Dissecting Cinema's Most Disturbing Director (A Twisted Genius)

yeah i heard score says he was afraid he was afraid he said he said he was afraid to meet me be afraid be very afraid david cronenberg is a director most well known for pioneering the body horror sub genre if you see in any of his early work films like shivers rabbit the brood videodrome and the fly then this is something you're very well aware of but what you may not be aware of is that cronenberg himself doesn't view his pioneer status as a badge of honor in fact he's even gone out of his way to emphasize that the themes of body horror body mutilation and manipulation is not something that even crosses his mind in the filmmaking process for his use of gore and his penchant for elaborate body transformations cronenberg has been called depraved sick twisted immoral and really just about any other name in the book the sequences in his films that inspire all in some and conjure up nausea and disgust and others are not gratuitous redundant or expendable although they can't appear that way cronenberg's inclination toward the gory and grotesque is a gateway into the themes and philosophical quandaries that make him the incredibly nuanced director he is my films tend to be very body conscious and the the the body and and what it is and what it does and what it can do tends to be very central in my films and it was never a conscious thing but i gradually realized that i was more interested in the things that happened inside you mentally and physically than i was in in a kind of exterior uh threat which is why that you could i think legitimately say that none of my films are monster movies in that sense it's your own body that's the monster your own existence at the time of recording david cronenberg is 79 years of age and has just released a film entitled crimes of the future his first work in nearly eight years if he were to retire from filmmaking today he leave behind an iconic body of work that few of his peers past present and future could live up to it may come as a surprise than to hear that filmmaking was not his first ambition and not even really an option on his radar until a fateful brush with chance cronenberg originally wanted to be a writer a novelist inspired by his journalist father and the scientist and science fiction writer isaac asimov the latter becoming a sort of template for his aspirations when he enrolled into university to study science and pursue an interest in cellular biology cronenberg's journey into filmmaking was an improbable one his hometown of toronto was isolated from the filmmaking hubs of hollywood and europe and the only film school available to him solely taught the technical skills needed for a career in television the story of cronenberg's first forays into film is one i've always found encouraging as it is devoid of help from industry connections lucky breaks and even a film school education cronenberg was completely self-taught and his rise to prominence fueled by a passion for the moving image my filmmaking was really first inspired by the new york underground because it meant that you could just take a camera yourself you didn't have to go to film school you didn't have to work in the film industry you could make a movie yourself just because you wanted to make a movie and that inspiration didn't come from hollywood or europe it came from the new york underground and then i saw a film called winter kept us warm intercepted winter kept this warm was a an actual movie made in 35 millimeter by david sector the student and in that movie were my friends as actors that shocked me it really shocked me because it was like a hollywood movie except it had your next door neighbor suddenly he's a star in the movie that was a shock and it that was one step up from underground it made us let us know let me know that filmmaking was accessible that you could do that uh so that's when i started to think about commercial movies in the sense that i would be paid you know for making it and the people who worked on it it would be a profession cronenberg embarked upon what would become his profession with the 1975 film shivers if this doesn't make you scream and squirm you'd better see a psychiatrist [Music] with shivers being his first commercial feature film cronenberg struggled for years to acquire appropriate funding comparing shivers with the rest of cronenberg's filmography it's apparent that the final budget was tight and perhaps that hampered his creative potential on the film but it didn't stop the canadian filmmaker from opening eyes and turning stomachs are you out to create a body of art or you have to make a fast buck because one of the things fast yeah it took me four years to get shivers made and i made 13 000 for it that's not a fast and it's not much of a buck either shivers follows the residence of a high-rise complex whose lives are complicated by the spread of slimy worm-like parasites that turn their hosts into sex-cray zombies out to infect through sexual content shivers is by no means his best or most memorable work but the film successfully put cronenberg on the filmmaking map and firmly established him as a cinematic provocateur an outrage campaign was launched against cronenberg following the release of shivers the moralistic criticism he faced was fierce enough to temporarily stall his career and even get him evicted from his apartment despite triggering the virtuous morals of the canadian parliament outrage whispers and money shouts there was a outraged article uh written about this movie which pointed out that taxpayers money had gone into this abomination suddenly questions were being raised in the house of commons about me and my movie and why it was money being put into it of course it was the first and only at that time movie that they had funded that actually made money back for the taxpayers so that eventually kind of became a non-issue shivers grossed more than any other canadian film ever had at the time and so cronenberg quickly got to work on his sophomore feature controversy followed cronenberg into his second film rabid in which an epidemic of flesh-eating zombies ravages quebec following an experimental skin graft surgery on the victim of a motorcycle crash with rabbit cronenberg once again received funding from the canadian government although this time more covertly once again the film was met with negative criticism over its disturbing subject matter however the main point of friction this time around was the casting of marilyn chambers a notorious porn star in the lead role although the casting of chambers gave cronenberg's critics additional ammunition she provided the film firstly with a good performance and secondly with a taboo allure that sold tickets and brought the canadian government and cronenberg a great financial success cronenberg would find financial success yet again with his next film 1979's the brood his collaboration with oliver reed on the brood marked the first time cronenberg teamed up with a bonafide star reid plays dr hal raglin a fringe psychotherapist running a clinic that practices his novel method of psychoplasmics in which a disturbed patient is encouraged to release suppressed emotions through physical changes to their body for some patients the method works wonders for others it causes the growth of tumors for the protagonist it threatens the life of his young daughter the brood marked a conceptual departure from shivers and rabbit it wasn't dabbling with b-movie tropes the subject matter was very raw and very personal cronenberg channeled the frustration boiling over from his real-life divorce and custody battle into the plot referring to the film as his version of kramer vs kramer the catharsis at the film's climax sums up cronenberg's mental state at the time pretty well the brood is something of a milestone film for cronenberg it's his first real expedition into psychological terrain where the horror in shivers and rabid comes from external forces seeking to infect and spread the horror of the brood is spawned from the internal brewing inside the character of nola is a war between body and mind while the two remain connected they are not synchronized her inner rage hijacks control of her bodily functions and puts the life of her own daughter into grave jeopardy this idea that our minds and bodies can be commandeered by forces out of our immediate control and force us to harm the ones we love is what makes the brood such an effective horror flick financial success is a common theme that linked shivers and rabbit with the majority of cronenberg's films that followed into the next decade as cronenberg fine-tuned his craft and even through his mainstream boom in the 80s another theme remained constant his obsession with the human body dissecting david cronenberg's peculiar infatuation with the body can help us understand why he's so fond of manipulating contorting deforming and transforming it and begin to crack the enigma of his twisted genius for this we should look away from his body of work for a moment and look towards the man himself cronenberg is an atheist no matter how monstrously outlandish his plots can be they're all more or less grounded in a secular framework rejecting any hint of the supernatural for cronenberg there is no afterlife body is reality it's the first and final frontier of existence for me the body is the essential fact of the human condition i'm not i'm an atheist i don't believe in an afterlife i i think the soul or when we die we disappear our bodies are what we are whether we agree with him or not on the ideological front we all share the empirical reality of existing within a corporeal form within a body so we all squirm and feel some degree of physical revulsion when we see max wren's betamax slit or the brundlefly beyond that the notion that the seemingly boundless expanses of the human spirit and human ingenuity is strictly confined to a meat sac with a rapidly approaching expiration date is highly unsettling although for cronenberg there is no great beyond or metaphysical leveling up that doesn't mean we are limited to the bodies we're born with the advent of life-changing and behavior altering technology adds a dynamic variable into the human equation cronenberg views technology as being an extension of the human body and in his early work no film affirms that belief more than his prophetic 1983 film video drone video jerome is perhaps ironically the only film from this period of his career to not make a profit on its budget it's made up for that in the past decades with a fervent cult following however the film follows max wren the president of a subversive tv channel specializing in softcore porn and other unsavory programming in hot pursuit of the next taboo television trend for his network max's video technician stumbles upon a mysterious broadcast called video drone a plotless show of reoccurring torture and snuff max is enamored by video jerome's potential and as he dives deeper he begins uncovering the conspiracy and malicious interests behind the broadcast the television screen is the retina of the mind's eye therefore the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it television is reality and reality is less than television professor brian oblivion anticipated the merger between humanity and technology that the advent of television made inevitable a merger he coined as the new flesh oblivion's work and mission was oriented towards providing a safe bridge towards the new flesh one result of that was video drone but somewhere along the way the programmed was co-opted by a morality-oriented group concerned with cleansing the cultural and moral filth in north american society as a prominent finger in television's filthy underground max wren is manipulated by both sides of the socio-political conflict that ensues his mind is assaulted by the hallucinations produced by videodrome and his body transforms grotesquely as a result of the technology but perhaps more significantly by the intent of those wielding the technology it's pretty safe to say that the extension television makes on humanity and video drone is not a positive one it makes one shudder to think of the sinister implications of virtual reality in the future the sinister implications of technology's encroachment onto the human body are explored in cronenberg's next film probably his most well-known film 1986 is the fly a tragic tale of deadly consequences that come with scientific hubris the fly was the financial pinnacle of cronenberg's career grossing over 60 million dollars from a nine million dollar budget now at the height of his career cronenberg was determined to prove that he was more than just the body horror guy i i like to be respected and like to have people think that i'm a good filmmaker but on the other hand i don't want to get to be too familiar to everybody and and my films and my film ideas to become too common to you know i really want to be constantly exploring new territory and and taking my audience with me cronenberg's next film dead ringers is another landmark work in his filmography although the body remains a prevalent theme there's very little blood no gore and no monstrous body transformation it would even be a stretch to label the film as horror and yet it retains the disturbing quality that links all of his films while this one being much more grounded in reality i think a lot of what was visual imagery in some of the other movies has now become more verbal and more conceptual and it really is a closed obsessive uh relationship movie and if it's scary and if it's disturbing it's it's because of the resonances it has and the implications it has about about the people in the film and so on i think so that's what's really different about the film with dead ringers cronenberg dives down to the depraved depths of human nature to provide the shivers and shutters we've become accustomed to with him the film stars jeremy irons in what is perhaps his best performance and really the best performance in any cronenberg film as he plays the mantle twins a pair of identical twin gynecologists the twins are renowned for their innovation in the field but what is responsible for their brilliance is their unusually tight-knit bond they both contribute to their practice but the reserved introverted beverly does the research and the outgoing extroverted elliot manages the speeches and the public appearances elliot is also the seducer of women women that the twins share without the women being aware of the ruse it isn't until the twins come in close contact with claire niveau a famous actress that the ruse is discovered and their relationship comes under the threat of being severed a severance that reveals the extreme degree of the twins hyper dependency on each other and spells disastrous consequences dead ringers proved to be a worthy entry in cronenberg's body of work but nothing could prepare critics and audiences for his 1996 film his uber controversial master stroke crash like the film before at 1991's naked lunch crash is an adaptation of a famous novel cronenberg's cinematic rendition of crash somehow managed to garner more controversy and piss off more critics than its already borderline psychotic source material the backlash cronenberg faced in the beginning of his career is nothing compared to the collective reaction to crash the infamous film's protagonist is ballard a stand-in for the novel's author j.g ballard the fictional ballard has an ideal life that many would strive for he works as a commercial director he's married and he lives in a nice apartment in a bustling urban center yet he and his wife openly cheat on each other and even derive a sense of enjoyment from recounting their adulterous tales despite the sense that it seems to refresh their relationship there's an ever-present sense of modern malaise looming over them it's safe to speculate that the standards of a conventional life don't satisfy them they are ripe for a metamorphosis of sorts they collide into a strange yet exciting new world when ballard gets into a nasty car crash that results in the death of a passenger in the other car such an experience would be life-altering for anybody it might stop some people from ever driving again but not for ballard the memory of the crash excites him invigorates him and even arouses him it makes him feel alive and leads him into the grips of vaughn a maniacally obsessive cult leader guiding a group of fellow car crash fetishists toward a new ideal of sexual enlightenment if you haven't seen the movie and you think that sounds crazy you should see the movie although to be fair that's not good advice for everybody when crash first screened at the cannes film festival it proved to be incredibly divisive some respected cronenberg's courage for making the film but it also prompted many walkouts and a thundering of booze among the most vocal of crash's fierce critics was francis ford coppola who served as the jury president that year coppola's criticism ensured that crash would not win the palm door the festival's top prize the rest of the jury however subverted him and awarded cronenberg with a special jury prize for originality for daring and for audacity essentially it was a consolation prize as the award was not given before and hasn't been given again since crash's toughest battle ever was not fought in cannes but it was fought with the censors in the united kingdom who deemed the film to be immoral and entirely without artistic merit the censorship is never about morality it's always about control and power and fear always in a democracy censorship is a paradoxical thing and generally a perversity i think and i can say this as someone who has been censored himself that it is a very sick experience to be censored it ends up you and someone else having an argument you and the board you and whoever the person is who wants to censor you immediately are dealing with their own specific fears their own education and film literacy and it becomes a one-to-one thing where some one citizen is trying to repress and suppress the voice of another and that's it and in a democracy i don't see how you can justify it i think the artist's responsibility is to not be afraid and to not self-censor but all the great artistic discoveries and insights and intuitions have been made in a condition of fearlessness on the part of the artist and not self-censorship and not obeisance to some whatever social uh norm seems to be prevalent at the time as soon as you start to censor you're no longer an artist you might you're you're an interior decorator i mean you might as well forget it crash isn't my personal favorite cronenberg film but i'll admit it might be his most interesting work equal parts enthralling and confounding i view crash as a sort of abstract puzzle that if pieced together depicts modern humanity in the nude crash is not an overtly violent film much of the clamoring for it to be censored comes from cronenberg's unwillingness to take a moral stance on the actions and the events for the censors amorality was the same as advocacy i think it's pretty clear that that is not the case beyond its graphicness crash is so good at getting under people's skin because it presents a cold world without any sort of existential safety net in this world there is no god there is no worthy mortality we simply exist we exist with our interest in visceral and carnal experience and our technology and we must create our own values our own why to the question of how cronenberg isn't endorsing mutilation and deformity as values to live up to but rather showing the depths at which people are capable of dredging to to find crumbs of meaning in what can often appear to be a meaningless world crash isn't a horror film but offers the most frightening implications of any film he's made crash is certainly the ballsiest film cronenberg has made his fearlessness in pushing the boundaries of acceptability to drill to the core of the conundrum of existence makes his special jury prize and status as a cinematic artist very well deserved crash's backlash marked cronenberg's bloodiest bout with censorship when put into perspective with the trouble he faced with his earlier work and adds an interesting context to videodrome one where we can view his 1983 film as an almost satirical condemnation of censorship one where gruesome images induce brain tumors and persuade viewers to commit violence and where shadowy figures seek to purge those who explore raunchier programming for the sake of societal hygiene after a brief return to body horror with 1999's existence and to psychological thrillers with spider in 2002 cronenberg veered his career off into an interesting new direction towards gangster films over a long period of time i mean your life changes your interests change it you your perspective on life completely changes you i if if you really like my movies or interested in my movies you gotta follow me you know where i'm i'm going i don't want to bore myself by doing the same thing over and over again if some mode of filmmaking has lost its intensity for me then i would be betraying myself and my fans by still going on and doing it just because i can you know i'm sure many were surprised by cronenberg's turn into a sub genre that is saturated and can often be shallow and vapid what shouldn't be surprising is the fact that cronenberg successfully injects his own flair into his next two films continuing to probe into the dark recesses of human nature while crafting some of his most accessible work the first of cronenberg's gangster flicks is 2005's a history of violence this was the first of several fruitful collaborations with viggo mortensen who stars in this film as tom stahl a humble diner owner in a small midwestern american town his life is simple it's quiet yet fulfilling that life however is turned upside down when a pair of thugs enter his diner one night with bad ideas in their heads with his life and the lives of his patrons and employees on the line tom is forced to commit an act of violence that reverberates throughout the town and the nation the media attention makes tom a local hero but it also rustles up the interest of some far more intimidating men who believe tom stahl to actually be joey cuzak a former philadelphia gangster with whom they have a score to settle the film is a stark meditation on the nature of violence itself cronenberg's exploration into a subject he knows very well is his most profound peak despite playing out on the smallest of scales in art to be universal you must be specific your story and it will always be in a particular context you can't make something that's universal directly you have to do it through specific things but that has resonance for people uh wherever they are in the world and you hope that that you know you hope for that you don't always achieve that you know as we should expect cronenberg leaves us with more questions than answers much like tom stahl with the transgressions of his past life we humans look back through the brutal and bloody pages of history and wonder if we've truly changed today we have the benefit of hindsight and we have our moralities and civility but the violent tendencies of our past have a way of always creeping back into the picture can we ever really move past them or is violence tattooed onto the sequences of our dna it's very easy to lose sight of what violence really is with when there's a sort of an aesthetic thing an artful evasion of the reality of it which is actually pretty brutal and for me is always totally physical i mean to me the first fact of human existence is the human body for me it's actually the whole fact of human existence so there's no escape unlike many films of the genre the violence here is impactful cronenberg doesn't allow us to switch off our minds and indulge in the kicks we can get from gratuitous violence he forces us to look into the mirror as a species and as individuals cronenberg not only subverts the genre but subverts what critics and audiences have come to expect of him he continued that subversion in 2007 with his film eastern promises which once again stars mortensen alongside naomi watts and vincent cancel watts plays anna a london nurse who delivers the baby of a young prostitute who dies in childbirth among the mother's belongings is a diary written in russian seeking to find a relative to take in the newborn child she reaches out for someone who will translate the diary she gets more than she bargained for getting entwined with the russian mafia and gradually discovering the sinister truth behind the mother's demise eastern promises presents another subversion from classic cronenberg tales it's one of if not his only film that depicts characters striving to triumph over evil and ends on an optimistic note in a 2014 interview with the guardian cronenberg was asked what philosophers had the most impact on his work in his reply he discussed a lecture given by jean-paul sartre called existentialism is a humanism which according to cronenberg basically said that we should accept that there is no god and if we did that and realize that compassion and humanistic empathy were valuable more than valuable but crucial then the world would be a better place cronenberg describes that as his approach to life and none of his films put that approach into practice much like eastern promises where characters ultimately aim to leave their harsh world a better place than they found it although a history of violence and eastern promises appear to be outliers in cronenberg's work both films retained some of the thematic bones that support his previous works both of his gangster films are interested in following characters through drastic transformation unlike a video drone or the fly that transformation isn't physical nor is it psychological as it is in dead ringers violence is the paradigm in which transformations happen in these films the characters in eastern promises become stronger and transform for the better as a response to seemingly arbitrary violence that unfolds around them tom stahl's reverse transformation in the history of violence is not as cut and dry and in the film's final moment leaves us feeling uncertain and uneasy as to his future and more significantly the future of his family the next period of cronenberg's career is the weakest in my opinion at least but i would still encourage you to watch all of these films and of course form your own opinions his first film of the new decade was a dangerous method in 2011. the film follows michael fosbender as the swiss psychoanalyst carl jung and his tempestuous relationships with sigmund freud and sabina spielrein i think it's his best film of the 2010s but the subject matter is pretty esoteric a dangerous method will be of interest to you if you have an interest in the real life figures his next two films cosmopolis and maps to the stars both feature the van rising star robert pattinson cosmopolis is adapted from a dondelillo novel about a 28 year old billionaire riding around manhattan in a stretch limo the film is plotless and convoluted and honestly pretty aimless cronenberg's style here is so cool and detached that it makes the film feel kind of lifeless although i must admit that this is a film that i need to revisit and when i do my opinion on it might change maps to the stars on the other hand is a grand disturbing satire of hollywood and the single-minded pursuit of fame that is pretty interesting considering cronenberg's outsider status but yet still falls a bit short of the mark of the quality we've come to expect from the canadian filmmaker midway through the decade cronenberg published his first and only novel to date consumed several years later rumors swirled that cronenberg would retire from filmmaking viggo mortensen specifically cited a tremendous difficulty in cronenberg being able to acquire funding for his projects as the reason for him considering retirement several years later however the stars would align and cronenberg and mortensen would reunite for 2022's crimes of the future kronenberg's triumphant return to body horror is a strange futuristic noir where pain and disease have been eradicated but weird things are happening to the human body a peculiar victim of those weird happenings is saul tenser a performance artist who develops the ability to spontaneously grow new organs the removal of these organs provide the spectacle of his performance art show and he and his partner caprice become renowned for their work they are sought out by both a secretive cult that believe they've discovered the next stage of human evolution and by the state bureaucrats who want to keep them in check crimes of the future is a strange ride that defies any concrete interpretation i like to look at the film as a kind of capstone to cronenberg's life as an artist in that context saul tensor is like a stand-in for cronenberg as the character who has his body opened up for the sake of his art the performance artists here are the template of any artist who is passionate opening themselves up exposing themselves their most intimate inner workings offering them to an audience which could makes them incredibly vulnerable to rejection to misunderstanding to anger as any and it basically therefore is the model of what an artist is despite being misunderstood and misrepresented his entire career david cronenberg has always stayed true to himself and his genuine artistic instincts never shying away from upsetting or disgusting people in his odyssey to better understand the human condition for me all art is subversive in some ways art is reflective it really forces you to reflect on yourself on your situation uh make you think about things like it's what is the human condition really about real art must be subversive of the status quo to some extent it's inevitable then if you consider yourself an artist that you are going to bother people that you're going to disturb people i think playfulness is is the main thing that i do i play with the concepts with the images with the metaphors and so i think i'm playful not sort of hostile and nasty and and yeah you want to get under the surface to see what's really going on and how things really work that does upset a lot of people then it's an inevitable consequence of being a serious artist

Channel: Renegade Films

Views: 106,254

Keywords: David Cronenberg

Id: 4br-tsmDfBo

Length: 37min 19sec (2239 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 18 2022