David Cronenberg is a Canadian-born director who began a career in film in 1969. His early years were marked by a series of low-budget sci-fi horrors which jolted his name into the public mind. Cronenberg's work continues to seamlessly mutate and fill the gaps in our subconscious. His pictures examine the edges of human physiology and psychology. Exploitation film, body horror, venereal horror or whatever you want to call it; like a disease, it gets under the skin and metastasises.
Cronenberg achieved a cult following with his early film, Scanners (1981). Pre-formed ideas of the body and infection began to surface, however low-production values show through and the outcome is unsatisfying if you've already been exposed to his more recent work. Two years later, Cronenberg pushed the envelope further with Videodrome (1983). A sleazy television producer, Max Renn, is at the centre of a perverse series of events/hallucinations. Despite Max's moral ambivalence, Cronenberg intentionally made the character into someone whose responses are likely to mirror those of the viewer in the same environment. In one particularly unnerving scene, a man on the TV stares through the screen and speaks directly to Max as he slips into hyperreality. Cronenberg here explores the concepts of media theorist Marshall McLuhan ("the television screen is the retina of the mind’s eye"), positing reality as a self-constructed concept rather than an absolute given.
From here, Cronenberg might have entered the world of seminal pop cinema with script offers including Top Gun and The Truman Show. Instead, he decided to remake the horror classic The Fly (1986). The film traces the degeneration of Brundlefly, a man who becomes genetically fused with a fly following a botched teleportation experiment. Brundlefly undergoes a compressed existence, a brilliant metaphor for ageing and the eventual succumbing to disease. Jeff Goldblum acts with harrowing intensity, introducing a previously unseen emotional dimension to Cronenberg's films.
Naked Lunch (1991), an adaptation of William S Burroughs' "unfilmable" novel, is as much an introspective meditation on the writing process as it is a mind fuck. Cronenberg followed this up with another masterpiece, eXistenZ (1999). Wrought with Cartesian skepticism, it reflects on atheism and the director’s obsession with the body as the primary site of human existence. After exhausting themes involving consciousness, Cronenberg moved towards realism. From subverting small-town values of History of Violence (2005) to the intimate depiction of violence in Eastern Promises (2007), Cronenberg maintains an innovative ability to disturb and distort his audience's perceptions.
Director Profile: David Cronenberg
