"Man is an animal that thinks too much, an over-rational animal that's lost touch with its body and its instincts."

Dr. Hobbes in Shivers

"Long Live the New Flesh!"

Max Renn in Videodrome

Introduction

The human body is obviously the central focus of David Cronenberg's work.

In his cinema we see it invaded by parasites, rabid, the victim of a television-induced hallucination-causing tumour, transformed into a man/fly, and scarred by car crashes. But how does he theorize this body? My central thesis here is that we need a dialectical structure consisting of four theoretical pictures to fully interpret the way that the human body is presented in his films.

Governing the operations of this dialectic are two themes that keep cropping up in Cronenberg's films: his explorations of Cartesianism dualism⁽¹⁾ and his view of bodily mutation as a potentially positive thing, linked to his suspicion that the story of human physical evolution is far from over. Cronenberg makes clear his interest in both the human body and his fascination with the duality of mind and body in his many interviews. He told Stephen Chesley in 1975, shortly after the release of his first commercial feature Shivers, that all his films have a have a strong physical consciousness, and that "the whole dichotomy of mind and body and the importance of physical existence is really uppermost in my conception of film" (25). Later, he told Chris Rodley that part "of my cinematic voyage has been to try and discover the connection between the physical and the spiritual: what we are physically; what is the essence of physical life and existence", and that many...

of the peaks of philosophical thought revolve around the impossible duality of mind and body. Whether the mind aspect is expressed as soul or spirit, it's still the old Cartesian absolute split between the two. There seems to be a point at which they should fuse and it should be apparent to everyone. But it's not. (1997: 128-9, 78)

His films can be seen as a series of thought experiments dealing with scenarios where technological or psychological interventions have upset the traditional givens of this dualism. In Shivers, Rabid, and The Fly, a technologically mutated body produces psychological mutations; in The Brood, Scanners, and Videodrome, altered states in the mind produce new and bizzare somatic states. There is a continual interplay between body and mind in his films, a flip-flop of the body being controlled by a radically distorted Cartesian thinking thing, then of the mind being horrifically altered by bodily mutations.⁽²⁾ The scientific mind, separated from nature, presided over by too ambitious doctors and technologists, produces the mutations that drive the typical Cronenberg plot to its usual chaotic or grisly telos.

In Mark Kermode's mind (1992: 11), the radical, shocking edge of Cronenberg's "cinema of change" comes from his refusal to characterize a mutation as negative. As Heraclitus pointed out, we can't step in the same river twice. Change is unavoidable:

Together, his films constitute a perversely polemical body of work which has grown in strange and wondrous ways while retaining an immutable thematic heart. The rebellion of the body; the unconscious redefinition of the self; the shock of the flesh - each of these themes has been employed by Cronenberg to address his recurrent central thesis: the acceptance and celebration of mutation.

This mutation might be beneficent or cancerous or both: in fact, the tension between these two possibilities is left largely unresolved by Cronenberg. Witness the sex-crazed zombies unleashed in Shivers by Dr. Hobbes' parasites: Cronenberg has insisted in several interviews that despite the breakdown in social order that results from the waves of lust that wash over the inhabitants of Montreal's fictitious Starliner Towers, that the effects of the parasite-induced mutations are in fact liberating.⁽³⁾ But Cronenberg does seem to be making a larger cultural/metaphysical point. As he suggested to Chris Rodley (1997: 145), "to whatever degree we center our reality - and our understanding of reality - in our bodies, we are surrendering that sense of reality to our bodies' ephemerality." The mutability of the body under the regime of modern medicine, science, and technology is thus matched to an onto-cultural ephemerality of the human race in the present age, an ephemerality that is fairly rigorously explored by Cronenberg's somatic dialectic.⁽⁴⁾

This dialectic is built on a pragmatist notion of the value of theory. As Cronenberg himself said in a 1980 interview:

All the phenomena explained by Freud in terms of sex someone like, say, Marshall McLuhan could see as problems of communication. My feeling is that every theory - Freudian, Marxist, feminist, what have you - gives you part of the truth, yes, but that none of them gives you all the truth. (Chute 1980: 38)

So Cronenberg is a theoretical bricoleur, picking up the bits and pieces of theory that he needs for the project at hand. We can find further evidence that this bricolage is intentional on Cronenberg's part in an interview with Susan Ayscough (1983: 17) where he tells her that "You put a lot into a film, and it's very complex. There are many levels: visual images, and thought, and sound, and emotion as well as many other levels. You hope that people will respond on many levels." Indeed, this sense of pragmatic bricolage is central to my argument for the progression of the somatic dialectic in his works: as we move from the body as site of Gothic horror to the body as the site of psychopathological rebellion, then on to technological transformations, and finally to the body as a postmodern simulacrum, we are moving from a crude "horror film" interpretation of his works to a Freudian interpretation, then on to a McLuhanesque one, then finally on to a Marxist/Baudrillardesque finale. So Cronenberg's films are doubly dialectical, both in terms of the multiple pictures he gives of Cartesian mind/body dualisms and somatic mutations he shows us in his films, and in terms of the theoretical models at work beneath the surface of these pictures.

To get a sense of this dialectic's history, we can see it contained in embryo form in his earliest works, i.e. Shivers and Rabid. But it only becomes clear in its full-blown form in his last few films, especially Crash. This book will thus be a look back from Crash at Cronenberg's cinematic corpus as a meditation on the human body in flux. I will look at nine of his films, dividing them into three "triads": his Pathological-Gothic, Techno-Fantasy, and Mature sets of films (see the Appendix for details).⁽⁵⁾ I now turn to the first level of theorizing the body, as the site for Gothic horror stories, as exemplified best in his Pathological-Gothic triad, but also in such later films as The Fly and Dead Ringers.

Chapter 1. Monsters Unchain'd: Cronenberg's Gothic Horror Stories

We can imagine the dialectic bursting onto our theoretical screens with images from a classic black and white Frankenstein film clip of the monster stumbling over a blasted heath, accompanied by ominous chords on a church organ.⁽⁶⁾ On the most primitive level, Cronenberg's films can be seen as tales of Gothic horror. Under this interpretation, the human body is theorized as a site for a war between human intentions (e.g. technological interventions), or what we can conveniently collect under the title "Culture", and Nature, with Nature triumphing in the end over human hubris by forcefully reminding the characters of the Gothic drama of the obvious: that human beings are mortal, that human life is fragile. The revulsion highlighted under this level of interpretation has its origins in the early nineteenth century's fears about science and the industrial revolution's first incursions into the human body, and the monsters that would be unchained by these incursions.

As Cronenberg said to Stephen Chesley early in his career (1975: 23), the "true subject of horror films is death and anticipation of death, and that leads to the question of man as body as opposed to man as spirit." This linking of death and the body to his own unique version of the horror genre is made clearer by Cronenberg in comments he made to Chris Rodley where he distances himself from the "psychological" horror and science fiction cinematic traditions:

The phrase 'biological horror' - often attached to my work - really refers to the fact that my films are very body-conscious. They're very conscious of physical existence as a living organism, rather than other horror films or science-fiction films which are very technologically orientated, or concerned with the supernatural, and in that sense are very disembodied. (1997: 58)

This sense of a bodily-conscious biological horror is especially clear in his early so-called "exploitation" films - Shivers (1975), Rabid (1976), and The Brood (1979), which we can group together (for reasons that will become clearer later on) as his "Pathological-Gothic Triad". Here we see the body as Monstrously Mutated, infected with parasites, rabid, oozing blood, sprouting a penal spike, or giving birth to a maleficent brood of deformed children. Later, Cronenberg returns to the Gothic in The Fly (1986), where the audience must endure Seth Brundle's horrifying mutation into Brundlefly, half insect, half man. We can also see it, in somewhat attenuated form, in what is probably Cronenberg's most subtle work, Dead Ringers (1988), where the Gothic is invoked in the Mantle twins' probings of the patients of their gynecological practice, and, in the denouement, of each other through drugs. This is the level of interpretation favoured by Robin Wood, who castigated Cronenberg's early work as reactionary horror films that exploited sexual disgust to titillate the audience.⁽⁷⁾

It is the level of interpretation that earned him the nickname "The Baron of Blood."

This level of interpretation is even given some early intertextual support by the trailers of Shivers and Rabid originally designed to lure audiences to these film, trailers that are affixed to the end of the recent video re-releases of these two pictures. They highlight the more lurid, disgusting, and bloody moments from each film. The former informs us that Shivers contains evil and horror that will make you scream and squirm. The latter, after showcasing the more violent bits of the film, growls "you can't trust anyone!" because "one moment they're normal, the next RABID!", asking us to "pray it won't happen to you!". In fact, the original poster for Rabid featured the lifeless corpse of one of the film's minor characters (a victim of Rabid Rose's deadly embrace), Judy Glasberg, lying frozen in a basement locker, mouth agape, a look of horror in her eyes.

Surprisingly or not, Cronenberg's horror stories match well the atmosphere and psychology of such classic Gothic novels as The Castle of Otranto, Vathek, Frankenstein, Melmoth the Wanderer, and She (and also some modern Gothic, such as Lawrence Norfolk's Lemprière's Dictionary, to which I shall later return). If we read Mary Shelley's modus operandi for Frankenstein, we could ask ourselves whether it could not have functioned equally as well as an introduction to at least Cronenberg's earlier screenplays. She wanted to write a story "...which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror - one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart" (vii). Indeed, Cronenberg's films, especially his earliest ones, do aim to curdle our blood and quicken our heart beats, employing monster-protagonists much as Shelley herself did in Frankenstein. But these monsters are set within a wider narrative atmosphere, one which we can loosely call the Gothic.

But what is the Gothic? For Maggie Kilgour:

The gothic is thus a nightmare vision of a modern world made up of detached individuals, which has dissolved into predatory and demonic relations which cannot be reconciled into a healthy social order. It shows the easy slide of the modern Cartesian mind from autonomy and independence into solipsism and obsession, depicting the atomistic individual as fragmented, and alienated from others and ultimately from himself. (1995: 12)⁽⁸⁾

Despite this gloomy picture, she also sees the Gothic's attack on modern fragmentation as suggesting the hope of recovering a lost organic unity, since it tries to use its "necromantic powers" to raise the past (15). Robert Miles concurs, adding that the Gothic partakes of a primitivist vision wherein a return to nature is undesirable and impossible, for "society, like man, has fallen. But beneath the corrupting veneer of artifice, there are instincts of nature, our true self, and these we can cultivate" (1991: 50). We see this collapse of the Cartesian rational ego, this slide into solipsism and obsession, these "instincts of nature", in Shivers, where the tenants infected by the parasites roam about indiscriminantly seeking sexual couplings with whoever (or whatever) comes their way; in Rabid, with the infected characters going into foaming and fuming rages, biting whomever they can latch onto; in The Fly, as Seth begins to take on insect-like qualities, including rather sloppy eating habits. So on the most basic level, Cronenberg's "Gothic" triad (and some of the later films also) feature a "nightmare world" where the control of the human thing by the Cartesian ego has broken down, resulting in "predatory and demonic relations" between the inhabitants of this world - they've lost control of their body and its most basic drives, with monstrous results.

Cronenberg's Gothic tales also use a traditional device of the horror genre: as in classic Gothic tales like Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, a castle dominates the narrative as a physical and psychological presence, and architecture "becomes the embodiment of fate" (Clery in Walpole 1989: xv). Of course, Cronenberg dispenses with the more old-fashioned castles wherein a Karloff or Lugosi might have felt more at home, substituting such starkly modernist versions as the bleak and soulless Starliner Towers in Shivers, the Keloid Clinic in Rabid, the Somafree Institute of Psychoplasmics' hilltop chalet in The Brood, or the headquarters of Consec in Scanners. He varies this theme a bit in The Fly, reducing the castle there to Seth's sparse loft, and in Naked Lunch, where the castle becomes the rather claustrophic looking Middle-Eastern Gothic of the Interzone. These are the home fields where the mad scientists play havoc with the natural order of things, with the delicate balance between mind and body, culture and chaos. Cronenberg's mutating and monstrous bodies, at least for a large part of each film, are confined within the spaces of these structures, adding to the Gothic terror of these monstrous mutations the feeling that the protagonist(s) have nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. This sense of confinement, in fact, can be said to be essential to at least part of a Gothic narrative: after all, if one can simply walk out into the bright sunshine, escaping from the horrors of the piece, then how horrible can the situation really be? In fact, Cronenberg seems at least dimly aware of this fact with the television commercial for Starliner Towers he includes at the beginning of Shivers, which lauds its pool, golf course, shops, medical clinic, etc., working on the assumption that the tenants will never have to leave their "island paradise". The ad informs us that the Starliner Towers are brought to us by Starco, a division of the ominous sounding "General Structures Inc.". One can take these "general structures" to be a metaphor for either the physical structures that confine the tenants to their dull and conformist way of life, or of the psychic structures that repress their basic drives, both of which collapse once Dr. Hobbes' parasites release the tenants' from the structures that would normally confine and repress their more "bestial" energies.

Presiding over the alteration of these general structures by medical or technological intervention are Cronenberg's mad (or at least severely misguided) scientists. Of course, the mad scientist has a long and rich history in the Gothic genre, one where science is mixed with magic, or at minimum with inquiries into things that science has no business "meddling" with. In William Beckford's Vathek, an Eastern Gothic tale of the lascivious and cruel Sultan Vathek, the Sultan's mother Carathis has truck with the infernal powers in her researches, her tower housing a collection of venomous serpents, rhino horns, woods of a subtile and penetrating odour, and "a thousand other horrible rarities", guarded by fifty female negresses "mute and blind of the right eye", formed from the "presentiment, that she might one day, enjoy some intercourse with the infernal powers: to whom she had ever been passionately attached, and to whose taste she was no stranger" (1993: 31). Yet she is no mere black magician, nor her strange collections a heap of meaningless nick-nacks; later in the book Vathek, about to leave on a trip, informs his underling Morakanabad to treat his mother well, and to "take care to supply whatever her experiments may demand: for, you well know, that our tower abounds in materials for the advancement of science" (37).

So the Gothic scientist pursues researches into strange and infernal regions. Yet these researches often have a noble (if impossible to attain) goal, as evidenced by Dr. Frankenstein's raison d'être in Shelley's classic picture of the Gothic scientist:

It was the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn; and whether it was the outward substance of things, or the inner spirit of nature and the mysterious soul of man that occupied me, my enquiries were directed to the metaphysical, or in its highest sense, the physical secrets of the world. (19)

This sense of illegitimate researches, of meddling with infernal powers, of seeking for "metaphysical" secrets, can be seen in the scientists and doctors in Cronenberg's films that initiate the somatic mutations, with monstrous results. The archetype is Dr. Emil Hobbes in Shivers, who creates parasites that free their hosts from sexual repressions. In Rabid the Gothic scientist reappears in the form of Dr. Dan Keloid, whose experimental skin grafts create Rabid Rose (played by porn star Marilyn Chambers), who subsequently roams country and town in search of victims from whom to drain the blood essential to her well being. In The Brood we meet Dr. Hal Raglan (played with relish by Oliver Reed), whose fringe psychiatry ("Psychoplasmics") allows disturbed patients to manifest their rage in a variety of somatic mutations or progeny. The mad scientist continually reappears in Cronenberg's films after the Gothic triad: Dr. Paul Ruth (Patrick McGoohan) in Scanners uses a pain killer invented for pregnant women to create a race of telepaths (the scanners); Seth Brundle in The Fly mimics Carathis' meddling with infernal powers in his own tower, in this case a warehouse loft jammed full not of venomous serpents and subtile woods, but of computers and telepods; the Mantle twins (both played by Jeremy Irons) in Dead Ringers, with their only mildly bizzare gynecological investigations; and last but not least, the renegade traffic control expert Vaughan in Crash, whose researches involve the collection of detailed photographs of crash victims and an experimental melding of human sexuality with the machine, specifically, the automobile.

Of course, no tale of Gothic horror would be complete without some sort of monster. In Vathek, the monster comes in the person of the "other", the infidel Giaour who visits the sultan to torment him with grandiose promises. After Vathek questions him:

The man, or rather monster, instead of making a reply, thrice rubbed his forehead, which, as well as his body, was blacker than ebony; four times clapped his paunch, the projection of which was enormous; opened wide his huge eyes, which glowed like firebrands; began to laugh with a hideous noise, and discovered his long amber-coloured teeth, streaked with green.(Beckford 1993: 6)

Perhaps the classic Gothic monster is Frankenstein's creation itself, who wanders the mountains of Switzerland and the Arctic wastes scarce half made up, a hideous patchwork of human bits and pieces. There are monsters a-plenty in Cronenberg's films too. In Shivers, the parasites slowly turn everyone in the Starliner Towers into monsters. Early in the film, we witness Nick Tudor, perhaps the ur-victim of Dr. Hobbes' test subject Annabelle, laying in bed massaging the frisky parasite swimming in his abdomen, encouraging it with a "c'mon boy... you and me are gonna be friends." Of course, it is even more monstrous that the parasites can enter their hosts at their least suspecting and most vulnerable moments, for example when one slithers up into Betts' (Barbara Steele) vagina while she bathes. This appears to later have "monstrous" results when Betts seduces Janine Tudor (Nick's distraught wife): as they kiss, we see a parasite crawling up Bett's throat and then down Janine's (in slow motion). This "monstrous" love-making is echoed writ large at the end of Shivers, when the putative hero Dr. Roger St. Luc (who has managed to escape infection up to this point) is corralled in the pool room by a pack of lust-crazed zombies - he's given a parasite-kiss by the formerly loyal Nurse Forsythe, to whom he seems to surrender with an "et tu, then falls Dr. St. Luc".

Cronenberg's own Frankenstein is perhaps Rose in Rabid, her good looks and sweet manner disguising the monstrous appendage and appetites that result from Dr. Keloid's well-meaning but flawed attempt at reconstructive surgery in the wake of a motorcycle accident. She develops a red gelatinous penis/spike in her armpit, hidden in a recessed "hole" until she strikes. She can no longer keep down normal food: her only means of sustenance is human blood sucked through the penis/spike (she experiments with cow blood, but with unpleasant results). As a result, she roams the roads and countryside around the Keloid clinic, and then later the city of Montreal, in search of blood, in many cases using the promise of sex to get close to her victims. The victims, after a brief incubation period, become rabid, their skin turning pale, foaming at the mouth, overcome by an insane urge to attack, bite, and thereby infect whomever they come into contact with.

There are strong suggestions of vampirism in Rabid. In addition, Rose's condition is made doubly monstrous by her being only periodically aware (until late in the film) of the ramifications of her mutated status and the actions that result from it. She confesses early on to Dr. Keloid "I'm crazy and I'm a monster", but the good doctor assures her that it can be fixed (she then takes the opportunity of a hug to drink from the doctor's bloodstream). Much later, Rose's boyfriend Hart confronts her with her Typhoid Mary status:

Rose: "It's not my fault".

Hart: "It's you... you carry the plague, you killed hundreds of people!"

Rose: "I'm still me, I'm still Rose!"

Hart: "You're not Rose".

On the outside she's a pleasant, attractive woman, the same woman that rode with Hart on the back of his motorbike before the accident that brought them to the Keloid Clinic. But hidden within is a monster, a monster unleashed by the physical mutation that was a side-effect of Keloid's meddling with the human body by means of his experimental skin graft.

Cronenberg's early films have led some commentators to see in his monsters misogynist or homophobic creative intentions. David Sanjek, discussing Shivers in the light of his first four films, notes that they all feature women who have been labelled as "monsters" due to some male action: witness the sexually rapacious women in Shivers, Rose in Rabid, Nola Carveth in The Brood, and Kim Obrist in Scanners (1996: 57-8).⁽⁹⁾ He goes on to condemn the lesbian kiss between Betts and Janine as proof that if a lesbian relationship exists in Dr. Hobbes' (Cronenberg's?) world, it would be initiated violently, and only between two "monstrous" women (67), concluding in the end that it appears that many of Cronenberg's films "construct narratives whose story-lines exist on the basis of the victimization of women who are made the objects of male power" (70).

Andrew Parker focusses on Rabid instead, linking monstrosity, the media reaction to the AIDS crisis, and national and sexual difference. He comments that "...Cronenberg has consistently been drawn into the same monstrous terrain where sexuality grafts itself onto nation, the same terrain the mass media have exploited since the advent of the AIDS crisis" (1993: 210). Parker sees in Rabid a remarkable anticipation of all the fears, all the "murderous details", that would come to dominate the American media's reaction to the AIDS epidemic, notably how sex is linked with death in the syringe/penis that Rose extrudes from her armpit when hungry for blood (216). Oddly, he parallels the sexual difference between straights and gays to the instabilities within Canada's borders, suggesting that Montreal (the site of Rabid) has a singular, sexualized role in Anglo-Canadian imagery. His youthful travels north of the border have convinced him that Quebec is an Anglo-Canadian metaphor for lustful desires and inner subversion, for homosexuality (213, 222).⁽¹⁰⁾

The central problem with both Sanjek's and Parker's critique (besides their basic exegetical errors and limited sympathies) lies in their being stuck in the first stage of Cronenberg's dialectic. They both concentrate on the monstrous body in his films, on the centrality of the horrific in his tales. In so far as Cronenberg is just a teller of Gothic tales, he might be legitimately accused of at least misogyny (although this is a complex issue even at this level), and on a very limited reading of his films, of homophobia too. But there is more going on in his films than either Sanjek or Parker realize, as we shall soon see.

Forging ahead, we find yet more evidence of the monstrously mutated body in The Brood (1979), Cronenberg's Gothic tale of psychiatry gone wrong. In it we meet Dr. Hal Raglan, whose science of "Psychoplasmics" (in a bizzare parody of Freudian psychoanalysis) insists that by somatizing one's inner demons, one's rage, one can overcome them. Unfortunately, those following his therapeutic techniques cannot get rid of the monstrous mutations that result from the Psychoplasmics regimen. Early in the film we meet Mike, whose externalized rage causes welts to cover much of his body; later, we meet Jan Hartog, whose treatment by Raglan has given him cancerous growth on his throat. But the real monsters in this film are the "brood" themselves, a gang of malformed murderous children running amok in suburban Toronto. We discover their physiological details after one of them dies and is given an autopsy by the city coroner: it has no irises or retinas, sees only in black and white, has a thick and inflexible tongue, no teeth, and a collapsed fleshy sac between its shoulder blades, like the yolk sac of certain fish. This "gas tank" was once full of nutrient material, but is now empty. Finally, we find out that they lack sexual organs, and (even more provocatively, according to the coroner) have no navel. This indicates their true monstrosity: they were never really born, at least as we understand birth.

The monstrous circumstances of their birth are revealed in true horror-film fashion in the final scene, when we find out that the brood are the immaculately conceived offspring of Nola Carveth's unconscious rage against her parents, husband, daughter, and others. Frank (her husband, and the hero of the piece) finds Nola in a bunkhouse near the Psychoplasmics chalet, squatting on the floor - after a brief discussion, she reveals her bloated stomach, with a multi-coloured sac growing from her navel area. She kisses and suck on the sac, blood drips out, she rips it open, and out pops another little monster, another "child of her rage", as Raglan calls it. In the end, after the brood is defeated by Raglan and Frank, we see a closeup of Nola and Frank's daughter Candy in the front seat of the Carveth's car: she too has a pair of psychosomatic welts on her arm. We can almost imagine the traditional horror film schlock here: "the end, or is it?", with promises of more chills and thrills in the sequel.

As final evidence of the importance of the monstrously mutated body in Cronenberg's films, we come to The Fly. In an early test of the telepods he hopes will allow him to avoid car sickness and, incidentally, revolutionize modern transportation, Seth Brundle tries them out on a test subject, a baboon. The result is a quivering mass of exposed flesh: it seems that his computer has turned the baboon "inside out". But the real horror is set in motion later when, in a drunken fit of bravado to impress the temporarily absent science reporter Veronica, he teleports himself. A fly buzzes into the teleportation chamber as he closes the door; the confused computer combines the genetic sequences of Seth and the fly into one being, a being Seth later christens "Brundlefly".

The transformation isn't instantaneous - it takes place over several weeks. He slowly loses his human characteristics (his fingernails, hair, smooth skin) while acquiring fly-like traits (thick hair, sticky ooze from his fingers, super-strength). Seth scientifically chronicles his transformation on videotape, storing his discarded body parts as "archeological artifacts of a bygone era" in his medicine cabinet which he nicknames the "Brundle Museum of Natural History". The horrific quality of Seth's transformation is doubled when be becomes fully aware that he has a "disease" with a purpose, to turn him into something else - Brundlefly. The external and psychological Gothic meld here: Seth realizes with horror that not only is his body mutating into something non-human, but that his mind, his formerly sacrosanct Cartesian ego, is changing in ways that will cause him to make strange new demands on that body and on the people around him. The tragic quality of Seth's plight is clear in his "insect politics" speech to Veronica:

You have to leave now and never come back here. Have you ever heard of insect politics? Neither have I. Insects don't have politics. They're very brutal. No compassion. No compromise. We can't trust the insect. I'd like to become the first insect politician. You see, I'd like to, but, I'm afraid... I'm saying I'm an insect who dreamt he was a man and loved it. But now the dream is over - the insect is awake... I'm saying, I'll hurt you if you stay.

In the finale, the then barely recognizable Seth pleads with Veronica to help him be human again by agreeing to a telepod-aided fusion of Brundlefly, herself, and her unborn child (by Seth) into one body in a bizzare parody of the Christian trinity. He suggests that this will be the "ultimate family", three in one. Naturally, Veronica resists, accidentally tearing off the remnants of Seth's human jaw. Brundlefly then sprouts insect parts, as his face and flesh melt away, and the bugman within emerges. Once the monster has emerged in toto, there is only one narrative recourse left to the Gothic storyteller: its death.⁽¹¹⁾

An important but less obvious theme that illustrates Cronenberg's Gothic intentions is the psychological horror evident in some of his films, what we might call the "internal Gothic". This is where the monstrosity exists within. Psychological horror can be found early in Cronenberg's work in Shivers, where, once infected, the characters are ruled by an insatiable lust, a monstrous appetite. Copulation (and the infection of others) is their only thought. They are impelled by dark forces beyond their control.

We find a parallel horror in H. Rider Haggard's She, where its chaste narrator Holly describes the mixture of wonder and revulsion he feels when first laying eyes on Ayesha, the mysterious long-lived African queen:

I have heard of the beauty of celestial beings, now I saw it; only this beauty, with all its awful loveliness and purity, was evil - or rather, at the time, it impressed me as evil... It lay rather, if it can be said to have had any abiding home, in an imperial grace, in a godlike stamp of softened power, which shone upon that radiant countenance like a living halo. Never before had I guessed what beauty made sublime could be - and yet, the sublimity was a dark one - the glory was not all of heaven - but none the less glorious... Drawn by some magnetic force which I could not resist, I let my eyes rest upon her shining orbs, and felt a current pass from them to me that bewildered and half blinded me. (Haggard 1976: 163)

The powerful repressions that keep his id in its proper Victorian-era place are let loose by the overpowering beauty of She, as Holly is drawn by the "magnetic force" of Eros down into his body and its drives. He is infected by his own brand of parasite. Later, he curses this lust as tied to an inner treachery:

Curses on the fatal curiosity that is ever prompting man to draw the veil from woman, and curses on the natural impulse which begets it! It is the cause of half - ay, and more than half - of our misfortunes. Why cannot man rest content to live alone and be happy, and let the women live alone and be happy also? (167)

This is the same inner treachery that overcomes the tenants of the Starliner Towers in Shivers as their lusts stage an all-too-successful coup d'état against the government of their rational egos, seizing control of the ruling powers of the self.

We see a further variation on this inner treachery in Rabid. Here the internal horror comes in two forms: Rose's own horror at being the unknown source of a plague, and the virulent rabies that turns its victims into violent, mindless subhumans. After the epidemic is well underway, Claude Lapointe, an official of the Québec Bureau of Health, appears on television to explain how the disease works: he announces that it has a six- to eight-hour incubation period, that it results in sweat, shakes, foaming at the mouth, violence, and the urge to bite others; finally comes a coma, then death. He provides the "official" narrative, in precise language, of the progress of this internal horror. Rose's dilemma is quite different, though: she is immune to the disease itself, but must continue to feed on the blood of others (and thereby infect them) if she's to stay alive. Her appetite for blood makes her a monster within, her body's needs subverting her will.

We find a parallel sense of internal horror in Charles Maturin's eighteenth-century novel Melmoth the Wanderer, a collection of Gothic tales united by the occasional appearance of the apparently immortal, evil-eyed Melmoth. One of the stories centers on the goings-on in a Spanish monastery. When one of the monks falls in love with a female novice disguised as a boy, the Superior discovers their clandestine meetings, and orders a sadistic brother (who is in the monastery to escape a criminal charge) to lure them into a gloomy underground vault where they are imprisoned and the door nailed shut. When their hunger leads one of them to half-heartedly attempt cannibalism, the criminal monk muses over over how dire straits can make any of us cast aside all of our finer notions and emotions:

One physical want, one severe and abrupt lesson from the tintless and shrivelled lips of necessity, is worth all the logic of the empty wretches who have presumed to prate it, from Zeno down to Burgersdicius... A trivial and ordinary want, whose claims at another time they would have regarded as a vulgar interruption of their spiritualised intercourse, not only, by its natural operation, sundered it for ever, but, before it ceased, converted that intercourse into a source of torment and hostility inconceivable, except among cannibals.(Maturin 1989: 213)

This surrender of love and friendship to raw hunger is the same surrender that Rose makes in Rabid, as she preys on her erstwhile benefactor Dr. Keloid, on her best friend Mindy, and on anyone else who happens to be present when she needs nourishment. She manages to resist feeding on her boyfriend Hart, but just barely. Her horror is like Seth's in The Fly: she knows what's happening to her body, and how this affects her actions, and how these actions hurt others, but there's nothing she can do about it.

In The Fly there is an interesting dream-sequence where Cronenberg himself makes an appearance, playing a gynecologist delivering Veronica's baby. This sequence comes right after she tells her somewhat annoying former lover Stathis Borans (John Getz) that she's pregnant with Seth's baby, and has even more of an "internal Gothic" feel to it due to the fact that it is not initially announced as a dream, but seems to be a continuation of the "real" story. Cronenberg encourages Ronnie to push harder to help the baby come out; when it does, the doctor and nurses are shocked to discover a squirming, bloody giant larva, thus confirming her worst fears about the invasion of her body by Seth's mutated genetic material. In this case we can imagine Cronenberg as "delivering", both gynecologically and cinematographically, a little Gothic horror from inside of Ronnie's body (or, figuratively speaking, from inside our unconscious minds).

Dead Ringers (1988) also uses a dream sequence to illustrate an internal somatic horror. The film centers on the "fabulous" Mantle twins, Elliot and Beverly (both played by Jeremy Irons), successful gynecologists in Toronto. They become involved with an actress, Claire Niveau (Genvieve Bujold), without her at first realizing that there are in fact two of them. The twins' lives and pysches are inextricably intertwined: they are extensions of one another. The less frivolous Beverly falls in love with Claire, but cannot break the tie that binds him to his brother. He dreams one night that they are lying naked in bed beside each other, linked by a fleshy mass (there are allusions to Siamese twins throughout the film). Claire appears, and begins to gnaw through the mass, telling Bev that she'll separate them. Bev awakes screaming in horror at the prospect of isolation from his brother, and, one presumes, at the horror of the traditional intimacy of the heterosexual union promised by Claire's love.

There are yet more Gothic elements in Cronenberg's picture of the human body in Dead Ringers. Early on, Elliot Mantle muses that he thought there should be beauty contests for the insides of human bodies, and standards of beauty for the entire body, inside and out. Later we see doctors and nurses in a inexplicably dark operating theatre cloaked in long red gowns, suggestive of priestly attire. Later still, after Beverly starts to go mad, he insists an artist (Anders Wolleck, played by Stephen Lack) fashion bizzare gynecological instruments that look more like medieval implements of torture than modern precision surgical tools. He calls these "Gynecological Instruments for Working on Mutant Women". He explains the need for these instruments to his brother in an insane ramble about his female patients: "They look all right on the outside, but their insides are deformed. Well I had to deal with it somehow! Radical technology was required." And to frame it all, the opening credits, in black, red, and white, feature old engravings of odd-looking medical instruments, an eviscerated woman, twin fetuses in the womb, internal organs, and Siamese twins. The background of the film is starkly modern, but its spirit premodern, almost medieval. All in all, Dead Ringers establishes a clear thematic link between modern medical science, Gothic horror, and the human body as the site of both.

We can turn to the conclusion of William Beckford's Vathek, after the demise of the Sultan and his mother, to hear the Gothic moral of the story of the using the body as site for unholy science and a "voluptuous unrestrained appetite":

Such was, and such should be, the punishment of unrestrained passions and atrocious deeds! Such shall be, the chastisement of that blind curiosity, which would transgress those bounds the wisdom of the Creator has prescribed to human knowledge; and such the dreadful disappointment of that restless ambition, which, aiming at discoveries reserved for beings of a supernatural order, perceives not, through its infatuated pride, that the condition of man upon earth is to be - humble and ignorant. (120)

This is the same moral that we might draw from Cronenberg's cinema seen purely and simply as tales of Gothic horror.

Chapters to Come:

Chapter 2. The Id Unchain'd: The New Gothicism of the Body as a Site of Psychopathological Rebellion.

Closely tied to the body as a site for Gothic horror is a sort of New Gothicism of psychopathological sexuality and aggression, a Gothicism of the late machine age. Under this level our unconscious psychical discontents are let loose, disrupting civilization at least on a local level. These discontents are psychopathological in the sense that their full expression - in the form of sex and violence unchained to socially acceptable forms - they are pathologies, diseases that our normally repressive society cannot tolerate and seeks to purge from the social body. This level of interpretation exists in an unstable equilibrium both with the previous level and with the next one, the body as technologically transformed (indeed, as Cronenberg's filmatic opus declares, it has to be technologically transformed in the first place for these pathologies to be released).

Chapter 3. Technological Transformations: Cronenberg's Science Fictional Impulse

Under this level, the body is theorized as the site for technological transformation. This is the "science fictional" reading of Cronenberg's corpus. Here the struggle becomes one of Nature vs. Technology, where the possibility of some form of technology-aided emergent evolution is suggested. The key films for this level of the dialectic are those of his "Techno-Fantasy Triad", Scanners, Videodrome, and The Fly.

Chapter 4. Postmodern Simulations: The Body Vanishes (And Then Returns)

But perhaps most problematic of my four levels of interpretation, I see hints of Baudrillard's notion of simulacra, of the body as a pure simulation, in Cronbenberg, especially in Videodrome and Crash. This is the sense that under the postmodern condition, the body as flesh disappears, only to return as "new flesh" (James Woods' character in Videodrome shouts "long live the New Flesh!" before shooting himself: we presume that he expects to return as, to echo Arthur Kroker, some form of data trash, maybe as a character in one of the violent porno flicks he has become so enamoured of). The body is transformed to the vanishing point of the non-corporeal by modern technology.

1. Or, more accurately, interactionism, i.e. the notion that the mind and body are composed of separate substances which interact with each other, although existing separately.

2. As David Chute (1980: 36) notes of Cronenberg's early films, typically, "his cancerous monsters or parasites are born directly from the flesh itself. But it's the mind, as represented by his dour medical technocrats, that sires these horrors." The interplay is at times, as in Videodrome, difficult to sort out.

3. See in this respect the articles by Chute and Harkness listed in the bibliography.

4. Indeed, although Cronenberg seems interested in focussing more on the body than the mind, on a deeper level his films aim at a therapeutic re-fusing of mind and body. As he told Chris Rodley (1997: 90), "A complete film-maker should be able to appeal to all facets of human existence, the sensual as well as the cerebral. If you do get this mixture together properly, you have a perfect example of healing the Cartesian schism. You have something that appeals to the intellect and to the viscera."

5. I'll exclude Cronenberg's early experimental films Stereo and Crimes of the Future, as these were unavailable on video (although second-hand reports indicate that they exemplify Cronenberg's somatic dialectic very well); Fast Company, a film about car racing that is does not fit in very well with the rest of his works; and The Dead Zone and M Butterfly, which, although they deal with some of the themes I'll touch on here (especially the mind/body split in The Dead Zone, and the mutability of the human body and of sexuality in M Butterfly), were not written by Cronenberg.

6. Indeed, Cronenberg seems to be parodying this interpretation of his works early on in The Fly, when Seth Brundle, the central character of the film, a slightly mad scientist played by Jeff Goldblum who, after having lured the beautiful science reporter Veronica (played by Geena Davis) to his laboratory/loft apartment after a cocktail party, plays a few ominous notes on his piano, warning her (after she's seen his telepods) that "It's too late - you've already seen them. Can't let you leave here alive."

7. Cronenberg has answered Wood a number of times. He told Susan Ayscough in 1983 that Wood interpreted Shivers on the most mundane and least interesting level, implying that he misses the film's more interesting level of the body's psychopathological rebellion. I'll discuss this level of interpretation of his early films in the next chapter.

8. Stephen Bruhm notes that pain occupies a central place in Gothic fiction, for it gives the characters therein a degree of "ontological confirmation"; it effects "a return of the body to a pre-Cartesian body - where mind and body are inseparable - at the same time as it pits the mind firmly against the body" (1994: 9). Once again the link to Cronenberg's films is obvious: the monstrously mutated body, e.g. of Rose in Rabid or of Seth in The Fly, experiences strange urgings and pain that ontologically confirms the falseness of the Cartesian split, while at the same time pitting the mind, with its last vestiges of traditional morality, against the body's newly discovered desires. We see this when Rose, in her lust for blood, preys on her best friend Mindy "against her will", and when Seth warns Veronica that he's fast becoming an insect, and that when he does, he'll hurt her.

9. This is bad exegesis right from the beginning: everyone in Shivers is sexually rapacious, while Kim Obrist is not the only (or even the central) scanner in Scanners, and is no more "monstrous" than her male counterparts.

10. This is a laughably bad interpretation of both Canadian culture and of Cronenberg's theoretical intentions. Perhaps American critics of Canadian cultural politics should follow Wittgenstein's suggestion at the end of the Tractatus: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent."

11. Richard Corliss, reviewing Dead Ringers in Time, says of The Fly that it is

Cronenberg's masterwork, where one man wages a heroic, doomed struggle against physical and moral degeneration; "The catalogue of punishments seems medieval - Savonarola meets Bosch - even as it taps baby boomers's fears of decaying vitality and eviscerated dreams. For Cronenberg the body is a haunted house whose rumblings trigger lust, mystery and excruciating pain in the poor tenant. The property is condemned." Once again, critics find the Gothic element in Cronenberg the easiest to intuitively grasp, in Corliss' case with a bit of social commentary added.

Appendix: Cronenberg's Films and Elements of the Somatic Dialectic They Embody (key elements in bold)

This list includes only feature films that Cronenberg both directed and scripted. It excludes his early experimental films Stereo and Crimes of the Future, which were not available for viewing, but which apparently fit into the themes dealt with in his earlier films quite well; Fast Company, which is his homage to car racing; and The Dead Zone and M Butterfly, which he did not write (but again which reflect these somatic themes to some degree, especially Cartesian dualism in The Dead Zone and pathological sexuality in M Butterfly).

A. The Pathological-Gothic Triad

Shivers AKA They Came From Within AKA The Parasite Murders (1975) - Gothic horror, psychopathological sex and aggression, technological transformation

Rabid (1976) - Gothic horror, psychopathological aggression and sex, technological transformation

The Brood (1979) - Gothic horror, psychopathological aggression (and reproduction), technological transformation

B. The Techno-Fantasy Triad

Scanners (1980) - Gothic horror, psychopathological aggression, technological transformation, postmodern simulations

Videodrome (1982) - Gothic horror, psychopathological sex and aggression, technological transformation, postmodern simulations

The Fly (1986 - co-written with Charles Edward Pogue) - Gothic horror, psychopathological sex, technological transformation, postmodern simulations

C. The Mature Triad

Dead Ringers (1988 - co-written with Norman Snider) - Gothic horror, pyschopathological sex, technological transformation

Naked Lunch (1991) - Gothic horror, psychopathological sex, technological transformation

Crash (1996) - Technological transformation, pyschopathological sex, postmodern simulations

A David Cronenberg Filmography (excluding his television work and shorts)

Stereo (1969, 65 minutes)

Written, Produced, Directed, and Filmed by David Cronenberg for Emergent Films.

An early experimental film, in black and white.

Cast: Ronald Mlodzik, Iain Ewing, Jack Messinger, Clara Mayer, Paul Mulholland, Arlene Mlodzik, Glenn McCauley.

Synposis: The future. Seven young people have volunteered for an experimental program devised by the Canadian Academy for Erotic Inquiry: they have surgery that removes their power of speech but increases their telepathic ability. The program is intended to investigate the theories of parapsychologist Luther Stringfellow, and is observed by an unseen group of scientists on television monitors. The group's "polymorphous perversity" is enhanced by aphrodisiacs. In the end there is violence and two suicides when members of the group are isolated from each other. The film highlights such typically Cronenbergesque concerns as the social repression of sexuality and Cartesian dualism, set in his usual cool and clinical cinematic style.

Crimes of the Future (1970, 65 minutes)

Written, Produced, Directed and Filmed by David Cronenberg for Emergent Films.

Another early experimental film, this time in colour.

Cast: Ronald Mlodzik (Arian Tripod), John Lidolt, Tania Zolty, Jack Messinger, Iain Ewing, Rafe Macpherson, Willem Poolman, Donald Owen, Norman Snider, Stephen Czernecki.

Synopsis: The setting is again the future. Millions of post-pubertal women have died from the cosmetics-induced Rouge's Malady (Antoine Rouge discovered the disease). Adrian Tripod, Rouge's disciple, wanders from place to place trying to understand the cataclysm. In his wanderings he encounters an old friend at the Institute of Neo-Venereal Disease whose body is strangely mutating, the Oceanic Podiatry Group, and a band of pedophiles who want to impregnate a young girl brought prematurely to puberty. The film deals with many of Cronenberg's traditional themes: perverse sexuality, repression, black science, and the unconscious. Ironically, "Crimes of the Future" is an alternative title for Cronenberg's latest film, eXistenZ.

Shivers AKA The Parasite Murders AKA They Came from Within (1975, 87 minutes)

Written and Directed by David Cronenberg.

Produced by Ivan Reitman, André Link, and John Dunning for Cinepix, with CFDC assistance. Budget: about $180,000.

Cinematography by Robert Saad.

Music by Ivan Reitman.

Special effects and makeup by Joe Blasco.

Filmed on Nuns' Island, Montréal, Québec.

Cast: Paul Hampton as Dr. Roger St. Luc, the resident M.D. at Starliner Towers.

Lynn Lowry as Nurse Forsythe, Dr. St. Luc's assistant.

Joe Silver as Rollo Linsky, a medical researcher, and Roger's friend.

Alan Migicovsky as Nick Tudor, a tenant.

Susan Petrie as Janine Tudor, Nick's wife.

Barbara Steele as Betts, another tenant.

Ronald Mlodzik as Merrick, the apartments' manager.

Fred Doederlein as Dr. Emil Hobbes, a medical researcher, and the inventor of the parasites. We see him only see in flashbacks.

Barry Baldero as Detective Heller, a police investigator.

Synopsis: Dr. Hobbes has invented a parasite that will free human beings from their sexual repressions and their excessive rationality by acting as a super-aphrodisiac. But it gets out of control, infecting slowly but surely the tenants of the Starliner Towers. Nick Tudor and Betts are early victims; Janine Tudor soon follows. Dr. Roger St. Luc and Nurse Forsythe try to figure out what's going on while fighting off the attacks of the infected characters, but the Nurse is claimed by the parasites, proclaiming to the doctor the universal rule of Eros. In the end the whole building is infected; St. Luc is the last to go, caught in the swimming pool by a zombie horde. The last scenes feature the horde driving out of the basement parking lot to infect all of Montreal.

Rabid (1976)

Written and Directed by David Cronenberg.

Produced by John Dunning for Cinepix, with indirect CFDC participation. Executive Producers: Ivan Reitman and Andre Link. Budget: $530,000.

Cinematography by Rene Verzier.

Music by Ivan Reitman.

Filmed in and around Montréal, Québec.

Cast: Marilyn Chambers as Rose, a motorcycle accident victim and the carrier of the rabid plague.

Frank Moore as Hart Read, her confused boyfriend.

Joe Silver as Dr. Murray Cypher, a friend of Hart's.

Howard Ryshpan as Dr. Daniel Keloid, head of the Keloid Clinic, and a researcher in experimental reconstructive surgery.

Patricia Gage as Dr. Roxanne Keloid, who works at the Keloid Clinic wih her husband.

Susan Roman as Mindy Kent, Rose's best friend.

J. Roger Periard as Lloyd Walsh, a patient at the Clinic.

Terry Schonblum as Judy Glasberg, another patient at the Clinic.

Victor Désy as Claude Lapointe, an official with the Quebec Bureau of Health.

Synopsis: Rose and Hart, on the back of a motorcycle, get into an accident; Rose is badly hurt. Dr. Dan Keloid repairs her external damage with a "morphogenetically neutral skin graft", which has the curious side-effect of her growing a penis/spike recessed in her armpit. She finds that she now requires human blood to survive, so she roams about first the clinic, then the countryside, looking for victims to feed on, luring them close to her with a need to be comforted or a sexual come-on. After she has vampirically sucked their blood, however, they develop a virulent form of rabies, violently attacking and biting whoever they meet. By the time Rose leaves the clinic in Montreal, the ultra-rabies she initiated has become a full-scale epidemic, and martial law is declared. Hart tracks her down in the city, but she realizes only too late that she's the cause of the epidemic, dying at the hands of one of her victims.

Fast Company (1979, 91 minutes)

Directed by David Cronenberg.

Written by Cronenberg, Phil Savath and Courtney Smith from an original story by Alan Treen.

Produced by Michael Lebowitz, Peter O'Brian and Courtney Smith for Quadrant Films. Executive Producer: David M. Perlmutter. Budget: $1.2 million.

Cinematography by Mark Irwin.

Music by Fred Mollin.

Filmed in Calgary and Edmonton, Alberta.

Cast: William Smith as Lonnie Johnson, a drag racer.

John Saxon as Phil Adamson, the corrupt manager of the Fastco racing team.

Nicholas Campbell as Billy Brooker, another drag racer, and Lonnie's team mate.

Claudia Jennings as Sammy, Billy's girlfriend.

Cedrick Smith as Gary Black, an independent racer.

George Buza as Meatball, Black's mechanic.

Judy Foster as Candy.

Robert Haley as P.J.

David Graham as Stoner.

Don Franks as "Elder".

Synopsis: Lonnie Johnson and Billy Brooker, members of a drag-racing team, fight the corporate machinations of Phil Adamson in this action film set in Alberta.

The Brood (1979, 91 minutes)

Written and Directed by David Cronenberg.

Produced by Claude Héroux for Les Productions Mutuelles and Elgin International Productions. Executive Producers: Victor Solnicki and Pierre David. Budget: $1.4 million.

Cinematography by Mark Irwin.

Music by Howard Shore.

Filmed in and around Toronto, Ontario.

Cast: Samantha Eggar as Nola Carveth, the mother of the "brood".

Art Hindle as Frank Carveth, her perplexed husband.

Oliver Reed as Dr. Hal Raglan, the head of the Somafree Institute of Psychoplasmics, and the author of The Shape of Rage.

Henry Beckman as Barton Kelly, Nola's father.

Nuala Fitzgerald as Julianna Kelly, Nola's mother.

Cindy Hinds as Candice Carveth, Frank and Nola's daughter.

Robert Silverman as Jan Hartog, a disgruntled ex-patient of Dr. Raglan.

Gary McKeehan as Mike Trellan, a current patient of Dr. Raglan.

Susan Hogan as Ruth Mayer, Candice's school teacher.

Nicholas Campbell as Chris, Dr. Raglan's assistant.

Michael Magee as Inspector Mrazek.

Larry Solway as Frank's lawyer.

Reiner Shwartz as Dr. Birkin, a police doctor.

Joseph Shaw as Dr. Desborough, a coroner.

Synopsis: The film opens with Dr. Hal Raglan using his "Psychoplasmics" therapy on Mike by helping him turn his inner rage into bodily mutations, thereby expelling it. Raglan's star patient is Nola Carveth, who has been hidden away at Raglan's Somafree Institute of Psychoplasmics. Frank Carveth tries to prevent the Carveth's daughter Candice from visiting her mother when he suspects Nola of physically abusing their daughter. Meanwhile, monstrous looking midgets kill Nola's parents, who have been separated for years and who, it is hinted, abused Nola as a child. When Candy's school teacher Ruth shows some affection for Frank, the monstrous midgets kill her too. One of the midgets is found "burned out"; the coroner discovers it has no sexual organs or navel, but has a nutrient sac between its shoulders that functions as an organic gas tank. Frank goes to Somafree to confront Nola and Raglan and to rescue Candy; Raglan confesses that the midgets are, in fact, the children of Nola's rage - a brood she has given birth to thanks to Psychoplasmics. They ally to end the brood's reign of terror. Raglan is killed, but Frank strangles Nola, thus depriving ther brood of their raison d'être and saving Candy from their clutches.

Scanners (1980, 103 minutes)

Written and Directed by David Cronenberg.

Produced by Claude Héroux for Filmplan International. Executive Producers: Pierre David and Victor Solnicki. Budget: $4.1 million.

Cinematography by Mark Irwin.

Music by Howard Shore.

Filmed in Montréal, Québec.

Cast: Stephen Lack as Cameron Vale, a scanner.

Jennifer O'Neill as Kim Obrist, a well-intentioned scanner.

Patrick McGoohan as Dr. Paul Ruth, the creator of Ephemerol and thus of scanners.

Michael Ironside as Darryl Revok, a power-mad scanner.

Lawrence Dane as Braedon Keller, Consec's crooked security chief.

Robert Silverman as Benjamin Pierce, an eccentric scanner/artist.

Adam Ludwig as Arno Crostic, an art gallery owner.

Mavor Moore as Trevellyan, the head of Consec.

Louis del Grande as the scanner whose head explodes.

Fred Doederlein as yoga master Dieter Tautz.

Synposis: In the immediate post-war period Dr. Paul Ruth created Ephemerol, a tranquillizer for pregnant women. But it had the unfortunate side-effect of inducing telekinetic and telepathic powers in the children of the women who took it, powers these "scanners" can only partially control, powers which made them anti-social outcasts. Cameron Vale is one such outcast - he's recruited by Ruth, and given a drug to allow him to control his psychic powers as part of Consec's attempt to develop scanning as a intelligence and military weapon. But a group of evil scanners led by Darryl Revok (and aided by Braedon Keller, Consec's security chief), whose aim is control of all scanners and (one assumes) world domination, disrupt Ruth's program, killing all the peace-loving scanners they can find. Ruth sends Vale (along with another scanner, Kim Obrist) to track Revok down; after dispatching some of Revok's flunkies, he discovers that Consec and Revok are producing a fresh batch of Ephemerol to create a new generation of scanners. In the finale, Revok and Vale (who it turns out are brothers, their father being none other than Dr. Ruth himself) face-off telepathically: Vale's body burns up and explodes, but not before he switches minds with Revok.

Videodrome (1983, 89 minutes)

Written and Directed by David Cronenberg.

Produced by Claude Heroux for Filmplan II International. Executive Producers: Pierre David and Victor Solnicki. Budget: $6 million.

Cinematography by Mark Irwin.

Music by Howard Shore.

Filmed in Toronto, Ontario.

Cast: James Woods as Max Renn, head of Civic TV, an independent television station that specializes in soft porn.

Deborah Harry as Nicki Brand, a kinky radio talk-show host.

Jack Creley as Brian O'Blivion, a media prophet.

Sonja Smits as Bianca O'Blivion, Brian's daughter and the keeper of his flame.

Peter Dvorsky as Harlan, Max's technological wizard.

Les Carlson as Barry Convex, the head of Spectacular Optical.

Julie Khaner as Bridey James, Max's assistant.

Lynne Gorman as Masha, a peddler of "artistic" films.

Reiner Shwartz as Moses, a manager at Civic TV.

David Bolt as Raphael, another manager at Civic TV.

Lally Cadeau as Rena King, a TV talk-show host.

David Tsubouchi as a Japanese porn merchant.

Synposis: Max Renn is the head of Civic TV, a Toronto independent station (modeled on Toronto's CITY TV) which specializes in soft porn. Max is looking for something "harder" with which to enliven his nightly schedule, and thinks that he's found in Videodrome, a show his technological wizard Harlan has supposedly pirated off a satellite. It's dedicated to torture and murder, and has no plot or dialogue. As he watches tapes of it at home he becomes addicted, and when he becomes involved with kinky radio personality Nicki Brand, he begins to have bizzare hallucinations, usually of a violent or sexual nature. He discovers through Bianca O'Blivion and tapes left behind by her dead father media prophet Brian O'Blivion (obviously modelled on Marshall McLuhan) that encoded within Videodrome is a signal that causes a brain tumour to develop, a tumour that is causing Max's hallucinations. He also discovers that Barry Convex, in league with Harlan, intend to use Videodrome to brainwash a corrupt North America. They send a "programmed" Max to kill Bianca. But she reprograms him, and sends him off to kill Convex and Harlan, which he appears to do (by this time we can't be sure whether the whole narrative isn't just another of Max's hallucinations). In the final scene Max is convinced by a video version of Nicki to cast off the "old flesh" and embrace the new - he shoots himself, repeating Bianca's mantra "Long Live the New Flesh!"

The Dead Zone (1983, 103 minutes)

Directed by David Cronenberg.

Written by Jeffrey Boam based on a book by Stephen King.

Produced by Debra Hill for Lorimar Productions. Executive Producer: Dino De Laurentiis. Budget: $10 million.

Cinematography by Mark Irwin.

Music by Michael Kamen.

Filmed in Toronto, Niagara-on-the-Lake, and elsewhere in Southern Ontario.

Cast: Christopher Walken as Johnny Smith, a schoolteacher and coma victim.

Brooke Adams as Sarah Bracknell, Johnny's one-time girlfriend.

Martin Sheen as Greg Stillson, an ambitious and somewhat messianic politician.

Geza Kovacs as Sonny Elliman, Stillson's right-hand man.

Sean Sullivan as Herb Smith, Johnny's father.

Jackie Burroughs as Vera Smith, Johnny's mother.

Herbert Lom as Dr. Sam Weizak, head of the Weizak Clinic.

Tom Skerritt as Sherriff Bannerman.

Anthony Zerbe as Roger Stuart, a wealthy local businessman.

Simon Craig as Chris Stuart, Roger's young son.

Nicholas Campbell as Frank Dodd, a policeman and serial killer.

Colleen Dewhurst as Henrietta Dodd, Frank's mother.

Roberta Weiss as Alma Frechette, a young girl, and one of Dodd's victims.

Peter Dvorsky as Clement Dardis, a television reporter.

Les Carlson as Brenner, a local newspaperman who opposes Stillson's election.

Ken Pogue as the Vice President in one of Johnny's visions.

Synopsis: Johnny and Sarah are set to marry in a small town in New England when Johnny is thrown into a coma as a result of a car accident. When he awakes in Dr. Sam Weizak's clinic five years have passed, and Sarah is married with a young child. Johnny is weak, his muscles severely atrophied, but he soon realizes that he has developed the power of second sight: he "sees" his nurse's daughter caught in a burning house (she's saved) and Weizak's childhood escape from the Nazis. After a partial recovery he helps Sheriff Bannerman to solve a serial killer case (the killer turns out to be Bannerman's deputy Frank Dodd), getting shot by the killer's mother in the process. He gets physically weaker as his psychic powers develop. After leaving town he becomes a private tutor. He has a vision of his young student Chris drowning while playing hockey on a thin-iced pond. His warning saves Chris (but not his team-mates): he realizes that his vision had a "dead zone", an empty spot, in it that proves that he can change the events in his visions. When he shakes the hand of the unscrupulous senatorial candidate Greg Stillson, he has a vision of President Stillson ordering a nuclear Armageddon. Johnny goes to a rally with his hunting rifle, intending to assassinate Stillson. He misses, and is shot by Stillson's aide Sonny; but when Stillson holds up Sarah's child as a shield, he's exposed as a coward. In a final dying vision Johnny sees Stillson kill himself in disgrace.

The Fly (1986, 96 minutes)

Directed by David Cronenberg.

Written by Charles Edward Pogue and Cronenberg from a story by George Langelaan.

Produced by Stuart Cornfeld for Brooksfilms. Budget: $10 million.

Cinematography by Mark Irwin.

Music by Howard Shore.

The Fly created and designed by Chris Walas Inc.

Filmed in Toronto, Ontario, and in the Kleinburg studios near the city.

Cast: Jeff Golblum as Seth Brundle, a scientist experimenting with teleportation.

Geena Davis as Veronica Quaife, a reporter for the science magazine Particle.

John Getz as Stathis Borans, Particle's editor, and Veronica's ex-lover.

Joy Boushel as Tawney, a barfly.

George Chuvalo as Marky, a tough guy.

Les Carlson as Dr. Cheevers, Veronica's doctor.

David Cronenberg as a gynecologist.

Synposis: Seth Brundle, a brilliant but misanthropic scientist, has perfected a teleportation device which disassembles then reassembles matter. Veronica, a science writer with Particle magazine, becomes interested in Seth's project, but Seth convinces her to keep the whole thing quiet in exchange for a scoop once his telepods have been successfully tested. They become lovers. But Veronica's ex-boyfriend Stathis Borans, the editor of Particle, begins to meddle in their relationship, making Seth jealous. To prove his mettle to Ronnie one night, while tipsy, he teleports himself. But the computer genetically splices Seth with a housefly that was in the chamber at the moment of teleportation. Seth begins to mutate into Brundlefly, at first strong and sexually voracious, later feeble and grotesque. He slowly loses his human qualities, both the physical and the emotional, as he becomes more and more insect-like. Ronnie, who is pregnant with Seth's baby, goes to an abortion clinic, but Brundlefly spirits her away back to the lab, planning to fuse with her in the telepods. Stathis rushes to save her; he struggles with Brundlefly, shooting up the telepod cables as the transport is starting, causing Brundlefly to fuse with one of the telepods. A sobbing Ronnie puts Brundlefly-pod out of its misery with Stathis' shotgun.

Dead Ringers (1988, 115 minutes)

Directed by David Cronenberg.

Written by Cronenberg and Norman Snider based on the book Twins by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland.

Produced by Cronenberg and Marc Boyman for Mantle II Clinic Ltd. and Morgan Creek Productions (with the cooperation of Telefilm Canada). Executive Producers: Carol Baum and Sylvio Tabet. Budget: about $13 million.

Cinematography by Peter Suschitzky.

Music by Howard Shore.

Filmed in Toronto, Ontario.

Cast: Jeremy Irons as Elliot and Beverly Mantle, identical twins, prosperous gynecologists living in Toronto.

Geneviève Bujold as Claire Niveau, an actress currently filming in the city.

Heidi von Palleske as Cary, one of Elliot's girlfriends.

Barbara Gordon as Danuta, the Mantles' receptionist.

Shirley Douglas as Laura, a friend of Claire's.

Stephen Lack as Anders Wolleck, an sculptor who works in metals.

Nick Nicholls as Leo, Claire's agent.

Synopsis: Beverly and Elliot Mantle are identical twin gynecologists working in Toronto. Elliot is a brilliant researcher, Beverly an expert surgeon and practitioner. They make a habit of taking each other's places when convenient, even sleeping with the same women. They both become involved with Claire Niveau, a patient. When she threatens to emotionally separate them, Beverly becomes addicted to drugs and fantasizes that his female patients have mutated interiors. Elliot, trying to help Beverly, follows him down the path of drug addiction, in the end both of them dying in a brother Liebestod.

Naked Lunch (1991, 115 minutes)

Directed by David Cronenberg.

Written by Cronenberg based on William S. Burroughs' book of the same name.

Produced by Jeremy Thomas for the Recorded Picture Company, with the participation of Telefilm Canada and the Ontario FDC. Co-Producer: Gabriella Martinelli. Budget: $17 million U.S.

Cinematography by Peter Suschitzky.

Music by Howard Shore.

Creatures created and designed by Chris Walas Inc.

Filmed in warehouse sets in Toronto.

Cast: Peter Weller as Bill Lee, a writer and exterminator.

Judy Davis as both Joan Lee, Bill's wife, and Joan Frost, a writer living in the Interzone.

Ian Holm as Tom Frost, Joan's husband, another writer living in the Interzone.

Julian Sands as Yves Cloquet, a gay libertine in the Interzone.

Roy Scheider as Dr. Benway, a specialist in bug powders.

Monique Mercure as Fadela, the Frosts' sadistic housekeeper.

Nicholas Campbell as Hank, a writer friend of Bill's.

Michael Zelniker as Martin, another writer friend of Bill's.

Robert A. Silverman as Hans, a German entrepreneur in the Interzone.

Joseph Scorsiani as Kiki, a handsome young lad.

Peter Boretski as the voice of the creatures.

Synopsis: Bill Lee is an exterminator in New York City in 1953. His wife is a junkie hooked on the bug powder he works with. Bill is arrested and put in a cell with a giant beetle that tries to recruit him to some sort of strange intelligence organization. He returns home, and accidently shoots Joan while doing their "William Tell" routine. The rest of the film is one gigantic, drug-induced hallucination: Bill meets the lizard-like mugwumps, goes to the Interzone (supposedly a haven for society's rejects on the North African coast), becomes an operative for his typewriter which from time to time turns into a talking bug, and meets various odd people, including the expatriate American writers Tom and Joan Frost (he has sex with Joan), Hans, Kiki, and Yves Cloquet. The bug informs him that an agent's best cover is homosexuality, which he flirts with. In the end it turns out that the "reports" he's been writing on his bugwriter are in fact elements of a novel called Naked Lunch, which his writer friends Hank and Martin attempt to assemble while Bill languishes in the Interzone.

M Butterfly (1993, 102 minutes)

Directed by David Cronenberg.

Written by David Henry Hwang based on his play of the same name.

Produced by Gabriella Martinelli for Geffen Pictures. Executive Producers: David Hwang and Philip Sandhaus.

Cinematography by Peter Suschitzky.

Music by Howard Shore.

Filmed in China, Budapest, France, and Toronto, Canada.

Cast: Jeremy Irons as Rene Gallimard, an official with the French Embassy in China.

John Lone as Song Liling, an opera singer.

Barbara Sukowa as Jeanne Gallimard, Rene's wife.

Ian Richardson as Ambassador Toulon.

Synopsis: It's 1964. René Gallimard, an official with the French Embassy in China, falls for the opera singer Song Liling. She is, in fact, a spy for the Chinese government, pumping René for information about American troop movements in Vietnam. Song fakes a pregnancy and leaves Beijing, returning during the Cultural Revolution, which claims her for a re-education camp. René, previously promoted to Vice Counsel, is stripped of his rank and sent back to Paris, where he works as a diplomatic courier. Song reappears in France, and convinces René to give her access to his diplomatic pouches. René is arrested and tried for espionage; Song is extradited back to China, but not before she exposes the fact that she is in fact a man, and that the whole "affair" with René had been a farce. René slits his own throat in prison while doing his own version of Madame Butterfly.

Crash (1996, 100 minutes)

Directed by David Cronenberg.

Written by Cronenberg based on J. G. Ballard's book of the same name.

Produced by Cronenberg, Stephanie Reichel and Marilyn Stonehouse for Allliance Communications.

Cinematography by Peter Suschitzky.

Music by Howard Shore.

Filmed in Toronto, Ontario.

Cast: James Spader as James Ballard, a TV director.

Elias Koteas as Vaughan, a renegade scientist and traffic expert.

Deborah Kara Unger as Catherine Ballard, James' wife.

Holly Hunter as Dr. Helen Remington, a crash victim.

Rosanna Arquette as Gabrielle, a partially crippled crash victim.

Peter MacNeil as Colin Seagrave, Vaughan's stunt driver.

Cheryl Swarts as Vera Seagrave, Colin's wife.

Synposis: James and Catherine Ballard have sex with multiple partners then share their experiences with each other to make their own love-making more exciting. James crashes into Helen Remington's car, killing her husband. While recovering he meets Vaughan, a renegade scientist who is studying accident victims and staging famous crashes. James, Catherine, and Helen all join Vaughan's circle (which also includes Gabrielle). The group have sex with each other in their cars while pursuing Vaughan's dark vision of a psychopathological sexuality of the future, a future where human beings and their technology are fully integrated. James and Catherine become more and more fascinated with Vaughan's perverse persona, each of them having sex with him in the back seat of his black Lincoln. Vaughan eventually commits suicide by crashing his car into a bus; James claims his wrecked car from the police pound, has it repaired, and takes Vaughan's place as an adventurer in the realm of auto-eroticism.

eXistenZ (1998)

In production. Written and Directed by David Cronenberg.

Cast: Willem Dafoe, Iam Holm, Jude Law, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Sarah Polley, Don McKellar, Calum Keith Rennie.

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