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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

David Cronenberg

  
 
grant
15:53 / 27.09.02
Dr. Cronenberg. Love the man to bits.

I hear, in another thread, there's a new Cronenberg coming out.

Spider?

Anybody know anything about it?

And, just to widen the topic out, how do you find Cronenberg?
Boringly obsessive? Cool as hell? Tired? Weird?
And why?

I hear a few people find him boring, but I'm not sure how that's possible (with the exception of Crash, where you're supposed to sort of know what James Spader is thinking without him saying anything for long stretches).

I find his interest in bodies and genders (and all that goo) disturbing, but also important. No other filmmaker seems to be so keen on the interface between image and flesh (and, by extension, "mind" and "brain"), at least in a literal, visual way.
 
 
videodrome
18:24 / 27.09.02
Well, given my name, it's a sure bet I'd hit this sooner or later. Might as well make it sooner, even though I feel like crap and am not currently prone to thinking. Two parts: listage, and then talk.

So: first off, Spider. Played at Cannes. Nominated for the Golden Palm, and I thought it had co-won something else there. Supposed to be very dark and somewhat slow, not the easiest picture to watch and certainly not very uplifting. But that's hearsay. Has generally been praised and I'm keen to see it. Everything else I know can be gleaned from the IMDB listing.

Couple of other things, re: the abstract listing:

Stereo, not listed, was made before Crimes of the Future, both student films, preceeded by a couple of shorts. Crimes has no dialogue, but isn't a bad picture. It's pretty oblique, and free of some of the grotesqueries that characterize almost everything else he's done. Crimes was available at one point in the Criterion Collection laserdisc release of Dead Ringers. Sadly it didn't make the Criterion DVD, which is out of print, anyway.

It's quite unlikely that you'll ever see Fast Company, Cronenberg's film about car racing. Supposedly, at one point it could be seen on television occasionally, but I've never happened across it, even in bootleg form in the 12 or so years that I've actively been aware of it.

Cronenberg on the film:
It was a labour of love; it wasn't a hack job. True, I had less control over it than any other movie, but visually I was honing my style...It was a good, solid B-movie actioner, as they say, with some interesting elements. We ended up with a distributor in the states who immediately went belly-up and the picture got involved in litigation because it was an asset, and died. Disappeared. It was barely shown anywhere....it proved to be a very important movie for me. I met Mark Irwin (cinematographer), Carol Spier (production designer) and Ron Sanders (editor) on that picture.

Irwin shot every Cronenberg picture up to and including The Fly and Sanders and Spier have worked on every film of his since they met.

You've also left off the episode of Friday the 13th, The Series that Cronenberg directed. I have that one on tape, minus about five minutes. It's OK.
 
 
moriarty
19:39 / 27.09.02
Videodrome has the "biggest fan of Cronenberg" title nailed down by name alone, but I too have an appreciation for the man's work. I'm not sure where Videodrome lives, but here in Canada it was possible to catch Fast Company on the odd occasion. Cronenberg got his feature film start with the help of Canada's incredibly generous late 70s/early 80s Tax Shelter program for films, the one that brought you such films as Porky's. The same government support has resulted in a slightly restrictive quota system for Canadian film on television that demands a great deal of CanCon from cable stations. The end result? David Cronenberg festivals, and the mysterious appearance of Fast Company.

Beside Friday the 13th, there was also an episode of Scales of Justice shown on the CBC. Unfortunately, I didn't manage on getting it on tape. And then there was the Nike commercial, back when they were really getting started and had William Burroughs and John K. doing their ads. I did get the episode of Maniac Mansion on which he guest-starred, complaining to his therapist that all he wants to make is a Musical Comedy about Canadian Politics, but he's been typecast as the "weird and scary" filmmaker. I like Cronenberg's acting gigs almost as much as I like his directing. He was easily the highlight of Nightbreed, and his small role in Last Night was excellent as well.

Happily, I managed on catching the Cronenberg exhibit when it swung around Toronto en route to Japan. They had props from most of his movies (including a large selection of Mugwumps) and a tv set that had Crimes of the Future, Stereo and From the Drain on rotation.

I think living in Southern Ontario was the reason I really got into Cronenberg, to be honest. When you're young, into horror and living in a boring city, having some maverick director come in and make that place scary is very exciting. The town of Niagara-on-the-Lake liked their Dead Zone gazebo so much that it's still there today. I co-starred in a film shot in the Screaming Tunnel, another set from the Dead Zone. I'm not positive, but I think CityTV still won't play his movies after his unflattering satire of the station in Videodrome. And driving along the highways outside Toronto is a treat when you play the game of trying to spot the scene of accidents in Crash. Cronenberg is at least partially responsible for making me look for the weirdness in my own backyard instead of just wishing for a way out.

Gush gush. I couldn't pick a favourite, but Shivers has a special place in my heart. And I'd say go for M. Butterfly. I'd say that on the surface it's possibly Cronenberg's most un-Cronenberg movie, being as it has no fantastical elements to it, but it still ties into his filmography so well.
 
 
Mycroft Holmes
07:17 / 28.09.02
Heres a story I heard. When American Psycho was first 'optioned' or whatever the right term is- Cronenberg was attached to direct. Apparently he was interested in making the film, but he refused to have blood or death in the film. He wanted to make the whole film as the exploration of Batemans obsession with fashion, music, ect.
I read this in an interview with BEE. So, it may or may not be true.
 
 
Seth
10:19 / 28.09.02
There's a superb a5e article on Cronenberg here. Worth sharing, even if I haven't seen enough of his work to join the discussion proper.
 
 
nutella23
17:41 / 28.09.02
I had heard that there was more than one version of Videodrome on the market, is this true? I know about the end sequence Cronenberg wanted but cut from production, but this regards scenes that were actually filmed and then deleted from the theater run, and added in some video versions but not others, or abridged cut-scenes in some versions(?). Maybe the foreign market releases?
 
 
videodrome
19:55 / 28.09.02
Videodrome had something like 90 seconds cut from the North American release, which has been restored in the video releases. The DVD currently available through Universal is the uncut, running at 89 minutes. The additional footage makes very little difference, adding nothing to the story itself. There's a bit more gore (more of the writhing Barry Convex) and whatnot, but it makes little difference either way. I don't know what was released internationally, and what the PAL running time would be, given the PAL time change thing.

Details at the IMDB, of course, including, I now see, the UK version stuff. I don't know what 'vulva image' they're talking about...
 
 
PatrickMM
23:27 / 13.11.06
I've now seen Videodrome, Crash, Naked Lunch, Existenz and History of Violence. What's the next Cronenberg movie people would reccomend checking out? My favorites so far were Crash and History of Violence. Videodrome was also top notch, though Naked Lunch sort of lost me. Existenz wasn't particularly impressive, almost descending into self parody at times. But the more I see, the more I like, so I'm looking for what's next.
 
 
Scrambled Password Bogus Email
00:32 / 14.11.06
Well, The Fly, natch.

Scanners is pretty great. Dead Ringers is intense and emotionally probably the most draining film I've ever watched.

Start there.
 
 
Kali, Queen of Kitteh
18:26 / 14.11.06
I could tell you about that month where I had nothing but erotic dreams of Cronenberg.

That trumped anything I watched.

But all of his films are pretty awesome.
 
 
netbanshee
18:56 / 14.11.06
I would also nominate Scanners and Dead Ringers. Both are pretty good. You might have some difficulty finding Dead Ringers unless you have a Netflix account or something.

Kali: of or with Cronenberg? I've had dreams I'm sure he'd option but he's never decided to make a stop in.
 
 
Kali, Queen of Kitteh
19:22 / 14.11.06
Um, with. But I do love his voice. It's so weirdly erotic AND psychotic.
 
 
netbanshee
21:25 / 14.11.06
Heheh... I get ya.

If you're interested in catching some more of him, there's a roundtable interview with Cronenberg, Carpenter and Landis on the criterion edition of Videodrome. Landis is fun (as usual), Carpenter comes off as a dick, and Cronenberg is his classy self. And you get to see a nice transfer of Videodrome with well done commentary and extras to boot.

Netflix tells me that Cronenberg had something to do with the Canadian TV comedy, The Newsroom. Anyone have any insight into this? Was he a guest director or did they associate him with the show erroneously?
 
 
alexis
18:48 / 20.11.06
Cronenberg's a cast member of a Don McKellar Canadian indie flick called 'Last Night', which is an ensemble piece about the end of the world. Cronenberg's characteristically phlegmatic acting style is put to great use here as he plays a guy from the gas company who has a suicide pact with Sandra Oh. This film is dazzling in the scenes with Callum Keith Rennie, who plays a guy out to fulfill all of his erotic fantasies before he dies (with the aid of some erectile snake oil), including sleeping with his old french teacher played by Genevieve Bujold from Dead Ringers. It came out the same year as Armageddon and Deep Impact (gotta love those millennial-angst disaster movies), but with it's vastly smaller budget kicks them to the gutter and steals their lunch money. Seriously, its emotional range is epic. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll hurl.
 
 
sleazenation
20:46 / 20.11.06
I remember watching this film at it's North American premier as part of the Toronto International Film Fest, (in the same cinema as Cronenberg and Don McKellar), and have loved it ever since. But despite repeated viewings I'd never identified Cronenberg's character as being the husband of Oh's character - was there some subtle (or not so subtle) clues that I missed?
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
20:56 / 20.11.06
My favourite Cronenberg movie is probably Videodrome, though Shivers comes a close second. In recent years, though, I've started seeing him as the only guy who can make movies of unfilmable novels.

Yeah, Naked Lunch is the obvious one. But I never would have thought anyone could make a decent movie of Crash. And Spider? When I first read that, I shit you not, I thought "if it wasn't for the fact that this was such a terribly British book, I could imagine Cronenberg making a movie of this". While I was reading it, his film premiered at Cannes. I had no idea until I saw it online just after finishing the book. (On the whole, I prefer the novel, for the "big reveal" at the end, which Cronenberg gives away in the opening shot, but he fucks with you just as much in his depiction of the sequence of events- and it's a fucking marvellous film either way).
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
21:00 / 20.11.06
Actually (apologies for the double post, but this only just occurred to me) the similarities between Cronenberg and Ballard, and Cronenberg and Tsukamoto, are interesting. IE the less overtly "SF" they get, the more fucked-up their work becomes, the more deeply into human pathology they delve. Dead Ringers, Crash and A Snake Of June are WAY more affecting than Scanners, The Atrocity Echibition or Tetsuo.
 
 
alexis
21:13 / 20.11.06
Hmm, not sure I agree with the above. Dead Ringers is my favourite of his films, no doubt, but The Fly is such a humane film it would be criminal to overlook it. Cronenberg has said he views his "straight" work as conceptual SF, in essence. For Dead Ringers, he tried to pitch the twins as the only twins in the world. Genevieve Bujold's three cervixes are certainly impossible. All he does in his more restrained pieces is, I believe, localise or internalise the mutation. The fact that A History of Violence was not oppressively gynaecological *was* a radical departure though, I admit. He seemed to be making a David Lynch film there, whereas I've heard 'Inland Empire' is quite Cronenbergian.

Oh, and Sleazenation, I inferred that Cronenberg was Sandra Oh's husband from the fact that she was listening to McKellar's rather dry gas company answerphone message again and again about half an hour before the end, crying great racking sobs. She knew she had no messages from him, so why else would she listen to it ad infinitum unless she wanted to hear his voice one last time? Also, at his dinner table, he had two plates of food prepared, yet dines alone. I'm anally retentive, I notice these things.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
21:45 / 20.11.06
Oh, don't get me wrong, I love The Fly, and Shivers is a fucking classic. I LOVE the more overt stuff; I just find some of the less overt stuff more affecting. I first got into Cronenberg for the "explodey-head-thing" of Scanners when I was a kid...
 
 
alexis
22:37 / 20.11.06
Yeah, I see what you mean. Crash ate me for breakfast, it really did. I love the book and it was as faithful in spirit as the best adaptations. I think Cronenberg realised sometime in the mid-eighties that his conceptual gunk meant he would be forever relegated to late night horror double bills. The Dead Zone or Videodrome are probably his first stabs at credibility. The fact that he was on a roundtable with Landis and Carpenter for Videodrome depresses me, to be honest. I think he's far more suited to comparisons with Michael Powell, Terry Gilliam or Peter Greenaway. I know both Carpenter and Landis have some gems in their ouvre, but they haven't produced an impressive body of work for decades. Cronenberg has been consistently brilliant, which you can't even say for Scorsese or Coppolla. Moreover, I think the man has absolute integrity. He turned down Top Gun and Total Recall after The Fly even though he could pretty much have written his own cheque had he done either. He's simply compelled to obviate uncomfortable ontological and existential questions, and I can lavish no higher praise on an artist than that.

I guess my affection for the gunk stems from that one sequence in The Fly where Howard Shore's mournful score swells as we see the Brundlefly in his final, abject stage of decomposition, standing in the hallway facing his lover. 'I'm an insect who dreamed he was a man for a time and loved it. But now the dream is over and the insect is awake. Leave now because I'll hurt you if you stay'. It floored me as a kid, I have to say. I didn't realise horror movies could wield such visceral emotional power. Making a fourteen year old kid aware of the inbuilt obsolescence in the flesh is no mean feat. It's one of the only horror movies that isn't date-friendly though, I have observed.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
00:37 / 21.11.06
Cronenberg has been consistently brilliant

No arguments there.

Though I think you're being a little harsh on Carpenter. Landis? Not so much.

I think Carpenter is like a Sam Raimi or a Peter Jackson who never got the big break.

Cronenberg has never cared about the big break. He's kept on ploughing his own furrow. (This is what I meant with the Ballard and Tsukamoto comparisons, really).

Have yet to see History of Violence, but I haven't been disappointed by a Cronenberg movie yet.
 
 
PatrickMM
02:21 / 21.11.06
IE the less overtly "SF" they get, the more fucked-up their work becomes, the more deeply into human pathology they delve.

I'd agree, I found Crash deeply unsettling in a way that all the fantasy imagery of Naked Lunch or Existenz couldn't match. Same with Snake of June. What those films do is expose the twisted potential of things that exist all around us. In Tetsuo, it's the small metal bits in the skin that's disturbing, not the giant robot man. However, the one thing I disliked about History of Violence was the way it stuck to conventional thriller plotting, rather than indulging anything really bizarre. Crash was a great midpoint between the two, and I'd like to see Cronenberg go in that direction again.
 
 
matthew.
03:40 / 21.11.06
I'm fairly certain that The Fly is my favorite sci-fi movie ever. Ever. I saw the sequel first when I was a child and I didn't remember much, except for a gigantic fly-like thing. Then, when I was in my teens, I caught the original Fly on television. I got a kick out of it. It was cool. It made me want Brundlefly. Little did I know.

The very first time I saw The Fly, I cried. It was horrible. I was devastated that Brundlefly held the shotgun to his own head. He knew. He knew he had gone crazy.

I first intrepreted the film as "Don't mess with technology" and then I began intrepreting the film as "This is how awful cancer is" and then I thought it was an allegory on AIDS. However, I heard Cronenberg has denied any direct connection. It doesn't matter.

It's so simple and effective. Three main characters and a gibbon (baboon?). It's effective because I was emotionally invested in both leads. There's something that I find very very very rare in film these days. For 2 hours, it's hard to get me caring about people. This film does it perfectly.

I can't possibly imagine a remake to this remake, but lo and behold, the machine is pumping it out.
 
 
alexis
09:57 / 21.11.06
The shotgun scene is pretty damn poetic, I agree. I think the interesting thing about the film is that it forces you to skew your perceptions regarding "the other". It isn't just "poor man", it's also "poor fly" if you think about it. Neither of them get any percentage out of the deal. What I find interesting on a psychological level is the desperation he has to be human. Is that the fly making the man crazy or the man making the fly crazy? The fly, in my opinion, simply reveals the true nature of the man. You peel away the veneer of civilisation and make a man a monster, it's the man who is prepared to do monstrous things to regain his humanity, not the monster.

As for the AIDS parallel, yeah, he's said he thinks it's bigger than that (if that's possible). It's life itself as a venereal disease. I think it's no accident that Brundle begins to deteriorate after an initial Apollonian detour straight after he loses his virginity.

As for the thriller format in A History of Violence, don't forget that it isn't Cronenberg's script. Also, I think Viggo Mortensen's subtle transformation into a thug is an acting masterclass. The "rape" scene is as problematic as the one in 'High Plains Drifter' for me. Does she enjoy it? SHOULD she?
 
 
alexis
10:01 / 21.11.06
Oh, and the director of the remake of the remake of The Fly has said that a problem he had with Cronenberg's version is that the Brundlefly never flew. Cue lots of cartoony CGI and a complete evacuation of any of the deeply romantic sub-plots that made the film so special. The whole point of the Brundlefly is that it's a remarkable genetic dead end, like Genevieve Bujold in Dead Ringers; fabulously rare, but ultimately pointless. The Brundlefly has no dick, so it's emasculated, and it has no wings so it's pretty damn useless as a fly. The machine logic of the teleporter understands 'the poetry of the steak', but it doesn't understand utility. Essentially, the judgment the teleporter makes in fusing them is an aesthetic one.
 
 
The Strobe
11:49 / 21.11.06
So: I really, really loved History of Violence; it's easily one of my favourite films, and I think it works far better than the pulpy comic that inspired it.

I think it's a relatively natural progression - sure, it has that thriller format, but there's a lot of lurking horror inside it. (Similarly, in Spider, the metamorphoses and horrors are internal, not external). There's the slow metamorphosis of the lead character - and his family - which looks like it might just resolve, but never does. There's the horror hidden inside desperate, bad sex, and desperate, bad acts. And Cronenberg takes on the thriller-violence with a much more gory, body-horror styled approach; of course, his approach feels much more realistic than the movie-realism approach to violence other films have practiced.

I think the sex-on-the-stairs sequence is interesting. I'm pretty convinced she does enjoy it; it shows two people at complete loggerheads with one another, with rage towering above them, and the only way to resolve it is either to beat the shit out of each other or to fuck. And so they fuck, and it's this great, violent, ugly release, and it's pleasurable in the strangest way, and then they walk off in other directions. If they hadn't had sex, they'd have probably tried to kill each other. It's a necessary act, not a desired one.
 
 
Scrambled Password Bogus Email
16:10 / 22.11.06
Ditto on The Fly being truly great film-making. It's a love story, at heart, a really simple geeky-boy-meets-uptown-girl-and-they-fall-in-love beautiful romance.

With loads of ick. And teleporters. It's a bloody awesome achievement that on repeated viewings it is so much about the relationship and so not about teleportation or disintegration, except in as much as these things relate to love and it's consequences. What a lyrical film...that 'insect politics' speech cited above is one of my favourite dialogues in a movie ever. Proper.

The score is also ace. Apparently it was this particular piece that lead Jackson to court Howard Shore for the Lord of The Rings.
 
 
grant
16:34 / 22.11.06
Genevieve Bujold's three cervixes are certainly impossible.

I'm not so sure. I've met someone who said she had two cervices. Apparently it's not all that rare (and neither is the opposite, one cervix leading to two wombs). (Although the double two-fer is pretty rare.)

I think that makes the film more interesting to me -- anchored in a real phenomenon. It's not just a poetic statement, but umm a surreal observation.
 
 
alexis
10:18 / 23.11.06
Hmmm. Three cervix(c?)es. Presumably one to give birth to her, two to give birth to Beverley and Elliot Mantle. I do believe I will run with that.

The scene at the end when the twins have their debased, smack-addled birthday party is one of the most moving sequences ever filmed. It rivals the corridor scene in The Fly. Cronenberg has the best 'end of the road' scenes in the history of cinema, in my opinion: Viggo Mortensen washing off the blood in the lake, Ralph Feinnes mumbling by the canal... brilliant. The exception to this is Videodrome because, to be honest, James Woods is so obnoxious I couldn't generate any sympathy for him.
 
 
matthew.
15:54 / 23.11.06
I loathed, loathed, loathed History of Violence. For me, everything was telegraphed from 8 miles away. 20 minutes spent showing us how idyllic and great his life is. I got it in two minutes, no need to belabor the point. It just seemed so obvious and nothing interesting was said about the character. For me, I don't find Viggo an interesting actor in the slightest. He's bland and repetitive.
 
 
matthew.
15:56 / 23.11.06
Is that the fly making the man crazy or the man making the fly crazy

"Are you the man who dreamt of being a spider, or a spider who dreamt of being a man?"

The Fly versus The Other... hmm... which is better? I wonder....
 
 
alexis
09:25 / 24.11.06
That's a corruption of Lao Tzu's butterfly conceit, isn't it?

Forgive my ignorance, but what's 'The Other'?

And to be honest, Cronenberg's never really been one to provide twists. In a thriller format, granted, that's probably a misstep, but he acquits himself every time with enough character to impel the plot forward.

Just heard he's doing an adap of Martin Amis' London Fields. He seems to be making a ton of films in the UK at the moment, along with Eastern Promises. Can't wait.
 
 
matthew.
13:51 / 24.11.06
(The Other was a horrible Spider-Man event from 2005 that takes its cue from Kafka and Cronenberg)
 
 
alexis
22:23 / 24.11.06
From Kafka? I know Spiderman's supposed to be about alienation, but that's overegging the pudding isn't it?

I guess it didn't pan out all that well then. Shame. I liked Joe Casey's Automatic Kafka. Did you ever read it?
 
  
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