David Cronenberg

Author or Film-Maker?

Mark Browning

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781841509822
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Arts de la scène

For more than thirty years, David Cronenberg has made independent films such as Scanners and A History of Violence which aim to disturb, surprise, and challenge audiences. He has also repeatedly drawn on literary fiction for inspiration, adapting themes from authors like William Burroughs, J. G. Ballard, and Patrick McGrath for the big screen; David Cronenberg: Author or Filmmaker? is the first book to explore how underground and mainstream fiction have influenced—and can help illuminate—his labyrinthine films.
Film scholar Mark Browning examines Cronenberg's literary aesthetic not only in relation to his films' obvious source material, but by comparing his movies to the writings of Vladimir Nabokov, Angela Carter, and Bret Easton Ellis. This groundbreaking volume addresses Cronenberg's narrative structures and his unique conception of auteurism, as well as his films' shocking psychological frameworks, all in the broader context of film adaptation studies. David Cronenberg is an essential read for anyone interested in the symbiotic relationship between literature and filmmaking. " David Cronenberg is a work that attempts to illuminate and unravel the connection between the great Canadian auteur and his literary influences."— Film Snob Weekly " David Cronenberg is an essential read for anyone interested in the symbiotic relationship between literature and filmmaking."— Video Canada

CHAPTER ONE

VIDEODROME: ‘NOT A LOVE STORY – A FILM ABOUT PORNOGRAPHY’¹

‘My greatest ambition is to turn into a TV programme’.²

The focus of this chapter is Videodrome (1982). This is not an example of a text being ‘translated’ from a literary entity into a cinematic one but the analytical focus here will be on potential links between Cronenberg’s work and a range of analgous texts including the work of media prophet Marshall McLuhan, some of the early short stories of Clive Barker and J. G. Ballard and Brett Easton Ellis’ novel American Psycho (1991). The relationship of Videodrome to the generic area of pornography will be also discussed, particularly in connection with the writings of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.

For Stephen King, ‘[t]he only director I can think of who has explored this grey land between art and porno-exhibitionism successfully – even brilliantly – again and again with never a misstep is the Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg’.³ However, on considering Videodrome specifically, critics seem to find it strangely puzzling and usually view it as an ambitious failure. Some commentators, like Julian Petley, ‘find it profoundly uninteresting, deeply unattractive and generally quite underwhelming’.⁴ Bearing in mind Cronenberg’s last-minute re-writing, the censorship that the film received in its various versions and Cronenberg’s own dissatisfaction with the project, Videodrome is perhaps best viewed as a partially successful experiment, with more ideas than space to breathe, a luxury that Cronenberg could afford in later years with the commercial success of The Fly (1986) behind him.

‘Everybody’s going to be starring in their own porno films…’ Pornography and Cronenberg⁵

In Ballard’s High-Rise (1975), there is mention of ‘a continuity girl’ working in pornographic films, who ‘has to note the precise sexual position between takes’, a difficulty Cronenberg has mentioned in connection with his direction of the apartment scene in Crash (1996).⁶ On being complimented on his direction of this scene, Cronenberg claims not to have seen Andrew Blake-directed pornography but admits ‘I’ve done sex scenes before, you know, like in video’.⁷ He does not expand upon what these were but the casting of porn star Marilyn Chambers in the lead role in Rabid (1976), although admittedly not his first choice for the part, and his own role as the ‘disembodied, wide-eyed porno freak’, Tom Cramer in Blue (Don McKellar, 1992), does seem to indicate at least a passing knowledge of the genre.⁸

Cronenberg has shown interest in the structures and stylistic tropes of pornography over many years. Referring to the opening of Shivers (1976), Victor Sage notes that ‘we have at least two narrative codes being played with: the promo film and the porn film’.⁹ A middle-aged man struggling with a woman dressed as a schoolgirl (a porn cliché itself) is intercut with a couple being shown around the building. The name of the clients, the Swedens, like the group watching Volvo crash videos in Crash, alludes to the stereotypical association of Scandinavia with the porn industry. As Mark Kermode notes, Cronenberg’s breakthrough into mainstream cinema was achieved ‘through the taboo orifices of the horror and soft-core porn genres’ due to ‘having failed an audition as a porno director for Canadian skin-flicks company Cinepix’.¹⁰ In an interview with Cronenberg, Susie Bright jokes that ‘maybe in your dotage we could corral you into making just an unabashed cock and cunt porn film’, to which he answers in a manner which makes it unclear whether he is being serious or not: ‘well, I like watching those myself…’¹¹

However, it is simplistic to see Cronenberg’s use of displaced genitals, such as Max’s slit, as pornographic in itself. Marty Roth’s notion that ‘the border between horror film and pornography is a blurred one’, is useful here.¹² Both genres share an inability to achieve complete narrative closure and Steven Shaviro notes that ‘horror fans know that the dead always walk again, even as consumers of pornography know that no orgasm is ever the last’.¹³ He also observes that ‘[v]iolent and pornographic films literally anchor desire and perception in the agitated and fragmented body’.¹⁴ Both horror and pornography are about arousal, more specifically provoking fear and a sexual response respectively, and are the two prime genres that speak about and through the body. Ian Conrich underlines the ‘relationship between the opened bodies of pornography and splatter-obsessed hard core horror’ that Richard Gehr calls ‘carnography’, which suggests that a text like Videodrome, featuring as it does bodies that are tortured, with a protagonist whose stomach opens without apparent reason and an antagonist who, upon death, bursts open with cancerous tumours, could be deemed pornographic.¹⁵ However, Cronenberg’s ‘new flesh’ redefines how this might manifest itself.

Is Videodrome pornographic?

We see how the porn industry works in Max’s first meeting of the day with Hiroshima Video, whose name reflects the poverty of taste in the environment in which he moves but also the sense of an over-stimulated environment to which Nicki refers later. The meeting itself is portrayed like a drug deal. The merchandise is kept in a suitcase and the deal revolves around price and the purity of the product, which is validated by a test of a key batch, the last one, talismanic number 13. The request seems strange as it takes the tapes out of order but reflects the serial nature of pornography and that the order of episodes is unimportant. The product is discussed in terms of mass production and of regular supply (‘thirteen with the possibility of another six’), expressing Debord’s notion that ‘the real consumer becomes a consumer of illusions…and the spectacle is its general manifestation’, so that ‘the spectacle is the developed modern complement of money…’¹⁶

Later, Harlan asks Max after being exposed to the Videodrome programme, ‘Are you in some kind of drug warp?’ Certainly, William Burroughs’ descriptions of drug withdrawal accurately evoke Max’s altered perceptions of video technology: ‘sense impressions are sharpened to the point of hallucination. Familiar objects seem to stir with a writhing furtive life. The addict is subject to a barrage of sensations, external and visceral’.¹⁷ Max’s explanation of Civic TV’s status on The Rena King Show continues the sense of pornography, rather than Burroughs’ preferred metaphor of drugs, as a prime paradigm of capitalist economics: ‘It’s a matter of economics. We’re small and in order to survive we have to give people something they can’t get anywhere else’.

The viewing of ‘Samurai Dreams’ acts as a bridge between the hotel deal and the Civic TV management as we track back from the screen to see Max and his associates around a table. Street level operations interconnect with corporate business. Max muses whether they will ‘get away with it’, as if cheating their audience with a product that is in some way inferior or diluted. Max’s listless dismissal of ‘Samurai Dreams’ expresses on behalf of his consumers (and possibly himself) a level of sexual ennui that is later articulated in Crash. There appears to be little pleasure in fooling his audience as he asks rhetorically, ‘Do you want to get away with it?’ On repeated viewings, it is possible to recognize the girl as the subject of one of the photos in Max’s kitchen earlier, implying possibly that the woman is a known star or alluding to a sense of precognition on his part (i.e. that the product has become predictable).

The Head of Production at Universal Studios, Bob Rehme, demanded cuts to the ‘Samurai Dreams’ sequence, when a doll is lifted to reveal a dildo beneath. Ironically, in a film about the potential effects of the media, such an image of female self-pleasure might have helped Cronenberg’s reputation with critics like Robin Wood. The cuts to the scene for the version shown on BBC2 mean the actions of the girl are incomplete but guessable, making the effect of the scene even more coy and Max’s frustration with its ‘softness’, even more appropriate. For Roth, ‘Videodrome is all about pornography, about the difference between hard and soft pornography, the pornography of the present as opposed to that of the future’.¹⁸

Roth is only partly right here. Max and his two colleagues express different views on the film, which represent an historical perspective on pornography. One expects that it will get them an audience they never had before (the present), another rejects it as ‘not tacky enough…to turn me on’ and moralizes that ‘too much class is bad for sex’ (the past). These represent the traditional positions of white middleclass/aged males, whose tastes have historically dominated the US porn industry. Whilst Max is looking for ‘somethi...