Cronenberg at the Cinematheque: Take the Skin and Peel it Back, plus Halloween Trivia Contest!

The last time David Cronenberg had a retrospective of any length at the Cinematheque, I got to speak to him for the Georgia Straight - a gigantic conversation that I actually struggled a bit with, because I wanted to challenge him about misogynist elements in The Brood, but found myself feeling it inappropriate in the context of an interview. There was one point, having done my homework - asking about his representation of women in the film, and whether Samantha Eggar's character is not a grotesque caricature of the female, the female body as source of horror - where I was entirely prepared to say, "Yes, that's the answer you gave Susan Ayscough in 1983, when she asked you the same question, but I don't buy it, because..." (and enumerate my reasons). But I chickened out, let the words die in my throat, because, I mean, my job was not to FORCE HIM TO CONFESS THAT ONE OF HIS FILMS WAS MISOGYNIST, it was to draw him out. If I'd pushed it, maybe he would have just hung up? If he didn't, it would maybe have made the interview much more interesting, but... 

I do still think, Ayscough answer aside, that The Brood is misogynist, and I actually did send Cronenberg (by way of the publicist who set up the interview) a long essay I wrote dealing with Robin Wood's objections to his cinema, most of which I overturn, but some of which stick, especially around The Brood. Truth is, I actually found writing that essay more enlightening and useful to developing my thinking about Cronenberg's cinema than actually talking to the man himself, though he was very pleasant and witty and an interesting conversationalist, the interview could only go so deep. The critical piece, however, had no constraints on it (like my feelings of intimidation or deferentiality). It initially ran under a slightly different title in CineAction magazine, but when I was going for my first round of cancer surgery, back in 2017, I put a few of my more important (to me, at least) articles onto this blog, lest they be lost. 

As I've said, Cronenberg sure has helped me come to terms with the aftermath of my various surgeries. His films prepare you for the weirdness of changes to the flesh in surprising ways, help you take an aesthetic distance from it - such that the most disgusting or uncomfortable things that have emerged from my body or been done to it have also been more interesting, worthy of contemplation - a sort of "that's disgusting, but just LOOK at it, it's also fascinating and strange. It came from ME!" (Go back to late December 2021 to January 2022 on this blog for lots of gross photos; I don't want to re-post any now).   

Crimes of the Future - which will get a free, likely VERY crowded screening at the Cinematheque this Thursday, complete with a panel discussion on the film - deals very much with surgery, and tumours, and "artists" who grow new organs that are a key to social change (one of many themes in the film that hearken back to Cronenberg's early work, from the parasites that are supposed to function as replacement organs in Shivers to the armpit vaginapenis in Rabid to the external wombs in The Brood - all three of which will also screen at the Cinematheque over the coming week or so, but not for free). As I mentioned in my blogged first response to the film, Crimes of the Future plays even more like "Cronenberg's greatest hits" than eXistenZ did, with Saul Tenser being a fairly clear analogue for Cronenberg - the artist who is ambivalent about accepting his new growths, who produces them almost compulsively but then rejects them and has them cut out by his partner, Caprice, as a sort of performance art. There is one point where they discuss the need to tattoo each novel organ, where Caprice claims that each tattoo must be uniquely "self-referential," tying back to Tenser's own work and history. This is the decoder ring I had hoped for, but missed, when first writing about the film, a key that the self-referentiality in the film is not just Cronenberg repeating himself (which is how eXistenZ felt on first viewing) but a deliberate tabling of his own art and position in society, and the relationship of his art to critics, fans, and bureaucrats. eXistenZ feels self-aware, Cronenberg consciously employing the Cronenbergian to deliberate effect, but it doesn't feel like it is about the Cronenbergian per se, whereas Crimes of the Future does. The film is so self-referential that it seems foolish to try to talk about the film at all without talking about the filmmaker; if I could revisit my interview with him, I'd definitely ask him about the sort of fawning fan encounters he satirizes in the characters of Wippet and Timlin (Don McKellar and Kristen Stewart, at their quirky best). I mean, does he get people wanting to show him their surgical scars and tumours and such when he goes out for groceries? (Is that, ultimately, why Tenser dresses like a ninja - because he's hiding from his fans?). 

And besides the obvious, aforesaid idea of the "new flesh" most memorably asserted in Videodrome, or riffs on the concept of Inner Beauty that were first explicitly tabled in Dead Ringers, the film is loaded with motifs echoing throughout Cronenberg's body of work. The umbilical connections between Tenser and his bed suggest the tubing used in eXistenZ. The thematic elements of going undercover - as Tenser does, as an expression of his ambivalence, reporting to the New Vice police about his infiltrations of the art scene - also feature in Scanners, Videodrome, Naked Lunch, and Eastern Promises. You have in Tenser and Caprice the idea of a couple in the process of reinventing a relationship based on their own chosen ideas of norms, which you see in Crash and to an extent Naked Lunch. The "Breakfaster" chair looks like a set element from Naked Lunch, perhaps (though of actual things shown in that film, it reminds me most strongly of the Julian Sands centipede-monster, for no reason I can defend). There is also the sense of factions each with their own agenda operating around Tenser, from the New Vice unit to the LifeFormWare technicians to the New Organ Registry bureaucrats to the art scene itself, which most powerfully reminds us of  Videodrome (as does the stomach-vagina "zipper" that Tenser has surgically implanted for ease of access to his guts). It's kind of dizzying, maybe a little narcissistic on Cronenberg's part, but has proven with each successive viewing (three complete ones at least, since that first, though also several partial ones) to have grown much funnier and more pleasing to behold.

Anyhow, if you're interested in reading about Shivers, Rabid and The Brood, I hope you'll check out the CineAction article that I linked above. You may also want to note that The Fly, maybe Cronenberg's most perfect "fusion" of the Cronenbergian with the mass-appeal thriller, will be screening twice, once on Halloween night proper along with a trivia contest. Having had more than  my share of moments in the last few years where I looked at myself in the mirror, as Seth Brundle does, and said (or at least thought), "What's happening to me? Am I dying?", The Fly has become an ever more poignant and powerful experience for me, a film I am very much looking forward to seeing on the big screen.

I might participate in the trivia contest, too, but that remains to be seen... 

For more information on Take the Skin and Peel It Back: Halloween By Cronenberg, go to the Cinematheque website.