DAVID CRONENBERG

WHAT CANNOT BE DECONSTRUCTED CAN ALWAYS BE DESTROYED IN CINEMA

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

Fine art culture becomes public once the product is published, but the cinema of filmmaker David Cronenberg takes publishing to an all new level.

Individuals have a public mask and a private face, and Cronenberg provides his unique perspective on what that paradigm means to individual realities.

Society impresses on everyone to fit into neat little identity defining categories, but while the public life may be perceived in that way, what individuals are doing psychologically and physically in private may be quite another truth. The privacy of one’s own psychological mind, one’s private residence, and even one’s doctor’s office tell quite another life story.

Cronenberg gives categories expression in film, but then the director deconstructs that perception to illustrate the truer than life reality of individuals in private that the public never sees.

In Naked Lunch (1991) art is turned inside out and right side up again with the psychological mind merging uncomfortably with the physical world as the words take control of a creative writer’s reality.

Peter Weller and Judy Davis costar with Ian Holm as Cronenberg explores the writing process.

The film’s protagonist Bill Lee pays the bills with work as a bug exterminator, but he and his wife, Joan, shoot up the chemicals.

Davis portrays Joan as totally lit on the bug dope to the point of having lost all bearing and moral turpitude.

Bill gets upset when he gets placed under investigation by his employer for suspicious bug dope use, but he becomes heavily addicted as well after trying to help his wife withdraw.

Everything becomes a crisis, and no one is certain anymore about what is real and what is a misperception.

Cronenberg merges the changing perception of a creative mind that has become distorted further yet by the hallucinogenic chemicals.

In The Fly (1986) costarring Jeff Goldblum, as molecular scientist Seth Brundle, and Geena Davis as Veronica Quaife, a science journalist at Particle, the integrity of the physical body is questioned.

Brundle has invented a teleportation device reliant on the decision making of a computer.

Cronenberg creates a discourse about science and the physical body in this remake of the classic Hollywood horror film starring Vincent Price, The Fly (1958).

The telepods eventually start operating properly after Brundle adjusts the computer codes. But science goes sideways when the computer assimilates the scientist with a fly that has snuck into the telepod.

The computer makes a very unhuman decision, but science continues on when Brundle does not do well with the extra chromosomes. 

Cronenberg creates slow grinding intellectual discussions on film that present a certain culturally defined individual reality, but then these realities are deconstructed to provoke thought about who people really are inside.

Once the social rules and morality codes are relaxed, who people are inside is what is truly interesting from the perspective of the film director.

Cronenberg provokes thought with images of the body breaking out of the protective skin. These images of the grotesque recur throughout the director’s filmography.

In the Brood (1979) psychoanalysis becomes critiqued by the meticulous commentator.

The director takes the mind apart when the reality might be better off left alone.

Individual perceptions are anchored in the experiences that created the subconscious. So, if everyone has different experiences, everyone has different realities.

This theme is repeatedly revisited by Cronenberg introducing a reality and then deconstructing the reality, sometimes literally with exploding bodies and collapsing psyches.

In Dead Ringers (1988) Jeremy Irons plays a gynecologist who has a twin brother, who is also a gynecologist working out of the same medical office, while Genevieve Bujold plays a famous actor with an unusual gynecological condition.

The doctors lose their objectivity but the subjectivity they develop has no precedent anywhere in the world.

Cronenberg merges the public and private realities to reinforce the idea that people live very separate lives, with internal thoughts and motivations seldom made public.

The films tend to be science horror involving the mental and physical tics developed as a result of the many human frailties.

The mind and body operate in synch as one entity, but the human cost for the slightest transgression may be a mind-body split that forces the individual to begin working out of their normal operating parameters.

The Dead Zone (1983) stars Christopher Walken as a school teacher who comes out of a coma after five years as a bit of a clairvoyant. Cronenberg has the protagonist survive a horrifying car accident so as to be able to foretell the death and suffering of others.

The mind has untapped special powers not necessarily limited to creative hallucinations.

In Crash (2004) the individual trauma of having to work through realities, composed of dysfunction, changes perceptions of reality.

Cronenberg uses an ensemble cast to create many realities occurring simultaneously during the day, with a kind of mystical cultural interconnectivity that merges the scenes into one movie narrative.

Don Cheadle plays an honest street hardened black Los Angeles police detective sent to the scene of a homicide only to discover that a white undercover cop has killed a black undercover cop.

The expression of the same recuring topics of reality and perception and the illusiveness of truth becomes a fine art in the film as Cronenberg creates discourses around the paradigm shifts that occur to make a good person bad, and a bad person good.

Matt Dillon plays a racist LA cop who pulls over a black couple in an expensive SUV just because they are black in an expensive SUV.

The traffic stop goes sideways when competing perceptions merge and change the reality of all the players.

Terrence Howard plays a film director who has managed to succeed by working with white people instead of being in their face constantly. But the outrage of his wife, played by Thandie Newton, exhibited at the traffic stop, gets him to gradually switch to the more defensive, more confrontational attitude that almost gets him killed. 

The director creates film art by examining the subjectivity of perception when everyone has a different perception and so everyone has a different reality, even though the characters are interconnected within the same environment.

Sandra Bullock’s character loses the sympathy of the audience by being a bit abrasive and unreasonable, but the perception of the character changes when she falls down and hurts herself.

Cronenberg has made art that provokes thought and emotion.

In A History of Violence (2005), starring Viggo Mortenson and Maria Bello, the past comes back to haunt the happily married couple. Mortenson shows how people often have two personas that can be switched off when convenient.

Tom Stall is a really nice guy with a beautiful wife and two happy children. But the protagonist’s history of violence becomes triggered by an accidental meeting with violence.

As in Crash, Cronenberg shows how the environment often determines how people behave. If the circumstances require violence, violence will indeed occur, but people can otherwise live quite well without violence in their lives.

In Cosmopolis (2012) Robert Pattinson plays a decadent billionaire who lives a good part of the day out of his limousine.

Pattinson shows how the decadence of greed can send all the moral and social rules down a separate path – and purposely so with almost a God-like arrogance.

Cronenberg often films with a wide angle lens which allows for the audience to have an expansive view of the world in which the characters live.

The director then leaves cues with the characters and in the spaces on either side of the characters to create a certain discourse.

The audience is not manipulated so much as persuaded to at least think about the subject matter the director presents, Cronenberg having acknowledged throughout his career the futility of thought control.

The Cinema of David Cronenberg, by Ernest Mathijs, London, Wallflower Press, 2008. The Artist as Monster, by William Bread, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2001.