Cronenberg, Part 1

David Cronenberg occupies a weird space in the world of cinema. He's undeniably a unqiue, original auteur, but despite being well-known and generally respected, his films don't seem to attract a remarkable amount of respect themselves. Everyone knows of Cronenberg, but so far as his films go, they may have only heard of A History of Violence or Eastern Promises, his two most commercially successful. Everything else flies kind of under the radar, all cult-film like. As far as my own understanding goes, while I had heard of more of his films, I had only ever seen History and Promises. I could tell you he was this sort of creepy, gross filmmaker, but if you asked me what themes he liked to talk about, or to go more in-depth about his style, I couldn't tell you. I decided to remedy this. This is the first in a four-or-five-part series on David Cronenberg I'm writing as I watch his films. I want to know more about this man called "the most audacious and challenging narrative director in the English-speaking world."*

Cronenberg started his career with Stereo in 1969, and for about a decade afterward mostly did really typical exploitation-fare B-movies. I wanted to skip some of that, though I do hear Shivers and Rabid are good enough. Instead, I jumped ahead to the 80s, where Cronenberg's career really began to take off. Not able to skip all his B-movie fare entirely, I started on his 1981 film, Scanners, which you may recognize as the movie with that one scene where the guy's head just totally explodes. You know the one.
The movie concerns a population of psychics, called Scanners, who are being rounded up and tested by a large corporation. One of these Scanners decides he wants none of it, and starts an underground Scanner terrorist-type movement, and the corproation sends a Scanner of their own to stop him. It has a lot of twists and turns, and feels a lot like what you'd expect from a decently-budgeted early 80s sci-fi flick. Also like a lot of early 80s sci-fi flicks, the acting is pretty bad. Stephen Lack, who plays the main character, apparently had a career after this movie, which shocks me. The other major actors - Jennifer O'Neill, Patrick McGoohan, and Michael Ironside - are just serviceable, good enough, and not bad, respectively, and the cast of extras is as you'd probably guess. The writing's kind of corny and not remarkably intelligent, but I have to give props to the special effects here. The iconic head-exploding scene and the fight between Lack and Ironside at the end are just great, good body horror all around - just the way the blood squirts out and the skin... what am I doing? Is this really what I'm choosing to single out? I geek out over the "so 80s" effects because there's nothing much else to praise here. This is a pretty bad movie, truth be told; the sort of bad that doesn't really get made anymore. Is this really the work of the "most challenging and audacious" director out there? I suppose a lot of ground still needs to be covered, but this is not a remarkably endearing start. When I watched the film, I didn't enjoy it like I would watching an artist at work, I enjoyed it like I enjoy "We Built This City." For its kitschiness.

The next film Cronenberg made was 1983's Videodrome, one of his three films in the Cirterion Collection and the one generally cited as exemplary of his early(ish) career. The whiplash here was nearly as jarring as the film itself. The film stars a young James Woods (improvement already!) as a sleazy executive of a small local tv channel who discovers a broadcast of torture porn and decides this is just the thing to pull in the ratings. It's that kind of movie.
This movie, I'm told, features a lot of what Cronenberg's going to be interested in for a while, so I took note. Continuing on from Scanners, there was a lot of good old-fashioned body horror, which was implemented well, I'd say, and used at good intervals. If there's one thing that I know Cronenberg can do so far, it's pace. Videodrome starts off innocently enough (as innocently as it can, I guess) and slowly drips discomfort into the fabric of the story until that's all that remains. This, much more than Scanners, is a deliberate effort to make a statement through about something, as opposed to telling a cool story with thematic undertones. There's a lot going on in this movie about the nature of entertainment and media - sometimes even coming across as technophobic - and it does a good job of, in its own way, showing how our culture of gratification through media can backfire. I admit to not understanding a chunk of what was happening during the last act of the film, but its images have stayed with me, almost hauntingly so. There's still a bit of that B-movie aesthetic going on, but while in Scanners it just contributed to the inconsequentiality of the film, here it seems fitting. We still have some top-notch "so 80s" effects (and I do mean top-notch sincerely), there's still some stilted 80s acting from some of the characters, but given what the film is going for, it contributes to the strangeness, working on a meta-level to drive the point home. This may be from the benefit of hindsight, I grant, but Videodrome succeeds at what it wants to do - make you afraid of what you're watching.

Cronenberg's next film, The Dead Zone, came out in the same year as Videodrome, but is much less manic and more conventional than its companion piece. Based on the Stephen King novel, The Dead Zone features a young, recently Academy Award-winning Christopher Walken as a man who wakes up from a five-year coma to discover he has gained the ability to see into the future. I could go on about how the story is structured and how it presents this as more of a curse than a blessing, but that's all in King's territory, and I'm here to talk about Cronenberg.
The first thing I should mention, though, with Scanners still fresh in my mind, is that a good cast works wonders. This is obvious, really, but it's hard to appreciate until you see it in action. Christopher Walken and Martin Sheen don't exactly pull career highs here, but they're their usual reliable selves, which is plenty good enough. On Cronenberg's end, the movie is a lot quieter in tone than his last two. While Scanners had a typical rise-and-fall-until-the-climax sort of tension-building scheme, and Videodrome built up discomfort and dread until it practically exploded out of the screen, The Dead Zone spends little of its run building tension. The first act is expository, and from then on there are only a few scenes that especially draw the viewer in, which works to the film's advantage. Throughout, Walken's character tries to avoid the stress brought on by his new ability, and thus the tone of the film reflects that by shying away from tense scenes until they are necessary. Like Videodrome, it offers an air of discomfort, though certainly of a suitably lesser magnitude. Both Videodrome and The Dead Zone show that Cronenberg is evolving as a filmmaker from his Scanners days, both in his writing and direction, and he's beginning to have more suitable tools at his disposal to present the stories he wants to tell. 1983 could be seen as a turning point in his career, when he moved away from B-horror and into more serious fare. If this was all happening right now, I might say that Cronenberg was a name to watch, but that might just be the hindsight talking.

* J. Hoberman, May 17, 2005, "Historical Oversight," The Village Voice