Day Of The Dread

To borrow a phrase from contemporary Luddism, the Technocalypse is nearly upon us. By the late 2050s, Ian Pearson, the not-remotely-mad scientist who heads up the futurology division of British Telecom, predicts that premium computing services will include an option to upload consciousness. Forget religion. Forget angels. Forget all the other crap we use to wish death away.

Who has need of such fairy tales when immortality is just a button push away? More radical scientific minds such as Raymond Kurzweil and Marv Minsky reckon this Singularity will hit even sooner. Consciousness, the argument goes, is merely a kind of emotional thinking. We’ll have that licked into ones and zeros within a decade. And afterwards, well, anything goes.
David Cronenberg isn’t surprised. Why would he be? The weird science of his 1983 film Videodrome told us precisely where we were headed. His vision might have imagined flesh digitalised into VHS copies, but he was on the right track nonetheless.
Perched attentively in his chair in a London hotel suite, he blinks his blue-eyes with interest when I mention transhumanism. Should someone with delicate measuring instruments have happened upon us just at this moment, they might say that this languid, unflappable presence was positively excited.
“Well, I’m interested in humanity in all its many forms,” he says. “And I’ve always been interested in the extent to which we create ourselves. Even a normal person with a normal identity is, I feel, expending huge amounts of creative energy to maintain that identity. Of course we now have the ability to transform ourselves physically into creatures that never existed before. What our bodies are composed of now is undoubtedly radically different from what a human body was composed of a thousand years ago. That’s because of what we’ve done to the planet, and not always in bad ways. But in a sense we’re transhuman now. Using language for example, or by just being on Facebook. It’s a simple way to do it but its something of you that will last beyond your corporeal form. The internet and what it allows us to do is unprecedented.”
He checks himself. It would never do for such a cerebral, considered entity to get too enthusiastic.
“So I wouldn’t say it’s my sole focus but it does interest me and engage me.”
It’s interesting that he talks about ‘transforming ourselves’. There have been rumours that he has, to borrow a euphemism, ‘had work done’ in recent years. Up close, witnessing none of the trademark signs of stretching and pulling and hoisting, I dismiss the idea out of hand. Certainly, at 64, he might pass for some ten years younger, though I suspect this has more to do with his recent decision to ditch his trademark glasses in favour of laser surgery.
Besides, he seems too cool, too scholarly and too cerebral to bother with such trifles. Back in the day, before a last minute switch to literature, he was training to be a scientist at the University of Toronto. Nowadays we are used to hearing artists such as Peter Carey lamenting their life choices. If only they had studied something with a little more rigour rather than the nebulous, less useful ball we call the arts. I ask Mr. Cronenberg if such notions ever trouble him.
“Oh no, not at all,” he says. “I do admire scientists in general and I find science fascinating and intriguing. A lot of my characters are scientists one way or another. But it’s a question of temperament. I mean, I dipped my toe into the sciences and realised that I didn’t have the kind of temperament required. There’s a lot of research, a lot of painstaking work that goes into scientific discoveries over years and years. I preferred to invent my own science, some of which has turned out to be quite prophetic. In Rabid, to take an example, I anticipated stem cell research. That pleases me. But you have to use what you have and you have to decide what you really are. I’m not sure I would have been a terribly good scientist.”
Born in Toronto to an academic family of Lithuanian Jewish heritage, the young David Cronenberg quickly developed an interest in writing after his journalist father, and an idiosyncratic obsession with lepidopterology (the study of moths).
“You would have to think of me as a secular Jew,” he says. “I have never been religious. I am an atheist and my parents were atheist. Everything seemed very logical and straightforward to me so I have never been part of the Jewish religious tradition. Religion generally has been pretty foreign to me, but the Jewish cultural and intellectual tradition has been very present in my life. That’s something I admire and I am happy to be part of. I’m quite sure that it has informed the intellectual aspects of my life and filmmaking.”
A science fiction aficionado with a particular affinity for Isaac Asimov, as a university student Cronenberg won a prestigious award for short fiction before a film by classmate David Sector (Winter Kept Us Warm, 1966) turned him onto the tenth muse. Rather touchingly, the Canadian master still regards the film as the “most influential” he has ever seen.
Inspired, he taught himself the basics by hanging out around camera rental outlets and had already made two no-budget 16mm films (Transfer and From The Drain) before hooking up with Ivan Reitman (who went on to direct Ghostbusters) to found the Toronto Film Co-op. Happily, this coincided with the foundation of the Canadian Film Development Corporation (later Telefilm Canada) and in 1969, Cronenberg became one of the first filmmakers to benefit when he received funding for the queasy psycho-sexual surrealist drama Crimes Of The Future (1969).
He started as he meant to go on. With the release of Rabid in 1977, one might already identify traits we now know to be Cronenbergian. That film, together with Shivers (1975) and The Brood (1979) forms a loose trilogy of body horrors centred on the female body as the progenitor of life and death. It’s tempting to think of Kali, the Hindu dark mother goddess when approaching such works. I wonder if he had that figure in mind at the time?
“That makes total sense though I wasn’t thinking of Kali specifically,” he nods. “ I’m a great believer that there are many ways to express the same thing, sometimes in religious imagery or scientific imagery. I think if you are touching on something that’s true about the human condition you are immediately touching people who have made the same connections. It might not be in the same form, but Kali seems so apparent now you say it.”
Certainly, the early visceral work presents femininity as a darksome force to be reckoned with. Rabid, an obvious precedent for 28 Days Later, sees porn star turned actress Marilyn Chambers infecting those around her with an anus under her armpit after receiving an experimental graft with embryonic tissue. Shivers is a sci-fi fantasy charting the spread of a parasitic venereal disease. The Brood stars Samantha Eggar as a woman who gives birth to monstrous deformed children, manifestations of her own negative emotions.
“Over the years I have explored that area a lot,” Cronenberg tells me. “I think all filmmakers are body conscious, as ultimately we are photographing the human body. Perhaps not all directors might think of it that way. I certainly do. But I don’t want to bore myself. I got a script a couple of weeks ago and I said to my agent, 'I did this movie 35 years ago and when I did it was the first time so why would I do it again?'”
Cronenberg’s mastery of body horror culminated with the 1988 release of Dead Ringers, in which a pair of twin gynaecologist brothers (both essayed by Jeremy Irons) spiral into drug addiction, madness and a belief that the women they are treating are mutating. Since then, the Canadian director has edged away from the flesh into more psychological realms (eXistenZ, Spider). Can we take it he has said all he wishes to say about our ambivalence toward our corporeal forms?
“Hmm, maybe,” he says. “But on the other hand if a project came along that one could characterise as that, but it was unique and intriguing to me and a challenge and fresh, I would not hesitate to do it just because it was a genre film or because it reminded people of my early films. I really try not to worry about people would expect of me. There are so many ways you can paralyse yourself as an artist and worrying about those things is one of them.”
He is, however, still determined to get under our skins, and knows just how to do so. He talks a great game on Sigmund Freud, on dreaming and where cinema forms a junction between the two.
“I think Freud has been a huge influence on western consciousness in general,” he muses. “I don’t think we can get away from that. One way or another, for better or for worse, we are dealing with Sigmund. I think in some ways he was more of an artist than scientist but his art had a huge impact. It infiltrated everyday thinking and language. I would have to start really analysing my films to really see the influence, but I do think movies work on the level of dream logic. The instant cutting we do from place to place is very dreamlike. Even a movie we think is really realistic is ultimately a communal dream. I think Freud is an enormous influence on film and I think that movies, in turn, have affected the way we dream. People dream in a different way now because of movies and Freud is somewhere in the middle of all that.”
Cronenberg’s most recent work, Eastern Promises, is, like its immediate predecessor A History Of Violence, a genre piece that, on superficial inspection seems a world away from His Earlier Freakier Ones. The film follows a nurse (Naomi Watts) who is drawn into a murky London underworld (Freud’s Unheimlich, anyone?) of Russian mobsters when she becomes inquisitive about the death of a teenage prostitute who has died in her care.
Though the script is penned by Steven Knight (writer of Dirty Pretty Things) and unfolds as a classic crime thriller, slowly, Cronenberg’s wonderfully nauseating tricks start to surface. I wonder if he felt pressure to, well, Cronenbergise such foreign material?
“Oh no,” he says. “I never worry about putting a stamp on something that pre-exists. It all happens organically. The fact that I choose to do a project means immediately that I’ll affect it. As soon as I get involved it starts to change and it changes in ways it would not if someone else was directing it. I know that when I am making a movie I will literally be making two or three thousand decisions a day that are unique to me. So I don’t have to worry about my stamp. Everything filters through the director’s sensibility. Always.”
A marvellously brutal eyeball stabbing in the middle of Eastern Promises would seem to bear that out. In a career that has produced vagina scars that act as VCRs, a man mutating into a fly, orgasmic uses for car crashes and all manner of syphilitic horrors, I wonder if people don’t think Mr. Cronenberg, erm, a bit funny in the head, like?
“Well, you’re sitting here so you know that’s not the case,” he smiles. “That would be an inaccurate perception of my work. Mostly people understand what I am doing or, at least, there are enough people understand what I am doing. In my early films not just fans of horror, but also critics, were very supportive. I never felt I wandering alone in the wasteland. Now that would have been horrific. You need support. But you don’t need universal support. If you are doing something difficult and controversial and, to an extent subversive, you know there will be misunderstandings and hostility. Or, in some cases, like Crash, complete understanding and hostility. I’m not making movies to be loved. Of course you love it if people respond to your movie positively, but you can't chase love. For me art is a crime. If you are just an entertainer, if you want to be loved , then that’s fine. Go do a song and dance routine."