David Cronenberg: Virtual Exhibition

Cronenbergian Artifacts

By Caroline Seck Langill

The menace of things: David Cronenberg’s vibrant objects

Introduction

Well, we still live in overstimulated times. Ever-prescient, David Cronenberg predicted our reliance on and interconnection with technology and its commingled objects. In order to bring new attention to the props and other objects that appear in his films, and to emphasize their role as material agents, this essay situates Cronenberg’s work within contemporary discourses focused on the object and its “thingness,” while recognizing that in many ways his films are beyond situated theorizations. ¹

Not since Hitchcock has any filmmaker created such menace with things. One only has to catch a glimpse of the Mantle Retractor in Dead Ringers (1988) to know the mind that invented such a threatening instrument was unsteady. For Cronenberg, these particular props are “crucial to the movie…touchstones to get me around and through” (Rodley 139). Objects are integral to the Cronenberg oeuvre. They often appear early in the film as ciphers that signify plot points, relieving the necessity for remedial narration. In Spider (2002), Dennis Clegg gets off a train wearing four button-down shirts, quickly establishing the obsessive nature of his character; in the opening scene of Crash (1996) Catherine Ballard presses her naked breast against the fuselage of a plane, immediately setting in motion a techno-fetishistic story of the car as erotic enabler. This essay will sketch out the ways that Cronenberg’s objects move beyond the context of the prop to become as significant to his films as the McGuffin was for Hitchcock.

Instrument for operating on mutant women (prop)
Cheryl Camack Grundy, Sculptor
David Didur, Fabricator
Peter Grundy, First Assistant Art Director

Dead Ringers, 1988
nickel plated brass
David Cronenberg Collection, TIFF Film Reference Library

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Science, Technology and Cronenberg's Objects

As a former science student turned English major, Cronenberg was keenly attuned to the zeitgeist of the late sixties, the period from which he emerged as a filmmaker. A brief but foundational study of biology deeply informed the content and aesthetic of his work. Science has always been about sex. What is evolution, if not a narrative of sexuality? And where does science happen? In the lab, where the hard instruments of that discipline meet the soft membranes of the organic life form. For British sociologist Andrew Pickering, scientific instruments become collaborators of experimentation, material agents in the production of knowledge. For Cronenberg they become the means to convey fear and dread, but also to perform their intended function, sometimes abominably, as seen in the Dead Zone when serial killer Frank Dodd commits suicide by falling onto pair of barber scissors. Or they migrate from the lab into the bedroom, becoming erotic collaborators enabling Elliott Mantle’s ligature of Claire Niveau to the bed with assorted tubing and surgical clamps. This theme can be identified with any occurrence of the penetrated (read: gynecological) body, regardless of gender. These are liminal moments moving beyond science to suggest the existential affordances of Cronenberg’s objects, such as the point at which Roni refuses to undergo teleportation in The Fly (1986). Seth’s response: “I bet you think you woke me up about the flesh, don’t ya’. But you only know society’s straight line about the flesh. You can’t penetrate beyond society’s thick, grey fear of the flesh. Drink deep or taste not the plasma spring. See what I’m saying? I’m not just talking about sex and penetration. I’m talking about penetration beyond the veil of the flesh, a deep penetrating dive into the plasma pool.”

The science and technology aesthetic, in conjunction with Cronenberg’s recognition of the peril from within as the ultimate uncontrollable threat to our mortality, serves to shape his dark narratives with their courageous, melancholic outcomes (Rodley 58). Unlike representations within the science fiction cinema of his youth, the experience of technology in a Cronenberg film is an embodied one. As the University of Manchester’s Anna Powell notes in her book  Deleuze and Horror Film, “ [t]he Videodrome (1983) cassette exhibits a variant of life, with organic attributes” (81). For Powell, this film in particular “exemplifies Cronenberg’s assemblage of ideological critique and re-mapping of the body’s corporeality” (80). As hybrids, Cronenberg’s props suggest the posthuman to be a condition that involves distributed cognition and agency, emergent consciousness, and information coding through multiple levels of knowing. ² But is there really a clear distinction between the “props” and the actors that inter(act) with them in Videodrome ? When the television screen softens and bulges, calling for Max Renn to “come to me, come to Nicki,” can we really refer to it solely as a prop? Cronenberg swings both ways in this regard. Max eventually takes on the attributes of hardware—becoming machine—when he develops a slit in his stomach which becomes a repository for a video cassette and, later, a gun, which remerges as a prosthetic confluence of his hand, connected by flexible electronic conduit which is woven above and under the skin. Philosopher and Utrecht University professor Rosi Braidotti would recognize this as a reification of “the fascination for the monstrous, the freaky body double,” and with regards to Videodrome observes that “of special relevance are the scenes where the video/TV screen comes alive, alternatively as an alluring female body, a bleeding, dying, tortured body, and, at the end, a mass of bleeding organs” (249). Hard and soft meet, metal and flesh, flesh and voltage, voltage and consciousness, consciousness and hallucination, in a chaotic heterogeneous muddle of seemingly disparate ontologies.

Accumicon – Spectacular Optometry International Helmet (prop).
Tom Coulter, Assistant Art Director

Videodrome, 1983
Plastic, foam, metal
35.6 x 44.4 x 31.8cm
David Cronenberg Collection, TIFF Film Reference Library

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Technoenchantments

The film set of The Fly is located in the laboratory of Seth Brundle, a scientist who uses himself as subject in order to experiment with the prospect of teleportation only to end up as the orchestrator of his own demise. The telepod in the film, despite being based upon the cylinder of a vintage Ducati motorcycle, appears to be a cross between a fifties-era spaceship and an exaggerated insect body. During a demonstration of the teleportation technology, a fly becomes trapped inside with Brundle, resulting in the splicing of their DNA. Unknowingly an admixture of Homo sapiens and Musca domestica, the scientist begins to lose his human features while gaining insectivorous ones. “I seem to be stricken by a disease with a purpose… I’m becoming Brundlefly!” The metamorphosis is gradual, facilitated by Brundle’s conversations with his cyber-assistant, the computer embedded in the telepod. Jane Bennett, Professor of Political Theory at John Hopkins University, has commented on the strange beauty of late modernity’s “admixtures of animal and human, organ and machine, the given and the made” (4). Referring to these as “technoenchantments,” Bennett counters the post-Enlightenment assumptions regarding the disenchantment of the world, and sees hybrids as potentially confounding dualities. Brundle is only a hybrid in as much as his DNA has been spliced with that of the fly, but he is wholly another creature. Film and literature scholar Eric Santner’s work on “creatureliness” comes to mind here, and while The Fly is fiction, the viewer knows they could just as easily metamorphose should the right disease come along. When Seth’s body parts fall off, they are immediately archived. Speaking to himself, he points out, “You are a relic, yes you are,” and refers to his ear, his fingernails and even his penis as “artifacts of a bygone era—of historical interest only.” The medicine cabinet becomes the reliquary, the “Brundle Museum of Natural History.” Seeing body parts lined up along a counter in Brundle’s increasingly derelict loft/lab, we get the sense of the chaos entering his personal ecosystem. The body parts are present through their absence, and as viewers we identify with Brundle’s loss and the fear associated with becoming something other than ourselves. Finally, the pathetic image of Seth as a man/fly/machine and his/its request for termination of the deeply inadequate hybrid, or even cyborg body, is a far cry from the utopic dreams of the android so prevalent in the films shown in theatres during that decade. Seth Brundle’s left ear in soap dish (prop).
Chris Walas Inc., Creature Effects

The Fly, 1986
Surface painted tinted hydrocal and white plastic soap dish
Courtesy John Board

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The Body and the Machine

For Cronenberg, the cyborg body can be deeply flawed, but it is not without its erotic potential. In Crash, what you see is what you get—people dealing with the integration of the body and technology, and the incommensurability of that integration. Various types of metal prostheses, from leg braces to full body armatures, as in the case of the character of Gabrielle, serve as recollection-objects arousing the protagonist, James Ballard’s sexual proclivity for the ultimate clash between the body and the car. ³ Gabrielle’s body-brace-cum-exoskeleton has a complement in the surgical instruments of Dead Ringers. In both cases they are highly stylized and sculptural, designed to adapt to the body’s curved surfaces; although metal, the designs are intended to fit upon or within bodies. It is this particular type of prosthetic that creates the vibrancy so necessary for the viewer to collapse one into the other, machine into body. The braces supporting the characters in Crash can be considered interveners, but it is important to see the car and the scarred body as parts within the same network of agents. ⁴ Gabrielle’s leg brace, worn in the film by Rosanna Arquette (costume).
Stephan Dupuis, Special Effects Makeup and Prosthetics Designer

Crash, 1996
Moulded plastic, fiberglass
70 x 12 x 15cm
David Cronenberg Collection, TIFF Film Reference Library

In her catalogue essay accompanying the exhibition Crimes Against Nature featuring the work of Mark Prent and David Cronenberg, the Art Gallery of Hamilton’s Louise Dompierre shares her preoccupation with finding shape to Cronenberg’s world. With regards to Stereo (1969), she observes, “What is remarkable about this film, as with most of Cronenberg’s films, is his use of architecture as an element of the plot. And if it can be said that the body is the site of horror in his work, architectural space and form, the human created environment, is the other dynamic factor, without which horror could not manifest itself” (8). The spaces Cronenberg chooses to work with and within are instrumental, as Dompierre suggests and, once again, Hitchcock can be evoked for his insistence that the house in Rebecca was as much of a character in that film as any of the actors. ⁵ The lavish restaurant in Eastern Promises (2007), the 19 ^th century farmhouse in A History of Violence (2005), Seth Brundle’s loft-cum-laboratory in The Fly, and the Cathode Ray Mission of Videodrome typify Cronenberg’s attention to site as instrumental to the mise-en-scène.

Interior detail of Trans-Siberian restaurant (maquette).
Carol Spier, Production Designer

Eastern Promises, 2007
Painted foam, paper, fabric, plastic
101.4 x 76.0 x 24.5cm
Courtesy Carol Spier

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Cars and Other Vehicular Actors

One could argue that the car threads its way through Cronenberg’s oeuvre, acting as both character and site, object and subject, a thing within which to act and to act upon. Crash is the most obvious example of this, but it is worthwhile to track the motor vehicle as a vibrant object used by Cronenberg to identify the nature of his characters and their relationship to the ground under their feet. Methods of transport are used as determinants of character, as modes of societal identification, as ways of being in the world. In his seminal text, The Culture of Nature, Alexander Wilson analyzes car culture in North America in tandem with the rise of tourism and the subordination of nature. For Wilson, the car “imposed a horizontal quality on the landscape as well as architecture” (33). The faster the car, the flatter the Earth appeared. Film critic Geoff Pevere reiterates this in a discussion of the significance of the car within cult classic films like Duel, Repo Man, Badlands and The Road Warrior when he states: “Whether it was speeding through the frame or observing landscape fly by through its windows, the car put the moving in the pictures” (Pevere 2013). Wilson refers to speeding through the landscape in this manner as events in automotive time, a concept which bears heavily on the discussion herein (34). Cronenberg’s own preoccupation with automotive time can be tracked from his early homage to drag racing in Fast Company (1979), to his canny construction of the limousine as metaphor for the insularity of asset manager Eric Packer in Cosmopolis. Nonetheless it is “The Italian Machine”, a short produced for the CBC in 1976, that best illustrates, for this writer Cronenberg’s recognition of the technological effect motor vehicles have had on our collective psyches. It opens in a machine shop inhabited by three motorcycle enthusiasts. Surrounded by bike parts and all manner of tools and fasteners, they discuss plans to liberate a Ducati 900 from the clutches of an art collector who has it on display as an objet d’art in his home. Disguised as a documentary film crew, they are invited into the collector’s home only to encounter another untoward art object, the beautiful Rinaldo. Soon after this initial meeting, the imposters invite Rinaldo into their plot to steal the Ducati, convincing him that it is “an endangered species,” and that “the asshole is going to kill the machine.” Rinaldo agrees and decides to appeal to the collector’s vanity: “This would, I think, be the first time one objet d’art, namely myself, bought another one, namely my motorcycle friend.” The scene in the living room where the schemers encounter the collector is a vivid illustration of Bruno Latour’s actor network theory. A constellation of agents can be drawn between the collector, his mod wife, their resident human-artwork Rinaldo, the modern art on the walls, and the motorcycle thieves in waiting, with the Ducati 900 at the centre. All the elements of Cronenberg’s future insertions of the motor vehicle as instrumental to postmodern time and existence are present in this vatic short. This is not to say the representation of the car is consistently within an obsessive realm, but it continues to assert itself as a thing which speaks for the director. In Fast Company, it is not just the exterior of the dragsters and their “macho highway chic” that draws the attention of audience, but the dark, dystopian interiors of the cars and their drivers, insectivorous in their protective gear. Johnny Smith’s hairstyle and clothing establish Christopher Walken’s character as naive and innocent in the Dead Zone, but it is the scene of him straining to see from behind the infamously inadequate windshield wipers in his Volkswagen Beetle prior to his car crash that provides the intense contrast to his changed character post-coma. There are numerous other examples of the vehicle as tactical agent, both through its presence and its absence: Seth Brundle’s motion sickness in The Fly, and his ironic obsession with teleportation; the bonding of the driver Nikolai with Anna in Eastern Promises through the repair of her Ural, a Russian copy of a BMW flat-twin motorcycle; the pickup and sedans driven by various hit men in History of Violence, and the lack of a car that forces Tom Stall to hobble to his farmhouse; finally, the car as home in Cosmopolis— initially slick and rife with screens it eventually degrades along with its occupant.

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Machine Agency

Crash remains the penultimate example of this parallel genre. It is extraordinarily beautiful and everything, including the road, seems to come alive. Cronenberg has discussed the set of Crash as one that was highly sexualized, where even the city itself had a sexual quality, but perhaps we can replace sexual with vibrant or, to use another Bennett term, evanescent. Bennett asks where evanescence lies, as property of stuff or of people? In Crash it oscillates between the two entities, and the elaborate braces facilitate the sexualized agency of these strange hybrids, bridging the relationship between humans and machines.

Cronenberg excels at the creation of liminal objects that evoke the uncanny and contest the purity of the human corpus. The braces of Crash are one iteration, but they are no match for the insectivorous typewriters of Naked Lunch (1991) that speak to their writer, Bill Lee, who is deeply embedded in the Interzone, or the fleshy game pods of  eXistenZ (1999). The typewriters are phenomenal objects—sculptural, animate, abject reifications of the control exerted on the writer by his tools. Like a bug that has managed to escape the clutches of the exterminator only to mutate into a talking typewriter, Lee’s is glistening and dark, its carapace separating to reveal a sphincter-like orifice that speaks to its proprietor. If this is one of Cronenberg’s most base prop/agents, the game pods of eXistenZ are his most elegant. The pods are enchanting. Attached to the gamer’s body via a pulsing umbilicus, they are of the body, made of flesh and, like a child attached to its mother, genetically one with the gamer. OCAD University’s Dot Tuer argues for a hybrid subjectivity within the new media landscape in which there is “an apprehension of the self that is struggling to bridge the natural and artificial, the sensory and the constructed” (5). For Tuer, it is a condition that is “reflexive, radical, and crossbred…[transforming] the phantasmagorical terror of a devouring matrix or the utopian ecstasy of cyberspace into a fluid apprehension of the self that interacts with simulation without being dominated by it” (15). Certainly the gamer, in fact any gamer, would argue they are the model of this particular type of subjectivity, but within this discussion of material agents and their role as actors in the progression of narrative in the aforementioned films, they are not only objects but subjects. The beauty of the pods and the maternal care demonstrated by Allegra Geller when she caresses her own, makes for very complex object relations.

MetaFlesh Game-Pod (prop).
Stephan Dupuis, Special Makeup Designer and Creature Designer
Jim Isaac, Visual and Special Effects Supervisor

eXistenZ, 1999
Composite silicone, mixed media, hidden metal components
20 x 16 x 8cm
David Cronenberg Collection, TIFF Film Reference Library

Things change after eXistenZ. Instead of objects signifying the threat from within, the characters themselves bear that burden. But certain typologies remain.

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Resources

• Gallery

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¹ Heidegger, “The Thing.”

² N. Katherine Hayles, online colloquium slides, http://online.kitp.ucsb.edu/online/colloq/hayles1/oh/04.html

³ The Skin of the Film , 81.

⁴ Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett discusses Bruno Latour’s actant as neither a subject nor an object but an “intervener.” (9)

⁵ Truffaut, Hitchcock, 131.

Works Cited

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: The Political Ecology of Things Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

Braidotti, Rosi. Metamorphoses: Toward a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Polity: Cambridge, 2002.

Dompierre, Louise. Prent/Cronenberg: Crime Against Nature. Toronto: The Power Plant, 1987.

Marks, Laura U. The Skin of the Film. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999.

Pevere, Geoff. “Why cars drive cult movies,” Globe and Mail, April 19, 2013. R2.

Pickering, Andrew. The Mangle of Practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Powell, Anna. Deleuze and the Horror Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007.

Rodley, Chris, Ed. Cronenberg on Cronenberg. London: Faber and Faber, 1997.

Truffaut, François. Hitchcock. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984.

Tuer, Dot. Mining the Media Archive: Essays on Art, Technology and Cultural Resistance. Toronto: YYZ Books, 2005.

Wilson, Andrew. The Culture of Nature: North American Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez. Toronto: Between the Lines, 1991.