David Cronenberg: Science Fiction or Horror?

"In Cronenberg’s hands, horror is no longer a disreputable bastard genre, but a new avenue of expression, gleaming with possibility."
- critic Stephen Schiff, writing about THE BROOD (Cronenberg, 1979)



One of the most gratifying things about looking back at the career of any filmmaker whose output has traversed multiple decades and stages of life is to chart their growth as artists and the maturation (or not) of their themes.

Throughout his entire career, the dominant thematic conceit that has characterised Canadian auteur David Cronenberg’s body of work has been the human body's relationship with disease, decay, physical destruction, and violence.

Almost without exception, his films have featured some of the most extraordinary and startling images of destruction, infection, and degradation – both physical and emotional – to be found anywhere within the confines of mainstream, Hollywood-friendly North American cinema.

From the penis-shaped rabies host in his second theatrical feature RABID (1977) and the exploding head of his breakthrough fifth feature SCANNERS (1981), to the mental illness of the title character in SPIDER (2002) and the culturally specific tattoos that adorn Nikolai’s body in EASTERN PROMISES (2007), Cronenberg's obsession with the human body and its manifold weaknesses has become one of the singular defining elements of his auteur status.

As he himself has said, “The first fact of human existence is the human body. If you get away from physical reality, you're fudging, in fantasyland, not coming to grips with what violence does."

But like all truly important storytellers, Cronenberg’s evolution as a writer and a director has seen him, in recent years, find greater fascination – and more inherently dramatic fodder for his concerns – in the internal, emotional aspects of decay and destruction.

As a natural evolution of his dominant thematic concerns, Cronenberg has refined his vision from the exploitation sensibilities of his earliest works and into a mindset and an artistic palette that, while it occasionally cherry-picks from the conventions and iconography of horror and science fiction (his earliest stylistic and commercial template), almost always subverts, deepens, and enriches them.

In this characteristic alone, Cronenberg has emerged as a singular voice in the North American cinema, and one its few true - and truly consistent – visionary individuals.

Moreover, it is a voice that easily transcends virtually every expectation laid upon him, even those of his most devoted fans and collaborators. No one is ever quite sure at any given point exactly where or how he will embrace his dominant concerns as an artist.

His most recent films, specifically EASTERN PROMISES, A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE (2005), and SPIDER, while they most certainly boast their share of graphic violence and/or highly confronting imagery, nevertheless ultimately find their sine quibus non in personal, internal, deeply character-based obsessions. It is in this thematic evolution that Cronenberg is revealed as an authentic artist of cinema and not merely a “world class provocateur", although he is certainly that as well.

But this journey from exploitation horror schlock – characterised by his earliest films SHIVERS (1975) and RABID - through to mature dramas about violence and the people who engage in it, passed through a curious “middle period” during the 1980s, in which Cronenberg managed to comprehensively blur the lines between horror and science fiction in a way that almost single-handedly created the hybrid.

This transition began in earnest with his 1979 horror film THE BROOD, the first of his films to tackle truly mature themes within a commercial horror framework.

But although the film’s pseudo-science, Psychoplasmics, is one of the purest and most repulsively compelling of science fiction conceits, it remains a MacGuffin, ultimately taking enough of a back seat to the iconography of the horror genre for THE BROOD to remain a pure horror experience. (Pseudo-scientific explanations are also offered in films such as DAWN OF THE DEAD (Romero, 1978) and its ilk, as explanations for zombie plagues, but this doesn’t make them science fiction… it is merely the device that facilitates the ensuing carnage that is typical of the modern horror film.)

But despite its prescient deviation into more mature themes, and its established status as a “thinking man’s scare film". THE BROOD was merely a teaser… a foretaste of Cronenberg’s later films, almost all of which would successfully reject much (but not all) of the visual viscera of his early work and instead bring his cinematic vision into line with a growing and maturing focus on the psychological over the corporeal.

The real breakthrough began with the three films I want to focus on in this essay: the three films Cronenberg wrote and directed between 1981 and 1986 – SCANNERS, VIDEODROME (1983) and THE FLY (1986).

(For the purposes of this essay, we will skip over 1983’s THE DEAD ZONE - a film Cronenberg helmed as a freelance “director-for-hire”, and not one he developed himself.)

In all three of these important transitional films, we find Cronenberg the auteur moving into territory that lay further outside the conventions and traditions of the horror genre and into an nascent, but already highly developed, analysis of what might be described as “the horror of science”. It would be here that Cronenberg would rest his boat for almost a decade, before veering into the psychological dramas that have characterised almost all of his subsequent/current work.

THE BROOD had successfully retained a pure horror sensibility at the same time as it signalled a deeper meditation on the scientific origin of horror’s iconography, Interestingly, it also managed to successfully integrate an intensely personal component into the narrative… this harrowing tale of familial dysfunction and parental/custodial conflict was born of Cronenberg’s own bitter, real-life divorce and custody battle with his first wife – an event from which he was, when he wrote the film, still extremely raw. It renders the film unquestionably his most personal, and for many it remains his masterpiece.

But it remained most defiantly a horror film, and Cronenberg would not begin swinging away from the temptations of “visceral for visceral’s sake”, and into a more balanced, cerebral approach to the same obsessions, until 1981’s SCANNERS.

In SCANNERS we find ourselves in a world where a Thalidomide-like drug - Ephemerol – has resulted in an entire generation of men and women possessing extraordinary abilities in telekinetic mind-control. The plot depicts the moral struggle by the doctor responsible for this drug, and the consequences of him attempting to exercise dominion over the struggle between two men – ultimately revealed to be his own sons and the prototype subjects of his original experiments with the drug – who war over the potential socio-political application of their psychic aberration.

But it is an ideological, verging on metaphysical, war that is waged between these two siblings, the good brother Cameron (Stephen Lack) and the machiavel Darryl (Michael Ironside). Although their conflict ultimately comes down to a direct psychic confrontation between their extremely – some might say excessively – strong telepathic minds (a literal battle of the wills), the final victory is ambiguous at best, if not downright Pyrrhic – and spectacularly typical of Cronenberg’s creative raisons d'être – Cameron wins, but only by utterly destroying his own body and taking over Darryl’s… telepathically transferring himself into Darryl’s conquered biological shell.

Cronenberg bases his narrative in the repercussions of medical science’s constant and (in the world of film, at least) utterly unrestrained experimentation. In doing so, he creates a film that demonstrably steers more towards science fiction than horror, although the film’s infamous exploding head scene and the graphic, blood-drenched climactic psychic battle are certainly more typical of the iconography of horror.

"Here, the mind actually leaves the body, violently."

It is perhaps the extremely graphic nature of these two isolated scenes of physical horror that have served to confound many serious attempts at identifying the film's true, dominant genre as science fiction. Many still classify it as a horror film. Some prefer to sit on the fence and classify it as a hybrid piece. Few, if any, classify it as pure science fiction.

In VIDEODROME (1983), the first film of Cronenberg’s to be almost exclusively labelled science fiction by marketing campaigns and video store proprietors, we see a man experiencing an increasing (and increasingly intense) number of hallucinations brought on by a tumour caused by “infected” television signals. As a metaphor for the spread of disease, and as a treatise on the shared journey of moral and physical corruption, particularly as it pertains to man’s journey through a world dominated by unchecked scientific and technological advancement, VIDEODROME aligns perfectly with the trajectory of Cronenberg’s dominant thematic concerns as they evolved, during this transitional period, from the physical to the metaphysical.

VIDEODROME is also notable for being the first work of Cronenberg’s to earn its lead actor (in this case, James Woods) widespread acclaim for his work as an actor, an aspect of Cronenberg’s work that had managed to escape attention during his genre-specific early films. It would not be the last time that Cronenberg would guide an actor to critical plaudits.

But again, while the horrors witnessed – the vaginal opening that appears in Max's stomach, the fusion of his hand to a gun on a biological/technological level – are extremely graphic and reek of the horror sensibility, they are sufficiently spaced throughout the narrative – just as the moments in SCANNERS were – and both entirely appropriate to the narrative context, for them to be comparatively transparent. In this, Cronenberg fuses genre in a sufficiently ambiguous manner for their respective acculturated expectations to be confounded.

The horrors depicted in VIDEODROME are also noticeably bloodless – unlike the moments in SCANNERS – and are tied thematically to a phenomenon that is more technological than biological. Because it is an electronic force that creates the body's decay (or at least the tumour-induced illusion of such), we are removed from the ubiquitous “disease/infection” iconography of horror’s traditional – if nominal - scientific foundation.

These attributes would carry over into his next major work, THE FLY.

At 43 years of age, with growing emotional and artistic maturity, not to mention by now major commercial success, Cronenberg was deepening his vision of human life as an ongoing process of decay and degradation. His subsequent films, beginning with DEAD RINGERS (1988) – the first Cronenberg film to garner an Oscar nomination - would see him move well past the sheer visceral horror of his early B-movies, and into a more defiantly art-house aesthetic based on emotional and spiritual decay.

But with THE FLY he refined his approach not only to the influence of technological science over medical science as facilitator of decay and degradation, but also to the impact this decay would have on the emotional life of the characters, and their interplay with one another on a human level. It was no longer simply about the disease, but the people most immediately affected by it.

The emotional dynamic between protagonist Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum), his lover/destroyer Veronica Quaife (Geena Davis), and her boss and ex-lover Stathis Borans (John Getz) is one of the most compelling and sympathetic to be found between characters in any of Cronenberg’s films prior to this, and would lay the template for his further evolution into a creator of exceptional character-based dramas… with DEAD RINGERS and M BUTTERFLY (1993) being the earliest subsequent markers of this trend.

The tragedy of Seth’s destruction is entirely built on the clumsy/sexy relationship that evolves organically between him and Veronica, and the connection that we as an audience are allowed to construct alongside it. Cronenberg cleverly plays on the unlikely symbiosis between these characters, allowing us to find a significant curiosity factor in the unlikely alliance between the awkward, enigmatic manchild Seth (the always quirky Jeff Goldblum being almost too perfectly cast in the role), the ambitious and forthright career journalist Veronica, and the stunningly realised anti-hero Stathis – a criminally underrated performance from journeyman actor John Getz.

That we absolutely believe the turns and transitions in each of these characters – that none of the significant emotional paradigm shifts ever ring untrue, is evidence of Cronenberg’s growing control over his craft and his actors.

In this, Cronenberg is clearly laying the seeds for his next artistic evolution, that of an actor’s director; but what is significant about THE FLY is that he so very clearly understands the nature of the medium he is working in – the purest and most perfectly pitched hybrid of science fiction and horror – that he is already transcending it, evolving it into another area entirely, even before his audience has caught up with him.

He uses just as much of the imagery of horror as the material requires, aligns it perfectly with the conventions of science fiction (just as he had done with VIDEODROME), and before we can say, “Well, which is it?” he has moved on into a different area again.




REFERENCES:

1. Rolling Stone” (February 21, 2003)
2. Ashley Allinson; “Keeping his Body of Work in Mind: A Chronology of David Cronenberg’s
Success as Canadian Auteur and Industry Pillar” (2002)