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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
David Cronenberg on Nabokov, his creepy, minimalist new "Spider" and why memory can never tell us who we really are.
Feb 28, 2003 | I think my friend Theresa stayed, even after the tray full of gynecological instruments designed for "mutant women" came out. She could always stand anything I could. But as the camera crawled across a tabletop littered with twisted pincers and forceps, like leftovers from a museum show on medieval torture or pieces of the "Alien" Queen's spinal cord, the rest of our moviegoing group had seen enough. It was 1988 in San Francisco, but David Cronenberg's "Dead Ringers," starring Jeremy Irons as a pair of demented twin doctors, could still drive a gaggle of overcaffeinated, post-whatever hipsters right out of the theater.
For the guy across the aisle from me at a Times Square theater for "Crash," in 1997, the sadomasochism was OK, the open-wound sex and disability fetishism was not a problem, the "autoeroticism," ha ha, was fine and dandy. But when James Spader and Elias Koteas embarked on some same-sex probing in the back seat of a 1963 Lincoln Continental (the precise model in which John F. Kennedy was assassinated, naturally), he was out of there. He was a large man, and he unfolded himself to his full height and girth to address the audience as he stood up. "No, no!" he said. "Nuh-uh! I ain't sitting here for that."
It's possible that no other filmmaker in the history of the medium has provoked as much discomfort, and so many of these walk-out moments, as Cronenberg has. At some point in almost every one of his movies, you're likely to share that guy's feeling: I ain't sitting here for that. And I'm not claiming immunity here, by the way. I made it through "The Brood" (1979), a misogynistic nightmare in which Oliver Reed's wife, under the influence of a cultish psychologist, gives birth to hordes of evil dwarves, but only just. No way in hell would I watch it again.
But like the other maestros of cinematic weirdness with whom he is most often compared, David Lynch and Peter Greenaway (as well as fellow Canadian Atom Egoyan, to some extent his protégé), Cronenberg draws his grotesque visions of transmutation, of human life rendered almost unrecognizable, from a well of genuine obsession. I'm not telling you that you have to like Cronenberg's movies. They certainly aren't for everybody, and while he has flirted with Hollywood from time to time -- he came close to directing "Total Recall," and recently to making a "Basic Instinct" sequel -- he understands that mainstream populist cinema is not really his field. But he isn't out to shock or torment audiences, or at least not to do so simply for its own sake. He's an explorer, driven equally by ideas and emotions.
Cronenberg's recurring images of people who grow extra sexual organs ("Rabid") or merge with machines ("Videodrome") or become monsters ("The Fly") or all of the above ("eXistenZ") are unashamedly metaphorical, even symbolic. All his work, no matter how squirm-inducing, seems shot through with a prevailing sadness at the fragility of human life and the ephemerality of love. He has described his themes as: "Disintegration, aging, death, separation, the meaning of life. All that stuff."
Cronenberg's new film, "Spider" (the screenplay is by Patrick McGrath, based on his own 1991 neo-Gothic novel), is more clearly concerned with those themes than most of his work. It isn't likely to drive anybody out of the theater -- although getting people out of the house to see a meticulous, minimalist study of madness and memory may be another story. "Spider" is a spare, stringent film, with only a few troubling flashes of nudity and violence. It has exactly one Cronenbergian special effect (maybe one and a half), which I'll try not to give away. That's not to say it won't make you highly uncomfortable in its own way. Like the other literary adaptations of the filmmaker's later career (besides "Crash," these include "M. Butterfly" and his controversial take on William S. Burroughs' "Naked Lunch"), "Spider" finds the inner Cronenberg within another writer's work.
Since his Hollywood breakthroughs with "The Dead Zone" in 1983 and, even more so, "The Fly" in 1986, Cronenberg has had the cachet to work with movie stars when he wants to. Some critics perceive him as a chilly intellectual who plugs actors into his moviemaking machine, but that's not what the actors themselves seem to think. In "Spider," Ralph Fiennes plays the title character, an adult man released from a mental institution into an East London halfway house who becomes increasingly haunted by memories of his troubled childhood in the same neighborhood.
In a brief conversation at Sony Pictures headquarters in New York, where I met Cronenberg for an interview, Fiennes spoke of the director with remarkable warmth. "He's very open, very easy to work with," Fiennes said. "I was very open with David, and he invites that. People say to me, 'What's he like? Is he weird and freaky like his movies?' Not at all. He's very focused and relaxed on set, very concentrated. I never knew him once to get mad, freak out, be anxious or seem troubled."
Fiennes had actually signed on for the screen adaptation "Spider," under the aegis of producer Catherine Bailey, long before there was a director attached. When Cronenberg emerged, the star felt immediately that the fit was right. "I didn't know all of David's work," Fiennes says. "I knew 'Dead Ringers,' 'Crash' and 'The Fly.' But I thought his response to the austerity of 'Spider,' the psychology of it, seemed right. We both responded to this existential figure in the middle of this bleak urban landscape trying to work out who he is and what's haunted him.
