In Focus: David Cronenberg

Last week David Cronenberg was made a fellow at the British Film Institute. He joins the ranks of other great directors such as Orson Wells, Akira Kurosawa and Martin Scorsese to be honoured with this accolade. Cronenberg is, however, a slightly surprising choice. This is not because his films are not up to this standard, but because he is one of the most controversial directors in film history. In 1996 the right wing press called for his soon to be released film Crash to be banned. Unfortunately, they had their way and the film is still not allowed to be shown in the city of Westminster. Despite this, Cronenberg is one of the most important filmmakers working today.

It would be easy to dismiss a director like Cronenberg as tasteless. To do this though would be unjust. While it is true that Cronenberg uses a lot of sex, violence and gore in his films there is always a purpose for its use. Take for example his best known film The Fly, the slow metamorphosis of Seth Brundle’s (Jeff Goldblum) body into a fly can be seen as a metaphor for old age. At first, Brundle is a lot stronger and has enhanced sexual performance since accidently mixing his DNA with a fly. But as the film progresses we see Brundle’s hair and teeth fall out, we see him hobble slowly along with two walking sticks and we watch his memory and emotions fade. While as a genre The Fly is classed as a horror film, what sets it apart from most mainstream horrors is the characters and setting. The majority of the film is set within Brundle’s apartment. The feel is claustrophobic, with a lot of Cronenberg’s trademark smoke choking the air. Brundle’s love interest, Veronica Quaife (Geena Davis), gradually becomes disgusted with his grotesque appearance. She never loses pity for Brundle, a possible continuation of the metaphor for old age.

These visual metaphors are ripe in Cronenberg’s films. Cronenberg often uses these metaphors or ideas and then brings them to their extremes. Think of Scanners, when we see a close up of a scanner’s face slowly dissolve into the face of the person they are scanning before going back into their own face. The effect is a blurred sense of identity for the scanners, a subject which is prevalent throughout the film. Or think of Videodrome, as Max (James Woods) hallucinates over the melting Dali-like videotape. Max’s sense of reality is blurred since watching this video but now he is hallucinating over the very videotape that causes his world to be turned upside down. Finally, consider Cronenberg’s masterpiece Crash, where the characters’ lust for sex and death are one and the same. In the final scene (spoiler), where James (James Spade) forces Helen (Holly Hunter) to crash her car, he caresses the overturned car then her damaged body. The camera tracks slowly out from the couple, with James now having sex with her as she lays dying (end of spoiler). Cronenberg is saying that this is the conclusion of extreme fetish. No director has talked about sex, death and mutilation before in such an uncompromising way.

All Cronenberg’s films in this article concern characters or themes that have tried to advance the human species along in some evolutionary way; The Fly tries to do this physically, Crash sexually, Scanners mentally and Videodrome does so with technology. All of these attempts are of course futile and in the end result in some form of tragedy. This is the essence of Cronenberg’s films, unsettling ideas that are taken to and beyond their extremes.

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