The Artist as Monster: The Cinema of David Cronenberg

584 Pages·2006·15.95 MB·English

by  William Beard

THE ARTIST AS MONSTER
The Cinema of David Cronenberg
David Cronenberg is one of the most fascinating filmmakers in the
world today. His provocative work has stimulated debate and received
major retrospectives in museums, galleries, and cinematheques around
the world. William Beard's The Artist as Monster is the first book-length
scholarly work in English on Cronenberg's films, analysing all of his
features from Stereo (1969) to Crash (1996). In this paperback edition,
Beard includes new chapters on eXistenZ (1999) and Spider (2002).
Through close readings and visual analyses, Beard argues that the
structure of Cronenberg's cinema is based on a dichotomy between, on
the one hand, order, reason, repression, and control and, on the other,
liberation, sexuality, disease, and the disintegration of self and of the
boundaries that define society. The instigating figure in the films is a
scientist character who, as Cronenberg evolves as a filmmaker, gradu-
ally metamorphoses into an artist, with the ground of liberation and
catastrophe shifting from experimental subject to the self.
Bringing a wealth of analytical observation and insight into Cronen-
berg's films, Beard's sweeping, comprehensive work establishes the
benchmark for the study of one of Canada's best-known filmmakers.
WILLIAM BEARD is a professor and the film/media studies coordinator
in the Film and Media Studies Program at the University of Alberta.
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The Artist as Monster
The Cinema of David Cronenberg
WILLIAM BEARD
Revised and Expanded
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS
Toronto Buffalo London
© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2006
Toronto Buffalo London
Printed in Canada
Revised and Expanded
Reprinted 2006
ISBN 10: 0-8020-3569-8 (cloth)
ISBN 13: 978-0-8020-3807-4 (paper)
ISBN 10: 0-8020-3807-7 (paper)
Printed on acid-free paper
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Beard, William, 1946-
The artist as monster : the cinema of David Cronenberg / William
Beard. - Rev. and expanded.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8020-3807-4
ISBN-10: 0-8020-3807-7
1. Cronenberg, David - Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.
PN1998.3.C79B42 2006 791.4302'33/092 C2005-906252-5
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its
publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario
Arts Council.
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian
Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to
Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its pub-
lishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing
Industry Development Program (BPIDP).
Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xiii
1. Stereo (1969) 3
2. Crimes of the Future (1970) 15
3. SWrers (1975) 26
4. Rabid (1976) 49
5. The Brood (1979) 71
6. Scanners (1980) 96
7. Videodrome (1982) 121
8. The Dead Zone (1983) 165
9. The Fly (1986) 198
10. Dearf Ringers (1988) 234
11. Naked Lunch (1991) 277
12. M. Butterfly (1993) 338
13. Cras/z (1996) 379
14. eXistenZ (1999) 423
15. Spider (2002) 471
Notes 505
Bibliography 553
Index 563
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Preface
First just a few words about what is not in this book. There is no
detailed account of production circumstances, reception history, or
'career history7 in general. I have made no attempt to trace in any
depth at all the origins or evolutionary development whereby individ-
ual works came into existence, or to examine the technologies of spe-
cial effects or any other aspects of the filmmaking process. Some of
these areas have been adequately covered in existing literature, while
others (for example, the very interesting topic of Cronenberg's place in
Canadian cinematic culture) remain largely yet to be written. What is
here instead is almost entirely interpretation and commentary, detailed
exegesis of texts - and that, too, of a particular kind.
The world of Cronenberg's films is one in which the boundaries of
so many culturally determined categories are routinely transgressed
and shattered: sexuality, social identity, accepted behaviour, finally
subjectivity itself. The collapse of 'fundamental' boundaries and defi-
nitions in these films, and their insistence upon unnerving metamor-
phoses and mutations that escape all the systems with which we try to
contain the unpredictabilities of existence, chimes perfectly with that
failure of belief systems and that universal fragmentation and subjec-
tivization of our understanding of the world which may be summed
up in the word 'postmodernism/ With the dissolution of so many
stable structures of explanation and universal 'truths' has come an
atomization of thought and feeling into a concern with the instruments
of this transformation towards meaninglessness (especially technol-
ogy) and with the ground of transformation (the body and subjectivity).
Technology, the body, subjectivity: these are precisely the areas upon
which Cronenberg's cinema focuses intensely and repeatedly. Add the
viii Preface
realm of gender and sexuality - also a domain of acute interest in a
postmodern environment, and also absolutely central to the world of
these films - and you have a filmmaker whose attraction as an object of
study for the community of film- and popular-culture scholars is con-
siderable.
Cronenberg's films have attracted attention along these lines from a
range of outstanding scholars, including feminist/psychoanalytic com-
mentators (such as Barbara Creed), Marxist cultural critics (such as
Fredric Jameson), cultural-studies theorists (such as Scott Bukatman),
and analysts of postmodern or proto-postmodern film art (such as
Steven Shaviro). Interest in his cinema has always run high in Britain,
and there are books on Cronenberg in French, German, and Italian. All
of this critical literature has seen something in him that has seemed par-
ticularly symptomatic of the age, an idiosyncratic but acute reflection of
contemporary perspectives and anxieties. Something similar has hap-
pened in the area of popular consumption as well, where Cronenberg7s
penchant for the strange and the mutated with its accompanying appa-
ratus of special effects and sensation has overlapped exactly with a cru-
cial zone of interest for a certain class of Generation-X viewers in flight
from a more mundane mainstream cinema.
But some essential aspects of Cronenberg's work are not, I think, very
well served by the prevailing discourse. If the technologically saturated
world of instabilities of perception and anxieties about the body is a per-
fect fit for the agenda of postmodern discourse, it nevertheless forms in
the work of this artist a ground of exile and loss. For Cronenberg is not
a postmodernist but a modernist informed by the conditions of a post-
modern age. The very certainties and universalities of which postmod-
ernism has disburdened us are seen very clearly by Cronenberg to be
illusions; but they are illusions whose departure has not freed him or his
characters in any useful way. On the contrary, it has left them in a con-
dition not simply of disorientation or panic (prototypical postmodernist
symptoms) but of despair and suicidal melancholy (prototypical
modernist and even traditional-humanist symptoms). In other words,
Cronenberg cannot believe in universal subjectivity, but he really
wishes he could, and all of his characters' attempts to fabricate some
kind of substitute for it are failures, notwithstanding a recurring rheto-
ric of liberation and redemptive transformation. His films are full of
split or scattered subjects, but none of them can survive in what is inev-
itably revealed to be an emotionally and psychologically dysfunctional
status. All of them yearn for a wholeness that can have no place in the
Preface ix
(post)modern world; and the author, too, must be seen as yearning for
a wholeness that he fully understands cannot exist. Of course this con-
dition is precisely one definition of the modernist sensibility.
One sees very clearly from the countless interviews given by the very
articulate and voluble Cronenberg that he has a strong conception of
himself as a modernist artist - and of a particular kind. His twentieth-
century intellectual heritage includes Freud and Sartre, probably Nor-
man O. Brown and Marshall McLuhan, but certainly not Foucault,
Althusser, Barthes, or Baudrillard. He has described himself as 'a card-
carrying existentialist/ and declares that art must be courageously
transgressive and the artist (by implication) a kind of romantic hero
who must brave the awful depths of his own unconscious - in the tra-
dition not only of terrifying modernist writers such as Kafka and Bur-
roughs but also of pre-modernist ones like Coleridge, Poe, and Biichner.
The cinema of David Cronenberg is an outstanding example of a
body of work, signed by a single person, that manifests an incredibly
tight and consistent group of subjects, themes, and attitudes as well as
an identifiable style - in other words, all the essential requirements for
status as authorial cinema. And it is a body of work that yields large
dividends to a critical perspective that tries to identify and trace the
different seams of these areas. Most commentators have either men-
tioned this consistency of subject or taken it for granted, even if their
primary interests lay elsewhere. But my own experience has been that
to follow the individual threads of Cronenberg's thought and feeling,
his narrative and thematic and characterological patterns, is to dis-
cover a world whose interconnection and flowering implications are of
quite amazing dimensions.
Some of these seams have been well mined. The first wave of
Cronenberg scholarship talked extensively about the 'mind-body split'
in the (earlier) films, and about Cronenberg's particular exploration -
practically his invention - of 'body horror.' The enquiry as to exactly
what anxieties this fascination might be manifesting was later
addressed in the scholarly realms of psychoanalytic and gender theory,
particularly when so much of the filmmaker's work showed a persis-
tent interest not just in sexuality but in biological reproduction. Then
the films' deliberate provocativeness and transgressiveness produced a
debate about their political status and effect, accompanied by another
variation on the endless argument about the relationship between
social and aesthetic values in controversial art.
I have happily incorporated much of what prevailing scholarship