David Cronenberg doesn't get it. Why do people think he's weird? OK, so he makes films in which men mutate into diseased flies, women give birth to giant slugs, car crashes are criticized, lovers penetrate vulva-like scars, game-players plug umbilical cords into their spines and syphilitic parasites go on the rampage. What's so damned unusual about that?
He seems shocked, outraged even, that viewers might be shocked and outraged by his films. After all, he says, they simply deal with the matter of life.
His vision is singular. What lies behind it? What inspired his love of blood and gore? He drills me with the eyes. "On the contrary, I wonder why you wouldn't be interested in that, and you're suggesting, in a way, that most people wouldn't."
PHOTO: EPA
Cronenberg has been making his existential horror movies for close on 40 years now. He is the master of his own genre - sometimes referred to as body horror or venereal horror. In his first films, Stereo and Crimes of The Future, he explores themes that are to emerge again and again through his body of work - diseased bodies, dissection, telepathy, sexual obsession, the growth of extracurricular organs and consciousness. Cronenberg has often been accused of misanthropy and, in particular, misogyny, but the director insists that he is merely shining a light on the human condition.
He has always been fascinated by, and fearful of, human beings invaded by foreign bodies. Shivers and Rabid are cautionary tales in which scientists modify the human body to disastrous effect. When in Rabid Marilyn Chambers grows a blood-sucking penis in her armpit, you just know things aren't going to turn out well. In later films, Cronenberg manages to combine schlocky splatterfest with downbeat naturalism, and has successfully adapted novels that were previously thought un-filmable - notably J.G. Ballard's Crash and William Burroughs' Naked Lunch. Burroughs' acid-trip masterpiece was perfect Cronenberg territory - as with so many of his films, you can't tell whether the action is happening in the "real" world or simply in the protagonist's head. Cronenberg the philosopher forces us to ask if there is a difference between the two.
His new film, Eastern Promises, about Russian gangsters in London, starts with three of the bloodiest scenes you are likely to see in the movies - a throat-cutting, the shooting of a heavily pregnant woman and a birth. The film is beautifully shot, pacy and overripe with carnage. In his previous movie, the impressive A History of Violence, a man's face is blown away and Cronenberg's camera focuses unapologetically (some might say gleefully) on the end result - a nauseating stew of tissue, blood and bone.
Cronenberg, now 64, has lived in the quiet, urbane city of Toronto all his life. He was born to secular Jewish parents - dad a writer, mom a musician. His upbringing was liberal and intellectually stimulating - he says he was never bored, despite growing up in the bland, closeted early 1950s.
By the age of 12, he was writing fiction. Not quite horror stories, but sufficiently sinister to surprise his classmates. Cronenberg's parents were atheists who encouraged him to experiment spiritually, convinced that sooner or later he'd find his own path to godlessness. And he did. This lack of belief, which became a belief system in itself, informs so much of his work: the primacy of the body, the finality of death, the lack of consolation. "It was apparent to me that religion was an invented thing," he says, "a wish-fulfillment thing, a fantasy thing. It was much more real, dangerous, to accept that mortality was the end for you as an individual. As an atheist, I don't believe in an afterlife, so if you're thinking of murder, if your subject is murder, then that's a physical act of absolute destruction because you're ending something, a body, that is unique. That person never existed before, will never exist again, will not be karmically recycled, will not go to heaven, therefore I take it seriously."
As time went on, Cronenberg became more and more interested in science. At the university of Toronto, he began studying organic chemistry before swapping to literature. He dreamed of being another Isaac Asimov - a research scientist who could also turn his hand to fiction. "It didn't take me long to realize I didn't have the patience or temperament to do years of research. I'd rather just invent it."
So he did. "When I made Rabid, I invented stem cell research, basically. I posited the possibility of a neutral kind of tissue that would read its context if it were applied to someone as a transplant." So, if he had patented his ideas rather than simply turned them into movies ... . He finishes my sentence for me. "I could have been truly wealthy. People like to think of Videodrome as an anticipation of the Internet." Cronenberg has never been backward in coming forward. Part of him still wants to be feted as a novelist. He says that screenplays are just technical accomplishments, and lack the beauty and depth of great fiction. He quotes Ingmar Bergman as another filmmaker who felt film was second division. Ironically, it was Bergman, alongside Fellini and Kurosawa, who finally convinced Cronenberg that movies could be art. "They are still my touchstones."
Many of Cronenberg's films originate with the what-if premise. "I think I'm just plugging into the zeitgeist and playing with that and examining it, because that's how I explore things. My movies are really me talking to myself about things, and saying, well, what about video games - for example, in Existenz: wouldn't a gamer want to plug directly into his nervous system? Well, let's just imagine he could. And then, when gamers see it, they say, 'Absolutely, I would do that.'"
You do love exploring your orifices, don't you? "Well, maybe not as much as Marilyn Chambers," he says, referring to the porn star he cast in Rabid. His face is expressionless, his voice a languid monotone. I'm not sure whether he's smiling inside. Or smirking. Or frowning. It's almost impossible to read him. He's extremely gentle, but cold gentle. At times, I sense a twinkle in the eye, but I'm not sure it's a benign twinkle. He admits he is taken with orifices. "Yeah, well, that's me. It's a creative thing. I'm thinking Darwin, evolution, and seeing the incredible life forms, and thinking humans could have developed in very different ways and still have been humans. And let me take on the role of the evolutionary force and see what we could be. In fact, a lot of those movies you're talking about are about evolution. It's really about how we have seized control over our own evolution." He points to his ears. "Look, I'm wearing hearing aids now. My eyes are lasered. I used to wear glasses for distance, I don't have to now - we are derailing evolution."
The image that stays with me from 1999's Existenz is the bioport, the spinal orifice, that Cronenberg creates for the game-player - in a moment of libidinous madness, Jude Law penetrates Jennifer Jason Leigh's bioport with his tongue rather than the game. It's disturbing in the way only Cronenberg can be. I tell him it doesn't seem right - I watch it and find it a turn-on. "Well, of course. An orifice is an orifice. The sexual aspects of it are pretty obvious and the psychology of orifices does involve sexuality of every kind. Every orifice has come to have its sexual use, including ears, noses and everything else. So why would this new orifice not have its sexual aspect? Of course it does. So, to me, I'm just revealing things that are there to be revealed."
The film critic Alexander Walker famously condemned Crash, about a group of people turned on by car crashes, as being "beyond depravity." What did Walker mean by that? "I have no idea what he meant by that." He wears "beyond depravity" as a badge of honor, though. "I was pretty proud of that, and quoted it many, many times."
Crash, released in 1996, is the most obvious example of how his movies force us to examine, as voyeurs, unpalatable desires.
He refers me to the throat-cutting scene in Eastern Promises and explains how its inspiration is rooted in the modern fundamentalist world. "You watch a beheading by several priests all shouting and it looks absolutely like a gay gang rite. I think there's a huge homoerotic element - not necessarily homoerotic, when you're stoning a woman to death, there's a heteroerotic element, too - in that that's very disturbing. I think those people doing that would be shocked that you would suggest such a thing, but to me it's obvious. And I think it needs to be addressed. I don't think you can cover it up with religiosity and self-righteousness because you're actually beheading this person whose arms are tied behind his back and he's on the floor, and you're sitting on top of him. What is that? It's very perversely sexual. I think it's evident."
Cronenberg has never belonged to the elliptical school of filmmakers. If there's an eye-gouging in the script, we can be sure we'll get to see it. You seem to do violence with such relish, I say. "That might be you projecting on to me. No, no, there's a cinematic joy because I'm creating something that looks real and it's horrific." Hmm. "In A History of Violence," he continues, "I'm saying you shoot somebody in the head, you've done a lot of damage to a human being by doing that, and I don't want to let the audience off the hook. If they enjoy that, then fine, that's good, then they should know that about themselves; that they might not mind shooting a bad guy in the head, even if it was pretty horrific and disgusting and repulsive and hard to look at. When I showed that movie in the States, some journalists said, 'No, that's great, I love that, good for him.'" Funny, everybody gets off on Cronenberg's sex and violence except him.
There is an old story that, after watching Cronenberg's early films, Martin Scorsese said he was terrified of meeting him. I ask if it's true. "He did say that, yes, because he saw Shivers and Rabid. When he told me that, I said, Marty, the guy who made Taxi Driver is afraid to meet me! I'm afraid to meet you!" Did he like the idea that Scorsese was scared of him? "I did, but it's kind of weird because I expect straight citizens to confuse the artist with his art - they think if you make violent films you must be a violent person. What bothered me was that another filmmaker could make the same mistake."
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