What Spawned in 1979

I wonder how I should feel that a movie about a woman giving birth to monsters was released a month after I was born. That's 1979's The Brood, which I watched again last night. It's a David Cronenberg movie, one of his best.

It'd been at least fifteen years since I'd last seen it. It's the first time I'd watched it since I started working with children. As such, I now find child actress Cindy Hinds' performance much more effective.

She plays Candice, the human daughter of Frank (Art Hindle) and Nola (Samantha Eggar). Now Nola, under the experimental psychotherapy of Dr. Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed), is giving birth to a brood of demon children, manifestations of her pent-up psychological issues.

I used to think Hinds' performance was too stiff, that Cronenberg simply lacked the ability to work with child performers. Maybe he does, but now I think Hinds works perfectly well. I found the shot of her approaching the kitchen door, behind which she can hear her grandmother being brutally pummelled to death, really heart-rending.

I've worked with kids who are this emotionally withdrawn and seeing her pulling her head back just a little speaks a lot to me about what she's going through.

Before she gets killed, Candice's grandmother (Nuala Fitzgerald) has an interesting line about how people rewrite the past in their minds. "Thirty seconds after you're born, you have a past, and sixty seconds after that you start to lie to yourself about it." I like how the movie never settles the question as to how abusive Nola's parents actually were to her. She remembers them being abusive, is the important thing, and now those memories, real or imagined, have taken dangerous corporeal form.

The Brood is available on The Criterion Channel.

X Sonnet #1783

Erasers take the place of vengeful ghosts.
Per pumpkin kills amount to ninety-nine.
Repayment chilled the itchy, writhing hosts.
On grounds of square we chopped the second pine.
With dinner done, the lunch could linger late.
However fast the break commenced, we wait.
And thus we close another book of fate.
Ordaining food as masters close the gate.
No swath of snow could sooth the child beast.
In scores of suits, the monsters beat the turf.
Condensing clouds exclude the warming yeast.
Deserving pumpkins ship to ev'ry surf.
Beneath the vibrant hoods were demon spawn.
Across the patchy snow's a ruddy dawn.

We've Secretly Replaced the Monsters with Folgers Crystals

So you want to tell a story about LGBTQ+ struggles but you don't want to write nuanced characters or situations. How do you lend your story the veneer of intelligence to garner, if not popularity, then at least shallow respect? Try using a secret code, something just hard enough that critics easily impressed by their own intelligence can decipher it. For your model, I suggest 1990's Nightbreed in which a race of demons are hunted and driven underground by redneck caricatures.

David Cronenberg did not write or direct this but he tried his hand (unsuccessfully) at acting, playing a psychotherapist, Dr. Decker, who's secretly a serial killer.

He convinces his patient, the film's hero, Boone (Craig Sheffer), that he's guilty of crimes Decker's actually guilty of, an unsubtle comment on how psychotherapists stay in business. Eventually Boone is forced to run off and join the Nightbreed, who draw the ire of cartoonish southern police.

The film was written and directed by Clive Barker. It has some impressive makeup and prosthetic effects for the Nightbreed but as Boone's girlfriend, Lori (Anne Bobby), wanders into the den of demons in search of her beau, it becomes quickly apparent Barker is not up to the task he sets himself. Danny Elfman's score suggests we're meant to be following Lori's point of view as she's overwhelmed by a fantastic labyrinth of magic and monsters. But the cheap lighting and boring camera work makes it feel more like a low budget TV show.

If you're a liberal who likes your opinions echoed back at you with all the subtlety of a mack truck, this movie may be for you.

Nightbreed is available on Cinemax and Shout! Factory.

Where Goes Your Head?

Is the goal of any political faction ultimately to make its opponents' heads explode? 1981's Scanners makes a convincing argument that this might just be the case. It's one of the most famous, and financially successful, early works of David Cronenberg, a director I've long admired. Yet Scanners is among his films I've watched only infrequently. I don't think I'd seen it in more than fifteen years before I watched it last night.

Mainly I think it's because, any time the mood might strike me to watch Scanners, I inevitably think, "Yeah, but I could watch Videodrome instead." Videodrome takes the underlying ideas of Scanners so much further. It has the commentary on the subliminal influences integral to political movements and ties it effectively to visual media. It removes distance between the viewer and the protagonist by making us party to his hallucinations, and we join him in being unable to distinguish between reality and fantasy--as well as being unable to distinguish between fantasies meant to titillate him and those meant to manipulate him.

Sex is present in Scanners but on a much, much more subdued level. Early in the film, we only see male Scanners, people with the ability to psychically join their nervous systems with another human. And the film's hero, Vale (Stephen Lack), is first seen wielding these powers as a weapon against an unsuspecting woman, albeit involuntarily.

He can hear her making disparaging comments about him, prompting him to reflexively "think about her". It's an elegant and sinister illustration of how a meme can work, even without any intentions from its creator and/or deployer. But where intention ends and accident begins isn't exactly clear, is it?

Cronenberg has said that he doesn't believe in spirits or the soul, he believes that the body is entirely physical. This makes sense of the fact that Vale is able to hack into a computer with his mind. But it's not quite the effective fusion of technology and biology we'll see later in his films.

While it may be no Videodrome, at least I haven't watched it ten billion times, so I was able to have something slightly closer to a fresh experience watching it last night. Ah, to be young and new to the filmmography of David Cronenberg again.

Scanners is available on The Criterion Channel.

Guts of the Artist

In a world without pain or infection, artists have nowhere to go but in. David Cronenberg's 2022 film Crimes of the Future is good old fashioned Cronenberg. It's weird how I can find something so comforting and disturbing at the same time. But I admired how much this movie made my skin crawl in much the way I've always admired Cronenberg's work of the '80s and '90s.

Crimes of the Future, which, aside from the title, has no relation to Cronenberg's other movie of the same name, begins with a little boy on the beach. His mother, from a nearby balcony, warns him not to eat anything out there. He doesn't, but she's not pleased when he comes back and proceeds to eat the plastic wastebasket in the bathroom.

And so she murders him, disturbed by this inhuman behaviour which, we learn later, happens to resemble surgical modifications her ex-husband, and the boy's father, had made to himself which enabled him to eat plastic. So we start to get some idea of the social and political forces at play in the future imagined by Cronenberg.

But the protagonists of the film are a pair of performance artists played by Viggo Mortensen and Lea Seydoux. This may be one of Cronenberg's most personal films because in scenes where Mortensen's character, Saul Tenser, talks about his creative process and Lea Seydoux talks about surgery, we're reminded Cronenberg has a background in both the avante garde art scene and in surgical medicine. In this world, pain and infectious disease have been almost completely eradicated. Saul, an anomoly, does feel pain as part of a condition in which he regularly grows entirely new internal organs. In art performance pieces, Seydoux's character, Caprice, performs surgery on him and describes to an enraptured but small indie audience the nature of Saul's most recent creations. The way he talks about them fittingly mirrors the uncertain, yet personal and driven, perspective of an artist.

In some ways the story resembles other things I've read and seen, like some older issues of Caitlin R. Kiernan's Sirenia Digest as well as the story concept behind David Bowie's Outside album. In Cronenberg's own oeuvre, I was reminded of Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch, Crash, and, of course, Videodrome. But there's a good dose of The Brood and The Fly in here, too.

In one sense, I think Cronenberg's vision with this movie reflects trends in modern society as young people increasingly indulge in more extravagant self-modification. Wealthier transgender YouTubers like Contrapoints and Jessie Gender have undergone skull shaving procedures that drastically alter the shape of their heads to appear more feminine and, living in Japan, I see plenty of people who've had work done on their eyes. But Cronenberg presents a world enraptured by biomechanical technology and transfixed by strange internal organs. The trend these days seems to be to move away from acknowledging the physical body as more and more people prefer to psychologically inhabit the internet with more honesty than the corporeal world. We live in a world of Virtual Youtubers and people who use increasingly sophisticated digital filters to totally alter their appearance. In Asian countries, young people are increasingly presenting a fantasy reality in which they and their friends are more and more resembling anime characters. Cronenberg's vision underestimates, and is likely not interested in, the youthful compulsion to be pretty.

But taken on its own merits, Crimes of the Future is a fascinating portrait of a strange alternate universe of compulsions and sex. Cinematographer Douglas Koch, standing in for the sadly absent Peter Suschitzky, provides a nice imitation of the kind of sensual shadows Suschitzky created for many of Cronenberg's previous films. The stalwart Howard Shore returns once again to provide the score, this time choosing a soft electronic sound. Mortensen and Seydoux both give fearless and generously sensuous performances. Seydoux in particular comes off as more committed than I've seen her in any other role.

As is often the case with Cronenberg at his best, he blends repulsive and attractive stimuli so seamlessly that you start to believe he really has invented a new form of sexuality.

Twitter Sonnet #1617

An angry brain controls the neighbour's flat.
The wakeful birds disrupt the nightly row.
Across the street, a dinner fills the vat.
Nutrition doomed the crispy bacon sow.
A pitcher benched could yet accrue a score.
Observing bills could float about the pool.
The only threat's an absent wild boar.
A quiet mouse could trick a singing fool.
A proper tool was melted prey in Hell.
A purple sickness crouched in foil bricks.
A poison breakfast comes for master's bell.
A passion swelled like algae turning tricks.
Configured guts accepted sex and art.
The moistened play provides an actor's part.

The Fearful Zone of Potential

It was Christopher Walken's birthday on Sunday so I was in the mood to watch one of his movies. 1983's The Dead Zone was right there on my shelf so I watched that. It's with my other David Cronenberg DVDs and Blu-Rays--The Dead Zone is one I don't watch very often I suppose because when I'm in the mood for Cronenberg I tend to reach for Videodrome, Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch, or Crash (not the Paul Haggis movie)*. In many ways, The Dead Zone is atypical of Cronenberg--it doesn't have a score by Howard Shore, employing Michael Kamen instead, and there's not nearly as many biological elements as Cronenberg's other films from the era. The lack of spirituality in his work has been commented on extensively and I've heard Cronenberg discuss his belief that the mind is not separate from the body; there's no ghost-like soul animating this flesh. So the story of a man who can see the future seems an odd choice as prophecy generally seems to have a spiritual or religious element to it. Particularly when, as in this case, the prophet in question foresees calamity that through his actions may be averted or is able to gain insight into crime or injustice he may in some way stop or find means of retribution for. It's hard to put down the implicit moral element to the randomness of the universe and maybe that's why I don't consider this a sterling example of Cronenberg's vision.

It's an adaptation of a Stephen King novel, an author who believes in God, whose work often features spiritual elements. I've heard people say they consider The Dead Zone the best adaptation of a Stephen King novel--generally people who consider Kubrick's The Shining a flawed work, though it's interesting to note that in both cases the director is an atheist auteur. We do never see any god or angel in Cronenberg's adaptation and I like how he plays up the strangeness of Johnny's ability. Whenever it manifests, it causes disruption and provokes fear in everyone present, fear and pain in Johnny himself.

At that point, Christopher Walken was probably best known for The Deer Hunter, he hadn't yet become the imitable icon associated with villainous roles he is to-day. But already he was making such remarkably weird choices with his lines. In one scene, his character, Johnny, is sitting down to a meal with his father (Sean Sullivan) which has been cooked by his visiting ex-girlfriend, Sarah (Brooke Adams). When she wonders whether Johnny's father will like what she's cooked, Johnny says, "I'll bet he will, he's fed up with my cuisine."

I'd bet you anything screenwriter Jeffrey Boam didn't imagine this line being delivered in a way anything like the way Walken delivers it. If I were looking at it on paper, I'd think it was Johnny's attempt at charming self-deprecation also meant to be encouraging or polite to Sarah. The way Walken delivers it, he waves his hands in front of him slightly and raises his voice adopting the self-consciously forced quality of a one-liner comedian. I almost wonder if this was Walken's passive-aggressive criticism of the line itself or if he was thinking of Johnny subtly commenting on the artificial normalcy of the moment since he and Sarah had just had adulterous sex before sitting down to this nice normal supper.

The climax of the film famously involves Johnny's plan to assassinate a presidential candidate played by Martin Sheen. It's a bold story to tell, particularly after assassinations and attempted assassinations of political figures had been regular occurrences in the preceding twenty years. It would almost be like if a new movie were made to-day that sympathised with a school shooter or terrorist. Mostly the impression I get from the film's take is what a frightening and unnatural thing certainty is. In what other state could one be so certain it's right to kill someone who is apparently doing no direct harm to anyone? Taxi Driver is a better example of how to treat the psychology of this subject realistically but as a fantasy certainly Cronenberg did much better with Videodrome, which was, incredibly, released the same year as his adaptation of The Dead Zone. What movie has exceeded Videodrome's brilliant depiction of technology transmitting first destabilising stimuli before imparting ideological certainty to the point that a previously ordinary man is turned into a killing machine? Well, now I want to watch Videodrome again.

*Cronenberg has spoken about Haggis' use of the title and he seems to regard it as an insult. I can't say I blame him.

Twitter Sonnet #1221

The counted coins became a tambourine.
A greenish mist prepared the room for sleep.
The brightest crickets start to softly sing.
A bliss awaits in blue and shady deep.
The line of candy carries up the stairs.
A gentle motor's heard across the street.
The eyes recorded minds in many pairs.
The shuffle sound was shoes on nightly beat.
The empty seats above the stage were packed.
No watch was set for boxes built of bread.
The bag had only just to-day been sacked.
The say had only just to-day been said.
In stages nets removed to show the whale.
A banquet starts beneath the gentle sail.