The Politics of Insects

David Cronenberg's Cinema of Confrontation

Scott Wilson

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781623563394
• eBook ISBN: 9781441123701
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film Direction & Production

Canadian film director David Cronenberg has long been a figure of artistic acclaim and public controversy. Bursting into view with a trio of shocking horror films in the 1970s, Cronenberg's work has become increasingly complex in its sensibilities and inward-looking in its concerns and themes. This trajectory culminates in the multiplex successes of his most recent films, which appear to conclude a straightforward evolutionary arc that begins in the cold outside of shock-horror and arrives in the warm embrace of commercial and critical success. Scott Wilsonargues persuasivelythat Cronenberg's career can be divided into broad thematic stages and instead offers a complex examination of the relationship between three inter-related terms: the director as auteur; the industry that support or denies commercial opportunity; and the audience who receive, interpret and support (or decry) the vision represented on screen. The Politics of Insects provides an opportunity to explore Cronenberg's films in relation to each other in terms of their thematic continuity, and in terms of their relationship to industrial concerns and audience responses.

Chapter 1

The Filmmaker as Heretic

Introduction: The Politics of Insects

Midway through David Cronenberg’s 1986 remake of The Fly, as Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) begins to fully comprehend the accident that will eventually lead to his death, he makes the following statement:

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. (Cronenberg, 1986)

Brundle has, as a result of the telepod mishap that is the film’s central event, become the ‘Brundlefly’, a human-insect amalgam. The Fly illustrates Brundle’s becoming, his increasing alterity, even as it functions as a discussion of this state and the implications of transformation in general. The full import of Brundle’s statement will be dealt with in the next chapter; its use here lies in the way Brundle’s wish to become the first insect politician demonstrates the political and philosophical concerns that exist at the centre of what Chris Rodley refers to as ‘the Cronenberg Project’ (Rodley, 1997, xv). This ‘project’, so called, is summed up by Rodley (and others) as a continued exploration of transformation as a means of renegotiating the human, both bodily and psychically. Of course, while I agree that Cronenberg’s project does do these things, suffice it to say that there is more at work in the cinema of David Cronenberg, not least of which is the way such transformation functions to reveal a host of structures that surround, govern, control and, if need be, punish transformation and the transforming individual.

The distinction that may be made between Brundle’s desire and Cronenberg’s intentions, as evidenced by his entire filmic output, lies in how the character and the director each view and negotiate the fact of transformation. The Fly functions as an essay on a particular form of transformation, and most critical commentary about the film tends to focus on the superficial fact of this activity: The Fly, most obviously, details Seth Brundle’s physical transformation from Brundle to Brundlefly and, finally, to the human-fly-telepod organism that is his final stage before death. What is often overlooked and yet hinted at by Brundle’s dialogue (as scripted by Cronenberg) is the relationship between transformation (in any form) and the host of ideological structures that exist to legislate such transformation. As William Beard explains, Brundle’s desire to function as the intermediary between the human and insect must fail

… because insectness is so intractably and horrifyingly evil in human terms that it cannot be mediated. There may be shades of humanity, signified by various degrees of trust, compassion, compromise – but there are no shades of insectness. (Beard, 2001, 220)

Brundle’s transformation removes him from the human and takes him to a place from which there can be neither return nor mediation; in so doing, it speaks volumes about both points – the point at which he begins to transform (as human) and our conceptions of the point at which he ends (as non-human). This movement towards a limit point of human experience, especially as it impacts on the ability of the film to represent such movement adequately, is pivotal to Cronenberg’s cinema and will be explored in greater detail below.

Despite the pejorative associations that popularly accumulate around the notion of a specifically Cronenbergian transformation, as it occurs in his cinema, transformation qua transformation is, at its very essence, a neutral act. As Cronenberg notes, ‘I think that change itself is fairly neutral, but it contains the potential to be either positive or negative’ (Kermode, 1992). The act itself only becomes coloured, as it were, when it impacts with the many structures that govern our complex social constructions. Cronenberg further explains,

It’s my conceit that perhaps some diseases perceived as diseases which destroy a well-functioning machine, in fact change the machine into a machine that does something else, and we have to figure out what it is that the machine now does. Instead of having a defective machine, we have a nicely functioning machine that just has a different purpose. (Cronenberg, quoted in Newman, 1988, 116)

Thus Cronenberg’s cinema is one of transformation, but – and this is essential – of transformation as it intersects with those legislative and necessarily disciplinary structures that move to limit, control or prevent outright such alterations. Cronenberg’s films, therefore, utilize transformation in order to more fully examine the structures that surround the transformative being, that provide it with meaning and, when threatened, move to stop or, at its most extreme, punish it for having transformed. Regardless of any specific articulation in the context of each text, these films highlight the ways in which the beings who inhabit Cronenberg’s narratives are disciplined as they attempt their various transformations and because of them.

Every transformation, in the eyes of these disciplinary structures, is a potentially dangerous act in that it offers the subject undergoing transformation possibilities that previously were unavailable – whether forbidden or simply unthinkable. Brundle demonstrates this with his continued transformation away from both the initial position of human and past the relatively stable insect-human hybrid who occupies the central third of the film. Brundle’s personal transformation only becomes dangerous when it contravenes the boundaries within which humanity, as it is conceived, can operate. It is dangerous because the very act of Brundle’s transformation forces us to recognize the essentially arbitrary nature of those structures that are in place to govern and prevent such changes. To conceive of an insect politics is therefore to begin to imagine a new order of consciousness; one that, for Brundle, does away with compassion and compromise. What Brundle offers is a glimpse of a new social structure and, within that, a new way of imagining the body within the body politic. Brundle’s body becomes one version among many of the ‘new flesh’ celebrated by Cronenberg’s films. It is for this reason that

[i]t has been widely observed that what David Cronenberg ‘disturbs’ is the institutional: order, systems, rules. His films thematize the transgression of boundaries of all kinds – biological, psychological, emotional, sexual, social and political. (Ramsey & Wilson, 1993/4)

All of Cronenberg’s films are concerned not just with transformation but with what happens when transformation becomes transgression. The particular forms these explorations take will be detailed in later chapters, but it is worth noting, even at this early stage, that Cronenberg’s own views of transformation are anything but celebratory. As closer examination of the films will reveal, the Cronenbergian hero (a figure whose very existence – or, at least, whose heroism – can and will be disputed) is an ambivalent figure, often passively swept along towards a change she or he can barely comprehend and which, all too often, leads to her or his demise. Similarly, Cronenberg’s cinema displays a strong current of anti-transcendentalism which emerges, first, from his continued attempts to trouble and problematize the Cartesian dialectic and, second, in his attempts to explore and critique both the perceived schism between body and mind and any orthodox favouring of the mind over, and at the expense of, the body. Regardless of this, it is an ‘unshakeable belief in the unavoidable nature of change (it is neither good nor bad, it simply is) [that] lies at the centre of Cronenberg’s cinema’ (Kermode, 1992). What remains to be explored is the manner in which Cronenberg’s examination of transformation and the disciplinary measures enacted to prevent or punish it become the site from which his continued critique of these disciplinary structures emerges. This drive to critique the actions of the disciplinary and ideological structures that surround, control, censure and punish the individual attempting transformation reveals a specific set of mechanisms at work in both the form and content of Cronenberg’s films. Indeed, so comprehensive is Cronenberg’s continued attention to these concerns that by charting these shifts and developments across his career it becomes possible, as Robert Koehler indicates, to detect traces of the future director in every work produced (2007). Thus we can conclude that, for Cronenberg, the drive to transform is intimately related to issues of control and claims of and for agency.

The Filmmaker as Heretic

In On Belief (2001) Slavoj Žižek discusses the ways in which heresy can be usefully understood in relation to the dominant structure that has outlawed it. He notes that

… in order for an ideological edifice to occupy the hegemonic place and legitimize the existing power relations, it HAS to compromise its founding radical message – and the ultimate ‘heretics’ are simply those who reject this compromise, sticking to the original message. (Žižek, 2001c, 8)

For Žižek, the heretic’s mistake (the action which, once performed, requires that it be labelled heretical) is to take the original interdiction too seriously and ‘overconform’ to it and thus reveal, first, the dangerous absurdity inherent within it; second, the distance that exists between the ‘founding radical message’ and the manner with which it is practiced by those who claim to serve and uphold it; and third, the essentially arbitrary nature of the law (as emerging from the ‘founding radical message’) and thus of the ideological edifice that is supported and consolidated by the law’s existence. This heretical impulse reveals, therefore, a ‘normal’ state of affairs within which

… what makes the Law workable / bearable is an ideological phantasy, a shadowy zone of illicit activities into which even the most law-abiding citizens enter on occasions when it becomes apparent that the Law makes such an ass of itself that for its own sake they must make an exception to it. (Krips, 2004)

Thus, as Žižek explains, much more subversive than actually breaking the law is to ‘… simply … do what is allowed, that is, what the existing order explicitly allows, although it prohibits it at the level of implicit unwritten prohibitions’ (Žižek, 2000b, 147; emphasis in original). This heretical act of ‘overconformity’ with the letter of the law therefore reveals the absurdity inherent in its absolute application that, in turn, draws attention to the fact that the law acts not to protect its subjects but to preserve its own hegemony. Žižek’s point is that demonstrating that law requires a set of ‘implicit unwritten prohibitions’ to supplement and, at times, supplant its regular (and regulatory) functions can only be revealed by an absolute and unwavering attention to, and extension of, the explicit instructions and that this, in turn, reveals the hidden arbitrary heart of discipline, ideology and hegemony.

Elsewhere, Žižek provides an example of such heresy that is well suited to the purpose of this examination. In The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway, Žižek discusses the figure of Mr Eddy who, along with Frank Booth (from Lynch’s Blue Velvet [1986]), is a figure

… of an excessive, exuberant assertion and enjoyment of life; they [Eddy and Booth] are somehow evil ‘beyond good and evil’ … [and yet] at the same time the enforcers of the fundamental respect for the socio-symbolic Law. (Žižek, 2000a, 19)

In this fashion, Mr Eddy, who famously pistol-whips a fellow driver for being discourteous, ‘enforces the rules … [but] does so in such an exaggerated, excessively violent manner that his role exposes the inherently violent and arbitrary nature of the law’ (Wieczorek, 2000, x). This example demonstrates the danger of the heretic: by vigorously enforcing the rules and demanding that others do the same, these figures reveal what they seek to hide (however unconsciously) – that the law is, itself, arbitrary. It is not so much that the fundamental respect for the law is an effect or product of the law’s arbitrary nature, but that respect for the law is used to hide the fact that the law is itself arbitrary. Moreover, it is the excessive nature of these figures’ adherence that reveals the law’s arbitrary (and, for Žižek, absurd) status. To negotiate the demands of any series of ideological edifices necessarily requires ‘minor’ transgressions in order to satisfy the majority of hegemonic demands, all of which work to elide the presence and arbitrary foundation of these structures.

What we can conclude is that heresy, such as Žižek defines it, is a taking-too-far, an excessive attention to the specific requirements of the laws that structure, govern and discipline the actions and articulations of the subject-in-society. The pejorative term itself indicates that the act is a threat to the ideological edifice(s). What such excesses do is draw attention to the hegemonic structures that function most efficiently when they are effaced in the very performance of their demands. Once attention is drawn to these structures – once they become visible to or are made visible by the subjects who are subject to them – they can no longer claim to be ‘naturally’ in place: ‘overidentification suspends its [the ruling ideology’s] efficiency’ (Žižek, 2006, 65).

As will be explored below, cinema’s role and function within a hegemony sees it function as, and alongside, the ideological edifices Žižek claims are revealed through the actions of the heretic. Cinema works to inform, instruct and discipline its audiences through the use of specific activities, located both at the level of film form and film content. The particular articulations of this control will be explored in depth but, as with any ideological edifice, the efficacy of its ideological operation depends entirely on the invisibility of its mechanisms. To draw attention to them suspends, as Žižek confirms, their efficiency and serves only to reveal their absurdity. This is not to suggest, however, that Cronenberg’s films (assuming they do, as I suggest, function as heretical texts) necessarily ‘fail’ as cinema. Part of this document’s purpose is to examine the way which Cronenberg locates his heresy, not as the totality of his cinema but as an effective portion of a larger, disruptive-but-acquiescent project. This paradox is important to bear in mind as we move to consider how Cronenberg’s cinema of disruption moves from its original outsider status to performing its own particular disciplinary function. Indeed, if one thing has typified his career, it is the ability of his works and their content to provoke and disrupt.

As is clear from the discussion above, Cronenberg’s films are concerned with exploring the heretical potential for cinema, utilizing narratives that explore various mechanisms of transformation, and formal techniques that unsettle and upset the standard spectatorial expectations. Thus Brundle’s desire to articulate a politics of insects becomes heretical, given Žižek’s schema, because it draws attention to the arbitrary construction of the politics of the human, to which the insect is compared and found to be radically alien. Further than this, Brundle’s politics of insects suggests the limits of representation or meaningfulness and, hence, of the presence of those systems maintained by the hegemonic structures that work to render signification transparent.

Cinematic Apparatus as a Disciplinary Structure

The cinematic apparatus – when considered in the terms of both its construction and operation – demonstrates all the functional hallmarks of what Louis Althusser labels an Ideological State Apparatus. Indeed, it is this status that is inherent in André Bazin’s recognition that

[t]hrough the contents of the image and the resources of montage, the cinema has at its disposal a whole arsenal of means whereby to impose its interpretation of an event on the spectator. (Bazin, 2005, 24)

However, this apparatus is not nearly as cohesive as its title, and Bazin’s brief note regarding its functioning, might suggest. As has been comprehensively outlined by others,¹ the cinematic apparatus is composed of a variety of functions and sites that combine to present, in direct opposition to their fractured status, a coherent spectatorial experience. In this fashion, the term apparatus is taken to mean

the totality of independent operations that make up the cinema viewing situation, including (1) the technical base (specific effects produced by the various components of the film equipment, including camera, lights, film and projector); (2...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Chapter 1:  The Filmmaker as Heretic
• Chapter 2:  The Body Explodes
• Chapter 3:  The Mind Erupts
• Chapter 4:  Functions of Failure
• Chapter 5:  The Subject Under Examination
• Chapter 6:  ‘All Agents Defect …’
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright