David Cronenberg

I've developed something of a fascination with his movies over the past year or so. I've seen The Dead Zone, Videodrome, Crash & eXistenz which have all affected me in subtle ways, it seems he certainly isn't your conventional horror director.

I've just watched Naked Lunch, which was a very confusing and strange movie which is unlike anything else i have ever seen. Reading up on the adaption from the William S. Burroughs novel is interesting and lends a bit more insight, i probably would of appreciated it more if i read the novel. Crash & Videodrome really hit me the sex & violence themes running throughout, i don't know if it's more shock over substance but i seemed to have got a valid experience in many ways out of this guy.

Talk Cronenberg.

I'm actually not even a fan of this guy. I liked The Fly and that was it. I felt all of his other films were a bit TOO surreal and disturbing to the point were I couldn't get past finishing them.

But then along came a film called A History Of Violence. I think it's his best achievement as far as an auteur goes. Cronenberg the crime film master is a lot more appealing than Cronenberg the body horror meister. At least to me it is.

I tell you what, this seems half the appeal to me. There's something about his brand of disturbing surrealism that captivates me, though it's a kind of twisted fantasy designed to be as nightmarish as possible i feel a need to watch.

I haven't seen it. I'd be interested to see how he fares in such a context. I've only seen his horror work, his grotesque biological/mechanical mutations really have hit a nerve with me. It more or less defines his movies for me that i have seen.

Check out Spider.

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The novelist does not long to see the lion eat grass. He realizes that one and the same God created the wolf and the lamb, then smiled, "seeing that his work was good".

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They had temporarily escaped the factories, the warehouses, the slaughterhouses, the car washes - they'd be back in captivity the next day but now they were out - they were wild with freedom. They weren't thinking about the slavery of poverty. Or the slavery of welfare and food stamps. The rest of us would be all right until the poor learned how to make atom bombs in their basements.

I was going to make a thread like this to help my dissertation on him. Best living filmmaker imo.

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Oh yeah, will post something more substantial soon.

Thought bump this thread up now should be cracking in on my dissertation.

Think Cronenberg's work falls into the three themes, body horror, adaptation and more commercial work. Obviously body horror is where he gained his reputation with low budget flicks like Shivers and Rabid before making cult classics such as Videodrome and adapting Vincent Price's The Fly to make a quintessential body horror / romance. Despite The Fly's brilliance within genre, personally i feel it lacks a Cronenberg touch, the narrative is somewhat simplistic and while it glimpses on his themes of bodily mutilation through technology it's not got much of a deeper subtext past that. Dead Ringers i feel his first mature film, moving from explicit gore and effects to implicit psychological torments of twin gynecologists. Past Videodrome (which i think is a stunning exploration of technology in the contemporary society as well as a fascinating twist on a male identity and sexuality put into a visually stunning and imaginative world) it's here Cronenberg has his two other masterpieces, Naked Lunch and Crash.

Naked Lunch, the literary adaptation of 'beat' generation William S. Burrough's novel, combined with his autobiography and elements of Cronenberg's own style proves to be the definitive work of Cronenberg in my opinion. The two creative forces blend seamlessly through the drug induced paranoid delusions of Will Lee lending room for Cronenberg's vivid body horror and bizarre creations to live...... (more to come)

I wouldn't say that he's my favourite director, but watching a film by him almost always guarantees a unique experience. I haven't seen Eastern Promices yet but I'm looking forward to it.

I think the reason to why Cronenberg never has and never will make his big break with the big audience is that I think the audience doesn't really know what to make of his films. Especially his latest work has been somewhat straight stories, but with a distinct Cronenberg touch. Unlike Lynch, another "wacky" filmmaker, who makes weirder and weirder and more and more abstract films Cronenberg seems to refuse to take the one or the other road. When an audience watch a film by Lynch they know that they will be in for a ride of their lives but with a big fat question mark on their foreheads afterwards. With Cronenberg I think people are confused and lured into thinking that they're watching a traditionally told story and then when Cronenberg begins to do his thing the audience doesn't know which foot to lean on (can't say if that applies to his latest film though). People only like to be confused if they are prepared for it. Otherwise they will feel dumb.

Eastern Promises was great, but Nakes Luch was a masterpiece. No one person can rightfully deny naked Lunch. Cronenberg is one of my fave's for sure.

Here's my dissertation on the man, some of it's a bit theoretical and more about him then about the rich themes within his work. It looks at three films- The Fly, Naked Lunch and A History of Violence.

Attached Files

Final.doc (170.0 KB, 1538 views)

I'm downloading this now. I will read it when i get a chance!

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Bump. Fenwick, should be attached above. Long time since read it so maybe bit ropier than remember

And I thought I had a lot of reading when Rice posted here Cuckoo's Nest paper, damn Pyro. Well I'm giving you rep regardless for writing a 30 something page dissertation on Cronenberg, that alone is worth it. Gonna read some now, skipping the part on Naked Lunch until I see the film.

edit: just finished the section on The Fly, gotta rest the eyes. With contacts in, reading on a computer screen can be hard on them sometimes. Pyro, have you submitted this already?

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"Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

I have two problems with this, both regarding the term "auteur". The minor one is that Cronenberg didn't write the source material, so off the bat his level of control over the creation was limited in that sense. I don't think original screenplays are necessarily a requirement of "auteur" status, but it speaks to a level of control regardless.

The bigger one is that A History Of Violence, as fantastic as it is, is far less "Cronenbergian" than most of his earlier works. In other words, it's more difficult to identify as something he directed. This, by definition, lessens the auteur factor; The Brood and Videodrome are pure Cronenberg (I'll set Dead Ringers aside for now), whereas A History of Violence is relatively mainstream.

These two points may raise one obvious objection: what about Crash? He didn't write it, it was based on a novel by J.G. Ballard. But the manner in which he adapted & filmed that novel was, again, so distinctly of his style that it would be hard to mistake it for anyone else.

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Yeah, Harry submitted it last year, got a 63 i believe which was 2 shy of getting put on University records. Thanks for reading by the way

Cayce, you just pretty much started talking what my dissertation was about lol.

I just looked at the date being 06-02 and didn't pay attention to the fact that the year was 08, I thought you just finished it. Good stuff by the way, I'll let you know when I'm done.

Saved it, will read further once I've seen more of his films.

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Iro's Top 100 Movies v3.0

Finished it (other than the Naked Lunch section), I'm thinking I may give Naked Lunch a shot despite wanting to read the book first.

Hell, have you tried reading the book yet, Harry? It's not an easy read, although for all I know you may find it better.

Not yet, I can't find a copy in any of the used bookstores and I try to buy all my books from these establishments as new books can get quite pricey