The Cronenberg Series Part 6: Love Comes in at the Eye

In 1982, the Canadian tax shelter producer-types with whom David Cronenberg then worked told him that, since the money was there, and since Scanners had been successful, they wanted him to get started on his next film, and so Cronenberg got to work. It seems strange that such a business-like pragmatism should have led to Videodrome, but here we are, and anyway this is how professional filmmaking works, more or less. But as the filmmaker says in both David Cronenberg: Interviews with Serge Grunberg and Chris Rodley's Cronenberg on Cronenberg, when he sat down to write the script he only had a general sense of what it would become, with various topics of interest, having to do with media and violence and video and so forth, colliding unexpectedly to shape one of the strangest, darkest, and wildest films of his career. Videodrome is often cited as Cronenberg's masterpiece, a stance I take issue with only on the grounds that by my count he's made more than one of those, and some of those I prefer to this, but nevertheless it must count as his boldest signature. It would also be, and I don't know if this means anything or not, the last purely original script he would write until eXistenZ, seventeen years later. In any case, he dumped a great deal of his imagination into this 88-minute film.

Which is maybe as good a place to start as any, and if not, too bad, because Videodrome is a tough one to get rolling on. But it's lean, is my point. Cronenberg has yet to make a film that anyone could reasonable argue was bloated, but dense and complex as Videodrome, only his first professional feature, Shivers, is shorter, and that only by a minute. Cronenberg talks often about how ruthless he is in the editing room, to the point that the version of Videodrome that was shown at its one and only, and nearly catastrophic, test screening was only 73 or 75 minutes long (accounts vary) -- in order for the picture to make any sense at all he had to puff it up to 88, which you kind of get the sense was as long as he could stomach. This is interesting for a couple of reasons I've already touched on, more than once each probably, such as Cronenberg proving yet again not only how much content, incident, and imagination you can pack into a relatively brief running time, and how even here, with his first film since Stereo that could be slotted into the "art film" category should one be so inclined to do so, though one wouldn't necessarily be so inclined, his early genre and exploitation...not roots, because those aren't Cronenberg's roots, but his only somewhat ironic inclinations bust through. I say "ironic" because Cronenberg's aesthetic education and interests didn't really build out that world -- in the Grunberg book, he talks about leaving science fiction behind in his childhood, as so many do, and only partly returned to it as an adult due to a new interest in writers like Philip K. Dick. But I say "somewhat" because in his horror and science fiction films, you never catch him winking or implying that we all know how ridiculous this stuff is. The closest he's ever come to that is when Shivers was originally called Orgy of the Blood Parasites, a title he bagged precisely because he realized that title turned his whole movie into a joke. During the years when he was making the horror and SF films that have defined him, despite the fact that these account for only about half of his career, Cronenberg made genre films in much the same way that novelist Richard Price has quietly been writing the best modern crime novels, certainly in the US, and quite possibly in the world, which is to say both men understand that these genres can be used -- and Price has said this -- to do pretty much any goddamn thing you feel like doing. So Videodrome is only 88 minutes long, is what I'm getting at.

And once again, like Scanners, Videodrome has a classic genre plot structure. Max Renn (James Woods) runs a small Canadian cable TV station that specializes in soft-core pornography and violence. He's opportunistic, smart, fast-talking, glib, all the kinds of things you might associate with a character played by James Woods, but also possibly more ambivalent about his job than he lets on, to others and to himself. He successfully tamps down on this ambivalence most times, and seems intent on obliterating it when one night he's checking in with Harlan (Peter Dvorsky), the cable airwaves pirate who works for him, and Harlan shows him footage from a mysterious signal he picked up. The footage consists of a nude woman chained to a wall in a large red room, being savagely whipped by a man in a mask. Harlan tells Max that that's all this programming is -- a series of people being stripped and tortured. There's no plot or anything. The show, or the programming, is called Videodrome. Believing, or convincing himself that this stuff is fake, Max also thinks it's thoroughly compelling and the next big step in sleaze. So he goes about trying to track the signal to its source -- Harlan says it's somewhere in Pittsburgh. And in its barest terms, that's Videodrome, another in a long line of stories, typically horror stories, that feature a character stumbling on some kind of art object -- and it can be anything, a film, a painting, a photograph, a book -- that is mysterious and dark, unpleasant and genuinely dangerous, yet so hypnotic in its queasy way that the hero must trace its origin. Usually by finding the artist, which isn't really the case here, since Renn isn't interested in art, and never thinks of Videodrome that way, but regardless Videodrome the film uses a classic plot, one which, I might as well tell you, is absolute catnip to me. Nothing even vaguely interesting will come from that revelation, by the way, I just thought I'd tell you that I like this kind of thing a whole lot.

Before any of the detective work gets going, Renn appears as a guest on a talk show to defend his broadcasting philosophy against claims that his brand of sex and violence can have an adverse effect on viewers. Set up as a counterpoint to Renn is Nicki Brand (Deborah Harry), the host of a radio show on which she helps her listeners through troubled times and whatnot. Very quickly, Renn and Brand become an item, and it's soon revealed that her taste for extreme violence and transgressive sex, which she doesn't exactly hide, so outpaces Renn's own that you have to wonder how her anti-Max Renn stance could have played out, had things gone that way. We don't even know enough about her to think of her as a hypocrite. But things don't go that way, and Renn shows Brand tapes of Videodrome, and tells her that the signal comes from Pittsburgh. She decides she was made for that show, and promptly skips off to Pennsylvania to see if she can get in. Meanwhile, Renn is beginning to hallucinate -- during sex with Brand, his apartment transforms into the Videodrome's torture room, a videotape seems to bulge and breathe in his hands, and he thinks he's beating his secretary when in fact he's doing no such thing.

Good gravy, is this thing hard to summarize. I haven't even gotten to the meat of it, though by way of doing that perhaps I'll note that in his interview about Videodrome with Cronenberg, Serge Grunberg asks this question:

Wouldn't it be your desire to, say, open a third dimension in cinema? I'm thinking of the hand penetrating the stomach of James Woods in Videodrome. I know image is not the ultimate thing for you, but this...

Whoa, whoa, hold it right there. Cronenberg immediately says that image is very important to him, but I hardly think he needed to bother. What do we remember most about Cronenberg's films if not the imagery? I could begin listing examples, but where would it end? Cronenberg's bizarre imagery, at least in the first half of his career, is how he illustrates pretty much every idea or emotion he's trying to get out there. If it's the ideas we take away from Cronenberg, they're inseperable from the imagery. Even if Grunberg is talking about composition -- and he doesn't seem to be -- "Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out," as Scorsese said, and so good film or bad film, what the viewer sees is always composition, so from that angle it's 95% of what a director actually does. In any case, in the Rodley book, Cronenberg ties Nicki Brand and that imagery and the film's very plot and counterintuitive philosophy together when he says:

If you're going to do art, you have to explore certain aspects of your life without regard to a political position or stance. With Videodrome I wanted to posit the possibility that a man exposed to violent imagery would begin to hallucinate. I wanted to see what it would be like, in fact, if what the censors were saying would happen, did happen. What would it feel like? What would it lead to?

That's only part of what Cronenberg, an artist who is fiercely anti-censorship, is doing here, as the unfolding plot lets us know, but it's still a very serious element. Eventually, the plot of Videodrome will include characters like Brian O'Blivion (Jeck Creley), a quasi stand-in for Marshall McLuhan, a prophet both for and against what would then have been new media, who helped develop Videodrome and acquired a tumor for his efforts, and Barry Convex (a terrific Les Carlson), an eyeglass manufacturer (no points for subtlety there) and developer of weapons for NATO. Of which Videodrome is one. This twist would seem to remove Videodrome from the curious situation it seems to hold as a graphically violent and sexual pro-censorship nightmare, but the fact remains that however deliberate the effects of Videodrome on its viewers, as plotted out by Convex, the gist is still that watching this shit will fuck up your head. The only difference is that Convex and his people know that already, and are just using it. I've spoiled a bit of the film already, so I might as well spoil more. Look what becomes of Renn once Videodrome really takes hold of his mind: he becomes, possibly, a sex killer (that one may not have happened, but the uncertainty of it doesn't weaken the point), a man who walks into his office and opens fire on his coworkers, and a political assassin. All of these monstrous acts, when they occur in real life, have been attributed at one time or another to extreme violence and sexuality in TV and movies. Renn is quite literally driven by voices in his head and images from television to carry out these horrors. It's quite possible to be anti-censorship and wonder where it will all end.

Then again, if O'Blivion resembles McLuhan in some ways, and if O'Blivion is Videodrome's mad, diseased, dead voice of, not reason, but anyway philosophical urgency, then what's happening on screen is less important than the screen itself. Or the video. Barry Convex doesn’t shove a violent movie into the gaping slit that has opened up in Renn’s stomach (a hallucination, one among many, that becomes real); he shoves in a videotape. Of course, Renn has already stuck a gun in there, so there’s a good mix of everything, I suppose. It’s quite possibly a fool’s errand to try to make sense of everything, every bit of grotesque insanity on display in Videodrome, or indeed in any of Cronenberg’s films, but while my knowledge of McLuhan is scant, to say the least, my understanding is that the very shallowest baseline point of the work that made him so famous in the 1960s and 70s, is that the danger of new media is less the thing itself than it is the way people roll along with it and offer up barely a single question. So that in Videodrome you have the slit in Renn’s stomach, which comes from Videodrome, the broadcast. And you have the gun, which Renn already owned for protection and in a fleeting bit of physical comedy shows us he’s not very adept with. And so you have the gun, and Renn sees the slit open up, and without even a though he sticks the gun in the slit. There’s no question in his mind that this is what is to be done.

Rick Baker’s special effects, by the way, are outstanding – they’re still outstanding, I mean. It’s not so much that you can’t see the latex seams, as you can see them but you still can’t quite figure out how those seams can lead to a given image, as a whole. And there’s lots of it, from the stomach slits to elastic TV screens to a man’s body completely ripping open because…why did that happen to that person (and did it happen, though my vote on that one is an enthusiastic and confident “Yes”)? I’d say because, and not to sound glib, his body was full of tiny little videodromes who no longer needed their host body. So it’s Cronenberg and parasites again, except this time the parasites are malignant tumors. Potato, potato. Carcinogen, instead of infection (or invasion, maybe). The point is, it will ruin you, and part of that ruination will involve you doing terrible things.

On the level of the medium itself – which is the message, I’m told – you have the freedom of video, or the “freedom of the image,” as Cronenberg puts it. He supports this, and the context of that phrase comes from a section in Rodley’s book where Cronenberg is talking about how censors, with the advent of video technology, had begun entering people’s homes. But it’s a videotape that Convex crams into Renn’s belly. Like Shivers, the beliefs and philosophies that Cronenberg holds as a human being appear to be at odds with what is actually on screen, though unlike with Shivers he has allowed for this, claiming it as a necessity when creating art. It takes some digging, but this could be the source of Videodrome’s fascination, and its reputation as the best of Cronenberg’s career. And it is a pretty terrific movie. The film had studio backing, and as such functions pretty much as an American film, which, Cronenberg notes, opened up the pool of actors available to him (the Canadian film industry has certain requirements that limit those options), and the presence of James Woods blows open the potential of Cronenberg’s career. While Deborah Harry is, you know, a singer, she’s not really in it much, and so Woods is free to take the considerable weight of Videodrome upon himself. There’s a certain kind of actor that is full of a restless energy that often, eventually, as they get older, transforms for whatever reason into flamboyance, but when they’re younger is invigorating and compelling. James Woods is this kind of actor, and Videodrome is pre-flamboyance. At this point, he could appear just as easily as a leading man as he could someone who was sleazy, dangerous, and possibly psychotic. Which is good, because he has to do all of that in Videodrome. Though Cronenberg had worked with many good, even great, actors before this – John Saxon, Oliver Reed, Samantha Eggert, Barbara Steele, Patrick MacGoohan, plus I’ll stand up for Art Hindle’s lead performance in The Brood, something I might have considered doing when I wrote about that film – with James Woods, he finally had the lead actor he deserved.

All of which, I’d say, helps Videodrome not just in the obvious ways, but also to transcend a vague feeling I have that buried in its heart, the one formed by McLuhan and man’s relationship with technology, the film contains at least a little bit of nonsense. It would be a bad idea to now attempt to argue against McLuhan, and Cronenberg’s take on him, so soon after I’ve accurately pointed out that I know very little about the man, but from what I’ve picked up over the years, McLuhan strikes me as having an academic’s view of the world, which is the kind of thing that tends to melt once the rain hits it. There’s some of that in Videodrome, too. But even so, a couple months back I remember seeing an internet headline, this for one of the internet’s inexhaustible supply of nothing stories, about a guy at a baseball game who had been caught on camera, from a distance, being mean, or something, to his girlfriend (or something?). On the scale of these sorts of things that we have nowadays, this story is absolutely not even a drop in the bucket, and, probably because I’m such a good person, I never clicked on the story, so I don’t know what he supposedly did, or if the footage came from a network camera or the phone of a regular joe, but I do remember thinking that this guy may have had a bad day, or done a stupid thing that was otherwise out of character, but whatever the case now it was on video, and now we can do whatever we want with him. Now, you may ask me in what sense does this directly apply to Cronenberg’s film, and it’s possible that you just may have me there. But all I can think about is something Brian O’Blivion says about the strange disease infecting him, and that might soon infect us all, which is that when they removed his tumor, it was called Videodrome.

Screech!

Boy things sure have grinded? ground? grinded? to a halt around here at the ol' blog lately, haven't they?  Well, I apologize.  I recently moved, and, by the way, have you guys ever moved?  Oh brother, am I right?  So there's that, and on top of that is the related fact that I don't know which box my David Cronenberg books are, those books being rather important to me lately.  I was hoping to write up Videodrome this weekend, but, well, see the previous sentence.

In the not too distant future, it is my hope to rev things back up.  One post in three weeks is not a rate that sits well with me, but these things happen during what I think might be called by some asshole or another Major Life Events.  So I apologize again, and beg your understanding.  In the meantime, hey, remember this movie?

Ha ha ha.  Nice try, bozos!

The Goblin Cat

It's a phenomenon that I suspect is more common among great films than those on any other level of the scale, but often when watching a movie I consider great I will notice a brief moment, maybe just a second long, that locks into place why the whole is so successful, or best illustrates the film's tone, or something else along those lines. If I may pull from the group of films I have watched or re-watched within the last couple of days, there's a bit in Hal Ashby's The Last Detail where Jack Nicholson's Buddusky is playing darts, and gambling with the per diem money provided by the US Navy for the five days it will, or should at most, take him and Otis Young's Mulhall to transport Randy Quaid's Meadows from the Naval base in Norfolk, VA to a military prison in Portsmouth, MA. Mulhall voices to Buddusky his concern that perhaps the man with whom Buddusky is playing darts for money might be hustling him, and Nicholson's expression, while difficult to describe, conveys amusement, arrogance, offense that Mulhall should so underestimage him, and a weariness that he should even have to field such concerns. If this hilarious moment doesn't sum up The Last Detail, it certainly sums up Buddusky, who, anyway, is key to the whole thing, after all.

A silent reaction to words spoken, not to her but about her, flits across the face of Oharu, played by Kinuyo Tanaka, late in Kenji Mizoguchi's The Life of Oharu, which Criterion is releasing on DVD and Blu-ray tomorrow. I keep wanting to call this film The Fall of Oharu, probably because of Mizoguchi's series of "fallen women" pictures, and also because Oharu's life is the story of her fall. At the point in the film when the moment I'm revving up to describe occurs, Oharu has gone from a young upper-class woman whose love affair with a young man (Toshiru Mifune) who is beneath her standing, to a middle-aged prostitute, carried along the sluice of late 17th century Japanese propriety, the jaw-dropping penalties when that propriety is breached, and, occasionally, old fashioned bad luck and tragedy. But mostly it's just being a woman in Japan at that time which does her in, and Mizoguchi is elegantly ruthless about it all. Oharu can do nothing to extract herself. She fell in love outside of her class, so she and her family are banished. Her family's good name is ruined, so to earn money she must become a prostitute. She must become a rich man's concubine when his wife becomes barren, which might save her family, but her past ruins even that, at least somewhat remunerative, indignity. And so on, without ease.

Eventually, without options and into her middle years, Oharu falls back into prostitution. One night she is taken by a man she assumes is to be her client for the evening into building, perhaps his home, where they talk for a bit, before it's revealed that the room she finds herself in is full of men, and the man is not a client, but a Buddhist pilgrim who has chosen Oharu to display to his fellow pilgrims as an incentive to not stray from their vows of purity. Telling the other men to look at Oharu, the man asks them if they still want to sleep with women. Mizoguch has placed his camera so that Oharu, embarrassed, is turned away from the men, but to the camera. The men line the wall to our left. Oharu faces the pilgrims only once, when asked to, and after that faces us. The first man goes on speaking about her as though she was deaf, and at one point -- and this is the moment in question -- describes her as a "goblin cat." At these words, Oharu lifts her head up and turns it slightly, and an expression of not just hurt but intense weariness crosses over her face. As if everything else wasn't bad enough, now I have to listen to this? And somehow not react to it? I must stay here, kneeling, and let them talk about me like this? The inhumanity of the moment is enormous, and, strangely, made worse still by the fact that it is entirely without malice. "Cruelty" is not quite the word, as this implies a deliberateness. But the pilgrims are merely upholding propriety. Oharu is merely an object lesson on the pitfalls of doing otherwise. That's all in her face.

Also fascinating about this shot is the distance Mizoguchi's camera is from Kinuyo Tanaka. Now you must forgive me here, and The Life of Oharu is not even my first Mizoguchi film; it's my fourth, if you simply must keep score. To be specific, prior to this I'd seen Ugetsu, Sansho the Bailiff, and, something of a left-field relative obscurity here, his four-hour The 47 Ronin. But that was all some time ago, and it wasn't until I watched The Life of Oharu that I noticed his positive phobia of close-ups. I've since gathered that this is actually part of Mizoguchi's whole deal, or was for a while anyway, but it was gratifying to be struck by it cold. But enough about me. The Life of Oharu is, of course, rife with the absence of close-ups, but it rang a particular tone at the moment when Oharu reacts to be called a "goblin cat," because I can't imagine another director, from the great ones to the shit ones, who wouldn't have either cut to her face, or let his or her camera drift to the right, maybe push in a little, something to highlight her, even if only slightly. Her face, at this moment, is in a sense the entire film in a one-second shadow, however, should we prefer to do so, we could look at the pilgrims instead -- Buddusky in that scene from The Last Detail may not have been in a strict close-up, but his face is pretty much the only thing we have to look at. And it's not as though Mizoguchi frames this shot so that Oharu is the visual equal of the pilgrims, but the viewer does have options. As Mizoguchi films it, there is a world apart from Oharu. There is a world that is, in fact, doing this to her.

I'm tempted, or was tempted at one point while thinking all this over, to regard this aspect of Mizoguchi's style as generous, in that Oharu not only doesn't exist in a cultural vacuum, which is hard to miss, but the people around her have lives, too. After all, not everybody in this film apart from Oharu, is an appalling stooge of this society (although, Jesus, it's close) -- more than a couple of them are rather sweet, if helpless, or just as unlucky. But I don't think "generous" is the correct word. If you'll pardon me for this, I suspect a better word way to describe it is to say that it is simply honest. Why is Oharu in this position? Look around her. Given the placement of Mizoguchi's camera, you're free to. Then again, with that honesty comes a certain unavoidable generosity. Over the course of the film, more than once Oharu will return home in shame to her parents. Oharu's mother Tomo (Tsukie Matsuura) is hopelessly loving, but her father Shinzaemon (Ichiro Sugai) is close to hateful in these moments -- early on in the most extensive of these sequences, he actually shoves Oharu out of childish selfishness and frustration. But if the camera sticks close to anyone in this section, it's Shinzaemon. You may want to throttle the son of a bitch, but you also can't miss that his life has collapsed, too. So the equation regarding close-ups becomes clear: the fewer of them you have, the more of everything else you will see.

And once you've gotten your teeth into the concept that The Life of Oharu completely lacks one of the most basic shots in filmmaking, you can't quite let it go, and everything else in the film must be considered alongside it. Towards the end -- and I'll tread lightly here -- after the "goblin cat" scene, the film's climax occurs within a frankly magnificent tracking shot, during which Oharu's face must tell the story of her life even more starkly than in the shot described above, yet we see her much less clearly. (I would be remiss, by the way, if I didn't mention the score by Ichiro Saito, which is generally wonderful and here achieves an eerie brilliance.) The tracking shot is about ceremony, which the "goblin cat" was not, at least not officially. The tracking shot chronicles something official, though, and a futile attempt to make the ceremony recognize something other than itself. In a general way -- or maybe a very specific way, depends on your definition, I suppose -- Oharu is the victim of ceremony, and by putting her at this particular distance from the camera, it's rather striking how lightly she glances off what is proper in her society.

The Cronenberg Series Part 5: Smooth Sailing

The man, or the character, pictured above is known only as either "ConSec Scanner," or, in an even greater blow to his humanity, "First Scanner." He's played by Louis Del Grande, though not in the still offered here -- Del Grande would not have been needed for that take. To give credit where it's due, which is sort of where I'm going here, and to put a face to a name, here's First Scanner in happier times:

These two versions of First Scanner, and Louis Del Grande, combine to form the central image, not only of Scanners, the film in which they appear, but arguably of David Cronenberg's entire career, and his is a career absolutely stuffed with defining imagery. Scanners, the filmmaker's follow-up to 1979's The Brood, was released in 1981, and was based on a concept, though not quite script, he'd previously called The Sensitives, and which had been floating around in his head for a long time. Scanners would go on to become Cronenberg's first major hit, of which there haven't been a great many, and I think it's reasonable to say that what put asses in seats was that exploding head. There had been exploding heads in films before, and not even long before -- Tom Savini blew up a zombie's head in George Romero's Dawn of the Dead from 1978, and he blew up his own head in 1980's Maniac, directed by William Lustig. The difference, I suppose, apart from distribution issues (which probably has more to do with the impact at the time of the Scanners scene than anything I'm about to say), is the fact that in the Romero and Lustig films, the bursting head arrives either in the midst of other violent mayhem, or follows several such moments, so that you already know what kind of film you're dealing with. The explosion, on the other hand, of First Scanners' head is the point in Scanners where you realize what you're in for.

I'm focusing, for the moment, on this scene, because for one thing in writing about Scanners you can't not, but also because Louis Del Grande gives one of my favorite performances in the film. He's not in it much, he only has the one scene, but in his few minutes he gets across solid, slightly bored, slightly impatient, but not rude, professionalism, as he attempts to conduct a kind of seminar on and demonstration of the telepathic abilities of the titular "scanners," as well as, following his key mistake of selecting as a volunteer a man named Darryl Revok who looks uncomfortably like the intense character actor Michael Ironside (Michael Ironside), confusion that quickly changes to fear that quickly changes to terror that is quickly washed away by a kind of pain and loss of bodily control that we can't even imagine, particularly when we see where it leads. What must it feel like just before that happens? I'm not saying Del Grande's performance makes it possible for us to know, but it does make it possible for us to think about it. It's all brought about by Revok, of course, and forget about his casually half-assed "I didn't do it," a claim whose believability doesn't seem to concern him even as the ConSec agents who swarm around him just seconds after First Scanner is shown across take him into custody. We'll learn soon enough why Darryl Revok doesn't give a shit who does or doesn't believe him.

Some narrative context is probably in order here, but please, not too much: Darryl Revok is a "scanner," a telepath of immense power -- though the level of power is not equal among scanners -- who is tracking down other scanners across Canada in order to recruit them for his underground army. If they say no, we learn, he murders them. Most of this happens off stage, though, as the film focuses on Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack), an apparently homeless man who we first meet stealing food from treys in a mall food court. Vale is also a scanner, but doesn't know or understand any of this -- as far as he knows, he's just crazy, though the negative physical impact his thoughts can have on others must, at a certain point, have gone beyond mere coincidence in his mind, but he couldn't tell you any more than that. That is until he meets Dr. Paul Ruth (Patrick McGoohan), the man who knows more about scanners than anybody else (we will also learn, without shock, that he's the person behind this phenomenon, having developed a drug called Ephemerol, whose use and impact recall the thalidomide tragedy), and whose corporation, ConSec, has designs on scanners, and Vale in particular, that while hardly selfless -- the word "weaponized" makes an early appearance, though less is made of this than you might expect -- is at least gentler and less globally destructive than what Revok has in mind. The gist of the plot, its structure, is that Vale, a scanner whose powers we gather are at least on par with Revok's, at Ruth and ConSec's bidding, goes on a journey to track down Revok and stop him creating a scanner army powerful enough to take the world over from "normals." Us, in other words.

This summary, which gave me no pleasure to write, does nevertheless illustrate what the whole thing is with Scanners, which is that it's practically an action movie. In Cronenberg on Cronenberg, Chris Rodley says it's the closes Cronenberg has ever come to science fiction -- this, if I may say so, is hogwash. Science fiction is a strong element to almost every film Cronenberg made up to M. Butterfly and Crash, which are the last two films covered in Rodley's book. As I've said before, his first two, Stereo and Crimes of the Future, are quite pure examples of a certain type of science fiction, and science fiction is as important to Shivers and Rabid and The Brood as it is to Scanners -- it's just that Scanners has more computers in it. But it's built in a fairly typical way: innocent but unique man is recruited by powerful organization to track down and defeat a renegade version of himself. The formulaic nature of Scanners may or may not contribute to a very curious facet of my relationship with the film, which is that I've now seen it three or four times, yet going into this last viewing I clearly remembered only two things about it -- the exploding head, and the blown out eyes that feature later in the film. Ordinarily when this happens, the actual rewatching of a film that has dropped through a hole in my memory will spark some amount of recollection, as happened when I recently rewatched The Brood. Nothing really came back to me with Scanners, so my third or fourth viewing, which occurred yesterday, might as well have been my first. I remembered nothing about the plot, or the characters, or the relationships between them; I recalled only a couple of the show-stopping effects, and not even many of those (Scanners racks up perhaps the biggest body count of any of Cronenberg's movies). I find this very curious, though you may not find it very interesting, and why should you? But I'm still left wondering why this happens with Scanners.

In any case, it’s a strange thing, as Scanners is both good and memorable, or you’d think it would be, anyway. Yet there’s still something standard-issue about it. Of his state of mind while making the film, Cronenberg tells Rodley:

I’d remarried; I’d had another kid, and was feeling much more optimistic about things in general. I was exploding heads just like any other young, normal North American boy.

So Scanners is the kind of movie you make to celebrate moving past the unpleasant experiences that led to The Brood. Fair enough, I’d say. But there’s a personal, individual aspect that’s missing from Scanners. This isn’t to suggest that an artist needs to be in the throes of misery in order to do great work, because that’s stupid, but I am left grasping for the kind of intangible quality, the mysterious element that is so commonly a part of Cronenberg’s work. As I said in the last installment of this series, The Brood works within a formula as well, but in that case the formula is inextricably bound up with the strangeness and the emotional punch that help make it so interesting, and so great. In Scanners, the formula is not so intimately tied with anything else. In a sense, I suppose The Brood and Scanners are similarly hitched to their formulas, but the difference is that Scanners carries nothing else along with.

All of which sounds very negative, and also puts me in the unusual-for-me position of seeming to rag on the concept of formula. As much as I loathe the phrase, and the thinking that leads to it, writing about Scanners has made it slightly (slightly!) easier to understand how someone can find themselves writing the words “It transcends its genre.” But please note, I haven’t said that, and if I ever do you have my permission to shoot me dead. It’s just that, and I suppose this should be obvious, all things being equal, “formula” is usually not as good as “formula plus something else.” And ultimately, Scanners doesn’t distinguish itself, in terms of concept, from similar films and novels that preceded it, like The Fury or Firestarter.

Still, enough with the negativity. It’s a good film. Cronenberg brought together a mostly fine cast, with Patrick McGoohan and Michael Ironside providing wonderful presence and menace – McGoohan, with whom Cronenberg had a somewhat fraught working relationship, is the kind of actor who only needed to show up to get the job done (Cronenberg is fond of the actor’s beard in this role, and he’s right to be), and Ironside, nice guy though I’m sure he is, was blessed or cursed with the face of a villain. But Ironside-as-villain was not the cliché in 1981 as it would eventually become, and Darryl Revok is not merely the slimy, ruthless, arrogant kind of villain Ironside would eventually play again and again. Revok certainly is ruthless and arrogant, but he also goes into terrifying rages that help bring home the threat at the root of Scanners -- this would be an Apocalypse film, if things worked out somewhat differently.

Which, okay, might as well get into it now, brings up the idea of Scanners being an optimistic film. Cronenberg implies it in the above quote, and Rodley says explicitly that Scanners is more optimistic than one is used to from his films. However, the frankly insane, horribly brutal showdown between Vale and Revok at the end – the Apocalypse in miniature – does not signal any kind of lightness of mood with which the viewer can leave the film. Even when Jennifer O’Neill, as a good-hearted scanner Vale eventually joins up with, stumbles upon the aftermath, and finds that the skin-flaying, fiery, blood-spattering battle turned out slightly better for Vale than we’d believed, and the defeat of Revok was of a rather different nature than we’d assumed, you still have…well, okay, spoilers, what happens is, somehow or another in Vale’s bloody defeat of Revok – and the two, we’ve learned, are brothers – the mind of Vale, or the consciousness, was transplanted, or transported, to the bod of Revok. Neither man’s physical body, you’d think, would have survived the battle in a state conducive to things like “standing up” or “breathing,” but that’s how it worked out – the film takes enough of an awed view of the powers wielded by Vale and Revok that this is easy enough to go along with. But the thing is that the last image we have is of Michael Ironside as Vale/Revok, revealing himself from under a coat, having been in a corner huddled under this, wide-eyed and saying something like “We won” before the screen goes to white. And this is Ironside saying this. There’s more than a tinge of “…Yay?” in one’s, or my, reaction to this. The worst part of Revok may have died, and the best part of Vale may have survived, but the person telling us this looks insane, and his capacity for destruction we know to be enormous.

And of course we know this not only because of that Revok/Vale showdown, during which both men had to pull out every ounce of their power in the face of something at least as strong and dangerous as themselves, but also because, way back near the beginning, First Scanner, a man we can only assume had the ability to look at us funny and thereby cause us to hemorrhage, sat down to do what he believed was a routine task, thinking that later on he’d head on back to ConSec and file a report and maybe get lunch. But instead Darryl Revok sat down next to him, and caused him very brief but unspeakable anguish, before releasing him. If there’s something intriguing and mysterious to Scanners, it can be found in the head of First Scanner. For a few moments, anyhow.

Ashes and Pus

In his essay included in the booklet that accompanies Criterion's release of Frantisek Vlacil's Marketa Lazarova, Tom Gunning says (among many other things, obviously), "I confess it took me four viewings before I figured out the incidents of Marketa Lazarova's plot (I am still not sure I know the names of all the characters or can fully explain their family relations)." Which, boy is that a relief. Marketa Lazarova is not a film that lends itself to easy absorption, but one doesn't like to learn that one is alone on these matters. And it's not as if the film is so utterly bewildering -- my moments of uncertainty while watching it were signaled not by thoughts of "What the hell!?" but rather "Well but wait a second." You can see the distinction, I hope. Films like Marketa Lazarova -- not that there's so very many of those -- challenge the viewer's ability to find a grip on the narrative very insidiously by not seeming to be that challenging in that regard. It's not obviously fragmented like Godard, nor is it such a naked piece of lunacy as, say, Sweet Movie (and thank Christ for that), but the logic it follows is not necessarily your logic, which, given all sorts of things, is fitting.

So the the thing to do here is to let Marketa Lazarova just happen to you, which I was eventually -- some way into it, I'll admit -- able to do. It is perhaps, therefore, not surprising that my favorite chunk of this 165 minute film was roughly the last hour. But I believe I'm getting ahead of myself here. Marketa Lazarova begins with a scene that actually establishes quite a bit of context for what follows. Set in the Czech region during the medieval era, Marketa Lazarova opens with a royal procession riding through the countryside. Two men who are not part of this procession are nearby, one, named Mikolas (Frantisek Velecky), is observing in secrecy from a cluster of tall grass, and another, named Adam (Ivan Paluch) -- a one-armed man who we will learn is Mikolas's brother -- makes some glancing contact with some of the soldiers, who regard him as a helpless peasant. This assumption helps lead to their downfall, as first Adam, then Mikolas, and then others following their lead, attack the procession, killing many, plundering all, and taking one prisoner, a young man named Christian (Vlastimil Harapes). This raiding party is part of one vast family, or at least a village of raiders that is led by one family, and ruled by their patriarch, Kozlik (Josef Kemr). Found scavenging by Mikolas among the wreckage of the decimated procession -- which was in service of the king, remember -- is Lazar (Michal Kozuch), the leader of his own, rather less aggressive clan. As Mikolas threatens Lazar's life, for trying to reap the spoils, or some of them, of his own clan's murderous work, Lazar pleads for mercy on behalf of his daughter Marketa (Magda Vasaryova), who he says would be ruined, and doomed, without him. Mikolas bends, and takes Lazar captive, for a while. More immediately important is the fact that the actions of Mikolas and his men have urged the king -- who we never see -- into retributive action, and he sends out what I guess would be called a military deployment, led by Captain "Beer" (Zdenek Rehor)(and "Beer" is a nickname, by the way), to defeat Kozlik's family. The fact that none of these three groups are notably different in kind from each other is not at all easy to lose sight of. Lazar may be less easily moved to brutality than Beer or Mikolas or Kozlik, but that's only because he's found that a lack of honor provides its own temporary rewards.

You may have noticed how nimbly I glossed over the presence of Marketa, Lazar's daughter, even though she is our titular character. Until the last section, Marketa, who is nevertheless very present, is not the central focus. For a while, she exists as a figure in vague, ethereal flashbacks, sometimes flashfowards, maybe dreams. Her father’s belief that she would be helpless without him is perhaps true – throughout the movie, she is either being made to do something, such as enter a convent, or victimized, as when she is kidnapped by Mikolas. Yet even so, she’s introduced to us with images that include this:

What is this? Does it hint at some hidden level of sinister motivation in Marketa? It would seem to initially, but finally doesn’t. This is the beginning of Marketa Lazarova’s fog of unanswerable mystery, which persists even if, on a narrative level, the film appears to scan. But throughout, Vlacil adds oddities of sound and image that made the whole thing seem distorted and otherworldly: voices echo strangely, some voices come from nowhere -- in one scene of dialogue between two characters, I wasn't sure the actors' lips were moving. Before Marketa steps forward to take part in the "present day" action, can we be sure that her scenes have actually happened? I'm going to go with "yes" on that one, simply because as the film progresses such dreamy, or nightmarish, moments do not belong to her exclusively, and the impact of some of what occurs in those scenes is clear and lasting.

The otherworldly nature of Marketa Lazarova does finally seem logical. Among other things, the film strikes me as one of the most authentic ever set in the medieval era. Authentic to me, anyway, which is no kind of bar for anyone to be proud of clearing, but even so there's an everyday quality to the grime and the brutality here, nothing ostentatiously designed about any of it. If Terry Gilliam was one of the first roughly mainstream directors to put the shit back in the Dark Ages, he still wanted you to know he'd put the shit there. Vlacil just puts the shit there. But Vlacil's great accomplishment in terms of tone and style here is achieved through the photography, on which he worked with cinematographer Bedrich Batka. Marketa Lazarova is a gorgeous film, and the black and white images are the sort that make you think the natural color reality being photographed wasn't all that colorful to begin with. We've landed on black and white from black, white, and brown, so that somehow the stylishness of black and white mixes with a realism that is then juddered off its axis. Water looks like dirty milk, and dead trees make you doubt they were ever leafy, and wolves look and behave like wolves but also call to mind demons or angels of death. There's a major character who is introduced about halfway through the film, a strange monk named Bernard (Vladimir Mensik), who has an unnatural relationship with his sheep. There's a huge number of things that Vlacil does not do with this information, to the degree that this is all close to being merely implied, but anyway at one point the sheep is killed and beheaded, not by Bernard, and its head is hurled into the woods. Vlacil shoots the head flying away from the camera, striking the ground, and bouncing and rolling down a hill. Many things are communicated, but one of the more hidden, yet obvious, is the fact that this is a grotesque, surreal, nightmarish image that did not need to be manipulated in any way to achieve that tone, short of film it in black and white, which, as I've said, is just one level of color less than we would have gotten anyway. More than anything, it reminds me of something that William H. Gass (I believe it was) said, which, to paraphrase, was that in prose a decapitation could be described with as much beauty as a flower.

That's Marketa Lazarova, in the smallest nutshell I could find. It's rich, perplexing, strange, horrifying, and graceful -- graceful in its craft, and achieving grace through the suffering it depicts. Sort of, or almost.

All the Universe

Recently I've been catching up a little bit with the major novels of H. G. Wells. One of those is perhaps his most famous work, The War of the Worlds, from 1898. Late in that novel, after it seems well-established that mankind is doomed to at best, or perhaps at worst, to wind up its time in the universe as ants to the terrifying Martians who have brutally invaded Earth, the unnamed narrator is faced with a terrible moral dilemma as the behavior of the man to whom he has found himself unwillingly hitched, a curate who is also unnamed, becomes increasingly unhinged and threatens to expose them both to the nearby aliens. The steps the narrator takes to save himself help to shape the novel into a somewhat fascinating look at the shifting morals of people in extreme crisis, but it's not what interests me at the moment. What interests me is what the curate says at one point that helps lead the narrator to conclude that the man has gone insane:

"It is just, O God!...It is just. On me and mine be the punishment laid. We have sinned, we have fallen short. There was poverty, sorrow; the poor were trodden in the dust, and I held my peace. I preached acceptable folly - God, what folly! - when I should have stood up, repent!...Oppressors of the poor and needy....The wine press of God!"

Disjointed, I think we can agree, not to mention simplistic in his willingness to throw all of humanity on the trash heap for what he regards as his own failings. I don't believe Wells would disagree with those objections, but it's also pretty clear, even if you know just a little bit about Wells (for the record, I know just a little bit about him), that the general sentiment behind the curate's word is one he would embrace. Social reform, in the form of Socialism, and pacifism, among other perhaps related philosophies, drove much of his writing life, which was far more expansive than most people realize. But what I find somewhat interesting about the curate's rant is that it's meant to be the key to the reader that the character is now beyond saving. This can be taken any number of ways, I suppose, among them that this is simply an example of the stock sandwich board-wearing madman shouting mad prophecies that, we only realize later, contained at least some truth. In any case, it sets up a conflict within The War of the Worlds between how we might wish to be and how catastrophe sometimes forces us to be.

In his excellent commentary track for the upcoming Criterion release of Things to Come, the Alexandra Korda-produced, William Cameron Menzies-directed, but H. G. Wells-dominated 1936 science fiction social and technological "history," David Kalat points out that this sort of conflict, even contradiction, between Wells's early fiction and his politics was not uncommon, and not lost on Wells himself. This understanding helps lock Things to Come, which was based on Wells's 1933 book The Shape of Things to Come, as a kind of deck-clearing, with the space created meant to be filled with this film: This Is What I Believe. And you shouldn't be concerned that those beliefs might be expressed too subtly for you to grasp -- this is the kind of film in which one soldier races to the side of one of his wounded comrades and says "When will we stop murdering each other!?" Things to Come is an intense piece of rhetoric and sermonizing, mixed with equally intense predictions (which obviously go hand in hand with the former), ambition, and cinematic design. As Kalat makes clear in his commentary, the world and ideas and people, such as they are, and intellectual and moral force were all Wells, while the visuals of the film belonged to William Cameron Menzies, the legendary production designer and art director, who also turned his hand to directing his own movies from time to time. As a director, Menzies' most famous film would have to be 1953's visually wonderful Invaders from Mars, but, while the goals are rather different, his work in Things to Come is no less impressive. The model work here, of which there is a great deal, struck me as practically seamless, and the progression through time of the film -- from 1940 to 2036 -- feels both believable and natural.

Things to Come is really the perfect vehicle for Menzies' talents, in that it doesn't require its director to focus on those things that do not capture his interest, which in the case of Menzies, as Kalat points out, included character, performance, or (though Kalat doesn't mention this) story -- the great shame of Invaders from Mars is that it was clearly inspired by, but just as clearly not written by, Ray Bradbury. The disinterest in these elements in Things to Come is in fact part of its ambition (excluding, perhaps, performance, as actors such as Ralph Richardson and Raymond Massey have to struggle to bring anything to the screen, and even if their efforts are lost, they're still appreciated). The film is structured as a series of vignettes that take us through the depths and heights of a Western civilization in flux over the course of a century. It is sort of a dramatization of a history that didn't happen, though we only know that now. At the time, it was a straight prediction (Wells knew there was a big war coming, for instance, though in 1936 I'm not sure how many points he should get for that one). Characters don't mean much, some are only in it for their vignette, which might last only a few minutes. Actors might reappear, generally as the descendants of their earlier characters, but in terms of the performance required, Massey, for example, only needed to remember that he was playing the guy who was right about everything all the time. The positive side of all this is that it makes room for visionary science fiction, real science fiction, real extrapolation and thought and imagination.

As a work of political lecturing, Things to Come is interesting in retrospect, as a piece of history itself, but I have a hard time taking any of it very seriously. This sounds rather dismissive of one of the giants of science fiction, I'll grant you, but I can't, one way or the other, get very worked up about what H. G. Wells, almost eighty years ago, thought was going to happen in about one hundred years. I mean, he was wrong. Now, the accuracy of prediction is not something I require of my science fiction. In fact, the stupidest criticism of 2001: A Space Odyssey ever written was the typically stupid Stephen Hunter's dismissal of Kubrick's film on those very grounds (the piece, which I've been unable to find online, was written, I believe, in 2001, and Hunter might as well have written "A-ha!" and left it at that). But when the predictions are off, the accompanying politics lose out, too. Of course, in a way this approach made it easier for me to enjoy Things to Come because if I did take Wells' philosophy more seriously I might have been outraged by his desire for a tyrannical Utopia. In his commentary track, Kalat points out that the scene in which the wonderful airborne Utopians use chemical weapons to put down their opposition, is rather alarming, yet rarely commented on. I was somewhat stunned to learn that this is rarely commented on. The fact that the chemical weapon in question is, laughably, sleeping gas, is pretty much irrelevant -- more relevant is the fact that the gas has, somehow, killed the one guy the Utopians are really better off being thoroughly rid of. But Wells chatted with Stalin, so you can hardly say the man, good intentions or no, was as clear-eyed about things as he liked to believe he was.

But Things to Come wins out in the end, because Wells had a ferocious imagination (just think about all the science fiction concepts that are as common to that genre as ghosts and vampires are to horror that Wells did first), and here he was joined up with the technical genius of William Cameron Menzies and the outsized ambition of Alexander Korda. And even if Things to Come is wrong about where we've come in the last eighty-some years, it is specific and thoughtful enough about the time in which it was made, that the filmmakers were building from, to achieve its own historical significance, and its own place in the annals of 20th Century imaginative philosophy.

The Cronenberg Series Part 4: We Plant Pumpkin Seeds

In both David Cronenberg: Interviews with Serge Grunberg and Cronenberg on Cronenberg, the filmmaker talks about his life in 1979, and how it led to the film that would follow Fast Company in pretty much the exact same terms. This is perhaps to be expected, but it's the first time while reading these two books that there has been such a heavy overlap in Cronenberg's words. After Fast Company, he was scheduled, through the Canadian tax shelter he was using to finance his movies, to make a film, the germ of which would eventually become Scanners. But at the time, he was going through a divorce with his first wife, and a related and painful custody dispute involving his first child, a daughter. Cronenberg feared for his daughter's safety, because he says his wife was involved in a near-cultish, semi-hippie group of people, and wanted to take their daughter to California. This situation culminated in Cronenberg taking -- "kidnapping" is the word he uses -- his daughter away from her school without permission, which itself led to his ex-wife signing over the parental rights to him. All of which, in turn, got into his head in a way that he was driven to write, and push to film, not the early version of Scanners, but something else far more personal, personal to a degree he says he's never experienced since, the angriest, most bitter, most desperate, and probably the scariest film of his career. The film, which came out in 1979, the same year as Fast Company, is The Brood, his first masterpiece, and a film, he tells Grunberg, that has "a real sense of vengeance in it."

Which comes through pretty clearly. There's a great deal that's very interesting and very disturbing, in, I'd say, the best possible way, about The Brood, and so I'd like to dispense with the dreaded plot synopsis right out of the gate, because one of the interesting things about the film is where the characters are, and where the viewer is, when the film begins. Frank Carveth (Art Hindle) and Nola Carveth (Samantha Eggar) are divorced. Their daughter Candy (Cindy Hinds) lives with Frank, while Nola is secluded at the Somafree Institute, where Dr. Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed) is conducting experiments and performing therapy sessions based on "psychoplasmics," which is intended to purge the patient of the psychological traumas of their pasts by forcing that psychology to manifest themselves as actual physical changes in their bodies. This is not based on nothing, as Cronenberg has pointed out that, for instance, a person under heavy emotional stress can break out into a rash, as a direct result of that stress. In the first scene, we see Raglan in a kind of theater, sitting on the stage with a shirtless man in front of him, one of his patients, going through a kind of role-playing therapy, with the patient playing his childhood self and Raglan playing the parent being addressed. This all seems like the kind of faintly absurd, or clearly absurd, sort of New Age-y psychothreapeutic nonsense many of us enjoy making fun of, until the session ends and the patient collapses into Raglan's arms, and we see sores, or lesions, all over the man's back. In the audience watching this is Frank, who has come to the institute to try and see Nola, but he's informed, as he has been before, that Nola is in no state to be seeing visitors, least of all visitors with whom she has such an emotionally tumultuous relationship. This situation disturbs Frank, but for now there's nothing he can do about it.

So this is the first interesting thing about The Brood, in a formal sense. There are three key figures in this disintegrating marriage: Frank, Nola, and their daughter Candy. In the course of the film, Frank and Nola won't even share a scene together until the end. Nola and Candy never do. What split this marriage apart, we don't know. What brought them together in the first place, we don't know. What kind of relationship Candy used to have with her mom, we don't know. But we sense there are real and specific answers to all of that, that are nevertheless irrelevant at this stage. It's all crashing down now, that's all that matters. And Cronenberg is able to do this, and avoid all of the "Well but why should I care about these people if I don't know how they met?" bullshit that plagues so many other filmmakers, how exactly? It may simply be the genre he was working in, or timing -- audiences and critics were less wound up about backstory back then, and willing to let the filmmaker tell the part of the story it was interesting to them to tell. Whatever the case, the result is that The Brood kicks off on a desperate and harried note, with Frank introduced to us as a man already in it up to his neck. Given the way things will eventually escalate, it's a wonder the man comes through it with his sanity intact. And it all, somehow, matters. I said something like this in my post about Rabid and Shivers but it bears repeating: knowing nothing but the actions on screen does not need to rob the viewer of the ability to empathize. As in Rabid, we meet the characters in The Brood after everything is different for them. What we're never told is, different from what? Yet the emotional impact is there. It speaks well of Cronenberg's grasp of general humanity, as it indicates that he doesn't need to drown you in it.

But we're not even into the meat of this thing. From here, Frank has to go back to his daily life. Candy lives with him, and he needs babysitting help. His mother-in-law (Nuala Fitzgerald) is helping him out, and shares his fear about what is happening to Nola under the care of Raglan. Then, while she's watching Candy, a series of crashes from the kitchen draw her to investigate, and she's viciously attacked and killed by, from what we can tell, a child -- blonde, like Candy -- wearing a snowsuit. This all leads to some pretty crazy shit, all adding up, finally, to the most traditional horror film Cronenberg has ever made. He himself acknowledges this, noting the "it's not over yet" stinger, and the implications of that stinger. I'd throw in that the film is structured almost like a slasher film, even though it is not that at all. But the action rises to a murder, and falls into aftermath, and rise to a murder, and so on. There's also a mystery element to this, a pretty heavy one, of the kind that slasher films originally only pretended to have, and even to the mild degree that they did stick with it, they usually let it fall away. But The Brood is a classic horror film in that the mystery (which he pays off in a hugely powerful way) doesn't have an answer that can be easily guessed, and the not knowing provides a context to shots that, without that context, could read as innocent, but with it they become creepy, eerie, and terrifying. "Scary" is not a word that often applies to Cronenberg's horror film, though "disturbing" often rushes in to take its place. The Brood, though, is scary.

That effect is strengthened by what the terrifying elements leave behind. Few directors are as attuned to the unpleasant realities of the human body, pre- and post-mortem, as Cronenberg, and the way he films the corpses here is as explicitly about them as corpses as anything from any of his later films that are perhaps more directly about violence as violence. Late in the film, Frank is seen holding in place the head of a dead woman as he checks to see if she might still be alive. When he gives up hope and takes his hands away, her head drifts and slumps in a way that is so subtly yet entirely lifeless that it's impossible to not see what Frank has seen -- or rather, not see what he has not seen. It's chilling and horribly universal: our heads will one day slide like that. It put me in mind of the flutter of Brendan Gleeson's eyes as his own lights go out in In Bruges. Both moments are like nothing else I've seen in a film in how they confront the viewer with the immediately visible biological process of death.

And all of this is even thematic, if you care, and why shouldn't you? "What is the theme?" is a question that typically bores me stupid, but not when it comes to Cronenberg (and others, but anyway), and besides that, besides his intelligence and thoughtfulness and seriousness (even through his frequent humor, which, nevertheless, Cronenberg acknowledges The Brood lacks completely) there is the fact that The Brood does something with the same kind of unabashed confidence exhibited by the only other kind of horror films that had the stones to do it. What it is, is putting his thematic concerns so far into the foreground that they not only become obvious; they become plot. The other kind of horror films that really did that, without shyness, were the classic films of the Universal era (though this does not exclude non-Universal horror films of the era). The similarities between The Brood and those films perhaps ends right there, but it's still refreshing, even exciting, to watch The Brood and see the idea that rage can infect a person and literally make you mentally and physically ill turned into the actual story. Almost every time we see Nola, she is taking part in one of Raglan's psychoplasmics therapies (as a result, Samantha Eggar shares the screen almost exclusively with Oliver Reed, and they're marvelous together; while earlier Cronenberg films had good actors and good performances in them, a corner was turned when certain internationally famous, and talented, actors began to work with him, and The Brood was that corner), and we learn, if not why her marriage failed, then we at least learn that the source of the anger that Raglan -- a mad scientist, maybe, but not an evil one -- is trying to purge from her, can be found in parts of her life and past that have nothing to do with her husband. And so when we learn that, the victims that these strange and violent little children have been murdering, begin to make sense. And the existence of the children makes sense. It all, somehow, makes sense.

Even the slide of that dead woman's head makes sense, beyond the physical reality of it, because what is The Brood if not a story about aftermath? This, again, is "theme as plot." Cronenberg's divorce and the ensuing custody battle left him bitter and angry, and, considering certain details related above, rather frightened. All of that is put on screen in a form that is entirely unhidden. Rage is the action, anger -- there's a distinction -- is the aftermath. Anger as the aftermath -- specifically, the aftermath of divorce; the film's not even an allegory! -- feeds off the characters, and makes them sick, and makes those around them sick, or it outright kills them. But it's the aftermath that is incalculable, as the film's ending makes clear. It's not a stinger in the "Oh shit here we go again!" sense that paves the way for The Brood 2; it's a stinger that acknowledges the truth of this very specific situation, in both the fantastic grotesquerie of the film we've just watched, and in its real world counterpart.

The Brood is a hugely exciting film, even now. Rarely are horror films this intelligent, both weird in their economy and economically weird, and emotionally devastating. Along with everything else, Cronenberg brings across the catharsis he felt in making the film by depicting what he dreamed about (all's I'll say is, I'm pretty sure Lars von Trier has seen The Brood) but would never, and should never, do. I'm not putting words in Cronenberg's mouth, either, he says as much in Cronenberg on Cronenberg. But it all steamed up and boiled over and spilled out and became The Brood. Horror films, and horror literature, rarely feel like they exist because their creator needed to release them. The Brood needed to be released, to infect the rest of us.