Monday, June 29, 2009

Tales of Flesh: David Cronenberg's Stereo and Crimes of the Future

by Bob Clark

Prologue: The Old Flesh

Of all the directors to rise through the ranks of sci-fi and horror filmmaking in the 1970’s and 80’s, David Cronenberg is perhaps the hardest one to pin down. Sharing many of the same intellectual and primordial concerns as contemporaries like John Carpenter, George Romero and even George Lucas—whose offer for the director to helm Return of the Jedi is not quite as well known as his invitation to David Lynch—Cronenberg never fit quite as comfortably inside B-movie conventions, even as he created some of the most vivid examples ever put to screen.

While not as universally iconic as Halloween, Night of the Living Dead or Star Wars, each of which captured the cinematic zeitgeist with definitive and highly influential visions of the slasher, zombie and space-opera genres, Cronenberg’s work remains hypnotic, unsettling and powerful. In films like The Brood, Scanners and Videodrome, the director’s brand of viscerally confrontational science-fiction works marvels with its combination of physical deformations, psycho-sexual dementia and corporate paranoia, as provocative in terms of thought as it is in terms of image. But this only marks one period of his career. Following his 1986 smash-hit The Fly—that rare commercial success that provides a perfect synthesis of mainstream appeal and a director’s disturbing idiosyncrasies—Cronenberg made a slow, yet substantial shift to non-genre filmmaking with 1988’s Dead Ringers.

While that film showcased a strong continuation of the director’s usual bodily preoccupations in its tale of demented, dependent twin gynecologists, it pulled him away from his pure genre roots and into the production-highs of prestige projects. Collaborating with actors like Jeremy Irons and paired with consummate behind-the-scenes veterans like cinematographer Peter Suschitzky, Cronenberg’s cinema began to take on the professional polish of Hollywood gems, and while it never quite lost its original spark or existential dread, it’s easy to miss the raw edge and unfiltered purity of films past.

That’s why I was so pleased to see the Blu-Ray release of his 1979 film Fast Company, not so much because I was interested in its drag-racing storyline, but because the release comes with the supplemental additions of his earliest substantial works—1969’s Stereo and 1970’s Crimes of the Future. Both a little over an hour-long, and filmed in the same experimental methods, these films are rare finds today, mostly known out of their reputation in Cronenberg’s oeuvre and for their history of underground screenings in his native Canada.

Usually showcased together as a kind of feature-length double-feature, they represent not only a welcome relic of Cronenberg’s early career, but also show his filmmaking instincts at their most independent. Not yet teamed with dedicated collaborators like early cinematographer Mark Irwin and longtime composer Howard Shore, Cronenberg works alone on these films, shooting and editing himself. Not yet awarded the budgets necessary to visualize his trademark biological brand of horror, he smartly retreats into plots that are more theoretical in their treatises and more minimalist in their execution, betraying heavy influence from Marker’s La Jetee and Godard’s Alphaville.

Those who watch Stereo or Crimes of the Future expecting the usual freakshow phantasmagoria— exploding heads, living television sets or decaying human frames giving way to the horrific results of taking a cosmic dip in the plasma pool—will find themselves sorely disappointed. But for those who enjoy the heady stream of heavy art-house cinema and rock-hard science-fiction, Cronenberg’s turn-of-the-decade couplet is a must-see event, an example of the same kind of filmmaking that drove Lucas’ debut THX 1138 or Tarkovsky’s speculative cinema in Solaris and Stalker. Cunningly written, deftly shot, and not without their share of sucker-punch shock and controversy, these aren’t just films that deserve to be seen—they demand it.

I: The Stringfellow Hypothesis

Filmed and released in 1969 on the Univerity of Toronto campus at Scarborough College, Stereo is a film that is at once entirely at odds with Cronenberg’s widely recognized style while absolutely in synch with it. Detailing work conducted by Dr. Luther Stringfellow on behalf of the Canadian Academy of Erotic Inquiry, the film follows a group of young telepathic volunteers, submitting themselves to experiments designed to help them achieve their psychic potential. Shot in black and white, with a keen eye for angles, compositions and action that take great advantage of John Andrew’s modernist architecture, the picture flies with a sleek, focused and contrast-heavy cinematography that resembles Gianni De Venanzo’s work on 8 ½-- a mix of surrealism and neo-realism that makes the depopulated squares and labyrinthine hallways look like the work of Escher or De Chirico come to life in dazzling monochrome.

That mix of styles—the Fellini-esque combination of dreamy action and documentary-like presentation—turns Stereo into a decidedly abstract, avant-garde affair, far unlike the otherwise traditional blend of body-horror sci-fi that Cronenberg became famous for. The film itself runs silently, with only occasional commentary from unseen scientists from Stringfellow’s institute, who alternately describe the experimental commune and debate the validity of its founder’s methods and hypothesis—that psychics can only develop and hone their extra-sensory perceptions when entering into sexually intimate relationships with fellow psychics of both genders. Positing itself as a rather oblique educational-film, Cronenberg appears to be using the verite-style both as a founding base for the realism of his story, and as a creative springboard for his deconstruction of the 60’s-era pseudo-scientific utopianism Stringfellow’s commune represents.

Part of the reason Stereo works so well is because of how eerily convincing it is—if it weren’t for the director’s name in the credits, you could easily show this to a class of undergrad scientists and fool at least one or two of them into believing it to be more than just a curious hoax. Cronenberg takes a lot of effort to make the science spouted from the mouths of his off-screen talking heads sound accurate and plausible, and works equally hard to make sure that the actions performed by the psychic test-subjects appear at least as natural as ethically-questionable social-experiments can be.

Yet even as Cronenberg strives to give his film a sense of realism, those same efforts work just as hard to undermine it in surprisingly subtle, even subliminal ways. While the off-screen commentary and on-screen activities always sound and appear convincing on their own, put together they create a very tense, unreal juxtaposition. What’s talked about by the commentators rarely corresponds with what’s happening onscreen, producing a decidedly parallel cinematic effect. It’s an editing dialectic that pays off throughout most of the film mostly by virtue of the absurdist behavior the test-subjects perform, and the rather open-ended psychological framework the story provides. Much of what happens in Stereo feels mythic, with characters and their actions corresponding to set archetypes, an effect aided by the narrative of test-subjects studying in the art of ESP. Cronenberg allows these metaphors freely with medievalist dress and iconography amidst the modernist environment, even having a scientist perform a test with one of his subjects using tarot cards, making the master-and-apprentice relationship as explicit as possible.

But Stereo does more than merely use psychic mumbo jumbo and minimalist aesthetic to justify a stale, student-film level allegory. It survives beyond that kind of gimmicky theater-of-the-absurd filmmaking because he makes the science of his fictional world just mundane enough to ground us in reality, and just profound enough to strike us as powerful. Like Lucas’ THX 1138, the film succeeds because it artfully constructs a convincing world on multiple planes of thought with a minimum of real-world areas used to maximum effect. Because Cronenberg pays so much attention to providing an academic rigor to the commentary, he effectively convinces the audience enough of the validity to this pseudo-science to suspend their disbelief enough to buy what’s happening onscreen as related to it. Therein lies the power of the parallel filmmaking he constructs, two-channels of information synching up to create a harmony both through resonance and dissonance—cinema in Stereo.

II: Rouge’s Malady

On the other hand, Cronenberg’s next long-form short, 1970’s Crimes of the Future, stands as a much more mainstream product in terms of coherent storytelling, but no less experimental in terms of method, mindset and all-out shock value. Filmed in color and with an additional soundtrack of ambient, occasionally industrial noise beneath the commentary, Cronenberg keeps much of the abstract filmmaking of his previous film intact while injecting just enough aesthetic and narrative conventions to make the product more palatable to audiences. Ejecting most of the parallel dialectics from Stereo, Cronenberg’s work in Crimes of the Future is far more straightforward and easy to digest, although its subject matter doesn’t make it any more palatable.

Starring Stereo’s head test-subject Ronald Mlodzik, the film follows sole-protagonist Dr. Adrian Tripod who comments on his strange odyssey from one obscure scientific post to another in a vaguely post-apocalyptic world. From dermatological clinic called the House of Skin to increasingly sinister organizations like the Metaphysical Import-Export and the Oceanic Podiatary Group, Tripod lives a picaresque journey in a world where seemingly all girls who reach the age of puberty fall to “Rouge’s Malady”, a disease named after Tripod’s mysterious mentor, Dr. Antoine Rouge. Encountering countless individuals who cope with this plague in a variety of unusual ways—discovering webbed toes, addictions to poisonous bodily fluids and the growths of useless organs labeled “creative cancer”—Tripod finally happens upon an opaque conspiracy of heterosexual pedophiles holding a five-year old girl captive, ostensibly for the scientific purpose of procreation.

Obviously, Crimes of the Future is a far more complicated film than its predecessor, with a premise that remains at once mysterious enough for audiences to miss its substance beneath the idiosyncrasies presented onscreen, yet not enough for it to disguise the plainly offensive implications left open at its conclusion. While never explicitly showing any acts of child abuse on screen, the sight of Mlodzik undressing himself in front of the young girl, and the very inclusion of the child actress in such a production feels wildly unethical, to say the least. It reminded me of scenes from the director’s later film The Brood, where a father photographs his young daughter’s body to document bruises as evidence of her institutionalized mother’s abuse. While Cronenberg’s intentions are very likely to highlight the moral outrage of violent and sexual abuse, one can’t escape feeling that including children too young to understand or even acknowledge the dangerous implications of these scenes constitutes a kind of exploitation that far outweighs any of the deformities or gore showcased in his later films.

It is no exaggeration to say that Crimes of the Future is easily one of the most discomforting films I’ve ever seen, more for what it kept on-set than what it put on-screen. It’s unfortunate, since up until its closing moments, the film carries an obscene power that rivals the minimalist aestheticism of Stereo and dares at least as many impressive and thought-provoking images and scenes as more well-known features like Videodrome. Watching the abstract, Burroughs-esque combination of images and wordplay on display throughout this film, one can’t help but feel that the horror filmmaking the director dedicated himself from Rabid to The Fly stands as a kind of serendipitous compromise. The filmmaking on display here is not the work of a man feverishly adding gore and deformity for the sake of genre-conventions, or one who forsakes such extreme and haunting visions for the sake of low budgets, as he did in Stereo.

The Cronenberg of Crimes of the Future is Cronenberg at his purest, and sometimes his best—pushed just far enough by production limitations to stage and shoot his scenes as creatively as possible, but given just enough allowances to invest in some pulpier additions to his visual palate. The intellectual ambition of his screenwriting here shines in a way that occasionally rears its head in later works, but would only be given a real chance to indulge itself in films like Videodrome and Naked Lunch, works where the demands of coherent drama could blend seamlessly with his own sensibilities. Until you see Crimes of the Future, you’ll never really understand just how avant-garde a filmmaker David Cronenberg truly is, and despite the squeamish and unsettling implications he provokes by mere casting, you very well may wish he still directed movies like this today.

Epilogue: The New Flesh

Which is not to say, however, that the director’s work from Rabid onward has been a complete compromise. Far from it—Cronenberg might be the most successful director aside from David Lynch from adapting his personal style of filmmaking to fit enough of the mainstream to stay in the business without sacrificing so much as to deny his creative potential. Perhaps the most unconventional masters of genre-conventions, he drives both meaning and measure through his grotesque cinema, providing a series of visually and dramatically engaging works that satisfy an audience’s intellectual capacity as much as their capacity for horror. Though always keeping blood, skin and guts in steady supply, Cronenberg never forgets that most important organ of any horror film—the brain.

However, over the year’s it’s been impossible to ignore a steady distance the director has kept between himself and the genres of horror and science-fiction. Since 1986’s The Fly, Cronenberg has directed only one sci-fi effort, 1998’s puzzling eXistenZ, which also marked his last original screenplay. Meanwhile, he’s made a good name for himself adapting literary and theatrical works for the screen, and while sometimes the combination of his own style and obsessions to an author’s has been fruitful—particularly in the case of Burroughs’ Naked Lunch and Ballard’s Crash—it has lately produced works that pale, somewhat, when compared to the Cronenberg of old. While impressive and accessible enough to win accolades from mainstream critics, films like A History of Violence and Eastern Promises feel pedestrian for the director’s hand, no matter how skillfully he stages his violence or drama.

Cronenberg’s next project—an adaptation of the Robert Ludlum thriller The Maratese Circle starring Denzel Washington and Tom Cruise—doesn’t bode much better, even with reports of the director rewriting the initial screenplay. I miss the Cronenberg who was more interested in presenting new patterns of bone, blood and sinew rather than merely providing us the spectacle of tearing them apart. I miss the Cronenberg whose talent with actors lay more in his ability to teach performers how to split their personalities in two rather than making it appear they’ve done so to a stuntman’s arm. I miss the Cronenberg who commanded words just as deftly as he commanded armies of special-effects technicians, rather than accepting scripts for hire or delegating screenwriting duties to lesser hands. Now that I’ve seen the earliest of his films, I can honestly say that I miss the Cronenberg who could do more with a handful of actors, a black-and-white camera and a college campus than the one who needs big-name stars and hefty budgets to get a simple thriller off the ground.

I miss that Cronenberg, because that was the real David Cronenberg. After a while, the one we’ve been stuck with for the better part of a decade seems nothing more than a vile hallucination sprung from one too many exposures to a pirated video signal. And so I say death to Cronenberg; long live the old flesh.