| Maybe
it’s obvious to say that Cronenberg is just this side
of David Lynch. Though I'm not sure which side. The Canadian
side I guess. In any case, both utilize clichés as
cinematic tools with a straight face, as if clichés
are just keys on a piano that includes realism, parody, pathos
and all the rest; and both are adept at contorting the tone
of a scene from one end of the emotional tightrope to the
other, so that what begins as a flat and cheery episode expands
into something dark and disconcerting without you knowing
just where the transition took place; and neither are afraid
to let the scene unfold outside of the viewer’s comfort
zone and hold it there, as Lynch does with the absurdly extended
Blue Velvet scene in which we first enter Frank’s
apartment with the hostaged Kwisatz Haderach as Quantum Leap
lip synchs to something like Patsy Cline after Frank announces
that he’ll fuck anything that moves, except Heineken.
Both conflate the grotesque and the sexual into a fleshy Baconian
all-pervasiveness. Both are named David. And both are adored
by teen goths and tattooed twentysomethings who jock say,
Chuck Palahniuk, so it’s tempting to invoke the right
of Anti-hater and underplay their merits so as not to be a
compensatory dickface by association. I guess the main difference
is not their approach but their subject matter, which necessarily
affects their approach: Cronenberg is preoccupied with overt
technoculture commentary (Videodrome, eXistenZ,
The Fly) while Lynch’s obsession with dreams
and dream logic (Dune, Mulholland Drive,
Lost Highway) makes him more of a “traditional”
Surrealist (the doppleganger scenes of Lost Highway
are more than just homages to Maya Deren). Even the supposed
sexism of Lynch could be construed as a misreading of an engagement
with Surrealist tropes. Though personally I think Lynch’s
portrayal of women is more complicated than the straight “your
boobs are the sound of a tree breaking” of the Parisian
boys club of the 1920s.
But
Lynch followed 2001’s Mulholland Drive with
a series of speaking tours promoting transcendental meditation,
so this review is about Cronenberg, who made a movie instead.
The title refers to Viggo’s proclivity for killing,
but the survey-course sound of it also references the history
of violence as portrayed in pop culture [ed note: embarrassingly
obvious Freudian typographical slip of the day: I initially
typed ‘pop culture’ as ‘poop culture’].
And Cronenberg’s manipulation of genre expectations
here is kind of unbelievable in how deft it is: his tonal
dexterity and genuine use of cliché allow him to craft
scenes that awaken our delight in violence as well as an awareness
of that delight. It's as if each act of violence contains
the history of that particular violence as a storytelling
device: the movie thus anticipates our enjoyment without passing
judgment on it, this lack of judgment then acting as a space
in which we view our automatic responses with a disconcerting
combination of condemnation and indifference. It's as if the
movie makes room for the audience reaction to its own reaction
within it, if such a thing is even possible. Take the scene
on the front lawn in which Viggo blows somebody’s fucking
face off. Cronenberg cuts to a superfluous shot of the bloody
remnants of the face quivering on the ground. The result is
something artificially tweaked that has the effect of something
real: it’s an absurdity that mimics the absurdity of
real violence, but in how it feels as opposed to how it happens.
This is Tarantino’s one true gift as a director (the
startling nonchalance of a gunshot played out in unblinking
real-time), but for Cronenberg it’s just an extension
of his overall aesthetic of tonal play. As is his acquiescence
to the pent-up audience demand for vengeance against the high
school bully: what starts out as an exhilarating release ends
up a disturbing spectacle we can’t contain, the ending
casting a backwards shadow on the moment before the violence
occurred, when the movie seemed to be encouraging us to yearn
for it. What it was doing instead was utilizing conventions
that encourage us. This kind of authorial distance isn’t
satiric: it’s an engagement with the unresolvable tension
between what we want and when we get it.
Which
includes two parallel sex scenes I can’t stop thinking
about, and not just because I’m a voyeur and a pervert.
Unless I’m totally misremembering, this construction
is straight up filched from Showgirls, in which cinematic
tagteam Eszterhas/Verhoeven make stripper Saved by the Bell
fake-fuck the Kwisatz Haderach in a particularly awkward and
memorable orchestration of coitus simulation in the V.I.P.
room of a titty bar; later, upgraded to her glamorous titular
self, Saved by the Bell fucks the Kwisatz Haderach for real,
but in the same particularly awkward and memorable orchestration
as before, with the K.Haderach’s seedy backyard pool
sitting in for the V.I.P. room. The parallel is so totally
unsubtle it more or less demands we interpret the scene to
mean that a whore is a whore is a whore. Cronenberg takes
the Eszterhas/Verhoeven symbiote’s construction and
rewrites it with a complexity that kind of blew my mind. Both
of his sex scenes involve the fetish of infusing the present
with the past. In the first, Viggo’s wife dresses up
in cheerleader get-up to up the kink factor – except
the kink is not a quotidian Lolita fantasy so much as it is
a reliving of the past they never lived together; they make-out
like teenagers, turned on by the infiltration of fantasy into
reality, the scene extending way past the point of charmingly
playful and far into uncomfortable intimacy as they reach
the ultimate of pre-intercourse teen highs, the sixty-nine.
What kind of blew my mind is how the second scene inverts
the relationship between fantasy and reality established by
the first sex scene. Once again the kink is powered by the
past infusing the present, but this time it’s the past
as reality infusing the present as fantasy,
since moments before Viggo confirmed that he really is a cold-blooded
killer, thereby demoting their bucolic family life together
to a fiction. Here, the obliteration of fantasy by reality
is itself a fantasy, one that triggers Viggo’s wife’s
disgust so as to overpower it with lust, without also obliterating
that disgust. That these mutually exclusive usts play out
simultaneously during the fucking also kind of blew my mind.
That the only bare ass we see during this impossible scene
is Viggo’s is also retroactively complex, given that
a scene or two later we see his wife naked for the first time,
the context too post-apocalyptic to be erotic. Though to be
honest that’s how I felt the whole time during Showgirls,
as if Basic Instinct is the kind of apocalypse it’s
best not to survive. |