The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2022: Naked Lunch (1991), directed by David Cronenberg

 

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: 'Heroin' by The Velvet Underground

       As I wrote in the Fear & Loathing review my tastes in literature skewed towards the odd, and one of the oddest in the bunch was William S. Burroughs. While my peers, if they were aware of the Beats at all, were drawn more to Jack Kerouac, I quickly became more interested in William S. Burroughs. Kerouac was the James Dean of the group, the freewheeler who made rebellion look cool and hip, but Burroughs felt like a true break from the miserable conformity that has come to define American culture in 1950s. Graphic depictions of heroin addiction, frank discussions about gay sex, frequent dips into science-fiction all of jumped out out of the page like a shotgun blast to the head. Kerouac and Ginsberg always felt like the writers that were cool to read, but Burroughs is the guy that you shouldn’t be reading, so I chose the latter.

       Released in 1991, Naked Lunch was written and directed by David Cronenberg and produced by Jeremy Thomas and Gabriella Martinelli through the Recorded Picture Company, based on the 1959 novel by William S. Burroughs. Peter Weller plays William Lee, a writer turned bug exterminator who ends up getting addicted to the powder they use to kill roaches through his wife Joan. After getting busted by the cops on a narco rap, a giant bug reveals to Lee that he is actually a secret agent, that his wife is an inhuman agent of the evil organization Interzone Inc., and that he must kill her. Lee balks at this, but after shooting up some black centipede dust, he ends up accidentally killing her anyway. Unsure of what to do next, he meets with an alien creature known as a Mugworm, who gives him his next assignment: infiltrate Interzone, insert himself within their ranks and carry out his missions, making sure to write reports along the way. Which he does, but Interzone is far more dangerous than Lee first realizes. Enemies and intrigue lurk behind every corner, a vast web of conspiracy grows larger by the day, and the centipede dust flows like water. A lesser agent might falter at such a monumental task, but Lee is just the type of guy who can pull it off.

       Yes, that actually happens in the movie.

       There’s obviously some parallels one can draw between Naked Lunch and our previous entry, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Both are infamously bizarre works of literature that deal heavily with substance abuse, and both were made into films by popular genre film directors with a penchant for extreme visuals. Fear and Loathing was an adaptation of the original novel however, while as far as I can tell Naked Lunch…isn’t. Some of the names are the same, terms like Interzone, the conceit of Lee being an ‘agent’, but as far as I can tell it’s not actually an adaptation of the novel so much as it is an amalgamation of parts of the book along with portions of Burroughs’ own life, in particular the murder of his common law wife Joan Vollmer and his time spent in Tangier (which is referred to solely as ‘Interzone’ in the film). While it’s hard to blame Cronenberg for not adapting word-for-word a novel that’s intentionally obtuse, the fact that the biographical moments are also riddled with untruths makes things even more muddled. Joan wasn’t a user of morphine or heroin for example, clearly what the bug powder is meant to symbolize, but amphetamines, and she was killed in Mexico not New York City, in fact the entirety of Burroughs’ time in Mexico and South America is removed entirely. So it’s not really a proper adaptation, and it’s not really a proper biopic, so what is it?

       Weird, as it turns out.

       Yes, up until this point Cronenberg had built his career on pushing the boundaries of horror and science fiction cinema, but that doesn’t mean they were always the most straight-forward movies in the world. Sometimes you got The Fly, and sometimes you got Videodrome. So when Dave got the chance to bring Naked Lunch to the screen, he used it’s lack of coherent structure to write this semi-biographical, pseudo-detective story built around William Lee’s relationship with Joan Lee rather than Burroughs’ relationship with Joan Vollmer. All of which seems like a lot more work than necessary, but hey, I’m not the famous director here.

       I mentioned Gilliam, but after watching a good portion of Cronenberg’s films, especially Crash and eXistenZ, I’d say the director he most wants to emulate in Naked Lunch is David Lynch. The noir influences, the surreal art design, the way the score breaks out into discordant saxophone solos (courtesy of legendary free jazz musician Ornette Coleman), the dazed, almost emotionless way Peter Weller delivers his lines all feel like Cronenberg trying to evoke the dreamlike atmosphere that is irrevocably attached to Lynch. For any of his faults however Lynch crafts worlds with a painter’s brush, time and space and reality and metareality all melding together into one sensory experience. Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch on the other hand is largely linear, going against Burroughs’ own ethos of crafting stories to be read in any order, and the weird turns the story takes has a robotic utilitarianism to it. Weirdness for the sake of weirdness, and compared to what Cronenberg did in Videodrome, and would do later in Crash and eXistenZ it doesn’t feel as weird as it could have been. That being said we do get to see Peter Weller rubbing a bug sphincter with morphine, so it’s not all bad.

       Speaking of bug sphincters, the visuals were always a major part of Cronenberg’s early success as a filmmaker, and that’s the case for Naked Lunch as well. The set design for both 50’s New York and Tangier is excellent, but it is of course the practical effects that are the most striking. The bug typewriter, the Mugworm, birdcage scene, the giant centipedes carved up like steaks, it’s unmistakably Cronenberg. On the other hand you could argue it’s a lot less sexually charged than several of Cronenberg’s other films, and that most of the eroticism we do get is of the heterosexual variety. That Burroughs struggled with his sexual orientation could certainly have been the case, I’m not a scholar on the man, but one of the books he wrote before “Naked Lunch” was literally called “Queer”, so I think he was less confused about his sexuality than this film would imply. A demand from the studio heads, perhaps, whose tolerance for LGBTQ people ebbs and flows with the tides of the stock market, and who were afraid that too much support for ‘the gays’ would drive away moviegoers driven into a paranoid frenzy by the propaganda surrounding the AIDS crisis. Or maybe Cronenberg just can’t write a good gay sex scene, I dunno.

       Regarding the casting, Peter Weller is an interesting choice as he feels both right and wrong for the role. I mean I like Weller, he’s in the A-list of cult movie actors and a prime catch for Cronenberg, but arguably he’s too good. Too suave, too cool. If he were supposed to be Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe it’d be fine, but he’s supposed to be playing a heroin junkie who thinks his typewriter is a bug and dabbles in teenage boys. Even that listless way he delivers his lines can’t distract from the fact looks like a marble statue given life. Judy Davis as Joan Lee is more in line with the tone of the story, a woman who could be called beautiful before drugs robbed her of the vitality that accompanies beauty.

       Naked Lunch gets the recommendation. As an adaptation of an unadaptable novel it has its issues as I mentioned, but for those Cronenberg faithful it delivers those grotesque visions that they knew and loved, and would have to subsist on as the director would take a break from the bizarre for a few years with his adaptation of David Henry Hwang’s Madame Butterfly. If you’re a fan of the dream noir of Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet or the vicious chaos of Catch-22, then Naked Lunch might be up your alley. And do not under any circumstances try to inject bug killer into your body, it will not turn out well for you. You probably shouldn’t proposition North African teenagers for sex either, just to be safe. Unless you yourself are a North African teenager, in which case go nuts.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2021: The Dead Zone (1983), directed by David Cronenberg

 

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune - "The Future Freaks Me Out" by Motion City Soundtrack

       If you’ve ever needed a visual aid to distinguish between strong and weak directors, look no further than Stephen King. Just about everything that man has put down on a page and put on a screen, from good to the coke-fueled, whiskey-soaked worst, and so the real challenge for the filmmaker is in how well he manages to adapt the material. Christine is literally a movie about an evil car, and yet John Carpenter managed to make it into one of the better films of his career and the decade. Stand By Me is about a bunch of weirdo kids who want to look at a corpse, but Rob Reiner managed to make it the coming-of-age movie that all future coming-of-age movies aspire to be. Conversely, Cujo is about a mother and her kid being menaced by a rabid dog, which seems like a good foundation for a thriller, but you never hear anyone speak about it or its director Lewis Teague in the same way they talk about Kubrick and The Shining. You can point to differing levels of budget or studio interference for these films and that is reasonable to an extent, but at the end of the day it comes down to how well you use the tools you have available. 

       Conveniently our unofficial rule of one Stephen King adaptation a year coincides with our annual appearance by Mr. Body Horror himself, David Cronenberg. Over the years I’ve found myself increasingly unable to place Cronenberg on the Bell curve of directors; He’s certainly has a mind for the grotesque and the ability to project that in his films in a way that not many directors are willing to do, and if they are not as successfully at the box office. Despite that, I’ve often found myself mixed on the films as films rather than just special effects showcases. Scanners was cool but the protagonist was a walking plank of wood, Crash was interesting but often like a porno on Ambien, and for a movie that involves performing oral sex with an open wound it felt like eXistenZ was constantly dragging its feet as it shuffled through the plot. I’m conflicted, so I’ve decided to take my own advice and see how one of one of the big names of 80s horror films tackles the material of one of the big names of 80’s horror literature. No, not Clive Barker, even though that seems like the obvious pairing, the other one.

       Released in 1983 (the same year as Videodrome), The Dead Zone was written by Jeffrey Boam, directed by David Cronenberg and produced by Debra Hill through the Dino De Laurentiis Company, based on the novel of the same name by Stephen King. Christopher Walken plays Johnny Smith, a respected English teacher and beloved boyfriend who one night collides into the side of a runaway milk truck. Five years later he awakes to find that the life he once knew is gone. Not only has he lost his teaching position but his girlfriend Sara (Brooke Adams) as well, who is now married to some guy who isn’t Christopher Walken and even has a kid. Coupled with this great loss however Johnny has somehow been granted an interesting gift: he is now psychic, able to see into a person’s past, present, and future with only a touch of their hand. Of course when you just woke up to find your entire life in pieces  the idea of playing Miss Cleo to every Tom, Dick and Harry off the street is the furthest thing, but as Johnny’s powers grow they cry out to be used, and no matter what he seems to do he keeps getting dragged into action. Which is the sort of behaviour that can get you in a lot of hot water, especially when Greg Stillson (Martin Sheen) enters the picture, a man with his eyes on the Senate and more than a few skeletons in his closet.

       As a story, The Dead Zone has a clear through-line of influence that traces back to the speculative fiction of Ray Bradbury, Rod Serling and the like. It presents us with a simple question: if you had the power to effect change, and you were the only one who could do it, would you do it in spite of the consequences? Does great power indeed come with great responsibility? For Stephen King, the answer is yes. After the accident ruins his life Johnny has little incentive to use his powers to help anyone; Indeed, Johnny is outright punished for using his powers throughout the course of the film beyond just being a social pariah, and yet each time he is confronted with the choice he chooses to help because he is fundamentally a good person. King’s choice to name his character ‘John Smith’, one of the most generic names in the book, was no accident; It was him saying that everyone had the potential to do what was right. Not too bad for the guy who wrote a story about an evil car.

       As an adaptation of the story though, I found The Dead Zone to be...simple I guess is close enough. It says what it needs to say to get the point across, sure, although perhaps in the truncated way that some adaptations do where it constantly feels like you’re missing half the book, but that’s where it stops. Were it not for the cast and the run time this feels more like an episode of Ray Bradbury Theater or the 90s Outer Limits than a multi-million dollar film. Spectacle for spectacle’s sake isn’t all that appealing, but we’re talking about David Cronenberg here. This is a filmmaker whose interests lie in the grotesque; Psychological extremes, sexual extremes, visual extremes in the case of his body horror, and yet everything about The Dead Zone feels by-the-books. Even when we get to the part of the film dealing with the Castle Rock Killer, something that sounds right up Cronenberg’s alley, it feels incredibly tame by his standards. Perhaps after the one-two punch of Scanners and Videodrome this was meant to be his big break movie, and he decided or was told to soften his tone to make it more accessible, but if that was the case I don’t think it was as successful as when the push was given to David Lynch or Paul Verhoeven. Or maybe I’ve just seen the big Cronenberg movies and I expect all of them to be weird as shit, who can say?

       I’m also not sure that the choice to cast Christopher Walken in the lead role was the best one. While Walken is a fine actor, even when he is a parody of himself, he lacks that quiet, everyman quality that the role calls for. He’s too intense; Every time he interacts with another human being it feels like he’s three seconds away from caving their skull in with a hammer, and setting him against the beautiful Brooke Adams doesn’t help assuage that feeling. On the other hand Martin Sheen is perfect as the boisterous, egomaniacal Greg Stillson, and the contrast between the apple pie eating, flag-waving patriot and this lumbering vampire is great visual storytelling. 

       While The Dead Zone is definitely not the flashiest movie of Cronenberg’s career (although the acting alone puts this over Scanners), he still put together an enjoyable film, and in terms of King adaptations that actually places it close to the top. The Dead Zone gets the recommendation; Perhaps not your first choice when you’re looking for genre films, but nevertheless a solid. And yes, there was a Dead Zone TV show a while back that made Johnny into a psychic detective playing around with the local cops solving crime, even though that cheapens everything about Johnny’s decision to help catch the Castle Rock Killer and the toll using his powers cost him physically and spiritually. Might as well just watch Psych instead.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2020: eXistenZ (1999), directed by David Cronenberg

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Games Without Frontiers", by Peter Gabriel

      Again we return to the 1990’s, and are again reminded that all things change. Mountains crumble, flowers wither and die, and some popular 80s genre film directors lost their touch. So it was with John Carpenter, who kicked off his 90’s experience with the Chevy Chase flop Memoirs of an Invisible Man, briefly revived with the cult hit In the Mouth of Madness, and quickly went downhill from there. So it was with George A. Romero, who contributed a couple segments to anthology flicks as well as an arguably unnecessary remake of his film Night of Living Dead in 1990, and rounding things off the unregarded Rochard Bachman opus The Dark Half in ‘93. So it might have seemed for the film industry’s kookiest Canadian, David Cronenberg, and yet he never suffered the precipitous fall that Carpenter or Romero or Verhoeven did in that decade. His first film of that period was 1991’s Naked Lunch after all, which ended up becoming one of his most famous films, so he was starting off hot. 1993 saw the release of romantic drama M. Butterfly, which despite it being a commercial and critical flop heralded Cronenberg’s willingness to break with the popular perception of him as a filmmaker, which ended up leading towards his career resurgence in the 00’s. Crash was next in 1996, the only film of his career thus far to win at Cannes (the Jury Prize rather than the Palme d’Or but still), as well as a couple of Canadian Cinema Awards. Not that bad of a run for a director, but before the decade was out and we all died from Y2K ol’ Croney figured he’d throw out one more for the road. A film that brought him back to what made him so famous in the first place, while also serving as a capstone for that : The horror and science-fiction genres.

      Released in 1999 by Miramax, Existenz (or eXistenZ if you’re naughty) was written and directed by David Cronenberg, the last film to be credited as such until 2012’s Cosmopolis. The year is unspecified future, and world famous game designer Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is leading a product testing seminar of her latest game eXistenZ, a landmark new title for the game pod, which is basically a bag of flesh that you jack yourself into through a hole in your spine. Everything is going well until a lone gunman arrives and starts shooting up the joint with a gun that shoots teeth. Allegra is rushed to the safety of the countryside by marketing trainee Ted Pikul (Jude Law), but she’s less interested in her own safety than she is in the health of her game pod, which was damaged during the shootout while downloading the game. She wants to get in there and see if things are alright and she needs Ted’s help to do it, only Ted doesn’t have the spine hole he needs to do the jacking. So they head off to a back alley hole dealer, only to learn the truth of the matter: There’s been a hit put out on Allegra, 5 million dollars for her death. Scary stuff, but they still need to get in that lumpy sack and poke around, and so Ted gets his cherry popped and they get all up in there. Which only raises even more questions, some more eXistenZial than others, but I think I’m running out of lewd wordplay so we’ll stop there.

      1999 was not only the end of Cronenberg’s dabbling in the science-fiction and horror genres, but of course it also was the Golden Year for the concept of virtual reality. The 90s had been littered with such films of course, Total Recall, The Lawnmower Man, etc., but of course ‘99 was the year of The Matrix. Even though cyberpunk had existed years before, The Matrix’s explosive popularity was such that it became the defining example of those concepts. It’s as if no one had questioned the nature of reality before the Matrix, and then suddenly you couldn’t go anywhere without people saying it’s all a simulation man, although I’m not sure how much would really in the world besides basically recreating religion but for nerds. That all died down somewhat by the time the Matrix sequels and subsequently underperformed, but with the success of films like Inception it seems that the idea that the reality that we live in may not be what it appears to be is still going strong. Probably because it allows people to disconnect themselves from the problems of the world rather than trying to solve said problems or something like that.

      So it is with our film here: Multiple layers of reality, surrealist imagery, characters who aren’t what they seem, hell there’s even a terrorist group here that’s dedicated to killing those who have committed ‘crimes against reality’. Where eXistenz changes things up, however, is that it approaches these things through the lens of game design. Again, a topic that had been tackled in cyberpunk literature, see Snow Crash, but I don’t know how many movies at the time were tackling aspects of game design like NPC and railroading the player. Not that deeply, it’s not like anyone is bustin out cheat codes or exploiting mechanics or what have you, but keep in mind that this is 1999; While video games were certainly on a hot streak at the time, with the release of the Dreamcast in North America and the Playstation 2 a year away, the rest of pop culture was largely stuck in the arcade days. They certainly weren’t art, so the story goes, merely mindless trifles meant for children and teenage boys that can’t get laid. So even if this film could be taken as an anti-video game film if nothing else it’s kind of cool that Cronenberg, whose film career began in 1969, wasn’t so immersed in the mystique of film that he couldn’t even fathom video games as a medium..

      Of course we all know what to expect when we go into a Cronenberg movie, and eXistenZ is no exception. Everything about the game pods have been tailor made to be as gross and as off-putting as possible; From their lumpy misshapen forms containing their horrific insides, to the way they squirm and wriggle around, to the absolute hell that is their creation, the absolute last thing you’d ever want connected to your spinal column. On the other side you’ve got the skeleton gun that shoots teeth, pretty badass, which was featured far more prominently on the posters than it ever is in the film. Not a lot of people-centric body horror this time around, but you do get a bit of the ol’ ultraviolence, so if you’re worried about your movies being bloody enough then Dave has got you covered.

      What is body-centric in this movie though is the eroticism. All that innuendo I was using in the synopsis is not hyperbole, this film is blatantly, openly horny. That’s not too much of a surprise, as Videodrome and Crash were both very sexual films, but Cronenberg isn’t even trying to be subtle in this one. One of the leads is a woman who spent her life creating this thing which resides in this unformed lump of flesh that is connected to one’s body through a fleshy cord, while the other is a young man who’s afraid of penetration and catching a disease who is introduced to this pleasurable thing by an experienced older woman, not to mention they way they treat those bio-ports looks like it was lifted from pornhub. It’s such an obvious Intro to Film Theory style symbolism that you can’t help but think it was intentional on the part of Cronenberg, which makes sense with regards to revelations in the final act, but up until that point you’ve gotta wonder just what Dave was getting into in that writer’s room.

      As for the cast, I think Jude Law plays a pretty good virgin and Jennifer Jason Leigh plays a good junkie. Then you’ve got Willem Dafoe as Gas the gas station attendant, who is always a good pull when you’re trying to make a creepy movie. The biggest surprise for me though was that Christopher Eccleston was in here, better known as the ninth iteration of The Doctor from the British sci-fi series Doctor Who. He doesn’t have a big role or anything but I believe this is the first movie I’ve ever reviewed that featured someone who played The Doctor. Besides the Doctor Who movie of course, and no Peter Cushing doesn’t count.

      It’s always a bit frustrating when you try to critique these movies though, because your problems with the story can be countered by the nature of the premise. Why are they using mutated frogs you plug into your spine to play video games? How exactly do you make games on a mutated frog? How did Allegra make the game eXistenZ but is oblivious as to what’s in it, and if she seems to have no control over what’s in the game how would she know what was wrong with it?  How is a game that’s so complex that it plugs into your central nervous system to function still dealing with the equivalent of adventure game text parsers? Well that’s because it’s a simulation, it’s all fake, so it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t make sense because that mystery tho. Which is fine, I enjoy a good mystery, but there’s a narrowness to this film that prevents me from digging too deep into. Like why is this what games are? Why is there a group dedicated to murdering game designers? Has the world fallen into some sort of dystopia where they’re addicted to virtual reality and they’re trying to liberate mankind, or are they just dicks? Who knows, because the entirety of the movie seems to take place in one 20-mile stretch of land in the Pacific Northwest, and we know nothing about how this world works. Who cares, because it’s all a simulation, it’s all fake, and none of it matters.So yeah, it’s a tad frustrating.

      What is the crux of Cronenberg’s focus as a filmmaker? I dunno, as I haven’t dipped into his entire filmography, but if I pretend to be one of those big shot paid movie critics I’d say that he’s a people person. Humanity, violent and sexual animals that we are, how those urges are expressed as the species grows ever more advanced. Secret government experiments change infants into psychic killers in Scanners. James Woods transforms into a super-powered monster through the power of video porn in Videodrome. Crash has man using the tools of man (automobiles) to violently inflict change upon itself, to the point where horrific scars and mutilations, which would be considered antithetical to the ideal life otherwise are considered signs of passion and lust. Existenz is the logical conclusion of that idea; Mankind has pushed itself to the point where reality itself has become an inconvenience that one can slough off for something better at the earliest opportunity. Why be just a person when you can be a god of your own private universe? Indeed, when reality is a game what does it even mean to be a human? What does it mean to exist?

      Heady stuff, but honestly as a film I found eXistenZ to be a rather sedate experience. Rather ironic for a movie centered around video games to contain such little action (unless that game was Myst I guess). Criticize the Wachowskis if you want, but as goofy as The Matrix is story-wise the reason it was as successful as it was because of that story was bolstered by kung-fu fights and slow motion bullet dodging. It was a movie that both the nerds and the jocks could enjoy. That being said, The Matrix never had Neo try to tongue-fuck an open wound on Morpheus’ back, so I think I’ll give eXistenZ a mild recommendation. I’ve referenced them about 30 times so far, but if you liked Cronenberg’s previous films like Videodrome and Crash, then you’re probably going to like this one as well. Make sure you’re wearing your Oculus Rift while watching though, so you can get the full experience.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2014: Videodrome (1983), directed by David Cronenberg

    The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Static", by Beck 

     We’ve covered Terry Gilliam, and we’ve done David Lynch, so now it’s time to give a little love for one of the weirdest directors to ever have a lasting career in Hollywood: David Cronenberg. Cronenberg is of course most famous for popularizing the concept of body horror (a subgenre that involves disturbingly graphic mutations of the human body) as a film genre, in films such as his remake of 50’s cult ‘classic’ The Fly and his adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ classic novel Naked Lunch. In more modern times ol’ Dave has stepped away from the body-bending that made him famous to tackle more serious drama, A History of Violence, etc. While I’m sure those films are quite interesting (I’ve heard good things about Cosmopolis), I have to wonder whether he would ever consider dipping into the well of insanity to pull out another legit horror movie. A movie like Videodrome.

      In a world not entirely unlike our own, television is taken super serial. Max Renn (James Woods) is the owner of Channel 83 or Civic TV, a cable network that has become infamous for its risque programming, heavy emphasis on softcore porn and extreme violence. One day Max’s tv pirates intercept a strange program that features incredibly realistic scenes of torture, which goes by the name of Videodrome. Max is sure that Videodrome is going to be the next big hit for his controversial Channel 83, all he needs is to do is buy the broadcast rights from whomever owns it. The deeper down the rabbit hole Max goes, however, the more mysteries that pop up. Is Videodrome just torture porn for people like Max and his girlfriend Nicki Brand (Blondie’s Debbie Harry) to get off to, or does it carry a more sinister purpose? Who are its owners, and what is their ultimate goal? And what is the deal with the hallucinations and crazy TV cults? All this and more when you decide to watch David Cronenberg’s Videodrome. Just don’t stand so close to the screen, okay? 

      In this brave new world of the 21st century, where endless violence and sex is a google search away, Videodrome might not as relatable to movie audiences as it was in the early 80s. Still, it has all the ultraviolence, deviant sexuality and disgusting mutations  that I’ve come to expect from Cronenberg’s body horror films, and seeing all the crazy shit that special effects could do back then is fascinating to me. The major thing that Videodrome lacks in my opinion is coherency, which was also a problem for Tetsuo: The Iron Man. After a certain point, all attempts at narrative seem to been pushed aside in favour of gross gun hands and sticking hands in James Wood’s hole. Which is fine, I love gross gun hands, but the ending was one of those ‘that was the ending?’ type of thing, and I don’t know if I would have had that same reaction if I knew what the fuck was going on or why people were doing the things they were. If your tastes in horror lean towards the weird and inexplicable, you might want to try out some Videodrome this Halloween.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2017 - Crash (1996), directed by David Cronenberg

The Trailer
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The Appropriate Tune: "Crash Into Me", by The Dave Matthews Band

     Last time we saw ol’ Davie boy here on the Marathon, I was covering one of his earlier films, Scanners. A film of psychic cabals and head explosions that hinted at the body horror he would experiment with in later films, hampered by some painfully wooden acting and kind of a dumb plot. Before that was the...whatever it was that Videodrome supposed to be, where James Woods gets a gun arm and Debbie Harry stars in a snuff film. It’s the kind of thing that makes you wonder how Cronenberg actually convinced people to give him money to film this stuff, but at the same time makes you wonder just what this guy is going to try next. Maybe a movie where a scientist experimenting with transportation technology accidentally combines his DNA with that of a fly? Well, not this year folks!. Although it is based on a book by a science-fiction writer.

     James Ballard (James Spader) is a man that’s good at two things: Making movies and having sex, and technically he’s only a producer. He has sex with his wife Catherine (Holly Hunter), he has sex with the film staff, he has sex in public places, he has sex on his veranda, the dude is neck deep in the stuff. When he ends up hospitalized after a car accident it appears at first to be a sobering moment, but it’s there he’s introduced to a subculture that he had never heard of before. Car crash fetishists, people who derive sexual pleasure from the act and the aftermath of colliding vehicles, seeing beauty in the mangled, bloody forms of its victims. ‘Reshaping the human body through modern technology’, as Vaughn (Elias Koteas) puts it, the mastermind behind a series of very real reenactments of famous car crashes, James Dean, Jayne Mansfield and so on. A bizarre idea, maybe even reprehensible to some, but to Ballard it’s the biggest turn on he’s ever experienced, and he’s eager to dive into the deep end. Ballard is on the fast track to the depths of lust and perversion and he’s got no intention of slowing down.

      As a filmmaker Cronenberg deals in violence and sex like Grecian traders deal in olive oil and feta cheese, and of all his films, Crash seems to be the culmination of that obsession. If you’re not seeing cars actually crashing, you’re seeing the wreckage and the bloody, twisted victims. Men are having sex with women, women having sex with women, men having sex with men, licking each others scars and what not, and they’re usually doing it in a car. The scenes of violence are explosively visceral, as car crashes often are, and the way it gives context to these sexual removes any sense of eroticism from those acts and replaces it with this cold, uncomfortable feeling of disgust that lingers on your soul. Cronenberg is not a merciful man either, he hangs on every scene like a vulture, making the audience squirm before moving onto the next stop through Dante’s Inferno. I dunno, there’s something about how realistic this movie is, at least in Cronenberg’s terms, that makes it far more unsettling and dehumanizing than his other films in my opinion. I guess because rich weirdos killing people so they can have orgasm sounds like shit that actually happens in this world, depressingly enough.

     Unfortunately, although Crash is a great idea on paper (it was a book after all), the translation to the silver screen ends up kinda dull. That atmosphere of creepiness is there, especially at the beginning and end, but to get there you have to sit through seemingly endless scenes of people talking about car accidents, looking at car accidents and banging each other (and sometimes they drive somewhere). None of the characters are especially engaging, in fact most of them barely talk at all except Vaughn, who sticks to rambling about dying in a car gives you the biggest boner ever. It’s as if Cronenberg saw Eraserhead for the first time and took the exact wrong advice from it, so you’re stuck with characters who emote once per hour and make vague airy statements to one another. If I actually liked James Ballard, if I thought he was an interesting character, then his downward spiral towards debauchery would have a much greater impact. As it is, the only thing I gathered about him was ‘Guy who has sex’. Not exactly revelatory.

     That fucking music, too! I don’t know how money Howard Shore got paid to play the same three notes on a guitar every five minutes or so, but it was far too much. Now sure, movie scores are about enhancing the atmosphere of a film, and what that entails can range from orchestral compositions to straight-up ambient tracks, but it’s the exact same thing every. single. time. It’s not a groundbreaking bit of sound, it doesn’t really enhance the scenes it’s repeatedly thrown into, it just ends becoming a nuisance. Why not change things up? Why not play 4 notes sometimes, or maybe just one really long one? Why does a movie made in 1996 feel like someone just discovered copy-and-pasting?

     Ultimately Crash is a film daring in its subject matter but bogged down in matters of execution, and whether you can overlook those issues will determine your enjoyment. When it comes to recommendations however, I’m on the fence. I like Cronenberg as a filmmaker, Crash is a dark & weird movie, and Halloween is a time for the dark & weird, but at the same it’s not really a fun dark & weird. It’s not a film you break out for your friends, unless your friends are a bunch of movie nerds that are comfortable with their own sexuality, it’s one to put on when you’ve run out of Smiths records but you still want to feel miserable towards the world. As always, the power is in your hands. Just remember to keep them to yourselves when you’re driving to work tomorrow.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2015: Scanners (1981), directed by David Cronenberg

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune: "Veteran of the Psychic Wars", by Blue Oyster Cult

     When you’re handing out accolades for the for the greatest names in Horror movie history, a few names are going to come up. George A. Romero, Ray Harryhausen, Boris Karloff, John Carpenter - People that, whether through their acting, directing or production have helped to develop the foundations for horror cinema and kept it a thriving genre even into the modern age. Well, ‘thriving’ is a generous term, considering most horror films these days seem to be torture porn or a series of forced memes and incredibly formulaic either way, but it at least makes enough money to sustain itself and a niche demographic. Isn’t that what we all want though, at the end of the day?

     As this is an article about a Cronenberg movie, of course I believe David Cronenberg would be a part of this list. Although nowadays Mr. Cronenberg is known as a celebrated director of serious dramas like A History of Violence and Eastern Promises, there was a time when ol’ Dave up there with John Carpenter and David Lynch as one of the weirdest guys in Hollywood. His remake of horror classic The Fly, Videodrome (which I covered in last year’s Marathon), the adaptation of William S. Burroughs's classic novel Naked Lunch, films that chilled audiences by attacking the one thing that everyone has in common: their sense of self. Body horror, as it eventually become known, a subgenre of horror focusing on severe and grotesque physical mutations, variations on which can be seen in Hellraiser, The Thing and From Beyond. Cronenberg may not have have been the progenitor of that specific field, but he certainly helped establish it in the mainstream consciousness and did it well enough that he could build a career on it, and thus have the credibility and the backing to perhaps make the films he wanted to make.

     Like eXistenZ.

     So what is Scanners about, beyond that one head explosion scene that has become a reaction image standard these days? Well...psychics, I guess? Drugs? Some kind of corporate espionage that turns into some kind of battle for the fate of mankind? Fact is, it’s an incredibly obtuse film. Even more so than Videodrome, which goes completely off the fucking rails in the second half. At least there you have some time to get behind James Woods as a character before you get down to business. Here you start off right in the craziness, and you never really understand much of anything about the characters or care about their motivations. Especially protagonist Cameron Vale, who is maybe the least charismatic lead I’ve ever seen in a film. I mean you have some great actors here, Patrick McGoohan, Michael Ironside, but everything feels so erratic and, to be honest, melodramatic, that I’m still not sure what happened. It’s like trying to recall a dream the next morning, one of those weird dreams you get when you eat pizza before bed.

     However, like I mentioned in the Phantasm article, for these types of films to work all they need to have an interesting idea, not necessarily to be a technically ‘good’ film. Scanners is a pretty good idea for a sci-fi film, as much as the X-Men were for a comic book I guess, and my respect for Cronenberg as a filmmaker means I can enjoy the idea while forgiving some of the misgivings about the plot and characterization, unlike my time with Phantasm. It’s a lot like getting a taste of the brown acid; You really have to ride this one out, accept the sounds and images as they come and try to maintain. Thankfully that’s not too difficult, as Scanners is generally entertaining if nonsensical, another point of difference between this and Phantasm. I’m really harping on that movie for whatever reason, not sure why.

     If you’re in the mood for a bit of the ol’ ultraviolence with a tangy sci-fi twist this Halloween, then Scanners might just be the film for you. Just try not to think about it too hard.