Blogathon Ahoy!

Boy, it's been a while since we've had one of these, isn't it? Feels that way, at least. Maybe it's just that it's been so long since anybody bothered to tell me about one of these. Okay, I see how it is.

But I'll get my revenge later. For now, it's important to focus on the topic at hand, which is a Nicholas Ray blogathon, hosted by the effervescent Tony Dayoub, of the great blog Cinema Viewfinder. Ray, as I'm sure you're all aware, was one of the giants of mid-century Hollywood filmmaking, and he is as worthy a subject for a blogathon as you'd imagine. So why don't you all take part? Head on over to Tony's place and read the details. You should know, though, that I plan on taking part in this one myself, so don't you go picking the movie I'm going to write about, or else I will punch you so hard.

The Collection Project: A Deep Penetrating Dive into the Plasma Pool

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An overview of the career of David Cronenberg would have to mark his 1986 remake of Kurt Neumann's The Fly as something of a watershed. In the view of many people, including myself, Cronenberg's The Fly is easily one of his best films, but it also works as a transitional film, coming after his semi-big Hollywood turn as the director of the Stephen King adaptation The Dead Zone. That film feels particularly un-Cronenbergian, and in this sense the ultra-Cronenbergian The Fly could almost stand as his Blue Velvet, following his own Dune, The Dead Zone. That analogy can only really work if anybody thought The Dead Zone was any kind of disaster, but nobody does, because it's terrific and popular, so the analogy turns out to be a big whiff. In any case, the fact that The Fly is a remake is almost incidental, as the material -- especially the way the science of the story was refigured from the 1958 film, credit for which Cronenberg gives to the writer of the original draft, Charles Edward Pogue -- is so in line with what Cronenberg was all about in the early-to-mid-stages of his career that the whole project, and finished film, seems like an absolute natural for him, in the same way that J. G. Ballard's Crash would a decade later.

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The film is, in short, disgusting, one of the most disgusting films of Cronenberg's very disgusting career. In Neumann's film, a scientist, through a mishap with his newly invented transportation device, is fused at a genetic level with a housefly, which results in his own head, and one hand, being replaced, respectively, with a fly's head and, ah, hand, I guess. Pogue's idea, which Cronenberg ran with, was to have his scientist, Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) suffer a similar mishap, but, instead of an instant and partial transformation, he would transform in stages, and the transformation would present, to borrow medical terminology, as his body gradually disintegrating. That's what happens in Cronenberg's The Fly, and the breakdown -- which starts, cruelly, with Brundle enjoying increased strength and energy -- is by turns sad, grimly funny, and stomach-churning. Of course, this breakdown isn't just a breakdown, because while certain aspects of his new bodily existence, such as copious vomiting, naturally appear to be the symptoms of a man who is desperately ill, they're also part of a new, accidental evolutionary step, from Seth Brundle/housefly to, as Brundle himself terms it, Brundlefly.

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There is much going on in this film. First, there is Cronenberg's major early theme of body-horror, used to describe and depict in grotesque metaphor the way any of our body's might casually betray us with disease at any given moment. At one point, Brundle even says that his transformation is showing up as a sort of cancer. My problem with focusing too narrowly on this idea, in any of Cronenberg's films that employ it, is that it tends to miss the forest for the trees, which is how I feel pretty much any time someone tries to boil down the work of an artist I admire. Cronenberg himself is explicit enough when talking about his work that all that stuff is indeed on his mind (AIDS wasn't, though, when he made The Fly, despite any number of critics trying to cram that particular metaphor in there), but, as I hinted above, there's the strangely hopeless view of evolution running through The Fly, which is underlined with some vigor at the film's climax, when Brundle has been mangled up into some ungodly amalgam of man, insect and machine.

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Beyond all this metaphor, though, The Fly is an intense depiction of a single character, Seth Brundle. The film really only has three characters -- along with Brundle, there is Veronica (Geena Davis), Brundle's girlfriend, and the reporter covering the various stages, first, of his work on the transporter pods which he believes will change the course of history and mankind (an ambition that is itself almost evolutionary in its scope) and later of his disease; and Stathis Borans (John Getz), Veronica's editor and former lover -- but for obvious reasons everything else in the film revolves around Brundle. And the key thing about Cronenberg's The Fly, and about Goldblum's extraordinary performance in it, is that Brundle is not simply the vehicle through which Cronenberg can express his themes and ideas. Brundle is a complete person (hell, even Borans and Veronica aren't simply idea markers here), and his graphic tragedy makes The Fly the most emotionally devestating film of Cronenberg's career.

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There are certain things about The Fly which, watching it again today, struck me as newly interesting, but the emotional power wasn't one of them. I saw this film when I was about eleven, probably ten, and by the end I was a sobbing wreck. Okay, so I was a kid, but I felt almost as helpless and desolate today, as I watched Brundlefly finally give in to his despair and, his body now a complete disaster, lift the barrel of the shotgun that Veronica's holding, up to his forehead. What happens in this film is so terrible, so unfair and cosmically absurd, that you can never view Brundlefly as a monster, even at his most physically monstrous.

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Which is fitting, since The Fly is also a bit of a throwback. There's a great deal of Frankenstein in Cronenberg's film ("Are you a bodybuilder?" a woman asks Brundle after he breaks a man's wrist in an arm wrestling match. "Yes," he says, "I build bodies."), both in the mad science element, and in its mournful atmosphere. But you can throw it even further back than that, because The Fly is at heart a classical tragedy. Brundle's flaws are outsized ambition and impatience (and let's not forget all the tampering in God's domain he does), and he dies for them. And the film gets there with such precision -- Brundle's rise, if only in the eyes of Veronica, and fall are sketched out in just enough detail, as is the intense love affair between himself and Veronica, which, along with the great work done by Goldblum and Davis, carries the film's emotional weight despite the fact that not a hell of a lot of time is given over to it before things go haywire. Even Borans comes through, as an asshole who might only be an asshole out of desperation.

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The Fly is really pretty amazing. It's a metaphorical horror film structured as tragedy that doesn't let its themes overwhelm the people inside it. It's a gory horror film in which only one person dies (though it does make room for one of the most psychotically inventive cripplings of a character I've yet witnessed), a monster film in which the monster's lone rampage in a public area is motivated by the need to talk to his girlfriend in private. It is, in fact, the kind of film I dream about: a horror film about people and emotions, the kind of film that -- and you really must pardon me for what I'm about to do here -- fuses its genre trappings with a classic, character narrative. The maturity that Cronenberg really began to show in Videodrome and The Dead Zone was confirmed here, in spades. There was no looking back.

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This post has been part of the Cronenberg Blogathon, hosted by Tony Dayoub at Cinema Viewfinder. I promise nothing, but I hope this is only my first contribution to this particular blogathon.

The Slump Continues

I humbly apologize for the lack of posting around here lately. My surgery, you'll be thrilled to know, was a success, and even the worst of my recovery period seems to be behind me. But mentally I still haven't adjusted to...something. I don't know if it's the fact that I'm four days into my medical leave, with a whopping fifteen more to come, or if it's just plain mental laziness, or what, but I still haven't been drawn back to this blog for any reason other than guilt. Frankly, I haven't been much drawn to the internet as a whole, but it should be noted that until today, my computer chair was the least comfortable chair for my battered, well, groin, to rest in. The fact that this, too, appears to be a thing of the past hopefully bodes well for the coming week, part of which I do plan to spend writing.

Writing what is a different question altogether. Earlier today, I was browsing a pop-culture website, and saw a post there that used the word "intertextual" in its title, and I felt a deep existential shudder. It made me think of the dangers of forcing yourself to appear academic, or to pretend to be something you're not, which is something I've fought against since I first started this blog. Seriously, go back (or don't) to some of my very early posts here. Horrific! So I have to get my mind right, and find something I really want to write about, as opposed to something I feel like I can bluff my way through.

In the meantime, you can, and should, read the good stuff that the internet has to offer, which, against all logic, is plentiful:

- Glenn Kenny has a terrific piece up about the supposed "death" of the romantic comedy. He argues against the idea with his typical blend of wit, erudition and acidity.

- Over at Arbogast on Film, Arbogast takes an intriguingly even-handed look at the much-looked-at-askance The Descent 2, which is, of course, the sequel to Neil Marshall's almost universally admired The Descent. As usual, Arbo knows not only more than you do, but also more than the filmmakers do, yet his wish is only to use his abilities for good.

- Meanwhile, Dennis Cozzalio has a wonderful, thorough piece up about Gwen Welles, seen through the lens of her work with Henry Jaglom and, as the subject of a documentary, Donna Deitch. Dennis has a Tarantino-like habit of pulling a name from obscurity -- obscure to most of us, anyway -- writing about them, and, by the end of the article, making the reader feel as if their frame of reference and understanding of film history has been instantly expanded. Which is as it should be, but Dennis does this with an open heart, and a warmth, that is the polar opposite of the academia I alluded to above.

- Speaking of Tarantino (sort of), last week Greg Ferrara wrote about Robert Forster's brilliant turn in Tarantino's Jackie Brown. If you haven't already read Greg's article, please do so now, because there are few bloggers who have as deep an understanding of the art of acting, or can express it as well, as Greg can.

- At Ferdy on Films, Rod Heath mounts a very convincing, on the page, defense of John Huston's Moby Dick. I remember, after reading Melville's novel about six years ago, being very excited to check out Huston's film, which I hadn't seen since I was a kid. And I was profoundly disappointed (not that I made it all the way through, because the tape broke, and I didn't bother rent the DVD after having my hopes dashed by the first half hour or so). Rod makes me think that I might have acted like an ass.

- Kevin Olson of Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies has just wrapped up his Summer of Slash, which I myself am in the process of reading my way through. And there's no reason you shouldn't be doing that, too. Kevin knows his horror films, and more and more lately I've found myself willing to embrace slasher films as something other than a despicable plague upon the genre. Kevin's just the kind of guy to make that argument, so I'll be paying attention.

- Recently, Ed Howard of Only the Cinema wrote up one of my very favorite films, Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter. As is often the case with Ed, he refused to simply agree with my every every passing thought and opinion, so his view of Egoyan's film is rather more mixed than my own. But fuck it, he makes some good points, as always. So give the piece a look, and then remind yourself that Bill R. disagrees, which should take the sting out of Ed's words a bit.

- I'm not going to point to a specific post here, but rather to an overall blog, namely Too Much Horror Fiction, hosted by Will Errickson. Will's blog is about exactly what you'd think, with a particular, but not exclusive, focus on the paperback horror fiction from the genre's boom years in the 1970s and 1980s. Will truly knows his stuff, and is a fun and engaging writer. I'm not pointing to a specific post, because you should just read all of it. It's my favorite non-film blog, so dive in.

- And finally, Tony Dayoub of the great blog Cinema Viewfinder, goddamn him, has just announced that he'll be hosting a David Cronenberg blogathon in September. If, for some bizarre reason, I'm still not off my ass, blogging-wise, by then, Tony and David Cronenberg should finally jolt me into action.

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That's it. Just popping in here to let you know I'm not dead. But look for more updates next week!

Decisions, Decisions

So Tony Dayoub over at Cinema Viewfinder has a blog-a-thon up and running today, all about everybody's favorite/least favorite Hitchcock riffer/satirist, Brian De Palma. I fully intend to participate (it runs from today through the 16th, so I have plenty of time), but I'm stuck on which film to write about. While I've seen most of his movies, I'm not versed enough in De Palma to do some umbrella piece on the guy, so I want to stick to a particular film, but nothing's jumping out at me. So here's a list of possibilities, and I want anyone who reads this to help me choose. I want about a thousand comments.

The Untouchables - A big film for me when I was a kid, but one I have since cooled on, at least a little. On the pro side is that I know the movie very well, but on the con side is that David Mamet wrote it, and I talk about him an awful lot already.

Carrie - Pros, it's one of De Palma's better films. Not sure what the cons are yet, other than that between the film and King's novel, there can't be much more left to say.

Dressed to Kill/Blow Out - Probably my favorite De Palma films. Probably. You can only pick one, however!

Mission to Mars - I think this movie deserves some sort of mild defense, so maybe I'm the guy who can do it. Or one of the guys. I bet it's been defended before. But hey, why not me, too?

Man, what a half-assed post. Anyway, remember, one thousand comments.