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I've seen Scanners a few times now, and with each viewing I seem to go back and forth on Stephen Lack's performance. No, I've never thought that it was actually "good", but I'm torn between whether he's a bad actor who is used well in the movie or a bad actor who deflates the centre of the movie. With this viewing, I'm leaning towards the former. To put it kindly, Lack is a limited actor, perhaps because he wasn't primarily an actor in the first place. I understand he was mostly a painter and sculptor, and one can speculate whether David Cronenberg cast him to help out one of his art world buddies, or to brutally dunk on an art world rival. (The former is more likely, the latter is funnier to imagine.) It's worth noting that Cronenberg later cast him in a small but affecting role in Dead Ringers.
There are probably two effective qualities that Lack brings to the material. One, as a relative void of charisma, he comes across as out of his element compared to his more experienced co-stars, and as a result ends up being a good audience vantage point. We are uneasy as this strange story hurtles forward, so it makes sense that we latch onto a character who seems as uneasy as ourselves. Two, Lack has large, spherical eyes, which lend themselves well to this story of malevolent psychics. The psychic battles here are depicted through a combination of stares, tilts of the head, and contorted and bulging faces, sometimes assisted by bladder effects. (If any of this sounds silly, it's a credit to Cronenberg's craft that he knows exactly how to shoot and cut these scenes for maximum energy.) While Lack is not the smoothest at executing these gestures, his stares photograph well, and his relatively affectless demeanour gives him a certain zen quality that works well in the final confrontation.
The cast around Lack however is a lot easier to defend without qualifiers. Michael Ironside provides an intense contrast to Lack in an early role, and it's easy to see why he became a go-to character actor in the years since. (Ironside also does those tilts and contortions a lot more naturally, perhaps because he seems ready to explode at any given moment.) There's Jennifer O'Neill, anticipating the tension of the Debbie Harry role in Videodrome with conceptually challenging hair (she isn't old, why is her hair so grey? okay, I'm only thirty and have a bunch of grey hairs too, the point is, she's good in the movie). There's Lawrence Dane as the kind of conniving executive that would be played by Ronny Cox were this a Paul Verhoeven movie. There's a brief but quite moving appearance by Robert A. Silverman as a tortured artist who has found other ways to manage his psychic powers. And there's Patrick McGoohan, providing the closest thing to a warm, paternal character in the movie, and whose rich, deep voice feels at one with the movie's textures.
Of Cronenberg's filmography, this is the first one in my opinion that really nails that sense of coldness we associate with him. A great deal of assistance comes from Howard Shore's vaguely futuristic score, but there's a certain sterility in the cinematography, a good eye for cold, unwelcoming interiors and great use of locations. This was shot in Toronto and Montreal, and while the movie doesn't specify the setting, Cronenberg is able to imbue these places with a subtly dystopian quality. Has Yorkdale subway station ever looked this sinister? (This quality continues in Videodrome, which is perhaps the definitive Toronto movie, giving the city some of the sleazy charge of a pre-cleanup New York.) And this quality even extends to the corporate names in the movie, with "ConSec" and "Biocarbon Amalgamate" both carrying a certain obfuscating coldness.
As body horror, this falls well into his pet concerns, and while it maybe isn't as sophisticated as some of his other movies in this regard, it benefits from a relentless forward momentum in the narrative and some memorable special effects. This is far from the grossest thing Cronenberg has made, but when you bookend your movie with the most famous exploding head in cinema and a gruesome psychic duel that evokes Thich Quang Duc, it's safe to say you've made an impact.
Scanners (Cronenberg, 1981)
I've seen Scanners a few times now, and with each viewing I seem to go back and forth on Stephen Lack's performance. No, I've never thought that it was actually "good", but I'm torn between whether he's a bad actor who is used well in the movie or a bad actor who deflates the centre of the movie. With this viewing, I'm leaning towards the former. To put it kindly, Lack is a limited actor, perhaps because he wasn't primarily an actor in the first place. I understand he was mostly a painter and sculptor, and one can speculate whether David Cronenberg cast him to help out one of his art world buddies, or to brutally dunk on an art world rival. (The former is more likely, the latter is funnier to imagine.) It's worth noting that Cronenberg later cast him in a small but affecting role in Dead Ringers.
There are probably two effective qualities that Lack brings to the material. One, as a relative void of charisma, he comes across as out of his element compared to his more experienced co-stars, and as a result ends up being a good audience vantage point. We are uneasy as this strange story hurtles forward, so it makes sense that we latch onto a character who seems as uneasy as ourselves. Two, Lack has large, spherical eyes, which lend themselves well to this story of malevolent psychics. The psychic battles here are depicted through a combination of stares, tilts of the head, and contorted and bulging faces, sometimes assisted by bladder effects. (If any of this sounds silly, it's a credit to Cronenberg's craft that he knows exactly how to shoot and cut these scenes for maximum energy.) While Lack is not the smoothest at executing these gestures, his stares photograph well, and his relatively affectless demeanour gives him a certain zen quality that works well in the final confrontation.
The cast around Lack however is a lot easier to defend without qualifiers. Michael Ironside provides an intense contrast to Lack in an early role, and it's easy to see why he became a go-to character actor in the years since. (Ironside also does those tilts and contortions a lot more naturally, perhaps because he seems ready to explode at any given moment.) There's Jennifer O'Neill, anticipating the tension of the Debbie Harry role in Videodrome with conceptually challenging hair (she isn't old, why is her hair so grey? okay, I'm only thirty and have a bunch of grey hairs too, the point is, she's good in the movie). There's Lawrence Dane as the kind of conniving executive that would be played by Ronny Cox were this a Paul Verhoeven movie. There's a brief but quite moving appearance by Robert A. Silverman as a tortured artist who has found other ways to manage his psychic powers. And there's Patrick McGoohan, providing the closest thing to a warm, paternal character in the movie, and whose rich, deep voice feels at one with the movie's textures.
Of Cronenberg's filmography, this is the first one in my opinion that really nails that sense of coldness we associate with him. A great deal of assistance comes from Howard Shore's vaguely futuristic score, but there's a certain sterility in the cinematography, a good eye for cold, unwelcoming interiors and great use of locations. This was shot in Toronto and Montreal, and while the movie doesn't specify the setting, Cronenberg is able to imbue these places with a subtly dystopian quality. Has Yorkdale subway station ever looked this sinister? (This quality continues in Videodrome, which is perhaps the definitive Toronto movie, giving the city some of the sleazy charge of a pre-cleanup New York.) And this quality even extends to the corporate names in the movie, with "ConSec" and "Biocarbon Amalgamate" both carrying a certain obfuscating coldness.
As body horror, this falls well into his pet concerns, and while it maybe isn't as sophisticated as some of his other movies in this regard, it benefits from a relentless forward momentum in the narrative and some memorable special effects. This is far from the grossest thing Cronenberg has made, but when you bookend your movie with the most famous exploding head in cinema and a gruesome psychic duel that evokes Thich Quang Duc, it's safe to say you've made an impact.