceans. Cold grey undersea eyes and hands touched Carl's body. The Comandante flipped him over with sucker hands and fastened his disk mouth to Carl's asshole. He was lying in a hammock of green hair, penis flesh hammers bursting his body. Hairs licked his rectum, spiraling tendrils scraping pleasure centers, Carl's body emptied in orgasm after orgasm, bones lit up green through flesh dissolved into the disk mouth with a fluid plop. (The Soft Machine, 105-6)

This kind of writing is not quite what one thinks of as embarrassing truth-telling. Undoubtedly it draws on the unconscious wells of 'universal' revulsion towards what is coded as vile and polluting in the boundaryless abject and sexual. But plunging head-first towards the very most nauseating clusters of the abject, transgressing against not just respectability and conformity but any form or restraint whatever, becomes at a certain stage not simply 'uncivilized7 or 'tasteless7 but a kind of evidence of a state of mental agony and near-damnation. If this

Naked Lunch

295

kind of vision is what is meant by (again in Cronenberg's words) a perspective that is 'too true' to be acceptable, then the 'basic/ 'primordial' condition of truth is that of a horrific nightmare - again, a very particular and restrictive notion of what constitutes base-level humanity in a psychological or philosophical sense. What needs to be stressed (and what is amply illustrated in these extracts) is the fear and revulsion saturating so much of Burroughs's imagination. If Burroughs is indeed a transgressive existentialist artist-hero, the effect of his expeditions into the depths of his being is to show transgressiveness not as daring and intrepid, but as full of loathing and dread. The wacky hilarity of the humour almost never obscures this underlying condition entirely, and the insouciance of many of the routines seems more unstable and insubstantial the more of Burroughs one reads. The heroic antisocial transgressiveness of Burroughs's drug use and homosexuality turns out not to be in any sense revolutionary and liberating, but profoundly horrifying to the writer himself. It is true that Burroughs is wonderfully accurate in his scalding parodies of the hypocrisy of governments, police, functionaries, plutocrats, and various other representatives of dominant and oppressive social power; and it is also true that the basis of his resistance to these and in fact all forms of power is his dual antisocial 'outsiderness' constituted by drugs and homosexuality. At certain times, too, he is taken with the idea of using good hallucinogenics (e.g., Yage) to drive out bad narcotics (e.g., heroin); and he often gleefully asserts the covert homosexuality of his heterosexual 'characters/ But at no point is he preaching the revolutionary benefits of either transgression. Instead, he is exploring, with ever-greater elaboration, intensity, and depth, his sense that drug addiction represents a condition of awful abjection and loss of self, and that sexuality in all forms (most centrally homosexuality) is a horrifying surrender to cruelty, filth, and revolting inhumanity. For whatever reason, Burroughs's philosophy throughout this period moved towards a more and more elaborate paranoia. Described by his friend and biographer Barry Miles as a man who 'doesn't believe that there's such a thing as a mistake,'22 Burroughs is relentlessly drawn to causal explanations of, in particular, every bad situation and every bad thing that happens. My own sense is that Burroughs - a man who has always felt outside and at odds, who has fallen into serious prolonged narcotics use and all the problems that come with it, who has accidentally shot his wife to death in an act of stupefying drunken negligence and has performed many other acts whose destructiveness he himself

296 The Artist as Monster

recognizes, who has feelings about his own sexuality that are ambivalent to say the least, and who through all this feels that his behaviour is occurring as the result of a series of inner promptings whose source is opaque and unreachable to his higher self - this man requires, as a matter of primary psychological self-defence, a paranoid explanation in which this situation is being willed by some malignant outer power. At first this is imagined as a shadowy conspiracy of governments, criminal organizations, big business interests, police, drug dealers, and a network of professional figures such as judges and doctors, all of whom somehow cooperate in a grand project to control and oppress ordinary individuals - and then it is imagined as an even more massive and universal conspiracy by yet more powerful and omnipresent forces. Burroughs and drugs The first medium of control that presents itself to Burroughs is drugs. During the period from the mid-forties to the publication of Naked Lunch in 1959, drugs and addiction constitute an enormous proportion of Burroughs's subject matter. Junky is more or less a straight memoir of the life of a heroin addict. Naked Lunch is full of drug situations, elaborate meditations on addiction, and a kind of constant attempt to extrapolate the dilemmas of drug use into a theory of the world, both psychological and political. The Yage Letters (1963) consists mostly of letters sent to Allen Ginsberg during Burroughs's mid-1950s odyssey to South America in search of Yage, a drug that Burroughs hoped would provide a definitive transforming insight while avoiding the addictive enslavement and the consciousness-cancellation of heroin: a kind of redemptive 'anti-junk/ in fact. And the rest of Burroughs's letters from this period are constantly issuing bulletins on the state of the author's relation to drugs: the difficulty or ease of finding them, the financial and personal problems created by them, various intentions or actual attempts to kick the habit, endless pronouncements on the ease or difficulty of accomplishing this. Burroughs builds heroin addiction into an entire allegory of private and social existence, rendering as universal metaphors the addict's need for the substance, the power exercised over the customer by both the vendor and the law, the way in which the drug reifies and homogenizes all desire and substitutes for all objects and all projects, the decay and dereliction that constitute the physical surroundings of one who is removed from any interest in the material world by the drug experience, and the irresistible opportuni-

Naked Lunch 297

ties for manipulation and control created by the gulf between the addict's abject dependence and the supplier's predatory power. Burroughs terms this set of parameters 'the algebra of need.'23 Caught between pushers and cops, the junky (or Burroughs at least) sees them as different manifestations of the same thing: a sadistic plot to torture him with drug dependency and drug withdrawal. This explanation even takes on a biomedical colouring, as Burroughs talks about 'junkcells' and sees the body as a kind of inner battleground of moral warfare. Junk addiction organizes the user's whole life, and causes him to do all kinds of things that would otherwise appear to be simply crazy and destructive. The need for drugs and the frustrations, humiliations, and bad consequences attached to it become the first foundation for the conspiracy of Control. Burroughs and sexual horror Sexuality is soon added to the list. Cronenberg has offered the opinion that when Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch, he 'had not at that point come to terms with being homosexual,' even though 'you expect something else from someone as extreme as Burroughs.'24 It is hard to disagree with at least the first part of this remark, as one encounters scores upon scores of passages in Burroughs's writing that connect sexual pleasure with cruelty, violence, and a deep revulsive reaction expressed in imagery of insects, monstrosity, and bodily disgust. The most scandalizing sections of Naked Lunch are the 'sex-hanging' passages, where boys are hanged as they are being sodomized, and at the moment of their necks snapping they ejaculate uncontrollably. This is a scenario that recurs obsessively throughout all of Burroughs's material from this period and is found again and again, especially in The Ticket That Exploded and The Soft Machine. It occurs so repeatedly, and regurgitatively, that it begins to seem like a film-loop that Burroughs is condemned to view over and over in his head - a metaphor that Burroughs himself comes close to using. Barry Miles quotes Ginsberg's explanation for this particular imagery: [T]here is the image of the man who is hung and comes involuntarily. That's an image of his own erotic fix. The involuntary orgasm when being screwed anally which he found a symbolic form of the man being hung.25

The key notion here is involuntariness. The subject has a sexual climax

298 The Artist as Monster

whether he wants to or not. Indeed, the fact that he has it even as he being hanged - publicly humiliated and tortured, executed - emphasizes rather forcibly that he doesn't want to: he is climaxing against his will, climaxing as a result of being tortured, in a scenario of horrific sadism and unwilling masochism. Another recurring scene, which seems almost like a variant of the hanging/coming one, has a young or sympathetic figure sexually assaulted by some older and completely evil personage or creature who metamorphoses explicitly into a monster as the act proceeds; the totally ugly and predatory attack is accompanied by a sexual response of the victim. Here is one example among many: During the sex act he metamorphosed himself into a green crab from the waist up, retaining human legs and genitals that secreted a caustic erogenous slime, while a horrible stench filled the hut.26

The other aspect of these torture and hanging scenarios is that so often it is not a man who is hanged, but a boy. Burroughs's own sexual preference is for youthful partners, adolescent ones. He ironically denies any taint of pedophilia in his own tastes. Interzone is crawling with pedophiles, citizens hung up on pre-puberty kicks. I don't dig it. I say anyone can't wait till thirteen is no better than a degenerate.27

At the same time he emphasizes the satirical and denunciatory aspects of his stance: The two chapters of Naked Lunch that have been described as pornographic are intended as a tract against Capital Punishment in the manner of Swift's Modest Proposal. If you want to drink blood and eat hangings, go to it boys. But leave us make it a Naked Lunch. I hear the boys in the back room say, 'Burroughs pulla the switch.' Well, maybe. Wouldn't you? I am not playing to lose. In fact, I am not playing at all. I mean it.28

The claim to a Swiftian satire is partially justified, since the chapters do display a cold outrage at the pleasure experienced by the audience of spectators; but for a true parallel to exist, Swift himself would have had to betray a genuine erotic thrill at the thought of roasting and eat-

Naked Lunch

299

ing Irish babies. 'Burroughs pulls the switch' indeed - that is, he attempts to escape moral accountability for his own appetites by projecting them onto a hypocritical and degenerate society. The question 'Wouldn't you?' is the ultimate, universal 'naked' question in Burroughs (and the sub-heading of Naked Lunch's last section, 'Atrophied Preface'), an appeal to the common principle of personal instinct in a sick-appetite-driven, kill-or-be-killed world. The answer is unspoken, but always 'Yes, you would.' What is inscribed here is an uneasiness, an ambivalence, an alternation between disgust at the hypocrisy of righteous citizens who are themselves sadistically excited by such spectacles and thoughts, and self-disgust for the excitement Burroughs feels himself. In his constant attempts to reassure himself that the young boys he has associated with, especially in Latin America and North Africa, are street-hardened, mercenary, and essentially unaffected by routine homosexual relations with a mature white man such as himself, he keeps sounding as though it is himself he is trying to convince, and the harsh, clear vision that always breaks through at some point in Burroughs sees the poverty and stolen childhoods of these boys. Consider the following fragment - not incorporated in any of the published material - included in a letter to Ginsberg written shortly after the death (at the hands of a jealous former partner) of Kiki, Burroughs's young lover in Tangiers: 'A boy walked by and looked at Carl with calm, clear young eyes. Carl followed the young figure down the tree-lined walk past the Greek wrestlers and the discus thrower with aching sadness. Train whistles, smell of burning leaves, harmonica music. Two boys masturbate each other in swimming pool change cubicle - smell of chlorine on the hard, young flesh. 'Carl was running down a wooden corridor in a curious green light. Steam puffs up through knot holes and cracks in the floor, which is hot under his bare feet. Sound effects of Turkish Bath steam room: bestial nuzzlings, whimpers, groans, sucking and farting noises. He opens a green door into The Room. In a corner of the room he sees himself lying on a straw pallet. Dust drifts across the floor littered with dried excrement and crumpled shit-stained pages of bright colour comics. The window is boarded up. 'Outside a dry husking sound and a terrible dry heat. The body is eaten to the bone with sores of rancid lust, the brand of untouchable vileness on the face. Slowly the thing moves to show its purple, suppurating ass-hole,

300 The Artist as Monster with little transparent crabs crawling in and out. The thing is gibbering and whimpering in some vile phantom embrace. The abdomen swells to a great pink egg covered with veins. Inside, something black, legs and claws stirring. 'Benway: "The broken spirits of a thousand boys whimper through my dreams, sad as the erect wooden phallus on the grave of dying peoples, plaintive as leaves in the wind, howler monkeys across great brown river in jungle twilight, whisper through my sleep, scurry like mice, bat wings, something in the room, stir of animal presence, somewhere, something. '"Let me out. Let me out." I can hear their boy images scream through the flesh. Always boy crying inside and the sullen averted boys7 eyes and those who still love me, and say: "What have you done to me? Why did you do it? WHY??"/29

This is a confession pure and simple. Burroughs is both Benway - the homosexual predator of boys - and Carl, who has a vision of himself in the place of homosexual encounter as a hideous monster whose sexual sins have realized themselves upon his body. It is hardly possible to imagine a more intense demonstration of self-loathing than this monster-self, this homosexual self with its 'rancid lust/ 'untouchable vileness/ 'suppurating ass-hole/ and, most terrifying of all, its pink egg-abdomen with its insectoid 'something7 inside. Control This despairing, self-accusing question, 'Why did you do it?/ is eventually answered by the astonishing theory that sexual pleasure itself, and drug pleasure too, are innately evil psychological mechanisms implanted in humans by a not-entirely-understood sadistic conspiracy of Control, possibly instigated by horrific aliens from outer space or prehistory. In the phantasmagoric 'Nova Trilogy' Burroughs imagines terrible societies of Control in ancient or exotic peoples such as the Mayans or the Chimu, and graduates to interplanetary landscapes of monstrosity, culminating in the horrific Insect People of Minraud. The Mayan priests inflict upon their helpless human victims the dreadful punishments of 'Death in Ovens' (roasted alive over a copper grill) or 'Death in Centipede7 (tied to a couch and eaten by giant centipedes). Agents of evil employ 'the Orgasm Drug7 or 'Death in Orgasm7 to sub-

Naked Lunch

301

due their targets to Control. Near the beginning of The Ticket That Exploded, to take only a single example, the character Bradly is imagined as being in the hands of shadowy 'guards' and subjected to a sextorture where he is given 'skin pants/ has a metal valve inserted in his spine, and is overwhelmed by sex-thoughts that 'sting like nettles' and inflict an exquisite pain like toothache while simultaneously driving him to repeated uncontrollable orgasms.30 In other scenarios onlookers are infected with torture films and spectacles of young boys being hanged (and ejaculating) and thus subjected to Control. Elsewhere Burroughs postulates thousands of Agents, each embodying a particular weak spot (drug- or sex-related), who will attach themselves to and manipulate targets sharing that same weak spot. Sometimes this symbiosis is literal, and the subject is actually constituted of two halves who have been biologically fused and are at war with each other (the recurring 'Mr Bradly Mr Martin aka The Ugly Spirit' is one such composite entity). Very often the process is described as an attack by the Virus' of Control - images or words that contain or arouse the appetites and pleasures through which Control enters. Transporting this drama into a science-fiction setting, Burroughs dubs the Agents of Control 'the Nova Mob' and sets up a set of Dick Tracy-type heroic fighters of this evil: 'the Nova Police' (Lee ends up as 'Agent Lee of the Nova Police' in Nova Express). By the end of this process Control is using not just drugs, and not just the temptation of sadistic sexual pleasure, to inflict damage on others, but every kind of bodily pleasure or need - and in the end every form of speech and coherent meaning. 'Reality' itself is a construct of these evil controlling forces, and the need is to 'storm the Reality Studio' and stop the production of images and ideas. The process of resistance to so wholesale and deep-rooted a conspiracy is radical disruption (exemplified in Burroughs's writing by the 'cut-up' method that splices together unrelated pieces of text) and best of all Silence. Further weapons include the apomorphine heroin cure and the Reichian orgone accumulator; then to erase obsessive image-and word-tracks from the mind, Scientology's laboratory-rat-like 'clearing' techniques are recommended. In summary: the enemy is (1) drug addiction, (2) sexual pleasure, (3) viruslike obsessive images and word constructs embodying human cruelty, and finally, it almost seems, (4) all pleasure and all meaning; meanwhile resistance consists of shutting down all these things at their source, which seems to imply shutting down, period.

302 The Artist as Monster

Obviously the 'Nova' scenario is a literary metaphor. But the degree to which Burroughs takes literally some of the most extravagant ideas he is setting forth can be regularly surprising. Certainly the agency of Control is no metaphor for him - the notion of an organized and wilfully prosecuted predatory process carried out by agents of evil is the simple, literal truth for him; and his biologization of the whole process through the use of virus-mechanisms is not metaphorical either (this is one area where some commentators have found a great point of connection with Cronenberg).31 The presence of this Control agent in himself he has termed 'the Ugly Spirit7 - following a piece of automatic writing penned by his long-time friend Brion Gysin that seemed to attribute the shooting of Joan to the agency of this force.32 He even has a shrewd idea as to the moment when it invaded him: In 1939,1 became interested in Egyptian hieroglyphics and went out to see someone in the Department of Egyptology at the University of Chicago. And something was screaming in my ear: 'YOU DON'T BELONG HERE!7 Yes, the hieroglyphics provided one key to the mechanism of possession. Like a virus, the possessing entity must find a point of entry. This occasion was my first clear indication of something in my being that was not me, and not under my control.33

After the wild oscillations of disavowal, paranoia, and self-accusation in which Burroughs alternately does not recognize, deflects, or desperately emphasizes his personal responsibility for the terrible events surrounding him, this statement expresses the position at which he more or less came to rest. 7 did these things/ he finally says, 'I shot Joan, I exploited and preyed on young boys, I poured much of my life down the hole of narcotics. But it wasn't really me; it was the Ugly Spirit of Control, which physically invaded and infected me from somewhere in time and space, overpowered my better self, and made me do dreadful things I cannot account for otherwise/ An onlooker unpersuaded of the malignant powers of ancient runes, or of the connection between the horrible pleasures of sexuality and a regime of the insect within, is forced to conclude differently. The longstanding existence of this paranoid philosophy - not to mention its bizarre co-optation by many of the author's admirers either for an academic sub-Foucauldian political resistance or for a Gen-X/X-Files apocalyptic cultural resistance - should not be allowed to obscure that intermittent moment that extended throughout much of the 1950s when

Naked Lunch

303

Burroughs was still struggling to understand things. What we see there is the oscillation between paranoid Control theories and an agonized crisis of personal conscience. The instabilities of the caustic 'routines' (between sarcasm and revulsion) and of (homo)sexual feeling (between pleasure and disgust) are, I believe, exact indices of this dialectic in which Burroughs did and did not feel crushing personal guilt. The process may be seen in, for example, Naked Lunch in the division of sympathetic and predatory roles into different characters - the protagonist-like Lee and Carl on one side, monstrous damage-doers like Benway on the other. But of course, as Burroughs told Ginsberg in a letter at the time, 'Benway and Carl... and Lee are, of course, one person/34 The film: taking responsibility Turning back at last to the film, we may now perhaps see more clearly what Cronenberg has taken from Burroughs's idiosyncratic, complex, and conflicted world, and what he has brought and added from his own world - also idiosyncratic, complex, and conflicted. The film, while replicating the paranoia and drug distortion of Burroughs's sensibility of the period, in the end presents the behaviour of 'William Lee' as far more unambiguously self-deluding. One of the film's two opening printed quotations offers the following exhortation (from Naked Lunch): 'Hustlers of the world there is one mark you cannot beat: The Mark Inside.' If this sentiment is characteristic of Burroughs's (alternately self-accusing and paranoid) recognition of an internal agent of evil, it is equally relevant to Cronenberg - the Cronenberg who has been wrestling with the question of responsibility for the sadistic and destructive or self-destructive currents fundamental to his own work, and who has ended up tracing these currents, and the whole problem of psychic dysfunctionality they symptomatize, back 'inside' to the personality structures of his central protagonists. And if Burroughs was repeatedly ready to blame drug dealers and cops, or alien creatures and viruses of Control, for the catastrophes inside and around him, Cronenberg has by now reached the point where he is decisively not willing to blame anything outside his authorial self for the condition of imbalance or impossibility depicted in his work: not an environment of social repression, not women's bodily otherness, not predatory corporations or technology, and certainly not the collection of grotesque creatures and melodramatic villains hallucinated by William Lee in the film version of Naked Lunch.

304 The Artist as Monster

The drama of William Lee in the film is essentially the drama of a character who denies and misrecognizes his own deepest impulses, who is unable to look at them clearly because he feels at some level that they are shameful and wrong, and whose resulting inner turmoil gives rise to hallucinations and the acting out of repressed desires under 'cover' of a self-invented alibi. Then the process of artistic creation involves first reproducing the turmoil itself and then seeing through it to an emotional identification of its first causes. Lee kills Joan because of this emotional conflict within himself, and because he finds himself in the grip of an irresistible inner compulsion, an inner demon. Somehow he is compelled to perform this act of violence, to commit this worst of crimes. It is not his fault, a beetle made him do it, a centipede made him do it, Benway made him do it. But really it is his fault, he wanted to kill his wife. The beetle, the centipede, Benway they are all his evil unconscious talking to him, manipulating him. He is powerless against them. Moreover, it is very strongly implied that a determining factor of the specific evil things his unconscious urges him to do is his homosexuality, and especially a misogynist impulse connected with it and an unwillingness to recognize and confront sexual desires that at some level he finds repellant and unacceptable. Later in the narrative his Mugwump typewriter tells him to meet with Yves Cloquet, the character representing the aspect of homosexuality most repellant to Lee/Burroughs; he takes with him his young lover Kiki, the character representing the most attractive aspect of homosexuality. At Cloquet's Kiki is tortured and devoured in a horrific hallucination in which Cloquet appears as a giant centipede and Kiki as a sacrificial victim (one of those Burroughsian scenes of monstrous transformation during sexual depredation - in fact a kind of 'Death in Centipede'). Again, this isn't Lee's idea, it is the Mug-writer's; and it isn't Lee who devours Kiki, it is Cloquet. But the Mug-writer and Cloquet are only more of Lee's hallucinations and projections. Lee is, in effect, as guilty of murdering Kiki's innocence as he is of murdering his wife. In other words, (Cronenberg's) Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch out of a melange of dangerous and indeed wicked inner compulsions that he had misidentified and that had led him - he felt - to kill his wife, become a drug addict, and collaborate in the destruction of his youthful homosexual partners. Any bravado affected by the swaggering routinier or the intrepid 'Agent Lee' is here dissolved in an acid bath of fear, horror, and massive grief as suffered by Lee at the climactic points of the film's narrative. Meanwhile the form of the bravado (Lee's tough-guy manner-

Naked Lunch

305

isms) is repeatedly shown to be inadequate and false. The heroic artist is transformed into a murderer and a wretched damned soul, and after his sad enlightenment as to the true cause and sequence of events, a figure of ultimate self-knowing melancholy. Neither Burroughs nor Cronenberg can rid themselves as artists of the feeling that, notwithstanding their claims to bravery beyond the ordinary in their inner explorations, at the base what motivates these inner desires is evil, and that they are in the grip of something dreadful. Transgressive art is in the end merely a regurgitative return to the site of evil, a dressing up of sin in a costume for performance, and in the probing of a deeper and more honest artistic exploration this art will turn on its own transgressivity and finally become a confession of guilt. A Cronenbergian hero The figure of the writer who emerges in the film of Naked Lunch is finally much more recognizable as a Cronenberg character than as a Burroughs one. In particular, the melancholia of the protagonist, and of the whole film, strikes just the same tone as that found so often in Cronenberg's cinema, especially since Videodrome. Lee's final recognition that he has willed the killing of his wife and the despoliation of his boy-lover and massively deluded himself about it afterwards overlaps perfectly with Max Renn's recognition of the determining importance of his own sadistic desires, Seth Brundle's recognition that he is a fly, and Beverly Mantle's recognition that he cannot escape his own sick self-encapsulation. And the way in which the damage being inflicted in those films is finally turned on the protagonists themselves, and accepted by them as appropriate, is paralleled in Lee's confessional realization that artistic creation is killing his wife (or rather is the excavation and expression of that awful part of him that killed his wife). Unlike, say, Videodrome and Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch does not carry its hero all the way to suicide. It is essential to the film that Lee kills Joan and not himself, that the effect of his destructive Inspiration' is to cause the death of someone else, a woman, someone he loves. Of course Lee cannot kill himself, because Burroughs did not; nor is Burroughs's personality a suicidal one (manifestly unlike what Cronenberg's protagonists in general have come to be). At the same time, there is no mistaking the fact that Cronenberg has taken the Lee character as close to the archetype of his other protagonists as he can. The confused, depressed, shell-shocked Lee of much of the film, and espe-

306 The Artist as Monster

dally the utterly drained and defeated Lee of the final scene, are in fact quite 'pure' manifestations of the late-Cronenberg protagonist. The melancholy of the film's mood is really very different from Burroughs's spasmic violence and disgust, his wild variations of tone and mood, the titanic battle of Control and resistance endlessly being fought in his writing. The numerous fantastic manifestations of malignity deriving from Burroughs - Mugwumps, beetles and centipedes, Benway, the misogynist figure of Fadela - are in the end remorselessly stripped of their agency, the entire epic paranoid drama of the film revealed as a 'colossal con' played by the artist on himself.35 Moreover, the 'body-horror' of the film is surprisingly less either than in Burroughs (with his monster spine-centipedes and 'insect hairs thru grey-purple flesh') or than in much of Cronenberg's own work (most recently Videodrome and The Fly). True, the film abounds with various creatures of abjection, and there are the spectacles of Kiki's devoration and Fadela's transformation into Benway. But no awful metamorphosis ever overcomes Lee's own body. Among all his astounding hallucinations that one is missing (again, contrast Videodrome), even though something like it actually might be said to be strongly implied in Burroughs. At times, Lee almost seems like the character of the drug-whacked Duke in Gary Trudeau's Doonesbury cartoon strip: no matter how horrifying the creature he is hallucinating, he just tries to treat it as if it's normal. This is a variety of machismo, and the film in fact constructs a portrait of Lee in which this deadpan hard-boiled manner is part of what is co-opted by the 'insect' regime of (self)manipulation. Lee is 'sent' to Interzone by his beetle and Mugwump 'controllers/ and enlisted as an 'agent' in an undefined espionage war against the 'enemy.' In this context Lee's fedora and suit, his gnomic Hemingwayesque shortness of speech, and his flat, tough-guy delivery all conspire to present a stereotype devolved from a certain kind of popular thirties and forties model of strong masculinity - one that could be found, for instance, in private-eye movies. Clearly, this is a representation of Burroughs's own appearance and manner, and also of the pungent period flavour they carried right through the author's old age. But what the film insists on, more than Burroughs's own work ever did, is the falseness and inadequacy of this masquerade of control. Whom is Cronenberg's Lee trying to impress with this act? If it is his friends like Martin and Hank, then it is simply a style statement; if it is potentially dangerous interlocutors like Benway and the creatures, then it is deluded and futile, since these are his

Naked Lunch 307

own hallucinations. Ultimately Lee is trying to impress himself, to reassure himself that he is not a dysfunctional hallucinating madman whose inner world is chaotic and unmanageable. But in the end the film is quite clear that this, in fact, is what he is, and the reassurance is false. Whether Cronenberg is trying to say this about Burroughs personally may be doubted; but he is certainly saying it about his own artist 'hero/ Lee does not hallucinate terrifying changes in his own body, and the dreadful struggles he conducts are not overtly with his own perceptions. Rather, all the horrors are outside - or projected there through hallucination. Furthermore, the foundational damage inflicted by his transgressive inspiration is also starkly external, and starkly permanent: the killing of his wife. For Burroughs in real life, as we have seen in his own testimony at least, art is not so much dangerous in itself as it is the by-product of dangerous impulses. Indeed, writing is conceived by Burroughs as a kind of preventive catharsis: you write your destructive thoughts so you won't act on them. He states this more or less directly in the last chapter of Naked Lunch: You can write or yell or croon about it ... paint about it ... act about it ... shit it out in mobiles ... So long as you don't go and do it ...36

For Cronenberg, by contrast, art itself is the dangerous activity. In Burroughs there is the situation of a drug- or alcohol-deranged person with potentially violent emotional problems and a fondness for guns who tries to use writing as a desperate means of defence against his own inner demons. In Cronenberg the situation is almost precisely reversed: there is a well-behaved and possibly over-repressed person whose imagination is chaotic and horrific, and for whom indulging or liberating the forces of this imagination is what creates actual danger. That is one thing that does not change all the way from Stereo to Naked Lunch. What was scientific experimentation is now artistic creation, but the mechanism remains the same: when you explore this realm, that is when catastrophe is unleashed. Burroughs says in 1985 that it was the killing of Joan that made him a writer, as a way of dealing with and fending off the awfulness of that act. In Cronenberg's Naked Lunch, it is the consultation with one's inner giant crab-beetle, speaking to one through its monster anusmouth, that initiates the deed. 'Kill her, kill Joan Lee,' says the first bug-hallucination. Later on, the same beetle appears as the Clark-Nova

308 The Artist as Monster

bug-writer, the first instrument for Lee's writing activity. Obviously the desire to kill Joan and the desire to write are related to each other. In addition, during the scene of the killing Martin, who is also present, is actually reading a passage from Burroughs ('Followers of obsolete, unthinkable trades doodling in Etruscan ...'), presumably something that has already been written by Lee, notwithstanding his earlier statement that he has given up writing.37 So writing is not something you do in order to prevent yourself from damaging someone as you have done in the past; rather it is something you are enabled to do after your inner insect-inspiration, the asshole you have taught to talk, has started giving you orders. You have an awful wish, and this gives you something to write about; indeed it is artistic inspiration. Certainly the act of writing, sitting down and encouraging your inner insect to come out, is vividly dramatized in the film. Flesh-typewriters, a penisheaded-typewriter whose dripping semen you milk into your drinking cup, an Arabic typewriter whose incomprehensible 'filthy' writing causes it to metamorphose into an insectoid-crustacean 'sex blob'38 these are certainly a colourful realization of the otherness of the liberated transgressive imagination. On the other hand, what is written does not appear as the wild and violent phantasmagoria of Burroughs's books. This Burroughs appears, and in a rather dampeddown way, only in the 'routines' that Lee does not write but speaks (the 'talking asshole' and 'Bobo the clown' recitations to Cloquet). The writing itself portrays instead the Burroughs of drugged incantation (as in the 'Followers of obsolete, unthinkable trades' passage) and, after the killing of Joan, the neutral activity of 'filing a report' - a flat recording of dreadful deeds whose trauma is disguised as detached reportage. The blank, sad, defeated nature of this latter kind of writing is powerfully expressed in two scenes near the end of the film - in Joan Frost's desolate confession that what she writes is 'All is lost,' and in Lee's desperately sad, tender second shooting of Joan in response to the command to 'write something/ The insect within Lee begins the film as an insect exterminator (Burroughs worked for A.J. Cohen Exterminators in 1943, and later wrote a short story entitled 'Exterminator!'). Killing cockroaches with pyrethrum, a yellow insecticide powder, constitutes a steady job for him. This is already a bizarrely meaningful profession, both for Burroughs and for Cronen-

Naked Lunch

309

berg. Burroughs's visceral hatred for insects, and the obsessive way in which he constantly uses them as a metaphoric expression of everything evil and other, can be shown by flipping at random through almost any of his books of this period. Throughout Naked Lunch, for example, he refers again and again to 'cancelled insect eyes/ 'insect lust/ 'insect calm/ and larval states/ Centipedes, 'red bugs/ cockroaches, and frightening insectoid creatures appear centrally or marginally as the narrative proceeds. There is a connection, too, between hard-shelled insects and the 'translucent/ 'protoplasmal/ jelly-like interior full of 'white juice' - so that the shiny, alien exoskeleton and the globular insides are equally sites of horror. Foul, slimy, corrosive secretions also emanate from these alien bodies, while larvae and other insect states of pre-maturity are just as awful. Burroughs associates all these images with the states of helpless drug addiction, predatory homosexuality and horrific sexual pleasure, and paranoid conviction of mind control. As for Cronenberg, The Fly is an eloquent testimony of similar feelings of horror (recall not only the physical horrors but the 'insect politics7 speech), notwithstanding the filmmaker's personal claim to a detached fascination with insects.39 In both cases what is especially alarming is the prospect of the 'insect within/ To be an insect exterminator, then, must be to practise a noble calling, or at any rate a positive and useful one. When the cops Hauser and O'Brien pick up Lee near the beginning of the film for 'possession of a dangerous substance' and point out his record of drug abuse, he replies, T was a troubled person then - I'm married now, straight, got a good job/ While the tone of this remark clearly echoes that of a veteran offender picked up one more time by the heat, there is still truth in Lee's assertion that his occupation is an attempt to escape from an aimless and self-destructive life ('best job I ever had' is how he describes it to his wife) that was, by implication, not only drug-addicted but homosexual and transient. (This is the life to which he will return by taking up new drugs, killing his wife and moving to Interzone.) The contradictions of his trade/and his attitude, are evident in the preceding scene when, asked to adjudicate an argument between Martin and Hank about whether writing ought to be revised or preserved in its pristine state, he remarks: 'Exterminate all rational thought. That is the conclusion I have come to/ Here the exterminator-of-insects is turned inside out; what the writer must exterminate is rationality - the antithesis of the insect. It is a kind of expression of Cronenberg's artistic credo, except that the alliance of art and the inner insect that must

310 The Artist as Monster

overthrow all rational thought is always disastrous in its outcomes, nowhere more so than in the film of Naked Lunch, where the writer 'exterminates' his wife. The film eventually depicts this syndrome extensively and powerfully, but its implications are already present in the idea of the writer who is an insect exterminator in both senses: an exterminator of insects, and an exterminator who is an insect. Another indication of the perversity of this world, and its habit of malignantly reversing meanings and pulling things inside out, is seen in the fact that bug-powder turns out to be a pleasure-giving narcotic. Lee discovers this fact when, after repeatedly running short of the stuff, he one day finds his wife injecting it into her breast. The sexually transgressive nature of this act is extremely clear, and in fact specifically recalls Nicki Brand burning her own breast with a cigarette as a sexual turnon. 'It's a very literary high ... a Kafka high - you feel like a bug/ she says. Lee accepts her invitation to try some, and soon both of them have a bug-powder habit. It is characteristic of Burroughs that feeling like a bug would be considered a desirable experience, when desire itself is insect-ugly - and it is certainly characteristic of Cronenberg's concept of writing that feeling inhuman and abjectly desiring like a bug is a 'literary high/ It is not long after this that Lee is pulled in by the police, and when he protests that he legitimately needs pyrethrum to kill insects, the cops suggest that he demonstrate this on a bug of their own. This turns out to be the giant beetle with speaking anus - the first bona fide hallucination in the film (Lee himself recognizes it as such later). This beetle introduces itself as Lee's 'controller' and addresses him as an 'agent' working against Interzone Inc.' Far from being killed by the pyrethrum, the beetle sits fatly burrowed into a huge pile of it, and asks Lee to 'rub a little of that powder on my lips,' emitting sensual moans as he complies. Bug powder, at least when ingested as a drug by Lee, does not exterminate insects but rather produces them in monstrous form. Real insects are still damaged by the stuff, as is demonstrated in the following scene, which shows bug-powder addict Joan breathing on cockroaches and killing them.40 But the hallucinated bug, the 'insect within,' is produced by and thrives on it. It is probably not wise to try to read this too plainly, but it might be said that what is captured here is a scenario wherein the individual tries to escape or counter a real world full of ugliness (symbolized by real insects) with drugs. These drugs do indeed obscure the ugliness of the real world (i.e., kill real bugs), but only at the terrible price of arousing a much more mon-

Naked Lunch

311

strous ugliness within. In particular, the 'literary high' is one that encourages exactly this ugliness: 'You feel like a bug/ The sexual nature of this inner insect is signalled by the erotic invitation to rub powder on the lips of the anus-mouth - which is both the orifice specifically of homosexual penetration and the controlling and order-giving and writing-dictating mouth of literary inspiration (the 'talking asshole'). Then the beetle's command is that Lee should kill his wife: an impulse of misogyny connected with his repressed homosexuality This 'order' from the 'controller' is accompanied by the news that Joan is an 'agent of Interzone Inc.' and possibly not human. Lee, while humouring the creature, stealthily removes his shoe and beats it to a pulp before making his escape. But on his arrival at home he finds Joan suffering from withdrawal anxiety, and asking him to 'rub some of that powder on my lips' - a hetero-erotic invitation that leads to a passionate embrace and kiss. Now Joan is the bug; now it is she who is asking for the realm of transgressive sexuality to be unleashed. Sexual jealousy Misogynist hatred of Joan and erotic attraction to Joan appear in parallel, yoked together by the nexus of transgression: drugs, sexuality, creative imagination. This mixture is rendered explosively fatal by two additions. One is Lee's movement from yellow bug-powder to black centipede-powder as his drug of choice (more on this in a moment). The other is Lee's walking into his living room to discover Joan fucking Hank on the couch while a stoned Martin reads the 'Followers of obsolete, unthinkable trades' passage aloud. Lee appears to take no notice, and when Joan apologizes to Lee a few minutes later he brushes it off as a trivial event in what is obviously their very bohemian mode of life, and shares his new drug with her. But a small sting remains behind even on the surface, as Lee makes sardonic jokes about Hank's leaving before coming. Immediately after this Lee suggests they play their 'game of William Tell' and kills her. What is noteworthy here is not only the absence of anything in the historical Burroughs scenario suggesting a wound of sexual jealousy, but also the repeated presence of exactly this element in the scenarios of Cronenberg's three preceding films. The pain of 'betrayal' is in all these cases a reflection of the protagonist's love for the woman and his vulnerability, rather than simply of a misogynist predisposition. That is, this particular kind of anger at the woman has to be based on caring for her in the first place. It is nee-

312 The Artist as Monster

essary to stress this aspect of Naked Lunch when it is in danger of being obscured by the competing conditions of homosexual misogyny and drug abuse as explanations for the protagonist's behaviour. The degree to which Lee loves his wife, both humanly and heterosexually, is a manifestly important part of the film - whereas to find it in either Burroughs's writing or his post-Joan life during this period requires at the least an act of hermeneutic decryption. Drugs The other development leading to Joan's death is the progress of Lee's drug use. To supply both himself and his wife with pyrethrum - and to conceal its disappearance from his exterminator's supply - he attempts to steal some from a co-worker, Edwards, whom he finds asleep on a subway car. Edwards, who appears briefly only a couple of times near the beginning of the film, is nevertheless an important character. Probably in his sixties, rather gaunt and weatherbeaten, a veteran exterminator/junky wearing a fedora and talking in a gravelly voice, Edwards is a physical representation of William Burroughs. He gives advice to Lee and, after catching him trying to lift his bug-powder, recommends that he consult Dr Benway for his drug problem. That is, he sends Lee into the hands of the most malignant personage in the film, who prescribes for him the centipede powder under whose baleful influence he will kill Joan. Moreover, all the hallucination-creatures in the film Mugwumps, bug-writers, Mug-writers, even the first beetle whom Lee has already seen - have the identical gravelly American voice, and it is Edwards's voice. Edwards/Burroughs, in short, leads Lee into the path of evil, and inhabits all the inner-insect-hallucination voices that speak to him all through the film. Benway, the doctor who kills, the saviour who feasts on your flesh, is ultimately another hallucinated inner projection, and it too is traced to the Burroughs-voice. The talking asshole ... is Burroughs himself/ This delirious configuration of historical human being (Burroughs the man), writer whose works have inspired the film (Burroughs the author), biographically based filmic character (Lee), and sublevels of other characters hallucinated by that character (Benway, giant beetle, Mugwump, etc.) cannot be disentangled and interpreted to make clear sense - especially not by yet another representation of Burroughs in the person of Edwards. What can be said is that in the film all these perspectives come down to a hall-of-mirrors scenario of a man talking to himself, prompting himself to do things,

Naked Lunch

313

and disavowing responsibility for the terrible things he does as a result. The black powder, made from the ground-up flesh of the 'giant Brazilian aquatic centipede/ is a more potent and deadly drug even than bug-powder. Characteristically, this 'cure' of Dr Benway's is far worse than the disease. Ordinary beetles, even giant ones, are disgusting and other, but centipedes are truly evil, both in Burroughs's usage and in the film's adoption of it. Like Benway himself nested inside Lee/Burroughs, centipede powder works from within, disavowed and unrecognized. As he mixes the black powder with the yellow, Benway says: You'll see how elegantly this works. The black will disappear completely. And there'll be no smell, no discolouration. It's like an agent, an agent who's come to believe his own cover story. Hiding, in a larval state, just waiting for the proper moment to ... hatch out.

It will produce an evil replica of itself in Lee, will foster Lee's inner centipede, a disease masquerading as a cure. Exiting Benway's office, Lee finds (in a striking prolepsis that puts him, as it were, already in Interzone) a Middle Eastern-style street stall where Arabs are selling dried centipedes; he buys some and is overcome by a sudden dreadful anxiety attack, looking up to the sky, shielding his face from something above, gasping and sobbing.41 Then he goes home to find his wife and Hank having sex, cooks up the black powder and injects both himself and Joan, and shoots her. The spent cartridge clanks onto the dressing table next to the package of centipedes. So the centipede is the signifier of Joan's murder, of the release of one's inner monstrosity. Later on, in a scene demonstrating Lee's intense need to disavow the guilt for shooting Joan, the Clark-Nova tells him that not only was he 'programmed' to shoot his wife, she was not even human - in fact she was 'an elite-corps centipede.' And in the other most terrible scene of human damage in the film, Cloquet takes the form of a giant centipede while devouring Kiki. The centipede-drug is the facilitator that brings this inner monstrosity into the world. The Mugwump Sitting, shattered, in a bar, Lee finds himself next to the attractive young Kiki - another indication that his Tnterzone' experience has begun already - who asks him whether he is a 'faggot.' Lee's prevari-

314 The Artist as Monster

eating answer leads Kiki to introduce him to 'a friend of mine who specializes in sexual ambivalence/ the Mugwump. Here is Burroughs's Mugwump: On stools covered in white satin sit naked Mugwumps sucking translucent, coloured syrups through alabaster straws. Mugwumps have no liver and nourish themselves exclusively on sweets. Thin, purple-blue lips cover a razor-sharp beak of black bone ... These creatures secrete an addicting fluid from their erect penises which prolongs life by slowing metabolism ... Addicts of Mugwump fluid are known as Reptiles.42

Cronenberg's first idea was reportedly to model this large, bodily emaciated creature on the look of 'old junkies/ and to derive some of its facial characteristics from Burroughs's own appearance.43 The word 'mugwump' itself derives originally from politics, and signifies someone committed to both sides or neither in a political dispute, a fencesitter with his 'mug' on one side of the fence and his 'rump' on the other;44 hence, presumably, Burroughs's and Cronenberg's adoption of the word for a creature whose rationality (head, 'mug') is divided from its (homo)sexuality (anus, 'rump'). In fact, Cronenberg's Mugwumps have multiple penis-like organs on their heads, which are subject to erection and the dripping of a milky fluid. By transporting these sexual organs to the head, and by creating a Mugwump-head-typewriter that dispenses a liquid that is connected to powerful writing, the film emphasizes the relation between artistic inspiration and transgressive sexual desire and drug use. Fence-sitting ambivalence, a separation of rationality and unconscious, thus both produces and becomes hallucinatory confusion, a delirious mixing of head and desire that yet preserves the neurotic conflict. It is the Mugwump who sends Lee to Interzone and instructs him to 'write a report' on the killing of Joan. Lee trades in his pistol for a Clark-Nova typewriter at a pawnshop - one of many indications that writing is both the narration of awful acts and the transformation of awful acts. His 'ticket' is shown (from Martin's non-hallucinating point of view) to be a vial of black centipede powder: the whole state of Interzone is an inner projection under the aegis of centipede powder and the Mugwump. Lee has progressed from pyrethrum to black powder; in Interzone he relies on the local, industrialized, production of the 'Black Meat' (giant black centipede ground up into an ash-grey paste called 'majoun').45 The centipede drug represents a deeper penetration

Naked Lunch 315

into the unconscious and a closer approximation to the insect within. Its transformative effect is more powerful, turning New York City into Interzone, the exotic home of homosexuality and drug use - and transgressive writing. Lee's application of 'the Black Meat' like boot polish to the ankles or the throat becomes a brilliant paraphrase for the effects of heroin and other drugs on the Lee/Burroughs subject: a telltale stain instead of needle tracks, an alternation of anguish and stupor as the facial symptoms. With the drugged state comes the emergence of the speaking-monster typewriters as indications of the dissolution of the barrier between conscious and unconscious and the conduit now created between chaotic unconscious wishes and conscious powers of expression. The equivalent in Interzone of the New York diner where writers would hang out and where Lee would meet Hank and Martin is a coffee bar where the local denizens sit writing at tables. Lee is sitting at one himself, typing out his report on the history of his relationship with 'Joan Rohmer'46 on his Clark-Nova portable. Here he meets Hans (played by Robert Silverman, a Cronenberg veteran memorable as Jan Hartog in The Brood and Ben Pierce in Scanners), an emigre drug manufacturer, trader, and agent, who spots Lee at once as someone who 'works for Dr Benway/ Hans strikes up a chatty conversation with Lee on the basis of their professional equipment: Clark-Nova. Very nice for writing reports. I use a Krupps Dominator myself. Company policy.

This is a funny line, especially in Hans's thick German accent, and it introduces the world of competing typewriter brands and their various qualities - an area that comes in for a lot of humour as the film proceeds. Soon Hans will introduce Lee to Tom and Joan Frost, and we will have an array of brands that includes Lee's Clark-Nova and Tom's Martinelli and Mujahaddin (Arabic characters only). And soon also all three of the latter machines will metamorphose into organic creaturewriters in Lee's hallucinating mind. Writing-machines

The typewriters represent the realm of technology and, broadly, science - seemingly an almost indispensable part of Cronenberg's repeated discovery-and-catastrophe scenario. There is no 'scientific'

316 The Artist as Monster

project as such in Naked Lunch, but the typewriters are there as it were to fulfil that function in the dynamic. They are machines whose purpose is to standardize and objectify the material put through them, in this case creative writing. Since writing of the kind done in the film, writing in Interzone, is saturated with illicit desire, typewriters become really almost an exact equivalent for the disavowing and masquerading projects of sexualized science elsewhere in Cronenberg. These machines are to their owners what the Mantle Retractor is to the twins in Dead Ringers - a way of regularizing a fascination with the abject/ sexual and integrating it into a Symbolic profession within the social realm. The Mantles are not obsessing about women's sexual difference, they are practising 'radical' scientific research; the writers of Interzone are not plunging madly into their own most exciting and horrifying bodily desires, they are objectively, scientifically, 'writing reports' using machines. That this is a peculiarly male strategy (certainly in Cronenberg's view) is evident not only in the exclusive maleness of all his scientists, but also in the fact that Joan Frost, the sole female writer in Naked Lunch, writes in longhand. Whereas in the male world, as the Mugwump tells Lee on giving him his writing assignment, 'handwriting is not considered professional/ When it is time for Lee to grapple with all the forces within his personality that underlie his homosexuality and his drug use - and especially which have provoked the killing of Joan - he needs a typewriter to keep these things at arms' length. The particular connection between using a typewriter and killing your wife, using a typewriter to disguise from yourself that you are killing your wife, is made during the very striking scene in which Tom is 'subconsciously' telling Lee about his ongoing plot to kill his wife Joan. Throughout this interchange, he is 'actually' talking shop about which brands of typewriters work for him. Here is the entire surreal conversation: TOM: You use a Clark-Nova, don't you? To write with? Typewriter? LEE: Oh, I do, yes. TOM: I wouldn't use a Clark-Nova myself. Too demanding. LEE: Demanding? TOM: Oh, come on! We're both writers. We know what we're talking about. LEE: Well, I'm new to this game, to tell you the truth. TOM: If I get blocked again, I'll let you try my Martinelli. Her inventiveness will surprise you. [pause] They say you murdered your wife. Is that true?

Naked Lunch 317 LEE: Who told you that? TOM: Word gets around. LEE: It was an accident. TOM: There are no accidents. For example, IVe been killing my own wife slowly, over a period of years. LEE: What? TOM: Well, not intentionally, of course. On the level of conscious intention, it's insane, monstrous. LEE: But you do consciously know it. You just said it. We're discussing it. TOM: Not consciously. This is all happening telepathically Non-consciously. [close-up of Tom, his lips are out of synch} If you look carefully at my lips, you'll realize that Fm actually saying something else. Fm not actually telling you about the several ways Fm gradually murdering Joan. About the housekeeper Fadela whom Fve hired to make Joan deathly ill by witchcraft. About the medicines and drugs Fve given her. About the nibbling away at her self-esteem and sanity that Fve managed, without being at all obvious about it. [he presses his lips together and nods in sad finality; then reverts to proper synch} Whereas Joanie finds that she simply cannot be as obsessively precise as she wants to be unless she writes everything in longhand.

Carry this idea to its logical conclusion and you find that typewriters are also 'instruments for operating on mutant women' - devices, that is, for males to practise a disavowed hostility towards the women around them. And like Beverly's instruments, the typewriters too are fetishized, their brand names and special qualities savoured and compared. In this very recognizably male-fan behaviour, Tom Frost leads the way with his experimentation with multiple brands, his suggestions for trading with his male aquaintances, and his nervous anxiety at the idea of having to do without one. But this is only a subset of the Interzone typewriter's function. Basically what it does is to channel unconscious desire out into the world. In keeping with the pattern that the scientization of sexuality also results in the sexualization of science, the typewriters themselves become organicized and insectified in this process. So the Clark-Nova turns into a version of the original beetle but with a new flesh-bug-keyboard; the Martinelli becomes a female bug-writer attacked and killed by the male Clark-Nova; and the Mujahaddin proffers for Joan Frost's fingers a visceral keyboard making sticky smacking flesh-sounds, gets a rather impressive erection, and turns into the sex blob. These 'bug-

318 The Artist as Monster

writers' and 'flesh-writers' are very close relatives of the 'breathing' organic televisions and video cassettes of Videodrome. But unlike in Videodrome, Cronenberg seems to have found these creature-machines amusingly absurd as well as symbolically appropriate. Almost every aspect of the 'drama' of the typewriters has a comic side. As Lee gingerly types the first letters into the newly insectified Clark-Nova, the machine barks: 'Don't be such a pansy! Be forceful!' The Clark-Nova's attack on the Martinelli, complete with feral growls and dainty screeches, plays like a sent-up scene in a melodrama. Fadela, in jodhpurs and riding crop, whips the Mujahaddin sex blob out of the room like a puppy that has defecated on the carpet; she orders it, as it were, to commit suicide out of shame by plunging off the balcony, where (now reverting to its actual mechanical form) it crashes spectacularly at the feet of an appalled Tom Frost. When Tom comes to confiscate the Clark-Nova in forfeit for the destroyed Martinelli, the Clark-Nova jumps off the table and makes a break for freedom; Tom shuts the door in its face and the machine crashes into it with a 'cling!' of its carriagereturn bell. The engorging and drooping head-penises of the Mugwump-writer definitely have a comic aspect, and perhaps the funniest writing-machine joke occurs as Lee stuffs the Mug-writer into its leather carrying case and takes it across town to deliver to Tom while the protesting creature's muffled voice keeps rambling on from inside the case with passages from Burroughs. Even the death of the ClarkNova, an affecting moment, is played with a kind of noble-farewelland-death hokum, as the Clark-Nova chokes out its last words: 'Ah! Leave me now! Before it's too late! ... Vaya con diosl' This, really, is Cronenberg's humour, dry and sneaky, rather than Burroughs's raucous and outrageous brand; and it is characteristic of a film that has more humour perhaps than any of Cronenberg's films since Rabid without departing at all from the fundamentally tragic model of its companions. A consumer's guide to bug-writers The typewriters chart the evolution of Lee's inspiration as a writer always transgressively drug-addicted and sexualized. The Clark-Nova is the machine closest to Burroughs's forties tough-guy masculinity, the original talking asshole ('It has mythic resonance,' says the Mugwump who tells him to buy it). Described by Cronenberg as 'a good guy,'47 this machine-controller wants to save Lee from 'Interzone Inc.'

Naked Lunch

319

and represents a more human form of dangerous inspiration than some later examples, notably the Mug-writer. The Martinelli is borrowed from Tom - who indeed almost forces it on him - and is represented as female. Both this and the Mujahaddin (also Tom's) are associated with Lee's 'heterosexual period' of attraction to Joan Frost, and when Tom says to Lee, 'Take her,' it is almost like an invitation to take his wife, who is present as he makes the offer. The Martinelli never speaks, and is seen as a machine that Lee writes on only in one scene, where he sits in a drugged stupor and the camera shows us both Martinelli and Clark-Nova in their 'actual' forms. On the Clark-Nova Lee has begun a letter to Martin: Please help me, I've got to get out of Interzone. I'm dying of lonelyness. I can,t connect with anybody. And on the Martinelli there is one to Hank:48 I seem to be addicted to something that doesn't really exist. I have embarked upon withdrawal and I am very fearful of what the withdrawl symptoms will be. Both machines, in their 'non-creative' forms, are used to send desperate distress messages to Lee's only real friends; but as a producer of creative, transgressive writing, the Martinelli seems unproductive. The hallucinated mortal assault by the Clark-Nova bug-writer on the Martinelli bug-writer may be read as an attack by Lee's homosexual and paranoid feelings on his heterosexual and tender ones. The Martinelli is an 'Interzonal agent/ shouts the Clark-Nova between carnivorous bites of 'her.' But it is the Clark-Nova that tells Lee to 'seduce Joan Frost' in an effort to discover more about the plots of Interzone, Inc.; and when Lee asks, 'What about Kiki and the Interzone boys? my cover?,' the Clark-Nova answers only, 'The enemyTl be thrown into total confusion!' Not just the enemy. Lee is now acting on his heterosexual attraction to Joan Frost, but doing so even more disavowingly than he had acted on his homosexual feelings. The seduction of Joan Frost will now be only an assignment ordered by his controller bugwriter, who is still dictating his actions. The 'heterosexual' typewriter that does produce some transgressive writing is the Mujahaddin, which Lee tempts Joan Frost into using despite her reluctance to tamper with Tom's things.' But it is Joan

320 The Artist as Monster

Frost's writing, not Lee's (he can't understand Arabic). They both take Black Meat mahjoun, and enter into a state of mutual drug/writing/ sex intoxication. At Lee's urging Joan writes stuff that is increasingly 'erotic/ 'dirty/ 'filthy/ while he murmurs almost inaudibly the 'Followers of obsolete, unthinkable trades' text. In the film's only real sex scene the typewriter metamorphoses into the sex blob while Lee and Joan embrace fiercely on the floor. The climactic moments of this scene find Lee embracing Joan from behind, nuzzling his mouth to the back of her neck, and whispering convulsively, 'Joan ... Joan' - the same words he had used after shooting his wife. Here the echoes of other Cronenberg films continue. The drugs and sex connection recalls Beverly and Claire in Dead Ringers, while the staging of the sex on the floor quite strongly resembles the first sexual encounter of Max and Nicki in Videodrome - and also foreshadows all the rear-entry sex scenes of Crash. Of course such a position places heterosexual and homosexual practices side by side as well. But the status of this typewriter, and this 'writing/ in Lee's creative journey remains uncertain and off-centre, another byproduct of Cronenberg's importation of heterosexuality into Burroughs's homosexual environment. The scene ends with the violent interruption of Fadela, a lesbian in quasi-dominatrix gear; and although what is overtly happening is Fadela's punishing disapproval of Joan's heterosexual lust for Lee, this should probably (in view of the extent of Lee's hallucinations) be understood as his own more vengefully misogynist side reacting against his own heterosexual desire. Following this, Joan Frost withdraws from the action until the final scenes - according to Tom a habitual reaction against any real attraction to a man, but metatextually a consequence of the film's necessity to honour Burroughs's homosexuality. The Arabic script and name of the Mujahaddin recall another aspect of Burroughs's world view. 'Mujahaddin' are of course Islamic terrorists or freedom fighters, and hence suggest a dimension of aggressive violence and stealth. The Arab world of Interzone in general is not only exotic in the sense of being non-Western, but also in the sense that it is (to the Western eye) full of strange, occult, sinister currents. Specifically, it is a place of easy access to drugs and street boys, and also a phenomenon such as Fadela's witchcraft. Everything in this environment is tinged with these qualities, and Westerners such as Hans, the Frosts, and Lee who have come there to write are once more illustrating that this kind of writing is fuelled by the 'alien' and potentially very dangerous qualities of the 'Arab' culture. Another connection is

Naked Lunch

321

with the first of the film's headnotes: 'Nothing is true; everything is permitted/ This saying is attributed to the apocalyptic nationalist terrorist Hassan I Sabbah (a historical figure appropriated by Burroughs in Naked Lunch and elsewhere).49 On the one hand a straightforward description of Lee's hallucination state, the epigram also points towards the condition of ultimate psychological and emotional chaos after boundaries and prohibitions have been broken. But for Burroughs, this frequently quoted maxim evokes a world that is both free of petty bourgeois restraints and dangerously open to Control: Hassan reputedly promised his suicidal assassins an eternity in Paradise and rigged up a false afterworld called the Garden of Delights where his drugged minions were given a taste of future bliss. The Garden of Delights was for Burroughs a symbol of the false paradise of drugs and sexual freedom, which were really the levers through which the malign forces of Control would manipulate individuals. To a degree, then, Interzone itself in its guise as a free ticket to drugs and (homo)sex is a sinister environment where the freedom is only a lure of destruction; and the film reflects this in its dramatization of that sinisterness as the paranoid projection Interzone, Inc. The Mujahaddin typewriter is only one relatively minor element of this 'Arab7 world of strangeness and dangerous freedom. But its use in an explicitly transgressive context of drugs, writing, and sex, and its transformation into a sex-monster, are pointed realizations of the dominant principle of Interzone. Following the seduction of Joan Frost and then her withdrawal, Hank and Martin come to Visit7 Bill in Interzone, and start piecing together the manuscript of what will be Naked Lunch. This corresponds with visits from Ginsberg and Kerouac to Burroughs in Tangiers, although as usual the film has simplified and metaphorized events. After Martin and Hank leave, Lee is overcome with a terrible loneliness and despair, and is rescued from it by Kiki. Kiki helps him to get the broken Martinelli-beetle-typewriter (more or less representing Lee7s heterosexual attraction to Joan) recast into the form of a Mugwump-head-typewriter (representing his homosexual desire for Kiki). It is recast in the forge of an iron foundry, all roaring flames, black smoke, and sweating muscular men. Lee remarks doubtfully, They don't seem to be capable of delicate work here,' but the transformation of Lee into an unabashed homosexual requires the raw heat of a furnace and the crude strength of iron tongs: it is a process of violent upheaval, where 'delicacy' is left behind.50 There follows a period of great productivity and even relative happiness for Lee, who is now liv-

322 The Artist as Monster

ing with Kiki, happily intoxicated on the drug of Mugwump-jism, and even eagerly asking his typewriter for new assignments. While seeming to be friendly and accommodating, the Mug-writer directs Lee to Cloquet, and precipitates the scene of Kiki's devouring by a giant Cloquet-centipede. The Mugwump, in fact, is worse than the beetle, and represents an escalation of the homosexual impulse, a franker and more open acceptance and enjoyment of it - and also (closely related) a more addicting and controlling drug. The Mugwump is associated with Kiki throughout; but while Kiki is a 'real7 person, a young and sympathetic lover who has nothing but affection and admiration for Lee, the Mugwump is just another voice of Lee's unconscious - that portion of his homosexual unconscious that is aroused by Kiki and that ends by sacrificing Kiki to predatory homosexual desire in the form of Cloquet. And, further, we must recall the little silver sculptural group shown earlier in the pawnshop window depicting the devouring through buggery of a hanging youth by a Mugwump. This configuration is repeated in larger and more horrific form in the tableau of the Cloquet-centipede devouring Kiki in the parrot cage. The Mugwump, then, is the more open recognition of homosexuality, a stage that carries the appearance of a liberation or a relief, but that does not really represent a consolidation of the personality or any kind of saving discovery. Underneath the apparent resolution of psychic conflict and the relaxation of the prohibition against homosexuality the deadly insect of evil continues to live, and ultimately reveals itself in the most horrible depredation in the film - the destruction of the beautiful and innocent Kiki. Heterosexuality The pair of Tom and Joan Frost are, as already mentioned, loosely modelled on Paul and Jane Bowles, both important writers, who were living in Tangiers at the time of Naked Lunch and eventually became long-standing friends of Burroughs. The degree of the Frosts' detailed resemblance to the Bowleses is, I think, of little importance - although Joan Frost's swept-up hair resembles Jane's bobbed hair style, and is a principal iconic difference between her and Joan Lee. Far more crucial is the way in which this couple mirrors the situation of Lee and his dead wife. Like Lee, Tom Frost is a writer and a married homosexual; like Lee, he has an Arab male companion (Kiki for Lee, Hafid for Tom) devoted to his peace of mind as a writer and concerned for the health

Naked Lunch

323

of his writing machines; and like Lee, he is unconsciously planning to kill his wife. The really astounding thing, of course, is the fact that Joan Frost is literally the second coming of Joan Lee: the identical presence of Judy Davis in both roles ensures this fact. Lee's first glimpse of her in the Interzone coffee house that so resembles the writers' diner in New York is like a stab in the heart: he gazes at her with an expression of overpowering sorrow and yearning. She is the ghost of his fatal, essential sin and remorse, the embodiment of his deepest regrets and of a profound affection and pity - love - that he has himself somehow poisoned and finally killed. Her sudden appearance now, and her subsequent persistence as an object of desire and a figure whose 'rescue' the protagonist desperately hopes may still redeem all his catastrophic acts, is one of the film's most astonishing strokes. It is entirely Cronenberg's stroke rather than Burroughs's (as indeed was the first presence of Joan Lee). And its resurrection of the 'murdered' wife with no explanation and no justification now or at any later time is entirely characteristic of the boldness and directness of Cronenberg's imagination. The centrality of Joan (both of them) to the film is undoubtedly mainly due to Cronenberg's need for an important female presence, and only secondarily to Burroughs's assertions in the introduction to Queer. For as long as he has been talking about doing a Burroughs film, Cronenberg has talked about the potential problem of his own heterosexuality.51 He even warned Burroughs about the consequences of this to an adaptation: 'One of the things I said to [Burroughs], for example, was "You know, I'm not gay. So my sensibility when it comes to the sexuality of this film is going to be I don't know what. I mean I'm not afraid of that, but on the other hand it's not innately me. And I'm going to probably want women in the film, you know ... more than in Naked Lunch."'52 Burroughs gave approval to Cronenberg, but his reaction to the finished film shows how far the filmmaker had departed from Burroughs's own sense of himself in this respect: 'For reasons best known to himself, David chose to treat "Lee's" homosexuality as a somewhat unwelcome accident of circumstance and plot, rather than as an innate characteristic. Whether this is because of David's own heterosexuality, or his assessment of the realities of making and releasing a multi-million-dollar movie, I cannot say.'53 The film in fact adapts Cronenberg's pattern to a revised version of Burroughs's. In Cronenberg's world sexuality, especially released sexuality, is inevitably a prelude to disaster. In the films just before Naked Lunch - particularly The Fly and Dead Ringers - the male protagonist's

324 The Artist as Monster

sexual relationship with a woman is the opposite of a bad thing; but the movement of the encapsulated male into a world of sexual and emotional intimacy creates an imbalance that reveals the male's dysfunctionality, and he is destroyed. The attitude to (hetero)sexuality here is ambiguous to say the least. In focusing on Burroughs's muffled uneasiness about his own homosexuality, Cronenberg is recreating the conditions for this syndrome, since it is clearly not just sexual feeling as such but the fact that it is a conflicting mixture of attraction and repulsion that constitutes the problem. Lee's homosexual feelings, his ambivalence about them, and the empirically noxious consequences they have on his actions would seem the perfect ground on which to lay the template of Cronenberg's paradigm of troubled sexuality as an agent of tragedy. But the film's lack of any real feeling of complicity with homosexual desire eonsititutes a limitation. The film is not, I believe, homophobic in any sense, although it does impute a dimension of predatoriness to Lee's homosexual impulses that it sees as stemming from Burroughs himself. Rather, Cronenberg can only feel that heterosexuality is the truly transgressive force, since it is, for him, the site of desire and all the pathology that comes with it. Of course he must extend this feeling to homosexuality (out of courtesy, as it were) as well as he can; but his ability is limited. The evidence for this assertion comes from the fact that the homosexual scenes - concentrated on encounters with Kiki and Cloquet, none of them actively sexual - are marked with the intentionality of desire but not its actual presence: they are cool and detached. Physical homosexual encounter is only presented in a horrified way - as in the Mugwump-and~boy figurine or the Cloquet/ Kiki hallucination - not in a horrified/erotic one. The addictive enslavement to (homo)sexual desire is expressed in the concrete metaphor of Mugwump-jism, and the more extended and powerful one of the Mugwump-jism dispensary; but this is the opposite of erotic. By contrast, what eroticism there is in the film is attached not to Lee's male aquaintances but to Joan. Moreover, this heterosexual desire has a transgressive edge, and once more revives the sadomasochistic outlines of earlier Cronenberg films: Joan Lee sticks a needle into her breast and asks Bill to rub insecticide on her lips; the turbid feelings aroused in him by these stimuli contribute to his shooting her. And of course the only sex scene in the film - and it is also a sex-and-writing scene - is between Bill and Joan Frost. Conflicted and pathological as they are, Lee's palpable sexual feelings are heterosexual.

Naked Lunch

325

So too are the deeper yearnings that form the idealist other-half of desire and are seen by Cronenberg as the only possible avenue out of self-encapsulation. 'Love' is an appropriate word here, since this longing is accompanied by feelings of tenderness and protectiveness. In every film since Videodrome, the Cronenberg protagonist has been caught up in the hellish alternation and intermixture of 'good' love and 'bad' desire, spiritual attraction and bodily compulsion. It is entirely understandable that Cronenberg should have seized with such force on Burroughs's remarks introducing Queer as a road to importing a central female figure into the male-dominated world of Burroughs's fiction, and thence as a means to introduce heterosexual desire and longing, and their woeful companions revulsion and loss, into his film. The protagonist's foundational sin must be against a woman, and must spring from an indigestible mixture of bodily disgust/desire and a fear-of/yearning-for spiritual intimacy. Those extrusions of Lee's unconscious, the Clark-Nova bug-writer and the Mugwump, map out the opposing boundaries of the syndrome. The Clark-Nova, in the midst of its attack on the 'feminine' Martinelli, says of Lee's relationship to Joan Frost: 'You were giving her access to your innermost vulnerabilities, forcing them on her for God's sake!' And the Mugwump, emphasizing in the most terrifying way the complicity between sexual desire and misogynistic violence, instructs Lee to write up Joan's shooting as a report: And don't leave out any of the tasty details. The small red hole in the forehead, aah, the look of astonishment on her face, aaah. Joans

Joan Lee, rather like Claire Niveau in Dead Ringers, is a woman whose lifestyle is full of 'irregularities.' She is a drug addict, she has a history of 'doing weird stuff';54 she casually falls into bed with a friend of her husband's without any thought of consequences; and in general she seems to be pretty much out of control. Some commentators have described her as very unsympathetic and as a lost cause.55 But there is a gentle self-deprecation and an affection for Bill that is evident too. Lee himself is hardly a stranger to drug addiction and sexual irregularity, and his stony blankness of manner never allows any overt expression of feelings and converts him into another of Cronenberg's isolated, shut-down males - and of course he does shoot her. In this

326 The Artist as Monster

context Joan Lee, whatever her faults, still represents the hero's best hope for an escape from self-encapsulation - again like the heroines of all Cronenberg's films since Videodrome. Whether the threat to his utter self-sufficiency is (along with his anti-heterosexuality) a part of his unconscious motive for shooting her cannot be asserted with confidence; but it is perhaps more than mere coincidence that in removing her from his life he is also removing his strongest line to anywhere outside himself. In fact, Joan Lee is not in the film long enough, or extensively enough, for us to find out very much about her. When she returns, as Joan Frost, she is in effect Lee's prolonged hallucination of the-Joan-hehas-lost. Now, perhaps as befits her 'dead7 state, she is modest and diffident, with frequently downcast glance; she is a writer like him; it is he who 'seduces' her rather than the reverse; and she is enthralled and finally imprisoned by the bizarre and protean Fadela, who is herself a projection of certain destructive tendencies in Lee and from whom she must be 'rescued/ Part of this character is still an independent being, Joan Frost, with even more indistinct roots yet in Jane Bowles. Tom's 'unconscious' plot to murder her through the witchcraft of Fadela and through a subtle program of psychological destruction carries a strong whiff of the Bowles situation - or rather of rumours and opinions about the Bowles situation. For example, when the lesbian Jane suffered a stroke a theory arose that she had really been poisoned by a jealous Moroccan woman who had been her lover; and Ted Morgan reports it as Burroughs's opinion that Paul wished her 'ruination,' mentions her belief in witchcraft, and points to a physical resemblance between Jane and Joan Burroughs (and also to Burroughs's mother).56 But a more important part of the character is Lee's projection onto her of Joan Lee, and his idealization of her in the light of his own guilt. This perspective is part of what is revealed when female, lesbian, anti-male Fadela turns out to be the male, homosexual, anti-female Benway - both of them of course hallucinated projections of forces within Lee's psyche. Fadela is the form that Lee's own anti-female impulses have taken in his hallucination, and melodramatization, of his internal conflicts; and thus Joan's need to be rescued from Fadela is a disguised version of her need to be rescued from the misogynist part of Lee himself. When she has finally succumbed to Fadela, and is condemned to follow her through the dreadful scenes of abject defeat in the Mugwump-jism dispensary, she has become already a lost, damned soul. She cannot meet Lee's gaze and turns away from him;

Naked Lunch

327

she is being prodded to keep detailed 'notes' on this spectacle of suffering by Fadela, but when Lee asks here what she writing she says: Tm writing, "All is lost, all is lost/' It's all I've ever written.' She herself is what is lost; her 'all is lost' is really Lee's 'all is lost/ and what is lost to him is Joan. The piercing poignance of this scene comes from the elegaic sense of the loss of something ideal and essential; something that the protagonist needs to make him whole but cannot have; something he himself forfeited; something female. This is once again the idealized Cronenberg woman whose healing touch the male protagonist is barred from by his own dysfunctionality. The words, and the sentiment behind them, expressed in Lee's forlorn 'Joan ... Joan' is so like the bewildered sense of utter defeat and loss in Max Renn, Johnny Smith, Seth Brundle, and Beverly Mantle as they see their female redeemers banished from their lives. Lee looking at Joan in the warehouse is like Max looking at video-Nicki in the derelict ship: such a mute, desperate sadness, such a blank, regressive stare of longing laid on top of a traumatized knowledge of total loss. Self-knowledge Lee's 'betrayal' by the Mug-writer, and the subsequent 'hostageexchange' melodrama for the dying Clark-Nova, represents another turn of the wheel in Lee's gradual development and self-education. The Mug-writer, at first apparently a producer of trouble-free sexuality and writing, has turned out to be another (internal) agent luring Lee to behave destructively. The death of the Clark-Nova - as it were at the hands of the Mug-writer - expresses the death for Lee of a certain way of thinking, and way of writing. The Clark-Nova's world of plots and counterplots, agents and cover stories, hearty macho enlistment of Lee into the fight against an Evil Empire, has been a kind of psychological strategy for getting Lee through one stage of trauma. But - in Cronenberg's view if not necessarily in Burroughs's own - this useful and even friendly paranoid fiction cannot continue indefinitely. When Lee sees through the Mug-writer's apparent benevolence, the disillusion has the secondary effect of killing the Clark-Nova's imaginative world. The reports from Interzone, campaigns to defeat Interzone Inc., expose the perpetrators, confound the enemy all funnel and collapse into one last mission: to rescue Joan from the clutches of Fadela and the controllers of the Black Meat. Here, the malignant forces of misogyny and drug addiction (which are inside Lee but which he still thinks are

328 The Artist as Monster

actual, external bad guys) are what will be defeated, and Joan (who is also inside Lee but whom, again, he has projected as a 'ghost7) will be rescued. In short, the grand drama between the bad parts of Lee and the good parts of Lee will have its showdown; and if the good wins, Lee will redeem himself for the killing of Joan and everything else too - he will get her back and the nefarious Interzone Inc. will come crashing down. The place of this showdown is perhaps the most striking location in the whole film: Fadela/Benway's Mugwump-jism dispensary. It is an old and dank warehouse-factory, where row upon row of Mugwumps are hanging upside down, chained by hands and feet, milch cows for a collection of pitiful addicts who wait to catch the drops from the now udder-like Mugwump head-penises.57 Mugwump-jism itself is the representation of a most abject indulgence in the desires of the unconscious - the last and most potent kind of drug, Dr Benway's ultimate favourite because of its power to reduce the user to complete subjection and abdication of the self. The dispensary is the paradigm of selfsurrender, homosexual abasement, and the institutionalization of the predatory. Its inspiration is likely a handful of passages of The Ticket That Exploded that talk about the 'milking7 of semen from the victims of Controlling sex pleasure. In the most extended example, Bradly in his 'sex-skin7 undergoes this experience: Bradly was in a delirium where any sex thought immediately took threedimensional form through a maze of Turkish baths and sex cubicles fitted with hammocks and swings and mattresses vibrating to a shrill insect frequency that danced in nerves and bones - The sex phantoms of all his wet dreams and masturbating afternoons surrounded him licking kissing feeling - From time to time he drank a heavy sweet translucent fluid brought by the guard - The liquid left a burning metal taste in his mouth - His lips and tongue swelled perforated by erogenous silver sores - The skin glowed phosphorescent pink purple suffused by a cold menthol burn so sensitive he went into orgasm at a current of air while uncontrolled diarrhea explosed down his thighs - The guard collected all his sperm in a pulsing neon cylinder - Through transparent walls he could see hundreds of other prisoners in cubicles of a vast hive milked for semen by the white-coated guards - The sperm collected was passed to a central bank Sometimes the prisoners were allowed contact and stuck together melting and welding into sex positions of soft rubber - He could see the terminal cases carried to the gallows, bodies wasted to transparent mummy flesh

Naked Lunch

329

over soft phosphorescent bones - Necks broken by the weight of suspension and the soft bones spurted out in orgasm leaving a deflated skin collected by the guards to be used on the next shift of prisoners ...

And in a later passage, we find [t]he Mugwumps milked for the Orgasm Meal by vampire women embalmed in predigested sperm, faces of smooth green alabaster giving off a smell of phosphorus as they sip spinal fluid through straws.58

Cronenberg has configured this into a scene as grand as Burroughs's less apocalyptic but more sadly desolate. Now the Mugwumps (perhaps in their guise as junkies) are no longer figures of power, but have themselves become pathetic creatures enslaved in the mill of addiction and Control. Here Joan wanders behind Fadela, taking notes on the exact effects of the drug. And here too resides Hans, the clearest emblem of the manipulating/manipulated and transgressive/abject subject, of homosexuality and drug addiction - who welcomes Lee to the dismal inferno by saying, 'Thank God! Now you are with us'/ This awful place is the destination of Lee's journey of drugs and desire, a kind of filling station of personal defeat and the surrender of the ego-self's project of control over the personality. And here Lee at last penetrates to the truth of his horrible, phantasmagoric experience. Now the malign and slippery Fadela is finally cornered; but the confrontation reveals that behind the mask of this conspiratorial enemy lies another conspiratorial enemy: Benway. Literally stripping off Fadela's female body, a macho, cigar-chewing Benway emerges, only to metamorphose further into a simpering effeminate mode of speech and a misogynistic bile as he conducts the last, lethal destruction of Lee's network of self-deceptions. As Lee tries vainly to maintain his facade of comic-book heroism, Benway delivers blow after crushing blow. Beginning as a kind of ghost of Cronenberg's medical-scientist figure prescribing a 'radical' remedy (centipede powder) that will cause a catastrophic emergence of inner monstrosity, Benway now begins to resemble that other baleful patriarchal figure, Barry Convex in Videodrome. Taking up like Convex the role of the terrifying superego-accuser, Benway remorselessly uncovers the hidden sins and selfdeceptions (again sexual) of the protagonist. Lee's whole experience, in Interzone and before, has been under Benway's evil guidance. Benway was recommended by Edwards, he is intimate with Cloquet, he is

330 The Artist as Monster

Fadela. Lee has been deliberately introduced and addicted to Black Meat and Mugwump-jism as a way of bringing him under control. His ambivalent homosexuality has been exploited equally for the same purpose, using the strategy of 'an agent who's come to believe his own cover story' - in this case a double deception in which Lee has come to believe the cover story that his homosexuality is only a cover story. The fatal stroke is delivered almost at once: the shooting of Joan, the anguished guilt over and intense need to disavow which will be the primary levers of Control inside Lee's psyche. Now it is balefully clear that there is no opposition of good guys and bad guys, there are only bad guys - and one burningly malevolent bad guy in particular, Benway, thefons et origo. Benway drills into Lee his own complicity, his own guilt, his own responsibility. The sense of foreordination and doom, the sense that Lee is innately marked and fated for the worst acts not merely of selfdestruction but especially of the destruction of others, is behind the deadly missiles Benway directs at him: We met once before, you remember? Stateside. You don't remember. You had that look, boy! The look of a sheep-killing dog. Decided to recruit you, right on the spot.59 I think the new order could find a place for a man of your calibre. .32, wasn't it? That is what you're here for, isn't it?

But 'Benway ... and Lee are, of course, one person'; Benway has become simply the concentrated embodiment of Lee's own inner evil. In this climactic scene, the erstwhile redeemer Agent Lee discovers himself to be the dupe of his own unconscious, and finds that his activities have installed the most malign aspects of that unconscious in the seat of domination. What fellow addicts and writers such as Hans ('Somehow I am certain that you are working for Herr Doktor Benway') and Tom Frost ('I understand you murdered your wife') sense at once about Lee he at last can see for himself. There is nothing now for him but to accept the new 'assignment' given to him by 'Benway': to move to a new imaginary country, 'Annexia,' where he will continue to live as a man manipulated by his worst instincts, and will, in 'writing' them, continually re-enact his fearful crime and publish to the world his criminal status. His only request to 'Benway' is to be allowed to keep, in this inner wasteland of vileness and self-loathing, the ghost of his dead wife. That purulent little cunt?' snorts the poisonous misogynist Benway-self; 'I can't write

Naked Lunch

331

without her/ replies the desolate remains of the Lee human ego-self. And so they arrive together, in a strange ramshackle buglike half-track vehicle, at the borders of Annexia. It is as cold and barren as Interzone was hot and teeming, a kind of Cold War, Iron Curtain tyranny presided over by guards in Soviet-style greatcoats and fur hats, rifles and boots. They are the cops Hauser and O'Brien, transformed like the landscape around them.60 Where previously they got Lee to demonstrate that he was an exterminator and introduced him to a bug that told him to kill his wife, now they demand that he prove his contention that he is a writer, and his proof is to kill his wife again. 'I have a writing implement/ says Lee, showing them a pen - significantly not a typewriter when the disavowing 'professional7 understanding of his activity has been so thoroughly destroyed. But they demand that he 'write something/ In fact the true 'writing implement7 turns out to be the gun. Lee turns to Joan, now asleep in a threadbare housecoat in the back of the vehicle, wakes her with the call 'Joan ... Joan/ and tells her that 'it's about time for our William Tell routine.7 She complies simply, humbly; he performs the shooting with tenderness. The shot, and Lee7s distressed cradling of Joan's head in his arms, satisfies the guards, who signal him to proceed. This, obviously, is genuine writing. In Cronenberg7s Naked Lunch the artist-protagonist 'files a report7 on the defeat of himself, on his own status as the victim (like every other adventurous would-be captain of the unconscious) of the conspiracy of the Tower7 elements against the 'higher.7 As the dying Clark-Nova bug-writer says, 'Every agent defects; every resister sells out.7 It is, if not the human condition, at least the Cronenbergian condition. Writing, filmmaking, has become for Cronenberg something very close to this: filing a report on the impossibility, the guilt, the hopelessness of the trapped and despairing male subject. The report may be, usually is, of some ugly and violent event - here, the confused killing of the woman one loves - but the mood with which it is sealed is one of sadness and suicidal resignation. Lee does not kill himself at the end of Naked Lunch, but his condition is so dreadful that death might seem a release. The innate dysfunctionality and pathology of his nature is repeatedly, didactically demonstrated - indeed it is hardly an exaggeration to call this a summary description of the film. His guilt and his complex structures of self-deceit are the scaffolding for the action. The film as it proceeds is enveloped in a stifling sense of suffering and awful sadness, which arises simultaneously with a gradual, inexorable exclusion of the protagonist's ability to be human. There is no place

332 The Artist as Monster

here for Lee's humanity, as he finds himself committing crimes against the one he loves through the uncontrollable action of some unsuspected inner insect, and then using the events as material for his writing. The debilitating grief and acute loneliness that saturates his whole existence, and that comes flooding up in great gushes in moments of crisis, cannot be situated or even acknowledged; but it springs from an indistinct apprehension of his own condition: its transgressive sinfulness, its incomprehensibility, and its abjection. The film's message too is 'All is lost, all is lost.' Mise en scene Tone and colour

Visually, Naked Lunch is probably Cronenberg's darkest film. The film's presiding colour is brown, often a kind of dirty oxblood-brown, which spreads itself through apartments, fittings, costumes, and creatures like an omnipresent and indelible stain - and fills the screen in the very first shot of a door on which exterminator Lee knocks. In this colour regime the film again recalls Videodrome, where the colours are somewhat shifted towards reds and oranges, but have a strong earthy-bodily brown base, visceral and excremental; large sections of Naked Lunch look almost as if they were taking place inside the Videodrome torture chamber. And of course this is in contrast to Dead Ringers, where the dominant colours are grey and blue. As those cool hues signal the empire of repression and a defensive rationalism, so these are definitely the colours of 'inside': of the body and the unconscious. They overlap very much with the 'dereliction' syndrome so often seen in Cronenberg's work, and of which Naked Lunch is the most thorough embodiment. The mess and clutter of Max Renn's apartment are left well behind by the outright seediness and disorder of Lee's living space. His New York apartment features stained and peeling wallpaper, cheap and worn furniture, bare lightbulbs, empty bottles, unwashed dishes, and a collection of worthless objects strewn around. His habitation in Interzone is equally neglected and impoverished, and glows equally brownly in the dull yellow incandescent light. Both venues are crawling with bugs. This brown squalor is an environment springing from poverty and bohemianism, but also from drug use and from the psychic disarray of artistic creativity. A world of darkness and dereliction has so often accompanied the outbursts of the Cronenbergian unconscious, with its

Naked Lunch

333

desires and compulsions. This is recalled in the atmosphere of coagulating reddish-mud sludge that seems to rule most of Naked Lunch's interior spaces (once again, there hardly are any exterior ones) and to express the inner world of William Lee. While scarcely ever leaving the 'realistic' world of recognizable objects, Cronenberg has made the film's various physical environments into projections of Lee's mental landscape, in a more expressionistic way than ever before in his work. This strategy is of course an appropriate and even inescapable concomitant of a narrative based in subjective hallucination. Lee's costume too is always, or almost always, brown. His invariable suit jacket, vest and trousers, fedora, and often his tie as well are a particular dark brown redolent of the period of the 1940s and early 1950s,61 and chime directly with the surrounding similar colours. Then so many other spaces associated with drugs and writing are brown-tinged also: both of Lee's apartments, the cafe-diners in New York and Interzone, Benway's office, the Frosts' apartment, the restaurant where Lee and Cloquet eat. The beetle and bug-writer are brown of course: a brown that seems to rest between the dull yellow pyrethrum and the black centipede powder. And this, in the circumstances, ill-omened colour reappears in more microscopic forms as well - for example, in the Arab from whom Lee buys the centipedes in New York, whose brown cardigan sweater echoes the colour of Lee's jacket and whose brown dazzle-pattern tie additionally echoes Benway's in the scene just concluded; or in the brown jacket that Joan Frost is wearing (for the only time) at her very first appearance, and that bonds her immediately into Lee's world. But if brown is the dominant colour, there is another colour environment in the film too. It is the competing environment of blues and greys that have always represented the world of repression and rationality in Cronenberg's later-period films. In Naked Lunch one finds this schema in the world outside Lee - and indeed to some extent one almost wants to include all the 'not-brown' parts of the film under this heading. It is the environment of the police station where Lee is taken for questioning; of the New York market street, of the pawnship; of the 'beach' in Interzone where Lee twice is woken up in a cold nonhallucinated junk-sickness; of the typewriters when they are 'actual' (especially in the scene where Lee leaves his distress messages for Martin and Hank); of the buses leaving Interzone and of the nighttime car ride to Cloquet's. It is the world outside Lee's window in Interzone, a blazing sky blue or a pale blue moonlight; also the colour of grey junky Mugwumps, of the Mugwump dispensary (tinged here with a sickly

334 The Artist as Monster

yellow), and finally of cold grey Annexia. Often in these circumstances it may be said to be the colour of reality - hangovers, junk-sickness, isolation and loneliness - as opposed to the colour of inner drug-states, self-fixation and self-delusion. Blue is also the colour of Joan. Joan Lee appears in a dingy pale-blue cotton dress in her first scene and her death scene. In the one appearance where she is not wearing this blue dress, she has on a pale-pink towel-ribbed bathrobe, even shabbier than the dress. Joan Frost, after her one and only moment in brown, appears always in blue: a royal blue sari, later a similar-coloured skirt, and lastly a pale-blue sweater that she wears after succumbing to Fadela. The Joan in the back of the vehicle in the final scene - we can probably call her Joan Lee - is again in pale blue, this time a pale-blue version of the pink towelled robe. This blue not only causes Joan to stand out from Bill's brown inner world, but aligns her with the objective external world (such as it is), and thus situates her as an independent being, not just another of Bill's projections. It is not that Joan doesn't have an important place in Bill's inner mental landscape - far from it. It's just that she is, as it were, his emotional lifeline to the external world; and equally important, when he shoots her, it is a real, external human being who is hurt and killed. Internal suffering, terror, even violence are one thing; killing Joan, an actual other person and, moreover, his crucial human link, is something else - not a psychological event but an irreparable physical one. Other, less prominent, dramas are also working themselves out in the colour scheme. Black, for example, is of course the colour of evil: black centipede powder, black centipedes (especially horrifying when ground out in paste form in Hans's infernal factory), Fadela with her riding crop, Benway's cigar. White then becomes the hue not of goodness but of evil's lying costume: Lee's white trenchcoat, worn as he tries to steal Edwards's pyrethrum on the subway and as he drives into Annexia; the white or off-white jackets worn by Tom Frost as he communicates 'unconsciously' with Lee and by the smooth predatory Cloquet throughout (but note his brown hat); Fadela's dazzling white blouse in the scene where she strips off both clothes and skin to reveal herself as Benway. Settings The dreamlike qualities of the mise en scene extend, as in Videodrome, to every visual aspect of the film. Lee's mental confusion leads to a phan-

Naked Lunch

335

tasmagoric shifting and metamorphoses of places, costumes, and visual tropes, again without the film ever pulling entirely free of an apparent 'objectivity' of viewpoint. So, for example, New York and Interzone have to be different places but the same place, given their status as simply states of Lee's mind, and so do the worlds of drug hallucination and sobriety. The duplication or partial duplication of locations with different dressings is a principal way of accomplishing this. So the New York and Interzone 'writers' cafes' are connected with similarities in booth upholstery, nickel-plated cash registers, and stainlesssteel implements. The restaurant (in Interzone) where Cloquet takes Lee for breakfast, with its pillars and arches, reappears differently furnished as the Frosts' apartment - where Lee remarks, 'There's a great restaurant in New York looks just like this/ Most amazing of all is the most prominent and recurring of all the 'outdoor' locations: a passage flanked by grey stone arcades of pillars with pointed gothic arches joining them serves an astonishing variety of functions. First it is the New York marketplace where Lee buys (but from Arab vendors) dried centipedes. Then it reappears as 'the beach' in Interzone: ash-white sand, cold white light, the flickering of small bonfires are the surroundings for Lee's appearances as a derelict. Here he lies on a dust heap, sleeping outdoors in his ash-covered suit with the other bums, coughing and hacking, a junky casualty; and here he is found first by Cloquet and then by Hank and Martin (in the latter scene Bill's 'writing machine' is shown to be a pillowcase full of drug bottles). As this location appears repeatedly, it is seen eventually not to be an exterior at all, but rather something like the nave of an abandoned church, with bluewhite light bleeding in through high windows. Its last appearance is the most powerful of all: as the Mugwump-jism dispensary, where its interior status is at last explicit. This shifting locale is the locus of a defeat that is overt and impossible not to recognize, the antithesis of the disordered brown interior of drug-subjectivity. This exterior is disordered too, or if organized (as the dispensary certainly is) that order is a malignant predatory one. In any case, it is the scene of a disastrous social and personal failure, but now drained of its brown warmth and interiority, cold and colourless. Lighting, motifs, music

This figuring of a cold white light as the invasive marker of an unforgiving exterior world is seen in several other scenes as well, and is

336 The Artist as Monster

reminiscent of the patterns of Dead Ringers and especially of such individual tableaux as the spectacle of Beverly Mantle mainlining drugs at the office as his secretary walks in. Generally the lighting of Naked Lunch, while certainly dark shadowed, carries the warmth of browns and oranges and yellows; but there are a couple of moments when a much starker and more dramatic chiaroscuro is used, and this aggressive and even violent lighting-attack polarizes things between black and white. For example, in one of the early scenes at A.J. Cohen Exterminators, the men's faces are brutally cut in half by sharp lines dividing harsh light from stygian shadow; and there are a handful of later examples with the same effect - for example, the scene where the Clark-Nova tells Lee that his wife was a centipede, or the scene at Cloquet's with Kiki. Then in the first encounter with Benway, the doctor is almost invisibly dark against window backlight. The nature and source of light in given scenes not only sets dramatic tone and temperature in an expressionist-derived way through a heavy reliance on chiaroscuro and sculpted shadows, but also creates a precise pattern of images made up of window frames and bars to indicate continuities across the New York / Interzone divide. A regime of textures and tones featuring chromed metal, mirrors, and spectacles creates a similar continuity. One particularly powerful feature is an image of Lee with, in the same frame, a mirror image of the back of his head. The primal occurrence of this image is during the scene of Joan's initial shooting, and it returns in several different forms throughout the film as a reminder of that prime psychological event that Lee is trying to deal with, or escape from. The way in which mirrors signify true or false self-images (as in countless mise-en-scene-conscious films) is here inflected so as to convey Lee's anguished relation with his own mind, and his mind's finally unsuccessful attempts to flee this memory in the context of drugs and hallucinations. Since the film's physical environment more or less doubles as the landscape of the protagonist's mind, the possibilities in this area are virtually endless, and the film takes advantage of very many of them. Finally, the musical score adds its strong and distinctive colouring to the whole film. If not perhaps quite at the pitch of tragic feeling of Dead Ringers, Howard Shore's score again is a determining element. Here, to reflect Burroughs's Beat cultural affinities and the links of that movement to jazz, the great jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman is brought in to improvise over Shore's base-music or to provide whole freestanding numbers. Here again the film takes a crooked and interesting path in

Naked Lunch

337

the effort to reflect some kind of cultural history. As the 'New York 1953' environment seems to lean back into the 1940s and even further (as Burroughs himself often does) and then turns into a Tangiers-ofthe-mind, so the movie's jazz links are comparably skewed. The jazz that Beat musicians were listening to in 1953 was Charlie Parker-style bebop, whereas the kind of aggressive, modernist, highly dissonant 'free jazz' of which Coleman was one of the crucial pioneers was a few years in the future; so its presence in the film is anachronistic, especially when other aspects of the movie are stretching in the opposite historical direction. On the other hand, Coleman's musical modernism, his abandonment of harmonic stability and his increase in the norm-ofdissonance might be thought the jazz equivalents of the fractured modernism of Burroughs's writing. In any case, it is an inspired choice. Shore's darkly looming brass fanfares and harmonic intervals of understated anguish form a platform for Coleman's demented saxophone scurryings, which convey the rising, brain-fried panic of a fly trapped in a bottle. The hipness of the jazz is finally only a costume, like Lee's tough-guy hipness, a mask for complete alienation and lostness; and the dark ocean in which the subject is swallowed up at last is that background of brass and strings that represents the inevitable telos of the protagonist. Harsh, anguished, dissonant chords repeated insistently in the orchestra are a summons to pain in which the saxophone is lost and extinguished, only to rise again later - only to be extinguished in the same way. This hybrid music reflects both the world of Burroughs (Coleman) and the world of Cronenberg (Shore) in a fashion that exemplifies the film's most successful creative strategies, and represents a kind of epitome of the whole - perhaps Cronenberg's most complex and ingenious work.

CHAPTER TWELVE

M. Butterfly (1993) 'Only a man knows how a woman is supposed to act'

After the rigours of Naked Lunch, which he had been wrestling with for many years, Cronenberg was apparently looking for a film project that would have a less protracted and onerous scripting process.1 He turned to David Henry Hwang's 1988 Tony Award-winning play M. Butterfly. This in turn had been based on recent news stories reporting the very strange case of a French diplomat named Bernard Boursicot who had been convicted of espionage after passing sensitive materials to a Chinese spy - a male travesti actor at the Beijing Opera named Shi Pei Pu, with whom Boursicault had been having a sexual liaison for twenty years while believing his lover to be a woman. The stranger-than-fiction National Enquirer aspects of this story ensured its widespread propagation,2 and Cronenberg's first reaction was evidently the same as everyone else's: Tt's one of those little stories like Dead Ringers. What? Twin gynecologists found dead? What? Chinese opera singer/spy loves French diplomat and turns out to be a man after 20 years?'3 Hwang's play, changing the names and many of the circumstances, finds its focus in the theme of Western colonialist attitudes towards the East, and especially Western socio-sexual attitudes towards the Oriental woman. Here the racial and sexual stereotypes spectacularly embodied in Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly could provide a frame: in turn-of-the-century Japan, an unthinkingly sexist and racist American naval officer (Pinkerton) 'marries' a 15-year-old Japanese girl (Butterfly), then abandons her only to return with his American bride to claim his half-Japanese baby, while Butterfly commits ritual suicide. Hwang's French diplomat, now called Rene Gallimard, fantasizes himself as the Western-archetypal white man worshipped by the Western-archetypal Oriental woman (a performer at the Beijing

M. Butterfly

339

Opera named Song Liling), whose youth and fragility, self-abasement and sacrifice, define her as 'the Perfect Woman/ and allow him to experience the full joys and powers of an equally 'perfect7 masculinity But of course such a fantasy is based on incredible distortions of actuality; and thus the surreal, elementary mistakenness of Gallimard, and his subsequent comic and tragic public humiliation, can serve admirably to illustrate the utterly delusory nature of the fantasy. In his afterword to the published version of the play, Hwang says: I ... asked myself, 'What did Boursicot think he was getting in this Chinese actress?7 The answer came to me clearly: 'He probably thought he had found Madame Butterfly/ ... Very soon after, I came up with the basic 'arc7 of my play: the Frenchman fantasizes that he is Pinkerton and his lover is Butterfly. By the end of the piece, he realizes that it is he who has been Butterfly, in that the Frenchman has been duped by love; the Chinese spy, who exploited that love, is therefore the real Pinkerton.4

The play thus expounds some analytical insights of an anti-patriarchal, anti-imperial political viewpoint. Gallimard is not primarily held up to ridicule or condemnation, but is seen rather as the pathetic and even tragic victim of his own culture's ideological fictions - deluded and self-deluded to be sure, but merely following a line of thought and feeling presented to him ready-made by Western cultural mythology. Adaptation Of all Cronenberg's literary-hybrid films, M. Butterfly is perhaps the oddest, and perhaps also the least satisfactory. The gap between Stephen King's Dead Zone and Cronenberg's highly unusual artistic personality was quite large; but the film version bridged that gap in the end very successfully, even if at the cost (from a narrowly Cronenbergian viewpoint) of importing softer and more conventional story phenomena into what had hitherto been a rather harsh and entirely personal narrative environment. Johnny Smith emerges as not only a Cronenberg hero with strong resemblances to his fellows, but one who, on account of the 'foreign' element deriving from the adapted story, actually becomes a meaningful and logically consequent variation of the species. The Fly, beginning as a remake and as somebody else's screenplay, was faced with similar problems of making the nonCronenbergian Cronenbergian, and surmounted them even more tri-

340 The Artist as Monster

umphantly. And Naked Lunch, whatever discordancies it introduced into the ec/zt-Cronenberg world emanating from the revered master Burroughs, produced a Cronenburroughs as bizarre as Brundlefly but equally a sensibility unimaginable outside a Cronenberg film. In M. Butterfly Cronenberg is for the first time adapting a play, with a dialogue-based dramatic focus already imagined in terms of staged scenes, and moreover working from a screenplay signed by the playwright himself.5 Even more indelible is the play's essential 'take' on the story, its foundation in specific insights regarding history, race, and gender. For example, it is impossible to escape the play's importation, and also its particular interpretation, of the 'Madame Butterfly' story. Indeed the film has no wish to escape it, nor would it at all make sense to do so while using the play as any kind of basis. And yet vital aspects of this focus are, I would argue, seriously extraneous to and incongruous with the film's fundamental interests - or perhaps I should rather say to those aspects of the story that chime most resonantly with Cronenberg's artistic pilgrimage. Hwang's play is kaleidoscopic and swift-moving, beginning in Gallimard's prison cell and flashing back to various points in the action before ending with the suicide of the protagonist arrayed in the costume of Madame Butterfly. Formally it is full of verve and virtuosity: characters step into and out of the fictional frame, alternately addressing the audience directly or taking their places in a momentarily more realist representation; episodes are danced or mimed; cartoon-like characters pop into the action to emphasize the symbolic nature of the drama, and also the central characters oscillate between satirical pastiche and a sober seriousness; the tone of the dialogue swings back and forth across a spectrum from vulgar colloquialism to poetic speech, as rude satire and. a kind of elevated pathos intertwine. Often there is an agitprop and certainly post-Brechtian flavour to the proceedings, and the work obviously wants to make its points clearly, quickly, and with dash. On stage, and even on the page, this strategy works very well: any inconsistencies, oversimplifications, or logical flaws in the didactic scenario are rendered insignificant in the brisk succession of striking events and coups de theatre. But it is difficult to imagine this specifically extremely stage-dependent formal approach translating well to the screen, and certainly not to any kind of film that might be thought at all mainstream. And Cronenberg's screen version aims to be more mainstream than perhaps any of his films since The Dead Zone. With a budget of around

M. Butterfly

341

$22 million, it was certainly his most expensive and epically ambitious project to date, with location shooting in China, Hungary, and New York, and so many crowd scenes and heroic long shots that the Geffen studio trailer was able to make it look like a David Lean picture/6 Of course the finished product doesn't really look like a David Lean picture, but it does look a lot more like one than any other Cronenberg film. Not since Rabid had Cronenberg incorporated the massive presence of a society so crucially into a film, and even then not so regularly (and certainly not so expensively) as here. The film isn't really interested in the history or social life of China, nor even in Western political events such as the Vietnam War and the May 1968 demonstrations in Paris that are incorporated into its action in significant ways. Instead, like every other late Cronenberg film, it is interested in the personal destinies, mostly internal and psychological, of its central characters, and especially its male protagonist. But Cronenberg's relative indifference to the specific political points made by the play - about the Western view of Asia, for example, or even the particular characteristics of the Western male sexual fantasy about the Oriental female - leave him in a rather peculiar position with respect to the socio-historical angle more or less mandated for the film by the play. Imbedded in the play he has quite legitimately found a drama about identity, gender roles, and the psychological mechanisms of a certain type of man, a drama very close to many of the recurring concerns of his own work. But to get this material he has also to take on a specific anti-colonialist analysis with which he may be in sympathy but that has never been part of his own agenda as an artist, and must represent a broad sweep of social and historical material far from the obsessive inner focus of his work as a whole. Hwang's play is able to accomplish multiple aims and multiple viewpoints, indeed to pursue them very deliberately, because of the political basis for its concept, and because of the style of virtuosic fragmentation that it adopts as its formal stance. But for Cronenberg one particular aim and viewpoint needs to be exploited: the strange personal experience of Rene Gallimard, and secondarily that of Song Liling. In order to give increased weight and depth to the psychological drama, and to de-emphasize the cartoonlike and didactic features so essential to the play,7 the film gravitates to a far more sober realist narrative style than the play. The central characters are given much more space, time, and substance: their scenes are drawn out and emphatic, their presence on the screen often lyricized and pregnant with feeling. And in adopting such an approach to the

342 The Artist as Monster

central characters, the film must do something, if not similar, then not completely incompatible, with the surrounding social and historical material. The dense and solid decor of the domestic scenes, the physicality of the streets of Budapest-as-Beijing and of political rallies during the Cultural Revolution or the 1968 Paris demonstrations, the epic scale of shots in the Chinese government labour camp or on the Great Wall, a full opera house for one brief sequence in Paris - all end up positioning M. Butterfly momentarily as a poor cousin of Bertolucci's The Last Emperor without Cronenberg having the least ambition to make a movie even a tenth of whose purpose is lavish spectacle.8 What the film does, then, is to 'naturalize7 the play's action in a way familiar from many screen adaptations of stage drama. The action is expanded and taken outdoors more, solidified and incarnated in 'real' locations and props. All the play's strategies of fragmentation, synecdoche, pastiche, and other forms of a more sketch-like signification are in the film laboriously reconstructed into naturalistic action and inserted into a narrative whose mainstream realist mode is probably the most straightforward in all of Cronenberg. At the same time, much of the play's dialogue is transplanted intact - though almost all of its impertinent low-comic raucousness is expunged. Quite typical of the play is the following exchange between Song and her9 government controller Comrade Chin, during an impromptu show-trial scene featuring agitprop dancers who set the climate of the Cultural Revolution and introduced Brechtianly by Chin walking across the stage with a banner reading The Actor Renounces His Decadent Profession': CHIN: What did you do? SONG: I shamed China by allowing myself to be corrupted by a foreigner ... CHIN: What does this mean? The People demand a full confession! SONG: I engaged in the lowest perversions with China's enemies! CHIN: What perversions? Be more clear! SONG: I let him put it up my ass! Dancers look over, disgusted CHIN: Aaaa-ya! How can you use such sickening language?! SONG: My language ... is only as foul as the crimes I committed ... CHIN: Yeah. That's better.10

Nothing remotely like this survives into the film - not the rapid-sketch conception and realization of the scene, not the broad political satire, and certainly not the deflating and demystifying vulgar language. The

M. Butterfly

343

dialogue that is repeated in the film does encompass much of the poetic and romantic vein of Song's exotic Oriental allure and Gallimard's heartfelt infatuation; but these passages undergo a subtle change in meaning through the absence of the rambunctious irony surrounding them in the play. In the play, the spectator (or reader) is never allowed to forget the absurdity either of Gallimard's actions or of the falsely elevated feelings motivating them, even if there is also a high degree of understanding of and pity for them there. But for Cronenberg this kind of mockery only serves to weaken the seriousness of the central interior drama. And so Gallimard's relationship with Song is lavished with all the slow intensity and fascination that beautiful art direction and the hypnotic gaze of his camera can endow. As a result, the film truly does come somewhat to resemble a romantic lyrical opera. It can never truly approach, well, Puccini's Madama Butterfly, because the protagonist's fantastic fundamental misperception always works against a straightforward romantic outpouring of feeling. But given that fundamental limitation, the film strives as hard as it can to produce an aura of emotional grandeur and seriousness - an aura that will reflect the scale and seriousness of the protagonist's experience just as Cronenberg's preceding films have done. Madame Butterfly The story of Madame Butterfly, both in the play and in the film, is taken from Puccini's opera of 1904. The opera's libretto was adapted from David Belasco's one-act play of 1900, which had been one of a series of big successes for probably America's most celebrated playwrightdirector during this period of the last great dominance of the stage. Belasco's play was in turn based on an 1897 novella by John Luther Long. The precise heritage of the Madame Butterfly narrative has no direct importance either to Hwang or to Cronenberg, except as an indication of the specific tradition from which the ideas for M. Butterfly sprang. But it is worth casting a somewhat more than passing glance at this tradition in order to understand more exactly what kinds of cultural currents Hwang is referring to, what their near-relatives are in the broader traditions of melodrama, and hence what kind of operation is being conducted upon the spectator of M. Butterfly. To my mind, there are two separate central features to the original 'Madame Butterfly' model. The first is its spectacle of an attractive, innocent, helpless young woman exploited by a more mature, sexually predatory man who takes

344 The Artist as Monster

advantage of her naivety and abandons her after having robbed her of her virginity and rendered her a social outcast. The second is the extra heightening of the flavour of such a spectacle by the addition of the stereotype of the Oriental woman and its accompanying notion of an abject devotion and self-sacrifice in her love for a Caucasian man; here, the innocence of the young female victim is augmented with a culturally formed self-abnegation and emotional surrender so complete that even the revelation of the man's perfidy cannot affect it. The extreme youth of the Long/Belasco/Puccini Butterfly - she is fifteen and constantly referred to as a doll-like, child-like 'plaything' is not taken up at all by Hwang, though it is a crucial aspect placing the story within one strong current of sexual hysteria in Victorian melodrama (and its cinematic perpetuators, notably Griffith). Cronenberg does not really take it up either, except in one strange and striking moment: SONG: Rene, there is a mystery you must clarify for me. GALLIMARD: What mystery? SONG: With your pick of Western women, [eyes move shyly aside] why did you pick a poor Chinese with a chest like a boy? GALLIMARD: Not like a boy, like - a girl. Like - a young, innocent schoolgirl [nodding at the justice of this comparison, with a look of inward communion, now articulating precisely] waiting for her lessons.

The sadistic nature of Gallimard's desire is captured here as nowhere else in the film; but even here Song's youth is only metaphorical: her 'chest like a boy' is not a marker of her child-body, but merely suggests that of a schoolgirl whose youth is more a matter of ignorance and tobe-initiatedness than of years. In any more substantial form, the pedophilia that is such a constituting feature especially of the opera is simply missing. In its place is a much more emphatic and fully articulated representation of the second, Oriental-colonial, aspect. This perspective involves the projection of these features of weakness and desirability onto the colonial world of Asia, to find a congruence between the masculine conquest of feminine powerlessness and the Western conquest of Eastern powerlessness. Both women and the Orient are exotic and other; and both are endowed with the characteristic of wanting to be commanded and exploited by the virile and confident white male. Postcolonial theory has many times over asserted this congruence, and posited a 'feminization' of colonized Eastern cultures in the Western

M. Butterfly

345

imagination, whereby (for example) China is like a woman, secretly waiting for and desiring the conquest of 'her' Western master despite a superficial show of resistance.11 Expired shelf life But I would suggest that both the child-woman and the perfect-Oriental-submissive-woman as complementary aspects of the Western masculine imagination are far less active and powerful now than they were at the turn of the nineteenth century. The sexually desirable womanas-child, though by no means extinct, seems in retrospect very much a by-product of Victorian gender-construction and especially of its masculine predatory sexual desire that is hysterically disavowed and re-projected as moral outrage towards characters such as Pinkerton. The helpless waif ravaged by an unscrupulous male does not exist in nearly as widespread, not to say obsessive, a fashion as she once did, and it would be difficult in, say, a North American cultural climate of to-day safely to extract anywhere near so much erotic mileage from this spectacle.12 The 'Oriental' half of the project has undergone a similar transformation. After the Second World War, the Chinese Communist revolution, Korea, and Vietnam - not to mention Japan's and then Southeast Asia's and China's spectacularly successful commercial 'penetration' of Western markets - the Oriental as submissive female is a far more difficult imaginative project for Western males than it was at a time when Commodore Perry's forcible opening of Japan was a relatively recent memory and when China was being Balkanized by Western nations pursuing commercial hegemony. It may indeed be possible to arouse a nostalgic yearning for such earlier times of easy patriarchal imperialism (along the lines of British television's endless narrative revisitations of periods when Britain was a world power), but I would suggest that this particular brand of nostalgia is a not-very-potent substratum particularly of an American (or North American) audience, whose historical illiteracy is generally such that the time and place in question has likely been quite forgotten. Hwang would certainly not agree with this statement, and makes an explicitly contrary claim in his afterword to the play: I knew Butterfly only as a cultural stereotype; speaking of an Asian woman, we would sometimes say, 'She's pulling a Butterfly/ which meant playing the submissive Oriental number. Yet, I felt convinced that the

346 The Artist as Monster libretto would include yet another lotus blossum pining away for a cruel Caucasian man, and dying for her love. Such a story has become too much of a cliche not to be included in the archetypal East-West romance that started it all... Gay friends have told me of a derogatory term used in their community: 'Rice Queen' - a gay Caucasian man primarily attracted to Asians. In these relationships, the Asian virtually always plays the role of the 'woman'; the Rice Queen, culturally and sexually, is the 'man'... Similarly, heterosexual Asians have long been aware of 'Yellow Fever' - Caucasian men with a fetish for exotic Oriental women. I have often heard it said that 'Oriental women make the best wives/ (Rarely is this heard from the mouths of Asian men, incidentally.) This mythology is exploited by the Oriental mail-order bride trade which has flourished over the past decade. American men can now send away for catalogues of 'obedient, domesticated' Asian women looking for husbands. Anyone who believes such stereotypes are a thing of the past need look no further than Manhattan cable television, which advertises call girls from 'the exotic east, where men are king; obedient girls, trained in the art of pleasure/13

Admittedly the stereotype of the submissive Oriental woman can be reactivated for, typically, a class of American males who have been (or see themselves as) major losers in the social and personal gains made by women in recent decades. The consumers of Asian mail-order brides are precisely men who find it hard to get any kind of a wife in an American setting, and need to rely on gross disparities of economic power to find one half a world away. And what they are buying is not a deeply enculturated submissiveness but an economic total dependency. Even the 'Manhattan call girls' have to have their exoticfantasy-of-submission qualities explained in the advertisements to viewers for whom it might not otherwise occur that there was anywhere where 'men are king' and girls are 'obedient/ The Pinkerton Syndrome, then, seems to me non-operative in American cultural masculinity at the moment. The Rambo Syndrome and the Indiana Jones Syndrome are very arguably present, and both of them strive to assert the superiority of the American white male, and posit in different ways 'good' Asians as grateful and devoted to their American male saviours. But Pinkerton's casual imperialist hubris, an expression of first-generation Manifest Destiny complete with brass-buttoned naval uniform, has an official status that lone action heroes as implicitly populist individualists must stay well clear of. No, the condition is really much more suited to Europeans. Often operating with sub-

M. Butterfly

347

aristocratic assumptions of superiority and an overconsciousness of the grandeur of European civilization, the Europeans are after all the founders and theorists of Western colonial ideology. Gallimard's specific brand of fatuity is indeed far more believable in a French diplomat of the 1960s than it would be in an American one. The original Butterfly story may have reflected a particular moment in American imperial history, but that moment was itself derived from a colonial imperialism that was originally and essentially European. Gallimard's entire imaginative construction of exoticism, Orientality, and as a matter of fact masculinity and femininity, has a European stamp. Of course Gallimard, in play and film both, is a Frenchman. But the play is written by an American for American audiences, and the film is equally North American in creation and aims. This becomes clear in the speech in which Song explains to Gallimard the self-flattery of the Butterfly story to Westerners: Consider it this way: what would you say if a blonde homecoming queen fell in love with a short Japanese businessman? He treats her cruelly, then goes home for three years, during which time she prays to his picture and turns down marriage from a young Kennedy. Then, when she learns her husband has remarried, she kills herself. Now, I believe you would consider this girl to be a deranged idiot, correct? But because it's an Oriental who kills herself for a Westerner - ah! - you find it beautiful.14

It is characteristic of the tone of the play that references to homecoming queens and young Kennedys are used for vivid and immediate effect on American spectators without any concern that of course such comparisons are hardly plausible in a Beijing Opera performer talking to a French diplomat. But although plausibility is not a priority of the play, it is much more one in the formally more realist world of the film, and here especially the disparity between the European sources of Gallimard's fantasy and its application for a North American audience is most apparent. The submissive female All of this is to argue that the play contains important arguments and assumptions that are perhaps questionable in themselves; and that these arguments and assumptions become more rather than less problematic in the context of the film. The difficulties are especially visible when one begins to consider M. Butterfly purely as a Cronenberg film -

348 The Artist as Monster

that is, as yet another return to the concerns and perspectives that have reappeared obsessively throughout his work, and more specifically to the issues of subjectivity, gender construction, and personal relationship that have been so central to the films since Videodrome. In this context, although the reasons Cronenberg should have felt drawn to M. Butterfly are clear and compelling, the project brings with it in addition a framework and central ideas that are so extraneous to Cronenberg's angle of interest as to constitute a kind of 'noise' that interferes with the film's ability to broadcast its 'Cronenberg' signal. Specifically, the entire apparatus of the Butterfly fantasy seems to me to be extraneous in this way. Neither in its racial nor in its gender-politics aspects is it at all close to what we have come to think of as the filmmaker's strong and consistent perspectives. To begin with the most obvious point, Cronenberg's work has never shown any strong attraction to or even slight interest in submissive women. As so many commentators have recognized, women in Cronenberg were from the beginning associated with excitement, transgression, disease, violence, and catastrophe, and were in almost every single case magnetic for the narrative in exact proportion to their sexual or proto-sexual power. And while this attitude might perhaps be interpreted as implying a fear of strong sexual women, any corollary attraction to submissiveness and prostrate devotion is entirely absent. What is menacing and destructive is also what is exciting - and indeed the recognition eventually arrives that it is the excitingness of, or rather the male excitedness at, sexualized females that constitutes their danger rather than any inherent destructiveness in the female object of desire. And so, although Cronenberg's heroines have become less and less plague-carrying or twisted in themselves, and more and more simply self-possessed and functional and in fact admirable, they have not lost any of their strength and assertiveness. Cronenberg the filmmaker likes strong women, and is attracted to them; what constitutes their scariness lies not in themselves but in the chaos of feelings they arouse. So when, in M. Butterfly, a man who is in many respects exactly another version of the Cronenberg male protagonist has his hot button pushed by the prospect of a meek and submissive woman, the spectacle is an unfamiliar and, I would say, to a degree an unconvincing one. There is of course one aspect of male dominance and female submission that does recall earlier avatars of the Cronenberg sex-fantasy: namely, its similarity to the patterns of male sadism and female masochism that have figured so prominently in earlier films. It must be

M. Butterfly

349

stressed, however, that in all the most important examples of this phenomenon, both sadistic and masochistic pleasures are physical. Nicki's branded breast in Videodrome and Claire's surgical-tubing bondage in Dead Ringers are vivid examples, as are Max's liberated desire to whip and pierce, and Beverly's physical realization of the implicit sadism of his professional passion. Moreover, to the extent that such physical sado-masochism is staged as itself, in a non-disavowing way, its operation is entirely dependent upon the invitation of the woman. It is a feature of the masochistic desires of the woman that, although they rather suspiciously complement the sadistic desires of the man, they are the initiating force which creates a sexual awakening in him; and hence, that even the physically masochistic woman retains the qualities of dynamism and power that invest all female sexuality in Cronenberg. However recurrent and crucial female physical masochism may be in the films, then, it is never accompanied by a female emotional masochism. That quality is attached, rather, to the central male at various (usually later) stages of his progress towards 'enfemalement' and the pathos-filled martyrdom of a 'feminine' melodrama. But the masochism of Madame Butterfly, and that of the Oriental 'perfect woman' described by Hwang, is not physical but emotional,15 and it is essential to its constitution that it not be dynamic and initiating but instead entirely passive and receptive. If in the Videodrome show that Max first views there are Asian-looking women being whipped and shocked, and its sadistic qualities are enhanced by the overlap of sexual and political projects of domination, such a pornographic spectacle has really nothing in common with the gentle graces of a Song LilingButterfly whose decorous sufferings are wholly psychological - and whose corresponding effect upon Gallimard is equally psychological. Well, perhaps it is not quite so simple as this. The archetype of Butterfly, and the imitation of it constructed by Gallimard and Song, is certainly passive, submissive, and non-initiating. But in fact it is Song herself who first introduces the archetype, constructing and deconstructing it in the most explicit terms in her first conversation with Gallimard. Responding to his deeply felt appreciation of the scenes from Puccini that she has just performed, she immediately manifests a critical repugnance both to the story itself and to Gallimard's enthusiasm for it. The play emphasizes this response unmistakably: GALLIMARD: I usually don't like Butterfly. SONG: I can't blame you in the least.

350 The Artist as Monster GALLIMARD: I mean, the story SONG: Ridiculous. GALLIMARD: I like the story, but... what? SONG: Oh, you like it? GALLIMARD: I ... what I mean is, IVe always seen it played by huge women in so much bad makeup. SONG: Bad makeup is not unique to the West. GALLIMARD: But, who can believe them? SONG: And you believe me? GALLIMARD: Absolutely You were utterly convincing. It's the first time SONG: Convincing? As a Japanese woman? The Japanese used hundreds of our people for medical experiments during the war, you know. But I gather such an irony is lost on you. GALLIMARD: No! I was about to say, it's the first time I've seen the beauty of the story. SONG: Really? GALLIMARD: Of her death. It's a ... pure sacrifice. He's unworthy, but what can she do? She loves him ... so much. It's a very beautiful story. SONG: Well, yes, to a Westerner. GALLIMARD: Excuse me? SONG: It's one of your favourite fantasies, isn't it? The submissive Oriental woman and the cruel white man.16

(And so on into Song's speech about the homecoming queen and the Japanese businessman.) The film script softens a little the corrosiveness of Song's irony by omitting her reference to the story of Butterfly as 'ridiculous/17 But it retains enough of Song's analysis to leave essentially unaltered the paradox whereby the character occupies the roles of both embodiment of the Oriental fantasy-female and the fantasy's chief critic. Hwang's play needs somebody to expound the Butterfly Syndrome and also to make sure a Western audience understands how absurd it is from an Asian standpoint; and the film has the same requirement, without nearly the choice of agents and strategies the play has. A very particular strangeness arises from the metamorphosis of the Syndrome's critic into its embodiment. The change is covered by one brief bit of dialogue in both play and film during Gallimard's second meeting with Song: SONG: We have always held a certain fascination for you Caucasian men, have we not?

M. Butterfly

351

GALLIMARD: Yes. But that fascination is imperialist, or so you tell me. SONG: Yes. It is always imperialist. But sometimes ... sometimes it is also mutual.18

With this shift, Song moves from being a strong, knowledgeable, independent figure to being one of passivity and helpless love. Of course the revelation that even such a critically intelligent woman is not immune to the fatal necessity of succumbing to a white man can serve to make the fantasy even more delectable to Gallimard. But what is suggested more strongly is that Gallimard's will to believe in the fantasy is instantly so strong that it simply ignores and obliterates any knowledge he might have been confronted with as to its unreality. That is, Gallimard emotionally lunges at the idea of the Butterfly figure and almost deliberately refuses to see the exposition of its falsehood that is presented at the same time. It is certainly an action that is characteristic of the person who will refuse to see that his ideal woman is in fact a man. This perhaps explains Gallimard's blindness, but it does not explain Song's spectacular oddness of behaviour - her motives, as we shall see, remain obscure throughout the narrative. What does emerge from Song's oddness and her change of stances, however, is a shadowy repetition of the sexually awakening initiative of the Cronenberg female. If Song must quickly metamorphose to a condition of helpless, submissive love, she nevertheless begins as a kind of provocateuse who arouses the Cronenberg male protagonist's dormant desire. And of course it is sexual desire that is at the base of the whole phenomenon. The reason Gallimard finds Song 'convincing' as a submissive victim but the 'overweight ladies' who usually sing Butterfly unconvincing has nothing to do with the anti-verisimilitude of 'bad makeup' and everything to do with the sexual attractiveness of Song's Butterfly to a male viewer. After all, 'overweight ladies' are just as capable of hopeless love and sacrifice as slim ones are - only they will not be so 'believable,' their story not so 'beautiful,' to male viewers for whom the whole spectacle of fragility and destruction rests on a disavowed basis of erotic attraction. But Song has a dualistic presence as neo-Butterfly and as deconstructive Butterfly-critic (whose ultimate act of deconstruction is, of course, to be a man), and this dualism complicates the operation of erotic attraction both for Gallimard and for the viewer. Indeed, this potential difficulty almost mirrors the alreadymentioned problem (for Cronenberg) of an erotically attractive female submissiveness. Song is passive and submissive (and therefore an

352 The Artist as Monster

erotic spur to the colonialist masculine desire of Gallimard); but she is also active and controlling (and therefore an erotic spur to the 'Cronenberg' whose desire is aroused by dynamic, sexualizing women). Gallimard We may turn now to Gallimard. In Hwang's play his ripeness to succumb to the Butterfly story is aided by his personal appearance and sexual history. He is shy, physically unattractive and socially awkward, stranded between actual failure to get women and pornographic fantasies of beauty and compliance - a stereotypical nerd who in school was voted 'least likely to be invited to a party,'19 and who in several scenes is vividly contrasted with his far more sexually knowing and successful friend from school days, Marc. He confides to the audience: 'We, who are not handsome, nor brave, nor powerful, yet somehow believe, like Pinkerton, that we deserve a Butterfly.'20 But when experience began to teach him that such a prize was beyond his reach, Gallimard 'took a vow renouncing love' and married a woman older than himself in order to advance his career. In all these respects, Hwang's Gallimard resembles neither the character's real-life model Bernard Boursicot nor the Gallimard of the film, both of whom are reasonably attractive, reasonably sexually self-confident men. In the film Gallimard's wife Jeanne is, as it were, a movie star (Barbara Sukowa) like himself (Jeremy Irons), whose only drawback sexually is that she is the wrong flavour (vanilla). The play uses its hero's physical mediocrity and low self-esteem to help create the conditions for his later blindness: at last he will be delivered from a lifetime of inferiority; Song will not perceive his unattractiveness because it will be eclipsed by his racial and cultural status of godlike white male conqueror and hers of humble, bedazzled female inferior. In a word he will have motives for not seeing - not wanting to see - the truth that a man with a less damaged sexual confidence might see, while still finding an outlet for a preening sense of masculine privilege that is the heritage of white European patriarchy. The film largely dispenses with this strategy, and one may speculate that it is because Cronenberg conceives of the drama in a form, and on a scale, less restricted by the particulars of personal experience. His Gallimard certainly takes a big leap from his previous life into his fantasy-love for Butterfly, but it is a leap of temperament, from caution and calculation to freedom and big feelings, rather than a transformation from girl-repelling loser into Lothario. It is important

M. Butterfly

353

for Cronenberg that his protagonist make as amazing, and transformative, a leap as possible, and that the scale of his (self-)deception should be of the greatest possible dimensions. Looked at from a certain angle, Gallimard has much in common with the Cronenberg male protagonist as we have encountered him in the films since Videodrome. Like so many of his predecessors he begins as a man of caution - careful, inwardly focused, emotionally rather isolated and shut down. Seth Brundle and the Mantle Brothers are scientists, Johnny Smith a schoolteacher, William Lee a close-to-the-vest writer. Rene Gallimard has the most humble and pedestrian occupation yet: he is a bookkeeper. Repeatedly he is seen engrossed in his professional calling - working alone in his shirt sleeves, burrowing through papers, checking files, tallying ledgers. His object is to use the certainties of categories and numbers to maintain the regularity of a system, to sniff out irregularities and to correct them. This profession certainly represents as wholehearted a committment to rationality and order as any of Cronenberg's rationalizing and order-supervising characters in the past. Just like Johnny Smith or Seth Brundle or the Mantles, Gallimard has arrived at a condition in which he is using the rational instrument of his profession and his way of life to negotiate a degree of emotional safety. Accountancy, then, is a way of keeping things under control - literally, as a job description, and figuratively, as an analogue of a particular psychological approach to life. But in the case of a scientist, or even a schoolteacher, there is some room in the approach for creativity, for a dialogue with the outside world even if it is constricted. Gallimard's profession, though, confines itself to petty law enforcement, to the pedantic and the bureaucratic. 'The soul of a bookkeeper': that is a kind of insult, and it is directed at him by the casually self-assured cadre of men in the intelligence branch of the French Embassy in Beijing when Gallimard starts auditing their expense accounts and making trouble for them. Their leader, played by David Hemblen, makes a particularly humiliating social attack on Gallimard at a diplomatic-community dinner party: INTELLIGENCE OFFICER [quietly]: You listen to me. You're nobody. You're worse than nobody. You're an accountant, [his colleagues giggle; he puts his finger deliberately into the sauce on Gallimard's plate, licks it, then wipes it on Gallimard's meat] If you're not careful, [pause] we'll break all your pencils in half.

354 The Artist as Monster

As an embodiment of the masculine principle of instrumentality and substitution of rational systematization for spontaneity and directness, Gallimard's profession and attitudes seem particularly limited and cautious, without any of the romance of scientific 'breakthroughs' or even an impassioned advocacy of Edgar Allan Poe. There is no spark of brilliance about him; on the contrary, he seems almost as dull in his wits as he is in his lifestyle. He is in no sense an artist or a creator. His life is orderly, habitual, and finally boring and stifling, and when he 'breaks through' in his relationship with Song, his affair has a degree of resemblance to the cliched dashes for freedom of other stifled bookkeepers, other dutiful bored married men. What distinguishes Gallimard from this familiar stereotype is not his dreams of a Perfect Woman or of an Oriental exoticism - these are quite unoriginal - but rather the sheer enormity of his self-delusion, the comically but at the same time astoundingly, heroically erroneous nature of his liberating passion. Wishing only to find an essentially banal escape from his humdrum life, Gallimard finds himself pursuing an undertaking that is far more 'radical' than he had intended. In doing so, he also at last becomes a kind of artist who creates his own reality, who brings Song to life as a woman far more completely than she can do herself. Another Cronenberg hero The path that Gallimard takes from repression through liberation to catastrophe replicates one more time the trajectory of the Cronenberg hero. At first the escape from self-encapsulation produces euphoria. Old shackles, a confinement so familiar it has not even been recognized as such, fall away from him as he moves into Song's world of fantasy and romance. In one striking shot, after his first meeting with Song, Gallimard lies in bed next to his perfectly worthy wife who is as dull as himself and who at that moment is doing a slightly grotesque impression of Madame Butterfly using a magazine for a fan, and sees them both framed in a large oval mirror opposite the bed. As Gallimard stares fixedly at the composed and static image, you can see the thought written on his face, 'What's wrong with this picture?' The answer is that Jeanne is not Butterfly, and this is not the picture that he wants to be in. And so he escapes this picture and enters another one in his own fantasy at least the one adorning the cover of the recording of Madama Butterfly that Song sends him, a picture in which the submissive exotic Butterfly kneels before the lordly officer Pinkerton.

M. Butterfly

355

Spurred by dissatisfaction and romantic ambition, Gallimard visits Song and makes advances to her, then deliberately treats her to a regime of humiliating neglect - in response to which she acts as she is supposed to, and becomes more and more desperate in her love. 'I have already given you my shame/ she confesses in the last of her pleading letters. This at last prompts Gallimard to visit her again, to ask her point-blank the crucial question, 'Are you my Butterfly?' And she answers, as she must, 'Yes/ The transformation that now comes over Gallimard is striking. It is seen not just in his scenes with Song; it is equally and perhaps even more striking in his behaviour at work. His dinner-party humiliation by his colleagues in intelligence is positioned between the scene in which he has made his first physical advance to Song and the arrival of the letter that confesses her love. That is, his combative engagements in both masculine and feminine fields of personal politics are proceeding in parallel. And victory in one sphere is directly linked to victory in the other. Gallimard actually holds Song's letter of surrender in his hand as he is summoned to a meeting with the ambassador, where, expecting to be demoted because of the disturbance he's been making about expense accounts, he is instead rewarded for it with a promotion to vice-consul. Euphoric with this masculine triumph he rushes to consummate another one with Song. The precise conjunction of this double success is very reminiscent of The Fly, where Brundle's sex life and his scientific project achieve their breakthroughs in quick sequence, and where again it is the liberating boost of confidence in consequence of sexual fulfilment that leads to success in the professional realm. The ambassador compliments Gallimard's 'new, aggressive, overconfident' manner, and is soon accepting his pronouncements on the political and military situation in Asia primarily because Gallimard is delivering them with such sublime assurance. Moreover, as his amour-propre becomes more entrenched and he starts holding forth on politics at embassy gatherings, his swaggering proclamations now in turn reinforce his sexual success: the formidable and much-coveted Frau Baden takes him briskly to bed after having been impressed with one of his public performances.21 The specific connection of the hero's embrace and re-enactment of the Butterfly story and his rise to influence as a political analyst is made quite explicitly in Hwang's play, and repeated in the film. Given the nature of Hwang's basic political/cultural/sexual analysis of the 'Oriental woman' and 'Orient-as-woman' syndromes, it is only logical

356 The Artist as Monster

that Gallimard's progress in both fields would be related, and would share the same ideology. When the ambassador seeks his advice on American strategy in Vietnam, Gallimard's replies exactly transfer into the arena of international politics his experience with his Butterfly: Deep down, they're attracted to us. They find our ways - exciting. Of course, they'll never admit it. But the Oriental will always submit to the greater force. If the Americans demonstrate the will to win, the Vietnamese, mark my words, will welcome them into a mutually benefical union.22

As the personal-sexual and the international-political mirror each other as zones of Gallimard's success, so do they as equal and related emblems of his utter self-serving stupidity and delusion. A character who makes confident predictions of American success in Vietnam looks, twenty-five years after the fact, as completely foolish as a character who mistakes a man for a woman while having a sexual relationship with him. The conjunction allows Hwang to attack both forms of the ideology simultaneously, and with gusto. For Cronenberg, however, this stupidity does create a specific problem. However hubristic and mistakenly self-assured earlier Cronenberg heroes had been (Max at various points in Videodrome, for example, or Seth at the height of machismo in The Fly), none of them had ever been quite so fatuous as Gallimard must repeatedly demonstrate himself to be - so blithely deceived, often so smirking and even contemptible.23 Hwang's project is, in varying degrees, postcolonial and anti-patriarchal; but Cronenberg's (insofar as he is not just going along for the ride) concerns the status of masculinity, or rather the identity and modus operandi of the male subject. So while for Hwang the character of Gallimard is simply enacting the inane illusions that a man of his limited intellectual and physical gifts finds lying to hand as a European in Asia, for Cronenberg he must shoulder the burdens of a deeper and more turbulent crisis of identity. Certainly a good deal of sympathy is extended to Gallimard in the play, and certainly he takes up the posture and the actions of a tragic hero, but he can only superficially attain this gravity when he is so much the pawn of a particular enculturation. The film's protagonist, on the contrary, is presented much more as the architect of his own condition, and as another of Cronenberg's self-inventing heroes whose bizarre predicaments spring essentially from their efforts to cope with the peculiarities of their pro-

M. Butterfly

357

prietary inner problems. Both artists are emphatic in their revelation that masculinity, in the bedroom and in the corridors of power, is nothing but a tissue of error; but for the gleeful Hwang masculinity is a political target, whereas for the saddened Cronenberg it is a prop of identity in an environment of existential isolation and anxiety. And while the ridiculousness of Hwang's Gallimard is always apparent, the film aims to metamorphose him into another of the strange and catastrophic male monsters who have occupied centre stage in every Cronenberg film since Videodrome. False confidence, 'letting go' Gallimard now begins to take on the symptoms of deluded confidence specific to the Cronenberg hero. As in The Fly, his behaviour becomes more relaxed, more assertive, more indulgent. In Brundle's case, the assertiveness moves from happy babbling to Nietzschean oratory to lumpenproletarian arm-wrestling, while the indulgence begins with taking too much sugar in your cappuccino and progresses to doughnut boxes and cake tins and acne and cheap women. For Gallimard, the subtler and more moderate signal activities are smoking and drinking. Tobacco and alcohol are drugs, and, relatively mild though they may be in comparison to what the heroes of Dead Ringers and Naked Lunch are ingesting, Gallimard's use of them repeats the Cronenberg pattern. They are symptomatic of the artificiality of the protagonist's project, its basis in some kind of quicksand of subjectivity, and a predictor of its eventual failure to stand the test of external reality. The whole process of 'letting go' simultaneously represents the character's escape from the prison of unhappy and unhealthy balance and is the harbinger of an inevitable slide past any kind of useful corrective and into a condition of delusion, dereliction, and finally suicidal impossibility. The pleasure he is getting from these drugs, like the pleasure he is getting from his liberating transformation, is going to be a destructive one, and its eventual destructiveness is already evident in the lack of balance, the sloppiness and rashness, of his behaviour under their influence. Then, its destructive effects will be mirrored in a bodily and spiritual decay. Previously abstemious in manner, apparently, Gallimard is first seen smoking as he and Song walk through the streets after he attends her performance at the Beijing Opera. It almost appears to be a habit he has caught from her: her preceding 'light my cigarette' scene with him backstage carries an erotic charge familiar from many another movie,24 and

358 The Artist as Monster

marks the first moment of real sexuality between them. As the film proceeds, it seems that the more engaged he becomes in his fantasy and its consequences, the more heavily he smokes. Delivering encomiums to the ambassador or to the assembled listeners at the embassy bar, walking through back alleys to Song's house, and then back in Paris sitting in a bar coughing as he laments his exile from the Orient, or climbing onto his motorbike in his ridiculous courier's uniform as security police move in to arrest him - Gallimard's smoking is an emblem of his transformation first into man of power, and then into broken-down casualty. Cigarettes are like his relationship with Butterfly: they are a form of selfindulgence that ends badly. Alcohol performs a similar function, only in a less pervasive way. Gallimard is drunk in the scene in which he most plainly appears as a braggart, as he holds forth expansively to a roomful of people on the Americans in Vietnam: So I say to the Americans, 'Diem Must Go!' I mean the US wants to be respected by the Vietnamese, and there they are propping up this seminarian nonentity as a president. A man whose only claim to fame is his sister-in-law, a woman who imposes fanatical moral order campaigns! The Oriental woman, when she's good, she's very very very good. But when she's bad, she's Christian!

Here is a man who has loosed the bonds of caution, and also of any kind of self-invigilation and modesty. In turning away from repression and self-repression, he has also given up control of himself, is now the creature of his most egotistical impulses. He is an embarrassment to the viewer because he is not an embarrassment to himself. And at length the consequence follows: in Paris, sitting in the bar or staggering into the street to watch a student Maoist demonstration, he is drunk; and his semi-dereliction here is again seen as the logical end of his earlier indulgence. In M. Butterfly the pattern is muted in every register - the drugs are mild, the dereliction is very subtle in comparison with the choking messes of earlier films, even the monstrosification and suicide are relatively understated - but it is there. The deconstruction of male desire Max Renn, Seth Brundle, Beverly Mantle all move out of solitude and encapsulation into something excitingly Other - specifically female and sexual - and in the case of the latter two it is from a quiet and diffi-

M. Butterfly

359

dent womanlessness to a deeply fulfilling romantic relationship with a woman.25 Gallimard too repeats this model (with the wrinkle that he does so from within an emotionally hollow marriage rather than from bachelorhood). But all of these men must discover the bitter truth that in Cronenberg's world there is no rescuing and self-completing Other, that for them this beacon and magnet is an illusion. The heroes of Videodrome and Naked Lunch, in encountering at last some form of the redemptive female, are in fact only conversing with the hallucinations of their own shell-shocked minds. The women of The Fly and Dead Ringers are real enough, and other enough, but they might just as well be hallucinations. The men simply cannot reach them, crippled as they are by internal dysfunctions that end by re-sealing them into their tombs and leave them only with a final recognition of their inability to reach the outside world: 'I am a fly who dreamt he was a man'; 'Happy birthday, baby brother/ In M. Butterfly the configuration is in some ways the most daring of all. The woman is other, and real, and the protagonist can extend himself to love her, and she will respond; but she isn't a woman at all, she is a man. That is, she is demonstrated to be something as utterly different (in the realm of sexuality) from what he imagined her to be as she could possibly be. At the end of M. Butterfly, the woman is as unreachable and unreal as ever in Cronenberg, for she is not there at all. She is a figment of the male imagination. If Cronenberg's preceding films had not succeeded in convincing all viewers that his women characters were not to blame for the disasters that attended their relationships with his male protagonists, surely M. Butterfly must do so. Every film since Videodrome that had given rise in some quarters to cries of misogyny - that is, every film except The Dead Zone - had essentially been about the twisted and destructive nature of sexuality in the heads of men, not about any kind of culpability in either women's bodies or their minds. The fact that the women in so many of these films are the indispensable occasion of male sickness, that as the objects of male desire they are the necessary catalysts of the inner conflagrations that consume these men, might perhaps have confused some onlookers. But what woman can be held to blame for the exemplary Cronenbergian fate of Rene Gallimard? Well, of course it is Song Liling - who in this case actually does tempt and pursue and deceive and betray the hero in a way that no previous Cronenberg female character has ever done to a protagonist. But Song Liling is precisely not a real female, she is precisely a creation of male fantasy, she is in fact a man. And when Gallimard, at the end of the narrative, hav-

360 The Artist as Monster

ing seen his Butterfly metamorphose and dissolve dreadfully into a man, himself takes up the role of Butterfly, dressing himself in her costume and enacting her sacrificial and suicidal fate, he himself becomes his own fantasy projection: the oneness of himself and the female other he desires is made as absolutely explicit as it can be. In this respect, looked at in the context of male-female relations in Cronenberg's work over the preceding decade, M. Butterfly is almost a thesis-film. Indeed, a number of things can be spelled out in this newly literal environment - for example, the exchange of genders that overcomes so many Cronenberg protagonists. To some extent, the heroes of virtually every film since Videodrome have become enfemaled, whether 'opened up' and invaginated like Max, or pathos-melodramatized like Johnny Smith, or physically abjected like Seth, or medically dissected as a female patient like Elliot Mantle. In M. Butterfly Gallimard, after having deliberately sought the stereotypical masculinity of a masterful, female-dominating Pinkerton, is doubly enfemaled. First of all he moves into the female role of masochistic sufferer, the heroine of melodrama who is traduced and abandoned and becomes a powerless figure of pathos through victimhood. And finally he consciously occupies the role of Butterfly himself, sees himself as the (female) one who loved a worthless man and was martyred when forsaken by the lover. In this case Song has abandoned Gallimard even more utterly than Pinkerton abandoned Butterfly - has entirely vacated the female sex and become a man, infinitely more distant in his frankly male body than he will be in the faraway continent he is travelling away to at the end of the film. And so there is no one to step into the utterly essential female category but Gallimard himself, who finally physically undertakes the masquerade of femininity that goes with the pathos of the role. The female role of Butterfly (always a male invention) carries a powerful freight of feeling that is in exact proportion to the powerlessness of its persona as a social and sexual being; it is Butterfly who is essential, not Pinkerton. Without the profound empathetic experience of Song's female surrender, Gallimard is really nothing. However apocalyptic, however (fittingly) suicidal the plunge, he must now merge with and lose himself in his own fantasy while sustaining the terrible truth that it is nothing but a delusion. And while Gallimard relentlessly progresses thus from male to female, Song has of course progressed from female to male not only physically, but as a reversal of roles in which he now appears not as the submissive and passive one, but as the (masculine) manipulator and controller of the entire pageant. Masculinity equals mastery

M. Butterfly

361

and femininity equals masquerade; but look at the kind of caricatured and bogus mastery Gallimard attains, and the kind of caricatured and totalized masquerade undertaken by Song - and, on the other hand, the incredibly successful manipulations and control of Song and the horrifyingly open-eyed and self-destroying masquerade Gallimard enacts in the end. The male-as-female configuration of M. Butterfly also illuminates other corners of the Cronenbergian transformation drama. The filmmaker himself declared that in this film, which apparently contains, for the first time, absolutely no creatures and no special effects, 'John [Lone] is the creature/ and 'John was my one big special effect/26 In a way, we have returned to the female monsters of Rabid and The Brood - except that this one surpasses both of those in virulence. It is the female Song Liling who 'infects' Gallimard with the Butterfly fantasy, performing the operatic role, expounding the mythos to him, then impersonating the submissive Oriental woman and luring him into a relationship based on fundamental deception, bestowing an ersatz parenthood upon him, finally making a spy, a convict, and a laughing stock of him. In a larger sense, she is the one who encourages the inner upheaval of feelings that alters and endangers him. Here, however, the true monstrosity of this monstrous woman is that she is not a woman at all, but a man. It is not simply that she is sexual - though she certainly is, and in just the typical awakening and catalytic way - it is the fact that she is so from a position of profound ambiguity and boundary-transgression, that being a man-as-woman she is far more a 'creature' than a woman-as-woman could be. Monstrosity and masquerade In the environment of Julia Kristeva's concept of abjection and Barbara Creed's of 'the monstrous feminine/ we may agree that for Cronenberg the monster is female - initially. His heterosexual male protagonists are aroused and overturned by sexual desire and the world of abjection it brings in its wake. In the end, however, they (or at least we) discover that the process that has overthrown them is self-originating, and it is thus highly appropriate that they should be then enfemaled and monstrosified. When males are revealed to be the sources of their own monstrosity, to have been rendered abject not by the women they desire but by their own impossible contradictions, then all the initial positions are reversed:

362 The Artist as Monster FEMALE = MONSTROUS

but FEMALE = MALE

and so MALE = MONSTROUS

In M. Butterfly, Song is 'the monster' to begin with, but by the end she is demonstrosified (re-accoutred, demystified, explicitly made male), while in turn Gallimard is monstrosified (re-accoutred, melodramatized, and explicitly made female). Seth Brundle turns into a fly, and Rene Gallimard turns into Madame Butterfly - an almost equally grotesque and horrifying creature. Of course, Gallimardbutterfly is a wholly psychological monster, and its monstrosity is something embraced by the protagonist in his wasteland of psychological identity-destruction rather than resisted to the bitter end. The story truly has no abject-feminine realm: everything has been transported into the realms of mental identity-construction on the one hand and physical costume and mimicry on the other, both undertaken by men. In emphasizing the headily romantic and poetic aspects of the central sexual relationship 'and de-emphasizing its gross physical aspects, the film's Wastefulness' underlines the conceptual and psychological aspects of this situation. Abjection has now become an idea, and M. Butterfly is in this respect the purest of all Cronenberg's essays on the hypothesis that life - the most intense and meaningful inner dimension of life - is a hallucination. If femininity as it is understood by males is always wholly maleinvented, then M. Butterfly has found a brilliantly literal rendering of that condition. The female here is dressed up, mystified and poeticized, given a mythical narrative of pathos and 'beautiful music,'27 all in accordance with male preferences. These things are what makes her feminine, and desirable, and it doesn't really matter what she actually is or might be: men can't know that and don't want to know it. In fact it doesn't even matter if she is female, as long as she is effectively enough dressed up as one. One of the most telling lines of the script occurs in the context of a conversation between Song and Comrade Chin: SONG: Comrade. Why in Beijing Opera are women's roles traditionally played by men?

M. Butterfly

363

CHIN: I don't know. Most probably a remnant of the reactionary and patriarchal social structure... SONG: No. It's because only a man knows how a woman is supposed to act.

This assertion, though it contains what seems to be a kind of common sense, contradicts the received wisdom that says that women invent and administer themselves as objects of male desire and are the most knowledgeable and discriminating judges of the success of female femininity and also controllers of its deliberate and artificial construction. One might imagine that gay male transvestites have as sophisticated a grasp of concepts of masquerade as any woman, and that they also are constructing themselves for male desire. But it is for male homosexual desire, not male heterosexual desire, which is what the transvestite Song is talking about and is the basis for his/her deliberately constructed appeal to Gallimard. Song's perspective is really much closer to that found in one of the telepathic experiments in Stereo, wherein heterosexual males can only be aroused by telepathically sharing the sexual fantasies of other heterosexual men, and not those of heterosexual women. Certainly the proposition of M. Butterfly is that 'only a man knows how a woman is supposed to act/ and if there is considerable doubt about the heterosexuality of Song, there is not much about Gallimard's - and Gallimard is the central, and final, woman-imaginer. Existential subjectivity and its discontents Reality here carries an insufficient force. In the extended scene between Gallimard and Song in the police van after the trial, Song attempts the task of getting Gallimard to look at him and acknowledge him as he 'really7 is - that is as a male in a male's body - while appealing to him for the love which he gave to the woman Song Liling. It is an impossible task. When Gallimard at last looks in the full light at Song's naked male body, this is what happens: SONG: I am your Butterfly. Under the robes, beneath everything, there was always me. Tell me, you adore me. GALLIMARD: How could you, who understood me so well, make such a mistake? You've shown me your true self, when what I loved was the lie. The perfect lie, which has been destroyed.

364 The Artist as Monster SONG: You never really loved me. GALLIMARD: I'm a man who loved a woman created by a man. [he looks down at Song's body, repulsed by what he sees] Anything else simply falls

short. Gallimard comes at last to embrace the existential truth that only what is self-created or self-perceived is experientially real. And yet his 'education' (the word receives much attention throughout the film) is destructive, for he cannot truly live in the realm of his own subjective beliefs. To say that fervid subjective perception is preferable to objective reality is not the same thing as to say that it can replace objective reality. However much such a thing - 'objective reality' - has been philosophically and psychologically undermined and rendered indeterminate, it is the distance between inner and outer realities that is the source of tragedy here, as in other Cronenberg films. During Gallimard's first backstage visit to Song, he is forcibly struck by desire for her; she appears as a beguiling shadow on the scrim curtain of her changing room, and as a beautiful head with fetchingly loosened hair appearing into view: SONG [her shadow]: Well, education has always been undervalued in the West. Hasn't it? GALLIMARD: I wouldn't say that. SONG: No, of course you wouldn't. After all, how can you objectively judge your own values? GALLIMARD [smirking]: I think it's possible to achieve a little distance. SONG [pointedly}: Do you? [she appears, sexily shadowed, her hair down, peeping out the curtain with cigarette in hand} Be a gentleman, will you, and light my cigarette?

Here once again it is Song who is 'educating' Gallimard in a sphere in which by the end of the film he will be the leading idealogue - in this case the impossibility of 'achieving a little distance.' Her delivery of this line ('Do you?') has, despite its soft and seductive timbre, a fine sinister overtone: what it recalls for a flash is the grimly smiling hallucinated video image of Brian O'Blivion confronting Max Renn with a much harsher but basically similar challenge to his grasp of objectivity: 'After all there is nothing real outside our perception of reality, is there? You can see that, can't you?' The distance that Gallimard ultimately achieves is not the distance of objectivity, but of subjectivity; it is not a distance necessary for a

M. Butterfly

365

detached and informed view of things, but a distance from such a view. This is the distance that makes him a monster: a deluded laughingstock, a fool, and finally a freak who stages himself as a preposterous fictional character. Gallimard's suicide-performance, the final scene of the film, stresses every crushing irony with literally deadly emphasis. His monologue here is full of the lyricism and the poetry - and the seriousness - of his romantic passion: I, Rene Gallimard, have known and been loved by the perfect woman. There is a vision of the Orient that I have. Slender women, in jiamsangs and kimonos, who die for the love of unworthy foreign devils. Who are born, and raised, to be perfect women, and take whatever punishment we give them, and spring back, strengthened by love, unconditionally. It is a vision which has become my life. My mistake was simple, and absolute. The man I loved was not worth, he didn't even deserve, a second glance. Instead, I gave him my love - all of my love. Love warped my judgement. Blinded my eyes. So that now, when I look into the mirror, I see nothing but... [he throws the mirror away in disgust]281 have a vision. Of the Orient. That deep within her almond eyes, there are still women. Women willing to sacrifice themselves for the love of a man. Even a man whose love is completely without worth. Death with honor is better than life with dishonor.29 And so at last, in a prison, far from life in China, I have found her. My name is Rene Gallimard. Also known as Madame Butterfly.

But the spectacle that he is simultaneously presenting of himself is full of discordancies. Throughout the monologue his voice is accompanied by the sound of an aria by Butterfly from Puccini's opera30 coming from a cheap portable cassette machine. His kimono is absurd, his wig ludicrous, and as he talks he paints his face in great daubs of white, red, and black. This process of costuming, painting, and bewigging Gallimard into Butterfly before an audience of male prison inmates deconstructs Butterfly precisely by showing his/her construction. The construction of illusion is not the point here, but rather the staging of illusion as disillusion. Dressing himself grossly and exaggeratedly in the form of his ideal woman, surrounded by the low-fi sounds of operatic lyrical grandeur and excess, Gallimard becomes a pathetic and clownish figure, something worse than 'an overweight woman in too much bad makeup' - instead a man in too much bad makeup. There is an additional appropriateness in this costume in an all-male environment, reminiscent of drag acts in First or Second World War POW camp theatricals: the necessity to construct and impersonate a woman

366 The Artist as Monster

in an environment where there is no actual woman, as there has been no actual woman in Gallimard/s grand romance. But here especially the result is grotesque, and its monstrosity is exactly the marker of its distance from 'objective reality/ since what is subjectively of compelling truth is objectively impossible and ridiculous. But the film insists on the genuine grandeur of Gallimard's performance while simultaneously insisting on its embarrassing impossibility. In the end, all this absurd artifice is going to be redeemed by reality, for death is the realest thing of all. Gallimard uses the mirror in which he looks at the silly and pathetic face of 'Butterfly' to cut his throat; the over-vibrant red makeup will become his gushing blood (dripping back into the paint pots that have just been used to construct his persona); the wrenching awkwardness of the spectacle of Gallimard-as-Butterfly is transformed into the jerking spasms of his mortally wounded body; his soulful, overpainted, would-be 'almond eyes' become the staring eyes of a corpse. Thus, as Gallimard's real life moved insensibly and totally into the realm of artifice and performance - a ridiculously deluded belief in artifice - so in the end his ridiculously undeluding and unbelievable performance moves insensibly and totally onto the plane of real death. Portrait of the artist as an idiot

M. Butterfly is almost as much a film about art and creation as Naked Lunch is. Here, the specific art evoked is theatre, rather than literature. Theatre is present in both its most grandiose and artificial form (e.g., opera), and in its most intimate and verisimilitudinous (Song's totally 'believable/ or at least believed, performance as a woman in Gallimard's life) - both ends of the spectrum fusing in Gallimard's Butterfly-suicide, a more-ludicrous-than-usual grand opera that ends in a real death. The principal theatrical performer is Song, an artist by profession, an impersonator on the stage who takes her creation off the stage into real life and thus extends and calls into question all the assumptions about the relation of artifice and reality. But she is not the artist who really interests Cronenberg: that artist is Gallimard. Gallimard is the artist who creates his own reality, the force of whose inner imagination or 'vision' transforms his own life. Unlike a professional artist's, his is an audience of one - himself - and he thus continues the Cronenbergian tradition in which what most fascinates the filmmaker is not any act of communication or impact of the artwork, but the effect of the creative process on the artist himself. It is in this sense that the

M. Butterfly

367

protagonists of Videodrome, The Dead Zone, and Dead Ringers may be thought of as artists: primarily they are compulsive imaginers whose 'talent' arises from their personal dysfunctionality and who are devastated by their own visions. In The Fly what the artist creates is a cancer in his own body that, Kafka-like, transforms him into a bug. Even the creative inspiration of William Lee is seen as first a set of ugly paranoid impulses and then a compulsive disavowing form of guilt avoidance, and hardly at all as something that might actually be consumed by anybody else as art. In these films creativity is a kind of hallucination or disease, and the artist who creates his own personal twisted world is creating a world that is vividly and 'radically' different from everybody else's - and the magnitude of that difference is simultaneously the mark of his originality and power and of his abject delusion and dysfunction. Rene Gallimard represents an addition to this gallery that is both appropriate and rather startling. His feat of creation is to employ an inner mechanism of desire and imagination so powerful as to transform a man's body into a woman's - in his own apprehension, that is. In this creative act he has a collaborator, Song, who suggests and tempts and disguises, but who never actually believes in the created work. Song fashions the statue, but Gallimard brings it to life. Again we should note that here creation is only for the self, and that it is indistinguishable from delusion. What is inspired and exalting about Gallimard is also what is ridiculous and demeaning about him. Max Renn and Beverly Mantle and William Lee may be hallucinating or paranoid or both; but Rene Gallimard is the only one whose delusion is so elementary and total that it can be perceived as just an extreme form of stupidity. The creation he believes in is a second-hand one, or thirdhand or fourth-hand. It is outlined to him by Song and impersonated by her, but is an adaptation - from Puccini, from Belasco and Long, from the most fatuous self-congratulating cliches of male European cultural ideology - an adaptation, in short, from a poor source. It takes a somewhat special man to believe in such threadbare nineteenthcentury stereotypes in 1964, a specially naive and innocent and stupid man. Again we have a situation such as that of Beverly Mantle and his 'instruments for operating on mutant women.' Everybody else thinks they are sculptural artifice, only the creator thinks they are real tools; his creativity and his delusion go hand in hand. In M. Butterfly everybody else sees the idea of Madame Butterfly as theatrical artifice, only Gallimard believes she is real. Indeed, this belief is his only (albeit

368 The Artist as Monster

vital) contribution to the creative process; and it is a belief that is totally, derisorily, contradicted by 'objective reality/ Many times Cronenberg has railed at censors (with whom he has had many brushes) because of the literalness of their assumptions, and the fact that they apparently think that audiences are unable to distinguish between fiction and reality. After all, there is a difference between the imaginative consumption of a spectacle and a naive belief in it: what kind of lunatic would you have to be to believe literally in the content of a fictional work? But so many of Cronenberg's artist-figures are naive and lunatic in exactly this way - and this is precisely what makes them artists, this is their artistic inspiration/obsession. In M. Butterfly the delusional qualities of creation are explicitly thematized as such and are at the heart of things; and, when Gallimard's fatuity is added to the mix, the film contains the least flattering portrait of the artist Cronenberg has ever given us. If artistic creativity is the ability to construct your own world and your own subjectivity in it, to make an amazing reality that no one else shares, then this film presents its reductio ad absurdam. Brutalpolitik Such self-hypnotization, such a surrender to subjective perception and a rejection of external reality, is always catastrophic and usually fatal in Cronenberg, and in M. Butterfly it is stupid and laughable as well. But despite the ease with which prosaic reality destroys poetic imagination here, the film is certainly not in any way temperamentally aligned with a realist outlook. This is most clearly demonstrated in its depiction of the world of politics, seen as the polar opposite of the world of art, imagination, and creation. Sometimes politics is satirically lampooned - as in the wonderfully stylized combination of scorpion-like sarcasm and limited intelligence in the ambassador (Ian Richardson in a role he could probably do in his sleep) - but more often it is simply depicted as brutal and insensible. The cynical realpolitik of Western imperialism is very unattractive, but the barbarities of the Cultural Revolution and of French Maoism are even less appealing. The regime, represented by the wooden and humourless Comrade Chin, has no time for poetic imagination or artistry, nothing but ignorance and contempt for any of the elaborate role-playing fantasies lived out by Song and Gallimard. The Cultural Revolution stands for levelling down, sending artists and intellectuals to the salt mines, stamping out individuality and creativ-

M. Butterfly

369

ity, replacing the Beijing Opera with agitprop, burning beautiful costumes, bringing everything back down to earth in a grand and savage project of social engineering. It is a project of the 'real world' that destroys, specifically, the beautiful piece of traditional artifice Song Liling. Meanwhile its sexual puritanism and its war against traditional gender styles and feelings destroys the strange cross-dressing plant Song Liling, and also of course Gallimard's bizarre and beautiful love based on this lie' and 'sin.' Back in Paris the Maoists are doing the same thing (except that their rhetoric of fundamentalism is much more theatrical, since they are costuming themselves as Chinese Red Guards). There is no doubt that the falsehood and potential destructiveness of 'exotic' Chinese traditions, artifices, and poetic stereotypes (especially in their colonized 'Butterfly' forms) are extensively demonstrated by the film; but the alternative of grinding actuality is worse. And it is also significant that Cronenberg is here emphasizing his preference for art, however deluded and even banal, over politics, which has (in this representation) no sympathy for artists of whatever stripe. The mysterious Song Liling Song Liling presents herself to Gallimard as the great Unknown, the exotic Orient, the truly Other female. Hwang's play spells out her contrast not only to the wife in whom Gallimard has no sexual interest, but also to the vivacious young Scandinavian who bustles him into bed and makes uncomfortably candid conversation about sex, and about whom Gallimard wonders whether it is possible 'for a woman to be too uninhibited, too willing, so as to seem almost too ... masculine.'31 After this, Song's sexual reticence and modesty and secrecy can be felt as embodying far more fully the conditions for a certain variety of male heterosexual desire. The film is not quite so explicit and explanatory, but there is certainly a contrast between the soft-voiced, downwardglancing, silk-swathed Song and the more prosaic forthrightness of Jeanne and Frau Baden. On the other side of the political spectrum, invisible to Gallimard, the contrasts are just as strong and even more ironic: the gender reversal of the graceful Song and the betrousered and mannish (female) Comrade Chin is almost caricatured and again serves to express that preference for femininity over masculinity which permeates the protagonist and the whole film.32 And yet even as the poetic-exotic image of a slender, graceful, almond-eyed Asian female is being conjured up, its construction is

370 The Artist as Monster

constantly being pointed to as fake. Both to ensnare Gallimard in the first place, and to frustrate his later attempts to explore Butterfly's mystery and her body, Song emits a cloud of mysterious-Orient hokum as impenetrable as a squid's; but the simple-mindedness of its cliches is never too much for the credulous Gallimard. Here are a few examples of her style: China is a country whose soul is firmly rooted 2000 years in the past. What I do, even pouring the tea for you now, it has implications. Rene. Please, let me keep my clothes on. It all frightens me. Modesty is so important to the Chinese. The Chinese are an ancient people. We cling to the old ways of life, and love. Though inexperienced, I am not ignorant. They teach us things, our mothers ... about pleasing a man.

The last example in particular is so thick in mumbo-jumbo that it teeters on the edge of comedy - a perspective encouraged by the repeated cutaways from the couple to Song's servant peering open-mouthed at these amazing goings-on - and is only held in seriousness because the scene contains the first real sex between the pair, in which Song fellates Gallimard. Similarly, when Song shows up at Gallimard's door in Paris after an absence of three years, she lays it on with a trowel ('After all these years, I have no right to even hope that you may remember'), and again Gallimard swallows her exaggerated humility without a qualm. Under the sign of this fatuity we also find the process of mutual 'education' that the lovers are extending to each other. This education begins as a revelation of exciting new vistas and ends up as a form of terrible punishment and disillusion. Song's sexual education of Gallimard regarding the delectable mysteries of the Orient is a tissue of tourist cliches, while Gallimard's sexual education of the naive Oriental schoolgirl turns into a knee-slapping howler when he can't even get 'her' sex right. In this context 'education' always has an ironic meaning: what people learn is never what they think they are going to learn and it is always extremely painful to them. In particular, Gallimard's patronizing role as teacher is completely inverted so that he becomes the one who is taught, and discovers at first hand how cruel it is to be 'educated.' It is not only for Gallimard that Song is unknowable - she is also

M. Butterfly

371

unknowable for the spectator. In every important sphere of activity her motives are unclear: in pursuing and enticing Gallimard, in dressing as a woman while she is off duty from the Opera, in becoming an agent for the Chinese government. The from-one-viewpoint vital question of whether she at any point actually loves Gallimard is never even asked. What is his/her sexual orientation? Why at the end does he insist on an emotional confrontation with Gallimard, now based on 'truth' rather than deception, and why are there tears in his eyes as his plane leaves? There are no answers to these questions, especially not in the film (the play at least advances the statement that Butterflyfor-Gallimard had a compelling professional interest for the actor Song Liling: T'm an artist, Rene. You were my greatest... acting challenge/)33 Such an absence of explanations may be thought of as a flaw in the more substantial, realist world of the film, but it does have the effect of placing even more emphasis on Gallimard's leap of faith and desire, and of preserving for Song the characteristic of mysterious indeterminacy and otherness that survives even his attempts to bare all. The scene in the police van where he strips to reveal his body openly is staged and lit in such a way as to sweep away dramatically the shadows and suggestions of Song's 'poetic7 presence as Butterfly throughout the film, and here it is almost as though we are witnessing a sacral descent of the Real into Gallimard's world, and the world of the film itself. But this impressive unadorned presence is then definitively rejected by Gallimard, who turns instead to the horrific parody of costume and makeup of his own Butterfly impersonation. Mise en scene M. Butterfly has a Took' that is unique in the Cronenberg canon. If Naked Lunch was a brown study, M. Butterfly is a study in beige. A lightness of hue and texture - sandalwood tones, pastels, a softness of surfaces and colours - is the dominant visual regime of the film. The mood is struck definingly and prophetically, as so often in later Cronenberg films, in the credit sequence. Here, against a background of sliding doors, screens, and beautifully textured backgrounds, come a series of objects, floating through space across the frame: a painted mask, a butterfly, a fan, a paper parasol, a lacquer bowl, calligraphic or emblematic Chinese characters, various other object-expressions of Oriental culture. The colours are exquisitely refined and serene, the sense of a tasteful and balanced aesthetic design evident in every detail.

372 The Artist as Monster

The lettering in which the titles are superimposed over these images is white with soft pink-red oversized capital letters. In its softness, quietness, lushly aestheticized traditional culture, it resembles nothing in any previous Cronenberg film - but it does strikingly and beautifully set the mood for what follows. The objects that float across the screen are clearly not, as it were, the objects themselves, but rather pretty little models of what they represent: a toy butterfly, a toy fan, a model mask and bowl. They cast shadows on the background, they are 'threedimensional/ but they are little replicas. As Asuman Suner has pointed out, the choice of these objects reflects exactly the Western stereotypes of Asian culture - they are like tourist souvenirs, the equivalent of little Eiffel Towers or Dutch windmills - and what they do is to introduce the film's general strategy of depicting China in the false and artificial terms of Western ideological understanding of it, and specifically of Gallimard's understanding of it: 'Visually, the film offers a blatantly banal and romanticized image of China. In a sense, Cronenberg's camera totally identifies with Gallimard's perspective and shows us how the French diplomat sees China as an eroticized Oriental culture/34 The film's whole mood in photography and art direction, and also its musical score, is saturated with just the 'Chinese' qualities that operate to transform Gallimard's dreary bookkeeper's life into a romantic fantasy, and the 'factually' male body of Song into the poetically seductive femininity of Butterfly. 'Banal' this proto-tourist vision of China may be, but it is also indeed 'romanticized' and 'eroticized/ and its beauty is not less beautiful because it is inauthentic. Once more the film devotes itself to conveying two contradictory things simultaneously: the beauty and power of the imaginative stereotypes at work in Gallimard, and their falsehood. Too uncritical an acceptance of the Butterfly Syndrome and the film would be as ignorant and deluded as Gallimard. Too critical a rendering of its falsehood, however, and the entire project of subjective transformation upon which the story is based crumbles and becomes merely a pathology from which the viewer is excluded and thus can learn nothing (this, perhaps, is what Cronenberg might have felt was happening in the play). To a far greater extent than the play, the film must try to be simultaneously anti-romantic and romantic.35 In addition to the numerous indicators of pretence and deceit, the visual artifice of too-prettiness is there to indicate falsehood. But the lyricism and exquisiteness of, for example, Peter Suschitzky's photography transcends its markers of 'loveliness' to become simply lovely (and inci-

M. Butterfly

373

dentally, M. Butterfly plays more strongly to what one feels are the inherently ravishing qualities of Suschitzsky's distinctive style than any of his other collaborations with Cronenberg). It might indeed almost be possible to mistake the delicate hues and caressing textures of so much of the film for a superior variety of the prettification that trivializes a thousand commercial movies, if it were not for the sudden hardening and coarsening of light and colours and materials that accompanies some of the later scenes - above all the suicide scene in which all the Oriental elements are recapitulated in horribly altered visual terms. (One might also note one particular shot of Gallimard, in the scene following the departure of Song and her baby led away by soldiers, as he receives the ambassador's message that he is being sent home - he sits forlornly on a couch striated by thick bars of desolating white light - which is a virtual copy of a shot in Dead Ringers of Beverly on his office couch after Claire has left town.) Similarly, the exquisite art direction and costume design endow especially Song's domestic surroundings and wardrobe with an aesthetically refined traditional beauty that is then contradicted by the labour camp on the one hand and the coarse makeup and props and costume of Gallimard's suicide on the other. Apart from the awful parody of Gallimard's dream-China that emerges in the final scene, there are other transformations that steal over the film as events advance. When the Cultural Revolution breaks out, Song (no longer privileged by her status as artist) goes to the country 'to have her baby' and her courtyard and house are overrun by a crowd of people from the streets. Now the elegance of her dwelling, with all its poetic appeal to Gallimard, is besmirched and vulgarized; and in the indiscriminate profusion of people and their disorderly trappings we can again see a version of the dereliction into which the imaginatively created worlds in Cronenberg's films so often fall. A different alteration appears in the confrontation between Gallimard and Song in the police van. Apart from the luminous directness of the toplighting, this scene features a stark decor whose absolute refusal of any kind of adornment is a direct analogue of the demystifying truths amidst which the two characters now face each other. The whole visual environment consists of flat industrial-grey walls and benches in that unyielding light, further scanned by the sweeping headlight beams of passing vehicles outside on the road. There is only a single feature to break up the monolithic blankness of this box-like interior - a coarse screen of grey wire mesh, which is repeatedly positioned in the visual

374 The Artist as Monster

compositions to dramatize the wall of misapprehension and unknowing that still exists between the characters and that co-exists with Song's attempt to bare the naked facts. The brutal grey blankness of this scene, with nowhere to hide and no means of either disguising oneself or evading the actuality of the other, is the strongest possible contradiction and negation of the lovely and mysterious 'Oriental' world that can be imagined. Racial confusion The film perpetrates one other falsehood - or reflects truthfully one more falsehood in the Western view of the Orient - namely, a conflation of Chinese and Japanese cultures. The conflation of course belongs originally to Hwang, whose combination of a real-life Chinese-French news story and a Japanese-American-Italian opera both attacks the casual colonialist smearing-together of different Asian cultures and performs the same activity itself one more time. To have Beijing Opera star Song Liling performing Puccini's idea of a Japanese character is already farfetched and, from a realist viewpoint, an alltoo-visible evidence of the playwright's need to embody his central metaphor. So although it is the Western colonialist male whom the play accuses of thinking that all Oriental women are the same and mythologizing them in the same way, it is Hwang and nobody else who is dragging Japan into a Chinese environment. Again, it is odd that Song feels justified in acidly pointing out the difference between a Chinese woman and her Japanese oppressors to an ignoramus white man when she has literally just finished impersonating a Japanese woman 'herself.' So from the very beginning Hwang's narrative is so fundamentally and inextricably tied up with the Song/Butterfly myth (which itself conflates Chinese and Japanese) that it is really impossible to disentangle the two Asian cultures, or rather the two Asiancultures-as-viewed-through-Western-eyes. For example, is there anything actually Japanese in the play or the film? No: only the colonialist pseudo-Japan of Puccini and Belasco and Long as re-performed in China and Europe. But the costume and coiffeur, the graphic style of the opera's record cover, the institution of seppuku are all Japanese in origin and all figure importantly in the film from Song's opera performance to Gallimard's suicide scene. One might even say that what is 'Japanese' in the film is restricted to what is melodramatic and operatic, and that this doubly false Orientality is particularly associated

M. Butterfly

375

with the emotional rhetoric of grand romance and sacrifice. Both play and film really need Puccini's opera, not just for its plot but for its music, its delirious lyrical plunge into the melodrama of the characters. This lyrical excess, this emotional release and outpouring, reflects the extremity of the protagonist's psychological condition and makes comprehensible his movement from prosaic mediocrity to heroic passion and delusion. With this in mind we might say, therefore, that the whole film is quasi-operatic. Are butterflies insects? The motif of the butterfly is of course strong throughout the film: the title itself, the blue butterfly that drifts through the credit sequence, and the potent characterization of Song as 'Butterfly/36 And butterflies are insects. For Cronenberg, the domain of the insect has always been the space of evil-desire and abjection and horror, with The Fly and Naked Lunch serving as the two prime exhibits. Naked Lunch, immediately preceding M. Butterfly, gives a truly exhaustive workout to insecthorror in the specific context of the insect aversions of William Burroughs. Remarking in an interview how relentlessly negative Burroughs's attitude towards insects is, Cronenberg continues: 'I asked him [Burroughs] if there were any insects he liked - he likes butterflies, you know.'37 The tone of voice in the final 'you know' clearly indicates that in Cronenberg's view - and no doubt in Burroughs's too - liking only butterflies is the same as not liking any insects at all. Butterflies aren't proper insects; they are too pretty and unthreatening. Is there an insect-principle in M. Butterfly? Yes there is, but instead of being embodied in monstrous centipedes and fly-creatures, insects are now butterflies, or else the gorgeous luminescent dragonflies that an old Chinese man is catching in a net by moonlight on the riverside (he gives one to the delighted Gallimard, on his way home from an early visit to Song). Gallimard is trying to net a butterfly of his own, and what he catches instead is this strange, bewitching creature Song, who is like the dragonfly - more insectlike than a butterfly but at the same time magical and iridescent rather than repugnant. Both quasi-insect or beautiful-insect forms are highly appropriate in a film where Cronenberg's usual anxieties and their dramatic consequences are similarly muted. In this film, instead of insects we have butterflies and dragonflies, and instead of viscerality, somato-sexualized bodies, monsters, dementia, and abjection we have their poetical abstractions.

376 The Artist as Monster Desire and the (excluded) body In the end M. Butterfly remains problematic in many respects. Cronenberg's aim is to demonstrate the extent to which (as he put it to an interviewer) 'sexuality, for humans, is an invention ... there's no absolute sexuality any more/38 After the unique and utterly subjective sexualities on view in Dead Ringers and Naked Lunch (to go no further back), it is easy to see M. Butterfly as another Cronenberg disquisition on this topic, at least as extreme in viewpoint as any that preceded it. And yet perhaps desire cannot work as well as it needs to in this film, at least for a heterosexual viewer. If it is to work, viewers must be able to share, to some extent at any rate, Gallimard's passion for his Butterfly, and to this there are many obstacles. Whatever its limitations, the useful revelation of The Crying Game (released almost simultaneously with M. Butterfly) lay precisely in subjecting male-heterosexual viewers to a vicarious sexual arousal by a personage who turned out to be male. The reticence and reserve of Song, the quiet underplaying of John Lone, the relative gender-nonspecificity of Chinese costume - all of them essential to the particular characterization the film has in mind - together help to produce a kind of femininity whose sexuality is sublimated, and hence a relationship where a cloudy imaginative excitement would replace a directly physical arousal. The film wants to address a question of the body, or at any rate to come back one more time and from one more angle to Cronenberg's foundational interest in the relationship of mind and body. Gallimard's mind (imagination, culturally derived apparatus of desire) arrogates so much interpretive power to itself that it makes a fundamental mistake about the body of his beloved, the body towards which he then turns the sexual instinct of his own body. He is heterosexually attracted to, and heterosexually intimate with, the wrong body, and he is able to make this mistake because of the multiform dimensions of indirectness, secrecy, suggestion, and masquerade that are the cultural accompaniments of femininity, and especially of a certain idea of Oriental femininity. To be retiring and abashed, to be well wrapped in clothing whose purpose is to cover the ineffable as fully as possible, to seek refuge always in (bogus) thousand-year-old Oriental doctrines of modesty, concealment, mystery - these are meant to stimulate a heterosexual male desire that is enflamed by what is hidden and shy of discovery, and the exquisitely exciting penetration of which is concerned at some level to preserve the mystery that it is engaging. Under these

M. Butterfly

377

circumstances, it is possible to see how Gallimard could make his mistake, how he could even have collaborated in its perpetuation - in a word, how he could have been so blind. And yet the question of bodies is essential: if Gallimard does not have sex with Song, the story lacks something absolutely essential, especially to Cronenberg. The narrative of a purely mental self-deception would lie much further outside Cronenberg's proprietary environment than even M. Butterfly might be asserted to be. The question of which body parts of whose go where in the sexual relationship between Gallimard and Song is one that, in the context of Cronenberg's work, transcends a simple and perhaps universal gaping curiosity. The filmmaker who is detailed and explicit in his depiction of what exactly is going on with the sex-parasites in Shivers, Rose's armpitorgan in Rabid, Nola's extra-abdominal womb in The Brood, Max's giant vagina in Videodrome, Ronnie's larva-fetus in The Fly, etc., etc., is certainly someone who could be expected to have a greater-than-usual interest in just this question. There are a number of shots of passionate kissing between the two men, but only one depiction of intercourse: a memorably intense slow tracking shot across the fixtures of Song's apartment to find the still-clothed pair in long shot, Song sitting on Gallimard's lap, both caught in a tableau of slowly writhing ecstasy in the dazzling top-light. The rear-entry coital position continues a Cronenberg tic that stretches intermittently from Videodrome to its unsurpassable apotheosis in Crash (a practice notable not least for its indiscriminateness as to sexual orientation), and its indirectness and inexplicitness mirrors the whole 'mysterious Orient/woman' theme of the whole story. But it is the only frankly, coitally serious erotic moment in the entire film. Nowhere in Cronenberg's work (before Crash, at least) do we have so much as a single full-frontal-nudity shot - though there are full-frontals in abundance of the bodily mutations that are the Cronenbergian equivalents of the shock of hard-core pornography. Here, in a project containing no bodily mutations, and not really any hallucinations of them either, the sight of an ordinary penis might have had exactly the effect of monstrosity that the narrative implies, and put into a more immediate context all the extremities of feeling around which the film revolves. This strategy, adopted in the play and also in The Crying Game, might have seemed too elementary and obvious, but it does accomplish an important something that seems to be missing from Cronenberg's M. Butterfly. With Cronenberg tending at least temporarily in the direction of a

378 The Artist as Monster

less creature- and special-effects-dependent mode of filmmaking, this project may also have seemed to offer an elegant way of returning to issues of perpetual interest. But in taking it he is drawn into an environment arguably overpopulated with elements unassimilable to his own artistic world: submissive Asian females, European and American colonialist arrogance, Puccini, the fathomless mysteries of the Orient, the dimensions of a pocket-David Lean production. And the story's emphasis on a romance rooted in poetic abstraction and idealism, while it provides a (for Cronenberg) useful and different angle on the question subjectivity and sexuality, also prevents the film from insisting on the body - to such a degree indeed that it seems instead to be avoiding the body. For Cronenberg, that seems an unnatural act.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Crash (1996) 'A benevolent psychopaihology beckons towards us'

Crash represented an attempt on Cronenberg's part to get away from a few things that had been creeping up on him, particularly big budgets and studio production.1 Perhaps M. Butterfly had acted as a kind of aversion therapy in this respect, with its (for Cronenberg) large expenditure, cast of thousands, and locations spread across three continents and also its financial and critical failure. So even if Crash continued the director's recent tradition of adapting a literary original of some substance - here J.G. Ballard's 1973 novel of sex and automobile wrecks in other respects it reverted to an earlier habit of lower budgets and local shooting. The film's budget was $9 million (compare M. Butterfly at $22 million), and was shot in Toronto using minimal hardware, special effects, and auxiliary lighting. 'We literally shot the whole movie within half a mile of my house/ Cronenberg told Chris Rodley2 Not that the completed film reveals anything of a 'low-budget' or even a documentary look: on the contrary, everything has the high polish and satin smoothness of a perfectionist-minimalist visual regime that is Cronenberg's most aggressively high-modernist yet. The film is actually quite faithful to the slim narrative content of Ballard's book. Its hero, a first-person narrator in the novel, is named 'James Ballard' and is a producer (in the book a director) of commercials for film and television. James3 has a serious automobile accident, in which he collides head-on with another car. Although neither he nor the woman driving the other car is critically injured, the woman's seatbeltless husband is fatally propelled through the windshields of both his and James's vehicle. Then recovering in hospital, James discovers that this traumatic event has somehow shaken loose an entire continent of feeling in his previously numb and alienated psyche. The pros-

380 The Artist as Monster

pect of imminent mutilation and death is violently spiked with new currents of sexual desire and a new fascination with cars, traffic, and accidents. This world of feeling reveals itself to James only gradually: through a strange sexual relationship he begins with the driver of the other car, Helen Remington (who seems as compelled as he by the presence of sudden mortal violence); through an instinct to use this perversely liberated psychic-sexual energy to revitalize his relationship with his wife Catherine (until now sunk in the doldrums of a mutual jaded promiscuity); and finally through his acquaintance with the ghoulish and irresistible Vaughan, crazed prophet and proselytizer of the nexus of car crashes and sex. The scar-covered Vaughan and his little band of initiates not only fetishize their own crash injuries, photographs of crashes and crash victims, and crash-test data and films, they obsess over the fatal crashes of stars such as Jayne Mansfield and James Dean and plan new enactments of these collisions of personal desires and the over-present public objects who inspire them (in the book Vaughan's fantasy is to engineer a fatal car crash involving himself and Elizabeth Taylor, who is in London to make a film). In this perversely excited environment the sexual currents between all these strange devotees flow strongly and almost indiscriminately, and James finds himself in newly compulsive sexual congress (usually in automobiles) with Helen, Catherine, a crippled young woman named Gabrielle, and finally Vaughan himself. As these people go further and more compulsively down the road of this philosophy, they approach the logical end of killing themselves and one another in car crashes as an expression of mutual love and desire. To re-enact the Jayne Mansfield crash with your male self as a bewigged and befalsied stand-in for the hyperfeminized sex-bomb, as the stunt driver and Vaughan-convert Seagrave does, is one way to articulate these feelings. Another is to flirt with your loved ones and objects of desire by threatening to run them over or crash into their cars, as Vaughan does at different times with both James and Catherine. Other, less lethal, manifestations of this phenomenon include James's frenzied couplings with Helen Remington in a replica of the car he was driving when he killed her husband, and James's sexual penetration of the crash-created wounds now reconfiguring Gabrielle's body. Vaughan's death, in a spectacular airborne crash that leaves his car (a decaying black 1963 Lincoln like the one in which John Kennedy was assassinated) with its top sheared off by the roof of a tour-bus, concludes the core narratives of both book and film, but both works

Crash

381

end by suggesting that James will continue to apply Vaughan's philosophy until he kills and/or is killed. The film adds a particularly astonishing denouement, in which by mutual agreement James (driving Vaughan's patched-up Lincoln) pushes Catherine's little sports car off the freeway, and in an aftermath that finds her not too badly injured, apologizes to her for not successfully killing her, simultaneously making love to her bruised body by the roadside. Repetition, stylization, sensation This summary perhaps indeed suggests that there is more plot in Crash than there actually is. True, there is a distinct procession of incidents and set-piece scenes in the book, which the film mostly follows with an almost surprising accuracy. But both the film and especially the book create a central impression of intense, obsessively repetitive one-note insistence without context or variation, a kind of authorial replication of the fixated tunnel vision of the characters (in Ballard's first-person novel, this last is of course exactly the case). The novel goes over and over the same ground, hypnotically repeating to itself like mantras the lists of car parts and bodily organs that violently collide with and interpenetrate each other. These apparently meaningless notches on his skin, like the gouges of a chisel, marked the sharp embrace of a collapsing passenger compartment, the cuneiform of the flesh formed by shattering instrument dials, fractured gear levers and parking-light switches. Together they described an exact language of pain and sensation, eroticism and desire. (90) [Vaughan's] photographs of sexual acts, of sections of automobile grilles and instrument panels, conjunctions between elbows and chromium window-sill, vulva and instrument binnacle, summed up the possibilities of a new logic created by these multiplying artefacts, the codes of a new marriage of sensation and possibility. (106) In a triptych of images reflected in the speedometer, the clock and revolution counter, the sexual act between Vaughan and the young woman took place in the hooded grottoes of these luminescent dials, moderated by the surging needle of the speedometer. The jutting carapace of the instrument panel and the stylized sculpture of the steering column shroud reflected a dozen images of her rising and falling buttocks. (142-3)

382 The Artist as Monster

In these and scores of other examples, the prose strains towards a precise but mute meaning that somehow inheres in the juxtaposition of sexuality and car technology. It repeatedly forces together the hard mineral outlines and surfaces of the automobile and the organic softness and irregularity of the human body, the cold indifference of metal and glass and the frenzied yearnings of the flesh, and tries to make them share the same space and mean the same thing. The narrator's inability actually to explain the nature of these things - this 'exact language/ this 'new logic/ these 'codes' - leads to an obsessively repeated jabbing at exactly the same point, an ever more intense narrow focus on exactly this conjunction, which despite its clinical language can seem almost frantic in its need to communicate something that it cannot really understand itself. Again and again, the narrator tries to read the phenomena surrounding him in terms of their opposites: the automobile in organic, animistic terms and the body - or else the crashed and deformed car - in terms of a 'geometry/ a 'diagram/ a 'model/ something 'stylized' or 'abstracted' or 'formalized/ The film cannot and does not try to replicate this modus: there is no strategy of, for example, cutting from shots of bodies to shots of dashboards or A-pillars, dissolving from the curvature of limbs to that of instruments or windshields. But it does find a way to recreate the novel's combination of claustrophobic fixatedness and clinical detachment. This process is aided by the screenplay's observance of the minimalism of the book's narrative events and its contextless and unifocused characters and settings. The presentation, without explanation or plotted connection, of scenes of sexual coupling and of displays of wounds, scars, bruises, braces, canes, and limps functions as a provocation both formally and in the terms of content. The film appears, in other words, simultaneously as modernist in its narrative strategy and as transgressive or sensational in what it actually shows. Just as important, it also appears as modernist in its highly stylized look: incredibly polished and clean, pursuing a fetishistic purity of photography, framing and camera movement, textures and colours and rhythms. It is extremely beautiful, extremely cool and controlled; and it resembles more closely than ever the visual aesthetic of high modernism from Arp and Mondrian to Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe - and in the cinema of filmmakers as obsessively minimalist as Bresson and Antonioni. The airless perfection of this visual style functions as an equivalent to the book's narrow repetition and insistence, its very strong focus on something extremely exact and unusual, and its cool detach-

Crash

383

ment of language. Moreover, the film's antiseptically immaculate and concentrated style sits over the organicity of sexual congress and corporeal wounds in a fashion exactly analogous to Ballard's metaphysical linkage of hard technology and soft bodies. Stark, cold, and empty Chris Rodley suggested to Cronenberg in an interview that Crash harks back to his earliest horror films - Shivers and Rabid in particular - and the filmmaker rather agreed with this assessment.4 So do I, but for perhaps somewhat different reasons. The film diverges in many ways from the arc of Cronenberg's recent work, but perhaps the most crucial change is its abandonment of the strong identification with the viewpoint of a central male protagonist that characterizes all the films since Videodrome. In this respect Crash may be said to have jumped back over the epistemological break which that film signified into a world where the focus on character is shallower and more spread out across a group of personages. This may appear as a particularly striking alteration when it is recalled that Ballard's novel is in fact narrated in the first person, and is at times full of the kind of surreal perceptual delirium that engulfs the heroes of both Videodrome and Naked Lunch. On the other hand, although much of the novel is indeed a form of private hallucination, Ballard is not at all interested in giving any of the characters including the narrator any psychological roundness or depth; and by withholding identification with a single personality Cronenberg is staying closer to rather than moving further away from the 'feel' of the novel. In any event, the shift from a first-person to a multi-person focus, and in effect from an interior to an exterior viewpoint, has significant effects on the Cronenberg world that is unfolded in this film. Crash depicts an isolated group of misfits and oddballs consumed with the surpassingly strange interests which their particular history has invested them with; and in this respect the film does strongly resemble the pattern of Shivers, Rabid, and Scanners, whose groups of infected or mutated characters pursue their compulsive drives in the midst of a largely indifferent and alienating social landscape. And the effect of this reversion is to bring back something of the mood and atmosphere of these earlier films, what Rodley calls their 'uncompromising, very stark and very bleak' aura. The uncompromisingness and starkness, I would suggest, stem exactly from the coldness and hardness that are the byproducts of externally viewed characters living in an alienating and

384 The Artist as Monster

alienated social environment, strongly exacerbated by the chill visual aesthetic of high modernism - which, incidentally, had also been evident in prototypical form in the visual styles of the earliest Cronenberg features, from Stereo to Rabid. But now we have come upon a really central aspect of Crash's narrative world, namely its emotional coldness. As we have seen, in Shivers it was the alienated over-control of the social environment, and the answering cool detachment of the film's mise en scene, that seemed to evoke and even require the chaotic libidinal violence of the sex-parasites. Indeed there is also a strong thematic similarity between Shivers and Crash, where the too-orderly world has become unhealthily distant from the body (in the earlier film this is exactly the rationale of Emil Hobbes, the inventor of the sex-parasites), and a perverse and destructive counter-reaction is the result. But the repressed blandness of the apartment dwellers in Shivers and the modernist cleanliness of its visual style are of a very limited order in comparison to their far more extreme equivalents in Crash. The style here has a density and concentration that constitute a kind of continuous heavy assault upon the viewer, and is much more potent than the style of Shivers. And the escalation of the emptiness of the characters is if anything even more spectacular. The central characters of Crash have, years before the beginning of the narrative, arrived at an affectless alienation and emotional vacuity that is so great that they have in a sense ceased to live at all. We are told nothing, either by Ballard or by Cronenberg, about how this might have come about. There is no analysis and no history, and in the film not even any hints about why people like James and Catherine should have come to occupy such an unfeeling and meaningless state, or people like Vaughan and Seagrave should have felt drawn to such perverse activities. In his relaying of the narrator's perceptions, Ballard is certainly able to convey the sense of exhausted, decentred, oppressive ennui that mere existence in the technologized post-industrial landscape of a large Western city entails, and also the chronic fictional overstimulation and desensitization that media- and advertisingdominated contemporary culture affords us. This ennui and desensitization are indeed the essential preconditions for the extraordinary mutations of feeling that the narrative presents. But Cronenberg must forgo even this minimal contextualization for the actions of his characters. Instead, he places the utmost emphasis upon the visible effects of such a psychic state: the bored, abstracted, trance-like emptiness of expression and movement that the characters manifest - and that in

Crash

385

turn is echoed in the extremely slow, extremely careful, empty beauty of the mise en scene.5 Ballard: alienation Ballard actually explains the origin and significance of this alienated state of being in the preface he wrote for the 1995 reissue of the novel: Thermonuclear weapons systems and soft-drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudo-events, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century - sex and paranoia ... Options multiply around us, and we live in an almost infantile world where any demand, any possibility, whether for life-styles, travel, sexual roles and identities, can be satisfied instantly ... We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind - mass-merchandizing, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the pre-empting of any original response to experience by the television screen ... The most prudent and effective method of dealing with the world around us is to assume that it is a complete fiction - conversely the one small node of reality left to us is inside our own heads. (4-5)

Inside the head of the novel's narrator, however, 'reality' seems equally unattainable. Instead, there is a bland but nightmarish state of alienated oppression, a profound sense of meaninglessness whose emblem is the harshly technologized landscape that stretches from horizon to horizon. The unyielding hardness of concrete and asphalt, the ceaseless metallic movement and noise of vast streams of automobiles along the freeways and airplanes jetting overhead, form the inhuman environment, at once wearily overfamiliar and frighteningly strange, in which human life seems condemned to exist. The aggressive artificialness of everything, the complete banishment of nature in any guise, wears and grates on the human sensibility gradually and endlessly. Human culture and sociality, as essentialized in representations of it on television and in magazines, is an indigestible mixture of sensations ranging from atrocity-titillation to narcissistic commodity-fetishism. And all these forms of stimulation become subsumed into the most primary of stimulations, sex. After James's accident, his wife tries to place him into this context: In her sophisticated eyes I was already becoming a kind of emotional cas-

386 The Artist as Monster sette, taking my place with all those scenes of pain and violence that illuminated the margins of our lives - television newsreels of wars and student riots, natural disasters and police brutality which we vaguely watched on the colour TV set in our bedroom as we masturbated each other. This violence experienced at so many removes had become intimately associated with our sex acts. The beatings and burnings married in our minds with the delicious tremors of our erectile tissues, the spilt blood of students with the genital fluids that irrigated our fingers and mouths. (37) The fundamental problem, however, is that none of this sensation has any meaning for those who experience it, any more than does the overwhelming omnipresence of the technologized environment most potently symbolized by the metal rivers and forests of automobiles. And the great unsatisfied need is to make these things signify. Again and again the narrator gazes at the world around him and interprets the accidental phenomena of technologization as some kind of puzzle to which there must be some kind of solution. I gazed down at this immense motion sculpture, whose traffic deck seemed almost higher than the balcony rail against which I leaned ... I realized that the human inhabitants of this technological landscape no longer provided its sharpest pointers, its keys to the borderzones of identity. (48-9) Along Western Avenue the traffic sped and swerved from one jam to the next. Overhead, the engines of the airliners taking off from London Airport wearied the sky. My glimpse of an unmoving world, of the thousands of drivers sitting passively in their cars on the motorway embankments along the horizon, seemed to be a unique vision of this machine landscape, an invitation to explore the viaducts of our minds. (54) I sat in the crowded traffic lanes of the flyover, the aluminium walls of the airline coaches shutting off the sky As I watched the packed concrete decks of the motorway from our veranda while Catherine prepared our first evening drinks, I was convinced that the key to this immense metallized landscape lay somewhere within these constant and unchanging traffic patterns. (65) The postmodern poverty of coherence offered by the technologized

Crash

387

landscape induces this kind of surreal apprehension in which the inert surrounding material starts to take on an animistic purpose (this no doubt a variation on the paranoia that Ballard points to as a ruling leitmotif of our experience). The disconnection of physiology and technology The book illuminates a condition in which physiology and technology have become profoundly disconnected from one another. What the cult of sex and crashes gives to its devotees is a reconnection of the flesh and technology. Technology dominates everything, is everywhere, controls our lives of feeling and thinking, and also perhaps contains our deaths. At the same time, it is inherently meaningless, a giant puzzle of some kind - a puzzle without a solution. People walk around in a zombielike state because of their inability to solve this problem; they become alienated and empty because of it. The great snarled traffic jams, the metallized landscape and sky, the overpowering and oppressive sense of tension, the inherent violence of technology in twisting the natural world, in forming hard and artificial substances into curves, becomes a metaphor for the human enterprise: an enterprise gone astray. At the same time, the body is always with us no matter how alienated and empty we may be. It demands to be fed, it wants to fuck. It too is meaningless and confusing, we cannot integrate its urges into any ordered context. The body is denied by the technoculture around us, but it cannot be escaped; we cannot truly become machines ourselves. The gulf introduced between the world of technology and the world of organic appetite and mortality is so great, and the insistence of both worlds so constant, that we are faced with an endemic problem of how to live. It will be an ever-present, if usually unconscious, human wish to heal this schism, to make the antithetical poles somehow meaningful in terms of each other; and anything that promises to forge a relation will appear as an almost redemptive gift to alienated and schizoid human sufferers such as the personages of Crash. The exchange of characteristics between the body and the symbolic agent of technology here the automobile - opens just such a channel. Ballard's cool hypnotic songs analogize the curves and shapes of instrument binnacles, steering-wheel columns, or door panels with the curvilinearities of the human body, especially when both are apprehended in the sexualized terms of desire. Even more satisfying unions are accomplished when the human body is imprinted with the hard edges and shapes of the car

388 The Artist as Monster

in the form of wounds, and when the automobile in turn is crushed and torn by a crash into an analogue of the wounded human body deprived of its controlled design and machine functionality. This liberating conjunction has the force of an epiphany, and in describing it Ballard's language rises into transcendental and religious terms: this is a 'marriage' of technology and the body; the union is 'celebrated' under the redemptive sign of a new 'benevolent' or 'benign' technology; a crash is a 'bloody eucharist.'6 From another angle we could simply say that technology has deabjectified experience, and is even de-abjectifying the human body It has banished the messy internal body with its visceral liquidity and its expelled or leaked fluids and waste substances. The external body, concomitantly, has been cleaned, smoothed, manicured, sheathed, and sculpted into an object nearly as artificial and impermeable as a machine. Under these conditions, sexuality will logically pose a difficulty. For James and Catherine in Crash, sex has become too remote and insentient, too mechanistic. Penetrations and ejaculations have become deracinated and routine, orgasms clockwork and meaningless. In an attempt to overcome their numbness and boredom they must resort to jaded perversities of stimulation such as encouraging each other to have sexual liaisons with other people and then quizzing each other on the details; but this only signifies that their sexual relationship is becoming 'more and more abstract' (34). In James's eyes, his wife is like a piece of technology: her clean, blonde physical perfection has removed her into a realm of anti-abjection: What had first struck me about Catherine was her immaculate cleanliness, as if she had individually reamed out every square centimetre of her elegant body, separately ventilated every pore. At times the porcelain appearance of her face, an over-elaborate make-up like some demonstration model of a beautiful woman's face, had made me suspect that her whole identity was a charade. I tried to visualize the childhood that had created this beautiful young woman, the perfect forgery of an Ingres. This passivity, her total acceptance of every situation, was what had attracted me to Catherine. During our first sex acts, in the anonymous bedrooms of airport hotels, I would deliberately inspect every orifice I could find, running my fingers around her gums in the hope of seeing even one small knot of trapped veal, forcing my tongue into her ear in the hope of finding a trace of wax, inspecting her nostrils and navel, and lastly her vulva and anus. I would have to run my forefinger to its root

Crash

389

before I could extract even a faint scent of faecal matter, a thin brown rim under my fingernail. (112)

At the same time, this ideal abject-less female body is full of perverse sexual desire: I remembered Catherine saying that she would never be satisfied until every conceivable act of copulation in the world had at last taken place. (107)

The end result is a woman who, in her simultaneous lack of any kind of physical grossness or real-body imperfection and her readiness to accommodate any libidinal excess, almost resembles a living sex-doll. Indeed, this is a comparison actually touched on for a moment by the narrator, but only to register its lack of appeal: At one time Catherine's body lying beside me in bed had seemed as inert and emotionless as a sexual exercise doll fitted with a neoprene vagina. Humiliating herself for her own perverse reasons, she would leave late for the office and hang about the apartment, exposing parts of her body to me, well aware that the last service I wanted from her was that blonde orifice between her legs. (51)

And the narrator is equally bored by and alienated from his own body. Under these conditions sexual desire is almost dead; only frantic efforts to render it transgressive can even faintly revivify it. The doorway to lost abjection What is necessary, then, is to re-abjectify the body, and to bring it once more close to its organic nature and organic limitations and put it in touch with its chaotic and boundaryless fundamentality. Only a drastic event can accomplish this, but James's car crash, happily (in the desolate emotional world of this novel), provides exactly such an event. Stunned and disoriented as he is in the accident's aftermath, he understands its basic meaning almost immediately: After the commonplaces of everyday life, with their muffled dramas, all my organic expertise for dealing with physical injury had long been blunted or forgotten. The crash was the only real experience I had been

390 The Artist as Monster through for years. For the first time I was in physical confrontation with my own body, an inexhaustible encyclopedia of pains and discharges, with the hostile gaze of other people, and with the fact of the dead man. (39)

The new electrification of his sexual urges, the way in which so many details of what he sees become eroticized - especially the physicality of automobiles and the now ever-present possibility of their violent collisions - follows almost as a logical development. The sudden brutality of the crash, smashing and deforming not only his reified, tooanaesthetized body but also that of the vessel of technology that he has been piloting, and depositing death almost literally in his lap, has in a stroke broken through his frozen numbness with a massive exciting stimulus. And what this breakthrough reveals to him is that there is a world of physical and emotional reality still present in him. It is a world of pain and terror, of a vivid awareness of mortality, and at the most basic level a consciousness of the body in all its sentience. In this realm sexual arousal and torn, bruised, screaming flesh are essentially the same thing (hence their immediate connection following the accident). This is the realm of bodily abjection, together with the intense apprehension of desire and mortality that accompanies it. The piercing, bruising, and bone-breaking of James's body reveals it to him as abject and alive, especially sexually alive. And crashes have the same effect on the bodies of others: they are made more sexual both to themselves and to those who now newly desire them. Everyone who undergoes this experience - and that includes almost all the important characters - makes the transition from inert meaninglessness to abject life. The way in which this transformation works specifically to re-abjectify and re-sexualize women in the eyes of the male narrator is evident at many different moments. The physically tooperfect Catherine (who has not 'had her own crash'7 and always hovers near a pre-abject state) is contrasted with a legion of physically de-idealized women whom the narrator sees or imagines in crash situations. These women are very often 'middle-aged' with 'heavy' breasts, their imperfect bodies pierced and crushed and bleeding from abdominal or genital wounds. (Indeed this syndrome, in which a male sexual revulsion at aging, slackening, over-voluminous women is turned around to provide an entry point for an enlivening abjection that rejects all physical 'purity/ seems a particular fixation of Ballard's, not present at all in the film. One may also note that the great starobsession of the novel, Elizabeth Taylor, had just passed the age of

Crash

391

forty at the time of the book's writing, with a certain admixture of 'heaviness7 to a once-'perfect' frame.)8 The most dramatic and explicit example of female transformation is that of Gabrielle, who is captured at the time of her accident in Vaughan's collection of photographs, and whose baroquely deformed, brace-encased, and sexually hot post-accident condition is in the greatest possible contrast: The first photographs of her lying in the crashed car showed a conventional young woman whose symmetrical face and unstretched skin spelled out the whole economy of a cozy and passive life, of minor flirtations in the backs of cheap cars enjoyed without any sense of the real possibilities of her body ... This agreeable young woman, with her pleasant sexual dreams, had been reborn within the breaking contours of her crushed sports car ... The crushed body of the sports car had turned her into a creature of free and perverse sexuality, releasing within its twisted bulkheads and leaking engine coolant all the deviant possibilities of her sex. (99)

And Gabrielle is now not only more deviantly and hence authentically sexually desiring, she is more sexually desirable to the male who craves female abjection: pierced, penetrated, deformed, leaking like a punctured radiator, and even manifesting a variety of extra crashcreated orifices that become the explicit sites of James's desire in a new, redemptive sexuality. The males are also abjectified, and to some extent enfemaled, by wounds and penetration. It is true that Vaughan is repeatedly described in the intensely masculine terms of hardness and ugliness as sexually impressive traits, and that his crazed and charismatic zeal brands his pock-marked, scarified body as that of a warrior-leader; but at the same time, the apex of his sexualization in the eyes of the narrator occurs when he is anally penetrated by James in an LSD-aided epiphany. The most powerful sign of male sexual abjection is semen the only evidence and presence of the male's body-insides, the genital fluid that is his small equivalent of the female's whole apparatus of reproductive abjection - and semen is brought with extreme emphasis into scene after scene of the novel. Kristeva may have excluded semen (along with tears) from her principle that all substances expelled by the body are abject,9 but Ballard obviously does not agree with her. Semen stains the jeans of stimulated men or drips from the orifices of women; it sits in pools on the seats of cars or is scattered in pearly drops across

392 The Artist as Monster

dashboards and steering wheels; it is collected in hands and daubed on surrounding surfaces as an animal marks territory, or smeared ritualistically across the holy places of crash vehicles.10 Again, it is the liberation of the liquid insides, the puncturing of the exterior surface to get to the abject interior, that is occurring - in smashed cars and in the previously technologized and desexualized bodies of women and men. As for automobiles, what crashes do for them is to detechnologize them also. A crash is, after all, the failure of technology, for the car as much as for the passengers. The vehicles' violent crunching and twisting re-forms them into expressionist sculptures of de-symmetricalized, de-designed, de-functionalized matter, just as it cuts open their compartments and conduits and leaves them leaking vital fluids like a mortally abjected body. The benevolent and redemptive new technology that the narrator blesses and welcomes is an anti-technology, one whose purpose is to crack apart and destroy itself, to sacrifice itself on the altar of the sacred abject. The car crash can thus reverse the entire thrust of technology. It propels the carefully designed and produced technological object back into a state of disorganization - or, as the narrator has it, a state of 'benevolent' reorganization into abjection. The devotees of the cult of the crash are forever running their hands over, or pressing their genitals into, the chaotically reformulated body of the smashed vehicle in wonder and gratitude. The evidence of its martyrdom, its transformation from something functional to something expressive, is moving. It has died and been reborn, as its occupants have, in the service of a sacrificial deliverance of humanity from the tyrannical shining surfaces of a soulless technoculture. Ethics

The book's absolute unwillingness to make any kind of overt judgment about the narrator's perceptions and enthusiasms, or those of the other crash-cult members, perhaps disguises the fact that what it is presenting is a pathology. Ballard's 1995 preface is clear about this, ending with a blunt disclaimer: Needless to say, the ultimate role of Crash is cautionary, a warning against that brutal, erotic and overlit area that beckons more and more persuasively to us from the margins of the technological landscape. (6)

The cult participants may feel blessed and redeemed by their new feel-

Crash 393

ings and activities, but what this testifies to is the extremity of the spiritual damnation they have hitherto experienced rather than the benevolence of crashes-and-sex. An early indication of this extremity is the way in which the sexual relationship between James and Helen Remington, far from representing a trivialization and forgetting of Helen's newly dead husband, is in fact felt to be some kind of memorialization of him. Despite the apparent detachment of the narrator's descriptions of his crash and of Remington's fantastically immediate and graphic death right in front of him, it is clear from the many references to 'the dead man' and 'the man I had killed' that James does not at all take this event lightly, or regard it merely as sensation. And, as far as we can tell, Helen also feels horribly bereaved and very hostile towards the other driver. It is highly symptomatic of the whole condition of their lives at the time of the accident that these feelings should be the basis for a compulsive sexual attraction to be consummated as nearly as possible to the site of the crash. The fact that this homicide should now be a turn-on for James does not indicate that he has become inhuman and lost all consciousness of the horror of what has happened, but rather that his sexual response (and hers) is an acknowledgment of this seriousness: only death, violence, transgressive sex, can make a dent in the emptiness and dizzyingly decentred scattering of the individual's experience and feelings generally. Thus, the powerful compulsions of their coupling can indeed act as a memorialization of the powerful horror and grief of Remington's death. Sexual excitement and emotional trauma are essentially the same thing in this vacuum of feeling, just as sexual pleasure and the pain of crash-wounds are the same. Later in the book similar and even more extravagant redemptive claims are made on behalf of Vaughan's whole project to systematize and document crash-compulsions, and even of the specific crashdeaths Seagrave and Vaughan are planning for themselves. Eventually this emerges as a form of solipsistic madness wherein crash victims suffer and die so that the narrator and his friends can experience a transcendental connection to feeling. It is one thing for James, as he stands feeling 'calmed and relaxed' by the spectacle of a big motorway crash, to testify to the healing power of his own injuries: I could feel my wounds again, cutting through my chest and knees. I searched for my scars, those tender lesions that now gave off an exquisite and warming pain. My body glowed from these points, like a resurrected

394 The Artist as Monster man basking in the healing injuries that had brought about his first death. (157)

But it is quite another to transfer such salvational feelings to any crash victim at all: Far from reacting with horror or revulsion now at the sight of these injured victims, sitting stunned on the grass beside their cars after an early afternoon fog patch, or pinned against their instrument panels, Vaughan and I felt a sense of professional detachment, in which the first workings of some kind of true involvement were revealed. My horror and disgust at the sight of these appalling injuries had given way to a lucid acceptance that the translation of these injuries in terms of our fantasies and sexual behaviour was the only means of re-invigorating these wounded and dying victims. (190)

- 're-invigorating these wounded and dying victims' not, that is, for themselves, but for Vaughan and James. The end point of this narcissistic nurturing of inner feelings occurs when they can simply be projected onto any external situation with no regard for anything but their own exquisite life. There is a staring contradiction in the idea that you can redeem wounded and dying victims by making more wounded and dying victims. By the end of the book, James is not bothering to tell his wife that Vaughan is probably planning to involve her in a fatal car crash, no doubt out of a dim recognition that she might not greet the occurrence with the same enthusiasm he feels: Still uncertain whether Vaughan would try to crash his car into Catherine's, I made no attempt to warn her. Her death would be a model of my care for all the victims of air-crashes and natural disasters. (218)

Here, this redemptive 'care7 is plainly visible in its true pathological, and in fact insane, state. These people are sick, and the fact that their delusions have been produced as a reaction to conditions of appalling social and personal emptiness does not make them less so. A repressed film The film can capture but little of this complex inner scenario, and confines itself basically to a single speech of Vaughan to James:

Crash

395

For the first time, a benevolent psychopathology beckons towards us. For example, the car crash is a fertilizing rather than a destructive event - a liberation of sexual energy that mediates the sexuality of those who have died with an intensity impossible in any other form.11

But the film does take off from the same condition of spiritual death as the novel, and it does present the strange compulsions of the characters as a form of self-administered therapy. Nearly every scene in the film has some origin in the novel, with three major exceptions - the staged James Dean car crash, the tattooing scene, and the final scene of James crashing Catherine. But the screenplay boils everything down as far as possible, and is very spare.12 Dialogue is minimalized and Cronenberg has resisted any temptation to port Ballard's virtuoso descriptions and elaborate perceptions over into the script. There are a few moments in which the characters pause to gaze at or run their fingers wonderingly and admiringly over crushed radiator grills or crumpled fender panels, and the theme of imprintation is actually extremely well articulated in the entirely appropriate idea of tattooing the outlines of the Lincoln's steering wheel and hood ornament onto the bodies of Vaughan and James respectively. But the redemptive or transcendental aspects of the crash-sex religion can only be hinted at, as likewise the harsh techno-industrial oppressiveness and tension that Ballard evokes so well as a primary precondition. What the film presents instead is both more concrete and more abstract - concrete in the sense that it consists of very specific people, objects, and places, rendered with great clarity and presence; and abstract in that these phenomena not only lack the extended rationale of the novel but are repeatedly fixed into tableaux of stasis, silence, and emptiness. This latter is really a departure from Ballard's world, which so often seems jangled and overwrought despite the objectivity of the language. Cronenberg's world instead is frozen and repressed, in a manner recognizable from even his most sensational films. (Well, Crash too is one of those in its way, of course.) It may indeed seem odd to describe the opening scenes of the movie - three successive unexplained depictions of men burrowing themselves into the naked hindquarters of women - as repressed. But the super-coolness of the photography, the precise silent smoothness of the camera movements, and the unblemished sculptural perfection of the actors all create an impression of extreme control - an impression that is actually heightened by the outrageousness of the content. The repeated reviewers'

396 The Artist as Monster

complaint about 'cold sex' certainly reflects an accurate observation at least. The violence, too, is very damped down and underplayed, especially considering what a jamboree of carnage the scenario could have offered. What might have been smashed and ripped bodies spouting blood are presented instead as a repertory of sutured gashes, flowering bruises, and patterned scars that indeed look extremely tender and painful, but that are intensely contained and integrated into the body rather than violently rending it. The crashes are also quick and literal a sudden smash followed by stunned silence - rather than spectacularly dramatized. In this respect Crash might be said to be straining to break through to the overt abjection of Shivers in a broadly similar situation, but without success; and the failure is an indication that the condition of alienation in the later film is far deeper and more incurable than it is in the earlier one. The problem of the body's insufficient abjection is, under these circumstances, and of course given the nature of the film medium, presented entirely iconographically. The film's starting point is the bodies of James and Catherine. (And so is its ending point: one way of describing Crash is as the trajectory that carries the separately perverse couple at the beginning to the couple united in a different perversity at the end.) Their presentation as bodies is ensured by the contextless sex scenes in which they make their appearances, first separately and then together. The sleekly gorgeous Catherine draws her breast from its brassiere, presses it to the cool smooth metal of a small-aircraft wing,13 and then puts it back - in a gesture that, despite its transgressive revealing-of-the-forbidden, is as formalized as it can be. Her costume, with its long skirt, platform shoes, garter belt, and stockings, but no panties, combines fashion-magazine elegance with porno-magazine fantasy. The movements of the characters, sexually engaged though they may be, are as cool and stylized as the smooth camera movement that introduces the scene. The next scene introduces James, his face rising into view at the rump end of a naked woman's torso in a weirdly disorienting shot where it seems for a moment that his head and her torso are part of the same strangely androgynous organism.14 The emphasis here is on James's face, as it is again at the beginning of the next scene, which opens with a close-up of him as he watches his wife pull her skirt apart to reveal her naked buttocks on their apartment balcony. The physical appearance of both actors is of supreme importance - a major tool in the film's creation of a world where smooth technolo-

Crash 397

gized surfaces have spread to incorporate the human inhabitants. Spader's classically beautiful face, with its Etruscan smile that sometimes seems to hint at an immutable inner cynicism and self-regard, is that of a Greek mythological hero - but one of those heroes (Paris, say) who are really too beautiful, and whose successes are compromised by an inner weakness or selfishness. The face is beautiful but impenetrable, unalterable, one might say finished. Debra Unger's glossy features, and her extensively displayed body too, also have a quality of finished perfection, garnished this time by slightly diabolical upward-sweeping eyebrows that seem tuned to the character's appetite for perversity, and that are the equivalents of Spader's too-knowing smile. But Unger's expression is different from Spader's. Catherine never smiles; her face appears vacant and abstracted. Her eyes seem glazed-over and unseeing, and in fact she rarely looks directly at anything - she seems to take things in only furtively, through sidelong or quickly downcast glances.15 This blank, unfocused gaze into an empty distance creates the strong impression that for Catherine there is really nothing that will bear looking at, as though whatever she looked at concentratedly would resolve itself into nothingness or perhaps into horror. It is the very essence of the alienated gaze. But behind it - and it is difficult to describe why or how one forms this idea - there seems a great reserve of desolation, an oppressed remnant of human feeling encased in layers of numbness and emotionally starved inertia. One sees this finally emerging, forced out bit by bit under pressure, in the astonishing sex scenes later in the film with Vaughan and with James. It is the suggestion of this underlying misery that prevents her deliberate transgressiveness of words and behaviour from rendering her cruelly inhuman. Nevertheless, the initial impression especially is of a lacquered insentient beauty, a sex-object and sex-subject of fabulous technical refinement. The expressionless static countenances and the verbal silence or laconic quiet monotones of these two personages thus become the very ground of abjectless absence of meaning. The accident It is not long before James receives his first major jolt of abjection. His head-on collision with the Remingtons may lack the bloodbath qualities of the novel's version,16 but it is terrible enough. The crash itself is over in a sudden moment, and the eerie silence and stasis of the state of shock into which both he and Helen are thrown seems like a horrible

398 The Artist as Monster

imitation of the zombie-numbness we have been watching up to now pierced only by the surreal flash of sexuality as Helen exposes her breast while fumbling for the seat-belt latch. But if the accident itself seems hardly to have touched James, his almost unmarked features an analogue of the shock-dazed emptiness following the crash, then the aftermath tells a different story. In hospital, James's face and upper body have blossomed into huge purple bruises, his nose now sprouting coarse suture-ends like Brundle's first fly-hairs, his neck slashed by a horrific jagged gash on a pond of bruised flesh, his smashed-up left leg encased in an aluminum brace of symphonic techno-virtuosity. Cronenberg's camera tracks over and cuts among these injuries with utter serenity; and the amazingly cool, clean, empty, purple-curtained hospital ward offers an environment of inviolable composure. Indeed, it requires every ounce of abjection emanating from James's wounds to prevent these massive bruises and contusions from being assimilated into the overpoweringly calm grey-and-violet design scheme. Catherine's equally blank sex-automaton presence, masturbating him with a soapy hand while providing an extensive, monotonal poetic cataloguedescription of the accident vehicle and regretting that dead bodies such as Remington's are not 'kept around for weeks' instead of buried, merely adds to the powers trying to recuperate James's new abjection back into numbness and Sadean instrumentality. In the novel, and in the published screenplay, James's accident is basically just that, an event that is essentially nobody's fault, an unlucky but not really unusual consequence of rain-slicked roads and darkness such as might happen to anyone at all. But the film changes this: James loses control of his car and plunges across the median into oncoming traffic because of his own serious inattentiveness. He is trying to drive while examining a sheaf of papers, and when some of them fall to the floor he leans over to pick them up, taking his eyes completely off the road for a few seconds. By making the crash James's fault in this way, Cronenberg has brought Crash into line with so many of his films since Videodrome that depict the transformations and monstrosifications of his protagonists as occurring as a result of their own actions, and specifically their own flaws.17 Inattention, carelessness, are always punished: eternal vigilance is necessary (though not sufficient) to keep disaster at bay. In Crash it would be particularly fascinating if James's inattention also had a connection to sexuality, as the accidents of The Dead Zone and The Fly do. We cannot see clearly what papers James is looking at

Crash

399

just before the collision. But later, as he sits emotionally in the parked wreck of his car and looks down onto the passenger-side floor in front of him, we see a collection of polaroids of a woman18 opening her coat to reveal her underwear and a porno videotape entitled A Fistful of Bimbos (together with a dried pool of Charles Remington's blood on the passenger seat). He reaches down, his fingers extended towards, but not touching, these items. It is not at all clear that they were in the same location - that is, exactly in the spot where James had leaned over to pick up something - at the time of the accident; and in fact the presence of the photos can be traced back to the novel, where James encounters them in revisiting his crashed car in a kind of minor Proustian epiphany of the detritus of his pre-crash life and yet another indication of the omnipresence of his obsessive sexual behaviour.19 But at the same time, the fact that they are sitting there now, when James is painfully reliving the moment of the crash, does mean something. In the hospital James had expressed regret at not being able to attend Remington's funeral; but the present scene is the one that most clearly depicts his feelings of guilt and shame at having caused this man's death. The porno video and sex photos make a pointedly sleazy effect in this solemn context of massive shock and mortality: there is a sickening contrast between James's shabby sexual self-indulgence and the homicidal collision that in some way seems like its consequence. The effect is increased by our awareness that the dead man's widow is also in the parking garage. In their only previous meeting after the accident, in a hospital hallway, Helen had responded to James's presence with a look of pure hatred and a sudden tightening of her grasp of her cane, indicating a savage impulse to strike him with it. Now, as their eyes meet again, James's glance sinks down, his head bows, and tears appear in his eyes in a clear expression of shame and remorse. It is perhaps this silent expression that allows Helen to forgo her own anger, the blow of which James expects but never receives. But these 'natural' feelings - guilt, shame, anger - slide sideways into sexuality under the prevailing conditions of numbness and alienation; and grief over the death of Charles Remington is dissolved in a river of pent-up feeling wherein violent deformation and transgressive sex unite to stage an escape from the spiritual desert of meaninglessness and reification. Even at this early stage, however, the film inscribes its ambivalence about the entire phenomenon. Compulsive crash-desire liberates feelings and allows them to flow, but it is also a way of avoiding the facts of Charles's death and James's negligence - just as, later

400 The Artist as Monster

on, it will sacrifice innocent bystanders in the pursuit of the twisted personal redemption of crash-drivers like Seagrave and Vaughan. The transformation of both the conscience-stricken James and the shattered and grieving widow Helen into creatures of obsessive perverse sexuality thus carries a dual charge: it allows their dessicated emotions a 'benevolent' relief, but it is also a form of displacement, and it is destructive of more than just techno-soullessness. To equate sex with violent collisions that kill and maim is to interpret it as an essentially damaged and damaging activity, even if the ultimate attempt is to transform both crashes and crash-sex into modes of salvation and love. The deranged extremity of this belief system is always visible, and it is never clear at any point that its benefits are greater than its costs. For Cronenberg, the picture remains the same: abjection can never be simply good, no matter how much its absence makes life unlivable; the monstrous is always monstrous. The frenzied copulation of James and Helen in the car, then, takes on a tinge of monstrosity even as it is showing James a way out of stasis and emptiness. James's first act, upon discovering this gateway of feeling, is to try to transport it into his relationship with his wife, to inform their relation of too-beautiful, tooinsensible, unsuccessfully-try ing-to-be-abject people with the truly abject compulsiveness of him and Helen rutting in his car. Commenting on the succeeding scene of James and Catherine having sex in imitation, Cronenberg himself spells this out: And then here working towards the same orgasm with his wife, it doesn't work out at all, because his wife has not had her crash yet, even though she's sitting on his lap in the same position and so on and they're trying to kind of recapture the moment that he had had in the airport parking garage with Holly [Hunter] ... [I]n this movie whether someone has an orgasm or doesn't is extremely significant, and has implications and consequences.20

The scene is only a first step in the conversion of these beautiful bodies, and these affectless damned souls, into the meaningful horror of abjection. Vaughan

The next step must await the arrival of Vaughan, the prophet and leader, the truly monstrous monster, and his motley band of true

Crash

401

believers. If James and Catherine are too beautiful and clean and impervious, these people are their didactic antithesis, as it were the goal they are trying to achieve. Vaughan is the iconic obverse of James. He has so many scars he almost looks pieced together like Frankenstein's monster. His sick pallor, dead black hair and hollow mouth- and eye-caverns, greasy hands and dirty fingernails, his strange hunched movements and constant gum-chewing make him into a creature21 moreover a creature who delights in his creatureness - and as far distant from James's evocation of the well-dressed good-looking yuppie as can be imagined. If Spader's James is too beautiful, Elias Koteas's Vaughan is powerfully ugly, actually a fine visual realization of the novel's Vaughan, with his 'unsavoury skin and greasy pallor' and his 'hard mutilated beauty.' Ballard also describes Vaughan as a 'hoodlum scientist' and 'renegade scientist.'22 And indeed, if we place him in the context of all of Cronenberg's films, he takes up the scientist's role there as well - the scientist who experiments and innovates, who applies 'radical' techniques to reconfigure human life, and whose actions produce abjection and monsters. (Even the 'medical' scientist is invoked: in his first appearance, in a hospital corridor, Vaughan is wearing a white lab coat and James takes him for a doctor.)23 Moreover, like the scientists of The Fly and Dead Ringers, he is himself the monster he produces, and he is the one who goes to his death as a result of his monstrosity. If Crash now takes this figure and pushes him back out of the role of the central protagonist and makes him more marginal, his presence is still very large, and his role is so much that of the alter ego of the would-be-monstrous protagonist James that he becomes both a love object and a kind of ideal for James to aim at, so that by the end of the film James is more or less trying to be Vaughan. Looking at Vaughan as Cronenberg's mad scientist sheds a particular light on his project and activities. It is not simply that, like Emil Hobbes in Shivers, he wants to liberate the human race from over-technologized numbness. It is that, as with not only Hobbes but also such later experimentors as Max Renn, the Mantle brothers, Bill Lee, and Rene Gallimard, a conduit for this liberation is transgressive sexuality and in particular a sadistic violence directed towards women. The sex-violence in both Ballard's Crash and Cronenberg's may look fairly equal-opportunity from a gender standpoint, and to a certain degree it is. Vaughan has more scars than anybody, is more eager for a crash-death, and finally accomplishes this ambition in a pretty much gender-neutral fashion. But there remain crucial elements of a pattern of male sadism

402 The Artist as Monster

and female masochism. The basic satisfaction of being in a car crash is that your body is violently assaulted - and this is the case every bit as much for males as for females. The car crash's equivalent in the realm of sexual relations must be one that involves a degree of violent assault but in this arena it is primarily the males who are enacting the violence and primarily the females who are suffering it. Certainly this is not the case everywhere in the film: the violence of James and Helen's couplings is conceptual rather than physical, and very even-handed; and the sado-masochism of James and Gabrielle's sex tussle is displaced (half-comically) into the mechanics of her disability-gear, which functions as a highly theatrical fetishist's costume that in fact empowers the female. But in the sex scenes involving Vaughan, a distinct male-sadistic quality is visible. Again, his hard, dark, unwashed, scarified body suggests a contempt for civility and an appetite for violence, as does his careless menacing bravado behind the wheel of the Lincoln (itself a clear symbol of its owner, with its battered body, massive power, and poor traction). His sexual relations with women are always aggressive reaching brusquely into Helen's crotch on the way home from the 'James Dean' crash, or handling the wonderfully hard and worn-looking prostitute he picks up in a parking garage like a piece of furniture. Vaughan the sadist, Catherine the masochist The apex and focus of this suggested brutality, though, is Vaughan's relation with Catherine. Right from the beginning there has been an antithetical sexual tension between Vaughan and Catherine simply on iconographic grounds. She is introduced to him when his giant Lincoln appears behind her Miata two-seater as she drives home from work, just ahead of James, squeals up threateningly to within inches of her rear bumper, and almost forces her off the road, then follows her into the gas-station parking lot, where she tries to escape from him, and screeches away grinning as James swerves violently into the lot himself. Cronenberg's laserdisc commentary on this scene spells out what is going on: Here [Vaughan's car] starts to take on its sort of mythic position in the film, as a creature, as an embodiment of Vaughan, as a threatening sexual beast, about to eat the rump of that little Miata.

Catherine's reaction is to be drawn to this violence as a more potent

Crash

403

form of the perversity from which she has been trying to extract something truly moving and othering. The extraordinary sex scene between her and James that follows casts Vaughan in the form of the absent-yetpresent beast-of-rough-sex whose transgressiveness enables their own meaningful sexual excitement. As they lie naked, with James penetrating her from behind, Catherine begins by saying that 'he must have fucked a lot of women in that big car of his' and leads a ritualistic exchange on the details of Vaughan's anus and penis ('badly scarred ... from a motorcycle accident/ says James), ending with a long, increasingly transgressive incantation of Catherine's that culminates in speculations about the saltiness of Vaughan's semen and deep orgasms for both of them. As much as any other moment, it is this scene that suggests depths of pain lying beneath Catherine's mirror-smooth surface. As the scene progresses, the words seem forced from her with the utmost distress, her face takes on an appearance of anguish, and her orgasmic cries sound like sobs. These can of course be the signs of sexual intensity, but their resemblance to those of intense suffering is more than suggestive in the context of this film in which sexual transcendence lies so close to physical injury and death. Everything becomes more explicit in the actual Vaughan/Catherine sex scene. Its nocturnal preparation begins with Vaughan in emotional pain, questioned by police about the death of a pedestrian.24 When James, thinking him too upset to drive(l), offers to chauffeur him, Vaughan moves from distress to bravado as he strips off his T-shirt in the cold air, gives a hard look to Catherine, and asks flatly, 'You coming?' Riding in the Lincoln, they providentially come across a gigantic freeway accident, wreathed in clouds of mist and exhaust vapour, surreally illuminated by flares and police lights: the film's most extensive lyrical set-piece. Vaughan circles through the wreckage taking photographs and making appreciative noises; James is distracted by finding blood on the Lincoln's doorhandle; and Catherine at last rises to glide out into the crash scene, tentatively moving through the car bodies and finally sitting down next to a young woman survivor (so dazed with shock that she does not realize she has a large shard of glass protruding from the side of her face), as if posing herself next to this crash victim in a deliberate attempt to see what it would feel like, or to perform an act of sympathetic magic. Now Vaughan comes to lead her, slowly but firmly, into his staging of the scene, positioning her like a director in the front seat of a blood-stained taxi and repeatedly photographing her as she sits with experimental uncertainty, as if asking, Is this right?' or 'Is

404 The Artist as Monster

this me?7 It is like a courtship or seduction scene (James is an appreciative viewer). Vaughan is certainly raised to heights of emotion as he then discovers that the creator and prime participant of this 'work of art' (as he feelingly calls it) is Seagrave, who has re-enacted the Jayne Mansfield crash, complete with a stuffed chihuahua in his back seat: a masterful, perfect death / mass-killing that leaves Vaughan dizzy and deeply moved. The romanticism of the whole enterprise becomes particularly visible as he addresses Seagrave's dead body in the poetic terms of a lover reproaching his beloved for prematurely committing a suicide that should have included him: 'Seagrave! You couldn't wait for me? You did the Jayne Mansfield crash without me?' This operatic tableau then becomes the inspiration for the agonized actual coupling of Catherine and Vaughan in the back seat of the Lincoln (with James in the front, trying to catch everything in the rearview mirror) as it goes through a car wash.25 What follows is an extensive and explicit enactment of rough sex: Vaughan half-strangles Catherine and grips her body with such excessive force that she repeatedly rolls her eyes and gasps and whimpers in pain. Her face looks positively desperate, and although she is making no protest and indeed seems to realize that this is exactly the logical goal of her fascination with this violent man, she at the same time looks very like a sacrificial animal under the knife of the high priest. It is another virtuoso scene, beginning with the Lincoln's power-windows and convertible top coming hydraulically up and snapping into place to artfully halfobscure Vaughan's vampiric seizure of Catherine's proffered breast, and continuing through the wordless succession of muffled gasps and groans and the whappings and swishings of the car-wash brushes and sprays, Catherine's ankle-strapped foot and leg thudding down the front-seat armrest to land in front of James's startled gaze. Its last shot is perhaps the most powerful of all: Catherine's hand in close-up, covered with sticky semen-slime, reaching up to grasp and claw at, and then slide off, the top of the driver's seat, in an image of monstrous abjection highly redolent of a true horror movie (and the only appearance of semen in the film). The next scene again transfers this act into the environment of James and Catherine's private relationship. The first shot is a close-up of Catherine's naked pelvis, with the monstrous bruise-mark of Vaughan's hand clearly outlined upon her thigh; and James carefully places his hand into this imprint. The camera now takes up a more distant stance, creating a striking tableau in which Catherine lies in an

Crash

405

extraordinarily formal static pose - flat on her back, her feet together, her head straight, her eyes looking directly up, her arms crossed. Especially in the context of her multiple bruises, she looks in fact like a corpse ritually positioned on a slab; and James, as he kisses her bruises and wounds with tender exactness, looks like a necrophile. Then as James moves his body full against hers (again from behind), she cranes her head back to kiss him in a movement of desperation. She turns towards the camera again as he buries his face in the back of her neck, and a tear appears in the corner of her eye, once more as though forced painfully out under great pressure. Here the setting of overpowering dark greys and blacks, the bed covered by a dully gleaming dark-grey satin sheet, adds to the ritualized quality of solemnity. For the first time in Howard Shore's score, in place of menacingly twanging guitars or plaintive winds, we hear the tender sound of massed strings,26 enunciating music that is deeply serious, very 'big7 in feeling. It is the set-piece that expounds the 'revitalization' of the James-Catherine relationship as founded not just on the abjection of crashes and crashlike injuries, but on those of injuries inflicted on a masochistic female by a sadistic male. Of course this is not quite as the film sees it. There, the operation is presented as the often strangely tender project to give Catherine 'her own crash/ and thus to initiate her into the realm of revitalized feelings experienced by the crash cult.27 But it is more than fortuitous that this operation should once again involve the willed physical suffering of a woman in a sexual arena. (At the same time, it must be remarked that Crash is the first Cronenberg film since Videodrome in which the women are just as crazy as the men.) Liebestod After the subsequent sexual coupling of James and Vaughan, both of the Ballards have become Vaughan's lovers, and both of them consequently his highway prey. James gets behind the wheel of the Miata, puts Catherine in the passenger seat, and drives through the night in search of Vaughan - or, more precisely, in search of an accident with Vaughan. Catherine says nervously, 'I want to go home, James/ but her husband pays no attention. Eventually they cruise past Vaughan slumped over in a bypass in the Lincoln, and Vaughan looks absolutely like a horror monster, quite mad, quite 'gone/ as the camera tracks melodramatically up to him. He pulls out after them and once again tries to 'eat the rump of that little Miata/ the Lincoln roaring and squealing crazily on rain-

406 The Artist as Monster

slicked asphalt. After banging three times into the rear bumper of the sports car, he emits an open-mouthed cry, swerves violently, and (as we can hear but not see) plunges through the guard rail of the overpass and down into the traffic streaming by below. In a way it would have made sense for Vaughan to kill all three of them at this point. That he doesn't, that he leaves James and Catherine to work out their own private crash, is another indication that the narrative really centres on those two, and that Vaughan, however charismatic and essential, stands slightly to one side as a catalyst and enabler but not a protagonist. The film's culminating development is perfectly logical. James, after reclaiming the blackened hulk of the Lincoln from police impoundment,28 'fixes it up just enough to get it rolling' (this had been Vaughan's ambition with 'a real crash car'), and proceeds, in the last scene of all, to chase Catherine with it and bump her car off the road, trying to give her 'her own crash.' In short, after James has taken lessons from Vaughan in how to be a dispenser of sadistic crash-sex, and Catherine has taken lessons from him in how to be a masochistic receiver of it, and both of them have rehearsed their lessons with each other, they can at last try to put the model into practice in an actual crash enactment in which he will actually kill her. The Lincoln's pursuit of the Miata, and its bumping it off the road, is played out by both parties. Catherine signifies her seriousness about it by deliberately unhooking her seatbelt as soon as James comes into view. He bumps her three times, as Vaughan had done - and the third time she careens off the road and crashes unseen, just as Vaughan had done. In a powerful high-angle telephoto longshot, James is seen climbing from the Lincoln and looking over the edge of the road to the crash site below. A closer shot shows him descending the hill, with the overturned Miata's rear wheel pushing up into the shot. James bends over this, examines and inhales the smell of the crashed body of the Miata. Only then does the camera show us that Catherine's body is stretched alongside the car, her legs trailing out of the cockpit, her skirt pulled up over her hips revealing her usual bare-pelvis-and-garter-belt. Even now James peers intently into the car's interior before turning his attention to his wife, whose dead-or-alive condition is not known. He asks her softly, 'Catherine, are you all right?' Now her eyelids flutter weakly, she says she does not know. Bending over close to her, he again asks tenderly, 'Are you hurt?' 'I think I'm all right,' she answers, and now tears appear in her eyes. James consoles her, saying lovingly, 'Maybe the next one, darling. Maybe the next one.' These words are the very ones

Crash 407

he had uttered to her on the balcony in their first scene together, as they quizzed each other on the day's sexual escapades. In answer to his question 'Did you come?' she had replied, 'No/ and he had said, twice, consolingly, 'Maybe the next one/ James now nestles up behind her, fumbles with his trousers, and enters her from behind as she whimpers and cries. A last, amazing telephoto longshot shows the two of them in this tableau, as the camera cranes up and away. On the laserdisc Cronenberg himself offers an interpretation of this scene, in the course of a commentary that admonishes viewers to pay careful attention to the film: What they're saying here, and how they're saying it, is really quite crucial, and when he says, 'Are you all right?' and she says, I'm all right, yes I think I'm all right/ she starts to cry, because she really doesn't want to be all right, she wants more, more of a crash, closer to death ... [IJt's quite critical that you listen to what he says, his last words in the movie, and understand what that means. In my first draft of the script I actually ended the script with the scene preceding this, at the wreckers' yard, and that was the end of the movie, and in fact that was more or less the end of the book. But then, when we started to read the script, we all felt that there was something missing, that there was something that was perhaps implicit in the book that was not implicit in the script, and that I needed to take it one step further. And suddenly the whole script came full circle with this scene, and as I say I think it is implicitly in the book - you understand that they are going to play these games together, and that Catherine ultimately will have her crash too.

Actually, Catherine has had her own crash; certainly she is wounded, and the spectacle of her being penetrated from behind while she lies whimpering, bruise-covered, and bloody invests her with a substantial measure of the abjection they both continue to seek for her. Cronenberg says she is crying because she is not closer to death. But if this represents a falling-short, it can only be of severe mutilation or death itself. It is a spectacle of abjection in the other, dictionary, sense as well: of a person who is absolutely at the mercy of everything around her, fixed in a position of helpless suffering, a figure stripped of control and agency. In this context Catherine's tears seem to be shed for the utter pathos of her position. This is what she has come to: to have reached such a pitch of desperation that, thrown brutally into the dirt from her crashed car, her status as object of sexual fantasy painted garishly upon

408 The Artist as Monster

her fallen form by her nakedness, she has still not succeeded in gaining the violent oblivion that will release her from her pitiable state. Certainly there is tenderness in the scene; but its logic is that Catherine's current state is not bad enough and that things would be better if she were dead. In short, it is another of Cronenberg's devastated endings - and this is particularly the case when the poetics of the image and the music are taken into account. Rear-entry sex Here we might take a moment to examine the question of rear-entry sex. A high proportion of the sex scenes, and all but one of those between James and Catherine, position the man behind the woman. Whether the sex is vaginal or anal is rarely clear, and under circumstances where sex acts are becoming a kind of search for meaning in which, to quote Cronenberg, the participants are trying to 'move beyond sexuality/29 it is perhaps not worth making this particular distinction. Rodley (among others) asked the filmmaker why there was such a preponderance of this sexual position: 'It's the choice I made. I liked the way it looked. It felt right, getting both the actors looking towards the camera and not at each other. It helped that sort of "disconnected" thing... It's more, "How do you have sex when you're not quite having sex with each other?" That kind of thing/30 This seems right, but not complete. Disconnection and detachment are powerful forces in this world, in the arena of sexual relations as well as everywhere else - indeed perhaps the most omnipresent symptom of the world's ruling sickness. If rear-entry sex is an emblem of this alienated condition, then we must remark that matters have not changed at the end of the film: James is still behind Catherine, and in fact the public and pitiable nature of this final sex act seems to inscribe its failure-to-connect more deeply than ever. But there is another factor here: namely, the connection between the configuration male-at-the-female's-rear and the scenario of male sadism and female masochism. Rear-entry sex is more sadomasochistic than 'normal' sex (of which, actually, there isn't any in the film), both through its location within the jaded practices of an alienated sex life where the partners try to arouse their own and each other's frozen desire by performing acts that would 'normally' be hurtful, and also through its association with an image pattern specifically implying sexual violence. Cronenberg's striking description of Vaughan's sex-crash flirtations as 'eating the rump of that little Miata' is entirely evocative of the film's opening two

Crash

409

sex scenes, where men are very specifically 'eating the rump' of women.31 When the Lincoln contacts the Miata from behind, it is an act of violence; and when James in the Lincoln smacks Catherine in the Miata off the road, and follows this up with an act of rear-entry sex, it is difficult to separate the latter from the former. To give Catherine 'her own crash' is to make a sexual attack on her, whose element of sadistic pleasure is not really mitigated by the fact that Catherine (masochistically) wishes to 'be crashed.' Again, men can be hurt and killed in crashes just as much as women, but it is significant that somehow it is always the men drivers who are inflicting the crashes, and that women suffer them but do not initiate them. Certainly this observation is not meant to suggest that Cronenberg really ought to have added a madwoman behind the wheel of a death-dealing crash car to the film's collection of madmen. On the contrary, it is to affirm that in the arena of sex-crash mania as in that of sexuality itself, the issue of the hurtfulness to females of male sexual desire is not far from the film's imagination. The failure of benevolent psychopathology So, within the context of Cronenberg's cinema, it does not seem at all accidental that Crash's powerful final scene should focus upon the dual spectacle of its heroine's suffering and of her sexuality. For, like Nicki Brand and Joan Lee, Catherine Ballard has been discovered to be the most heavily laden emblem of the filmmaker's agonized emotions about the dyad of transgressive sexual appetite and the damage done to female objects-of-desire who are also 'human subjects.' She is the martyred female figure whose willing abjection makes her the eloquent testament of both the central male's ugly desires and his redemption. Catherine, then, accepts the role as crash victim, prepared by Vaughan's physically abusive assault and submitting to James's rear-end collision and then to a final rear-end coupling as a 'consolation' for her failure to suffer really enough to transform anything. Her function is to act as the same kind of inspiration to the hero's sensibility as Nicki and Joan - namely, as sources of longing and of a brimming emotional self-understanding. But if this final, emotionally saturated, state in Max Renn and Bill Lee is the signal for suicide or deep despair - if, in other words, for them ultimate illumination is the understanding of their own failure and impossibility32 - for James the final tableau of female sacrifice seems only to indicate that he has not reached this state of illumination and culmination. Of course he

410 The Artist as Monster

is not really the Cronenbergian hero of the films from Videodrome to M. Butterfly: he is less central, less deep, less hysterical. His renewed marginality carries with it some of the emotional coldness of the male protagonists of the films before Videodrome. But at the same time, Crash's conclusion remains a failure - now a failure of the protagonist to crash through his own walls of numbness, and a failure of his redemptive female object-of-desire to redeem him. The film's grip of cold existential lifelessness remains almost as icy at the end as it is at the beginning, and the extraordinary, 'radical' transformative experiment has not succeeded in transforming anything. In a certain sense, Cronenberg's cinema has been looking for a 'benevolent psychopathology' right from the beginning, especially in two places: in a disease whose transformative actions might prove to be something other than simply horrifying and deadly; and in a transgressive male sexuality that would be forgiven and even welcomed by its female object. In the end it is not difficult to see these two places as fundamentally the same place - to see them as respectively physical and moral expressions of the same question. This new verbalization, 'benevolent psychopathology/ is in some ways the most accurate of all, or atleast the one that locates the question within the psyche, rather than as a somatization in the body. In Crash the psychopathology lies in the self-evident sickness of the activities of transgressive sexuality and homicidal crash-violence: they smash and damage the body or they reveal the existential desperation of the soul. The benevolence would reside in the liberation and meaning-giving that such 'radical' means would afford its practitioners. Sex-crash mania is thus the disease, or the existentialist invention, that will transform its bearer into 'something else' in an environment where he or she (mostly he) has had trouble existing 'normally.' As with so many of his films whose destructive transformations he wants to interpret as simply 'radical' means of adaptation to a difficult situation, Cronenberg sees Crash as a story about people who are just doing what they have to do to survive. To viewers who feel that the film offers a spectacle of horror, he responds: I didn't agree with everything that [J.G. Ballard] said, particularly that this is a cautionary tale. A lot of journalists have said to me, 'We don't feel your movie is a cautionary tale/ and I said, 'Well, I don't feel that it is, either.' So I said to Ballard, 'When you were writing it, did you feel you were writing a cautionary tale?' He said no.33

Crash

411

And in the laserdisc commentary, the filmmaker offers one of the fullest interpretations he has given us of any of his films; it revolves around the same point: [F]or me this movie is really an existential romance, you could say, with the lovers united in the end. Even in death - and that's the romantic part. And the existential part is really the understanding that the only meaning that there is in the universe is created by us, by us for ourselves, and that these people in this film have come loose from the old meanings. For the couple that we meet at the beginning, all the old forms have lost their meaning - forms of sex, of love, of social interaction - all those things have lost their meaning for them, they're just going through the motions. And through the epiphany of the car crash, which is really a moment of revelation (even though he doesn't perhaps notice it as such at the time) for the Ballard character, he is going to have to reinvent all those things. And he finds a group of people who are engaged in the same process. He will reinvent those things which we think of as being immutable, things that we think are the basics of life that are the same for everyone, but in fact are really not, are reinvented for every time in every culture - that is once again to say, love, sex, what death means, what emotion is. These are not absolutes at all, they are variables. And these people are now experimenting, they have taken it upon to invent new meaning for themselves, and to reinvent sex, to reinvent death, to reinvent love. That's really what I think the movie's about.

But really nowhere in Cronenberg's whole cinema, and despite his repeated insistences to the contrary, is this transformation or reinvention anything other than appalling.34 Diseases do not lead to viable new forms of life (at least not of human life), transformations are not into something better or even something tolerable. And it is just the same in Crash. These people may have reinvented love, sex, and what death means, but they have not done so very successfully; their reinventions do not convey much fulfilment or satisfaction - especially to the central couple, and really especially to Catherine. The crash cult

What successes the process of existential self-reinvention may have in the film (and they are not exactly unmixed either) accrue to the original band of devotees - that is, to Vaughan and his circle. Here we find a

412 The Artist as Monster

menagerie whose life circumstances are very different from those of the Ballard couple, or even from Helen Remington. Vaughan himself, the Seagraves, and Gabrielle are casualties of a different kind. Above all what distinguishes them from the Ballards is their iconography. When James and Helen first descend into this realm, after the 'James Dean crash/ the film is introduced to an environment as far removed from the icy bourgeois perfection of the Ballards' environment as can be imagined. The Seagraves' living quarters, in the back of a peeling car-repair shop, are of a really exemplary underclass trashiness: fakewoodgrain wallpaper, cheap K-Mart furniture and fixtures, bad carpets, garage-sale-type lamps and various kinds of junk strewn around, with a dirty yellow-beige the dominant colour. An old television set is on, tuned to a bass-fishing show, and the denizens are sitting around it smoking cigarettes and joints and drinking beer. Seagrave, when he is helped in, falls into a Lazy Boy recliner that is just another piece of artdirection perfection, while his wife Vera, wearing a threadbare cotton print dress and so stoned she can hardly see straight, clumsily cradles his concussed head before stumbling out to the kitchen for another beer. Seagrave is still wearing the red windbreaker and blue jeans from his performance as James Dean (it is Dean's costume for Rebel Without a Cause, incidentally), and has not been sitting dazed in the chair for long before Vaughan is trying to cheer him up by suggesting they 'work out the details' of the Jayne Mansfield crash, and Seagrave starts to obsess about the size his falsies are going to be (in a later scene Vera with wifely solicitude is fitting him with a gigantic black brassiere). Here too, in the back room, Vaughan has his 'laboratory' of crash-porno photographs, and here the outrageously costumed Gabrielle seems to hang out constantly. Vaughan, once apparently a middle-class professional, has found a social level that he prefers. He does not even reside in the Seagraves' lower-working-class environs; instead he inhabits a level even lower, even more dismissive of mainstream social values: he lives in his car. Through the scarring violence of car crashes, and of his own temperament, Vaughan has made himself into a personage who is somehow quite at home in this underclass environment; his monstrosity is what has made him so. Gabrielle is quite different from the other members of the VaughanSeagrave bande a part. In the first place she is played by Rosanna Arquette with large helpings of sultry golden glamour: parted lips, provocative glances, lazy sensuality. But of course what really distinguishes her is her apparatus of disability, a fantastic paraphernalia of stainless

Crash

413

steel, leather, and curved plates of heavy black plastic that look like armour. The image she presents is wonderful. Struggling to move, encased in braces and harnesses and aided by a cane, she is at the same time sending the strongest possible signals of a totally different set of stereotypes. Part biker sex-girl (with a black leather bodice that outrageously cuts out a zippered hole around one breast), part cyberpunk robot-of-desire (Metropolis flashes briefly to mind), part sword-andsorcery dominatrix in fishnet stockings, Gabrielle consecrates every aspect of her crash-created difference into a style statement, and what the style says is 'sex' - kinky, fetishistic, s&m, porno-fantasy sex. Her presence is so theatrical, and her flaunting of it so brazen, that it contains its own ironic self-consciousness, and skates easily between witty selfsatire and inflammatory concupiscence. Clearly she has invented herself, with a little help from medical technology and a lot from her crash. Although there is a good deal of grunting and grimacing awkwardness in her movements, her physical pain has been transmuted into another aspect of her sexuality, another erogenous symptom; it is never allowed (either by her or by the film) to extend into an area of genuine suffering. She is the poster girl for crash-erotics, complete with a large nouvellevagina scar-orifice on the back of her thigh, actually penetrated sexually by James and demonstrating its impeccably Cronenbergian heritage by recalling the strange new sex organs of Rabid and Videodrome.35 tterfauxnaiflewd invasion of a Mercedes dealership transforms these cold, lifeless, iron-grey precincts with transgressive heat and flesh just as her apparatus rips open the black leather seat of the car. Of all the sexual encounters in Crash, the one between her and James in the cabin of her bizarrely disability-modified car is, oddly, the most like a traditionally erotic scene (with its glamour-lighting and photography), the only one that really seems to express 'the joy of sex/ So that Gabrielle, with her near-comic self-possessed theatricalism and her porno-fantasy sexual warmth and enjoyment, becomes a kind of anomalous figure amidst the blank-faced or neurotic sexualities of the Ballards or Helen Remington, the lumpen trailer-park pathos of the Seagraves, and the demonic abjection of Vaughan. Dereliction and class Returning to the question of the whole Seagrave milieu, it is difficult here to suppress one's awareness of how similar forms of dereliction and social abjection have been characterized in previous Cronenberg

414 The Artist as Monster

films. Most penetrating is the memory of Seth Brundle's descent into the lower-class world, also as a result of his radical transformative experiments. There the downward fall from middle-class standards of behaviour and deportment constituted an unambiguous sign that something bad was happening. In Crash, things have changed to some extent. For one thing the Seagraves themselves have not perhaps fatten at all socially; and also the quirkiness of their lifestyle has a charm not to be found in the mean streets and bars of The Fly - as Cronenberg's running laserdisc comment on the second scene chez Seagrave indicates: 1 love this. This is the Seagraves at home -1 think there ought to be a TV series, "The Seagraves/' watching crash footage as though it were some kind of porno tape ... The Seagraves: you've got to love them/ But there is a hint even in this comment that loving the Seagraves is something you do from a distance. Inside the narrative, however, the social chasm between the Ballards and the Seagraves is something the Ballards, particularly James, are trying to rectify by moving downwards to the warmer and more authentic level of abjection. The hard, frozen haut bourgeois splendour of James and Catherine's apartment and wardrobe is something they need to escape, to wreck. Again, there is a close parallel in the transformation of the Mantle brothers' similarly sterile and upmarket lifestyle. The scenes near the end of Dead Ringers where the twins are padding around their monstrously junked-up living quarters in jackets and underpants represent a systematic destruction of their repressed and lifeless environment of Italian furniture' earlier in the film. So in Crash James proceeds (like Brundle) from a suit jacket to a leather jacket, and Catherine from elegant fabrics and frilly garter belts over perfect white flesh to cuts and contusions on naked bruise-coloured flesh; and their new social ground is epitomized by Vaughan's mangled and discoloured Lincoln and its equally messed-up owner. In the monster-Lincoln Catherine is assaulted and violated while James watches; here James fucks Vaughan near a derelict auto-wrecking yard; and here (after reclaiming the crashed hulk from another wrecking yard) James sits enacting the role of Vaughan while trying to kill or maim his wife. But the protagonists of Videodrome, The Fly, and Dead Ringers have all fallen into dereliction, they have not really chosen to descend. The Ballards, on the other hand, pick their way down to the level of the Seagraves and Vaughan rather carefully and gingerly, trying in a very controlled way to lose control. This deliberate consciousness is the sign of their truly 'existential' pilgrimage; but it is also perhaps the reason

Crash

415

why they can't finally complete the journey. Notwithstanding the abjection of the final tableau, there is something missing. Not only does the crash fail to kill Catherine (and we might ask why it fails - if Cronenberg was going to add a new conclusion to the script bringing some completion to the narrative, why not go all the way and kill her?). It also fails to bring James to any kind of resolution or selfunderstanding - something that may have been implicit in the scenario's externality, but that remains a limitation on the film's ability to achieve a conclusion as 'romantic' as those of the other films since Videodrome. And on a purely iconic level, it leaves them both still beautiful, still frozen-faced, still rear-coupling. In the end, we must say again that the descent to abjection does not succeed. It does not transform the protagonist(s) utterly, it does not swallow and obliterate them; it leaves them alive and unfulfilled, not really so far from where they started. Antonioni But here questions of narrative and theme start to intertwine with questions of cinematic style. For it would be difficult for Crash to abandon its utterly controlled mise en scene at this culminating point of the film even if it wanted to. And that style has been the powerful expression and the embodiment of the narrative's and the characters' condition of affectless alienation from the beginning. Crash not only represents the apex of Cronenberg's fluctuating practice of high-modernist cinematic style (begun in Stereo and Crimes of the Future, then backing off to an extent during the 'low' period beginning with Shivers, then advancing decisively in Dead Ringers)', it also, for the first time, prompts comparisons with other masters of modernist cinema - and I am thinking particularly of Antonioni and Bresson. The repeated depiction of alienated central characters, numbed and unhappy, whose encounters are sterile and whose relationships are dysfunctional, is powerfully reminiscent of Antonioni, particularly in the films from L'Avventura to Red Desert. The similarity is heightened by the fact that these encounters occur between well-dressed, well-coiffed, good-looking members of the middle class (or in Antonioni's case sometimes jaded aristocrats), and in circumstances where the inhumanity of industrialized surfaces and well-to-do lifestyle are much in evidence. The constant neurotic unwillingness of Antonioni's characters to endure the troubling and even panic-inducing emotional frankness of a meeting-of-eyes for more than an instant at a time is uncannily repli-

416 The Artist as Monster

cated in the Ballard couple, and particularly in Catherine's evasively sidelong glances or vacantly unfixed gaze. James is at least willing to look, even if he is not exchanging a look, but Catherine can hardly even seem to do that. In this context (and in confirmation of Cronenberg's explanation) the rear-entry sexual encounters start to look like something Antonioni might very well have thought up himself had he spent a lot of time more explicitly depicting sexual intercourse between the unconnecting couples of L'Avventura or La Notte, and Debra Unger starts to look something like a Monica Vitti going through an extremely bad phase. In a more general sense, for both filmmakers the forbidding blankness of the visual environment, often expressed through an empty stasis and a strong emphasis on abstract composition, are among the most important means of expressing the overpowering emotional coldness of the world. And certainly the basic thesis upon which both Crash and, say, L'Avventura are based is that just such a condition prevails in the modern post-industrial world. In short, the theme is the same, and the strategy of expression is the same. Bresson With Bresson there are different points of comparison. What is most immediately striking is the similarity of an entire range of individual shots in Crash - a range never before explored by Cronenberg - to the characteristic decoupage of Robert Bresson. No filmmaker in history controls the exact content of each shot more fanatically than Bresson. As part of a general strategy of austerity, Bresson practises on the level of shot composition and disposition an almost aggressive refusal to show what would normally be shown, and a corresponding insistence on showing just exactly this aspect or fragment of the scene - a portion whose angle or framing is often so unusual as to seem arbitrary. And it is an approach similar to this that Cronenberg adopts especially in one area of the film: shots of people riding in cars. One first sees this manner not in the sequence of James's accident, but during his ride home from the hospital - indicating that the unconventional nature of this visual syndrome is a consequence of the 'epiphany7 of the accident and its alteration of the perceptions of the crash victim. Here the camera, braced as almost always in these shots onto the body of the car to present a totally rigid image of the moving vehicle, looks down from above roof-level somewhere just outboard of the passenger side at James riding in the rear seat of a taxi taking him home. It is a com-

Crash

417

pletely 'unnatural' angle, its rigidity of composition strongly contrasted with the movement of the car down the road and its modernist 'artiness' further emphasized by the reflective surface of the window behind which James sits. It is an altogether striking image because of its insistence on pursuing something other than narrative utility and because of its severe, abstract beauty. This shot is only the first of many. Indeed the next sequence that exhibits this syndrome does so much more extensively, and with even greater virtuosity of abstraction. This is the scene of Helen's first car ride with James (this section of the film begins with their meeting at the wreck of his crash-car, and proceeds through this ride and its nearaccident to the airport car park and their hectic coupling). Here, even more extraordinary braced high-angled shots from outside the car show a curtailed image of Helen in the passenger seat, her thighs emerging from her short skirt, blue sky and industrial structures reflected off the window glass. Other obsessively-insisted-upon extreme close-ups (now for a moment also suggesting Hitchcock) show the back of James's neck with his hand agitatedly running over his shoulder strap and eventually removing it, and Helen's red-leather-gloved hand with its lighted cigarette, again from outside the car through the window. The impression of strange, tense control of the visual field is overpowering, and is oddly complemented rather than flatly contradicted when the car nearly veers off the road and the decoupage suddenly erupts into buffeted, unfocused, uncontrolled handheld shots fiercely punctuated by flashing cutins of details like a hubcap exploding off its rim and hurtling away. It is impossible to catalogue every sequence and shot of this style throughout the film - though indeed few of them are quite as dramatically 'Bressonian' as the ones I have described. But the attentive viewer will certainly notice how many of the shots of drivers are insistently offset in one way or another - often by a hood- or fender-mounted camera that abstractly frames the shot in such a way as to have at least half of the image devoted to the side-mirror and the space beside the car, with the driver pushed over to one side and frequently obscured by windshield reflections or raindrops. In the latter case the shot, with modernist perversity, masks what is 'essential' in the shot content and shows clearly what is not. High modernism There is another aspect of Bresson that Crash calls to mind, namely, the

418 The Artist as Monster

juxtaposition of this obsessive severity of style with a narrative that is full of cruelty and pain. From this perspective, what is most Bressonian about Crash is the general disparity between the awfulness of what is depicted and the frozen modernist formalism with which it is beheld. Such a dualism has been present in some form ever since the beginning of Cronenberg's career, of course, and even Shivers shows a tendency towards cool detachment and a proto-modernist aesthetic when it is not immersing itself in abjection. But Crash, returning to a relatively distanced view in a narrative without a consumingly important central character, advances stylistically to a condition of almost perfect control even as it is presenting a subject aggressively centred around sex and violence. The high-modernist style is ultra-repressive; meanwhile, both narratively and thematically the content denounces repression and strenuously aims to shatter the airless prison of affectless technologism and control. To a degree Cronenberg's cinema has always fought against itself in this way, because it has shown a strong underlying instinct towards a visual world of cleanliness, detachment, and control, while finding in those qualities a manifestation of unhealthy repression and emotional sterility that would inevitably call forth its opposite. This dualism, so strong in the early films, recedes in a number of the later films, as they focus on central characters who, as in The Dead Zone or Naked Lunch, are far removed from the over-controlled circumstances of upper-middle-class culture. It does return, spectacularly, in Dead Ringers, where Elliot Mantle's severely modernist taste in interior decoration becomes a very clear indication exactly of emotional displacement and sterility - but more as an indication of a personal neurosis than as the primarily social condition it was in the early films. And is again in Crash, where now, however, its stylistic expression has become most of the time as fanatically pure over almost the whole terrain of the film as it was in the Elliot Mantle decor of Dead Ringers. To invest virtually the whole look of the film with what in previous films had been identified with a condition of emotional dessication, a pathology of emptiness, is to regard the dualist battle between over-repression and over-liberation firmly from one side of the divide. That is, the film itself cannot escape from the cold grip of its own high-modernist aesthetic no matter how much it might intellectually admire, or even hopelessly yearn for, the messy unrepression of crashes and their uglified spokesman Vaughan. The trangressive heat of all the crashes and all the sexual couplings in the film is not enough to raise the temperature significantly The astonishing disparity of Crash works once more

Crash

419

like Bresson's cinema, but in reverse: while Bresson is trying to escape from pain and sinful desire to grace-saturated beauty and control, Cronenberg is trying to escape from the beauty and control to the pain and sinful desire - but without success. If Bresson's films remain neurotic in some fundamental way, Cronenberg's are simply fundamentally pessimistic. In this way, Crash is perhaps the definitive example in Cronenberg's work of the way his pessimism - his disbelief in the final possibility of positive transformations and positive outcomes - is embodied in the aesthetic stance of control and distance that has always distinguished his work to some degree, and that is also, incidentally, exactly the pattern of the transgress!ve modernist writers he so much admires: Kafka, Beckett, Nabokov, Burroughs. In any case, Crash contains passages of modernist cinematic bravura that surpass anything else of the kind in Cronenberg's work. The 'Bressonian' shots already described are certainly prominent among them. But there are also other startling moments: the tracking shot that seems to be a point-of-view shot as James pulls his car into the stall of his parking garage before his first coupling with Helen, but that continues (in an 'impossible' way) right across the barrier and window to look down into the scene below; or, probably most striking of all and a wonderful piece of cinematic formalism, the three-and-a-half-timesrepeated camera movement from the driver James across into the back seat of the Lincoln where Vaughan is engaging in various sexual acts with the prostitute. It is perhaps surprising that a filmmaker with Cronenberg's combination of visual acuity and sensational subject matter has always been at base a restrained, contained stylist, rarely given to the kind of sophisticated display-of-technique that fills so much of mainstream cinema and (in a different way) has often been a hallmark of high-modernist cinema as well. It is simply another indication of the degree to which Crash is Cronenberg's artiest film since Crimes of the Future. The sensual appeal of so much of the film - an appeal that is somehow both rich and cold - is seen in almost every scene (those at the Seagraves' perhaps excepted). The one just described, for example, together with all the other nighttime scenes in the Lincoln, is just a visual feast in a flavour Cronenberg has never given us before: the burgundy/oxblood leather seats of the Lincoln are always-already visceral and blend with the dull gleams of light off the chrome interior trim and the symphony of muted colours (orange, blue, red) radiated by the external freeway landscape gliding by But this process of visual examination would lead us to an account of most

420 The Artist as Monster

of the shots in the film. We can still see - as in all his other films Cronenberg's careful regulation and even micro-management of colour, costume, details of setting; now, however, they are all subsumed in a visual regimen where the iron hand of control is visible almost everywhere. Artistic creation Again in Crash, art and scientific 'experimentation' are conjoined. Vaughan often talks like a scientist, he has his 'laboratory' of photographs and dossiers, he performs his experiments. But he is a mad scientist, and it is his madness that brings him more fully into the realm of art (just as it did with Beverly Mantle). And again, science is only an alibi, a cover. Neither Vaughan nor, still less, his followers have any real interest in the medical implications of crash injuries, nor in the safety questions of crash testing, nor in any dimension of social science that might be illuminated by or help to explain the whole phenomenon except insofar as these issues press directly on their own sexual desire. (The crash-test films they watch are, precisely, porno films for them.) What really constitutes the scientific impulse at base is transgressive desire. And since art has, for Cronenberg, always had its base in transgressive desire, the aboriginal scientific project has become more and more fused with an overtly artistic one. Crash-art involves making a gesture of creativity that is also, primarily and most obviously, a gesture of destruction. This art's connection to sexuality repeats a syndrome that is a constant feature of Cronenberg's work retrospectively since Videodrome and especially since Dead Ringers. But its connection to destruction - the destruction of others and the suicidal destruction of the self - is also consistent with the films' fear that artistic creation is in fact dangerous to everybody, both the artist and his audience. In Crash the complex metaphor of destructive art finds a compellingly simple form: the car crash, where there is a great risk to both the artist (the driver) and to his audience (which receives the impact). An artwork is a collision engineered by the artist where both parties are injured; the artist is brave and path-breaking, but also a dangerous lunatic. The self-consciousness of this perspective is seen in many guises. James's leg-brace is far too wonderful to be simply functional, and it it appreciated both by 'doctor' Vaughan and by the camera as the expressive sculpture it is. The artistic dimension is amplified to unmissable

Crash

421

proportions in the James Dean crash, an overtly theatrical event complete with emcee/raisonneur, costumed players, elaborate props, and an audience in bleachers. All the crashes suggested or created by Vaughan have the effect of street theatre (highway theatre, one might say) and of elaborate pieces of performance art that make a deep impression - literally. The big set-piece of the nighttime freeway crash site is the fullest realization: not only does the film present this in the highly stylized, dramatized, terms of drifting mist, chiaroscuro, coloured lights, and music, but Vaughan moves through the 'set' like a director with his camera and his star (Catherine), and pronounces it 'a work of art7 even before he finds that it has been engineered as such by Seagrave. More subtle examples are seen in Gabrielle's self-theatricalization, in the intense importance of setting to James and Helen's couplings, and in the highly formalized sex scenes between James and Catherine wherein they 'act out' Vaughan's presence. At the other end of the scale, it is intriguing to watch Cronenberg's fascination with the low-culture art of Seagrave. Seagrave's markers of artistic production, and self-production, begin with his somewhat incongruous appearance in Dean's Rebel without a Cause outfit, and escalate rapidly to his grotesque emulation of Jayne Mansfield, capped by dime-store wig and gigantic home-made falsies - all of it rendered extra-farcical by Seagrave's boozy middle-aged unglamorousness. There are multiple layers of trashiness here, because not only is Seagrave's persona crass and overdone, but so was Jayne Mansfield's.36 The dumbfounding conjunction of artistic seriousness (deadly seriousness) and garish lumpen-aesthetics is epitomized at Seagrave's death scene: the Weegee-like screaming vulgarity of the mess and the corpses, Seagrave's unlovely gashed head and ludicrous, pathetic wig torn askew, the stuffed chihuahua a touch so unthinkably tawdry that it functions as genius ('the dog is brilliant!' cries Vaughan, a fellow artist turned appreciative critic). What all this recalls is the similarly vulgarized self-theatricalization (also in drag) of Rene Gallimard in his artsuicide scene at the end of M. Butterfly. The style may be ridiculously crude, the art primitive - and this is especially the case in the highmodernist environment of Crash - but the sincerity of the performance is not in doubt. Cronenberg's next film, eXistenZ, even as it retreats from Crash's hyper-cleanliness to a hyper-messiness, is yet more extensively devoted to a meditation on the nature and consequences of artistic creation. The filmmaker's wr-themes of bodily disturbance and the bad

422 The Artist as Monster

consequences of transgression have certainly not disappeared, but the theme of art has now become virtually as large and central: one sees Cronenberg shifting insistently to this perspective in every film since Dead Ringers. In Crash, the process is externalized: artists are not so much people whose personalities collapse in upon them, and whose process of creation is more or less a by-product of their internal dysfunction - as in Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch, and M. Butterfly - as they are externally viewed and externalizing figures whose activities have a directly destructive external effect. This fact, together with the emphatic artiness of the film itself, gives Crash its special status in this progression.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

eXistenZ (1999) 'I find this disgusting, but I can't help myself

eXistenZ is not Cronenberg's most powerful film and sometimes creates the sense of being a not entirely successful experiment. But it presents a particularly fascinating experience for devotees of his work, because it contains so many echoes and repetitions of his earlier movies and of his whole approach as an artist. If it can seem at different times an insubstantial jeu or a somewhat contrived philosophical statement or perhaps a victim of its own contradictions, it also presents a visual and imaginative world as striking as anything Cronenberg has created. Revisiting the surreal and hallucination-like methods of Videodrome and Naked Lunch, eXistenZ benefits from the fertility that such radical freedom-of-the-unconscious has always stimulated in Cronenberg's imagination, and it is full of striking and effective things. Although it references his own work with astonishing breadth and detail, it is also something original and unique in Cronenberg's output to date. During the late 1990s some critics and commentators were pointing out, either in a disinterested or more often in a sniping way, that Cronenberg had not written a purely original screenplay for one of his films since Videodrome in 1982. Insofar as this is a criticism implying some leaching away of authorial originality, it is a canard, since such 'adapted' recent films as Dead Ringers and Naked Lunch are so intensely true to Cronenberg's unique set of themes and concerns, and so far from their literary originals, that the point seems a trivial one. With M. Butterfly and Crash, however, Cronenberg had stayed closer to Hwang's play and Ballard's novel respectively, so that it actually is proper to call those films adaptations, even if their purely Cronenbergian elements are so strong as to obviate any assertion that the director

424 The Artist as Monster

was somehow diluting his 150-overproof authorial presence. But when one is called, however egregiously, 'the asset-stripper of the modernist cult canon/1 one perhaps feels the urge to show directly that the charge of creative parasitism is utterly misplaced. In any event, eXistenZ has an entirely original screenplay. Another critical complaint about Cronenberg's recent output is that it had acquired too great a sheen and somehow had become too wellmanicured and professional to be really transgressive and cutting-edge - a far cry from the 'guerrilla filmmaking'2 of his earliest features. The British writer and independent filmmaker Chris Petit was quoted, for example, as saying that Cronenberg had turned from 'a good middlebrow director with lowbrow pretensions' into 'this vaguely middlebrow to highbrow director/3 It is impossible to say whether such accusations made any kind of impression on the filmmaker, but again eXistenZ seems like a deliberate move away from the high-modernist polish of Crash, and back towards something resembling the 'low' punkish shocking qualities of Shivers and Rabid (this despite the fact that the film's budget of Can$31 million was the highest of Cronenberg's career, and the highest in Canadian film history).4 Now we are back in the world of creatures and disease and organic mutations, as well as of a Scanners-like sci-fi near future. Cronenberg himself, tying these points together, has said, 'We must remember that it's the first completely original script I've written since Videodrome, so maybe that has something to do with it - when I have to provide the world of the movie completely on my own with no other context - that's where I go.'5 In fact eXistenZ feels more like a genre film than anything of Cronenberg's since The Fly, although its genre affiliations are tricky and unstable. It certainly has elements of the neo-genres of cyberpunk and virtual-reality, and when eXistenZ was released many reviewers casually lumped it with a small handful of Hollywood movies that appeared more or less concurrently - Dark City (1998), The Matrix (1999), and The Thirteenth Floor (1999).6 Those films, together with a couple of other contemporary artificial-reality movies such as Pleasantville and The Truman Show (both 1998), are a striking reflection of the anxieties felt by American culture at the end of the twentieth century about the loss of authenticity and the omnipresence of simulations. They are typical examples of how Hollywood acts as a surrogate for the broader culture first by sensing and expressing these anxieties, and then by allaying them through rebuttal and closure. With the possible

eXistenZ

425

exception of Dark City,7 all of them present a spectacle of uncertainty and confusion about the ontological basis for their characters' - and by extension their viewers' - experience of the world, only to re-establish a firmly grounded 'reality' by the end of the story. eXistenZ goes much further than any of these films in its insistence that there is no difference between reality and virtual reality, between a base reality of stable facts and an ungroundable 'reality' consisting only of our shifting perceptions and beliefs, and is, I would suggest, a different kind of film. Still, with its near-futuristic setting, its virtual-reality games and game-gear, its unpeeling levels of narrative, its paranoid action-plot, and its two potentially edgy stars (Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jude Law), eXistenZ could certainly be taken at a superficial glance for something we could call a genre film. As Serge Griinberg suggests, it is 'in the suburbs of Hollywood.'8 Its release was accompanied by a novelization and a graphic novel,9 and its marketing was not very different from that for a mainstream film, albeit something of a 'niche' product if only on account of Cronenberg's name above the title. All of this signals a move by Cronenberg downmarket - down, that is, to a more broadly based viewership after the increasingly stately art-cinema progress from Dead Ringers through Naked Lunch and M. Butterfly (even Crash had shown a frozen high-modernist gloss). eXistenZ moves away from this model not only in narrative and generic terms, but in its setting and visual style, which are aggressively and self-consciously drab and seedy, when they are not aggressively and self-consciously visceral and revolting. But in almost every respect, eXistenZ is difficult to classify or achieve a comfortable critical 'set' towards. Its remarkable look - settings, photography, tonality, and textures - is like nothing else in commercial cinema, and not all that much like anything in Cronenberg. Narratively, it has Hollywood genre overtones but ultimately eludes all generic models and rejects a standard film-to-viewer relationship. It signals an affinity with basement-level punk and grunge art, but engages in a multitude of special effects and computer-generated images.10 It is full of parodic elements, cartoonishness, and a lighthearted satire of popular narrative cliches, but stages these things in a dark, infected, and increasingly oppressive world. For much of the time it feels like comedy (often quite broad comedy) and it pokes fun at itself incessantly, but the final outlook is bleak. It sets its narrative conundrums as a series of problems to be solved by the clever viewer, but then reveals that no problem in this world can have a solution (rather like provid-

426 The Artist as Monster

ing to an elaborate mathematical question the answer that numbers have no status outside our own minds). There are so many plot provocations, twists, and sudden reversals that the film passes right out of a 'solvable' narrative paradigm, and right through one that parodies plot-solution movies, all the way to the condition of an unreadable enigma. Since the film's final subject is the unknowableness of everything and the uncertainty of everyone, all meaning-giving activities, including those conducted by viewers with respect to the film, are undermined. What kind of a plot is this? The opening scene of the film gives us a focus group assembled in a church, invited to the first public trial of a virtual-reality game, 'eXistenZ by Antenna Research/11 as the presenter announces. The acclaimed game designer Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh) will herself preside over its trial run. A dozen volunteers mount the stage, plug the 'metaflesh gamepods' into the 'bioports' fitted surgically into their spines using 'umbycords/ and begin to play the game. Before anything can happen, though, an assassin leaps up from the crowd, brandishes a grotesque organic pistol made of bones and gristle, shouts 'Death to the demoness Allegra Geller! Death to Antenna Research!' and shoots her in the shoulder with what later turns out to be a human tooth. In the confusion, Allegra is confided to the protection of a wide-eyed security-guard/management-trainee named Ted Pikul (Jude Law), and the pair of them jump into a car and ride off into the countryside. Less than ten minutes into the movie, we are immersed in an action plot featuring some radical kind of virtual-reality game that operates organically, an assassination attempt in what is clearly a politically charged social environment, and the inauguration of a 'boy and girl on the run' scenario. These elements of standard movie excitement cause viewers to classify the film according to 'genre' stereotypes and to develop an expectation about what kind of film they are going to be seeing.12 But, although Cronenberg repeatedly throws in elements of action, suspense, paranoia, and provocation, the film begins, from a genre-plot standpoint, to go off-message quite soon, and to carry viewers in directions quite different from the linear forward drive a Hollywood movie would routinely provide. Although people are trying to kill her, she doesn't know whom to trust, and she is in serious need of explanations, Geller's strongest

eXistenZ

427

desire is to stop everything and play her game. Pikul, already identified with the role of a cautious innocent being dragged reluctantly into a world of excitement by this powerful, sophisticated woman, expresses scepticism, and Geller responds with a strangely maternal passion: PIKUL: You can't seriously want to play games now! Not here. Not while we're being hunted down by crazy people. GELLER: My baby here took a huge hit in the church, Pikul, when those umbycords got ripped out of her just as the game architecture was being downloaded from her to all those slave pods. That's a very vulnerable time for her. She could be crying out for help right now.

Later on she proclaims, Tve devoted my five most passionate years to this strange little creature/ As the film progresses, the big-plot mysteries and explanations fade further into the background, and we are left with this interest in the game itself. The Hollywood movie we might have mistaken eXistenZ for is dispersed in fragments and in its place we are finding a meditation on perception and reality, and another of Cronenberg's allegories of the artist and the artwork. The bulk of eXistenZ, then, is devoted to exploring the VR gaming experience: what it looks like and feels like, the differences between oneself in propria persona and as a virtual game character, questions about whether one has any ethical responsibility in a virtual environment, the bleed-through of game into reality and reality into game, and the suggestion that impulses and conduct in the game world can have serious consequences outside that world. Yet we are essentially disoriented right from the start, not only by the narrative swerves, but by the fact that the 'real world7 the film is presenting us with is very strange. Of course it is the near future, it has a fantasy component. But even when that is taken into account, there is still something very odd about this world. The church in the opening scene, the rurality of the setting, the fact that Geller's gamepod is carried in a ski boot - many details of this sort cause a sense of subtle disorientation. The 'Country Gas Station' where Pikul has his bioport installed by a grease-stained mechanic named 'Gas' (Willem Dafoe) is already dangerously overstylized for anything that could actually be 'real/ and this feeling persists throughout the movie. Our orientation is definitely not solidified when we move from this 'real' world into the game world of eXistenZ: we have not been able to ground ourselves in a solid base before mov-

428 The Artist as Monster

ing into a virtuality which, in fact, is only somewhat more extraordinary - arbitrary, contextless, grotesque - than 'reality' has been. On subsequent viewing this double strangeness is itself grounded in the revelation that all the earlier scenes in the film are also occurring in a game; but the first-time viewer can never get properly set. Gas goes from shivering with reverence and literally kissing 'gamegoddess' Geller's feet to trying to assassinate her for a bounty offered by the 'Realist Underground/ She is rescued when Pikul shoots him through the neck with the bioport gun. When the pair try to play the game, it transpires that Gas had deliberately implanted a faulty bioport in Pikul, and now the gamepod needs some surgery. Geller leads them to a former ski chalet that is now a technical service centre for games, headed by scientist Kiri Vinokur (Ian Holm), who performs the required service, and they can at last enter the VR world of eXistenZ. There, they find themselves at 'D'Arcy Nader's Game Emporium/ which sells a miniature version of the gamepod ('from Cortical Systematics') that is sucked entirely into the body, and where the pair are overcome with game-inspired sexual desire for each other. Just as they are about to couple hungrily in a derelict back room, the game shifts suddenly to a place called "The Trout Farm/ Here, mutated amphibians are raised for biogaming purposes, and Pikul finds himself on an abbatoir assembly line and Geller in a primitive 'operating room' with unfinished wood and walls of chicken wire. On their lunch break they go to The Chinese Restaurant,' where Pikul orders the truly disgusting 'Special,' from which he retrieves the parts of the Gristle-gun, assembles them (using a dental bridge from his own mouth as a magazine), and shoots the waiter. A big greyish dog (an Irish wolfhound) lying on the restaurant floor makes off with the bone-gun. Although Pikul repeatedly expresses doubts about the loss of reality and cautious reluctance regarding the transgressive (sexual, violent) promptings of the game, the pair keep returning to the game. At the Trout Farm, disease infects Allegra's gamepod inside the game, it is torched by the demented 'Realist' assassin Yevgeny Nourish (Don McKellar), and it ruptures into a massive rain of infection-bearing 'deadly spores/ When Geller and Pikul boot out of the game, they find that the pod has brought its infection back into 'the real world/ By this time, however, the different worlds have become so intertwined that it is no longer possible to make clear distinctions between virtuality and reality, and the film is emerging as a philosophical statement - an existential one, unsurprisingly, given both the title and

eXistenZ

429

Cronenberg's historic affinity with existentialism. A Molotov cocktail lands in their hotel room, signalling the incursion of a large-scale Realist Underground guerrilla action spearheaded by a character, Hugo Carlaw (Callum Keith Rennie), they have just seen at D'Arcy Nader's store - that is, inside the game. Kiri Vinokur arrives with an offer to Geller to leave Antenna and join Cortical Systematics - a company existing only inside the eXistenZ game world. So it appears that in coming out of that game, Geller and Pikul have only landed themselves in another virtual space, one with uncanny resemblances to 'the real world/ but in fact still a part of the game. Now the final phase of that game - still 'eXistenZ/ probably - involves the characters played by Allegra and Pikul trying to kill each other (Allegra wins by blowing out Pikul's spine with an explosive charge planted in his bioport, shouting 'Death to the demon Ted Pikul!') At last this world is unambiguously shown as a game, as the film boots out of it into a higher framing 'reality/ where all the film's characters thus far are revealed to have been game characters from the very beginning. Everything from the opening 'eXistenZ' trial session in the church onwards has been series of game scenes from a game called 'transCendenZ' ('from Pilgrimage') taking place through a focus group in a very similar church, where personages played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jude Law, Willem Dafoe, and the rest are now present as game players sitting on a stage at the conclusion of the game. In other words, we revert to the beginning of the movie, but with changes as important as the ones between the earlier focus group and the world of eXistenZ. Now, Allegra and Pikul (they retain their names) are a shy couple in a long-term relationship, and the wild-haired assassin Yevgeny Nourish is the actual designer of the game, diffident and rather nerdy. Once congratulations have been given and the focus group disbanded, Geller and Pikul, with their Irish wolfhound in tow, approach Nourish, pull back the fur on the dog's back to reveal it carrying pistols in holsters, and shoot the designer, shouting, 'Death to the demon Yevgeny Nourish! Death to Pilgrimage! Death to transCendenZ!' On their way out of the hall they raise their guns at the personage who had played the Chinese waiter, who pleads with them: 'You don't have to shoot me! Hey, tell me the truth - are we still in the game?' Blackout, end of movie. There is no answer to the question, and the absence of an answer is as definitive as a reply of 'Who knows?' We can never know whether or not we're in reality, or even be assured of the existence of such a thing. A film that began by suggesting genre qualities is ulti-

430 The Artist as Monster

mately revealed as a rather extreme modernist/postmodernist narrative, one that not only doesn't have an ending but, as Serge Grlinberg elegantly points out, doesn't have a beginning either.13 Existentialism Existenz is the German word for 'existence' (but in the sense of 'life' or 'situation,' as in 'What kind of meagre existence is this?'). During one of the sequences at the Trout Farm - that is, inside the game of eXistenZ - the following exchange occurs between Pikul and Geller: PIKUL: I don't like it here. I don't know what's going on. We're both stumbling around together in this unformed world, whose rules and objectives are largely unknown, seemingly indecipherable or even possibly nonexistent, always on the verge of being killed by forces that we don't understand. GELLER: That sounds like my game, all right. PIKUL: That sounds like a game that's not going to be easy to market. GELLER: But it's a game everybody is already playing.

In his DVD director's commentary, Cronenberg has this to say about the speech: It's basically existentialist propaganda you're hearing here. It's really Martin Heidegger, the German existentialist philosopher (though he didn't like the term existentialist himself, he would have rejected that). These are almost pure Heideggerian descriptions of life as it is lived by humans on earth, when you strip away all the facades and the fantasies and the false hopes.14

This comment reminds us that Cronenberg has always been quick to point out the philosophical underpinnings of his work, and especially its affinity with an existentialist perspective - specifically one that stresses the necessity for all humans to invent themselves. This necessity is staged by Cronenberg in all of the transformations of human life attempted by his scientists and quasi-scientists and artists quasi-artists, from Stereo to Naked Lunch, and then in a more literal way in M. Butterfly and Crash. The disappearance of stable theoretical foundations for human society and human values, the stark realization of the insignificant position

eXistenZ

431

of humanity in a material cosmos, the undermining of all kinds of knowledge about the world and ourselves, leaves the existential human subject without clear guidelines for living, with no certainty of anything but his or her own death. As human beings we are (in Heidegger's terms) 'thrown' into this awesome circumstance, and (in Sartre's) 'condemned to freedom' and alone. Culture, science, the whole edifice of modern European civilization are ineffectual in addressing the individual's desperate plight. Philosophers seeking to address this problem begin to throw everything overboard - social criteria for behaviour and belief (Kierkegaard), social ethics and values (Nietzsche), all culturally derived interpretation (Husserl), the Cartesian mind-body split (Heidegger, the phenomenologists), essential human nature (Sartre) until all that is left is the body, raw perception and emotions, and the immediacy of our particular surroundings. From this we must create ourselves as meaningful beings, and create the world as meaningful for ourselves. From this we must build up the new foundations of our own lives, adding other people, culture, history, and politics tentatively and fragmentedly as necessary, but ultimately reaching an understanding of 'authenticity' (Heidegger) and 'being-for-itself' (Sartre) through a fundamental, anguished confrontation with the unanchored and deathlimited nature of human life. In this context, science and technology, instrumental knowledge, the Enlightenment project - the foundational beliefs that have come to take the place of God and other forms of transcendence - are of no help. They cut individuals off from the fundamental questions of personal existence, and leave them alienated in a world crowded with facts but void of meaning. Science in the positivist sense, for Nietzsche 'one of the most stupid of all possible interpretations of the world, meaning that it would be one of the poorest in meaning/15 is condemned to mechanistic sterility. In Cronenberg's films, which are repeatedly drawn to the scientific enterprise and to technological innovation, this remains true to an extent: science can only produce anything existentially substantial when it is 'fertilized' by desire (almost always sexual desire). At the same time, Cronenberg has repeatedly tried to marshal science and technology to existentialist aims. Ever since the 1970s he has protested interpretations of his films that suggested that they were anti-science or anti-technology merely because all their scientific and technological projects were corrupt or deluded and exacted a terrible price in human suffering. In a recent reiteration of this protest, apropos eXistenZ, he says:

432 The Artist as Monster I've never been pessimistic about technology - this is a mistaken perception ... Fm saying that we are doing some extreme things, but they are things that we are compelled to do. It is part of the essence of being human to create technology, that's one of the main creative acts. We've never been satisfied with the world as it is, we've messed with it from the beginning. Most technology can be seen as an extension of the human body, in one way or another, and I show this literally in the film with the references to the bioports. I think that there is as much positive and exciting about it as there is dangerous and negative.16

We will evaluate eXistenZ by this last criterion later, but here we may simply note that the film is another of Cronenberg's self-conscious attempts to express his existentialist philosophy, and to illustrate, in his narrative and characters, how scientific and technological creativity can be used to realize an act of existential self- and world-creation. From Stereo, where scientists use innovative and 'radical' techniques to create for their subjects a new world of telepathic existence with new meanings, through the strikingly similar scenarios unfolded in Shivers and The Brood and Scanners, Cronenberg returned repeatedly to this theme. And in transforming the creative scientist into the creative artist in the films that followed, he merely shifted the ground slightly, for these scientist-artists, and quasi-artists, and finally literal artists all pursued the same kinds of radical transformation of life experience, a reinvention of life that becomes more personal and more openly and recognizably existential as it goes along, with M. Butterfly (and now Spider) as the 'purest' examples. And we may recall the way the filmmaker has commented on the meaning-inventing aspects of the crash cult, led by the primary 'creator' Vaughan, in Crash. Still, it is also important to note how peculiar Cronenberg's version is. For existential thinkers from Kierkegaard to Sartre, the individual's terrified confrontation with the abyss of non-meaning and Promethean struggle to fashion new meaning in its face are gigantic and heroic. But they are in another sense utterly ordinary, because they must be undertaken by every single human individual who wants to face the truth of existence. It is true that a rhetoric of heroism attaches to Nietzsche's overman, Heidegger's authentic individual, and those who resist what Sartre calls 'Bad Faith,' and it is true that all these thinkers assume that probably most persons will be incapable of the deep and painful task of self-destruction and self-remaking that the existential subject must perform. At the same time, for Kierkegaard or Heidegger the unlettered

eXistenZ

433

peasant, close to spiritual fundamentals and the soil, was quite likely to have a deeper connection with his existence than the educated rationalist. For none of the existentialists (with the possible exception of Nietzsche) is the path to personal meaning reserved for radical innovators, brilliantly creative minds, pathbreaking pioneers, as it is in Cronenberg's cinema. For Cronenberg, the existentialist journey of personal transformation is seen most completely in the romantic/modernist trajectory of the heroic artist. His scientists enact their existential transformations - most un-existentially - on others (as in Stereo, The Brood, Scanners). And if, in his most straightfowardly existential phase, these scientists begin to become their own subjects and transform themselves existentially (as in Videodrome, The Fly, Dead Ringers), the transformation of others is usually not too far out of the picture. Even the pure artist in Naked Lunch doesn't transform his own life as fully as he does his wife's, while the crash cult in Crash is unconcerned about collateral damage to strangers as it acts out its own transformational creed. And then there is the central and powerful fact that in Cronenberg's world, existential transformation is always pathological. Yes (says orthodox existentialism), we are existentially all doomed to die and be swallowed up by Nothingness, but along the way we may carve out a niche or ledge on the cliff, we may have the satisfaction of looking life in the face and standing up to it. Cronenberg's existential creators never experience such satisfactions, and their existential re-creations always bring transformations of a hideous kind on their inventors and on others. If in reading Kierkegaard or Heidegger or Sartre one has the sense that individuals who opt out of existential re-evaluation are condemned to dull and deferred and insubstantial lives, in watching Cronenberg's films one has the distinct sense that dullness and insubstantiality are much to be preferred to horrific monstrosification, especially when the reward of greater authenticity and truth for the transformed subject in his cinema is nonexistent. The question arises, too, of why in Cronenberg's world existential transformation must always be accomplished through the catalyst of transgressive desire. It is not some existential revelation of the hollowness of life and the insufficiency of received truths that creates the impetus to smash the old forms of existence and invent new ones. Rather it is something sexual or predatory, a drive, an appetite, that invokes Freud far more readily than the Sartre who heatedly rejected a Freudian view of life in which individuals were unfree prisoners of their psychic histories and hardwired desires.

434 The Artist as Monster Existential ethics

Cronenberg's work also illustrates rather startlingly one difficulty of existentialist philosophy - namely the disappearance of ethics. Nietzsche explains quite convincingly that if the whole structure and tradition of European Christianity is essentially fictional, then its ethical system must be no less so than its mythology. Subsequent existentialists have tended to try to work around the question to some extent, since it is potentially an embarrassment to them. How is it possible to rescue ethical values and moral behaviour if every other aspect of social belief must be rejected? Recall the saying of Hassan I Sabbah, quoted with approval by Nietzsche and Burroughs and used by Cronenberg as an epigraph to Naked Lunch: 'Nothing is true; everything is permitted/ (In eXistenZ this axiom is literally true in the context of the virtual game world.) For Cronenberg the idea has a powerful but sinister charisma, because for him existential reduction and reinvention, the 'radical7 throwing-off of received truth, creative breakthrough, is absolutely yoked with transgressivity. Whereas the existentialist philosophers are often simply silent on the responsibility to others of the individual pursuing existential transformation, Cronenberg's existential practitioners are repeatedly depicted as dangerous to others. The liberations and transformations they produce seem positively to require some degree of moral degradation, even if it is only Seth Brundle's food and sex binging or Rene Gallimard's cigarette-smoking.17 Cronenberg's characters do not indulge in symbolic violations of an empty ethical system along the lines of Camus's acte gratuit. Instead they seem to reproduce that quasi-Freudian sense that their individual freedom - a sacrosanct item of the existentialist creed is compromised by appetites that are so powerful they are strongly impelled to do something ethically ugly. This happens to Pikul in the Chinese Restaurant. He finds he wants to kill the waiter, and is told by Geller that the impulse is part of his game character's make-up and that he won't be able to do anything to stop it. PIKUL [sarcastically]: Free will is obviously not a big factor in this little world of ours. GELLER: It's like real life - there's just enough to make it interesting.

(Note, incidentally, how very un-existentialist the limitation of free will is.) Ethics are troublingly suspended in the game world, but it is not for

eXistenZ

435

the existentialist reason that no ethical rules have any standing in the existential world and that all acts are therefore neutral. Rather it is because the sensibility that has created the existential game world (Geller) and those existentially inhabiting it (Geller and Pikul) are impelled by desires for dominance and casual cruelty that some part of the film persists in viewing as ethically bad. 'Everything is permitted/ but in eXistenZ (as in Cronenberg's Naked Lunch) this state of affairs is presented not as beneficially liberating or even neutral, but as malignant. In other words, the film still has ethics, even if the existential life it depicts in the game world (and there is no other world in the film) does not. At the end of all this, one is tempted to say that if Cronenberg is 'a card-carrying existentialist/ perhaps the organization might think about revoking his card. We're all on shaky ground What differentiates eXistenZ from Cronenberg's work since Videodrome in this context is that the film is less concerned with specific individuals who invent themselves and the world, and more with a wholesale allegory of the world according to existentialist doctrine as modified by Cronenberg. The virtuality of the game environment then functions as a metaphor for the virtuality of all human experience in the absence of a stable, knowable real world, and the necessity for games players to discover the rules of their environment, the goals of the game, and the roles and compulsions of their game characters figures the condition of the existential individual. The very flatness and contextlessness of even the central characters (although that has other derivations and purposes as well) makes the film more abstractly philosophical and less traditionally dramatic. Cronenberg again expounds the existentialist moral of the story at length in his own DVD commentary: I'm suggesting that all reality is virtual, that all reality requires great effort of human will to make it work, to make it viable. I actually think that the first thing you do in the morning when you wake up, before you have your breakfast and before you brush your teeth, is you have to recreate yourself. And you recreate reality - you have to reconstruct an identity for yourself, remember who you are, where you are, what you are, why you're there, what your social structure is you're finding yourself in, because it's not an absolute, it's not something that is absolutely solid. People want it to be solid, and in a way, to function they have to pretend

436 The Artist as Monster that it's solid, but it isn't really, and that's also part of the theme of the movie ...

By the same token, individuals who apprehend and create for themselves the whole world are living already in a state close to that of hallucination - a recurring feature of Cronenberg's cinema, and one that in eXistenZ takes on a widespread and shared (rather than simply a solitary and 'insane') form through the device of the virtual-reality game that can be played by many individuals. (This spreading of existential transformation over a group of people again recalls the scenarios of the early films, as well as the Crash band of brothers and sisters.) When Geller and Pikul, in the game, are thrown into new situations and have to find out who their characters are, and what roles they are supposed to be playing, Cronenberg supplies this gloss: 'So there's that idea as well... the whole idea of performing, in society and in life - and in terms of performing an identity. An identity is not something that is given to us, it is something that takes a lot of will, a lot of creative human effort, and is created over an entire human life.' In general, the virtual environment is a fine, economical vehicle to illustrate existentialism's assertion that socially accepted meanings have no solid foundation, and that human nature is not essentially anything. At the same time, the game's intense physical presence and its complex but baffling environment and 'rules' echo the insistence of Heidegger and other existentialists that being is something quite immersed in the conditions of a specific world. For the existentialists, 'existence precedes essence'; and in eXistenZ Existenz, existence, is all there is. There is no transcendent realm of higher, purer, realer reality from which the contingencies and blind too-closenesses of existence can be viewed. When, in one of its many jokes, the film pulls itself out of a world that is playing eXistenZ into a higher level of reality where the world is playing a game called transCendenZ, it is only to assert that transcendence is as virtual as existence, and to undermine the reality of every 'higher' level.18 The film has similar fun with the metaphor that under existentialism every subject must invent the world and everything in it - that every person must be God. The opening and closing scenes in churches emphasize the religious overtones of such a vast undertaking, while undermining the base of the worshipping activity by embedding it in shabby deconsecrated surroundings, secular consumer capitalism and fan culture. Allegra Geller is introduced as 'the gamepod goddess' (and her assassins all denounce her as 'demoness'). Following his pros-

eXistenZ

437

trate adoration of her, Gas hymns the praises of his favourite Geller game, 'ArtGod/ Thou, the player of the game, art god/ he quotes. 'Very spiritual. Funny, too. God, the artist. The mechanic/ Here, as well as referring to the godlike creative powers of the existential-individual-as-games-player, Cronenberg skips through eighteenth-century notions of the Divine Watchmaker, his own metaphors early in his career about himself playing god in the fictional worlds he invents, and a mocking movie review of eXistenZ itself (Very spiritual ... funny'), putting the remarks in the mouth of a grease-stained clown of questionable psychic stability. Later, as Gas brandishes the giant hydraulic drill he's going to use to pierce Pikul's spine to instal the bioport, Pikul fearfully murmurs, 'Oh my god!' - to which Gas replies, with a vulgar grin, 'God, the mechanic!' eXistenZ follows all its predecessors in Cronenberg's oeuvre in presenting the stand-in god of the fictional world as a frightening, sadistic or cruelly indifferent, and potentially brutal entity. The artist By now it will be obvious that eXistenZ is a complex and self-conscious continuation of Cronenberg's ongoing allegory of artistic creation. Allegra Geller is the latest Cronenberg creative scientist-artist (and we may note how those two functions are once again combined here, since the technical and engineering aspects of game design are much greater than anything required of, say, a creative writer of the traditional sort). Again this figure is 'radical.' Geller's game eXistenZ is a big step beyond anything that is available. In the opening scene she announces to the assembled faithful in the church: 'The world of games is in a kind of trance. People are programmed to accept so little, but the possibilities are so great.' Geller's game is ground-breaking because it offers total immersion in a virtual world and no set rules or goals: 'You have to play the game to find out why you're playing the game/ The former statement is Cronenberg's code message that mainstream movies are sadly limited and that more adventurous artists (such as himself) can offer so much more;19 and the second is a close paraphrase of Cronenberg's comment 'I have to make the film to find out why I'm making the movie/20 Both are among the numerous indications that eXistenZ is a reflexive work about filmmaking and specifically about Cronenberg's filmmaking (we will return to this question later). In short, it is a parable - like so many of Cronenberg's films in a more general way

438 The Artist as Monster

and like Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch, and Crash in a more detailed and specific way - of radical artistic creativity, with the filmmaker David Cronenberg as the prime example. As with all the previous examples of this phenomenon, we have to ask: what kind of art is being created? what are its effects on those who consume it, and on the one who created it? In the first place the question might even be raised as to whether it is art. The question of whether designing video games would qualify is one Cronenberg himself asked in the 1995 interview he conducted with an in-hiding Salman Rushdie (a meeting that the director later said inspired the idea of a film about an artist hunted by fatwah killers, to wit, eXistenZ).21 Both Cronenberg and Rushdie are sceptical of the idea, though Cronenberg is willing to consider it while Rushdie simply closes the door, denying that any game could be 'anything that I would recognize as a work of art/ Yet both of them share a functioning definition of the artist as someone special and the artwork as something that manifests an extraordinary beauty or complexity or intensity. At a time when every advertising illustrator and hoardings graffitist is routinely considered an artist, when the term 'commercial artist' is scarcely used any more, and when in the environment of the academy no object is too Tow' for scholarship in the humanities to devote the most serious attention to, this is somewhat disconcerting, particularly in view of Cronenberg's reputation as a supremely postmodern artist. Nothing illustrates Cronenberg's modernism, and denies his postmodernism, more illuminatingly than this tiny detail. Nevertheless, Cronenberg definitely means Allegra Geller to be taken as an artist in eXistenZ. In fact, after Bill Lee in Naked Lunch, Geller is the most explicit representation of the artist in Cronenberg's cinema. The fact remains, however, that she is a games designer - that what she creates is meant for nothing more substantial than puzzlesolving, stimulation, and spectacle. In a postmodern world, and in the film's future-world that is clearly an extension of current postmodern tendencies, the positioning of the artist in a realm of depthless surfaces is quite unremarkable. The existence of the games industry as an entirely commercial sphere, and the position of Geller as a 'radical' artist somewhat distanced from the commercial mainstream, are further markers of the film's reflexivity: these are conditions which exactly mirror those surrounding today's commercial cinema, and Geller's position as something of an 'indie' and quasi-avant-gardist corresponds to Cronenberg's at the present time. But the nature of Geller's

eXistenZ

439

game, her attitudes towards it and its players, and games culture in general are none of them flattering to the film's portrait of the artist. The world of Geller's eXistenZ is drab and run-down, eventually brutal and squalid, and it develops an ever-intensifying quality of revolting physical abjection: slaughtered mutant creatures, blood-spattered manufacturing processes, infection and disease. D'Arcy Nader's Games Emporium is a harsh and visually unfriendly commercial environment. The Chinese Restaurant serves as its Special a dish so loathsome that onlookers turn away and Geller has to stifle her own nausea at the spectacle. The Trout Farm features an abattoir-like assembly line of nightmarish derelict-looking technology where gutted creatures spout blood and body fluids, a quonset-hut building and wire-fenced grounds suggest a primitive concentration camp, and finally 'operating rooms' display blood-drenched crude wooden tables and strawcovered floors that are like somebody's hysterical vision of a horrorpunishment facility where unspeakable atrocities occur. Leaving aside for a moment the degree to which these features parody on the one hand the condition of violent video games and violent Hollywood movies (somewhat), and on the other the condition of David Cronenberg movies (considerably), we can simply observe that this world is never pleasant or soothing, and that its violence and Grand Guignol spectacles quickly go past the level of titillation to become a deliberately disgusting provocation. This is the landscape. The characters and their channels of action are equally troubling. Geller says that you have to play the game in order to discover why you're playing the game. Why you are playing eXistenZ, it appears, is to have a series of experiences that are stimulating in the grossest sense, to play along with a crude but impenetrable paranoid action plot, to practise violence upon a number of game characters, and then to identify and kill your opponent (in this case your 'friendly' fellow-player). There is no meaning, and most of the pleasure comes in the form of aggressive impulses and violent acts. Pikul continually objects to features of the game world (as we have seen in his complaints about the lack of rules), and Geller inevitably dismisses these objections, or else simply fails to recognize them as problems at all. So for example, in the Chinese Restaurant: PIKUL: I actually think there's an element of psychosis involved here. GELLER [grinning]: Yesss! This is a great sign! It means your nervous system is fully engaging with the game architecture.

440 The Artist as Monster

Then, as Pikul begins to eat the revolting Special: PIKUL: I find this disgusting, but I can't help myself. GELLER: Good? PIKUL [sarcastically]: Good, this is good. GELLER: Yeah, it's a genuine game urge, something your character was born to do. Don't fight it. PIKUL: I'm fighting it, but it's not doing me any good.

And finally, after Pikul has constructed the Gristle Gun22 from the bones of the Special: PIKUL: I do feel the urge to kill someone here. GELLER: Who? PIKUL: I need to kill our waiter. GELLER: Well, that makes sense ... When he comes over here, do it. Don't hesitate. PIKUL: But everything in the game is so realistic, I don't think I really could. GELLER: You won't be able to stop yourself, you might as well enjoy it.

(And so on to the exchange about free will.) The artwork as represented in this film is a device to implant in its audience revolting or homicidal impulses, which they will be unable to resist however much their more rational or conscientious selves may try. And the radical, transgressive artist is someone who gets pleasure from this exercise, who looks with indifference or sadistic delight at the spectacle of characters unwillingly performing murderous or self-disgusting acts. Geller's nonchalance regarding ethical questions, and her fixation simply on total involvement in the game, can be thought of as the obsessional byproducts of the artist's creative frenzy. The jealous care of the artist for her work is then represented by Geller's protective concern about the Vulnerability' and possible injury suffered by the eXistenZ prototype, and her constant references to the gamepod as 'my baby' - a metaphor that is remarkably close to a literal description when the pod is a small fleshy lump connected to its 'mother' by an umbilical cord. Geller's almost hysterical emotional connection with this strange animal is queasy and weirdly intense, and seems as mutant as the pod. It is the lot of the Cronenberg artist: Seth Brundle with his ovoid telepods, Beverly Mantle with his instruments for oper-

eXistenZ

441

ating on mutant women, Bill Lee with his insect typewriters, Rene Gallimard with his Galatea so mutated she is a man. Geller's behaviour goes beyond what we would normally think of as the enthusiasm, the concentration, or even the neurosis of the artist with respect to her work. Its ominous roots become clearer yet as she manifests the appetite of a drug addict for playing her game. Her appeals to Pikul to get a bioport installed, to be 'friendly' and play the game, are in the first instance rhetorically pitched as appeals for compassion, to help a mother allay her anxiety about her baby. At the same time, the intense nervous anxiety is that of a junky who feels the need. As soon as the game-playing is about to begin, Geller's whole demeanour alters: a wide lubricious smile spreads across her face, her body sensually relaxes and sways, she snaps her fingers in the anticipation not of maternal reassurance but of pleasure - again, like an addict about to get a hit. When Pikul, at the Trout Farm, says 1 don't want to be here/ Geller replies with 'Come on, Pikul, you've just got a bad case of firsttime-user anxiety.' And when Pikul's new Vinokur-installed bioport is revealed to be infected, Geller says: I've got something that will help you. I'm going to seal up your bioport with this sporicidal resonator. It uses the umby pick-ups for power. Should cleanse all your porting channels of infection within a few hours. It's going to give you a slight skin buzz when it's done. 'Course, we can't play until then.' This is the language of the practised 'user,' the self-medicating junky. And when Geller is reassuring Pikul during his first eXistenZ 'trip' at D'Arcy Nader's, she says, 'You'll see how natural this feels' - sounding disturbingly like an echo of Dr Benway giving Bill Lee his first fatal vial of the Black Meat ('You'll see how elegantly this works').23 That overtone of lasciviousness in Geller's need to play the game is also connected, in fact more straightforwardly so, to sexual desire. The pod itself is activated by tweaking a fleshy button that looks exactly like a nipple, and, as many commentators have noted, the bioport is a new bodily orifice whose utilization often has an unmistakably sexual character (as when Geller sprays Pikul's with lubricant, inserts a finger, and says 'new bioports are sometimes a bit ... tight - wouldn't want to hurt you,' or when Pikul inserts his tongue in Geller's port). We will return to the question of sexuality, but the point I want to make now is that playing the game - that is, experiencing the artwork - is taking on more and more the aspect of an indulgence. This is a quality that attaches to the game qua game, in the sense that a game is an insubstantial stimulating diversion; it attaches to it as a kind of drug-

442 The Artist as Monster

appetite; and again as a form of lecherous desire. The latter two dimensions reach their strongest and most disturbing moment when, at the Trout Farm, the gamepod-inside-the-game has become diseased - blue, wrinkled, infected - and Geller suddenly feels the desire to port into it while it is diseased, and does so, over Pikul's horrified objections. This turns out to be a dreadful mistake, as both common sense and the experience of all of Cronenberg's earlier films tell us; but what is most remarkable is that Geller should feel this desire, and that it should be understood by the viewer to be simply an extension of the less openly perverse and dangerous desires she has been exhibiting throughout the film. Once again, we have the spectacle of 'radical' art as a dangerous indulgence, a totally uninhibited and unregulated appetite. The desire for the diseased pod in eXistenZ is, indeed, as 'extreme7 a manifestation of the phenomenon as anything in Cronenberg. To desire a disease is the ultimate Cronenbergian reduction of desire, and it shows that the filmmaker is still capable of revisiting the imaginative landscape of the rawest of his early films, Shivers, with its scenario of sexas-squirming-parasites and its statement that 'sex is the invention of a clever venereal disease/ Geller's drug-desire for the game, a desire that resembles the loose, careless indulgence of Max Renn and Seth Brundle and Rene Gallimard, finally graduates to an explicit appetite for sickness, an explicitly sick appetite. This artist is as twisted a figure as any in Cronenberg's growing gallery. Meanwhile the artwork is not only an embodiment and a disseminator of disease, but as dangerous to the consumer as it is in Videodrome: when Geller ports into the diseased pod, the umbycord fuses to her back and cannot be removed (Pikul has to cut it, and Geller starts to bleed to death). Freedom and irresponsibility The film takes another angle on the same broad subject of the indulgence and danger of art and the artwork through its contrast between the games community and the 'Realist Underground/ Geller speaks the language of artistic freedom and the transforming enlargement of horizons that the radical artwork can bring ('the possibilities are so great'). When this language is met, almost immediately, by an assassination attempt, the Rushdie connection becomes visible and the outlines of a fatwah24 against an artist appear. The fatwah against Rushdie was greeted with dismay by the whole world apart from fundamentalist Muslims, and for an artist like Cronenberg, who has had to fight

eXistenZ

443

censorship and venomous criticism for his whole career, the issue is as morally clear as any issue can be: the artist is purely the victim of his singular gifts, and his enemies are evil and dangerous. For decades Cronenberg has preached the necessity and worth of artistic creation that is original and challenging, and in eXistenZ one can see his appalled vision of a Cronenbergian radical artist suffering the fate of a Salman Rushdie. As with the mullahs' attack on Rushdie, the Realists in the film are trying to kill an artist who is responding faithfully to her own personal inspiration (and the more challenging this inspiration is, the more authentically artistic it is, according to the heroic romantic/modernist view of the artist). But, also as in the fundamentalist attack on artistic freedom in our own world, the art, and the culture, that is being attacked is compromised by moral vacuity or sickness on the one hand and by corporate power and materialistic values on the other. The film's denunciation offatwah has to coexist with its uneasy depiction of this artist and this artwork. The dilemma thus posed can be seen at that moment in the Chinese Restaurant when Pikul points the newly reconstituted Gristle Gun at her and says, 'Death to the demoness Allegra Geller!' and she replies, That's not funny/ just before going on to urge him to kill the waiter. The virtuality - that is, the non-reality of the game environment is constantly invoked by Geller as a defence for all the transgressions going on inside it (It's only a game'). But the film then comprehensively illustrates the falseness of that argument when it depicts aspects of the game world breaking through to the 'real world' (and then of course by demonstrating the nonexistence or at any rate unknowableness of 'the real world'). So the killings, disease, and other horrors of that world can travel from the artwork to the world of its consumer. And now the game must answer for the outcome of its commodified and amorally indulgent aspects. In the battle between Gamers and Realists, the game world, the virtual world, is a place where you can do whatever you want, no matter how questionable your actions might be in a real-world situation. It is a world of unimpeded desire without consequences, where 'everything is permitted.' Metaphorically, this is the world of violent video games, of indulgent Hollywood movies, and also of the transgressive, boundary-piercing cinema of David Cronenberg. Vigorously buttonholing Pikul in the Gas Station when he is shying away from his bioport installation, Geller tells him: This is it, you see. This is what keeps you trapped and pacing about in the smallest possible

444 The Artist as Monster

space forever. Break out of your cage, Pikul. Break out now/ But then, of course, the world he breaks out into is not very pleasant or functionally liberating for Pikul, and it turns out to be dangerously uncontainable once entered. By contrast, Realism is the world of consequences. The problems that consequencelessness has for the 'breakthrough' artist are illustrated most forcefully as Geller and Pikul boot out of eXistenZ amidst the chaos of her bleeding severed umbycord, the stabbed flame-throwing Yevgeny Nourish, and the spores-spouting fried gamepod back to their motel room at Vinokur's ski chalet. What they find is the Realist insurgency, with Hugo Carlaw about to assassinate Allegra amidst the explosions of an attack on the games-repair chalet: CARLAW: The victory of Realism. And you were part of it. GELLER: The death of eXistenZ. And we were part of it. CARLAW: There's just one more thing. [He lifts his rifle to kill Geller] PIKUL: Hey, we're on your side. CARLAW: How could you be? How could Allegra Geller, the world's premiere game designer, be on our side? Oh yeah, we know who you are. You can't hide inside a game forever. PIKUL: Something's slipped over the edge here, Allegra, something's all wrong. CARLAW [with a little grin}: See what I mean? See the problem?

This little question carries a powerful charge. Running around killing people whom you disagree with on philosophical grounds, as the Realists do, is very definitely bad. But from one perspective Realism seems actually like a rational antidote to sick artistic creation, the appetites it provokes, and the disease-like infection that it can carry past all boundaries and into all realms - as explicitly demonstrated at this exact moment of the film. In good 'Canadian' fashion, as always. Cronenberg sees the other side of the question quite clearly, even to the point of seeing things from the viewpoint of a disease. It is a contradiction that exists throughout Cronenberg's work, and which he reproduces over and over again. We have noted in the chapter on Videodrome how that film makes a powerful implicit argument for censorship by demonstrating the danger of art both to its creator and to its public. One could say something similar about many of Cronenberg's films; but eXistenZ makes the case more explicitly, perhaps, than any of them.

eXistenZ

445

Technology One of the most visible differences between eXistenZ and its Hollywood parallels (Dark City, The Matrix, The Thirteenth Floor) lies in its representation of technology. In the Hollywood films, both the machinery of virtual reality and its 'feel7 have a high-gloss, slick-effects, techno-porn quality notwithstanding how degraded or sinister the worlds being produced are. In eXistenZ, however, nothing - not even the vanishing beginningless and endingless narrative - is more astonishing than the film's depiction of technology and the virtual reality it creates. Mainstream treatments of virtuality, from Blade Runner to A.L, are positively smitten by the creepiness of how machine technology might replicate organic appearance and even organic experience. This has given rise to all their anguished meditations on the differences between or interpenetrations of humanity and technology: can a machine have feelings, can it be as human or even more human than some people? could an environment that is entirely artificial convince us that it is real? have we developed technology so far that we have lost nature, and lost our humanity? and so on. Cronenberg has no interest in any of these questions. The virtual reality produced by technology in eXistenZ is spookily convincing, certainly, and the question of the reality status of phenomena is as important here as in the mainstream. But the film finally abolishes any difference between VR and what it is supposed to be emulating, and asserts that however important the reality status of phenomena is, it is unknowable. Moreover, Cronenberg also abolishes the culturally central dichotomy between shiny machines and not-shiny bodies. Near the beginning of his career, Cronenberg had some moments with shiny technology, but even as early as The Brood he was moving in a different direction towards a darker and more organic environment for scientific invention and its human products. The sensational juxtaposition of hard polished steel and yielding human flesh is, of course, central to his medical and surgical obsessions, and such juxtapositions persist right through Crash, but the darker and dirtier environment is what ultimately dominates. Videodrome lays out the ground definitively for Cronenberg's cinema in this as in so many ways. The seedy physical surroundings of both Max's television station and Spectacular Optical's eye-shop, the Videodrome helmet's cardboard box, the mundane aspects of video technology, and above all the organicization of cassettes and television sets: these establish the tone for Cronenberg's unique world of technology. From now

446 The Artist as Monster

on, in a vision that is highly original, technology takes on not only an aspect that is overtly organic (often sexual), but also one that is earthbound, rusted and brutal. The final scene of Videodrome strikes this note resonantly, adding a TV set that explodes with viscera. And one can make a brief catalogue of subsequent developments: in The Fly the military brutality of Brundle's computer and his matte-dull, heavy, pigiron-like telepods; in Dead Ringers the crude metal operating rods manipulated by mantis-like Beverly Mantle; in Naked Lunch the insectoid or sticky-viscera typewriters, the blast furnace where they are made over, and the decayed industrial shop floor where Mugwumps are chained for milking; in Crash the rusted mass of Vaughan's car and the beer-soaked bad-video sessions of the Seagraves. Nowadays, Cronenberg says simply 'technology is us/25 and points constantly to the foundation of human life in the body. Therefore technology is going to be bodily. eXistenZ is the absolute apotheosis of this phenomenon in Cronenberg's films. Not even in Videodrome or Naked Lunch is technology so organic as here. The 'metaflesh' gamepods are hairless mammalian mutations in appearance - or rather, with typically Cronenbergian surrealism, they look like new mammalian organs that somehow have a life of their own. The film tells us that they are developed from 'mutated amphibians/ but with their flesh-pink colour and the prominence of an on-button that looks exactly like a nipple they seem literally mammalian. The umby-cords with their blue-veined flesh look like very straightforward sculptural reproductions of human umbilical cords. The amazing surreal scrambling of categories Cronenberg is capable of is on full view here. The eXistenZ pod with its nipple suggests a mature female breast, but it is Allegra's 'baby/ connected to her torso by an umbilical cord that supplies it with power (nourishment). At the same time, its human 'mother' (male or female) ports into it, and receives game programming and information from it - reversing the polarity so that the pod is now the parent-controller and the player is the infant being fed from a kind of breast. To this latter perspective we can add a Freudian twist by noting that this 'parental' breast is not simply nourishing but also sexual, with its nipple-tweaked squeals and shivers of pleasure. This infantile/sexual body-organ then suffers repeated insults through power surges, infection, and finally roastingby-blowtorch, so that its very existence seems inseparable from rude assault. The surgical repair conducted on it by Kiri Vinokur is sticky and viscerally explicit, and allows Cronenberg to make a maximum contrast between, say, getting your computer serviced and having your game-

eXistenZ

447

pod undergo a blood-soaked open-heart operation. In the eXistenZ game world, the manufacturing process for pods undergoes the same metamorphosis, or perhaps an even more extreme one, given the conveyor belts of gutted amphibians, the organs dripping blood that are wrapped and thrown into bins, and the operating-room assemblages taking place in the crudest and dirtiest surroundings. Through this biotechnology Cronenberg imports the medical operation into the film's narrative world. Never, even in Cronenberg's medically frightening cinema, has it been more openly depicted as a form of murderous violation. The first example is actually Pikul's bioport installation, a procedure performed in completely unhygienic surroundings by a grinning grease-monkey using a giant hydraulic drill. Gas's drill is the ultimate example of the crude instrument of sadistic bodily reconfiguration, something that is 'not capable of delicate work' - the instrument whose coarseness is what belies its wielder's claim to be a 'scientist' or an 'artist' and affirms that he is instead, or in addition, a predator. In Dead Ringers or Naked Lunch this crudeness of instrument, and of craftsman/artist, is signalled subtly. By Crash it is hard to avoid the recognition that Vaughan's Lincoln, and what he intends to produce by crashing it into an object of desire, are brutal and assaultive. In eXistenZ we have Gas's drill and the primitive knives of slaughter and evisceration at the Trout Farm (used also to sever Geller's umby-cord and murder Yevgeny Nourish) - instruments whose crudity is so excessive that it also functions as a kind of satire. Altogether, the world of eXistenZ, despite its amazing technical advances in the production of fantastically detailed virtual reality, is not high-tech but low-tech. The refinement which one might think should attach to these achievements is vitiated not only by their messy biological qualities, but also by the fact that everything is designed for mass production and mass consumption. At the games focus groups, all the attendees have their own gamepods. Bioports are 'industry standard.' The whole film's appearance, and much of its texture, has this strangely flat and colourless quality, this stubborn refusal to go in the direction of the technologically seductive, indeed this absolute insistence on going in the other direction. Gender At this stage of Cronenberg's career, eXistenZ is quite fascinating for the changes it rings on his deployment of gender roles. It is an unprec-

448 The Artist as Monster

edented thing in Cronenberg's cinema to find that the figure of the artist-creator/scientist-inventor is a woman. We have seen how vast a geological movement it was in his work to inch this figure from the distance (Crimes of the Future) to the margins (The Brood) to the centre (The Fly), and to bridge the gap between distant powerful patriarchs and diffident impotent jeunes premiers and unite those two figures. The centralized male creative figure could hardly help but be, if not exactly autobiographical, at least a representation of the author's wish to stage something of the conditions of his 'radical' creative endeavour. Meanwhile, the sexually charged female occupied the role of the catalyst, the instigator of male desire that enables transgressive creation. In eXistenZ a strange alteration relative to the films since Videodrome has occurred. Talking to Cahiers du cinema, Cronenberg said: For the role of the game-designer, I at first thought of a male character. I wanted the film to refer clearly to the cinema, and then the hero could be seen as a director. In that case, it became hard to imagine myself in the role of a woman. But while I was actually writing, and without my being able to say why I found it natural, the young man changed into a confident and seductive woman: Allegra. In the film, the result of this reversal is interesting because it creates something strange and troubling, through the range of unusual moves it implies. It's the man - Pikul - who is the virgin. He's timid, frightened. The woman has the experience of bioports and makes him have his first 'connection/ his deflowering that is necessary for the passage into the virtual world of the game. The contrary would have been banal.26

These few sentences are full of interest. The blank statement that in eXistenZ games are movies and the game designer is a film director, and that Cronenberg directly identifies with the game inventor, supports in the most direct way the notion that the film is an allegory of artistic creation, and supports by extension the idea that this figure has always been one that the filmmaker personally identified with. So in the beginning Cronenberg was going to be Allegra (and maybe he still is Yevgeny Nourish at the end of the film). But what arose then was the old paradigm of the powerful sexually invested woman and the cautious male. In The Fly, Ronnie leads Seth over the sexual threshold, but he does the inventing. Here, Allegra is both the leader and the inventor, and Pikul is once again the recessive male in the tradition of the 'heroes' of Rabid and The Brood, as well as being the virginal male of The

eXistenZ

449

Dead Zone and The Fly. (What is new in eXistenZ is the way the situation is played for comedy. As they are getting ready for their first mutual port-in, Pikul shyly asks, 'Don't you think you could call me Ted?' This is funny, but not as funny as Geller's blase reply, 'Maybe afterwards/) In eXistenZ there is no trace of the central, creatively powerful male whose drama of subjectivity was the spine of The Fly, Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch, and M. Butterfly. We noted with respect to Crash how the central characters had multiplied, and the film had only vestiges of interest in the question of personal subjectivity. eXistenZ goes further still in this direction, with all the characters, including the two central ones, much flattened. Perhaps it is this approach that prevents the artist here from being male, and invests transgressive power exclusively with the female. In any event, as with so much in the film, the effect is one of a reversion to an earlier Cronenberg. But the woman artist-protagonist is totally new. True, Geller is only one half of the protagonist function (the other half is Pikul). Yet for a woman even to share top billing is a rare thing. Only Rabid has a female character who is more central. Even in movies where there are strong women characters - The Fly, Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch, Crash - they all essentially play second fiddle to the most important males. Geller is a strange figure. She shows up almost anonymously at the opening focus group, and behaves bashfully, prompting a remark by Pikul to the session moderator, who replies: 'She spends most of her time alone in a room designing her games. I think she'd like it best if she never had to show them to anybody.' So she is shy and reclusive, like those other inventors Seth Brundle and Beverly Mantle. But then, in a reversal which one doesn't know whether to attribute to unresolved conflicts in Cronenberg's imagination or to a principle of wilful surrealism consistent with so many of the film's dreamlike reversals and transformations, she becomes energetic, sophisticated, aggressive - while it is Pikul who assumes the role of diffident one. The most striking symptom of this change is Geller's visible sexualization and then overt seductivenenss with regard to Pikul.27 This process begins almost immediately after Pikul has dragged her away from the scene of the assassination attempt. In the car, she casually bosses him around, sneers at his technical naivety, and quickly we arrive at the following scene: GELLER: Fucking hell. I'm marked for death and they send me on the road with a PR nerd.

450 The Artist as Monster PIKUL: Marked for death. Marked for death. Oh jeez. GELLER: OK, don't sweat it. Fm going to handle it. And right now, we need to stop. PIKUL: We do? Why? GELLER: So we can have an intimate moment together.

For a viewer who has been following Cronenberg's work closely, the scene that follows is one of the most astonishing in the entire film. At the side of the road, Geller is telling Pikul to remove the Gristle Gun bullet from her shoulder with his knife. It is a Swiss Army knife, and Geller's wound is very close to the spot where Nicki Brand in Videodrome revealed three small slash wounds while inviting Max Renn to 'take out your Swiss Army knife and cut me here - just a little/ The association is too hallucinatorily exact to be ignored, and following it up lands the Geller-Pikul relationship in the country of Max and Nicki. Not wholly, of course, since there is no sexual relationship going on between these two at this point - and in fact no sexual relationship that will ever be consummated at any point. But the suggestion of transgressive sexual seduction through the sado-masochistic invitation of a woman to a man comes startlingly into view, and it persists throughout Geller's campaign to initiate Pikul into the new, transformed, created world of eXistenZ. How potent in the imagination of the filmmaker this scene must be. (Again: 'when I have to provide the world of the movie completely on my own with no other context that's where I go/) Bioports and plugging-in are sexually charged, as already noted, and Cronenberg himself has talked about how 'in one sense there's sex happening in every scene/ despite the relative absence of literal sex.28 Geller's campaign to get Pikul a bioport has an unmistakable sexual suggestion. Her aggressive and provocative speech telling him to 'break through' is definitely a sexual challenge (deliciously staged as she kicks a shop-floor chain out of the way and steps up onto a car tire so she can get up to push Pikul eye-to-eye at a distance of about 3 inches). Her behaviour in the motel room, a place with its own sexual connotations, is alternately languorous, beseeching, and commanding, running through a sometimes discordant variety of come-ons. The couple's first eXistenZ destination, D'Arcy Nader's Emporium, is without very much delay the scene of a surge of explicit mutual sexual desire. Allegra at first critiques this development ('Our characters are obviously supposed to jump on each other - it's probably a pathetically

eXistenZ

451

mechanical attempt to heighten the emotional tension in the next game sequence'), albeit breathing heavily and practically trying to devour Pikul. When Pikul draws back (I'm very worried about my body'), Geller reassures him ('you're gonna pop right out of the game if there's a problem') and the two proceed hungrily. In a climax of desire, she turns her back to him and he grasps her breast - only to find himself instantly transferred to the Trout Farm killing floor with a breast-sized dead mutant amphibian in his rubber-gloved hand. This is shocking and comic in a gross way. Its translation of hot heterosexual foreplay into a disgusting and violent place and activity is so deliberately disconcerting that it seems somehow didactic: don't think you're going to get anything as straightfoward as steamy sex from this movie, it has other mutated amphibians to fry. Certainly this bizarre manoeuvre is typical of the film's incessant will to go somewhere unexpected, to derail any kind of extended linear development, and to employ a grotesque and self-mocking humour. Geller's liberation of Pikul, his breakthrough, have led here, not to any place where the stimulations and rewards are obvious or even observable. In this film, sex is constantly deflected, often into absurdity and often into violence, and at no time does the nominal beneficiary of the breakthrough experience even the temporary profound sexual satisfaction of a Max Renn (though neither does he undergo Max's disintegration and doom), nor indeed any kind of satisfaction. He is taught, eventually, in the Chinese Restaurant, to be a murderer, that's about all. So: the sadomasochistic liberating seduction of a sexually forward woman again pulls a reluctant male across a threshold, and again what he finds there is nothing good. In eXistenZ, however, the whole process is fragmented, diverted, diluted, and finally blown away by the disintegration of any kind of reality base or knowable truth. And we must remember that the calamitous results of this scenario for the 'liberated' subject in other Cronenberg films is largely missing in this one: no devastating psychological crisis, no terminal melancholy, no suicide. Perhaps, too, Pikul is saved from such a fate because the 'radical' activity he undertakes is not sexual, but violent. The recalibration of transgression in this direction, the substitution of a hard, vicious violence for the engulfing morass of sexuality, is one we have seen before, in The Brood, Scanners, and to a degree in The Dead Zone. And once more in eXistenZ we find the paranoid world of powerful, half-hidden organizations engaged in an unscrupulous struggle: ConSec (Scanners)

452 The Artist as Monster

and Spectacular Optical (Videodrome), even Interzone, Inc., are suggested in the way the vaguely sinister Antenna Research, Cortical Systematics, and Pilgrimage seem to extend their tentacles everywhere; and the Realist Underground's homicidal program seems not so different from that of Videodrome's puritanical murderers Harlan and Barry Convex. Despite all the 'metaphors' of transgressive sexuality, the real payoffs in eXistenZ are provided by violence. This is true from the opening assassination attempt, through the killing of Gas, the murders of the Chinese waiter, of Hugo Carlaw, Kiri Vinokur, and finally Pikul in eXistenZ, all the way to the slaughter at the end of the film. (This is so much the case that I feel the film really ought to end with a second shooting of the 'Chinese waiter' character, rather than simply the question 'Are we still in the game?' That would finish with an exclamation point emphasizing how, although absolutely nothing makes sense here, violence survives anyway, like the cockroach in nuclear winter, and in fact becomes a kind of grim existential statement.)29 No doubt this in part reflects the world of actual video games, where violence is ubiquitous and sexuality has to stay out of the limelight. But it is also hard not to feel that eXistenZ escapes from Cronenbergian personal sexual disaster because it has reinstituted a gender split and once more desexualized the principal male character. Pikul's virginity is comical right from the beginning, with Jude Law's lisping, eyelash-batting shyness so pronounced as to teeter on, and sometimes over, the brink of parody. It is hard to take his reluctance seriously, hard to feel that there is anything really at stake whatever may befall him. The gender opposition, that field of titanic struggles and awful casualties in Cronenberg's cinema, has now become, like the characters and the action, flat and almost weightless. Reinventing sexuality Cronenberg's explanation for what was going on in Crash was that the characters were 'reinventing sexuality.' This is also something that the central characters of M. Butterfly, Naked Lunch, and Dead Ringers were explicitly doing, and indeed it was among the very first things to emerge from Cronenberg's creative imagination, in Stereo's fascination with 'omnisexuality/ It is abundantly clear that Cronenberg's cinema is far more interested in reinvented sexuality than it is in any non-reinvented kind, and in eXistenZ, the metaphorical representations of newsexuality have pretty much pushed out actual-sexuality entirely The

eXistenZ

453

female seductiveness of Jennifer Jason Leigh wearing a short tight skirt and a look of provoking disdain is considerable. Pikul feels it, and viewers do too, but other than that one kiss and grope in the back room at D'Arcy Nader's, all the 'sex' is through bioports and umbycords and gamepods and the nervous stimulation they provide. The bioport is a new (sexual) orifice, a 'new sexual organ' - something Cronenberg has been talking about ever since Stereo. Teresa de Lauretis remarks that 'the bioport has taken over the erogenous functions of both anus and vagina.'30 Its placement at the bottom of the back makes its nearest relative the anus, which indeed the film suggests, when Gas is pretending not to know anything about bioports: That's a sort of hole in your spine, isn't it? Lots of assholes around here, but that's generally it.' Every port-in thus becomes, 'metaphorically,' an act of anal penetration. This metaphor carries eXistenZ absolutely to the top of the list of films staging Cronenberg's cinematic obsession with rear-entry sex, and sets up a host of outrageous moments of which Pikul's bioport installation, spreadeagled face-down on a stuffed chair beneath Gas's monstrous red hydraulic penis is only the most comically lurid.31 Recall, too, those passages from Burroughs about the man who has a metal valve inserted in his spine that produces involuntary sexual excitement,32 or about Mugwumps who 'sit sipping spinal fluid.'33 Under these circumstances it is not surprising that for Pikul, the initiate who is led into the transgressive world, every stage of his bioport experience has bad consequences. The bioport that Gas instals has been sabotaged by the installer and short-circuits, almost destroying the gamepod. At the ski chalet, Kiri Vinokur has to replace it ('Let's get that nasty bioport out of you and put a nice fresh one in'). But this installation too is a dangerous one ('[T]hat bastard Kiri Vinokur ... he gave you an infected bioport so that my pod would die'). Geller now treats the swollen, painful bioport with a 'sporicidal resonator' that turns out to be a bomb, which she remotely detonates to kill Pikul and end the game. Every penetration of Pikul's new anus gives rise to a sexually transmitted disease, ending with an explosive suppository that blows his viscera across the landscape. This is savage repayment for the adventure of transgression and sexual reinvention, and demonstrates that Pikul's attitude of timorous reluctance, however unflattering it looks, is fully justified, and that every one of Geller's persuasive seductions is an invitation to destruction. Here again, without much ambiguity, is the cautious Cronenberg who always accompanies the transgressive filmmaker.

454 The Artist as Monster Mutant motherhood The game environment of eXistenZ involves not just sexuality, but the reproductive spheres of pregnancy and childbirth. Gamepods, exterior to the bodies of their users yet connected by an umbilical cord, are like Nola's external brood-sac, or its contents. It is the mass distribution of the mother-child relationship of Allegra and her game. The importation of so much fetus-like organicity into the world of scientific/artistic invention and commercial consumption makes the whole process a kind of deviant sexual reproduction, and demonstrates a kind of 'reinvention' of the business of making and consuming movies. And into this business come the messes and hysteria of sexuality and reproduction, as seen in The Brood, The F/y, or Dead Ringers. The climax of this phenomenon occurs in the last Trout Farm scene, where Geller ports into the diseased pod, her umbycord fuses with her body, and Pikul cuts her free. This scene, from a plane of sullen emotional flatness that is the typical base level of eXistenZ, rises very quickly to traumatic distress and total panic. Pikul severs the umbycord with what looks like a lino cutter, in a pretty exact copy of the ritual routine of hospital childbirth whereby the father gets to cut the cord. The severed end begins to pump blood all over Geller's bare legs and the straw-covered floor, and she gasps Tm bleeding to death/ Pikul fumbles with the bloodslippery cord, trying to fold it, and finally drops it in despair ('I can't stop it!'). In the DVD commentary Cronenberg describes the scene as follows: [TJhis is the kind of scene that most people eventually have to play out in their lives; it's like a scene of miscarriage, or a scene of a wounding. So despite the fantasy element, it really plays like the scenes of horror that people end up having in their bathrooms - you know, a place that's relatively innocuous, until one day something like that happens, whether it's finding someone who's had a heart attack or wounded himself, or committed suicide, or a wife who's had a miscarriage.

A scene of miscarriage, or a scene of a childbirth or abortion gone wrong, like Ronnie's nightmare in The Fly. It is curious that Cronenberg mentions 'a place that's relatively innocuous' when the 'operating rooms' of the Trout Farm is something he had described a little bit earlier as 'nightmarish' and reminiscent of Hieronymous Bosch. But one

eXistenZ

455

strange feature of this location does pop into focus during this terrible scene, and that is the straw, which in the context of these birth-related events suddenly gives the location a manger-like overtone. We can also recall that mutation, a process that floods eXistenZ even more comprehensively than disease, is in fact a subset of the reproductive process. Mutations have surfaced strongly in Cronenberg's cinema from Shivers onwards, with the latest appearance taking the form of 'mutated women' in Dead Ringers. In eXistenZ mutation is the basis for organic game technology, and we can briefly note the emphasis on 'mutated amphibians' in the film. Sometimes it is simply their mutated DNA that is extracted from them to provide the essence of the gamepod, and sometimes, as in the Trout Farm, we see them flopping in pools or unceremoniously eviscerated, dismembered, and packaged. We are back here into the allegory of artistic creation that Cronenberg has imagined, where aspects of the organic world are 'radically' mediated by creative scientists, to produce the objects (now also identified with artworks) that then allow 'breakthroughs' for their consumers. (That is what the chunks of repulsive fish-flesh manipulated by Pikul on the assembly line are. It is true that there is one charming mutant, the two-headed 'frog-salamander-lizard thing' that Geller sees on one of the gas pumps, but it ends up as the Special.) We are reminded in all this of the strangely aquatic nature of Cronenberg's art world, from Crimes of the Future's Oceanic Podiatry Group to Dead Ringers's 'sex underwater' and the Mantle brothers' clinic, described by Cronenberg as 'submarine' and an 'aquarium.' Of course, Cronenberg, with his webbed feet,34 is himself a mutated amphibian, so that providing the essential DNA for radical/transgressive artworks is something he can identify with. Strange evolution, strange reproduction remain as central to Cronenberg's work as ever. eXcremenT Bioports are new assholes. The association not only produces all the metaphorical sexuality of the film, but also recalls Burroughs's fable from Naked Lunch, much beloved of Cronenberg, of 'the man who taught his asshole to talk.' In the sense that novo-anus-bioports produce, or at any rate are the conduits for, the virtual worlds of games, they are talking assholes, and what they are saying is the game experience itself. As with Burroughs's unfortunate man, once the transgres-

456 The Artist as Monster

sive process is set in motion it is impossible to stop. Hence the 'bleeding' or leakage7 of people and organizations, disease and assassination, from the world of eXistenZ to the world that is playing it. The game world has, too, an appearance that is so dark and dirty and verminous, and at last so foul and obnoxious, that it might fairly be called excremental. The dark brown teeming-with-bacteria note is struck right at the outset, in the credit sequence. This is typically impressive and powerful, with Howard Shore's music sounding the ominous note of slowly coagulating horror while abstract images of cloacal infection crowd the screen. It is a condition that the film's world, and the eXistenZ world in particular, increasingly progresses towards. The opening scenes are simply dingy, but the feeling is stronger in Gas's workshop, and D'Arcy Nader's Emporium goes a step further. It is the Trout Farm, however, that represents the terminus ad quern of all this, a loathsome and polluted place that really does seem like the bowels of some sewer. Again, this is the world produced by artisticexistential reinvention, and it is awful. It is a characteristic that infects the persona of the artist as well. Allegra Geller as she appears within the eXistenZ world is, like Pikul (and, as we eventually discover, all the other players), slightly transformed from her appearance outside the game. Pikul looks a bit less nerdish, a bit more stylish. Geller looks more aggressively sexy - her clothes are tighter and skimpier, for example - but also more slatternly. Her colour is poor, her skin shows blemishes, her make-up is rather coarse, and her hair looks unwashed and uncombed and just altogether bad. On the one hand this just unites her with the world she has created, but on the other it identifies her with Cronenberg's other derelict breakers-through, pizza-faced Brundle and the corpse-yellow druggie Mantles and coughing chain-smoker Gallimard, who have let themselves go' in more dimensions than one. Reflexivity As Pikul experiences his first entry into eXistenZ - into any game world - in D'Arcy Nader's Emporium, this brief exchange takes place: PIKUL: That was beautiful. Is that kind of transition normal? That kind of smooth interlacing from place to place? GELLER: Depends on the game. You can get jagged brutal cuts, slow fades, shimmering little morphs.

eXistenZ

457

This is obviously an allusion to movie editing techniques, and backs up Cronenberg's remark that he 'wanted to refer clearly to the cinema/ And Geller, trying to impress upon Pikul the importance of eXistenZ, describes it as 'an entire game system that cost thirty-eight million dollars to develop, not including pre-release marketing costs/ This is the budget for a movie, in fact a little over 20 per cent more than that of eXistenZ. So both the technical basis and the production costs of moviemaking are inscribed in the way people talk about VR games here. The relentless commercial labelling of games ('eXistenZ by Antenna/ 'tranCendenZ by Pilgrimage') emphasizes the death grip that corporate ownership has over what is an industry as well as an art - again, a clear reference to the cinema. Geller says to Pikul, 'You want to be in the biz and you've never played one of my games?' - 'the biz' is movie industry slang, as in 'showbiz/ And as Cronenberg has said the opening focus group is 'a parody of test previews/35 The whole discourse about art in the film has to be put into this context as well, as does the political and philosophical struggle between imagination and 'Realism/ With all the elements in place, we see that eXistenZ is a rather complex and troubling portrait of art and creation as a social phenomenon. Allegra Geller's inventing talent is compromised not only by the way her passion for creation has self-indulgent and drug-like qualities, and by the ethically bad effects it has, and by its 'excremental' qualities, but it is also revealed as something that is imbedded in the harsh world of corporate power. When the film proposes that Geller herself may be the victim of Antenna Research, it seems to set up an opposition between the artist and her 'producers/ At the same time, however, she has practically the same function with regard to what (it is suggested) might be a predatory corporation that Paul Ruth has at ConSec in Scanners - as the inventor of a transformative entity whose effects on people are at least open to question and which the creator has placed in the hands of an unscrupulous organization in return for money. Bad movies In the way that it stages cinema reflexively, eXistenZ seems to want to do two contradictory things. On the one hand, it wants to make Allegra Geller, eXistenZ, and the profession of game-designing as metaphorical of cinematic art, and specifically of Cronenberg's own kind of 'breakthrough' art. Inset within this theme is a debate about a cin-

458 The Artist as Monster

ema that might be artistically good (radical, transformative) but ethically bad (narcissistic, irresponsible, violent). On the other hand, the film also wants to use the art/game world of eXistenZ as a stick to beat the generic, hackneyed, and aesthetically inadequate aspects of mainstream entertainment narratives. In short, it wants eXistenZ to represent both aesthetically good movies and aesthetically bad movies at the same time. The world of eXistenZ's narrative is full of overt selfparody and self-critique from beginning to end. The assassination attempt and guy/girl-on-the-run are already, in the context Cronenberg's usual filmmaking stance, slightly parodic, and as soon as the film arrives at the 'Country Gas Station' this element becomes much stronger, and plainly visible. A motel named 'Motel/ like a country gas station named 'Country Gas Station/ and a Chinese restaurant named 'Chinese Restaurant/ indicates, as Cronenberg himself has pointed out, a representation of the generic aspect of game design (and by extension of a certain kind of movie creation).36 The game world of eXistenZ, the one Geller refers to as having unlimited possibilities, is flat and generic, with simple characters, banal dialogue and corny action - in some respects 'industry standard/ like the bioports. These qualities of artistic limitation must be understood as part of the film's critique of mass-culture narratives in video games and mainstream movies. As they unfold, both eXistenZ and eXistenZ offer a pastiche of action-plot cliches. For example, Allegra is twice saved from death just when someone is going to kill her by someone else killing the would-be assassin in the nick of time (this happens three times if you count the moment when Allegra kills Pikul). The atmosphere of a mainstream paranoid thriller is guyed with all the obscure hints that Antenna Research or Cortical Systematics are manipulating the action in secrecy, and the revelation that you can't trust anybody (Gas, Kiri Vinokur, and Yevgeny Nourish, and finally Geller and Pikul themselves are all friends who turn out to be enemies). It is true that such a paranoid flavour can be found in nonironic form elsewhere in Cronenberg (perhaps even elsewhere in eXistenZ), and that it is more or less bedrock truth for Burroughs, but it also functions as another parody of a generic feature of mainstream movies. The characters and dialogue come in for an even more explicit disparagement. eXistenZ game characters like D'Arcy Nader and Yevgeny Nourish have only a coarse presence, no depth and bad dialogue. Geller herself actually points this out with respect to Nader ('he's not a very well-drawn character, and his accent was just so-so'), just as she

eXistenZ

459

critiques the 'pathetically mechanical7 introduction of a sex scene between herself and Pikul as eXistenZ characters. The grand climax of eXistenZ, with Realist insurgent Hugo Carlaw breaking into their chalet room and spraying machine-gun rounds in every direction, followed by his killing by Kiri Vinokur, and his killing by Geller, and finally the twist-ending confrontation of Geller and Pikul, all amidst explosions and burning buildings, is a tissue of mindless thriller/ action-movie banalities. The way characters go into game-loops and freeze until somebody activates them with the right line is certainly a reproduction of an aspect of role-playing computer games. But it also reflects the way so many bad Hollywood movies seem modular and mass-produced, restricted to a list of limited and banal choices of which the movie must choose one, and producing the effect of a set of rote variations using prefabricated materials. So the quasi-automatic or pre-programmed aspect of mainstream movie entertainment is satirized in the plot, characters, and dialogue of eXistenZ, as an extension of characteristics of computer-game narratives. But in the film's playful, perverse, reality-less environment many of the same features that constitute parody and critique are applied in another direction as well - as manifestations of a positive aesthetic of surrealism. So the reappearance of last-minute rescue killings satirizes conventional action movies, but the reappearance of, for example, the Gristle Gun or the dog that gets it or brings it or (ultimately) bears it is something else. The long-haired Irish wolfhound is on one level a sophisticated yet almost infantile joke (dog + bone, shaggy dog who incarnates the unending and terminus-free nature of this shaggy-dogstory of a movie), and at the same time a dreamlike recurrence whose evocative power comes precisely from its meaninglessness. When Nader and Nourish go into game-loops, it is satiric and even funny, but when, for a moment in the Trout Farm operating room, Geller does too, the effect is strange and alarming, as the bottom drops out of the film and we are forced to confront the possibility that we have nothing whatever to hold onto in the characters and story. Trying to sort out parody from surrealism is difficult, and maybe unnecessary. In the weightless postmodern landscape of eXistenZ, these things (parody of bad repetition and aesthetic power of surreal repetition) are equivalent, and Cronenberg perhaps doesn't have to be bothered with distinguishing them. But such an aesthetic program does make it hard for the film to mount a rational critique of what it disapproves of, or to sustain coherence.

460 The Artist as Monster

We may note one further aspect of eXistenZ's commentary on moviemaking, movie-watching, and movie culture: the film's representation of its audience. The focus-group audience for eXistenZ has a slightly disturbing inbred, cultish, fanzine quality. The isolated rural setting suggests that attendees have had to come a long way, and the fact that the building is a church suggests the quasi-religious devotion that they demonstrate. Here again we see the film's double face. As a select audience drawn to the power of an art that appeals more to the margins than the mainstream, they are indeed an elite, and they correspond to the minoritarian but intense elite of viewers who respond strongly to Cronenberg's work. At the same time, there is the suggestion of something slightly crazed about these fans (one youth screams 'Allegra!' like a bobby-soxer screaming 'Frankie!' at Sinatra), and about the atmosphere of a cult of true believers. It is an impression that is hardly diminished when we encounter Gas, who abases himself and kisses Geller's feet and always seems unbalanced. Passions run very high in this environment, and they may rebound on the creator. Indeed, there are unnerving similarities between the fanaticism of Geller's devotees and that of the Realist Underground: the whole spectrum has been 'radicalized/ On the other hand, what these fans are so enthusiastic for in the film is a game, marketed by a corporation that stamps its brand name on the product at every opportunity. Their emotional commitment to a cutting-edge artwork is (a) shallow and even contemptible when applied to narratives featuring game-looped characters and by-the-numbers shootouts, and (b) entirely co-opted by commercial interests that sell the aura of specialness and unconventionality to as mass a public as possible. Cronenberg on Cronenberg eXistenZ is more self-referential than any other Cronenberg film. It not only thematizes the process of filmmaking, but restages many specific elements from Cronenberg's earlier work in a manner so striking that the resemblances stand out vividly. It is not - or not only - a case of Cronenberg returning one more time to a theme or perspective he has visited repeatedly before. This happens in eXistenZ, but not in the almost dogged developmental way it had in the films before Crash. Instead, eXistenZ seems to offer a pot-pourri of earlier Cronenberg characteristics almost disconnected from their contexts, and through flatness and parody presented as free-floating elements to be juggled like

eXistenZ

461

coloured balls. The result may indeed be a philosophical meditation on reality, virtuality, existential reinvention, and death, but it has the effect of an abstract, diagrammatic one. I have the feeling that Cronenberg, returning in what seems an almost wilful way to the world of 'an entirely original screenplay/ and encountering there a closet full of old perspectives and old imagery, brought these things out and wrote and directed them as if playing with old toys - fascinated by them but not really directly involved with them in the same old way. Let us consider for a moment just the resemblances between eXistenZ and Videodrome. Many viewers familiar with Cronenberg's earlier films immediately thought of eXistenZ as a kind of revisitation or follow-up of Videodrome. For example, Serge Griinberg had this exchange with Cronenberg: SG: What can we say about eXistenZ? It's an original scenario, and at the same time many people have seen it as the second part of Videodrome. DC: A sequel, a refinement [mouture]. SG: I would say the second part because it's not really a question of a sequel and it's not at all a remake, even if one is a little on the same ground. But one feels there is also all the experience you have accumulated since Videodrome in it. DC: It's true. The film in effect has a very radical structure, and a style too.37

The list of common elements is remarkable, both on the broad plane of narrative elements and the narrow one of specific small similarities. Looking at eXistenZ as though Pikul were the principal protagonist, we see a story about a man who is drawn somewhat reluctantly across a threshold into a new and more transgressive world by a powerful woman who uses her sexuality as a tool to accomplish this. Both Nicki Brand and Allegra Geller specifically exhort their respective males to 'break through/ Again, the woman's remarkable invitation for the man to cut into her shoulder with a Swiss Army knife makes this connection vividly. The male's portal to this breakthrough realm, meanwhile, is a new physical orifice in his torso, through which he is 'programmed.' In Videodrome the appearance of the slit is related in some way to Nicki's awakening of Max's sadistic desire; in eXistenZ it is at Geller's insistence that Pikul's bioport is installed. As Max scratches at the 'rash' that will turn into the slit, Pikul scratches at his new bioport. The breakthrough realm involves a kind of false or artificial sight - hal-

462 The Artist as Monster

lucination in Videodrome, VR seeing in eXistenZ - and the man's programming makes him into a murderer. The weapons - Fleshgun and Gristle-Gun - share a phantasmatic organic quality and are more like each other than either is like anything else in cinema. The gun arrives at an earlier stage, and then comes back at a later one in a more visceral and protoplasmic form (the Fleshgun emerges dripping from Max's abdomen, Pikul removes the Gristle-Gun from the Special, peeling off and chewing its flesh and sucking out its marrow). The badly programmed or infected orifice is treated (reprogrammed) by a woman (Max's slit by Bianca O'Blivion, Pikul's bioport by Geller's sporicidal resonator), and after this the man goes after a different target to kill (Videodrome, Geller herself), but not in a way that ultimately helps the man. In the end (for Pikul, the end of the eXistenZ game) each man dies violently after a final conversation with the woman, accompanied by flames and an explosion (in Videodrome of the viscera-filled TV set, in eXistenZ of the viscera-filled Pikul). More details reinforce the uncanny similarity. The gun is absorbed into Max's torso, just as the micro-pod in eXistenZ disappears into Pikul's torso. When Harlan tries to program Max a second time, his hand fuses with Max's body and cannot be removed - a situation recalled when the umbycord from the infected pod fuses to Geller's bioport. In both films the man first threatens to kill a woman (Max is trying to assassinate Bianca, Pikul first points the Gristle-Gun at Allegra and says, 'Death to the demoness Allegra Geller!'), but has his attack deflected by her (Bianca sends Max against Harlan and Convex, Geller gets Pikul to kill the waiter instead). In a more general sense, the background of both stories involves a paranoid conspiracy involving sinister corporations (Spectacular Optical, Antenna Research) and a culture war between purveyors of 'breakthrough' entertainment (Civic-TV, eXistenZ) and a religious-Right-type war of assassination against decadence and the transgressive passing of boundaries (Spectacular Optical, the Realist Underground). The other, 'media,' side of the struggle has its own religious fervour (Brian and Bianca O'Blivion's salvational rhetoric, the churchy setting and devotional qualities of the focus group of games enthusiasts - and even within eXistenZ the 'Death to Realism!' mania of Yevgeny Nourish). There is, however, a great difference between Videodrome and eXistenZ: the former is a delirious, out-of-control, anguished utterance, while the latter is a detached, philosophical, 'games-playing' one. Insofar as the two films traverse the same ground, it is (to paraphrase Marx) the first time as tragedy and the second as farce.

eXistenZ

463

The attentive observer of the details in D'Arcy Nader's Game Emporium will see witty references to other Cronenberg films as well: the games on display include 'Hit by a Car7 (Crash) and 'Viral Ecstasy' (Rabid, Naked Lunch), and the people running the place are a Nader and a Car Law (again Crash).38 I particularly like the Crash jokes, since they postulate a public eager to pay for the experience of being hit by a car (Cronenberg's viewers), and position the moral guardians, the Cassandras or Ralph Naders, of car culture as actually marketing the thing they are denouncing (Cronenberg's critics). Funny ha-ha, funny peculiar In the same way that it transforms itself from bad-art parody to goodart surrealism and back again, eXistenZ oscillates between self-mockery and seriousness. The film has, probably, more outright comedy than any other Cronenberg film. All of the parody brings humour with it, but the non-game characters too (even if there are finally none of these) are treated with a comic touch. Pikul's timidity and Geller's street-sophisticate mannerisms are both slyly lampooned. Pikul's reluctance is especially risible, from his prissy fears (T have this phobia about having my body penetrated7) to his horror at Allegra's insatiable game appetite ('You're not going to port into me while Fm paralysed, are you?7) to his sarcastic comments on the dreadful game situations that she takes quite for granted (as when she exclaims that psychosis is a great indication that the game is successful). Perhaps the most delectable comic moment in this vein comes after the game pod7s disease comes back from the eXistenZ world into the 'real7 world: PIKUL: I'm infected? Wait a minute. GELLER [distraught}: The poor thing was trying to tell us it was sick by introducing the theme of disease into the game. PIKUL [screeching]: THE THEME OF DISEASE?? I'M FUCKING REALLY INFECTED!! What, is it going to crawl up my spine and rot my brain? GELLER: All right, just calm down.

This is practically a laugh-out-loud moment at the expense of critical distance (and critical analysis, for that matter). Geller7s hand-onmouth nausea at the sight of the Special is another stroke of this essentially wry and sophisticated humour.39 From the beginning of the film onward we are presented with faintly

464 The Artist as Monster

ridiculous things like the Antenna security woman who pulls a gun from a leg-holster under her skirt, Gas and his coarse jokes, and the absurdly accented Kiri Vinokur ('Ve are becomink glorifiedt weterinarians!'). Then in the world of eXistenZ almost everything has a comically clumsy aspect, beginning with the outlandish D'Arcy Nader and his ridiculous Irish brogue and moving along to Yevgeny Nourish, whose slapstick stage-Russian pronunciations decisively trump all predecessors ('might under the nyosses of ourrr enemiess!... Ve luffyoul') These ludicrous accents attract criticism from Allegra and puzzlement from the tranCendenZ players (the Ian Holm character says, 'My accent in the game was so thick I could hardly understand myself), and in the end one's own question as to what they are doing in the film has as its best answer that they are in small part satire-of-bad-Hollywood-movies and in large part simply a madcap jape of David Cronenberg. And yet the strangeness of it all confers a quality of surreal wonderment on all these preposterous jokes. The shaggy-dog-with-bone trope works in the same way. The dog appropriates the bone-gun after Pikul kills the Chinese waiter and chews on it quietly in a corner. Later Carlaw pulls it out of a packing case to point at Pikul, explaining that the waiter's 'uh, dog brought me this/ A little while later Carlaw himself is killed with the gun, now in Vinokur's hands ('my dog brought me this'). And in the final scene Geller and Pikul as Realist assassins retrieve their pistols from the same dog, now theirs, pulling its shaggy coat back to reveal a leather harness with holsters. This last is, on one level, completely silly. It is the culmination of the security girl and her underskirt gun in the first focus scene, and even more of a strange lowcomedy moment. Yet the presence of violence in association with them, and the way that the violence is presented (particularly in the last scene) as quite unfunny, again skews the dog-and-bone into the plane of a 'serious' surrealism. This fluctuation is a fundamental characteristic of the whole of eXistenZ. The Trout Farm is truly ghastly, but it is punctuated with cartoonish exaggerations - and indeed from one perspective the Trout Farm is one big cartoonish exaggeration. The first shot of the sequence is a comically popeyed giant frog-thing, held up in Pikul's hand in a lightning substitution for Geller's breast in the previous shot. Yevgeny Nourish, with his long, greasy black hair and ridiculous accent, is practically a Saturday Night Live version of a demented Russian anarchist. Then the archaic technology, the crudeness of everything - the blood, the squirting guts,

eXistenZ

465

the paper-wrapped body parts and the rest - become caricature also, a caricature of Cronenberg's buckets-of-blood and dereliction habits, and eXistenZ becomes more clearly than ever before a caricature of a David Cronenberg movie. But here again the film is balanced, or oscillates, between incompatible opposites: the in-your-face revoltingness is funny in its exaggeration, in a manner perhaps recalling Monty Python's decapitations and amputations; but there is too much in the Trout Farm that is truly, deeply awful for it to ever be comfortably funny. Towards the end of the sequence there is nothing funny at all any more, and finally it is just appalling. Absurdity is everywhere in eXistenZ, and that absurdity is often comically preposterous. Yet the film's absurdity and self-satire coexist with its fear and loathing, and the latter will never go away. Howard Shore's music plays a large role here, insisting on the bigness and sinisterness of what is going on even if some of the images or dialogue are working in another direction. The film simply contains these contradictions, and asserts them simultaneously. Mise en scene eXistenZ is a troublesome and problematic film in a number of ways, but one aspect of it is simply a triumph: its look. That look is every bit as controlled and micro-designed as Crash's, but in a completely different tonality. Crash is dominated by cold, dense hues and hard textures (that gleaming oxblood and chrome interior of the Lincoln is a superb example, or the Ballards' ice-cold blue bedroom). eXistenZ instead gives us rich, sometimes glaring, colour, flat rather than glossy, and softer textures. The effect is the opposite of naturalistic, and also the opposite of techno. The tone is set by the first scene: the wooden church interior, with walls a buttery ochre-yellow and the Antenna presenter in saturated dark blue. It is not exactly anti-naturalistic, but its flat, richly coloured qualities create a stylized effect. At the same time, the film is immediately sounding another strange and characteristic note. The church is an incongruous setting for the focus-launch of a big, expensive new product. Dour and modest, it is fitted with wooden pews and a semicircle of chairs on a wooden stage where an altar must once have stood. In one corner is a refreshments table with a tea-urn and china cups. That a big, powerful, sophisticated corporation like Antenna Research is using premises like this is as odd as that Videodrome's Spectacular Optical, in its attempt to take over the world, works out of a dingy little store in an unprepossessing part of town.

466 The Artist as Monster

The rural settings of the whole movie create a similarly disconcerting effect as a setting for a drama about cutting-edge technology. Yet such brutal 'subtractions/ as Cronenberg calls them, are central and important to the film, whose de-urbanization, de-electronification, one might say wilful primitivization of a sci-fi environment has a strong and original but entirely unclassifiable effect only partly accounted for by the notion of reproducing the blockiness of video games. The film's strategy of making startling design statements by a radical simplification is encapsulated in the fact that the carrying case for Geller's eXistenZ gamepod is a blue ski-boot - not something that looks kind of like a ski boot, but an actual ski boot. It is a strategy that is daring, elegant, and disorientingly original, and its effect is estranging and surreal, and yet visually very attractive. Whatever its other similarities, eXistenZ doesn't look like Videodrome, or in fact like any other Cronenberg film, or any other film, period. Succeeding scenes, one after the other, make strong statements of the same kind. Pikul and Geller on the road at night are in a bewitching phosphorescent blue just a little too strong to be mistaken for anything natural or even 'natural' in the mainstream sense. The Motel's interior with its overgrown leafy wallpaper looks like a seedy jungle or swamp, and the primary-colour blue-and-yellow 'Perky Pat' fastfood containers are alarmingly loud and simple in design. The Country Gas station is grimly sober and downmarket industrial, its outstanding feature perhaps the appallingly decrepit stuffed leather chair where Pikul suffers his bioport installation / monstrous sexual assault (it looks like a mortally diseased sibling of the red leather chair from The Fly where Brundle couples with his barroom pickup Tawny). Kiri Vinokur's ski chalet in the woods is a dumbfounding concept. As Geller says pityingly to her companion, 'Nobody actually physically skis any more, Pikul,' and yet Vinokur's high-tech work-facility/operating-room has a complete complement of ski poles, together with a peg-board tool rack that looks like something out of Home Improvement. The whole ski trope (Geller is still carrying the gamepod in its ski-boot case) is unexplained and inexplicable, arbitrary and surreal, and yet quite down-toearth and unexotic. Once our protagonists enter the world of eXistenZ the design jamboree really ramps up. Here we see one astonishing stroke after another. First the ski-chalet room Geller and Pikul are staying in simply changes into D'Arcy Nader's store, retaining its pitched ceiling and little iron spiral staircase. (This kind of repetition and transformation of

eXistenZ

467

locations in quite different situations is a return to some of the design strategies of Naked Lunch) as Yevgeny Nourish remarks to Pikul at the Trout Farm conveyor belt, 'Seems like everything used to be something else/)40 The Game Emporium is a bizarre and wonderful environment: glowing blue-painted windows printed with illegible characters, green walls, pink and purple and green neon lights, metal racks of blisterpacked games, a pinball-type floor-standing game of 'Chinese Restaurant' ('Will You Make It Out Alive?') featuring a bloodstained Chinese waiter and a rack of bloody dead meat, and, strangest of all, a floor made of what looks like grey styrofoam packing chips. The place has a rather weather-beaten appearance despite all the fresh paint, and that impression is underlined when the action moves to the back room, where D'Arcy Nader, in orange shirt and orange t-shirt, gives Geller and Pikul their micro-pods. This room is one of the most amazing pieces of visual design in all of Cronenberg's work.41 The cement walls are paint-chipped in large pinto patterns, with rust-coloured patches on a serene light blue. The only furniture is unfinished shelving units and wooden packing crates, and there is straw on the floor. This straw, like the straw in the 'operating rooms' of the Trout Farm, cannot rationally have a use. The merchandise of the Emporium, advanced gaming products, is not going to come packed in straw. The only explanation I can find is that the organic, animalian aspect of these game devices has an association with stables and straw - although the micro-pods we get a close look at come in plastic blister packs. The most startling thing of all is the two windows in the back wall admitting a bright red glow. Where could this light be coming from? Later in the sequence the initial wide shot of the room reappears, but now the windows are bright bluel This is jaw-dropping, and the casualness with which it is presented is equally so. Of course, inside eXistenZ everything is going to be slightly 'off or different. If it is pointed out that the stylization begins in the very first scene, before any virtuality is present, then that can be accounted for (a) because this is the future, so things look different, and later (b) because it was all the inside of another game, transCendenZ - and ultimately we just don't know whether there is anything at all in the film that isn't in a game. At the same time, the design effects in eXistenZ are like nothing else anywhere. Everything in the film is disorienting in a bafflingly simple way. For example, in the transitions from game world to upper world, the decision to go for (as Pikul says) the 'smooth interlacing from place to place/ and to avoid precisely (as Geller says) the

468 The Artist as Monster

'jagged brutal cuts, slow fades, shimmering little morphs' that would more overtly dramatize these shifts, is quite characteristic of the film's whole strategy. (It is also reminiscent of the equally straightforward and unobtrusive editing of hallucination and reality in Videodrome and Naked Lunch, and looks forward to Spider too in this respect.) Ultimately, the mixing of eXistenZ-style louder stylization with the quieter but still very operative stylization in the earlier sequences gives rise to a situation where all viewing positions are destabilized even before the unknowableness of anything is explicitly asserted.42 The most powerful locus of mise en scene in the film is the Trout Farm. The factory scenes are aggressively colourless. After the oranges and blues and greens of earlier locations and costumes we have a cinder-black set of dirty conveyor belts, workers in battered black-leather work aprons, fixtures of cold uncoated iron, a potent sense of dereliction and old technology (say, first-generation Industrial Revolution). Pikul and Nourish are hacking at amphibian corpses with crude knives, wrapping the organs in brown butcher's paper, and throwing them down chutes into laundry hampers to be trucked to other departments. Everything is covered with blood, and the whole place is filthy. One recalls a strange line of Gas's about conducting a medical operation in the back of an auto shop: The way they've got these things set up you could fire in a bioport in a slaughterhouse and never generate an infection/ Here is the slaughterhouse. All this is so odd as to be staggering, and some of the details are pulverizingly strange. There is a little brown-paper-tape dispenser that gets its own momentary closeup: it has a roll of tape which as it is pulled off is drawn through a little tank of water to activate the glue. This small contraption looks like a primary schoolchild's artwork or rank beginner's craft project, crudely painted in gaudy blue and yellow ('Perky Pat' colours?), almost the only point of colour in these grim surroundings and utterly incongruous with everything around it except by virtue of its rudimentary quality. It just sits there, unexplained, unaccountable, astonishing if you notice it, exemplifying in its tiny way the whole design genius of the film. At last, a postmodern Cronenberg After being called a postmodern artist for decades, Cronenberg has finally made a truly postmodern film in eXistenZ. Despite the presence of so many postmodern elements in his work, Cronenberg has been

eXistenZ

469

primarily an anguished modernist, whose work has staged in his own terms the modernist crisis of the loss of certainty and identity and the search for something to replace them with. His postmodern themes of the primacy of the unknowable body, sexuality, mutation, technology, transformation, and the rest have always touched bottom in the filmmaker's deep pain at the terrible prospects all these agents create for the human subject. The strong aura of melancholy in his work, the fact that so many of his films culminate in suicide or some other tragic dead end for his characters, renders his response to the totally unmoored and desubstantialized conditions of postmodernity one of sadness and loss - again a modernist rather than a postmodernist reaction. His artistic heroes have been canonic modernist literary figures: Burroughs, Nabokov, Kafka, Beckett. Even his devotion to McLuhan reminds us that that philosopher surveyed the modern media world with a gimlet eye, from a standpoint that was in many ways that of a cultural conservative. As well as sharing their 'radical' qualities, Cronenberg can connect with Burroughs's tortured revulsion, the terrifying abyss opened up by Kafka, the nauseated horror at emptiness in Beckett. Cinematically, too, his work began in formalist quasi-high modernism, and has progressed back to it. Nor would one think of calling existentialism a postmodern philosophy. The seriousness of individual life is guaranteed by the brute fact of its inevitable extinction. If under existentialism identity becomes transformable and free-floating, if people need to discover or reinvent themselves, the new existential identity that they find never loses its supreme importance. And if the objective 'truth' of individual identity can never be grounded or verified, that does not make it any the less fundamental and solid for the existential subject - indeed, it is the one fundamental and solid thing in individual life. In this context eXistenZ's playing with virtual realities does exactly deprive even individual identity of any ground to stand on. Geller and Pikul go through three separate identities each during the narrative, and the ones they end up with carry absolutely no promise of being more substantial or final than the earlier ones - quite the reverse, for they seem the most arbitrary of all. In a sense there are no persons in eXistenZ at all, only characters, presented as characters, without depth or background. However much a textbook case the film might be for some aspects of existentialism, it ultimately cannot be passionately existentialist because the film has no subjects, and the pretend-subjects it does have exist in an environment where there is no death. Characters die, cer-

470 The Artist as Monster

tainly, but most of them come back - some, like Pikul, in the very next scene - because the virtuality of everything means there is no finality to anything. Under these conditions, although Cronenberg may be conducting Heideggerian 'existentialist propaganda/ there is none of the anguish stipulated by Heidegger as central to human existence and especially to the inner crisis necessary to bring individuals to a fundamental sense of being. So there is no deep consuming fear of the forces of the body or Other-life (although there is some loathing of these things in the horror of the created art-work), and neither can Cronenbergian melancholy can find a purchase. Cronenberg's cinema does indeed contain death as the ultimate fact and the ultimate terror - it has ever since Shivers - but the recognition of the inevitability of death is never (except, perhaps, in The Fly) seen as a crucial aspect of the existential reinventions taking place in his films. To the contrary, it often seems like an exit from the existential madhouse via the 'solution7 of suicide. At the same time, the very extremity of the sufferings of his central characters, and the fact that death does lie at the conclusion of them, has given their lives a kind of existential authenticity. In eXistenZ, however, in place of the despair, the sense of loss and terror of the end of the Cronenberg protagonists of Videodrome or The Fly or Naked Lunch, we have the superficial (and postmodern) 'panic7 of Pikul's loss of reality or the viewer's loss of narrative ground and direction, and the generalized horror of dirt and disease. The artistic work underlying eXistenZ is not Burroughs or Kafka, but rather the primitive postmodernist Philip K. Dick, whose Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1966) is, through the reference to 'Perky Pat,7 specifically (and postmodernly) hommaged in a fashion unique in Cronenberg's work.43 Or, to take another angle, the artistic work underlying eXistenZ is Cronenberg's own earlier oeuvre, whose modernist anguish and sadness emerge here as depthless abstractions and satirical caricatures. The modernist force that does survive in eXistenZ is surrealism, for the film7s dreamlike repetitions, reversals, and transformations are among the most powerful and interesting things in it. As I have suggested, all the contradictoriness of reality and virtuality, revulsion and comedy, serious art and formulaic trash, fear and fun can be recuperated at the anti-logic level of an oneiric reading. In such a reading nothing has to make sense and nothing has to be reconciled, and we can simply be astonished once again at the strange shape-shifting power of David Cronenberg7s irrational imagination.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Spider(2002) 'Spider, c'est moi'

After ostentatiously breaking with literary adaptation in his 'original script' for eXistenZ, Cronenberg immediately returned to it in Spider, from Patrick McGrath's 1990 novel. (Strictly it isn't even Cronenberg's adaptation, since the screenplay is also McGrath's.) And after eXistenZ's ostentatious display of authorial Cronenberg fingerprints such as the body, mutation, technology, monstrosity, disease, and the rest, Spider is superficially so devoid of such fingerprints that it is the first Cronenberg movie in a long time where even an experienced viewer might not be able to identify an uncredited version of it as his work. There was the strong presence of a second personality (McGrath) at one stage of the creative process and a third (actor Ralph Fiennes)1 at another. It features a very detailed British setting and characters, and an austere, minimalist, and (one hesitates to use the word) tasteful treatment. But despite all these elements, Spider is revealed upon examination to fit with surprising ease into the frame of its director's unique and personal artistic landscape. Although it is a story of insanity, sexual frenzy, hallucination, psychic horror, and murder, it is a film of extraordinary restraint and exquisite realization. It confirms Cronenberg's development into a maker of art films of superb control and severe beauty. Spider is the story of a man in his mid-thirties, Dennis Cleg, nicknamed 'Spider' (Ralph Fiennes), released after twenty years from an institution for the criminally insane in a state of mind far from stable or 'normal,' who takes up residence in a London East End halfway house, and tries to reconstruct in his own mind - and record in his own journal - the traumatic events of his childhood that got him locked up for two decades and have kept him locked also into an almost catatonic state of

472 The Artist as Monster

fearful misery. Spider's strange clochard costume of worn dun overcoat, boots, and four layers of shirts, his stooped hesitant movements, and his silence or incomprehensible quiet mumbling tell us clearly enough that he is socially dysfunctional and probably mentally disabled in some way; but the film does not explain either his past or his present. Instead, it shows Spider meditating on a bench by the canal, or staring at the giant gasworks, or creeping down to the abandoned allotments, and then scribbling in some kind of indecipherable cuneiform in his little notebook in his decayed, spartan little room. As he writes, we are cast into flashbacks from his childhood, to a small working-class home where live the twelve-year-old Spider (Bradley Hall), his plumber father (Gabriel Byrne), and his loving mother (Miranda Richardson). These flashbacks are physically inhabited by the grown Spider, who peers through windows, lurks in closets, or sits at bars while the events of his past unfold around him. In this past, Spider sees his mother displaced by a brassy, vulgar slut, Yvonne (Miranda Richardson), that his father has met at the pub. The adult Spider watches one day at the allotments as his father clubs his mother to death with a spade and buries her body under the potato plants while an indifferent Yvonne looks on. After this Yvonne comes to live with them, saying to the little Spider, 'Yes it's true we murdered your mother - try and think of me as your mother now/ Eventually Spider becomes so disgusted with this situation, and especially by this woman's sexual attentions to his father, and it seems her very sexuality itself, that he devises a scheme to turn on the stove gas while the drunken Yvonne is sitting in the kitchen, and she is gassed to death. Meanwhile, in the present, the landlady of the halfway house, Mrs Wilkinson (Lynn Redgrave) has also metamorphosed into Yvonne (and is now also played by Miranda Richardson), and he is on the point of killing her too when he has a vision of the night of the gassing, and sees his father sobbing brokenly over the body not of Yvonne, but of his own mother, Mrs Cleg. As we put the 'true' story together gradually, we come to understand that little Spider has enacted an early-adolescent oedipal trajectory with terrible literalness. His sexuality is given a sharp jab one night when he goes to the pub (The Dog & Beggar) to fetch his father for dinner, and encounters a table of blowzy tarts, one of whom, Yvonne (Alison Egan), casually flashes a bare breast to him in a provocative gesture that is not so different from sticking out her tongue. Then he is disagreeably affected by the sight of his father groping his

Spider

473

not-totally-unwilling mother in the back courtyard as they are going out for a drink. The next time he sees Yvonne she is played by Miranda Richardson, albeit a Miranda Richardson whose maternal kindness and air of gentle propriety is replaced by gapped teeth, tacky clothes, and an indescribably vulgar horse laugh. When he catches his mother modelling a new slip in her bedroom mirror and asking him 'Do you think your father will like it?' things take a further dip, and it is shortly after this that she is 'murdered' and replaced by 'Yvonne.' The quotation marks indicate, of course, that Mrs Cleg was not bludgeoned and buried and replaced by a coarse slut. Rather, the child Spider has imagined all these things - first recasting a pub tart in his mother's form, then fantasizing his father's affair and displacement of his mother by this threateningly sexual woman, then her murder at the hands of the two of them, and at last seeing his mother as this pub tart Yvonne. At last he kills the sexual intruder who has replaced his mother. In cold fact he has hallucinated a bizarre scenario as a result of sexual confusion and killed the one person he loved. From McGrath's standpoint, the story is a portrait of a schizophrenic, and a rather realistic one at that, based on McGrath's own observations being brought up on the premises of Broadmoor Hospital for the Criminally Insane where his father was chief medical officer, and later at a similar institution in Ontario. For Cronenberg, it is another portrait of the artist as a hallucinating existential reinventor, and a return to the harrowing and melancholy terrain of dysfunctional subjectivity not seen since the films before Crash. For McGrath (at least in the novel - his original screenplay is not available) the narrative is a fevered inner drama, full of hysteria and horrors. For Cronenberg it is an austere record of a poor human's sad, quiet condition of suffering, and this remains true even when the film enters his consciousness through subjective flashbacks that represent his tortured attempts to order his memories and understand his past. McGrath's protagonist is articulate, flamboyantly descriptive even as he suffers the utmost psychic terrors; Cronenberg's is silent, only mumbling under his breath or scribbling in an indecipherable alphabet even when experiencing a rush of thoughts. In McGrath we experience the scarifying, lurid return of the repressed; in Cronenberg it is repression piled on repression understanding, invention, self-explanation as repression - a massive force pressing inwards on Spider and compressing everything into a state of dense unceasing pain.

474 The Artist as Monster The novel

In McGrath's book, Spider's journal is the novel itself. He records his memories, his theories, his feelings as they unfold in him, and addresses the reader directly just as if he expected we would be reading this exact text. As he remembers his earlier life, he tells us his memories; and as his understanding of it changes, this too emerges in his accounts. He keeps us apprised of his mental condition, records his oppressive hallucinations (though not as hallucinations) and tells us whether he has had a good or a bad night. At the end of the book, he has still not had a clear memory that it was his mother he killed and not a prostitute substituted by his father. But he has discovered in his memory enough evidence to come to that conclusion, even if it does not force itself all the way into consciousness. Describing the aftermath of the gassing in the third person, he says 'he was puzzled, and dimly sensed that some sort of mistake had occurred7 (218). Even this dim apprehension is enough, however, to drive him to suicide, and the book ends with his briskly expressed intention to go and hang himself directly. This conclusion, like much of the novel's portrayal of the protagonist's mental state, is in keeping with a form of severe schizophrenia: Cronenberg reports that McGrath's father, the clinical psychiatrist, told him that 'people like Spider do not survive.'2 (This seems like a good ending also for the film, especially as so many of Cronenberg's dysfunctional protagonists kill themselves; but apparently the script came to Cronenberg with the existing ending where Spider is returned to the asylum, and he made no attempt to revise it.)3 But Spider's mood as he goes off to hang himself seems rather upbeat, whereas the movie creates a devastating moment of clear understanding for its Spider, and even though he lives on, the film's final prospect is very bleak - bleaker than the novel's, where the hero will at last get release from the terrifying psychic episodes he regularly endures. The book dates its action reasonably precisely. Spider goes to live in the halfway house in 1957, and more than once he says that this was about twenty years after the events of his childhood. (At first he says these two decades were spent in 'Canada,' and only later on is this revealed as a fantasy-substitution for Ganderhill mental hospital.) The London described in the novel is oppressively derelict and ugly, and the spaces Spider inhabits dire. Here is Spider's room at the halfway house: There is a small threadbare rug on the cracked green linoleum, and a hook

Spider

475

on the back of the door from which a pair of wire hangers dangle, jangling tinnily when I open the door. The window is dirty, and though I have a view of the small park across the road I can never be sure that I see what I think I see down there, so poor is the visibility. The wallpaper is a dingy yellowy-green color with a very faint floral pattern, worn away in places to reveal the older paper and plaster beneath, and from the ceiling hangs a bulb in a hat-shaped shade of some parchmentlike material. (11)

Here is his old childhood bedroom in Kitchener Street: It was a small room, and probably the dampest in the house: there was a large patch on the wall opposite my bed where the paper had come away and the plaster beneath had started literally to erupt - there were crumbly, greenish lumps of moist plaster swelling from the wall, like buboes or cankers, that turned to powder if you touched them. (24)

Outdoors things are least as bad. Spider on his childhood neighborhood: I remember everything narrow: rooms, houses, yards, alleys, streets - narrow and dark and constricted, and all pushed together beneath an oppressive sky in which the smoke from the chineypots trailed off in vague, stringy wisps and strands, a sky filled with rainclouds - it always seemed to be raining, and if it wasn't raining it was always about to rain. There was blackened brickwork and grimy walls, and against them gray figures in raincoats scurried home like phantoms through late winter afternoons before the lamps were lit. (12)

And a-moment later his current landscape: I sit on my bench with my back to the wall. The sky is gray and overcast; there is perhaps a spot or two of rain. An air of desolation pervades the scene; no one is about. Directly in front of me, a scrubby strip of weeds and grass. Then the canal, narrow and murky, green slime creeping up the stones. On the far side, another patch of weeds, another brick wall, beyond the wall the blotchy brickwork of an abandoned factory with shattered windows, and beyond that the great rust-red domes of the gasworks hulking against the gloomy sky. (12)

And another 1957 location:

476 The Artist as Monster All around me the ground was scattered with bricks and rocks and lumps of concrete with shorn-off iron cables sticking out of them, and not far off the ground dipped to form a gully in which water had collected, bleak tufty patches of grass round the edges. Scraps of paper drifted across this waste-ground. (94) The physical world Spider inhabits is relentlessly drab and blasted in this way. His internal landscape, however, is much worse. At first the outcrops of terror are relatively mild and far between. But as his project of constructing and ordering his past (with all its fantasies that we can deduce but he cannot) nears the worst sources of trauma, his imagination breaks out with extended scenes of mental torment. As he is sitting, in his memory, at dinner with his father and his prostitute substitute (in the book named Hilda), the baked potato on his plate begins to bleed: Again my eyes fell upon the oozing potato, and now the blood appeared to be congealing in a viscous puddle under my kipper ... Something odd was happening to the light in the room; there was only the one bulb, unshaded, dangling from a braided brown cord, and the light it shed was harsh and yellowy ... I was unable to watch Hilda and my father anymore, for they terrified me now, they were transformed, they were like animals of some kind, there was nothing in their faces that I could read as human, and this set the hair on my neck prickling - when I looked down at my plate the blood was faintly glowing, there was a pale incandescence to it, and I stared at it in a state now of frozen shock even as the light slowly came up again and returned the kitchen to that strange unstable state of false normalcy. (117-18) Later still this rises to a screaming pitch of fear and loathing: It was a long night. I still don't know how I got through it, for it was probably the worst one yet. Despite further layers of brown paper taped to my torso, despite the layers of vests and shirts and jerseys on top, the smell of gas was with me until dawn. Of course I had the journal, and this alone, I believe, saved me from doing harm to myself or anybody else. A new strategy from the creatures in the attic: I kept my light on all night of course, and the bulb crackled at me as it usually did, and I paid it no attention - until, that is, the crackling grew suddenly loud, as it had in Kitchener Street the night Fve described, but this time it was the voices

Spider

477

that had taken over, and were producing a sort of chant that came out of the bulb, and the chant went: KILL her kill her kill her kill her KILL her kill her kill her kill her. (155) Cardboard crackled as I shifted my limbs, moved to the bed, lay on my back and gazed at a damp-stained ceiling that an hour before had been a demon's dark canvas of hellish forms in coils and knots that squirmed, spat, oozed with filth and violence. (161)

Finally this develops into an elaborate hallucination about the monstrous state of his body: [M]y small intestine is wrapped tightly around the lower part of my spine and ascends in a taut snug spiral, thickening grossly into the colon about halfway up, which twists around my upper spine like a boa constrictor, the rectum passing through my skull and the anus issuing from the top of my head where an opening has been created between the bones joining the top of my skull ... Since this occurred (late one night earlier in the week) I have tried not to eat, for the movement of matter through the intestines has become painfully vivid to me, a series of jerky spasms as though a worm of some sort were crawling around my backbone. Other organs have been compressed against my skeleton so as to create a void or emptiness in the trunk of my body, and I haven't yet learned why this is occurring. One of my lungs has disappeared; there is a worm in the other, but fortunately smoking remains possible ... I stand over the toilet and with trembling fingers unbutton my trousers. A small pipelike apparatus, something from a plumber's toolbox, protrudes and begins urinating tiny black spiders into the bowl, where they curl up into points and float on the water. I appear to be infested; I appear to be playing host to a colony of spiders; I appear to be an egg-bag. (175-7) It ebbs now as with trembling fingers I light my cigarette and get a good harsh mouthful down, feel it sucking down the pipe, pushing down the terror, emerging in thick cloudy coils and whorls into my one remaining lung where a worm lies dozing in the lower part, the segments of its plump white body heaped atop each other in a circular formation. Smoke rapidly fills the sac, is absorbed by grayish spongy tissue, enters the system of lacelike filaments that trace their forking circuits (still!) across the pulpy inside surface of my rind, and so to skull and brain. Nothing looks so bleak after a smoke. (181-2)

478 The Artist as Monster

These are the mental processes of a soul in hell. They are, however, communicated to the journal, and to us, in the language of a gifted writer, and from one standpoint it is difficult to believe that a man such as Spider, a working-class lad with no particular education who has spent his entire life since the age of twelve in a hospital for the criminally insane, could ever achieve such a mastery of language, however intelligent and potentially talented he might be. But these are the kinds of doubts that we cannot allow with respect to most first-person novels, a form that could scarcely exist if it were strictly confined to the actual words passing through the narrator's mind or pen. (McGrath's Spider seems actually placed between mind and pen, as its journalistic alibi is regularly contradicted by verbal elaborations and literary description that envisage the novel but not the day-book.) This was Cronenberg's point, too, when he demanded of McGrath that all the voice-over passages of the original script be removed: In the book, Spider writes rather beautifully, and that's because Patrick writes beautifully. It's a literary conceit. I mean, this guy's personality is kind of disintegrating and he's hallucinating, but he still somehow manages to write beautifully. Well, you accept that in a book. But on screen I could immediately tell it wouldn't work, having his voice. It wouldn't feel like the same person.4

So from being a gushing talker in the novel, Spider in the film becomes almost completely silent. And yet the film is in every way clearer than the novel in its presentation of the story. Partly because the book is always inseparable from Spider's consciousness, and partly because that consciousness never arrives at a moment of clear understanding as to its own delusion, the events of the novel are much more difficult to piece together. The film's brilliant device of placing the adult Spider into the scenes of his own past as an observer (familiar from Johnny Smith's visions in The Dead Zone) and its splendid clarifying mechanism of using the same actress to play Mrs Cleg and Yvonne have the effect of allowing viewers to comprehend the complicated and unusual viewpoint(s) of the film with as little confusion as possible.5 This is no mean feat when the film is attempting (like the book) to depict the misperceptions of a consciousness through that very consciousness. In the event the film finds a simple, elegant, expressive means of accomplishing a difficult narrative task.

Spider

479

It is remarkable that the film systematically departs from the novel precisely in those areas of the book that seem most 'Cronenbergian.' The suicide, the bleeding potato, the mutating faces of Spider's antagonists and above all his phantasmatic re-imagination of his own body, the fact that the boy Spider (not unlike the boy Cronenberg) is obsessed with his insect collection - even the fantasy of 'Canada' as a substitutive place of exile, or the name you give to a mental asylum you don't want to recognize - are all features that, starting from a reading of the novel, you can easily envisage in a Cronenberg adaptation.6 It is difficult to know how much of this excision is McGrath's own revision in the original filmscript, and how much Cronenberg's. Evidently the bleeding potato did survive even into the production phase, but Cronenberg decided to leave it out because 'I really thought that scene was from some other movie'7 (to which one might add, 'some other Cronenberg movie'). The essential point that these renunciations direct us to is the nature of this Cronenberg movie: its will to austerity, restraint, simplicity, minimalism. In the finished film, the bleeding potato has metamorphosed simply into a wonderfully sinister, but at the same time quite literally believable, dish of eels for supper.8 Expressionism Denuding the filmscript of all spectacular elements and of all verbal articulacy leaves the residue eloquently bare. Indeed, Cronenberg describes his whole revision of McGrath's filmscript as essentially 'subtraction.'9 Similarly, during production the director found himself subtracting elements from the mise en scene: extras, props, cars, action of all kinds.10 The result, especially in the exteriors, is a landscape almost devoid of people and their products, a London stripped clean of pedestrians, vehicles, all sign of human habitation except buildings. This was a deliberate process of rendering the world through Spider's consciousness, as is evident in many of Cronenberg's own statements (especially extensive in the DVD commentary, where he repeatedly emphasizes that no part of London has ever been this deserted), and in the filmmaker's characterization of the whole process as 'expressionist.'11 Again, though, the form of this expressionism is not what one might expect (especially after reading the book) in the depiction of a madman's hallucinations. The film eschews dramatic lighting, distorted perspectives and tortured framing, offering instead a cool and blank depiction of an empty world whose very emptiness stylizes it.

480 The Artist as Monster

The effect is more like De Chirico than Kirchner (or, to use a literary analogy employed by both Cronenberg and Fiennes, more like Beckett than Kafka). Extradiegetic soundtrack noises of seeping gas and gasworks operations, usually quite subtle, are discreet tokens of Spider's inner fear, and link up with some of his actions, such as tying layers of newspaper around his torso with string, or lying fetally curled in his bath. Objective reality is almost nowhere to be seen in the film in a way that is completely unquestionable. It is simply impossible to know to what extent even the halfway house in the film's present is an accurate record of something objectively 'there.' Certainly the lighting of the scenes there showing Spider writing in his journal is far from realistic in its blank sheets of white light exposing the protagonist as to a harsh gaze (very reminiscent of similar moments in Dead Ringers and Naked Lunch). In general the film is as confined to the questionable consciousness of a hallucinating subject as Videodrome or Naked Lunch, but without their obviously hallucinatory monstrosities. All the flashback scenes - scenes, that is, direct from Spider's consciousness and with no guarantee whatever of 'real' foundation - are presented in quite a straightforward way, except for the physical presence of the remembering subject himself in corners and closets. This is a device that beautifully encapsulates the film's whole approach to subjectivity and 'expressionism/ What the camera shows us is physically impossible, yet presented in a calm and literal way, and the effect is startling but quite without 'drama.' If there is an affinity with Expressionism in this depiction of subjective states of mind, there is perhaps an even stronger one with Surrealism, with which Cronenberg shares this impassive demeanour in the presentation of impossible images and the consciousness that such a refusal of reaction has its own disturbing quality. The scenes in Spider's family home, in the pub, at the allotments all unfold, then, with a disconcerting solidity and literal presence, and there is no distinction in the mode of presentation between events that may well have happened something like this and things that did not happen at all outside Spider's fantasy. Discreetly unrealistic lighting, slightly wider than usual lenses, the emptiness of the streets, the occasional geometric stylization of shots, these are the visible signs of Cronenberg's relaying of an intensely subjectivized world. It is also a characteristic of the film that the remembered or imagined scenes from Spider's childhood seem in many ways more 'normal' than those set in the film's present. Not only are his mother and father (and 'Yvonne') more substantially present than anybody in present-day Lon-

Spider

481

don, but the inhabitants of the past are more numerous and there actually seems to be a social environment - Yvonne has her friends, the pubs are crowded with patrons, people talk to each other. Even the couple of sequences set during Spider's asylum days have a social sense. Spider and a few fellow-patients smile and talk in a fragile and friendly way out on the moor during work detail, sharing sniggering sex jokes. (One of the men also seems to be having trouble with his mother's sexuality, and as he talks Spider takes out his own period-porn photo whose women start to take on Yvonne's face.) The doctor in charge of the institution is kind and gentle. By contrast, the present is deserted. Essentially there are only two people in it apart from Spider: the briskly bullying Mrs Wilkinson and a single friendly fellow inmate of the halfway house, Terrence (John Neville), who tries to make Spider feel more at ease while telling him diverting stories about people he once knew who made fatal errors. And it is in the present, too, that the film indulges in its most overtly modernist and 'expressive' shots (such as the repeated close-ups of Spider's battered boots,12 or the shots of him on benches or in the bath). In this way, the film's severely attenuated present-day world is actually more expressionist than the wholly mental past. The film's time frame has similarly disorienting features. The opening shot, Spider exiting from a train in a London railway station, seems quite contemporary in its depiction of the other passengers and the train itself. But it cannot be happening anywhere very close to the year 2002 if it is to remain in proportion to other periods depicted in the film. The England of Spider's childhood may not be the 1930s of the novel (though at times it might almost be), but it is certainly not the England of 1982 either. At times it seems almost pre-technological: primitive electricity, hot water, appliances, almost everything in a decayed-First-Industrial-Revolution state. Perhaps it is congruent with the 1950s (when the novel's present takes place), but that too is not certain. The aura it gives off is early postwar - but if it is set, let us say, in 1955, then the present day of Spider in the halfway house must be roughly 1975, and nothing in that world suggests that date (such as the hair and dress styles). The odd moment in Spider's present suggests something more from the late 1980s or 1990s (for example, the moment when Spider at last goes back to his old home, only to find a young mother in jeans taking her child out for a pram ride), so the film's present appears to be spread between the 1950s and the 1990s. These are obviously not catastrophic continuity errors, but a deliberate policy.13 And the effect, again, is subtly disorienting, forcing us into a sub-

482 The Artist as Monster

jective world without the usual cinematic markers of such a process of distortion or selective perception, another analogue of Spider's highly concrete yet unreadable consciousness. In the beginning The film begins with another of Cronenberg's wonderful credit sequences. Is there another filmmaker who can match his run of credit sequences (especially since Dead Ringers) that are not just beautiful and compelling, but function so intensely to essentialize the films' meanings and direct the emotional attention of the viewer? I don't think so. Despite very strong competition, Spider's credit sequence is, along with the one for Dead Ringers, perhaps Cronenberg's finest. The images are of stained wallpaper, mildewed plaster, or discoloured wood or concrete, but 'folded' to produce Rohrschach-like butterfly or other insect shapes, their colours and textures simultaneously decayed and beautiful. They brilliantly encapsulate and abstract the film's environment of dereliction, and the fantastically patterned and vibrant nature of Spider's inner life. Their Rohrschach overtones also gesture at the activity of psychic projection that those tests are intended to reveal in subjects, and thus already present themselves as a symbol of Spider's wild subjectivity and also his attempt to read the world. Usually the images of Cronenberg's credit sequence are governed by, or at any rate work indissolubly with, Howard Shore's music. Shore's probing, anxious score for Spider is as interesting and important as his other work for the director, but for the credits the music comes from another source. It is the English folksong 'Love will find out the way' (dating back to the seventeenth century)14 as sung in a simple arrangement with piano by a mature female singer, not at all professional but not exactly painful to listen to either. The aura it creates is Victorian or early twentieth century, a simple, heartfelt song that carries us back in time, since the era when songs like this were truly folkish, or even parlour standards, is gone. This sense of pastness, together with the rather maternal nature of the singing voice, previsions Spider's fixation on his childhood and his mother, and has a strong Proustian sense of lost innocence. Cronenberg remarks in the DVD commentary: 'The music at the head of Spider ... has a very melancholy, sad feel to it, and it's sung by a woman who is of middle age, and the idea was that it was really a maternal song, it's Spider's mother singing to him. Of course this doesn't mean anything to people at the beginning of the film, but it

Spider

483

does have resonance later/ Whether it is Spider's mother or not, the lyrics of the song do have a message: Over the mountains And over the waves, Under the fountains And under the graves, Under floods that are deepest, Which Neptune obey, Over rocks that are steepest, Love will find out the way. Where there is no place For the glow-worm to lie; Where there is no space For receipt of a fly; Where the midge dare not venture, Lest herself fast she lay, If love come he will enter, And so find out his way. You may esteem him A child for his might, Though you may deem him A coward from his flight. But if she, whom love doth honour, Be conceal'd from the day, Set a thousand guards upon her, Love will find out the way

'Love will find out the way' is an anything but uncommon sentiment in song. But the imagery (which Cronenberg describes as 'quite strange if you can understand it') is unusual, and the whole song becomes additionally odd and additionally powerful as a depiction of a child's love for a mother rather than that of a lover for a lover. Of course Spider looks at his mother both as a child and as a lover, that is exactly his problem, and this literalization of child-mother sexual feelings can, again, be laid upon the text of this song to produce an ardent childlover whose persistence and ingenuity are uncanny and not to be denied. (The poem's presentation of love as male, and the third

484 The Artist as Monster

stanza's characterization of him as 'a child' - Cupid? - certainly helps.) That the child Spider's persistence and ingenuity will lead to his fantasy-transformation of his kind and gentle mother into a vulgar woman of coarse sexuality, and then to his actual murder of her, lends a horrific frisson to the phrase 'love will find out the way/ But the little miracle of this song in this place is that it can create such a shudder even while it directly expresses, through the melody, the arrangement, and the singing, Spider's innocent child's love for his mother. The introduction of Mrs Cleg in the film carries a similar charge. It occurs almost twenty-five minutes in, and is the first flashback into Spider's childhood, 'placed' as a series of long intercuts from the adult Spider leaning over the chest of drawers in his room at the halfway house and writing in his journal. The grown Spider walks down the lane behind his family home, goes into the courtyard, and pulls aside the kitchen curtains to see himself as a child sitting with his mother at the table, playing with a cat's-cradle of rough string. She asks him what he's making, he tells her it's for her, she admires his handiwork and then sends him out to get his father from the pub for dinner.15 There is nothing extraordinary about her, but at the same time she clearly loves her boy dearly (and for the rest of the film we will see her again and again extending him care and reassurance). Throughout this little dialogue we keep getting close-ups of the adult Spider at the window, murmuring his own words to his mother just after, or just before, the child Spider says them. These close-ups reveal Ralph Fiennes's face transfigured by a little smile of such sweetness and longing, so transparent in its utter love, and so moved by the spectacle of his mother, so distant from the grown man and yet so close in memory, that it can almost be compared with Chaplin's in the overwhelming final closeup of City Lights. After the scenes of confusion and dreary oppression of the halfway house, these moments show us how much is at stake in this film, how much love there is in Spider and how much he has lost. This is the foundation on which the film is built: a base of deep and powerful maternal love, and of child love. And the essence of the film's emotional potency is the dreadful contrast between this beautiful love and its unthinkably terrible outcome. Sexuality The source of the trouble is, of course, sexuality. It is the first problem in Freud, and the first problem in Cronenberg. McGrath's story has an

Spider

485

obvious oedipal outline. In the novel, Spider's father is made into a monster, angry and drunk much of the time, whipping Spider repeatedly with his belt in the cellar. In casting his father as an adulterer and then a murderer, Spider has clearly distorted his father's nature to a considerable extent, but in the book there seems to be corroborative evidence for a certain brutality. In the film, however, Mr Cleg ('Bill' rather than 'Horace' in the novel) receives a much more sympathetic portrayal. There are no snarling rages, no beatings, no obvious drunkenness, and although he responds to his son's accusations that he is a murderer and his wife a 'cheap tart' with a slap to the face, his general demeanour is at the worst simply unreadable; sometimes he just seems puzzled and worried about his son's behaviour. In any case, the oedipal Spider of the film is clearly less comprehensively, and viscerally, hostile to his father than McGrath's original model.16 And he is if anything more fixated on his mother. The traumatic effects of sexual awakening and its disastrous attachment to the figure of his mother is much more simply and explicitly drawn in the film. The catalytic moment is the woman's exposure of her breast to little Spider in the pub (no equivalent in the novel), which is followed quite quickly by the boy's transmutation of this woman into his mother (now she is played by Miranda Richardson), and his mother into this woman (she invades his home). In the boy Spider's mind, the maternal breast is traumatically transformed into a female 'secondary sexual characteristic.' For Cronenberg this moment of sexual discovery is the boundary-transgressing 'breakthrough' that changes everything. As he put it to one interviewer, talking about Spider, 'You see one breast and it makes you insane.'17 It's more or less what happens to Max Renn, to the virginal Seth Brundle (like little Spider made 'crazy by the flesh'), and to the dormant Rene Gallimard, and it's specifically what happens to the Mantle twins as boys of just about young Spider's age at the beginning of Dead Ringers. Like the boy Mantles, little Spider has no idea what to do with his own new sexual feelings, and in finding a totally original and private 'solution' to the problem of sexuality, he joins the fraternity of Cronenberg male protagonists. 'Reinventing what sexuality is' (Cronenberg's description of what the cultists are doing in Crash) seems to be a primary activity in the filmmaker's existential world, and Spider's reinvention of sexuality is every bit as disastrous as every other example in Cronenberg's work. Although its feel is quite different (largely, no doubt, because of McGrath's strong prior presence), Spider does return to some of the fun-

486 The Artist as Monster

damental issues of Dead Ringers. These include childhood sexuality and its relation to subjectivity, the transference of issues surrounding origins (infancy, maternality) into adolescent and then adult male heterosexuality, and the negotiation (in both films dysfunctional) of an oedipal trajectory wherein male children replace their mothers with other women as objects of desire. In Dead Ringers the originary and indispensable position of the mother - the only one who might 'explain' the twinness and alienation of the Mantle brothers - is empty; and this void becomes a figure for the way that all male18 children must lose their mothers and the space of a dysfunctional, split subjectivity in the Mantle psyche. Spider's mother is very definitely there in the film, and indeed she is perhaps too much there in Spider's psyche. She is, in fact, the first mother in a Cronenberg film since the somewhat deranged pair of mothers in The Dead Zone (also adapted from a novel), and the only one apart from them and the even more problematic pair in The Brood. From a psychoanalytic interpretive standpoint this presence is a rather major event, though its potential importance in a reading of Cronenberg's work is somewhat weakened by the fact that the concept is essentially McGrath's. Nevertheless, it is perhaps possible to bracket Spider with Dead Ringers in the same way one can bracket The Dead Zone with The Fly: in The Fly you're damned if you go to bed with your girlfriend and in The Dead Zone you're damned if you don't, whereas in Dead Ringers you're damned if you don't have a mother and in Spider you're damned if you do. What all four have in common is the damnation, and in this of course they join a very substantial list of Cronenberg films. Ultimately, too, Spider's schizophrenic adult subjectivity is founded, like everyone's, in the loss of his mother - though in his case it is himself who has banished her with unusual forcefulness and actually killed her. Poor Spider stumbles and falls at the oedipal challenge, and it is because he is so profoundly spooked by the discovery of the sexual female - 'You see one breast and it makes you insane.' In the novel the broad mechanism of Spider's response is the same, but it doesn't have this status of a sudden thunderclap. There, Spider can bluntly report, 'My parents had sexual intercourse that night, as they did every Saturday night' (27) at a stage well before any fantasy substitutions have been made - that is, he can objectively recognize that his mother is a sexual subject independently of the process of unconscious brooding over the fact that she is a sexual object for him that drives him into hallucination and psychosis. In the film, the two revelations seem to occur more or less simultaneously. Events unfold as follows:

Spider

487

1 The first flashback to Spider's home, where his mother is introduced, is immediately followed by his visit to the pub (to fetch his father for dinner), where he sees Yvonne and she exposes her breast. 2 Mrs Cleg tells Spider the oft-told story of her seeing big spiders' webs as a young woman, especially their 'shining7 egg-bags, and then relates his favourite part: how the mother spider just crawled off and died after laying the eggs ('Her work was done ... she was all dried up and empty'). 3 Spider, through his bedroom window, sees his father groping his mother, who is evidently not as dried up and empty as she ought to be, in the back courtyard as they are on their way out to the pub together. 4 Mr and Mrs Cleg arrive at the pub - in Spider's imagination, since he is only there in his aspect of adult observer from the future - and there Yvonne appears, now played by Miranda Richardson. Both the real Mrs Cleg and her 'replacement' now inhabit the same scene. After this crucial, concentrated sequence of Spider's metamorphosing apprehension, events move on somewhat more gradually. Spider imagines his plumber father visiting Yvonne's flat to 'do her pipes/ and later meeting her in the pub, from which they walk out under a bridge by the canal and she gives him a hand job. In this scene the grown Spider is a close observer, and indeed, in the shot where the foregrounded Yvonne shakes the semen off her fingers into the canal, he actually takes the physical place of his sexually serviced father. (This occupation of his father's place eerily and economically demonstrates Spider's own sexual attraction to his fantasy-composite-female, and further literalizes the oedipal scenario.) The next development is the scene of Mrs Cleg modelling the new slip, and after this her distraught visit to the pub in search of her husband, followed by her 'murder' and replacement by 'Yvonne.' It is striking that for Spider the apprehension of sexuality in women, most particularly of course in his mother, should take the form of coarseness and blatancy. 'Yvonne' is Miranda Richardson, but with a low accent, vulgar manners, tasteless clothes and make-up, and a rude, aggressive attitude towards sex. She is also more burgeoning and voluminous in flesh (this is particularly emphasized in the novel, where she is contrasted in this respect to the 'slim' Mrs Cleg), and has these prominent, yellowish, gapped teeth. Revulsion, in other words, plays a large part in the way she is apprehended. Indeed, revulsion and attraction

488 The Artist as Monster

seem indistinguishable from each other. This female creature is a monster in two senses: she is physically excessive and disgusting, and she is (somehow the same thing) tremendously sexually powerful and compelling. I find it very suggestive that Cronenberg in his DVD commentary more than a dozen times refers to Yvonne as a 'creature' - 'this creature in the pub/ 'this creature, this slut/ 'this woman, this creature/ 'this Yvonne creature/ and so on. Yvonne is of course a creation of Spider's mind, and so in that respect literally a creature, but repeatedly labelling her with that word produces a sense of her as another kind of 'creature': as the monster in a horror movie, or at any rate a Cronenberg movie. She is a creature, then, like Rose in Rabid or Nola in The Brood, or perhaps like Claire in Dead Ringers, another 'mutant woman/ or like Song Liling in M. Butterfly, a woman who doesn't really exist. We may also recall that merely being a woman, in a sexual sense, is enough to render females as somehow monstrous or mutant as when Cronenberg musingly quotes Burroughs saying that women are a different species than men. Integral to their mutancy or monstrosity is their sexual attraction to the Cronenbergian male sensibility, and it might even be said, conversely, that this constitutes their attraction. Such a cluster of feelings is of course quite in keeping with the psychoanalytic notion of the abject female body as the centre of both horror and attraction. So when Yvonne exposes her breast to little Spider, it really is the appearance in his life of something utterly strange and frightening, but also very attractive. The role of this 'creature/ the sexual woman, in Cronenberg's cinema is always to make the male protagonist insane, 'crazy with the flesh/ and though in many of his films where this happens that is a metaphorical description, in Spider it is a completely literal one. Existential insanity Spider, in imagining a fantastic scenario of image confusion between his mother and a pub tart, and then fantasizing an equally bizarre murder to explain his own mistaken perceptions, is another Cronenberg protagonist who reinvents the world. The existential doctrine that individuals must forge personal meanings for their own human lives and not simply accept the received wisdom of centuries of convention is directed towards freeing people from false and dead social meanings and bringing them to a fuller realization of whatever truth is available to them as individuals who must live and die in a humanly meaning-

Spider

489

less cosmos. Cronenberg has certainly seized with both hands the notion that human beings have no essential or given identity and must continually construct their own. It is a viewpoint he expresses repeatedly in interviews and commentaries, and presents to his audience in this way as an interpretive key to his cinema. For example, in the DVD commentary for Spider he repeats the suggestion we've heard in his commentary for eXistenZ that we all have to recreate ourselves when we wake up every morning. This is rather different from the traditional existential view that people have to be driven to recreate themselves, and driven away from the mindless non-recreating acceptance of socially given meanings that they insert themselves into pretty effortlessly every morning. Cronenberg's existential idiosyncrasy is even more striking when we recall that although existential reinvention is broadly supposed to bring one closer to the truth of existence, in Cronenberg's films as reinvention becomes more personal and less conventional it simply drives its subjects into error (a concept that in some formulations of existentialism - including, it often seems, Cronenberg's own stated ones - is scarcely possible). This outcome is in addition to the emotional and ethical disasters that attach to the process. When Bill Lee thinks he is being addressed by a giant Mugwump thing that is telling him to go to Interzone, he is wrong', there is no Mugwump outside his own consciousness, and he is talking to himself while deluding himself that he is talking to an objective entity. (By contrast, his wife is really there, and really dead when he really shoots her.) Similarly in M. Butterfly, Gallimard is also just wrong to think that Song Liling is female; and one can confidently make the assertion that in Crash the liberation that the cultists think they are bringing to random crash victims is also wrong in this way - these people will not actually be liberated nor feel themselves to be. In a truly radical subjectivist schema, there would be no difference between, for example, Gallimard's thinking that Song is female, and Song's actually being so, because the notion of there even being an 'actually' would be false. And there is no difference - in Gallimard's consciousness, for most of the film, until he has a change of outlook. But in all these cases the films themselves tell us that their protagonists' 'creative' apprehension of the world is incorrect: that Lee is hallucinating, that Song is male, that the cultists' victims are just maimed or dead, and that Spider has killed his own mother.19 Moreover in M. Butterfly and Spider the films insist on bringing their protagonists as well to the realization of their errors. So reinvention in

490 The Artist as Monster

Cronenberg seems synonymous not just with subjective choices that we all have to make that happen to turn out unfortunately in these cases, but with a misreading of an objectively existing world that the film knows and conveys to us to some extent. It is in fact this that gives to Cronenberg's protagonists their pathos. The films' consciousness that their central characters are deluded adds a sorrowing pity to the vivid anguish of their psychic experiences. In Spider this pathos is as strong as it has ever been in Cronenberg, in spite of the fact that the protagonist's delusion has moved all the way to clinical insanity. Spider himself is, like all these central characters, particularly sensitive and creative, particularly fitted to reinvent the world powerfully for himself - even more particularly than the others, in fact, because of what we can also call his schizophrenia. In the DVD commentary, right after talking about the need to recreate yourself every morning, Cronenberg adds that 'of course in schizophrenics, for example, that energy somehow has failed, and there is no longer either the will or the energy, for whatever reason, to sustain an identity, and the identity starts to fall apart.' But this inability to reinvent the self coherently is also what makes the subject interesting to Cronenberg, and in fact seems to be the very thing that the filmmaker is actually identifying with. Again from the DVD commentary: '[F]or me the movie is not a clinical study of schizophrenia, it is a study of the human condition when it's pushed to a particular extreme. So it's a philosophical movie rather than a medical one.' Then to an interviewer: 'I can easily see myself becoming Spider, whether because of a medical problem or a financial problem or an emotional trauma.' And to Serge Griinberg, in a nutshell, 'Spider, c'est moi.'20 So the existential subject that Cronenberg identifies with, continually represents in one way or another, and finds in Spider, is an outsider or a stranger (reminiscences of Camus). He has fallen out of an ordinary social place, and is solitary and even derelict. This description can be made to fit Cameron-Vale-as-bum in Scanners, Max Renn in his rusting ship's hulk in Videodrome, the wracked and fugitive Johnny Smith in The Dead Zone, Seth Brundle living alone with a closet full of identical outfits in The Fly, the drug-addicted Mantles in Dead Ringers, the hallucinating addict Bill Lee in Naked Lunch, the chain-smoking Rene Gallimard sitting by himself in Paris bars in M. Butterfly, and the little cult watching crash videos at the Seagraves' in Crash. The special gifts of all these people, their creativity or unusual sensitivity, their reinvention of things, is directly connected to this outsiderness. As their 'difference'

Spider

491

manifests itself more and more, most of them fall all or much of the way into dereliction. In Spider the protagonist is derelict when we meet him; his special gift is actually the same thing as his insanity and places him irrevocably outside society The artist as madman The specific figure whom both Cronenberg and Ralph Fiennes have mentioned as models for Spider's appearance is Samuel Beckett. Visually, the connection is especially to photographs of Beckett wandering around Paris, and Fiennes says that Spider's haircut - cropped at sides and back, spiky and disorderly on top - was inspired by Beckett's.21 Spider's overcoat and shabby clothes may call to mind the tramps in Waiting for Godot, but Cronenberg says that the real affinity in his mind is to Beckett's novels, especially Molloy and Malone Dies.22 The way Molloy and Malone are shut into their own consciousnesses and shut out of 'normal' social life, and their constant fussing with little objects that have no meaning to anybody else and with mental questions that are encapsulated and idiosyncratic to say the least, link them to Spider as depicted in the film. In a larger sense, Beckett's empty universe, his existential ferocity, and his stringently modernist minimalism constitutes a philosophical and aesthetic stance that Cronenberg seems to be growing closer to. (It is either a case of direct influence or uncanny conjunction when one finds Molloy saying, 'You don't immediately remember who you are, when you wake.')23 And this brings us to another major aspect of Spider's character in the context of Cronenberg's whole cinema: Spider as artist. From one standpoint this is obvious: Spider is writing everything down in his journal, he is trying to synthesize the meaning of his life experience and set it down as a narrative. In the book this activity is inescapable but hidden by the conventions of the first-person novel; the film however, insists on repeatedly showing us Spider writing in his journal, and carefully places the flashbacks to his past in the context of that writing. We must remember that the film, which does not (and cannot) share the first-person narrative of the novel, has no essential reason for preserving the device of Spider's journal at all; to preserve it at all is in a way to insist on it. Cronenberg says that he stumbled upon the recognition of Spider as an artist during the editing of the film, without being aware of it during shooting. We have seen how every one of Cronenberg's films since Scanners has had some kind of allegory of

492 The Artist as Monster

artistic creation, and how this representation of the creative artist has become more and more forthright until films like Naked Lunch and eXistenZ present it literally. In Spider, the artist that Cronenberg discovered in the film during editing is a nightmare vision of an artist figure so much the outsider, so true to his own intensely personal inner vision, that he has become a pathetic creature mumbling to himself and writing in a crazed script that no-one else can understand.24 This artist is not Cronenberg's usual 'breakthrough' kind. It is not by pushing the envelope of creative endeavour that Spider qualifies for the label of Cronenberg artist: there is nothing of the scientist, the inventor, the pursuer of 'radical' means. Neither in the boy Spider's involuntary refashioning of objective reality nor in the adult Spider's painstaking attempts simply to reach the truth (the two sides of his artistic-creative-like behaviour) is there anything like this. Nevertheless he does fit into the group, and he does so by virtue of the extremity of his imaginative reconfiguration of the world, and by the violence that he employs. He is a 'radical' artist naturally, without at all realizing his creative activity. As with Beverly Mantle and his 'instruments for operating on mutant women,' he does not understand that he is an artist; he thinks he is simply reacting to an objective truth, and it takes an external observer (the sculptor Anders Wollek in Dead Ringers, David Cronenberg) to see that his activity is breathtakingly creative, an impressive embodiment of a personal vision. As with Bill Lee, he thinks that in his journal he is 'writing a report,' when what he is doing is expressing the fantastic emanations of his own mind. And as with Rene Gallimard, his creativity is identical with an elementary and terrible mistake about the world. The extremeness of Spider's personal construction of the world is the means by which we identify him as mentally ill. Looking at him as a Cronenberg artist, it is possible to say of Spider that in him art has finally become madness. It is not a condition that is merely unstable, or bordering on insanity (as with earlier Cronenberg artist-heroes), but now actually is insanity. If this is in some way the logical endpoint of the 'radical' artist's creativity, then no wonder Cronenberg identifies with Spider as a lost derelict whom no one can understand and who cannot even understand himself. It may be noted in passing how vividly such a scenario recalls the storms and stresses of the Romantic artist, dramatically banished or self-banished from human society, driven to or over the brink of madness and suicide by the intensity and unmanageableness of his (and it is always 'his') elementally powerful visions and sensations. As for the artwork

Spider

493

itself, it is so authentic to the utterly personal creative imagination that it is totally incomprehensible. The mysterious incantation-writing of Burroughs in Naked Lunch ('Followers of obsolete, unthinkable trades doodling in Etruscan ../) has moved much further into obscurity in Spider's fevered jottings in an alien cuneiform for which there is no dictionary. A recreative impulse so strong and all-encompassing that it becomes hallucination is one of the symptoms of Cronenberg's artist, or protoartist. The heroes of Videodrome, The Dead Zone, and Naked Lunch all inhabit a world where some or all of what they experience is hallucination, and the explicit artistic project of eXistenZ is a reproduceable, marketable experience of hallucination. In Spider, the hero experiences as real and factual a whole array of scenes whose objective status is false or deeply questionable. But where the earlier protagonists require some drug, or subliminal brain signal, or paranormal event to explain their visions, Spider needs even less outside help than Rene Gallimard to see what is not there. It is something innate in him that causes it, something that the world (and Patrick McGrath) can call clinical schizophrenia, but that Cronenberg thinks of simply as something about the human condition, arbitrarily amplified in this one case but potentially present everywhere, and easily found when you 'strip away the facade'25 of life. Each man kills the thing he loves Spider's violence seems like the desperate action of a wounded child, a striking back by the orphaned boy at the killers of his beloved mother and indeed it is that. But of course his premise is completely delusory. And that premise is not a simple wrong interpretation of events which it might be rationally possible to misinterpret, but an extended and elaborate whole-cloth invention of his own. Little Spider is angry at his father for taking an important part of his mother's attention and desires, and angry at his mother for giving them to his father. He is even more angry at his mother for becoming another person, as it seems to him, when nuzzling with his father in the courtyard or wearing a sexy slip for his pleasure. He simply has no idea what to do with his own sexual feelings as a pubescent boy, and especially what to do when those feelings project themselves onto his mother, the woman whom he loves most and the human being he feels incomparably closest to. The shocking arrival of explicit female sexuality in the form of

494 The Artist as Monster

Yvonne and her bare breast causes a short circuit that ends in Spider's seeing his mother as literally another woman. This is, after all, one way to deal with the incest taboo and with the felt incompatibility between filial and heterosexual desire. The less childlike form of this conflict in the male psyche, the woman as mother and whore, is a commonplace in Western culture, and something we can discern in Cronenberg all the way back to the female as 'human subject' and 'object of desire' in Shivers and Rabid. What puts Spider more firmly into the tradition of Cronenberg protagonists is that this conflict, and the existence of the sexual female as an anarchic force in the male psyche, finds an outlet in violence against the woman. Spider the writer can be considered from one standpoint an exemplary artist. He is delving into his memory, his psyche, examining his feelings to arrive at a true interpretation of the world, true above all to his own experience of it. He goes in search of the truth, and ultimately, after a profound struggle, he finds it. But what is the truth, and what is the consequence of Spider's finding it? The hypothesis that he started with, that his mother had been replaced by another woman and that he had killed that woman in revenge for the murder of his mother, is revealed to be false. Spider is trying to put his story together like a puzzle. This is a metaphor that is realized literally in a couple of places in the film, notably the jigsaw puzzle that we see him working at in the halfway house on two occasions. The second of these occurs right after the memory-scene of his mother trying on her new slip: just as this fact, showing that his real mother wants to be sexually attractive to her husband, does not fit his hypothesis, so he begins to have trouble with the puzzle, trying to ram in a piece that will not fit (in the end he tears apart the pieces and overturns the table). Spider's artistic process, for all his misperception, has integrity. The truth it brings him to is the most appalling realization he could possibly experience: that he killed his own beloved mother, devastated his father, condemned himself to an orphan life in a criminal asylum. The truth is atrocious. There is nothing cathartic or therapeutic about this discovery - it is simply crushing. In fact, if we think back over Cronenberg's work, something like this is always the end result of the artistic or quasi-artistic search for what is fundamental about the artist. Max Renn is a sexual sadist and so are the Mantles, Seth Brundle is an outcast doomed to defeat himself, Rene Gallimard is a pathetic fool, Vaughan & Co. are destructive maniacs, even Allegra Geller is an irresponsible narcissist with dangerous appe-

Spider

495

tites. Spider's closest relative of all, though, is Bill Lee in Naked Lunch. Lee is a man who kills the woman dearest to him following the promptings of inchoate sexual urges that cast that woman in a negative light and involve sexual jealousy, and that present themselves to him in the form of hallucinated 'objective' events. Moreover, the act of killing her is the foundational event of his impulse to artistic creation, an endeavour whose principal purpose is to address the traumatic psychic problems created by that act of violence. He has committed an awful crime, and precisely engineered his own exit-less agony. Point for point, all of this is true of Spider as well. The detail of the repetition is quite uncanny, especially considering that the first author of Spider's story is Patrick McGrath and not David Cronenberg. Once more the artist is a monster, once more art itself is a pathological symptom and a process horrifically dangerous to the self and others, once more a crime is what makes the artist an artist. Arachnophilia The motif of spiders and their webs is, not surprisingly, pervasive. There are Spider's nickname, the story his mother tells him repeatedly, the webs he makes with old string (the cat's cradle, the webs he weaves through his bedroom as a child and at the end in his room at the halfway house, the elaborate old-string device he uses to turn on the gas tap for the murder). The web is something that the mother makes to trap food for her babies, but then she crawls off and dies, leaving the child to function alone as the spider. Spider's own webweaving has the same dual function of providing a reassuring home environment for himself and operating as a trap for his prey. As viewers we are aware of the intense pressure and anxiety Spider is suffering both as a child and as a man, and so we can see how the webs seem for him defensive devices, to protect him from his enemies. But in this they also express the dreadful truth of Spider's behaviour: the webs seem defensive to him, but in truth they don't defend him from anyone; in truth they function (in their ultimate form of the gas device) only to kill his mother and destroy his family. They also work to fix Spider's mother in the nursery-story role of the spider-mother. Since Mrs Cleg continues to exist as an independent sexual being with an interest in another male (her husband), Spider ensures that she will instead 'crawl off and die' as the ideal mother is supposed to do when her maternal function is over. And when the adult Spider is menaced

496 The Artist as Monster

by the return of 'Yvonne' in the person of Mrs Wilkinson, his first action is to festoon his room with string-webs (his next is to re-enact his first murder of her, stealing her keys, foraging for tools, taking her unawares). The webs that Spider weaves may also be seen as an analogue of his artist's work - he weaves his narrative in the same way he spins his web. It too starts out as a narrative of a dreadful crime against the author, and ends as a narrative of a dreadful crime by the author. Moreover, the whole spider metaphor begins as something mildly eccentric, a little bit grotesque but not seriously so: spiders as a source of childish investigation, as a nursery-tale-like model of family life. But it ends by reclaiming its monstrous arachnophobic heritage - spiders as predators. In a certain ultimate distillation, the meaning of Spider's life, the message of Spider's book, is that he is one who trapped and killed - by mistake, under a delusion, but still somehow innately. It is hard, thinking along these lines, to completely escape the idea that this 'spider' has some affinities with the insect-horror of much of Cronenberg's work. If Seth Brundle turns into a fly, if it could be suggested in Naked Lunch that Joan Lee is an 'elite-corps centipede,' then is little Dennis Cleg to be thought of in some sense as a bug too? Certainly 'insect evil,' in the Burroughsian sense, is something that seems to lurk in the web of the spider mythology of this mother and son, of the son and his victims. McGrath's spider imagery turns monstrous by the end of his book, and if there are no insect images in the film that may only be something else that is repressed in the project of aesthetic 'subtraction' and minimalist austerity. There is no horror in the actual relationship of Spider and his mother, but there is a horrific outcome, and that outcome seems somehow to be prefigured in the insect presence in their little nest of storytelling. This would be a very Burroughs-like insect, of unknowable alien origin, preying on victims in a cruel and senseless fashion, here a kind of symbol of the tragic principle in human affairs. Nicotine stains We have noted the derelict physical condition of both Spider and the world he traverses, and this is a motif whose long history in association with Cronenberg's obsessive protagonist is familiar by now. But one detail of the scenario of these doomed heroes receives its apotheosis in Spider: smoking. So many of Cronenberg's 'creative' heroes who are in trouble or about to be in trouble smoke, and, as Bukatman and

Spider

497

other commentators have noted, it is a kind of red flag in his work. I have argued that it is related to the syndrome of 'letting go/ and linked to other bodily indulgences like junk-food eating and ultimately drugs - often against a background of the mother of all bodily indulgences, sex.26 Smoking and eating become signs of a slip (or impending slip) over the edge of control into what ends up as a dissolution of subjectivity, a perdition of the self. In Spider the adult, smoking protagonist is well past the stage of indulgence; he is in a permanent state of perdition and has been since he was a child. Smoking is a primary behavioural anchor for him: he rolls his own cigarettes, and carries the 'works' around with him in his precious little tin box, stowed in an old sock and suspended into the inside crotch of his pants with a string. (In the novel Spider smokes as continually as he does in the film, and, as one of the quotes above exemplifies, the activity often seems like the only source of comfort in his life.) Spider's fingers are as deeply stained with tar and nicotine as if they had been soaked in betel juice, and this disturbing sight is repeatedly presented to us as we watch his hands in extreme close-up writing in his journal. These indelibly stained fingers are a sign: Spider's life is as stained as they, and the stain is as deeply ingrained. Spider directs a movie As the grown-up Spider writes in his journal/we are taken to a kind of representation of his writer's mental landscape, his memory as he is deliberately recalling it. In this representation, Spider literally oversees a restaging of the events of his childhood. Also, in terms of the film's work, because the medium is cinema this mental landscape, like all mental landscapes, must be externalized and staged and personified and enacted so the camera can see it. And if Spider is overseeing this work, it becomes like the making of a film (apart from metadiegetically actually also being the making of a film). So Spider becomes an artist not only in the medium of literature, as he writes in his journal, but in the medium of cinema, as he oversees the stagings of his own memory. This is an idea which a viewer actually suggested to Cronenberg, who was quite struck by the idea even though again it had not occurred to him while making the film. As he records in the DVD commentary: 'Someone said to me that in these scenes Spider is almost like a director, directing a scene in a film. And I thought that that was very appropriate, because the structure of the movie of course is that Spider does

498 The Artist as Monster

rewrite, re-edit, re-direct, his memories/ In any event, it introduces the perspective of reflexivity for the third straight time in Cronenberg's work - after Vaughan's 'directing' of Catherine in the big roadside crash in Crash and Allegra's wholesale quasi-cinematic creation in eXistenZ.27 Theatrical overtones are equally strong, and in this context we can recall the operating-room scenes of Dead Ringers or the final aria and suicide from M. Butterfly. All stagings of hallucinations share some of the same qualities as well. Ultimately these are all subsets of the primary necessity to physically realize events that are in some sense mental - and, of course, increasingly in Cronenberg's cinema such events occur within the framework of some kind of (mentally) creative activity. Staging the mind The subjectivity of Spider's subjective experience is, of course, crucial to the action, and to the construction of the character as schizophrenic (McGrath) and as existential reinventor (Cronenberg). And yet its presentation in the film achieves a solidity and literalness rare in cinematic depictions of private mental experience. Cronenberg has visited this territory many times, far more often than most narrative filmmakers ever do. His solution to the problem of presenting mental phenomena so that the camera can see them has always been simple and direct: to present them just as if they were objective physical phenomena. In retrospect Cronenberg can be seen to have been constantly doing something like this right from the beginning. In the films before Videodrome, however, the mental phenomena that the films depicted were not rooted in any of the films' characters, but in Cronenberg's creative imagination. Rose's strange armpit spike in Rabid and the brood children in The Brood are not objective phenomena anywhere outside Cronenberg's mind; only the what-if genre components of horror and science fiction allow the depiction of such fantasies as solid elements in a realist narrative. The science-fiction apparatus exists still in Videodrome, but for the first time Cronenberg places the fantasy-imagination inside a character, and is faced with the task of representing that character's subjective vision. As we have seen, Videodrome stages all Max's phantasmagorical private perceptions as objective events, and does very little to indicate that they are purely subjective - and purely hallucinated. Much the same approach is employed in Naked Lunch, though the drug-crazed nature of the protagonist's bug and creature hallucina-

Spider

499

tions perhaps disguises the fact. eXistenZ's wide-ranging display of events occuring only Virtually/ inside someone's head, is an extended demonstration of how to use simple tools of classical shot selection and continuity editing to represent mental phenomena. In Spider every scene from Spider's childhood is only mental, only a memory or, even less, a supposition. The film demonstrates how close memory and identity can be. Spider - like all of us, as Cronenberg says - doesn't know who he is until he remembers. In retrieving his memories and suppositions, entering them, ordering them, he is constructing himself, and this mental activity is represented by staging it as if it were objective occurrence, with the single difference that the adult Spider is impossibly placed into them and himself rendered as an objective presence. The cinematic presentation of all this seems (except that the adult Spider is there) to be simple flashback, when in fact it is never flashback but always present-time mental construction. Narrationally, in other words, what is only imagined is promoted to the status of objective event, what appears as third-person narration is actually first person (or as close to first person as cinema can functionally come).28 It has often been observed that in cinema there are no past or future tenses - to which one might add, there is no conditional or subjunctive mood. Filmmakers have attempted to compensate for these absences by creating markers of non-realist status such as unusual inflections of photography, editing, or music. Again, Cronenberg prefers to leave imagined scenes as close to the objective realm as possible, and to transfer the most extraordinary (and, in the case of Spider, psychotic) mental landscapes into the calm, ordinary language of classical cinematic realism. There are two positive benefits of this approach. The first is the subtle but powerful air of surreality that arises from the incongruity between impossible content and matter-of-fact style, and the second is the emphasis on the potency of the subjective creative imagination when it is rendered as indistinguishable from everyday perception. As the grown-up Spider doggedly and literally haunts the scenes of his own memory, both of these benefits are vividly felt. The film also deftly includes in its wholly subjective scenes some indications to a beholder who is not in the grip of Spider's delusions what might actually be going on. This is a problematic undertaking, because the memory sequences have no status at all outside Spider's head; they cannot narratologically be from Spider and from an omniscient narrator simultaneously or even consecutively. (Or at least they cannot be without creating something like the same solecism cinemati-

500 The Artist as Monster

cally as McGrath's schizophrenic derelict Spider with his impeccable writer's virtuosity does literarily.) Still, the film is able to include stagings of events that can have more than one interpretation, making it clear what Spider's is but also leaving room for a more 'objective' reading. This is particularly the case in scenes that are directly remembered by Spider, where in the original events he himself was present (as opposed to those 'infected memories' where he is speculating about or imagining what happened). Probably the most important of these scenes is the one where Mr Cleg talks to Spider in the allotments shed after the boy has shouted out accusations of murder and run away from the house. Here the film allows Mr Cleg to present the honest bafflement and concern of an out-of-his-depth father who has no idea how to deal with a child whose perceptions are so distorted, who searches for simple homely diagnoses of his son's condition ('You're by yourself too much'), and who is happy to get a formal compliance from Spider and believe the problem is solved. The film has managed to fit this view into a memory of Spider's while still preserving Spider's belief that his father is a murderer. There are similar moments in the presentation of Mrs Cleg (note, for example, that she is always drinking orange juice or, at the pub, gin-and-orange, and that this then becomes Yvonne's drink of choice as well), and of the Cleg marriage as well, which actually seems to be improving at the time of Mrs Cleg's murder.29 It is a delicate narrative balancing act that requires finesse and tact from the film. Mise en scene Spider looks different from every other Cronenberg film for one principal reason: it is set in Britain. Except for M. Butterfly with its Budapestas-Beijing locations and epic overtones, and the fantasy Algiers of Naked Lunch, all of Cronenberg's movies have been situated in North America.30 The detailed exposition of a not-quite-determinate but still very local and specific London gives the film a strong aura of place and history. This change of look gives Spider something like the status in Cronenberg's cinema that Felicia's Journey has in Egoyan's - a major shift of tone. Another factor may be the absence of Cronenberg's usual designer, Carol Spier, and her replacement by Andrew Sanders. Then, as we have seen, the film's world of dourness and decay is very much in evidence in McGrath's novel.31 But there is no doubt of Cronenberg's contribution to the film's look. Talking to Dave Kehr, he says:

Spider

501

I went to England when I was very young... I mean, in my early 20's. And I've been going there for a long time. So I had a real feel for it physically as well as artistically. I slept on floors with the heater burning your face and the rest of you freezing. And the moldy, damp wallpaper was a very important part for me, because you need to feel all that stuff.32

And more expansively, he told Serge Griinberg: Spider's world is my own. To go back to history, I note that Canada was a British colony for much longer than the United States - we never had a revolution - and then became a Dominion; so the presence of England is much stronger than in the United States (or in Quebec). My father was a bibliophile and an Anglophile; so as a child I read children's magazines like The Tales of Horatio Hornblower, etc. Then there were marvelous English films of the forties and fifties. I really felt the presence and the influence of Carol Reed and James Mason while making Spider. And, when all is said, I have never, even partially, expressed my personal world in my films.33

I myself do not feel the influence of Carol Reed and James Mason: they are too far up-class to be very relevant to the world of Spider. Rather, the English cinema the film recalls to me is that of early Hitchcock (and his later visitations of London, especially in the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much and Frenzy) and such near relations as 10 Rillington Place, which wed the stained wallpaper, lumpy paintwork, and dirty brick of lower-class London in disrepair to deviant sexuality and acts of violence that therefore seem to arise from the 'English' repression and ugliness of this environment. There are also the relics of Empire, captured in McGrath's place names - 'Kitchener Street/ 'Omdurman Close' - whose distance from the mythic glories of British Imperial Africa is pathetic and awful. Although the derelict details of this world are rendered meticulously, the drabness of the film's London brick row-housing, greasy pavement, canals, railway bridges, gasworks, and allotments actually does not seem to me to quite measure up to the depressing power of the real thing. Perhaps this is simply due to the fact that London's constant grey skies and drizzle are not much in evidence. Or perhaps it is because of Peter Suschitzsky's miraculously subtle photography, with its superbly refined colour balances and pastel overtones whose source you can never identify. While not prettifying anything, it seemingly

502 The Artist as Monster

cannot bear to be simply ugly either. Mike Leigh's recent film Vera Drake (2004), set in more or less the identical place and with a not-unrelated subject, is not nearly as visually creative and stimulating as Spider, but its unvarnished mud-brown look more directly captures the oppressiveness of this claustrophobic, relentlessly shabby world. Still, it would be truly churlish to criticize the look of Spider when it so potently synthesizes a unique vision. The 'expressionist' aspects of its visual rendering are the product of a demented beauty set into the context of impoverishment and decay. The strange and wonderful credit sequence is a distillation of this paradox: beautiful and disturbing at the same time (this might almost be Cronenberg's aesthetic motto). But it can be seen in less concentrated form throughout the film: in the loving treatment of scarred woodwork and wallpaper in the halfway house, in the penetrating pale light falling on Spider in his barren room, in the reflections from the canal water that pulsate on the concrete tunnelling where Yvonne and Mr Cleg embrace, and in the clothing, gait, and demeanour of Spider himself. Here are pity, love, and fear all at once, the perfect expression of the film's essential meaning. In recent years it has looked to some as if Cronenberg were getting into creative difficulties. The projects he has taken on have sometimes seemed to suggest an uncertainty about what kind of film he should undertake. The sequence M. Butterfly - Crash - eXistenZ rather supports this hypothesis, particularly when interspersed with a number of disparate projects that never came to fruition (e.g., Red Cars, Pain Killers, Basic Instinct II). Dead Ringers, the director's masterpiece, was followed by Naked Lunch, which for all its problems of stageability was connected to Cronenberg's long-standing admiration of and influence by Burroughs. After this, M. Butterfly was an odd direction to take. Not the fact of an adaptation, but the indigestible (to Cronenberg) nature of Hwang's play, was the source of the problem, and the decision to use Jeremy Irons a second time produced what somehow seemed a pale copy of his indelible performance in Dead Ringers. Crash was certainly a better suited project, and that fact is indicated in the quality of the film and the impact it made. As noted in the last chapter, eXistenZ's return to a set of wfer-Cronenbergian subjects by means of a completely original screenplay, and its playful and satirical approach, resulted in a work that ventures into self-parody, and one that contrasts strongly with almost everything Cronenberg had made since Videodrome. After all this, Spider - set in Britain, screenplay and novel by an established if not so widely known writer - looked at first sight to confirm

Spider

503

the notion that Cronenberg might be having a hard time settling. But in the event it proved just the opposite: namely, that Cronenberg can take on a project with a high degree of outside creative input and make a film that is powerful and aesthetically assured, and at the same time render it highly relevent to his own concerns as an artist. In this respect it recalls the otherwise very different Dead Zone. Apart from its intrinsic merits as a film, Spider is a very encouraging sign of the director's ability to work with assurance in areas not obviously custom-fitted for him. The film's modernist purity of tone and style, its minimalist philosophy of paring away distracting or stylistically jarring elements, its sensitive nesting of Ralph Fiennes's quiet but extremely powerful performance - all of these factors create something that looks like the work of an artist at the peak of his powers. A couple of chapters ago I suggested that Crash contained echoes of the cinema of that austere and intense master Robert Bresson. It is a comparison one or two commentators have now made with respect to Spider,34 and, indeed, with its solitary tormented hero trying to distil the agonizing truth into his journal, this film is almost Cronenberg's Diary of a Country Priest. Spider also marks a return to Cronenberg's best form insofar as it takes him back to that deepest ground of his power as an artist: the melancholy spectacle of dysfunctional subjectivity, of the failed male subject and the damage that doomed soul inflicts. It is a ground that Crash and eXistenZ forsook, after M. Butterfly had seemed to indicate that Cronenberg's sequence of destroyed and withered protagonists had reached exhaustion. Now it is precisely the different framework provided by McGrath and Fiennes and Britain that has enabled its impressive renewal. Like so many of Cronenberg's protagonists, Spider is quite unable to master the conditions of his psyche and his life. And as with his forerunners, he suffers severely and permanently from the effects of his own actions. More than with most of his predecessors, the pathos of his situation is tremendously magnified by the fact that his misplaced feelings and perceptions have resulted in the pointless death of the person he loves most. It is further exacerbated by the fact that the subject who suffers and enacts this is a child - a child whose 'natural' understanding of the world and reading of his own feelings is fundamentally flawed and who can never afterward escape from either the cause or the effect of his disastrous errors. Although this is not clear on a first viewing until the end of the film, everything is seen from a vantage point after the fact, everything is preordained and unavoidable because it has already happened. Of all Cronenberg's disaster-stricken heroes, Spider is the only one who does not progress

504 The Artist as Monster

to disaster, but from the beginning of the film already inhabits the ruined landscape of his self-blasted world. All that remains is to understand what has happened, and this progression to understanding is an entirely desolating experience (and also, as we have seen, a task identical with the work of the artistic imagination). It is not speaking too loosely, I think, to call Spider a tragedy. The catastrophe is self-produced, by a flaw of personality, but at the same time understandable and even forgivable, since the person is a child. The devastation it wreaks is strongly imbued with tragic irony, since it redounds on the head of the one who unleashes it, and it leaves behind an utterly wasted landscape. Here, in a classic demonstration of cinematic virtue, the physical appearance of the film's world perfectly mirrors and reinforces its emotional burden: the decayed and damaged quality of all the locations, however naturally grounded in historical and documentary fact, serves as a constant force expressing the terrible message of the narrative and the terrible mental condition in which Spider must inhabit those places. This desolate space seems natural to Spider - as his unresisting adaptation to it, and his appropriation of little derelict objects from it, signifies - as natural as his own scrambled mental state. Neither seem natural to the viewer, and the film thus presents a construction where both Spider and his world are beheld from outside by us compassionate onlookers, and the protagonist's essential innocence (or ignorance, or difference) creates a wave of pity for him and his story, and a sense of tragic waste. The purity of Spider's childhood love, his helplessness confronted with both his love for his mother and his confused sexual feelings, and the almost unchanged purity and helplessness of the grown Spider, are set starkly against the spectacle of irrevocable destruction and of the absolute hopelessness of retrieving anything from the situation. The return, over the endcredits, of the main-credit folksong 'Love will find out the way,' now in a piano-only arrangement - that is, with the singer gone, the mother gone - is quietly heartrending. In all these ways, Spider is a 'big' film, even though its dimensions are small and its focus narrow. It presents a vision of a life lived as if under a rock - and yet a life that was as full of love and aspiration as any, that still is full of love though now accompanied by the fearful apprehension of a terrible explanatory truth. And the viewer is left riven and full of pity. If Spider is at all indicative of what we can expect from Cronenberg in years to come, his later work may yet prove the most dazzling jewel in his crown.

Notes

Chapter 1: Stereo 1 The story of Cronenberg's first engagement with cinema and the film scene in Toronto during the 1960s (along with descriptions of Transfer and From the Drain, and the origins and history of Stereo and Crimes of the Future) has been told a number of times. See, for example, Beard and Handling (159-70), Rodley ed. (4-27), and, especially, Morris (30-51). 2 The voice-over commentary specifies that there are eight experimental subjects, but the film only shows us, I think, six of these - plus one researcher, for a total cast of seven as specified in the end-credits. 3 Cf. Rodley ed. (25), where Cronenberg says: 'My role in Stereo was as Dr Luther Stringfellow, the absentee scientist who actually set up the experiment, because, in a sense, I had set up the experiment/ 4 Note that the two separate mentions of a subject who pierces his head with a drill are inconsistent: he resorts to this measure in the first mention as a despairing response to his telepathic dependency, in the second as a reaction to a telepathic intrusion that has driven him to self-encapsulation and total non-communication. 5 Probably Godard's Alphaville (1965) should also be mentioned - another film that uses contemporary modernist settings in a perfectly literal way to suggest an oppressive quasi-science-fiction future. 6 This is not true slow motion, which is achieved by overcranking at a higher-than-normal frame rate and then projecting at a normal rate, but rather stop-motion, a slow-motion effect achieved by optical reprinting of each frame five times.

506 Notes to pages 16-28 Chapter 2: Crimes of the Future 1 At least Crimes of the Future made it to video, in a beautiful transfer as an appendix to the laserdisc 'Special Edition' of Dead Ringers. But this has already been withdrawn, and although Dead Ringers has reappeared on DVD, Crimes has not. 2 'Cronenberg: A Dissenting View/ 133. 3 The name of the production company of both Stereo and Crimes of the Future is 'Emergent Films/ Peter Morris (24-30) details Cronenberg's early fascination with the concept of 'emergent evolution/ and links it to the influence of William Burroughs, whose work the filmmaker so admired. 4 Wood's position on subsequent Cronenberg features - at least up to The Dead Zone - is that they are, by and large, homophobic, and that the films are striving to repress the homosexuality that they have discovered in themselves and are panicked and disgusted by. 5 Incidentally, the webbed foot shown in the film - along with the six-toed foot as far as I know the only non-special-effect, or 'natural/ example of bodily mutation in Cronenberg's cinema - is revealed by the filmmaker to be his own (interviewed by Atom Egoyan in Take One, Fall 1993). This couldn't be more appropriate if you fantasized it. It appears again in Don McKellar's short film Blue (1992), in which Cronenberg acted. 6 And one might just note in passing how predictive these names are: the parasites of Shivers, 'a combination of aphrodisiac and venereal disease/ might have issued from the Institute for Neo-Venereal Disease; while the pathological 'radical' practices of the Mantle Brothers in Dead Ringers might well be housed in the Gynecological Research Foundation; moreover, the Oceanic Podiatry Group, with its philosophies of the water-based origins of life and its strange sex-substitute-like foot massage, is also recalled in Dead Ringers's early references to the fact that the complications of human sexuality are attributable to the fact that 'we don't live in the water/ Chapter 3: Shivers 1 See Morris (68-74) for a fairly detailed account of the initial events. 2 Beard and Handling, 172-3. 3 The American release title was They Came from Within. I use the eventual Canadian and international title throughout, as Cronenberg tends to do himself. 4 Curiously, she has no first name. 5 Shivers, however, reverses that film's libidinal economy: whereas the

Notes to pages 29-50 507

6 7

8 9 10 11

12 13 14

personality-transforming pod-creatures of Body Snatchers wish to enthrone cold reason and expunge emotion - especially love7 and sexual feeling the parasites in Shivers are designed to do exactly the reverse. In Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982); see esp. 1-55. Barbara Creed in particular has extensively applied this notion to the horror film, especially to horror cinema's representation of the female as monstrous. My reading of some crucial aspects of Cronenberg's work is indebted to Creed - as indeed is so much recent gender-conscious scholarship on the horror film - although I cannot agree fully with her own interpretation of Cronenberg. See particularly Robin Wood, 'Cronenberg: A Dissenting View/ 115-35 and, more recently, Bukatman, Terminal Identity, 81. See, for example, Beard and Handling, 170-9 and 193-4. See Beard and Handling, 176. There is a similar image near the beginning of Scanners, where Cameron Vale is first seen using his telepathic powers to 'punish' a middle-aged woman in a shopping-mall food-floor for looking disapprovingly at his derelict appearance. Vale gives the woman a kind of seizure, during which she collapses to the floor and writhes, her skirt again riding up. There is too much coincidence for these scenes to be accidental: the image clearly has a certain particular transgressive sexual power for Cronenberg. Cronenberg says of St Luc: There's a repressed sexual something going on. He's a saint, don't forget/ (Beard and Handling, 178). While enacting another variation of Barbara Creed's 'monstrous feminine.' Reportedly cherry-picked from the stock library by producer Ivan Reitman, who receives the music credit.

Chapter 4: Rabid 1 It is true that during a later operation Keloid runs amok: he cuts off his wife's finger with scissors and tries to suck on the stump. Here he truly inhabits the realm of the mad doctor crazed by desire. But his behaviour is 'covered' by the disease he is suffering from - as indeed is the behaviour of all the rabid victims. It is not he who is acting in this transgressive way, it is the disease. 2 This notion of a 'morphogenetically neutral' tissue is no doubt inspired by a passage in Burroughs's Naked Lunch. At one point during his story about 'the man who taught his asshole to talk,' the character Benway narrates: 'After that he began waking up in the morning with a transparent jelly like a tadpole's tail all over his mouth. This jelly was what the scientists call

508 Notes to pages 51-60

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

un-D.T., Undifferentiated Tissue, which can grow into any kind of flesh on the human body' (133). Or at least she would have been back in the 1970s and even the 1980s, when she was 'current/ Marilyn Chambers, after beginning her image-career as 'The Ivory Soap Girl' with advertisements that emphasized her wholesomeness and innocence, starred in Behind the Green Door (1974), one of the earliest and most celebrated of the 1970s Triple-X porno features that introduced explicit sex to widespread distribution and exhibition. Rabid was Chambers's first foray into non-pornographic film, and (to my knowledge) the only movie in which her role was not primarily to have lots of sex on screen. See Rodley ed., 54-7 for some of Cronenberg's reaction to Chambers, and his account of the decision to cast her - evidently producer Ivan Reitman's. One of the omnisexual developments of the parasite plague in Shivers is a union of father and daughter: a white-haired and bearded patriarch asks Forsythe to admire 'my beautiful daughter,' a barely nubile girl. Patriarchal, or simply aged male, sexuality is seen elsewhere in that film, and the spectacle of old man and young woman - with its archetype the father and daughter - is something that recurs (though never with any sense of complicity) in Cronenberg's earlier films. Asexual patriarchs will fulfil a very important role in the next three films. Note also that the needed substance is ingested through a kind of needle, and Rose's symptoms are sometimes very close to those of heroin withdrawal (the abdominal cramps just mentioned, the flu-like sickness suggested by 'my body aches all over'). And no auditory 'spectacle' either. The porno-movie soundtrack running throughout the scene consists exclusively of paralysing banalities of trivial conversation spoken in 'dubbese.' Mere transcription of the soundtrack of a dubbed European porno film is enough to constitute a satire of the form, and the effect is amusing but not at all sexual. E.g., Beard, 'The Visceral Mind,' 28; Handling, 111; Wood, 'Cronenberg,' 135; Drew, 'A Gothic Obsession,' 19; Rodley ed., 57; Shaviro, The Cinematic Body, 130; Morris, 82. When asked why Rose's spike is positioned in her armpit, Cronenberg replied, 'Where else would you put it? ... [T]ry thinking of another place that will work and get you past the censors'; see Morris, 83. Drew, 'A Gothic Obsession,' 19. Barbara Creed enumerates it as one of the multitude of forms of a female sexuality that provoke male anxiety, in this case 'a graphic representation of the infantile phantasy of the phallic mother,' who is 'thought... to have a penis hidden inside her body' (The Monstrous Feminine, 50—1) - a notion deriving from Freud. The charge is pre-eminently Robin Wood's, who extends it to find in

Notes to pages 65-81 509 Cronenberg's films (up to the time of his essay's writing in 1983) a fear of any kind of female assertion or activity: '[I]n Rabid ... the catastrophe ... takes the form of released female activeness, dramatized as horrific and disgusting7 (130). Also, Barbara Creed's catalogue of female monstrosities in the horror movie, The Monstrous Feminine, constructs a large edifice on the foundation of male fear of female sexuality, and points to a number of Cronenberg films, including Rabid, as examples. 10 See my article The Canadianness of David Cronenberg/ See also Handling, 'A Canadian Cronenberg/ 11 Scanners is the single exception to this pattern, in that its hero is narratively central and does assume agency and even redemptive power, while escaping corruption by and destruction by the powers of desire. This (for Cronenberg) anomalous 'solution7 to the problem is enabled by the simple expedient of entirely desexualizing the narrative. Chapter 5: The Brood 1 See Rodley ed., 76-7 for an account by Cronenberg of this situation and of his struggles to prevent the script from becoming too literal an account of his personal history. 2 From the first therapy session we see between Nola and Raglan comes this exchange: 'NOLA: Mummies don't do that, mummies don't hurt their children. RAGLAN: They don't? They never do? They never do? [silence] NOLA: They sometimes do. Sometimes. But then they're bad mummies, they're fucked up mummies!' 3 Making the creatures child-sized entails some manipulation if they are to assault and kill adults with small battering weapons. So Juliana is seen to have been drinking, possibly for hours, before her death at the hands of one broodling; Barton is very drunk when he too is killed by a single assailant; Ruth Mayer is sober but not especially robust, and two creatures are sent to attack her; then Raglan, a big, mature male, requires the whole corps of broodlings to bring him down. 4 The presence of a homicidal little figure in a red hood immediately suggests Nicolas Roeg's 1973 film Don't Look Now, especially when this 'child' is also a kind of imaginary product of a parent's overwhelming emotion (in Don't Look Now, a father's grief). 5 Whom he momentarily mistakes, in his alcoholic marination in the past, for Nola as a child - a perceptive error. 6 And Cronenberg has remarked: T can't tell you how satisfying the climax is. I wanted to strangle my ex-wife' (Rodley ed., 84).

510 Notes to pages 82-91 7 In the photograph, the actor playing the part of little Nola is the same Cindy Hinds who plays Candice - a fact that emphasizes in one more way the replication of the malign process across generations. 8 Wood (1983), 131. 9 Creed, The Monstrous Feminine, 46-7. 10 This is a central point in Carol Clover's article 'Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film/ reprinted in her important book Men, Women, and Chainsaws, 21-64. Creed, extrapolating from Kristeva, characterizes all the body sores of Raglan's patients as openings or disruptions in the 'clean and proper body' that recall the maternal 'wound' (The Monstrous Feminine, 47-8). 11 As a sidelight, it is interesting to read this scene also as a kind of ironic view of what happens in psychotherapy: the patient discovers his or her buried feelings, carefully removes them from their organic context, and examines and caresses these messy organs of the personality with pride and loving fascination. The sense of a kind of narcissism and fetishization of symptoms that may result from a process of so much introspection and therapeutic attention is also perceptible in Nola's description of her therapy to Frank in this scene: 'Are you ready for me Frank? Are you really? I seem to be a very special person, I'm in the middle of a strange adventure.' These words are spoken with a sly sense of satisfaction. 12 Creed, The Monstrous Feminine, 43-58. 13 See, as a locus classicus, Rodley ed., 80^L 14 Creed, The Monstrous Feminine, 49. 15 One might recall, too, that Cronenberg at one time considered filming a version of Brent Easton Ellis's American Psycho, a capsule description of which might be that it is one long series of highly explicit, increasingly grisly sex murders. 16 Strictly speaking, one ought to include Barton's murder here, and perhaps also Raglan's. But Raglan's is scarcely noticed between the danger to Candy and the events downstairs between Frank and Nola, and anyway his death is a kind of 'fitting retribution' for his role in the whole tragedy. Barton's death is certainly as violent (and as pathetic) as any, but because he is not in any way an object of actual or potential sexual interest to the film, his murder lacks this particular 'edge.' 17 Rodley ed., 25. 18 Ibid., 78. 19 Wood's contributions, in Film Comment magazine (subsequently reprinted in Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan) and in The American Nightmare, were foundational texts in this movement. Subsequently, there has been a whole scholarly movement using psychoanalytic methodologies to study horror

Notes to pages 91-104 511

20

21 22

23

films (most prominently, Barbara Creed and those who draw on her model), and therefore of course using child-parent relations and subsequent development of psychic structures as a theoretical model and hermeneutic tool. But although oedipal and other configurations are necessarily founded in domestic infancy and childhood, their symbolic depiction in narrative need not focus explicitly on the domestic scene or child-parent relations. It is Wood who is most concerned with the persistence of narratives of family in horror movies, directing attention to the elements of amily discord, repression, and symptomatic monstrosity in films such as Night of the Living Dead, Martin, It's Alive! and It Lives Again!, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes, Sisters, Carrie, and Halloween. Although she does not mention family melodrama as such, Linda Williams ('Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess') makes an interesting three-way connection between pornography, the horror film, and melodrama - all seen as expressing in different ways a spectacle of excess as manifested in the body This essay also makes use of Carol Clover's work, and has some relevant overtones for a number of Cronenberg films. 'Minnelli and Melodrama/ 117. Cronenberg says: 'She was only there three days, but it's a role in which she never moves. She just sits in the same place. The most she does is to rise to her knees; a strange, immobilized character. Very bizarre, intense and weird' (Rodley ed., 84). In an interview with David Breskin, Cronenberg makes an interesting analysis of the question of bad acting and dialogue delivery in horror movies, and says that whatever inferiority there is in the dialogue scenes of his early films is largely a question of minuscule budgets and brutally short shooting schedules (Breskin, 220-1).

Chapter 6: Scanners 1 It is difficult here to suppress one's knowledge of the harum-scarum, lastminute-script-additions aspects of the production, chronicled by Cronenberg himself in Rodley ed., 86-8. 2 We may recall that the positive potential of group telepathy was also a particular area of experiment in Stereo, and that there too it was a failure. 3 Cronenberg's irony has not deserted him, however. The typical crowd of gallery first-nighters are circulating through these monstrosities with wineglasses, showing no indication that their sang-froid has been disturbed. 4 The echo of Stereo here is loud and clear.

512 Notes to pages 104-24 5 Rodley ed, 88. Cronenberg does also add, 'But maybe I wasn't successful cinematically in selling that/ 6 See, again, Clover (1987) for the extended argument that victims in the horror film must be gendered female even if they are standing in for male viewers, and Creed, The Monstrous Feminine, for the wound as a mark as femaleness. 7 Note the similarity of this grand scene to the ritualistic abjection-monstrosification of Nola at the end of The Brood - and to those other ritualizations of horror-grandeur from the slow-motion scenes of Shivers and Rabid to the torture chamber of Videodrome and the operating room of Dead Ringers. 8 Thalidomide, a drug widely prescribed between 1956 and 1961 to treat the nausea of morning sickness, and which produced mutations in the offspring, may well have been in the filmmaker's mind here. The lovingly prepared and photographed Life Magazine full-page colour advertisement for Ephemerol talks about avoiding 'storms' and promises 'smooth sailing' just like the ads for the apartment complex in Shivers. Its appearance is dated to 1947, and the wonderful over-wholesomeness of its images, together with the knowledge of what its product has actually done, is a little paradigm of the style of ideology in the forties and fifties. 9 One of the items to be seen is an old-fashioned undersea diving suit with spherical steel helmet, canvas body, and trailing hoses. It functions as another piece of sculpture, one perhaps expressing its owner's perilous condition as a potentially 'drowning' scanner. It is also another of Cronenberg's aquatic metaphors, a device that protects the wearer from that environment. 10 Rodley ed., 90. 11 Ibid., 87. 12 One of them is entitled 'Revok Film Prodigies' (www.revok.com), and is devoted to a massive catalogue of horror, slasher, and sci-fi videos. The other is the 'Ripe Program' (www.pcb.co.za/ripe/). Chapter 7: Videodrome 1 McGreal, 9. 2 Personal interview with Cronenberg, 1982. 3 Though Cronenberg says that Videodrome started out as a more conventional narrative, 'a very straightforward melodrama about a man who discovers a strange signal on television ... he becomes obsessed with it... tries to track it down, and gets involved in a whole mystery' (Rodley ed., 93-4). This sounds a lot more like Scanners.

Notes to pages 124-8

513

4 See especially Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic, Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity, and Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (all published within a one-year span, 1992-3); but also Christopher Sharrett, 'Myth and Ritual in the Post-Industrial Landscape/ Tanya Modleski, The Terror of Pleasure/ and Bart Testa, Tank Pornography/ All of these writings foreground Videodrome either prominently or solely from among Cronenberg's films. 5 Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic, 26,31. 6 Ibid., 28. 7 Bukatman, Terminal Identity, 92. 8 Both Jameson and Bukatman reveal imperfect memories of the film's events, however. Bukatman says that Max needs Videodrome because his station is 'foundering' (85) and, more seriously, that 'Videodrome is finally revealed to be a government project' (87). Neither is even remotely suggested (although in the alternate and sanitized version of the film often shown on television Convex says that Videodrome began as an Army weapons project). Jameson states that the Videodrome show is broadcast from Pittsburgh (27), whereas Harlan and Convex later tell Max that there was no broadcast of any kind, just a tape played for Max and described as a broadcast. Of course, in Videodrome of all films, a certain amount of confusion is almost inevitable. Jameson has the most elegant exit from the 'decoding' problems the film poses. Getting hardly half-way through his plot summary of the movie, he just shrugs off the work: 'But by that time, the Philip K. Dick-like reality-loops and hallucinatory after-effects are so complex as to relieve the viewer of any further narrative responsibility' (23). 9 Shaviro, The Cinematic Body, 128. 10 Ibid., 133. 11 Ibid., 138. 12 Ibid., 139. 13 Ibid., 148. 14 Shaviro also says: 'But let us not mourn the disappearance of those promises of redemption and transcendence, which were never anything more than pacifying myths, or devices of social control, in the first place. The time for idealization and fantasy is fortunately over. Cronenberg's films desublimate and decondition the affects of fear, anxiety and mourning; that is to say, they present these feelings positively and literally, as affections and transformations of the flesh, and not as secondary consequences of some originary loss or lack. We are given the experience (an intense physical excitation) without the meaning' (The Cinematic Body, 149).

514 Notes to pages 128-33 15 In the alternate television version there is a scene, not present in Cronenberg's cut, where Barry Convex explains that Videodrome arose from military testing of low-level gunsights - and was, presumably, only then 'developed7 by Brian O'Blivion. 16 The Third World 'other/ tortured and economically exploited, is also present in a spectacle of a more 'primitive7 lower tolerance for 'underground7 or pornographic videos, evident in two scenes. In one Max warns Nicki not to get involved with the Videodrome show, since 'in Brazil, Central America, those kinds of places, making underground videos - they execute you for it/ The second scene is the one in which Harlan contrasts a North America 'soft7 because of its (sexual) self-indulgence against 'the rest of the world,7 which is 'tough7 by virtue of its puritanical self-discipline. From another perspective, there is a suggestion here of Asian exoticismeroticism in 'Samurai Dreams7 and the Videodrome victims that is returned to very articulately in M. Butterfly - both David Henry Hwang7s play and Cronenberg's film. An additional point: when Bianca O7Blivion asks Max what format he wants a tape in, he says 'Videodrome/ and, after a nonplussed moment, she asks, 'Is that an oriental configuration?7 17 Bukatman, Terminal Identity, 74-80; Griinberg, 32-6. 18 Now two, after the release of eXistenZ with its overtones of ruthless corporate behaviour. 19 Note the direct echo of one side effect of Rouge's Malady in Crimes of the Future. 20 Certainly this argument would raise an objection from Shaviro, who insists that it is precisely the unprogrammability of the body that makes it a site of resistance. In his reading, Spectacular Optical is as deluded as Max in its attempts to bring the body to heel. For theorists who are more centred on the mechanisms of social control and the evacuation of the subject through media engulfment, the consumer-zombies of Romero's Dawn of the Dead would seem a more fitting monster than the hysterical, homicidal Max. 21 The Soft Machine, 78. These movies depict the hanging-boys7-death-orgasm scene that Burroughs introduces obsessively and repeatedly in Naked Lunch and the books immediately following it. By the time of The Soft Machine, he was describing it as a controlling operation of the virus of evil - the image-virus. This transgressive, ugly, sexually exciting image has been planted in his brain by shadowy controlling powers - a paranoid interpretation that Cronenberg can never subscribe to for long, and humanistically or existentially converts into a question of personal responsibility. See chapter 11. 22 Burroughs, Nova Express, 109.

Notes to pages 138-50 515 23 She is talking to a weeping woman who is trying to blame her (unknown) problems on her sister. Nicki's response is 'It isn't your sister, lover, it's you.' This advice to stop looking outside for persecution and start looking inside for responsibility might almost be aimed at Max. 24 The last shot of this sequence is a slow-motion close-up of Max raising his face off of Nicki's naked body Cronenberg rarely uses slow motion, but on those occasions when he does (the end of the swimming-pool orgy in Shivers, Rose's attack on Judy - also in a swimming pool - in Rabid, and rather more often amidst the many anti-realist techniques of Stereo and Crimes of the future), it signifies a grand moment of transgressive sexual indulgence. 25 This is not the case in the alternate television version: here Nicki is given a whole extra scene and a distinctly different position in the narrative. 26 We may recall that both Annabelle as murder victim in Shivers and Rose in her visit to the porno theatre had this quality as well. 27 Note that a shower would extinguish a cigarette. 28 Doom Patrols, 77. 29 Testa, Tanic Pornography.' 30 Clover also persuasively categorizes a whole range of horror films that involve the 'opening up' or emotional enfemalement of a male subject, which is seen as a necessary corrective to the closed-down-ness endemic to some males, and whose emasculating dangers are disguised through the simultaneous sensational over-hystericization of a female (Men, Women, and Chainsaws, 65-113). Videodrome (to which Clover refers on several occasions) is an almost overexplicit rendering of some aspects of 'opening up'; but for Cronenberg, if this is a balancing corrective to male closed-down-ness or even sadism, there is nothing health-giving or productive about it. Instead it is abjecting and destructive. Clover does remark, a propos Shivers and Videodrome, that 'Cronenberg is generally inclined to put men at very much the same risk as women' (96n). I would say that in the later films, at least before Crash, he is generally inclined to put them at much greater risk. 31 Personal interview, 1982. 32 One notes also the way in which Harlan in his lab carries a screwdriver in his mouth - a fellational image that also furthers the film's surreal conflations of sexuality and technology. 33 The paternity issue is further confused if we recall that, in the earlier scene, the moment Max has desperately confirmed that his gun is indeed 'gone' and inside his body, the telephone rings to introduce and summon him to Convex. 34 The notion of the screen as breast is not only articulated in Ralph Ellison's collection of television reviews entitled The Glass Teat (1971), but has been

516 Notes to pages 155-61

35

36

37

38 39

40 41

persuasively theorized as a masochistic, pre-oedipal determinant of screen spectatorship by Gaylyn Studlar in a much-anthologised essay ('Masochism and the Perverse Pleasures of the Cinema/ 1984) incorporated into her book on Sternberg-Dietrich, In the Realm of Pleasure. This is a point emphasized by Testa (Tank Pornography') in his analysis of the pivotal scene where Max's slit appears. But Testa's argument is rooted in 'apparatus' theories which assume that the classical shot-countershot 'system of the suture' is ideologically tainted, and that only alienating modernist narrative (or anti-narrative) structures can perform ideologically resistive tasks. His analysis refers to the 'banality' and 'dullness' of the shot-countershot structure in this sequence, and emphasizes Max's ownership of the gaze (which we share) at his own body. But it is precisely not Max's gaze: it is that of the omniscient third-person camera sitting across the room in a position not even remotely possible to Max's view. It is the 'banality' of the apparatus here that constitutes its most disorienting feature, its most 'radical/ The alternate television version has some shots here of Max sitting up, rubbing his eyes, and getting out of bed. The fact that Cronenberg's final version omits those shots helps to make the basis for the film's events more uncertain. This strategy is hardly unique to Videodrome. In Cronenberg's earliest films virtually every name is a kind of ironic commentary, and in subsequent films the names of, especially, the 'mad doctors' (e.g., Hobbes, Keloid, Ruth) have this kind of significance. But in Videodrome these names spread out to cover more of the narrative than in any of the films since Crimes of the Future. For a consideration of the name-play in Cronenberg's films up to Videodrome, see Maurice Yacowar, 'The Comedy of Cronenberg/ Including a bizarre composite photograph that shows Hitler's head on the body of a tutu-ed ballerina, whose costume bears a large black swastika. The alternate television version contains much material here that is not in the director's version: Convex offers Max another pair of frames, more delicate, that looks equally inappropriate, and at last says sourly, 'You look lousy in glasses/ This phrase, like 'You're playing with dynamite,' is a highly appropriate metaphorical commentary on Max's behaviour throughout the film. The full text of the sign is 'Closed for Alterations': the alterations will occur in Max as he is 'reprogrammed' by Bianca. Terminal Identity, 81. In Videodrome the sexual characters (Max, Nicki, Masha) smoke and the non-sexual characters (Bianca, Bridey, Harlan, Convex) don't. Harlan's screwdriver-in-mouth might suggest a monstrous

Notes to pages 163-84 517 cigar, a substitute smoke that is also a substitute phallus, again indicating displacement of sexual energies. Smoking is also a sign of bodily (and sexual) indulgence in Dead Ringers and M. Butterfly. 42 1 wanted to see what it would be like, in fact, if what the censors were saying would happen, did happen' (Rodley ed., 94). Julian Petley, in 'V.D. O'Nasty/ takes a sneering and dismissive attitude towards the film on the grounds that it presents a 'conservative' (and anti-sex) view of the damage television can do. Chapter 8: The Dead Zone 1 Cronenberg: 'It's certainly the least offensive film I've made' (Rodley ed., 114). 2 It's a tear-jerker,' Cronenberg has said (Rodley ed., 116). 3 Cronenberg: 'It's Chris Walken's face. That's the subject of the movie; that's what the movie was about. All the things that are in his face' (Rodley ed.,

in).

4 After this he dismisses the class with an assignment to read The Legend of Sleepy Hollow: 'You're gonna like it - it's about a schoolteacher who gets chased by a headless demon.' Obviously the literary content here, and in the Poe ('Nevermore!'), is prophetic of what lies in store for Johnny, and his enthusiasm for the literature is something more than mere dramatic irony. The point is extended much later in the film, where Johnny is tutoring young Chris Stuart, once more in The Raven, and the passage - about the eternal loss of the beloved - has its relevance emphasized by the reappearance of Sarah while the lesson is going on. 5 The similarity to the road accident that begins Rabid is a strong one. There as here, the accident is not the fault of the nice male protagonist, but of the (male) driver of the other vehicle. Characteristically, in Rabid Hart is driving, but the extraordinary and tragic effects are borne by Rose, while in The Dead Zone Johnny is both driver and sufferer - another small indication of the way in which male agency has moved away from disavowal. Incidentally, Johnny is driving not the motorcycle that gives Hart a tinge of spurious machismo, but a Volkswagen Beetle, entirely stereotypical of his modest and appealingly nerd-like disposition. 6 There is a strong reminiscence here of Norman Bates's room as it is seen towards the end of Psycho: the room of a neglected child, a person who has never left childhood emotionally. 7 For some remarks about the archaic mother, see Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 12-15,53-4, and 56-79.

518 Notes to pages 184-203 8 See Creed, The Monstrous Feminine, 16-30 and 139-50. 9 In this context, Dodd's murder weapon - the scissors - suggests a pair of castrating shears redirected. 10 This too is conventional. Creed notes the subset of horror films 'where the child struggles to break away from the mother, representative of the archaic maternal figure, in a context in which the father is invariably absent (Psycho, Carrie, The Birds)' (The Monstrous Feminine, 12). 11 The actor here is Nicholas Campbell, whose other noteworthy appearances in Cronenberg's films include Raglan's rather sinister henchman Chris in The Brood and, more importantly, Bill Lee's young writer-disciple Hank in Naked Lunch - whom Lee finds having sex with his wife just before 'accidentally' shooting her. 12 Some random Hollywood titles: The Age of Innocence (1934,1993), Stella Dallas (1937,1990), Back Street (1932,1941,1961), Dark Victory (1939), The Old Maid (1939), All This and Heaven Too (1940), Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), No Sad Songs for Me (1950), There's Always Tomorrow (1955). 13 Rodley ed., 147. The remark occurs in the context of a discussion of Dead Ringers, also characterized as 'female7 in some way and opposed to the masculinity of Scanners and the machine-dominated The Fly. 14 Amazingly, King's novel provides Johnny with a brain tumour as an accompanying symptom of his condition. This utterly Cronenbergian condition is, however, characteristically the by-product of an awakening of desire and the body in Cronenberg's films (as evidenced in examples from Crimes of the Future to Videodrome), and hence not right for a protagonist who is exerting every effort to suppress these forces. 15 See my article 'The Canadianness of David Cronenberg/ 16 The wittiest (and most trivial) instance of the film's Canadianism occurs in the Vision' Johnny has in connection with Chris, which presents the vista of an entire peewee hockey team in full gear under water. This seems, to me at least, like a distinctively Canadian surrealist moment. Chapter 9: The Fly 1 Cronenberg's summary of the film's script situation: 'There's one line of dialogue from Chuck's script that remains, but not one character'; on the other hand, 'there was no question that Chuck Pogue should get first screen credit; there couldn't be a Cronenberg version if there hadn't been a Pogue version... I wouldn't have done the movie if I had had to do Pogue's script. On the other hand, what got me excited was his script' (Rodley ed., 125). 2 M. Butterfly might perhaps appear to be an exception to this rule, but there

Notes to pages 205-17 519

3

4

5 6

7

8 9

10

11 12 13

14

the romance is founded on such an astounding act of deception and selfdeception as to undermine everything. Just how Brundle might be able to type such 'fleshly7 knowledge in at the keyboard terminal (as we see him doing) is a question the film blithely, and wisely, skates over. Notwithstanding Ronnie's first humorously sceptical assessments - that they are 'designer phone booths' or 'the world's largest microwave oven/ One commentator who particularly stresses the egg resemblance is Adam Knee (The Metamorphosis of the Fly'). 'More Human than I Am Alone,' 137. The wound is in the form of three parallel scratch-lines. As one of its many meaningful juxtapositions of stills from different Cronenberg films, Serge Griinberg's book David Cronenberg (1992:117) instantly shows the similarity of this wound to Nicki Brand's neck cuts in Videodrome. Adam Knee notes these 'steroid effects/ though he interprets them, in a context that is drawing on Barbara Creed's 'monstrous feminine,' as marks of Eiundle'sfeminization - emphasis on pectorals ('breasts') and testicular shrinkage (33n7). I cannot share this interpretation at all. Played by former world-ranked and Canadian champion heavyweight boxer George Chuvalo - a kind of Canadian in-joke. As they couple on the red leather armchair at Seth's place, one shot shows Tawny digging her fingernails into Seth's back and scratching - at a spot very close to the microchip wound. It is a moment that underlines one more time the sexual nature of this in-all-ways-metaphorical wound. We may note, too, that the predisposition towards junk food is already present in the 'first' Seth. In the initial flush of his happiness at impressing Ronnie with his machine, he tempts her with the alluring prospect of a cheeseburger - clearly a favourite treat of his. (Ronnie's lack of enthusiasm at the invitation shows that the film certainly doesn't regard cheeseburgers as any kind of universal object of desire.) Robbins,140. Burroughs's insect imagery - and Crdnenberg's affinity with it - is discussed in greater detail in the chapter on Naked Lunch. The Insect People of Minraud are mentioned repeatedly throughout the Nova Trilogy (The Ticket That Exploded, The Soft Machine, Nova Express); quotations are from, respectively, Naked Lunch 24 and 52, The Soft Machine 44, 89, and 95. This notion of ceaseless change is especially stressed by Shaviro, for whom it represents exactly that mode of unfixed being that signifies a potential 'line of flight.' See The Cinematic Body, 145-8 and Doom Patrols, 112-13.

520 Notes to pages 218-34 15 See, especially, Edward Guerrero, 'AIDS as Monster in Science Fiction/ but also Adam Knee, The Metamorphosis of the Fly/ 16 Cf. Rodley ed., 127-8. Cronenberg also says there: 'If you think of The Fly as an AIDS movie, then you have to think that Geena Davis gave it to him, because he's a guy who's never been fucked before. Then, is she going to die? That's why I don't want it to be AIDS, truly.' Adam Knee tries hard to find homophilic associations in Brundle's activities and physical states, and even reads Brundlefly's acid-vomit over Stathis Borans in the final scene as a kind of sexual contact, but I find this argument very difficult to accept. 17 Drew, 17. 18 This is an extension of his earlier line about 'a disease with a purpose.' These are further examples of seeing horrific bodily transformation from the disease's point of view. One recalls Rollo Linsky's office sign in Shivers: 'Sex is the invention of a clever venereal disease.' (This, incidentally, is a parallel Cronenberg himself draws in Rodley ed., 128.) 19 In Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (New York: New Directions, 1964), 230. 20 See Rodley ed., 134. 21 The Cinematic Body, 148. 22 Doom Patrols, 117-21. 23 The Cinematic Body, 148. 24 And one recalls the uneasiness of pregnant women in Scanners - the condition leading to the development of the monster-producing drug Ephemerol. 25 Or 'gynecologist,' as he is called in the end-credits of the film. 26 Here, as in all of Cronenberg's films since The Brood (or actually since Fast Company), the art-direction/production-design credit is Carol Spier's. Needless to say, in matter-of-factly attributing all the creative authorship of his films to Cronenberg I am misrepresenting the complexity of what is always a collaborative process, and slighting what must be the substantial contributions of people such as Spier. This partly is out of a profound unwillingness to delve into exactly who was responsible for how much of what, and partly out of an underlying critical principle that sets itself the task of examining the texts themselves for internal similarities and differences (the commonalities then labelled Cronenberg's 'authorship') but not the specific, historical conditions of production. Chapter 10: Dead Ringers 1 Rodley ed., 149. 2 Always excepting the atypical Fast Company.

Notes to pages 237-9 521 3 Cronenberg appears to disagree, at least to some extent, and avers an interest in the phenomenon of actual identical twins, partly in terms of what it intimates about the genetic or innate vs social origins of human characteristics ('the implication of this is that a huge amount of what we are is biologically determined' [Rodley ed., 144]). This 'scientific' interest in twins, on the other hand, stands in for the absence of the science-fiction/horror elements: 'In one way, Dead Ringers is conceptual science-fiction, the concept being "What if there could be identical twins?" Some might say, "But there are." But I'm suggesting that it's impossible, and let's look at them really closely. I can imagine a world in which identical twins are only a concept, like mermaids. Elliot and Beverly... are creatures, as exotic as The fly' (ibid., 144). In other words, the twins are monsters. 4 Jaehne, 20,22. 5 Maggie Humm, recalling Melanie Klein's testimony that her own little son associated the colour blue with the male genitals (his own and his brother's) and the colour red with the mother, says: 'Dead Ringers makes use of similar, sexualised colour contrasts between the blue male Mantle apartment and baroque red garments and rooms of the gynaecological work' (82). Reading the apartment, with its 'Italian furniture/ as Elliot's domain and the operating rooms and gowns as Beverly's (for he is the surgeon and the only brother who inhabits this locale and costume), one can even read this gendering of the twins into the colour scheme. 6 Rodley ed., 148. 7 But Cronenberg also says that 'both the characters have a femaleness in them' (Rodley ed., 148), and one notes that Beverly's nickname for his brother, 'Elly/ is also 'female.' (It might be noted that both of the principal female characters, Claire and Cary, have names that might be used for either sex as well.) 8 For the film's relation to the novel Twins, see Rodley ed., 135-6. In the audio commentary to the Criterion laserdisc/DVD issue of the film, Cronenberg comments: 'In the book Twins, which technically this movie is based on but there's not really very much from the book in this movie - there is a scene where the brothers have sex with each other. I really found it completely unconvincing, and completely psychologically wrong. It had nothing to do with my attitude towards homosexuality, it had to do with my attitude towards twins. It just felt completely wrong that they would fuse that way when they were already fused in so many other ways/ And later on, in a comment on the dancing scene with Cary, he adds: 'I think you've got to see this scene as an attempt by Elliot to seduce his brother - back to him, away from Claire. And using Cary as a buffer, so that it's not too obvious, and so that it's not too frightening. But it doesn't work of course. And

522 Notes to pages 239-40

9 10 11

12

13

14

of course this is as close as the twins ever come to having sex with each other, or flirting with the idea of it, through the medium of a third person/ I am grateful to my friend and colleague Wayne Rothschild for leading me in this direction. Rodley ed., 147. Elliot is not interested in Claire's trifurcated uterus, but he is fascinated by her actress's glamour, including the appalling bruise-makeup applied to one side of her face that he sees when visiting her in her on-set trailer ('Lucky Bev, he gets to rub up against the magic'). When he is trying to slight her to Beverly he returns again to this territory, in a description that actually applies to himself: 'She's an actress, Bev, she's a flake, she plays games all the time - you never know who she really is/ The dialogue of this scene, incidentally, caricatures the twins' situation. The script is that of some cheesy-sounding thriller that features the hero and heroine handcuffed together. But the yoked-together metaphor fits Beverlyand-Elliot rather than Beverly-and-Claire. From this perspective, Claire's line ('Just because some dumb cop handcuffed us together doesn't mean I've got to like it') 'plays' Beverly, while Beverly's ('Until we find the computer-code-release for these cuffs I suggest we learn to like what we see') 'plays' Elliot. Beverly's temperamental dislike of playing Elliot, both in manner and in viewpoint, perhaps adds to the special clumsiness of his performance. But this is also the scene in which Beverly inadvertently blurts out that he has a brother, and precipitates his own hysterical crisis, resolved only by a drug-taking session. Cronenberg reveals in his spoken commentary on the laserdisc/DVD that there was a conscious attempt to introduce an autobiographical element here. His sister Denise, the costume designer, went back to old family photos for the appearance of the street and of the twins themselves in terms of costume, hair style, glasses, etc. The twins are a little bit like me, I have to admit... I loved insects and science and animals as a kid, but I don't think I was as strange as these kids/ Like the Mantle boys, Cronenberg had 'a desire to dissect, and to control reality, through the intellect and through learning. But I think I managed to avoid the other side of it, which was the kind of shrivelling up and deficiencies of the emotions and the affective faculties/ It is impossible in either of the two childhood sequences to tell which twin is which, since no names are used. But I would guess that 'Twin A' is Elliot, because it is he who first mentions the impulse to approach the neighbourhood girl, and who utters the invitation to her - and these seem Elliot-like characteristics.

Notes to pages 248-58 523 15 In the laserdisc/DVD commentary, Cronenberg says of the 'spectacular set7 of the offices: ' I wanted very much to have the twins live in a kind of submarine tone. The idea was that you were almost watching them as exotic creatures in an aquarium. And so, blues and purples predominate in the decor and in the colours and in the light/ 16 Rodley ed., 145. 17 Humm misidentifies the Retractor as a probing instrument and appears to count it among Beverly's 'instruments for operating on mutant women/ But the Retractor's function is clear both from its appearance and from the demonstration of the prototype's use on the Visible Woman in the second boyhood scene. 18 See Rodley ed., 137-8; see also Gleiberman, 43, for Cronenberg's comments on what kinds of men might become gynecologists. 19 A visual device that strongly emphasizes his resemblance to Cronenberg himself - especially for those who recall the filmmaker's 'gynecological' operating-room appearance in The Fly. 20 Once again, this 'legitimate' surgical device, like the 'standard-of-theindustry' Mantle Retractor, has a dimension of appalling crudeness. Both devices seem anything but delicate, flexible, or sophisticated, and look more like instruments of torture that (again) foreshadow Beverly's 'sick' surgical instruments. 21 The presence of this anxiety in Cronenberg's own cinema is (like so many of its characteristics) parodied in eXistenZ, when Ted Pikul says, 'I have this phobia about having my body surgically penetrated/ 22 See the appendix to the laserdisc/DVD issue, which describes the origins of the original engravings and the process of their development for the screen. Part of the documentation there reads: 'The sequence was inspired by an exhibition of medieval torture instruments and an illustrated book of antique medical instruments owned by David Cronenberg ... Finding a strange similarity between the medical tools and the instruments of torture, [the credit-design team] Balsmeyer and Everett built on this theme, incorporating a series of woodcuts and engravings they found in books from the 15th through the 17th centuries. Drawing from both science and mythology, the illustrations set up thematic elements of the film: dissection, fertility, birth, and twins (which were perceived as monsters in the Middle Ages)/ 23 This has not prevented some commentators from asserting that Claire is presented as a monstrous woman responsible for bringing the twins to grief, and accusing the film of misogyny pure and simple. See, e.g., Jacobowitz and Lippe: 'The most offensive misogynist product to emerge in some while,' '[one of those] films which exploit and denigrate women' (65).

524 Notes to pages 259-64

24

25 26

27

28

29

Frank Burke, albeit in a far more nuanced context, says that the film presents Claire as 'the little bitch ... [who] starts all the trouble/ and 'a nymphomaniac druggie, too horny to distinguish between two different lovers' (33). And Barbara Creed (1992) refers to Claire as 'another of Cronenberg's monstrous female freaks' (127). This latter term is missing from Videodrome because, while Max has been deeply stirred by the 'permitted' expression of sadistic sexuality, there is really no other person in this relationship - only the strange, flatly emblematic, not really 'human/ emissaries of sexual and asexual femaleness in (red) Nicki and (white) Bianca. Hence the particular pathos of Max's lostness as he fixes such desperate longing onto the phantasmagoric forms of Bianca and Nicki in the final stages of the film. Dead Ringers shows what emotional depths can be plumbed when this self-disintegration takes place within an actual human relationship. Cronenberg says he invented the name 'Claire Niveau' because it means 'clear and level' and is meant to capture her forthrightness (laserdisc/DVD audio commentary). All these similarities to Beverly are accompanied by one striking similarity to Elliot - namely, Claire's profession as an actress. As already mentioned, Elliot is attracted to her very successful performing side: 'I'm into the art of glamour/ he says to her in her trailer. In the laserdisc/DVD audio commentary, Cronenberg remarks during this scene, where Claire displays one 'normal' profile and one bruised one: 'I suppose here Genevieve is a twin, each side of her face the same but different... I wouldn't make a very schematic thing out of it, but we were all aware of it. It turns her into a twin herself. Maybe Beverly is the more battered twin, maybe the left side of her face is Beverly and the right side Elliot.' So then to speak 'schematically/ Claire's secretly suffering side is Beverly while her glamorous acting career is Elliot. Maggie Humm advances a similar idea in asserting that Cronenberg positions masculinity 'in tension both with its own horrific construction of the feminine and also with its psychic desire for the maternal feminine, particularly for the reproductive body/ and that for him 'masculine subjectivity always involves ... desiring the phallic within the maternal' (60). See Helen Robbins, Marcie Frank, Maggie Humm (Chapter 3, 'Cronenberg's Films and Feminist Theories of Mothering'), and especially Barbara Creed ('Phallic Panic: Male Hysteria and Dead Ringers') - to whom I must acknowledge a particular debt. Creed (1992), 139-40.

30 In Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982). See esp. pp. 1-55.

Notes to pages 265-70 525 31 Creed 1992,133. Creed also draws attention to the engraving (by Ambroise Pare) of twin hermaphrodites included in the credit sequence, and suggests that the pairing Elliot/Beverly has a quasi-hermaphroditic status: In disavowing sexual difference, both sexes are reunited with the other half: the androgyne is a totally self-sufficient figure, its narcissistic desire for complete sexual autonomy fulfilled. Thus the androgyne represents a fantasy about the abolition of sexual difference - a fantasy at the heart of the Mantle twins' ill-fated existence7 (144). 32 In making a connection between horror and melodrama, Linda Williams has this to say: 'Horror is the genre that seems to endlessly repeat the trauma of castration, as if to "explain," by repetitious mastery, the original problem of sexual difference. And melodramatic weepie is the genre that seems to endlessly repeat our melancholic sense of the loss of origin, the impossible hope of returning to an earlier state that is perhaps most fundamentally represented by the body of the mother' ('Film Bodies/ 154). Though her essay makes no mention of Cronenberg and may even have been written before the film appeared, these words could hardly be more apt to Dead Ringers. 33 As expounded in her book Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. 34 Marcie Frank draws attention to the appropriateness of this term to Dead Ringers, recalling that Freud described the feeling of the infant at the breast as 'oceanic/ She remarks that such 'oceanic feelings7 may be approached through the use of narcotics: a useful connection between the twins7 drug addiction and their suicide (469n6). 35 In the laserdisc/DVD commentary Cronenberg himself draws attention to the 'dereliction7 similarity between Dead Ringers and The Fly. Surveying the scene of devastation in the Mantle clinic, he says: 'I think there's some resonance here of The fly, in a set littered in accumulated debris and junk that represent the state of mind of the person living there, the deterioration of his inner life and of his will, and I think I have several scenes in my movies that correspond to this in one way of another. One of the fascinating things about film as opposed to literature is that the word does have to be made flesh, it has to be made physical, the metaphors have to be physical... So that the disintegrating apartment, the disintegrating lab, are my way of conveying those states of mind.7 36 Rodley ed., 102-3. 37 And perhaps not dizzying enough: the operation may also be seen (as suggested earlier) as the realization of a long-delayed sadomasochistic (homo)sexual encounter between the brothers, with Beverly finally

526 Notes to pages 272-8

38 39 40

41

penetrating Elliot's body in an act whose tenderness is matched by - and even equated to - its 'slashing open' homicidal violence. See Brown. Laserdisc/DVD commentary. Veronneau, 152 (my translation: 'Que ce soit dans 1'appartement des jumeaux ou dans leur salle de consultation, les tons de gris et de bleu qui dominent 1'image et rordonnance cartesienne du mobilier a 1'italienne et des accessoires, creent une imagerie rigoureuse, clinique meme, etouffante certes, qui rend encore plus percutante et perceptible 1'emergence rougeoyante de 1'anormalite'). Italian furniture/ indeed, seems to be a code word for this decor: Beverly tells Claire that he and his brother 'share a taste for Italian furniture/ and later (in a scene where he gratefully rediscovers Claire) he complains that an exhibition of extremely severe modernist furniture-objects presided over by an Italian is 'cold and empty.' Veronneau also says, in a striking comparison, that 'ce melange de controle et de passion' recalls the work of Canadian pianist Glenn Gould (152-3). Later, when the situation has become more fraught and Elliot has begun to devote himself to the rehabilitation of Beverly and their relationship, the television is tuned to a daytime soap opera where a daughter is telling her mother she cannot bear to stick with her marriage another day (the mother replies, 'Every relationship has its ups and downs, dear'). This detail recalls the scene of Beverly's script-reading with Claire: these peripheral narrative fragments pastiche the concerns of the central narrative.

Chapter 11: Naked Lunch 1 See Silverberg, 118. The book was originally published in France by Olympia Press as The Naked Lunch, and retained this title in British editions. For the first - and all subsequent - American editions, Grove Press changed the title to Naked Lunch. Burroughs doesn't seem to have cared whether the definite article was used or not, and there is thus no 'official' correct title for the book. The film uses the version without the article, and I will adopt that usage for both book and film. Burroughs's first novel also has a titular anomaly: it was first published as Junkie, but in later editions became Junky, the title by which it is now usually known. 2 Rodleyed.,161. 3 Burroughs's first book, Junky, was signed with the name ('Lee' was also Burroughs's mother's maiden name). William Lee is also the name of the protagonist of Burroughs's second (unfinished) novel, Queer. In diaries and routines that Burroughs was writing down at a certain stage when he was

Notes to pages 278-88 527 struggling towards some kind of framework for his material, he systematically uses William Lee as a central character and explicit alter ego for the author: see esp. 'Lee's Journals7 in Interzone (63-95). This is as close as Lee gets in Burroughs's writings to the stature he assumes in the film. Lee also pops up repeatedly in his fragmentary Naked Lunch form in the subsequent 'Nova Trilogy/ 4 At a joint press conference with Cronenberg held when the movie was released, Burroughs said: 'I wouldn't expect to see any more than a tiny fraction [of the book] on film - couldn't expect to see' (television program The Making of Naked Lunch'). 5 'Ginsberg Notes,' from 'Lee's Journals,' Interzone, 127. 'Cutting off finger joint' refers to the time in 1939 when Burroughs cut off the joint of a little finger with a knife in order to impress a man he was hopelessly smitten with. See Morgan, 72-6, and also 'The Finger,' Interzone, 13-17, where the same event is narrated in the same words, fictionally, about Lee, who is now in love with 'a girl.' Huncke is Herbert Huncke, a longtime fellowjunky and friend of Burroughs. 6 All quotations from Queer, xiv-xxii. 7 Ibid., xix, xxi. 8 See any of Cronenberg's early interviews for conformation of this - e.g., Beard and Handling in The Shape of Rage (159-98), where many of the selfcharacterizations discussed here are to be found. For a good account of Cronenberg's background and early career, see Peter Morris, David Cronenberg: A Delicate Balance. 9 Rodley ed., 52,110,16. 10 Ibid., 110. 11 In 1984, as Best Director, for Videodrome. This signalled a turning-point in Cronenberg's institutional acceptance in Canada. After this, he received an art-gallery retrospective in 1987, an invitation for Dead Ringers to open the Toronto Film Festival, and a subsequent second Genie for the same film. Naked Lunch itself garnered Cronenberg's only Best Picture Genie to date. 12 TV program 'The Making of Naked Lunch/ 13 Lolita was published in 1958, Naked Lunch by Olympia Press in France in 1959 and then by Grove Press in the United States in 1962. 14 Interview in the TV program 'The Making of Naked Lunch.' '[T]hey were both aliens - you know, Nabokov literally, because he was a Russian who got transplanted to America and had to write in a foreign language, namely English; and Burroughs, because he was born an alien who had to write in a foreign language, namely American. And I think that sort of outsiderness, even though it manifested itself in very different ways, drew me to it.'

528 Notes to pages 288-302 15 See Beard and Handling, 194-5. 16 Burroughs, Naked Lunch, 131-3. The passage occurs in the 'Ordinary Men and Women7 section as a speech by Benway. 17 In a passage of this 'routine' omitted in the film, this jelly-like substance is described as 'un-Differentiated Tissue/ a kind of wr-tissue that metamorphoses into any cell-type required - an idea taken up in the 'radical' plastic surgery of Rabid. See chapter 4, n2. 18 TV program 'The Making of Naked Lunch/ 19 Ibid. 20 Jaehne, 25. 21 I include not only the fragments and letters of the time but the entirety of the 'Nova Trilogy' in this category. Although they were augmented and subjected to Burroughs's 'cut-up' and other fragmenting and transforming operations, the basic materials for these books came originally from the great mass of writing in the mid-1950s (most of it in Tangiers) from which Naked Lunch was somewhat arbitrarily extracted. Burroughs often described this large pile of manuscript material as his 'Word Hoard' (which was also at one stage a working title for what was eventually published as Naked Lunch). 22 TV program The Making of Naked Lunch/ 23 This is the title of one of the sections of Naked Lunch (206-9), and also of Eric Mottram's book-length study of Burroughs. 24 Rodleyed.,163. 25 Miles, 63. 26 The Soft Machine, 91-2. 27 'Lee's Journals/ Interzone, 94. 28 Letter to Allen Ginsberg, 11 September 1959, from Paris (Letters, 424-5). The two chapters of Naked Lunch are 'Hassan's Rumpus Room' (74-83) and 'A.J/s Annual Party' (88-103). 29 Letter of 19 October 1957, from Tangiers (Letters, 372-3). 30 The Ticket That Exploded, 8-13. 31 Especially Griinberg, who has written a book on Burroughs ('A la recherche d'un corps,' langage et silence dans Voeuvre de William Burroughs [Le Seuil, 1979]) as Well as one on Cronenberg (plus a book-length interview with the director). See particularly in David Cronenberg (1992) the sections 'C'etait ecrit' (9-22) and 'Le virus' (27-46). 32 See, among many testimonies, the introduction to Queer, xix. 33 Queer, xix-xx. The immediately ensuing passage points a connection to the story 'Exterminator!' and to the first scenes of the film: 'I remember a dream from this period: I worked as an exterminator in Chicago, in the late 1930's, and lived in a rooming house on the near North Side.'

Notes to pages 303-14 529 34 Letter of 28 October 1957, from Tangiers; Letters, 375. 35 'I truly do suspect some kind of colossal con': Lee says this to Hank and Martin when they confront him with Naked Lunch manuscript materials he has written but claims he has never seen before. 36 Naked Lunch, 223. 37 This passage actually appears twice in Naked Lunch with only minor differences (53-4 and 108-9) - an indication of how disorganized the original manuscript, the selection process, and the editing process all were. The first occurrence, the one used in the film, is from the section 'The Black Meat' and is described by Burroughs's own editorial note as having been written in a state of Yage-intoxication. It appears twice in the film as well - the second time as a muffled recitation by Lee during the seduction of Joan Frost. Clearly it is associated with 'drugged' writing and in both cases accompanies transgression (shooting Joan Lee, sex with Joan Frost). Lee has earlier told Martin: 'I gave up writing when I was ten. Too dangerous/ Miles remarks in passing (87) that the passage is 'a follow-on from a routine in Junkie/ so it may indeed date from an earlier period and this in turn may suggest a period of writing inactivity equivalent to the film's depiction of the composition of Naked Lunch as a return to something given up. 38 This was the name given by the film crew to the creature that the Mujahaddin typewriter transforms into during Lee's seduction of Joan Frost: a scuttering crab-legged thing with bucking naked buttocks and a reptilian tail. See Silverberg, 38. 39 Speaking in the TV program The Making of Naked Lunch' of the differences between Burroughs and himself, Cronenberg says, 'His approach to insects is somewhat different from mine, and it figures prominently in the script... [H]e usually uses that as a negative feature - you know, if he says someone has 'blank, insect eyes,' or an 'insect voice,' that's usually meant to mean soulless, inhuman. I sometimes find some kind of attractive otherworldliness about insects...' 40 This scene is echoed later in the 'Interzone' section of the film, when Lee, stoned on 'Black Meat' centipede powder, breathes on a centipede and causes it to fall to the floor. 41 This is a transcription of Burroughs's own experience just before Joan's death as narrated in the introduction to Queer and quoted above. 42 Naked Lunch, 'Black Meat' section, 54. Another Mugwump appearance and description occurs in the 'Hassan's Rumpus Room' section, 74. 43 Silverberg, 90. 44 Although this once-current etymology is not, in fact, truly 'original,' since the word derives from the Algonquin language.

530 Notes to pages 314-25 45 Another instance of the film's bewildering mixture of actuality and imagination. 'Majoun' is a real drug, a kind of hashish paste. It is introduced to Lee as such in the film by Tom Frost. But when Lee is taken to the 'Black Meat7 factory by Hans, clearly what they are consuming is ground-up centipede, which now appears as a majoun paste. The same substance is licked off their fingers by Lee and Joan Frost during the filthy-writing/ sex-blob scene. 46 Joan Burroughs's maiden name was Joan Vollmer. 47 Quoted in Silverberg, 100-1: "'Clark-Nova is a good guy," Cronenberg asserts, "- or at least as close to a good guy as you're going to get in Interzone/" 48 It is, perhaps, in keeping with Ginsberg's homosexuality that the letter to Martin should be written on the Clark-Nova, and with Kerouac's heterosexuality that the one to Hank should be written on the Martinelli. 49 Hassan I Sabbah, or Hasan Sabbah (c. 1050-1124), was the founder of the Ismaili sect of Assassins. Burroughs got an account of the figure from his close friend and collaborator Brion Gysin while he was working on Naked Lunch (cf. Morgan, 305). Their understanding of Sabbah, crucially inaccurate in some aspects, derives from myths dating back at least to the Crusades and may have been filtered through Nietzsche, who quotes the motto approvingly on two occasions (Thus Spake Zarathustra IV, 'The Shadow' and On the Genealogy of Morals, Third Essay, section 24), in the latter case articulating the apocalyptic, anarchistic interpretation of Burroughs. Quite fittingly in the context of Burroughs, the name 'Assassin' comes not from 'Hassan' but from the killers' use of drugs - hashishim. 50 This brutally crude technology in the transgressive transformation of a sensitive object harks back to the Mantle Retractor and the steel operating rods of Dead Ringers - devices that also 'don't seem to be capable of delicate work.' 51 See, e.g., his remarks in 1982: 'I'm basically heterosexual male ... I've talked about admiring Naked Lunch and wanting to do a movie of it. One of the barriers to me of being totally one hundred per cent with William Burroughs is exactly that' (Beard and Handling, 194). 52 TV program The Making of Naked Lunch/ 53 Silverberg, 14. 54 When Lee walks in on her shooting bug-powder into her breast he says, T thought you were through with doing weird stuff; she replies, with a resigned sigh, 'I thought I was too. But I guess I'm not.' 55 Mary Pharr, for example, says she 'has no particularly likable qualities. She is a slatternly tramp who commits adultery with her husband's best friend right in front of Bill' (Pharr and Haas, 38); Judy Davis herself remarks that

Notes to pages 326-38 531

56 57

58

59

60

61

Joan Lee has 'crossed the line and there is no salvation for her' (Silverberg, 78). See Morgan, 416,421, 587, 594. This scene produces an exact reversal of the famous Surrealist sex-confusing moment in Luis Bunuel's Viridiana (1960), which features a cow's teat apprehended as a penis. The Ticket That Exploded, 10-12; ibid., 85-6. In Nova Express (104), there is a reference to 'Controllers of The Ugly Spirit Spinal Fluid/ thus indirectly evoking Mugwumps, who are often 'sipping spinal fluid/ Spinal fluid in turn is a code word for drug and sex pleasure exploited by Control in the bodies of its victims. Thus, also, Mugwumps/drugs/sex are connected to the 'Ugly Spirit' that Burroughs came to believe had shot Joan. All of Burroughs's imagery links up in this fashion eventually. In yet another example, the Vampire women' here reappear in a passage from Nova Express (60), in the following guise: Two Lesbian Agents with glazed faces of grafted penis flesh sat sipping spinal fluid through alabaster straws' establishing another filament between Mugwumps, spinal fluid as a semen-like beverage, and Cronenberg's lesbian Fadela. Tenuous, metamorphic connections like this are typical of the film's reflection of the world of Burroughs's writing. Burroughs reports that this striking phrase, 'you have the look of a sheepkilling dog,' was applied by the father of one of his schoolmates to the young William during his boyhood in St Louis, and understandably made a long-lasting impression (see Bockris, xiv; also Morgan, 32). Another echo of Burroughs's Naked Lunch, which begins with a section in which a protagonist-figure is busted for drugs and questioned by the police, and (sort of) ends in a quasi-pulp-fiction scene in which the same figure escapes after shooting the cops questioning him, now named Hauser and O'Brien. Naked Lunch, Iff. and 209-17. Lee's suits for the film were 'made from authentic 1950s fabric ... purchased at a New York specialty store' by costume designer Denise Cronenberg, who explained, 'You can't get that brown colour any more' (Silverberg, 72).

Chapter 12: M. Butterfly 1 A magazine article published at the time of the film's release reports: 'When he finished Naked Lunch, Cronenberg decided he wanted to direct a script he hadn't written or worked on himself. "Both Dead Ringers and Naked Lunch took three years to make, and I wanted to direct more"' (Collison, 46).

532 Notes to pages 338-45 2 Apart from Hwang's play and the film, there was a large spread in People Magazine (6 August 1988) including interviews with Boursicot and Chin, and a follow-up book telling the tale in depth (Joyce Wadler, Liaison)', also, various actual participants of this story overqualified for The Jerry Springer Show were interviewed with comical solemnity by Barbara Walters on ABC Nightline. 3 Johnson, 40-1. 4 Hwang, 95-6. 5 One magazine piece, which includes interview material with Cronenberg, states that Hwang 'co-wrote the screenplay with' Cronenberg (and that he 'was amenable to changes' to the play); but the onscreen writing credit is solely Hwang's. See Johnson, 41. 6 Cronenberg's own description, in Johnson, 39. 7 See Johnson, 41, where Cronenberg is quoted as saying that he found the play 'very cartoon-like, too didactic and too obvious - attitudes fighting each other.' 8 The most amazing stroke of all is the scene of Song at work in a labour camp in the countryside, where a micro-to-macro-to-micro panorama containing hundreds of extras dotted upon a vast expanse of barren strip mine exhorted by propaganda over a PA system is captured in a single epic sequence-shot, over the end of which is faded up on the soundtrack the music from the opera performance Gallimard is attending in Paris. 9 In a way that seems to me natural, and in common with most other commentators on the film and the play (e.g., Garber, Suner), I will use the feminine pronoun to refer to Song in her female persona (i.e., dressed in women's clothing and speaking in a feminine register) and the masculine pronoun to refer to him in his masculine one (i.e., dressed in men's clothing and speaking in a masculine register). 10 Hwang, 70. 11 Suner (51^) gives a summary of this idea and some of its central sources in the work of prominent postcolonial theorists such as Homi Bhabha and Edward Said. 12 As for child female sexuality - an idea that would have horrified Victorians had they thought of Madame Butterfly and its relatives in that light - latterday narratives such as Nabokov's Lolita or Louis Malle's film Pretty Baby have certainly had their day. One may also point to the ending of Crimes of the Future (where a pre-pubescent girl is to be made pregnant) and the attack on Annabelle at the beginning of Shivers as precedents for Gallimard's 'schoolgirl' fantasy. But the 1997 Lolita was considered morally

Notes to pages 346-56 533

13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21

22

offensive and could not get mainstream North American distribution, and generally speaking the subject is almost taboo now. Hwang, 95,98. Hwang, 17. The text in the film is slightly altered: 'homecoming queen' is changed to 'cheerleader7 and 'he treats her cruelly' is changed to 'he marries her/ Insofar as there might be a related element of physical sadism in the spectacle of Butterfly's seppuku suicide, it is that of the dramatist (and perhaps the viewer), and is entirely disavowed. Hwang, 16-17. The film changes 'huge women' to 'overweight women/ In the film, Gallimard has never encountered Madama Butterfly before and has to have the story explained to him by the woman sitting next to him, Frau Baden. The film is thus able to inform viewers about the Butterfly story even though it has done away with the play's extensive anti-realist exposition of it through sketches that feature Gallimard playing Pinkerton, his friend Marc playing the American Consul Sharpless, and Comrade Chin playing Butterfly's servant Suzuki (a sample line from the latter: 'Girl, he's a loser. What'd he ever give you? Nineteen cents and those ugly DayGlo stockings ... I mean, the guy was a woofer!' [Hwang, 12]). This is the version in the film, only slightly altered from that of the play (Hwang, 22). Ibid., 2. Ibid., 10. There is quite a difference between play and film in depicting the woman with whom Gallimard has his, as he calls it, 'extra-extramarital affair/ Frau Baden, a somewhat older, Germanic woman, resembles Helge, Gallimard's wife in the play; while there his lover, Renee (!), is a healthy, bouncing, sexually aggressive and demystifying Scandinavian, much younger. (Meanwhile Gallimard's wife in the film has retained her German heritage at least insofar as Barbara Sukowa's nationality and accent are concerned, even though she is given a French name, Jeanne.) Frau Baden's characterization continues the dialectic of East and West, male and female, as it is she who is Gallimard's first guide to Madama Butterfly, while the terms in which she is described by the David Hemblen intelligence officer (That woman is built like the Forbidden City: everyone can look, but no-one gets inside') simultaneously emphasize her exotic/female mystery and otherness and her status as a potential conquest. At the same time, in her blonde GermanicEuropean strength and forthrightness she stands in the most emphatic contrast with the dark, petite mystifications of Song Liling. This is dialogue from the film. For the version in the play, see Hwang, 44-6.

534 Notes to pages 356-65 23 Very early, or more minor, Cronenberg characters had certainly shown the depth of the filmmaker's disdain for masculine overconfidence, however one thinks of St Luc in Shivers, for example, or the absurd make-out artists in Rabid. 24 Among which we may number Videodrome. 25 Beverly Mantle cannot strictly be said to be 'womanless,' of course. But there is a strong sense that he is tagging along in Elliot's libidinous foraging expeditions, and that he feels cut off from women. Having to share women with Elliot means not really being able to connect with them, especially since no-connection is one of the aims of Elliot's dating strategy. At any rate, Claire arrives in his life with almost exactly the same force as Ronnie arrives in Seth's - or Song in Gallimard's. 26 Johnson, 39; Collison, 47. 27 This refers to the naive notion (expressed by Gallimard's wife) that the buried ideological content of Madama Butterfly - and by extension that of all other aestheticized expressions of cultural objects - is non-existent or unimportant. After hearing the scenes from the opera and being lectured by Song about its pernicious subtext, Gallimard discusses his experience with his wife: 'GALLIMARD: Do you know the Chinese hate Madame Butterfly? JEANNE: She hated it but she performed it anyway? GALLIMARD: They hate it because the white man gets the girl. Sour grapes if you ask me. JEANNE: Why can't they just see it as a piece of beautiful music?' 28 The text of the play reads at this point, 'nothing but... a woman' (Hwang, 92). 29 The motto inscribed upon the sword with which Madame Butterfly commits suicide. 30 Butterfly's most famous solo number, the Act II aria Mn bel di vedremo which expresses the heroine's belief that her husband will return one day carries most of the opera's burden in the film, and is prominently featured both during Gallimard's attendance at a performance at the Paris Opera and during the final suicide scene. This is perhaps rather odd, since specific mention is made both in the play and the film script of Song's performance of 'the Death Scene from Madame Butterfly/ which is never actually heard in the film. It is doubly odd that the Death Scene is not used anywhere, including during Gallimard's Death Scene, when its music is even more grand and overwhelming than that of the aria in question, and more thematically appropriate. (Perhaps it is because the aria expresses a belief that the false lover will return, and belief in an impossible fulfilment is central to the film; or perhaps it was a problem of cutting and fitting the music to the length and specific shots of the film.) The play makes rather extensive use of the opera, with a number of specific moments directed to be played on

Notes to pages 369-79 535

31 32

33 34 35

36

37 38

speakers during the action, and explicit quotation and translation of lines of the libretto. In the film, all this has been reduced largely to the one aria, although during her first performance as Butterfly, Song does, rather oddly, sing part of the Act I love duet (without a partner). Hwang, 54. The point about the gender contrasts of Song and Chin is also made by Suner, who describes Song as 'a man who tries to be feminine' and Chin as 'a woman who tries not to be feminine7 (58). Citing among other things its hostile characterization of Comrade Chin (Song calls her 'what passes for a woman in modern China7 [Hwang, 49]), Marjorie Garber also describes Hwang7s play as 'intermittently antifeminist and homophobic, ridiculing the female cross-dresser, Miss Chin, while it elevates Gallimard's plight to the plane of high drama. The other women in the play, like Renee and Helga, are likewise presented in caricature rather than in sympathetic depth7 (141). Such a privileging of masculine ideals and productions of femininity is in keeping with 'only a man knows how a woman should act.7 Hwang, 63. Suner, 55. See Johnson, 41: 'Cronenberg stresses that it is both a romance and "a subversion of romantic love - you have the emotion, but you also have the tools to examine it, to dig under and around it and through it.777 From left field comes, also, the traditional Chinese narrative invoked by the 'original7 Song, Shi Pei Pu, to explain to Bernard Boursicot her 'disguise7 as a man: 'The Shadow of the Willow,7 also known as 'The Story of the Butterfly.7 In this story, often played by Shi in the theatre, the gifted daughter of a wealthy man impersonates her slower brother in order to get an education, and is fallen in love with by a male schoolmate who cannot at first understand the strange feelings 'he7 evokes: she returns his love, and in the end both kill themselves because they are unable to marry See Wadler, 39-40. TV program 'The Making of Naked Lunch/ Johnson, 41. And this is strikingly similar to Cronenberg's description of the crash-sex cult in Crash: '[T]hese people ... have taken it upon [themselves] to invent new meaning for themselves, and to reinvent sex, to reinvent death, to reinvent love - that's really what I think the movie's about7 (voice-over commentary to the laserdisc/DVD issue of Crash).

Chapter 13: Crash 1 See Rodley 1996: 'RODLEY: After the big-budget location extravaganza of M. Butterfly, was Crash intended as a back-to-basics Cronenberg movie? CRONENBERG: Absolutely. That was very conscious7 (8).

536 Notes to pages 379-95 2 Ibid., 11. Cronenberg's voice-over comments to the laserdisc issue of the film detail the many instances of available-light location shooting. 3 For convenience, I will refer to the central character of Crash (both book and film) as 'James/ and to the author of the novel as 'Ballard.' 4 Rodley 1996,8. 'RODLEY: Seeing Crash I was immediately reminded of very early Cronenberg. Shivers and Rabid mainly. Like those two, it is uncompromising, very stark and very bleak. CRONENBERG: I don't disagree. I was also thinking of the Daryl Revok character in Scanners. Vaughan in Crash does seem very much like my own creatures, who were emerging at the same time as Ballard was writing his creatures/ 5 Hence, where negative reactions to Ballard's novel take the form of disgust at its perversity and pornography, critics of the film often voice a mixture of disapproval of its sensational content and bored impatience with its slowness and blankness, and seem vaguely puzzled as to whether to be censors or philis tines. 6 Most of these terms occur so frequently that a citation is impracticable; but the solitary 'bloody eucharist' occurs on 157. 7 The phrase is Cronenberg's (laserdisc commentary). 8 See the typically candid and undiplomatic discussion of Taylor's physical presence and appeal in the first edition of David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema, also written in the early-to-mid-1970s: 'But she has been unable to maintain her looks - in the way of Garbo, Hepburn or Bette Davis - or to adjust them to time. Thus her growing alienation from the appearance of the age, something that she once epitomised' (554). It is important to realize that the Elizabeth Taylor that Vaughan wants to collide violently with in a sex-death is not the Elizabeth Taylor of A Place in the Sun, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, or Butter field 8 (all made when she was in her twenties), but of Who's Afraid of Virginia Wool/? (1966), Boom (1968), and Zee & Co (1971). 9 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 71. 10 The omnipresence of semen in Ballard's Crash, and its relative exclusion from Cronenberg's, is a point much dwelt upon in Harpold's essay on the film. 11 This speech quotes from Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition, a collection of various short chapters and sections originally published in different journals and broadsheets, the whole so prophetic of Crash (published shortly afterwards) as to constitute a kind of warm-up. The chapter The University of Death/ in the section Transliterated Pudenda/ has the following passage: Talbot's belief - and this is confirmed by the logic of the scenario - is that

Notes to pages 395-9 537

12 13 14 15

16

17

18 19

automobile crashes play very different roles from the ones we assign them. Apart from its ontological function, redefining the elements of space and time in terms of our most potent consumer durable, the car crash may be perceived unconsciously as a fertilizing rather than a destructive event - a liberation of sexual energy - mediating the sexuality of those who have died with an intensity impossible in any other form: James Dean and Jayne Mansfield, Camus and the late President. In the eucharist of the simulated auto-disaster we see the transliterated pudenda of Ralph Nader, our nearest image of the blood and body of Christ' (29). The published screenplay runs to a mere 62 pages, a high proportion of it description rather than dialogue; but the finished film cuts at least a third of the script. The script describes a juxtaposition of an erect nipple and a wing-rivet, but this does not appear in the film. Cronenberg, deadpan, in the laserdisc commentary: This is a very good introduction of James Spader -1 think it's one of the more interesting introductions of a major character in recent films/ In his jacket note accompanying the laserdisc of the film, J. Hoberman captures this quality exactly: 'At once dazed and hyperalert, she is forever looking sidelong off camera. No sooner does her husband initiate a caress than her eyes slide away from him like marbles on a table/ 'He died on the bonnet of my car, his blood sprayed through the fractured windshield across my face and chest. The firemen who later cut me from the crushed cabin of my car assumed that I was bleeding to death from a massive open-heart wound' (Ballard, 20). The published screenplay too says that 'the propelled man's blood spatters James's face and chest' (7), but this is not what the film presents. It would seem that in Cronenberg road accidents in particular are never just accidents. Somebody is always at fault, and whoever it is is not the principal victim of the accident. Not only James Ballard in Crash and The Dead Zone's somnolent truck driver but also the confused family father dithering in the middle of the road at the beginning of Rabid are all examples of drivers whose inattention causes accidents the most serious consequences of which are to others. This woman is James's lover Renata, present both in the novel and in the published screenplay but excised from the film. See Ballard, 69. The published filmscript (19) specifies 'a set of route maps, a mildly pornographic novel, a polaroid of Renata sitting in the car near a water reservoir with her breasts exposed/

538 Notes to pages 400-5 20 Laserdisc commentary. 21 Recall Cronenberg's description of Vaughan in these terms to Rodley, cited in n5 above. 22 Ballard, 171,19,110. The novel's Vaughan is a former television pop-scientist, whose casually aggressive proto-punk appearance and style garnered him a short vogue. Cronenberg, feeling perhaps that with James's role as a TV filmmaker he already had quite as much reflexivity as he wanted, makes Vaughan merely a former 'specialist in international computerized traffic systems/ 23 There is even a hint here of Dr Benway, when Vaughan's apparently solicitous interest in the injuries of his 'patients' is ultimately revealed to be lubricious, and part of a grand plan to produce injuries. 24 We hear nothing of this questioning, and though James says to Catherine that 'Vaughan isn't interested in pedestrians/ there is no indication of what happened, or why Vaughan should be so obviously affected. 25 They are in the car wash because of the blood James has found on the doorhandle, and on the wheels as well. 'We must have driven through something' is his explanation. But it is difficult to see how what they might have driven through at the crash scene (and we have seen them doing it) could have deposited anything on the doorhandle. Could this have a connection with the pedestrian-victim the police were questioning Vaughan about in the previous scene? The question is impossible to answer, and in fact even difficult to ask; but the aura of murky unpleasantness is certainly there. 26 Except that (unfortunately, in my view) they are not real strings, but those of a synthesizer-orchestra. Cronenberg's laserdisc commentary outlines the budgetary reasons for the score's confinement to a handful of instruments and remarks that they rather happily recalled the earliest days of his collaboration with Shore (which dates back to The Brood). For most of the time this diminution is no hardship at all, since the frequent electric guitars and occasional wind instruments that constitute most of the cues are extremely effective. 27 In the laserdisc commentary, Cronenberg offers this gloss (referring to the scene of the nighttime traffic accident and Vaughan's 'posing' of Catherine amidst the wrecks): 'And really this scene is partly about Vaughan's attempt to gradually ease Catherine towards her crash, towards having a real crash, so that she could then understand them, and really fuse with the rest of the people in the group, including her own husband ... For a lot of people, it's really his wife's character, Catherine, who is the entree into the film, because she stays outside the group much longer. In fact a lot of the movement of the film is Catherine trying to become part of the group, or not, and

Notes to pages 406-21 539

28

29

30 31

32

33

34 35 36

also looking for her own car crash, which would allow her admission to the group/ From none other than the filmmaker himself: the voice explaining the release procedure to James and Catherine (we cannot see him) belongs to Cronenberg. In the laserdisc commentary Cronenberg explains his presence on purely utilitarian grounds - change of plans, nobody to dub the voice, etc. It remains appropriate, however, that it is the filmmaker who releases Vaughan7 s symbolic vehicle of destruction to the couple. From Cronenberg's laserdisc commentary on the sex between James and Vaughan: 'I think ... by this time everybody in the movie is, what they're trying to do, is move beyond sexuality at all, to some other place/ Rodley 1996,10. Another evocation is of the scene from Naked Lunch between another pair of machines symbolizing the genders, in which the (male) Clark-Nova bugwriter 'eats the rump7 of the (female) Martinelli in a murderous attack whose humorous overtones do not affect the fact that the 'male7 kills the 'female/ It may seem odd to describe Max Renn7s final zombified, emptied-out state as one of 'illumination7 and 'saturation/ But I would say that there is one big thing that survives in Max at the end of Videodrome - one thing that in fact constitutes him - and that is his (emotional) apprehension that he is a dysfunctional and impossible person. Smith, 19. But there is no doubt Ballard does now feel that the book is 'a cautionary tale7 - he says so not only his 1995 preface but also in an interview contained in the laserdisc's appendix. There he says: 'I don't endorse everything either in the novel or the film of Crash. To some extent, both are cautionary tales. They warn against the sort of nightmare marriage between sex and technology that is being celebrated within our minds every day of the year/ Again, a partial exception is Scanners. Notwithstanding its comprehensive origin in Ballard7s novel (see 174-81). There is a recognizable relation in the book between the Jayne Mansfield crash and the crash Vaughan is trying to engineer with a latterly-moregone-to-sleaze Elizabeth Taylor. Needless to say, the subsequent crashdeath of Princess Diana - glamour queen chased by paparazzi and the object of quasi-religious postmortem cults - is so astonishingly like one of Crash's sex-crash fantasies as to beggar belief. Salman Rushdie, with whom Cronenberg had conducted an extended interview in 1995 (some of which suggested to the filmmaker the idea for eXistenZ), entitled his New Yorker piece on Diana's death simply 'Crash/

540 Notes to pages 424-5 Chapter 14: eXistenZ 1 Iain Sinclair says this in his BFI Modern Classics book on Crash (12) apparently on the basis of Crash and Naked Lunch, although he also mentions Stephen King's The Dead Zone. This seems at the least a gross exaggeration: two modernist cult-canon novels and a mass paperback best-seller in twenty years (quite a distance behind the adaptive activities of, say, Orson Welles, at whom nobody hurls stones on this account). This is just one manifestation of the scarcely veiled hostility towards later Cronenberg that recurs throughout Sinclair's book. Sinclair's view regarding Naked Lunch is that Burroughs provided the blood, sweat, and tears, and Cronenberg came along and 'purchased ... the Naked Lunch franchise. The name, the marketing opportunities.' (17) Adapters are hacks and predators, while writers are true suffering artists. Obviously this is an attitude that directly threatens Cronenberg's cherished and often-insisted-upon title of creative artist - and it would sting all the more since Cronenberg's artistic heroes, too, are all writers. 2 Rodley uses this phrase to describe the shooting of Shivers (43). 3 This again is from Sinclair's book on Crash (36). Sinclair quotes rather extensively from Petit, whom he seems to regard as the right kind of filmmaker. 4 Along with the 1992 film Shadow of the Wolf, which also cost $31 million. See Wise and also Amsden. 5 'An Interview with David Cronenberg,' in Scoffield, 102. 6 One might add to this list the made-for-television movie Virtual Nightmare (2000), which is Australian though masquerading as American. 7 Dark City is courageous - in fact rather astonishing - in its unwillingness to back off from the proposition that the reality we experience is entirely constructed, inauthentic, and 'false.' On the other hand, the hero, having defeated the predatory aliens and taken over the business of artificially redesigning the desolate asteroid of 'the world' through his special mental talents (an anticipation of The Matrix here), constitutes his girlfriend with a false happy memory, the planet with a false beach and sunset, and more or less sits back to enjoy it all. This feels something like a happy ending, even if it isn't one. And, again like The Matrix, at least there is a real here, even if it is a desert. 8 In the original, 'dans la "banlieue" d'Hollywood.' Griinberg (2000), 166. 9 David Cronenberg's eXistenZ; a novelisation by John Luther Novak (nom de plume of Christopher Priest) adds some embellishments to the events and the dialogue; David Cronenberg's eXistenZ; a graphic novel, illustrations by

Notes to pages 425-30 541

10

11 12

13

14

Sean Scoffield contains the complete dialogue from the film with no additions. This is something of an exaggeration, since, as Cronenberg remarks during Katherine Jeans's documentary The Invisible Art of Carol Spier, and also in his interview accompanying the graphic novel (Scoffield 103), there is not actually much CGI in the film relative to the average Hollywood sci-fi or 'effects7 film. At the same time, notwithstanding Cronenberg's assertion that 'you won't say, Oh my god, what a great computer effect' (ibid.), this is the kind of movie where effects are routinely assumed to be computergenerated. When the word 'eXistenZ' is employed without italics, I am referring to the game; when it is italicized I refer to the film. This is a point laboured, as well, by the Cahiers du cinema interviewers Joyard and Tesson in their conversation with Cronenberg ('L'aventure interieure'). They suggest that the opening 'flight' scenes are 'classical' and 'Hitchcockian' (70). Griinberg (2000), 166. '[N]ous decouvrirons, ebahis, que si cette histoire n'a pas de fin, elle n'a - et c'est beaucoup plus rare - pas de debut!' ('We will discover, astounded, that if this story doesn't have an ending, it also - and this is much rarer - doesn't have an beginning!' My translation.) See also Cronenberg's 1999 interview with Richard Porton for Cineaste, entitled 'The Film Director as Philosopher/ After Cronenberg's assertion that his films are 'bodycentric,' this exchange takes place: CINEASTE: Do these preoccupations come out of reading contemporary philosophy? CRONENBERG: I think it's just a personal awareness that's developed in my life. I do read a lot of philosophy. In fact, the stuff I read before I write now is almost all philosophy. Schopenhauer, for example - The World as Will and Representation. You could almost give this movie [eXistenZ] that title. It's about will and re-presentation. CINEASTE: The title seems Heideggerian. CRONENBERG: Yeah ... it's a Heideggerian reference. [Jude Law's speech just quoted], that's Heidegger in a nutshell. It refers to his description of what life is, being thrown into the world. Cronenberg's long-standing interest in philosophy seems to have revived, or grown, in recent years. His eXistenZ DVD commentary mentions Schopenhauer as well as Heidegger, and in his interview with Xavier Mendik in 1998 ('Logic, Creativity and (Critical) Misinterpretations,' 2) he talks about having read a lot of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein lately.

542 Notes to pages 431-41 15 The Gay Science, para. 373. In Guignon and Pereboom, Existentialism: Basic Writings, 158. 16 Porton,6. 17 This is clearly not the case in The Dead Zone, where the transformation that overcomes Johnny Smith is unsought and strongly resisted. In other films Stereo, Shivers, Rabid, Scanners - the individuals whose world is transformed are the experimental subjects of the true existential inventors, the scientists, and themselves have exercised no will to transform. 18 Contrast what happens in The Thirteenth Floor, which presents the viewer with a similar experience in undermining the 'base' level from which the characters enter into a virtual world by eventually revealing it as itself another virtual world - only to construct a third, still higher, level where, however, we can at last find a stable base reality. 19 See Joyard and Tesson, 68. 'Quand Allegra affirme que le monde du jeu s'agite dans une sorte de transe, et qu'a 1'interieur de ce cadre, les possibilites offertes sont infinies, elle remarque aussitot que les attentes du public et des financiers sont tres limitees. Tel est mon sentiment sur le cinema actuel/ ('When Allegra asserts that the world of games is in a sort of trance, and that inside her game the possibilities are infinite, she is saying at the same time that the expectations of the public and of producers are very limited. That is my feeling about current cinema/ My translation.) 20 Crash laserdisc director's commentary. It is a statement Cronenberg has made in one form or another many times. 21 'David Cronenberg interviews Salman Rushdie/ Cronenberg talks about the interview as a starting-point for what would become eXistenZ on numerous occasions (one example is in Porton, 4-5). 22 'Gristle Gun' is the name Cronenberg and the crew used to describe the weapon. My first instinct was to call it a 'Bone Gun' (and that works well with the fact that it is associated more than once with a dog), but I will use Cronenberg's term throughout. 23 It must be noted, though, that Cronenberg specifically disagrees with the 'drug addict' interpretation. See the Porton interview in Cineaste, where apropos of Philip K. Dick and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch) Cronenberg says, There's not much of the drug element in eXistenZ/ and the following exchange ensues: CINEASTE: If the Allegra character isn't actually addicted to game playing, she certainly has a tremendous emotional involvement in it. CRONENBERG: That's different, she's allowed to. After all, it's her game, she created it. Allegra is not just another game player. She's an artist and

Notes to pages 442-50 543 this is her creation; she's worried about it being destroyed. She's allowed to be a little more obsessed. She's not an addict, since she has a rational and emotional reason for wanting to keep playing that game. A movie about the addictive nature of game playing would be completely different. (7)

24

25 26

27

28

This doesn't explain all the drug-suggestive aspects just detailed - which Porton seems to have picked up on as well. The word is actually used (by Kiri Vinokur) to describe the contract that is out on Geller, even though there is nothing explicitly Islamic in the film, and any religious overtones that exist arise more from the games community, with its church meetings and its description of Geller as a 'games goddess.' This exact phrase occurs in his 1999 interview with Blackwelder. Joyard and Tesson, 68. Tour le role d'inventeur du jeu, j'ai d'abord pense a un personnage masculin. Mon souhait etait que le film parle clairement de cinema, et done, que le heros puisse etre identifie a un metteur en scene. Dans ce cas, m'imaginer a la place d'une femme devenait difficile. Mais au moment de 1'ecriture, et sans que je ne m'explique pourquoi je trouvais cela naturel, le jeune homme s'est transforme en une femme sure d'elle et seduisante: Allegra. Dans le film, le resultat de ce renversement est interessante par ce qu'il cree d'etrange et de troublant, par la panoplie de gestes singuliers qu'il suppose. C'est 1'homme - Pikul - qui est vierge. II est timide, apeure. La femme possede 1'experience de plugs et lui fait subir son premier 'branchement/ son depucelage necessaire au passage dans le monde virtuel du jeu. Le contraire aurait ete banal.' (My translation. As with all of Cronenberg's French interviews, this one was was conducted in English, then translated into French for publication - and now back into English again. I am not sure how close it is to what Cronenberg actually said.) Cronenberg, in the DVD commentary: There's an element of the seductive, the seducer, in any artist. It's something that's part of the game; that is you are trying to seduce your audience ... And so [Geller]'s very strongly seductive throughout the whole movie, not only sexually but in terms of freedom.' eXistenZ DVD director's commentary. In context: 'A lot of people have commented on the homosexual undertones, or maybe I should say overtones, of this scene, and the one coming up between Gas and Pikul, and some people actually asked me if I noticed that myself, [chortle] Obviously, this movie, although it's very chaste in terms of actual nudity or sexuality of the normal kind, is on another level quite obscene - in a metaphysical

544 Notes to pages 452-8

29

30

31

32 33 34 35 36

way - in that it has many, many metaphorical references to all kinds of sexuality. And so in one sense there's sex happening in every scene/even though it's not what most people would consider to be sex. So the answer is, yes, I was pretty aware of most of the sexuality in the movie, and I believe that our actors were as well/ See also the 1999 interview with Rob Blackwelder, where Cronenberg refers to 'the metaphorical sex, which is all this plugging in and that sort of stuff/ At one point, Cronenberg actively considered this option. From the DVD commentary: 'I did shoot a version of this ending in which the Chinese waiter is shot by our revolutionary couple. People got very upset, I was kind of touched to see they really didn't want the Chinese waiter to die again. And after I thought about it I thought that they were right. In the script originally I didn't have him shot, and then when we were on the set I thought, well, I could try it and see if it works, and I'll have it as a possibility. But it really didn't work, for some reason it just unbalanced the ending of the movie, and so it was much better to leave the whole thing as a question mark at the end/ 'Becoming Inorganic/ 559. De Lauretis continues by saying the bioport 'is not a metaphor but a replacement [for the anus and the vagina], signalling a new sexual economy of the human body/ This new, Virtual/ sexual economy, initiated by a woman artist, is imbricated with the element of play, and de Lauretis greets this development with relative approval because 'the film uncouples sexuality from nature, from anatomy, from gender, from reproduction, and from the binding force of Eros, and at the same time carries it back to the body' (568). Many commentators have noted the connection. Quick-eyed Teresa de Lauretis (566) also notes in Gas's toolchest the can of 'XE-60' (= WD-40, an industrial lubricant that is in some questionable circles a rather dangerous substitute for KY Jelly). See chapter 11, p. 301, above. See chapter 11, p. 314, above. See p. 506 n. 5. Porton, 7. In the DVD commentary, Cronenberg says: 'Most of the things in this movie are labelled, and that's part of the "gamepack" idea, that everything in the film is actually generic, and not specific/ And later on in the commentary, he adds: 'We don't have any stripes, polkadots, it's all very simple, flat kinds of colours ... It was an intuitive idea but I can justify it: it gives an idea of the blockiness of current gaming, if you're going to animate somebody who has a striped shirt it's going to take a lot more computer memory to

Notes to pages 461-3 545 move that shirt through three dimensions than if it was a simple plain colour. And there's a kind of blockiness to current computer games, which is of course changing/ Cronenberg explains this also as a byproduct of a strategy of designing a near-future where he didn't want to have to redesign everything, and decided to proceed 'by subtraction' from the present: 'So for example, in the motel room, you don't have a television set and you don't have a telephone, because except for the pinkfone there are no telephones in the movie, there are no television sets, in fact there are no screens, no computers of any kind - which might seem odd for a movie that's about gaming - in fact there are no running shoes in the movie, no ties, and no patterns on the clothes ... [W]e don't have any jewellery, no watches, no earrings, no necklaces and so on. It gives the movie a very austere look.' 37 Griinberg (2000), 170 (my translation). The original: SG: Que pourrions nous dire d'eXistenZ? C'est un scenario original, et pourtant beaucoup de gens y ont vu la deuxieme partie de Videodrome. DC: Une suite, une mouture. SG: Je dirais la deuxieme partie parce qu'il ne s'agit pas vraiment d'une suite et ce n'est pas du tout un remake, meme si 1'on est un peu sur le meme terrain. Mais 1'on sent qu'il y a aussi toute 1'experience que vous avez accumulee depuis Videodrome. DC: C'est vrai. Le film a effectivement une structure assez radicale, et un style aussi. 38 Although eXistenZ was conceived and largely written as much as three years before Crash (cf. Porton, 7), obviously details like this could have been added later. Certainly the specific Cras/z-related humour here seems like a response to the British hysteria over the film (see Barker et al, The Crash Controversy for an account of this phenomenon). Automobile and vehicle names are not new in Cronenberg. Max Renn is the NSU Rennmax, a German motorcycle from the 1950s, and Veronica Quaife can only refer to Quaife racing and aftermarket automobile parts. Cronenberg has made a racing movie, Fast Company (about drag-strip racing), and during the 1990s worked on a project called Red Cars (about Ferrari). Apropos of the latter, he told Griinberg in 2000 that of all his unmade projects he had not 'totally renounced' this one: It's the only project that I've written myself, and that I would really like to make' (173^1). Jeans's documentary The Invisible Art of Carol Spier, prowling around the Game Emporium set during shooting, reveals another game (not visible in the film itself): 'Biological Parent.' 39 Cronenberg told Cineaste that Jennifer Jason Leigh was actually suffering

546 Notes to pages 467-71

40

41

42

43

from stomach flu at this point in the shoot, and, trouper that she is, decided to 'work with it' as part of the scene (Porton, 8). The fact that, as Jeans's film The Invisible Art of Carol Spier makes clear, there are cost savings in this approach is, I think, irrelevant. The important thing is that there is no attempt in these scenes to totally conceal the re-use of sets, but rather an effort to turn this strategy to surreal or hallucinatory aesthetic ends. It is revealed in Jeans's The Invisible Art of Carol Spier as being a last-minute improvisation while shooting. The cast and crew were crammed into a tiny room that caused much physical discomfort for everyone. But the very fact that the area was so cramped must surely have given rise to the wonderful tableau-like 'establishing shot' of the scene. Even the filmmaker seems to be destabilized. During the scene at the Country Gas Station when Geller is outside the building running her fingers over the walls and gas pumps, Cronenberg remarks in the DVD commentary: 'Here is a scene which perhaps is mysterious the first time you see it, and then once you understand the movie is very very straightforward. Here is a woman who is looking at her creation, she has created this world, and she is admiring the completeness of it, the textures of it, the sounds of it, the smell of it, my god, the gas, you can actually smell it, and it's a created world/ Except that Geller hasn't created this world. She has created the game eXistenZ, which they have not yet begun to play. She is in a game world, as we later understand (and this must be why Cronenberg is talking about 'the first time you see the movie') - the game transCendenZ - but that was not created by her, it was created by Yevgeny Nourish; and in the world where she is playing that game she is a shy game devotee or a Realist assassin, but not a game designer. So in what sense can she be 'looking at her own creation'? This is to overlook the modernist Nabokov, whose narrative-nestings and moments of mise en abyme are echoed in eXistenZ, as pointed out by Mark Browning in his essay 'Thou, the Player of the Game, Art God: Nabokovian Game-playing in Cronenberg's eXistenZ/ This valuable essay is the only critical commentary to look carefully at the relationship between Cronenberg's work and that of one of his oldest and most frequently professed models.

Chapter 15: Spider 1 Fiennes became attached to McGrath's script at an early stage and wanted passionately to play the central role. It was his involvement that attracted

Notes to pages 474-9 547

2 3

4

5

6

7 8

9

Cronenberg's attention when Fiennes's agent sent him a copy of the script. This is related in many sources, but see for example Blackwelder ('"Spider" Man7) and the 'extra7 documentary on the DVD, In the Beginning: How Spider Came to Be. See Keith Phipps, Interview with David Cronenberg/ 'When I got the screenplay, it had the ending that you've seen - that Spider was not going to commit suicide. Obviously, in thinking of it for the screen, that was [producer] Catherine Bailey's responsibility ... I think she might have told him, "Patrick, it you have him kill himself, no one will come see this movie." But that wasn't my doing, and I felt that that was the good ending' (Phipps). Blackwelder (2003). In the DVD commentary, Cronenberg elaborates on the same point: 'I felt that in terms of cinema, Spider being that good with words and that self-aware, self-conscious and manipulative, I felt that it really wouldn't work in the movie. In the first draft of the script, Patrick had a lot of voice-over, with Spider reading, basically, from the novel. And I said to him, "Patrick, these are really two different Spiders. The Spider that you've created for the cinema cannot possibly say these things, cannot possibly think the things that the Spider in the book did." So we got rid of the voice-over.' Although Cronenberg says in the DVD commentary that 'often people don't realize it's the same actress,' I would suggest that most sensitive viewers will realize this at once, and at once begin to calculate what it must mean. A number of Cronenberg's interlocutors who had read the novel share this idea. Cf. Keith Phipps's interview, and the Cannes Festival press conference moderated by Robert Gray ('David Cronenberg on Spider'). DVD commentary. The eels are there in the book, too (126), but there they are blankly recorded as the 'something nice for your supper' that Spider's (false) mother has 'popped out and got [ten]' for them. In the film, the black eels in their white serving bowl get an emphatic but not particularly dramatized close-up, and their arrival at the table is followed by a comically eager - but in Spider's view also surreally sinister - widening of eyes, chafing of hands, and winking on the part of his father. Cronenberg told Phipps: 'Spider came to me as a script where all the hard work had been done by Patrick. I just felt that all I did was subtract, taking things away from his first draft.' We can recall Cronenberg's use of this term to describe his process of staging the futuristic or virtual scenes in eXistenZ, too.

548 Notes to pages 479-85 10 Cf. the DVD commentary for many detailed instances of this process of stripping away during shooting all kinds of elements that were present in pre-production and even on the set. 11 '[E] verything that you see in the movie is really expressing Spider's inner state of mind, it's not really meant to be realistic in a documentary sense, it's meant to be evocative of this particular inner life of our main character' (DVD commentary). 12 In view of Cronenberg's interest in existentialism and Heidegger in particular (especially in his DVD commentary on eXistenZ), one is tempted to relate these curiously insistent and contextless close-ups of Spider's old boots to that painting by Van Gogh of a pair of old peasant's boots which Heidegger pointed to as an exemplary image of humanity's existence in the world. Certainly Spider's boots tell some kind of similar story of a life harshly and physically lived. 13 Cronenberg seems to imply some kind of fixed period, but one without sharp definition, when he says to Kevin Jackson: 'There was also a timeless element which I was conscious of wanting to capture without being coy We chose a period that was slightly different from the book - in the book, it's close to the war, but you have only a hint of that in the film with the backto-back street being replaced by structures that would have been there as late as the 1960s' (13-14). In the same issue of Sight and Sound, Ralph Fiennes remarked to Nick James: 'In Patrick McGrath's book Spider is put away in the 1930s and emerges in the 1960s [sic]. I thought for the film, before David came on board, that he should be put away as a boy in the early 1960s and come out in the present. But when David got involved he didn't agree. He wanted a generic London in which we don't know quite where or when we are' ('The Right Trousers/ 15). Fiennes's account would have Spider in the asylum for either thirty years (1935-65) or forty (19622002), not twenty. 14 The song was collected in Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1767), and was given an updated, partly reharmonized setting in Roger Quilter's Old English Popular Songs (1921), though the version used in the film is, instead, very simple and basic. The text was also set in German translation by both Brahms and Bruch as 'Weg der Liebe.' 15 The last event of this scene is her turning on the gas of the same stove that will eventually kill her. It is another of many details of the film whose significance is only available to us at a subsequent viewing. 16 Patricia MacGormack's article 'Phantasmatic Fissures: Spider/ though mostly devoted to other matters, gives a careful account of the film's oedipal element with reference to Freud and especially the 'Little Hans' case.

Notes to pages 485-92 549 17 Alioff, 'Stripped to the Bone/ Cronenberg adds the comment, 'Certainly that's what happened to me/ 18 Not only male children, of course - but it is only male subjectivity that Cronenberg is concerned with. 19 Outside the film (in the DVD commentary), Cronenberg tries to argue that this truth is as questionable as any that Spider has experienced. As Spider is driven away to the asylum in the final shots, Cronenberg remarks: 'But then, we ask one question. Could this also be a fantasy of Spider's? Could his feeling that he murdered his mother be also a fantasy? A child will often feel guilt for a separation, a divorce, feeling that somehow a parent left him or her because of something the child did, even though it really had nothing to do with the child. Is it possible that Spider's mother just left, or that Spider's mother committed suicide, and that Spider the boy felt guilt for this, and so engineered a fantasy, that he had killed his mother? In other words, when he goes back to the asylum, will there be another level of reality that he will uncover? We don't know, but the possibility is really there, that he still has not gotten to the bottom of the truth of his past, and perhaps never will. And that's the end of the story/ This interpretation almost equates the ending of Spider with the ending of eXistenZ. But if Spider's mother is not really dead or he has not really killed her, why has he spent 20 years in a hospital for the criminally insane, and why is he so quickly whisked back there when he is discovered on the brink of a second killing? 20 The preceding quotation is from James, 15. Cronenberg goes on to add there: 'It isn't an abstract feeling but a strong, visceral feeling that I can connect with this creature. I could see myself walking the streets muttering to myself and what I was saying would have meaning for me but for nobody else. When you say this some people think you're being cute, they don't believe you for a minute. But there was a French journalist, and I said to him, "I am Spider," and he said, "Well, who isn't?"' The French journalist is probably Griinberg, who titled his interview and commentary on Spider with Cronenberg's line 'Spider, c'est moi' (Griinberg 2002). 21 Cf. James, 14. 22 In response to Jackson's suggestion that Pinter might have been an inspiration, Cronenberg replies: '[W]e were thinking more of the novels of Samuel Beckett - Molloy, Malone Dies - and even of the look of Beckett himself... the image of Beckett in the streets of Paris, walking around with his notes. I was also thinking of Kafka and Dostoevsky ../ (12). 23 Samuel Beckett, Molloy, 38. 24 Cronenberg told Jackson: '[I]t wasn't until I was editing the movie that I thought, my God, this is the archetype of an artist, the nightmare version of

550 Notes to pages 493-8 an artist mumbling to himself incoherently in the streets and writing passionately and obsessively and with great attention to detail in a language that's incomprehensible to anybody else and maybe even to himself7 (12). 25 A phrase Cronenberg has employed many times when elucidating his films. See, for example, his use of it in the eXistenZ DVD commentary, quoted in the previous chapter. 26 In Episodes 9 and 10 of Season 3 (2003) of the ABC television series Alias, Cronenberg plays the part of a 'Yale researcher/ Dr Edward Brazzel. His experiments in drug-induced alternate cognition, especially waking dream states, are employed to get the series heroine to recover some buried memories. Brazzel seems like a remnant of the 1960s, with his hippie-like casual attitudes, drug enthusiasms, and nubile lab-assistant/playmate. Brazzel not only seems perpetually stoned, but consumes cigarettes and junk food to comic excess. Eventually he is assassinated by shadowy conspirators via a morphine-drip drug overdose. Altogether this character is a very amusing detailed caricature of elements of the Cronenberg creator who has let go' - experimentation with alternate consciousnesses, indulgence in sex, drugs, smoking, and junk food - played by the meta-creator himself. 27 It is a fourth straight time if you include Cronenberg's 6-minute Camera, made in 2000 on commission from the Toronto Film Festival as part of its 25th anniversary celebrations (and now generally available as an extra on the recent Criterion Collection reissue of Videodrome). This brief film features Les Carlson as an ageing actor living in a house where some children have found and repaired an old 35 mm Panavision movie camera, complete with dolly. The bulk of the film consists of Carlson (filmed by a handheld digital video camera) talking to us about photography and dying. He says: 'Really if you look at it in a cold light, photography is death. Death, memory and desire, ageing and death.' He talks about having had a dream, as a young man, about being in a movie theatre watching a movie: 'I was ageing rapidly as I sat there. It was the movie that was doing it. I had caught some sort of disease from the movie and it was making me grow old, bringing me closer and closer to death. I woke up, terrified, [pause] And look at me now ... The dream is coming true.' He confesses to nervousness about having the 35 mm camera in the house, and in the hands of children: 'When you record the moment, you record the death of the moment. Children and death are a bad combination ... I was thinking ... "Get that damn camera out of the house! It will poison us all, it will do irreparable damage to us all!"' Then he thinks that 'the camera itself had aged ... It had its own obsolescence and death to deal with.' This makes him feel sad, but eventually he decides that he and the old camera are the same in some ways: 'We were growing old

Notes to page 498 551 together/ The sadness fades to 'a taste of melancholy/ and now the actual camera is up and running (one of the kids operating it is a little boy with 'Cronenberg' glasses reminiscent of the ones the boys in Dead Ringers are wearing). The final shot, in 35 mm film, is of the actor sitting calmly in this visually much-improved environment, smiling benevolently; but the last few frames catch his face breaking up into a spasm of intense fear, just before the end-of-roll slashing conclusion of the film. In Camera we have Cronenberg emphasizing the Bazinian, indexical nature of the filmmaking process - namely, the idea that it actually records what is really there - and identifying it with the fundamentally real process of mortality. The camera, off in the background being rehabilitated from its derelict state, is the object of fear. By contrast, the digital video camera actually recording the monologue seems like something else, something lighter and not as 'true/ Indeed this camera seems not even to exist, to be outside the process of photography. This is the case even though its swoops and extreme close-ups exemplify a decoupage easy for a small digital camera and very difficult for a bulky 35 mm one, and calls attention to two different kinds of filmmaking, a 'difficult7 kind and an 'easy' kind. This firm distinction between 35 mm (indexical, recording and producing death) and DV (just ones and zeroes in a realm of virtual representation) recalls Cronenberg's resistance to digital effects in his own cinema - expounded, for example, in the DVD commentary to eXistenZ - and duplicates the dichotomy of film vs video to that of real reality vs self-invented perception, and, beyond that, to that of modernism vs postmodernism in the Cronenberg schema. Mortality is the fundamental problem, the fundamental terror, just as in orthodox existentialism, and also as it lurks behind Cronenberg films ranging from Rabid to The Fly. If this interpretation holds, Camera is another testament to Cronenberg's status as a traditional artist who believes in chiselling substantial works out of the rock of the traditional 35 mm apparatus, and also as a modernist who believes in objective reality, not a postmodernist who doesn't - with this kind of modernist artist and this kind of apparatus both seen as becoming obsolete and headed for death along with this particular camera and this particular actor (and this particular filmmaker). On this account, Cronenberg prefers 35 mm exactly because it authentically contains and produces death. Needless to say, Camera thereby continues his project of presenting the activity of creation as sinister and inseparable from an activity of destruction (his films give you a disease and his cameras cause death), and for the first time identifies the apparatus of his art - film - with the fundamental existential truth of death. Perhaps the film is also obliquely another swipe (like the many in Cronen-

552 Notes to pages 499-503

28

29

30

31

32 33

34

berg's eXistenZ commentaries) at the new medium of digital video and the slick Hollywood big-budget trash F/X movies that use it). In this context, we can also note in passing how Cronenberg scornfully contrasts Spider to A Beautiful Mind, saying 'Spider is the schizophrenic who doesn't win the Nobel Prize' (Gray). To use these terms borrowed from literary narratology ('first person/ 'third person') is, of course, to distort them, since narration in film is quite a different proposition from narration in literature and, as an area that is strongly contested in scholarly debate, far from transparent. As Bill and 'Yvonne' arrive home from the pub on the night of the gassing, Cronenberg remarks on the DVD commentary: 'Now if you think, once again, of this as being the real Mrs Cleg and not Yvonne, you see that they've gotten a bit drunk together, and they're kind of affectionate, and maybe, you know, the marriage is kind of healing itself. But of course for Spider, boy Spider, it is Yvonne, not his mother, and the closer that his father gets to her, and the more affectionate, the more a threat it is to him, Spider.' Even M. Butterfly has strong American overtones, mostly remnants of Hwang's writing unashamedly for an American audience. Naked Lunch, of course, never leaves New York except in Bill Lee's hallucinating imagination. According to Ralph Fiennes, '[o]ne of Patrick's visual references was Bill Brandt's photographs of the pubs and the prostitutes - there's one picture of a woman in a bar which formed the inspiration for Yvonne' (James, 15). Kehr, 'Awakening to the Nightmares of Youth.' Griinberg (2002), 19 (my translation). 'L'univers de Spider est le mien. Pour remonter dans 1'histoire, je note que Canada a ete une colonie britannique pendant beaucoup plus longtemps que les Etats-Unis - nous n'avons pas connu de revolution - ensuite c'est deyenu un dominion; ainsi la presence de 1'Angleterre est beaucoup plus forte qu'aux Etats-Unis (ou au Quebec). Mon pere etait bibliophile et anglophile; ainsi, enfant, je lisais des magazines d'enfants comme Les histoires de Horatio Hornblower, etc. II y a eu ensuite ces merveilleux films anglais des annees 40 et 50. J'ai vraiment senti la presence et 1'influence de Carol Reed et de James Mason en tournant Spider. Et, en fin de compte, je n'ai pas encore, meme partiellement, exprime mon univers personnel dans mes films.' See especially Amy Taubin, 'Webbed Wonder/

Bibliography

Alioff, Maurie. 'Stripped to the Bone: Cronenberg's Spider/ Take One, December 2002. (Accessed electronically.) Amsden, Cynthia. 'Robert Lantos: The Singular Prince of Serendipity/ Take One, Fall 1999. (Accessed electronically.) Atwood, Margaret. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. Toronto: Anansi, 1972. Ballard, J.G. The Atrocity Exhibition. London: Jonathan Cape, 1970. - Crash. London: Vintage, 1995 (1973). Barker, Martin, Jane Arthurs, and Ramaswami Harindranath. The Crash Controversy: Censorship Campaigns and Film Reception. London: Wallflower Press, 2001. Beard, William. The Visceral Mind: The Major Films of David Cronenberg/ In Handling, ed., The Shape of Rage, 1-79. - The Canadianness of David Cronenberg/ Mosaic 27:2 (June 1994), 113-33. Beard, William, and Piers Handling. The Interview/ In Handling, ed., The Shape of Rage, 158-98. Beckett, Samuel. Three Novels by Samuel Beckett: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable. New York: Grove Press, 1965. Belasco, David. Six Plays. Boston: Little Brown, 1928. Blackwelder, Rob. 'Metaphor Man/ Interview with Cronenberg for SPLICEDwire online, 1999. Accessed at http://splicedonline.com/features/ cronenberg.html. - '"Spider" Man/ Interview with Cronenberg for SPLICEDwire online, 2003. Accessed at http://splicedonline.com/. Bockris, Victor. With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker. New York: Seaver, 1981.

554 Bibliography Breskin, David. Inner Views: Filmmakers in Conversation. New York: Da Capo, 1997 (1992). Brown, Royal S. CD booklet notes for Dead Ringers: Symphonic Suites from the Films of David Cronenberg. Silva Screen FILMCD115 (1992). Browning, Mark. "Thou, the Player of the Game, Art God": Nabokovian Game-playing in Cronenberg's eXistenZ.' Canadian Journal of Film Studies 12:1 (Spring 2003), 57-69. Bukatman, Scott. 'Who Programs You? The Science Fiction of the Spectacle/ In Kuhn, ed., Alien Zone, 196-213. - Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. Burke, Frank. '"How'd You Like to Disappear?": Theorizing the Subject in Film/ Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 13:1-2 (1989), 25-43. Burroughs, William S. Junkie. New York: Ace, 1953. - The Soft Machine. New York: Grove, 1961. - The Ticket That Exploded. Paris: Olympia, 1962. - Nova Express. New York: Grove, 1964. - Naked Lunch. New York: Grove, 1966 (1959). - Exterminator! New York: Viking, 1973. - Queer. New York: Viking Penguin, 1985. - Interzone. Ed. James Grauerholz. New York: Penguin, 1990 (1989). - The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1945-1959. Ed. Oliver Harris. New York: Viking, 1993. Burroughs, William S., with Allen Ginsberg. The Yage Letters. San Francisco: City Lights, 1963. Campbell, Mary B. 'Biological Alchemy and the Films of David Cronenberg/ In Grant, ed., Planks of Reason, 307-20. Chaw, Walter. 'From Flies to Spiders: Film Freak Central Interviews David Cronenberg/ 15 November 2002. Accessed online at http://www .filmfreakcentral.net/notes/dcronenberginterview.htm. Clover, Carol. 'Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film/ Representations 20 (1987), 187-228. - Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. Cohan, Steven, and Ina Mae Hark, editors. Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema. New York: Routledge, 1993. Collison, Robert. 'David Cronenberg Turns Inside Out/ Saturday Night 108.7 (September 1993), 42-7. Creed, Barbara. Thallic Panic: Male Hysteria and Dead Ringers.' Screen 31.2 (1992): 125-46.

Bibliography 555 - 'Dark Desires: Male Masochism in the Horror Film/ In Cohan and Hark, eds., Screening the Male, 118-33. - The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge, 1993. Cronenberg, David. 'David Cronenberg Interviews Salman Rushdie/ Shift 3.4 (June-July 1995). - 'David Cronenberg interviews Salman Rushdie/ Shift 3:4 (June-July 1995). (Accessible online at http://www.davidcronenberg.de/cr_rushd.htm.) - Crash (screenplay). London: Faber and Faber, 1996. de Lauretis, Teresa. 'Becoming Inorganic/ Critical Inquiry 29:4 (Summer 2003), 547-70. Drew, Wayne. 'A Gothic Revival: Obsession and Fascination in the Films of David Cronenberg/ In Drew, ed., David Cronenberg, 16-22. Drew, Wayne, editor. David Cronenberg. BFI Dossier 21. London: British Film Institute, 1984. Egginton, William. 'Reality Is Bleeding: A Brief History of Film from the Sixteenth Century/ Configurations 9:2 (2001), 207-29. Egoyan, Atom. 'Interview with David Cronenberg/ Take One 3 (Fall 1993), 11-15. Elder, Bruce. Image and Identity: Reflections on Canadian Film and Culture. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1989. Feldman, Seth, and Joyce Nelson, editors. Canadian Film Reader. Toronto: Peter Martin, 1977. Fiander, Robert. 'At the Movies: The Interpenetration of Cinema and Virtual Reality/ Antigonish Review 120 (Winter 2000), 43-52. Fothergill, Robert. 'Coward, Bully or Clown: The Dream-Life of a Younger Brother/ In Feldman and Nelson, Canadian Film Reader, 234-49. Frank, Marcie. 'The Camera and the Speculum: David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers/ PMLA 106.3 (1991), 459-70. Frye, Northrop. The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination. Toronto: Anansi, 1971. - Divisions on a Ground: Essays on Canadian Culture. Ed. James Polk. Toronto: Anansi, 1982. Garber, Marjorie. 'The Occidental Tourist: M. Butterfly and the Scandal of Transvestism/ In Parker et al., eds., Nationalisms and Sexualities, 121-46. Gleiberman, Owen. 'Cronenberg's Double Meanings/ American Film 14.2 (October 1988), 39-43. Grant, Barry Keith, editor. Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film. Lanham, MA: Scarecrow Press, 1984. - Film Genre Reader II. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995.

556 Bibliography - The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. Gray, Robert. 'David Cronenberg on Spider.' Transcription of press conference with David Cronenberg at Cannes Film Festival 2002,21 May 2002. Accessed online at http://www.abc.net.au/arts/film/stories/s660704.htm. Griinberg, Serge. David Cronenberg. Paris: Editions de 1'Etoile / Cahiers du Cinema, 1992. - David Cronenberg: Entretiens avec Serge Griinberg. Paris: Cahiers du cinema, 2000. - 'David Cronenberg: Spider, c'est moi/ (Interview.) Cahiers du cinema no. 568 (May 2002), 16-22. Guerrero, Edward. 'AIDS as Monster in Science Fiction/ Journal of Popular Film and Television 18:3 (Fall 1990), 87-93. Guignon, Charles, and Derk Pereboom. Existentialism: Basic Writings. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995. Haas, Robert, editor. Post Script 15:2 (Winter/Spring 1996). Special issue: David Cronenberg. Handling, Piers. 'A Canadian Cronenberg/ In Handling, ed., The Shape of Rage, 98-114. Handling, Piers, editor. The Shape of Rage: The films of David Cronenberg. Toronto: Academy of Canadian Cinema, 1983. Handling, Piers, and Pierre Veronneau, editors. L'horreur interieure: les films de David Cronenberg. Montreal: Cinematheque quebecoise, 1990. (Translation, with additions, of Handling, ed., The Shape of Rage.) Harpold, Terry. 'Dry Leatherette: Cronenberg's Crash.' Postmodern Culture 7:3 (1997) [electronic journal at http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern. culture] Hickenlooper, George. 'Interview with David Cronenberg/ Cineaste 17:2 (1989), 4-7. Hoberman, J. 'Along Came a Spider/ Interview with David Cronenberg and Patrick McGrath. The Village Voice, 26 February-4 March 2003. Accessed online at http: // www.villagevoice.com /issues / 0309 /hoberman2.php. - 'Sound and Fury/ Review of Spider. The Village Voice, 26 February-4 March 2003. Accessed online at http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0309/ hoberman.php. Hotchkiss, Lea M. "'Still in the Game": Cybertransformations of the "New Flesh" in David Cronenberg's eXistenZ.' The Velvet Light Trap 52 (Fall 2003), 15-32. Humm, Maggie. Feminism and Film. Bloomington: Edinburgh and Indiana University Presses, 1997.

Bibliography 557 Hutchings, Peter. 'Masculinity and the Horror Film/ In Kirkharn and Thumim, edsv You Tarzan, 84-94. Hwang, David Henry. M. Butterfly. With an afterword by the playwright. New York: Penguin, 1989. In the Beginning: How Spider Came to Be. Documentary (uncredited) on the making of Spider included on the Alliance Atlantis DVD issue of the film, 2003. Jackson, Kevin. 'Odd Man Out/ Interview with David Cronenberg about Spider. Sight and Sound, January 2003,12-15. Jacobowitz, Florence, and Richard Lippe. 'Dead Ringers: The Joke's on Us/ CineAction!, Spring 1989, 64-8. Jaehne, Karen. 'Double Trouble/ Film Comment 24.5 (September-October 1988), 20-7. James, Nick. 'The Right Trousers/' Interview with Ralph Fiennes about Spider. Sight and Sound, January 2003,14-15. Jameson, Fredric. The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Jeans, Katherine A. (director). The Invisible Art of Carol Spier. (Television documentary film.) 53 minutes. Screenventures XXIV Productions Ltd. (Alliance Atlantis) and Existence Productions Ltd, 1999. Johnson, Brian D. 'A Director's Obsession/ Maclean's, 13 September 1993,38-41. Joyard, Olivier, and Charles Tesson. 'L'aventure interieure: Entretien avec David Cronenberg/ Cahiers du cinema, no. 534 (1999), 67-73. Kehde, Suzanne. 'Engendering the Imperial Subject: The (De)construction of (Western) Masculinity in David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly and Graham Greene's The Quiet American.' In Murphy, ed., Fictions of Masculinity, 241-54. Kehr, Dave. 'Awakening to the Nightmares of Youth/ Interview with Cronenberg about Spider. New York Times, 23 February 2003, sect. 2: 23. Kirkham, Pat, and Janet Thumirn, editors. You Tarzan: Masculinity, Movies and Men. New York: St Martin's Press, 1993. Knee, Adam. The Metamorphosis of the Fly/ Wide Angle 14.1 (1992), 20-34. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. - Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. Kuhn, Annette, editor. Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema. London: Verso, 1990. Labarthe, Andre S. (writer and director). David Cronenberg: I Have to Make the Word Be Flesh. (Television documentary film, with interviewer Serge Griinberg.) 68 minutes. AMIP [France], 1999.

558 Bibliography Lavery, David. 'From Cinescape to Cyberspace: Zionists and Agents, Realists and Gamers in The Matrix and eXistenZ/ Journal of Popular Film and Television 28:4 (Winter 2001), 150-7. Long, John Luther. Madame Butterfly. New York: Century, 1903 (1897). Lydenberg, Robin. Word Cultures: Radical Theory and Practice in William S. Burroughs' Fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. MacCormack, Patricia. Thantasmatic Fissures: Spider.' Senses of Cinema: An Online Film Journal 27 (July-August 2003). Available at http://www .sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/27/spider.html. McGreal, Jill. Interview with David Cronenberg/ In Drew, ed., David Cronenberg, 3-15. McGregor, Gaile. 'Grounding the Countertext: David Cronenberg and the Ethnospecificity of Horror/ Canadian Journal of Film Studies 2.1 (1993), 43-62. McLarty, Lianne. '"Beyond the Veil of the Flesh": Cronenberg and the Disembodiment of Horror/ In Grant, ed., The Dread of Difference, 231-52. Mendik, Xavier. 'Logic, Creativity and (Critical) Misinterpretations: An Interview with David Cronenberg/ Filmhaftet, no. 118 (June 2001). (Interview originally conducted 1998; also available from Film International online at www.filmint.nu.) Miles, Barry. William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible. London: Virgin, 1992. Modleski, Tania. The Terror of Pleasure: The Contemporary Horror Film and Postmodern Theory/ In Modleski, ed., Studies in Entertainment, 155-66. Modleski, Tania, editor. Studies in Entertainment: Cultural Approaches to Mass Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Morgan, Ted. Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs. New York: Avon, 1988. Morris, Peter. David Cronenberg: A Delicate Balance. Toronto: ECW Press, 1994. Moss, John. Sex and Violence in the Canadian Novel. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1977. Mottram, Eric. William Burroughs: The Algebra of Need. London: Marion Boyars, 1977. Murphy, Peter E, editor. Fictions of Masculinity: Crossing Cultures, Crossing Sexualities. New York: New York University Press, 1994. Novak, John Luther (Christopher Priest). David Cronenberg s eXistenZ: a novelisation. London: Simon and Schuster, 1999. Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey. 'Minnelli and Melodrama/ Screen 18:2 (Summer 1977), 113-19. Paul, William. Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.

Bibliography 559 Parker, Andrew, Mary Russo, Doris Summer, and Patricia Yaeger, editors. Nationalisms and Sexualities. New York: Routledge, 1992. Penley, Constance, and Sharon Willis, editors. Male Trouble. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Petley, Julian, 'V.D. O'Nasty/ In Wayne Drew, ed., David Cronenberg, 35-40. Pevere, Geoff. 'Cliffhanger: Cronenberg and the Canadian Cultural Consciousness/ Take One 3 (Fall 1993), 6-9. Pevere, Geoff, and Greig Dymond. Mondo Canuck: A Canadian Pop Culture Odyssey. Scarborough, ON: Prentice-Hall, 1996. Pharr, Mary, and Lynda Haas. 'Somatic Ideas: Cronenberg and the Feminine/ Post Script 15:2 (Winter/Spring 1996), 29-39. Phipps, Keith. 'Interview with David Cronenberg/ The Onion A.V. Club 39:9 (12 March 2003), accessed at http://www.theonionavclub.com/feature/ index.php?issue=3909&f=1. Pomerance, Murray. 'Neither Here Nor There: eXistenZ as "Elevator Film/" Quarterly Review of Film & Video 20:1 (2003), 1-14. Pompon, Geraldine, and Pierre Veronneau. David Cronenberg: La beaute du chaos. Paris: Editions du Cerf / Editions Corlet, 2003. Porton, Richard. 'The Film Director as Philosopher: An Interview with David Cronenberg/ Cineaste 24:4 (1999), 4-9. Ramsay, Christine. 'Dead Queers: One Legacy of the Trope of "Mind over Matter" in the Films of David Cronenberg/ Canadian Journal of Film Studies 8:1 (Spring 1999), 45-62. Rapp, Alan E. 'You can never read too much into it/ Interview with Cronenberg for salon.com (29 April 1999). Accessed 29 August 2004 at http:// www.salon.com/ent/movies/int/1999/04/29/cronenberg/. Robbins, Helen. '"More Human than I Am Alone": Womb Envy in David Cronenberg's The Fly and Dead Ringers/ In Cohan and Hark, eds., Screening the Male, 134-47. Robni, Drehil, and Michael Palm, editors. Und das Wort ist Fleisch geworden: Texte uber Filme von David Cronenberg. Vienna: PVS Verleger, 1992. Rodley, Chris. 'Crash/ Sight and Sound 6:6 (June 1996), 6-11. Rodley, Chris, editor. Cronenberg on Cronenberg. Toronto: Knopf, 1992. Ryan, Michael, and Avery Gordon, editors. Body Politics: Disease, Desire, and the Family. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994. Sanjek, David. 'Dr. Hobbes's Parasites: Victims, Victimization, and Gender in David Cronenberg's Shivers/ Cinema Journal 36:1 (Fall 1996), 55-74. Scoffield, Sean (illustrator). David Cronenberg's eXistenZ: a graphic novel. Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1999. Sharrett, Christopher. 'Myth and Ritual in the Post-Industrial Landscape: The

560 Bibliography Horror Films of David Cronenberg/ Persistence of Vision 3-4 (Summer 1986), 111-30. Shaviro, Steven. The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. - Doom Patrols: A Theoretical Fiction about Postmodernism. London: Serpent's Tail, 1997. Showalter, Elaine. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siecle. New York: Penguin, 1991 (1990). Silverberg, Ira, editor. Everything Is Permitted: The Making of'Naked Lunch/ New York: Grove, 1992. Silverman, Kaja. 'Masochism and Male Subjectivity/ In Penley and Willis, eds., Male Trouble, 33-66. Sinclair, Iain. Crash. London: British Film Institute, 1999. Smith, Gavin. 'Cronenberg: Mind over Matter/ Film Comment 33:2 (MarchApril 1997), 14-29. Studlar, Gaylyn. In the Realm of Pleasure: Von Sternberg, Dietrich, and the Masochistic Aesthetic. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Suner, Asuman. 'Postmodern Double Cross: Reading David Cronenberg's M. Butterfly as a Horror Story/ Cinema Journal 37:2 (Winter 1998), 49-64. Taubin, Amy. The Wrong Body/ Sight and Sound, March 1992, 9-13. - 'Webbed Wonder/ Review of Spider. ArtForum, February 2003, 37. Testa, Bart. 'Panic Pornography: Videodrome from Production to Seduction/ Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 13:1-2 (1989), 56-72. - 'Technology's Body: Cronenberg, Genre, and the Canadian Ethos/ Post Script 15:1 (Fall 1995), 38-56. Timpone, Anthony. Men, Makeup and Monsters: Hollywood's Masters of Illusion and FX. New York: St Martin's Press, 1996. Twitchell, James B. Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern Horror. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Veronneau, Pierre. 'Monstration et demonstration/ In Handling and Veronneau, eds., L'horreur interieure, 137-58. Viano, Maurizio. 'AlphaBet City: The Politics of Pharmacology/ In Ryan and Gordon, eds., Body Politics, 115-23. Wadler, Joyce. Liaison. New York: Bantam, 1993. Wiater, Stanley Dark Visions: Conversations with the Masters of the Horror Film. New York: Avon, 1992. Williams, Linda. 'Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess/ In Grant, ed., Film Genre Reader II, 140-58. Wise, Wyndham. 'David Cronenberg talks about eXistenZ and reality/ Take One, Spring 1999. (Accessed electronically.)

Bibliography 561 Wood, Robin. 'Cronenberg: A Dissenting View/ In Handling, ed., The Shape of Rage, 115-35. - Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Wood, Robin, Andrew Britton, Richard Lippe, and Tony Williams. The American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film. Toronto: Festival of Festivals, 1979. Yacowar, Maurice. The Comedy of Cronenberg/ In Handling, ed., The Shape of Rage, 80-6.

This page intentionally left blank

Index

ABC Nightline, 532n2 Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television, The, 287 Adams, Brooke, 165 Age of Innocence, The, 518nl2 A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, 445 Alias, 543n26 All This and Heaven Too, 436nl2 Alphaville, 505n5 Althusser, Louis, ix American Psycho (novel), 510nl5 Anger, Kenneth, 3 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 13, 286, 382, 415-16; L'Avventura, 415-16; La Notte, 416; Red Desert, 415 Arp, Jean, 382 Avventura, L', 415-16 Bailey, Catherine, 547n3 Ballard, J.G., 379-95, 401, 410, 539n32, 539n34; Crash (novel), 379-95, 397-9, 401, 423, 536n5, 536n6, 536nlO, 537nl5, 537nl7, 537nl8, 537n21, 539n32, 539n34, 539n35 Barthes, Roland, ix Baudrillard, Jean, ix, 124, 126-8, 131-2

Beckett, Samuel, 217, 286, 419, 469, 480, 491, 549n22; Malone Dies, 491, 549n22; Mo/% 491, 549n22, 549n23 Beckman, Henry, 94 Behind the Green Door, 426n3 Belasco, David, 343-4, 367, 374; Madame Butterfly (play), 343-4, 532nl2 Bertolucci, Bernardo, 342; The Last Emperor, 342 Beverly Hills Cop, 198 Bhabha, Homi, 532nll Blade Runner, 445 Blue, 506n5 Boom, 536n8 Borges, Jorge Luis, 221 Boursicault, Bernard, 338, 352, 535n36 Bowles, Jane, 280, 322, 326 Bowles, Paul, 280, 322, 326 Brahms, Johannes, 548nl4 Brandt, Bill, 552n31 Bresson, Robert, 382, 415-19; Diary of a Country Priest, 503 Brooksfilms, 198 Brown, Norman O., ix Brown, Royal S., 272

564 Index Browning, Mark, 546n43 Buchner, Georg, ix Bujold, Genevieve, 234 Bukatman, Scott, viii, 126-9, 161, 496, 513nl, 513n8 Bufiuel, Luis, 531n57; Un Chien Andalou, 153; Viridiana, 531n57 Burke, Frank, 524n23 Burroughs, Jackie, 185 Burroughs, Joan, 279, 284-5, 307, 326, 530n46 Burroughs, William, ix, 123, 126, 129-30, 132-3, 209, 216-17, 234, 237, 268, 277-88, 293-315, 318, 320-9, 336-7, 340, 375, 419, 434, 453, 455, 469-70, 488, 493, 496, 506n3, 507n2, 527n4, 527nl4, 530n49, 530n51, 530n58, 530n59; 'Exterminator!' (short story), 278, 308; Interzone, 294, 527n3, 527n5, 528n27; Junky, 284, 296, 526nl, 526n3; Naked Lunch, 277-80, 285, 294, 296-9, 303, 307-9, 321-3, 325, 493, 507n2, 514n21, 526nl, 528n21, 529n37, 529n42, 530n49, 530n51, 531n60; Nova Express, 278, 301, 531n58; 'Nova Trilogy/ 133, 278, 300, 519nl3, 527n3, 528n21; Queer, 278, 284-5, 323, 325, 526n3, 528n32, 528n33, 529n41; The Soft Machine, 278, 294, 297, 528n26; The Ticket That Exploded, 278, 297, 301, 328-9; The Yage Letters, 296 Butterfield 8, 536n8 Byrne, Gabriel, 471 Campbell, Nicholas, 518nll Camus, Marcel, 434, 490, 537nll Carrie (film), 511nl9 Carlson, Les, 550n27

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (film), 536n8 Chambers, Marilyn, 51, 52-3, 55, 57-8, 60, 64, 70, 111, 289, 508n3 Chien Andalou, Un, 153 Chuang Tzu, 221 Chuvalo, George, 519n8 Citizen Kane, 81 Clover, Carol, 141, 510nlO, 511n20, 512n6, 515n30 Cohen, Larry, 70; It Lives Again, 511nl9; It's Alive! 511nl9 Coleman, Ornette, 336-7 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, ix Conversation, The, 118 Creed, Barbara, viii, 82-3, 85, 141, 184, 190, 263, 264-5, 361, 507n7, 507nl3, 511nl9, 518nlO, 524n23, 524n28, 525n31; The Monstrous Feminine, 508n8, 509n9, 510nlO, 512n6, 518n8, 518nlO Cronenberg, Cassandra, 71 Cronenberg, Denise, 502nl3, 531n61 Crying Game, The, 376-7 Dafoe, Willem, 427, 429 Dark City, 424, 425, 445 Dark Victory, 518nl2 Davis, Bette, 536n8 Davis, Geena, 198 Davis, Judy, 280, 323, 530n55 Dawn of the Dead, 514n20 Dead Zone, The (novel), 164, 184-6, 235, 339, 486, 518nl4, 540nl Dean, James, 380, 395, 402, 412, 421, 537nll De Chirico, Giorgio, 480 Debord, Guy, 124, 126 de Lauretis, Teresa, 453, 544n30, 544n31

Index 565 De Laurentiis, Dino, 165, 198 Dewhurst, Colleen, 185 Diana, Princess, 539n36 Diary of a Country Priest, 503 Dick, Philip K., 470, 513n8, 542n23; The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, 470, 542n23 Don't Look Now, 509n4 Doonesbury, 306 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 549n22 Drew, Wayne, 60, 218, 508n7 Eggar, Samantha, 71, 94 Egoyan, Atom, 506n5; Felicia's Journey, 500 Eisenstein, Sergei, 59 Eliot, T.S., 287 Ellis, Brent Easton, 510nl5; American Psycho, 510nl5 Ellison, Ralph, 515n34; The Glass Teat, 515n34 Emshwiller, Ed, 3 Evil Dead, The, 30 Felicia's Journey, 500 Fiennes, Ralph, 471, 480, 484, 491, 503, 546-7nl, 548nl3, 552n31 Fitzgerald, Nuala, 94 Flashdance, 198 Fellini, Federico, 286 Fly, The (1958), 198 Foucault, Michel, ix, 124 Frank, Marcie, 524n28, 525n34 Freud, Sigmund, ix, 83, 263, 433, 484, 508n8, 548nl6 Friday the Thirteenth, 184 Fulford, Robert, 26 Garber, Marjorie, 535n32 Garbo, Greta, 536n8

Geffen Pictures, 341 Ginsburg, Allen, 279, 283, 296-7, 303, 321, 530n48 Glass Teat, The, 515n34 Godard, Jean-Luc, 505n5; Alphaville, 505n5 Goldblum, Jeff, 94, 198 Gould, Glenn, 526n40 Griffith, D.W., 91, 344 Grove Press, 526nl, 527nl3 Griinberg, Serge, 129, 461, 490, 501, 519n6, 528n31, 545n37, 545n38, 549n20, 552n33 Guerrero, Edward, 520nl5 Gysin, Brion, 277, 302, 530n49 Hall, Bradley, 472 Halloween, 511nl9 Handling, Piers, 508n7, 509nlO Harpold, Terry, 536nlO Hassan I Sabbah, 321, 434, 530n49 Heidegger, Martin, 430-3, 436, 470, 541nl4, 548nl2 Hemblen, David, 353, 533n21 Hepburn, Katharine, 536n8 Herrmann, Bernard, 272 Hills Have Eyes, The, 511nl9 Hindle, Art, 94 Hinds, Cindy, 94, 510n7 Hitchcock, Alfred, 417, 501; Frenzy, 501; The Man Who Knew Too Much, 501; Psycho, 184, 272, 517n6 Hoberman, J., 537nl4 Holm, Ian, 428 Hooper, Tobe, 70; The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, 30 Humm, Maggie, 521n5, 523nl7, 524n27, 524n28 Huncke, Herbert, 283, 527n5 Husserl, Edmund, 431

566

Index

Hwang, David Henry, 338-47, 34950, 352, 355-7, 369, 374-5, 502, 532n5; M. Butterfly, 338-43, 349-50, 352, 355-6, 369, 371-2, 374-5, 377, 423, 502, 514nl6, 532n5, 533nl7, 533nl8, 533n21, 533n22, 534n28, 534n30, 552n30

Kuchar, George and Mike, 3

Jacobowitz, Florence, 523n23 Jameson, Fredric, viii, 126, 129, 132, 513nl, 513n8 Jason Leigh, Jennifer, 425, 429, 545n39 Jones, Ernest, 54; The Life and Works of Sigmund Freud, 54 Joyce, James, 287

Lacan, Jacques, 263-4 Lack, Stephen, 101, 119 Last Emperor, The, 342 Last House on the Left, The, 511 Law, Jude, 425, 429, 452 Lean, David, 341, 378 Le Corbusier, Charles Edouard Jeanneret, 382 Legend of Sleepy Hollow, The, 517 Leigh, Mike, 502; Vera Drake, 502 Letter from an Unknown Woman, 518 Lippe, Richard, 523n23 Lolita (film, 1997), 532nl2 Lolita (novel), 21, 287, 532nl2 Lorn, Herbert, 165 Lone, John, 361, 376 Long, John Luther, 343-4, 367, 374; Madame Butterfly (novella), 343-4 Lorimar Pictures, 165 'Love will find out the way' (English folksong), 482-4

Kafka, Franz, ix, 217, 286, 310, 367, 419, 469-70, 480, 549n22; The Metamorphosis/ 217 Kennedy, John R, 380 Kerouac, Jack, 279, 321, 530n48 King, Stephen, 165, 184-5, 235, 339, 518nl4; The Dead Zone, 165, 184-6, 287, 339, 486, 518nl4, 540nl Klein, Melanie, 521n5 Knee, Adam, 519n4, 519n7, 520nl5, 520nl6 Koteas, Elias, 401 Kramer vs Kramer, 91 Kristeva, Julia, 23, 29, 31, 45, 83, 85, 191, 264-5, 361, 391, SlOnlO, 517n7 Kroker, Arthur, 125 Kubrick, Stanley, 13

MacCormack, Patricia, 548nl6 Madama Butterfly (opera), 338, 343-4, 354, 374-5, 533n21, 534n27, 534n30 Madame Butterfly (play), 343-4, 532nl2 Madame Butterfly (novella), 343-4 Malle, Louis, 532nl2; Pretty Baby, 532nl2 Mansfield, Jayne, 380, 404, 412, 421, 537nll, 539n35 Martin, 511nl9 Mason, James, 501 Matrix, The, 424, 445, 540n7 M. Butterfly (play). See Hwang McGoohan, Patrick, 111 McGrath, Patrick, 471, 473-4, 478, 484-6, 493, 495, 498, 500, 501, 503,

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), 28, 507n5 Irons, Jeremy, 94, 169, 234, 352, 502 Ironside, Michael, 120 It Lives Again, 511nl9 It 's Alive! 511nl9

Index 567 546nl, 547n4, 547n9, 548nl3, 552n31; Spider (novel), 471, 473-9, 485-6, 491, 497, 547n8, 548nl3 McKeehan, Gary, 94 McKellar, Don, 428, 506n5; Blue, 506n5 McLuhan, Marshall, ix, 124, 126-7, 131 Metropolis, 413 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 382 Miles, Barry, 295, 297, 529n37 Miller, Henry, 286 Minnelli, Vincente, 91-2, 168 Mlodzik, Ronald, 3, 5, 14-15, 34 Modleski, Tanya, 513nl Mondrian, Piet, 382 Morgan, Ted, 326, 527n5 Morris, Peter, 505nl, 506n3, 506nl, 508n7, 527n8 Mother's Day, 184 Mottram, Eric, 528n23 Mulvey, Laura, 205 Nabokov, Vladimir, 21, 217, 286-8, 419, 469, 527nl4, 546n43; Lolita, 21, 287, 532nl2 Nader, Ralph, 463, 537nll Neville, John, 481 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 431, 433^, 530n49, 541nl3 Night of the Living Dead, 28, 30, 50, 511nl9 No Sad Songs for Me, 518nl2 Notte, La, 415-16 Novak, John Luther, 540n9 Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey, 91 Old English Popular Songs (Quilter), 548nl4 Old Maid, The, 518nl2 Olympia Press, 530nl, 531nl3

O'Neill, Jennifer, 103 Ozu, Yasujiro, 48 Parallax View, The, 118 Parker, Charlie, 337 Peeping Tom, 112 People Magazine, 532n2 Percy, Thomas, 548nl4; Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 548nl4 Petit, Chris, 424, 540n3 Petley, Julian, 517n42 Pharr, Mary, 530n55 Pinter, Harold, 18, 549n22 Place in the Sun, A, 536n8 Pleasantville, 424 Poe, Edgar Allan, ix, 169, 354; The Raven, 169, 517n4 Pogue, Charles Edward, 198, 518nl Powell, Michael, 112; Peeping Tom, 112 Pretty Baby, 532nl2 Priest, Christopher, 540n9 Psycho, 184, 272, 517n6 Puccini, Giacomo, 192, 343-4, 349, 365, 367, 374-5, 378; Madama Butterfly, 338, 343-4, 354, 374-5, 532n21, 534n27, 534n30 Quilter, Roger, 548nl4; Old English Popular Songs, 548nl4 Rebel without a Cause, 412, 421 Red Desert, 415 Redgrave, Lynn, 472 Reed, Carol, 501 Reed, Oliver, 71, 89, 94 Reitman, Ivan, 507nl4, 508n3 Rennie, Callum Keith, 429 Richardson, Ian, 368 Richardson, Miranda, 472-3, 485, 487

568 Index Robbins, Helen, 205, 214, 524n28 Rodley, Chris, 379, 383, 408, 435nl, 536n4, 537n20, 540n2 Roeg, Nicholas, 509n4; Don 't Look Now, 509n4 Romero, George, 28, 70; Dawn of the Dead, 514n20; Martin, 511nl9; Night of the Living Dead, 28, 30, 50, 511nl9 Rosemary's Baby, 225 Rothschild, Wayne, 522n9 Rushdie, Salman, 438, 442-3, 539n35 Said, Edward, 532nll Sanders, Andrew, 500 Sartre, Jean-Paul, ix, 431-3 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 541nl4 Sharrett, Christopher, 513nl Shaviro, Steven, viii, 508n7, 127-8, 131, 141, 221-2, 513nl, 513nl4, 514n20, 515nl4 Sheen, Martin, 165 Shi Pei Pu, 338, 535n36 Shore, Howard, 271-3, 336-7, 405, 456, 465, 482, 538n26 Silverman, Robert, 94, 102, 116, 315 Sinclair, Iain, 540nl, 540n3 Sirk, Douglas, 168; There's Always Tomorrow, 518nl2 Sisters, 511nl9 Skerritt, Tom, 165 Spader, James, 397, 401, 537nl3 Spier, Carol, 273, 500, 520n26 Stella Dallas (1937, 1990), 518nl2 Studlar, Gaylyn, 516n34 Sukowa, Barbara, 352, 533n21 Suner, Asuman, 372, 532nll, 535n32 Suschitzsky, Peter, 276, 372-3, 501

Testa, Bart, 141, 513n4, 516n35 Ten Rillington Place, 501 Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The, 30 There's Always Tomorrow, 518nl2 Thirteenth Floor, The, 424, 445, 542nl8 Thomson, David, 536n8 Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, The, 542n33 Top Gun, 198 Total Recall, 198 Trudeau, Gary, 306 Truman Show, The, 424 Twentieth Century Fox, 198 Twins (novel), 521n8 Unger, Debra Kara, 397, 416 Vera Drake, 502 Veronneau, Pierre, 273-4, 526n40 Viridiana, 531n57 Virtual Nightmare, 424, 542n7 Vitti, Monica, 416 Wadler, Joyce, 532n2, 535n36 Walken, Christopher, 165, 169, 517n3 Walters, Barbara, 532n2 Weegee, 412 Weller, Peter, 279 Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (film), 536n8 Williams, Linda, 511n20, 515n32 Witness, 198 Wood, Robin, 18, 21, 82, 91-2, 506n4, 507n8, 508n7, 508n9, 510nl9 Woods, James, 94, 169 X-Files, The, 302 Yacowar, Maurice, 516n37

Taylor, Elizabeth, 380, 390-1, 536n8, 537n35

Zee & Co, 536n8