Consumed by David Cronenberg (4th Estate, £18.99)
If you were trying to capture Consumed in a few words, they would include: cannibalism, consumerism, Cannes film festival, elective amputation, 3D flesh printing, insect larvae and Kim Jong Un. The book’s real subject, however, is the one place where all these things coexist: the internet.
Google “David Cronenberg” and you learn that Consumed is his first novel, and that the “Canadian filmmaker, screenwriter and actor,” also known as the “King of Venereal Horror” or “Baron of Blood,” was born in 1943. Recent photos show a shock of white hair raked back from sharp blue eyes and a brow that is usually furrowed in bemusement. The effect is a wry kind of sternness reminiscent of late photos of Samuel Beckett, or what Beckett might have looked like if he had grown up in “an ordinary, middle-class progressive Jewish family.” That’s how Cronenberg describes his childhood in Toronto. His mother was a pianist. His father was a writer. As a child, Cronenberg remembers falling asleep to the click of fingers on the typewriter. He started writing short stories when he was very young. He also became obsessed with science, especially insects. He spent his first year at the University of Toronto majoring in cell biology before switching to English. After graduation, he began making underground films, learning as he went.
In the 1970s, the Canada Film Development Fund was offering subsidies to independent filmmakers, and after a few years in television, Cronenberg went to work at Cinépix, a company that used state funds to put out soft porn and horror movies. His first two feature films, Shivers (1975) and Rabid (1977), contained elements of both. The films turned big profits but Cronenberg decided to stay in Canada rather than head to Hollywood. Relying on state funds, he developed an idiosyncratic “trash” aesthetic that used low genre themes and conventions to tell highly inventive stories. In time, he turned himself into a strange crossbreed: a B-movie auteur.
Videodrome (1983) was his international breakthrough. James Woods plays a sleazy executive at a public TV station in Toronto, who stumbles upon a snuff broadcast called “Videodrome” and becomes obsessed with it. The film blends reality and hallucination to the point where it is pointless to debate where one starts or the other leaves off. Cronenberg presents actual and virtual life not as opposed, but as continuous. TV screens become pulsing, pixellated lips that suck characters into them headfirst; TV sets explode, and fling out sizzling guts. The film’s success paved the way for Cronenberg to take on bigger budget projects, such as his 1986 remake of the 1950s cult classic The Fly, about a brilliant scientist (Jeff Goldblum) who builds a teleportation machine that accidentally turns him into a giant insect.
In this, and his next two films, Cronenberg moved fluidly between the “real” world and characters’ hallucinations. He made bodies spray stage blood and break apart into oozing hunks of latex and wax. In January 1986, Screen magazine coined a term to describe the renaissance of low-budget gore that took place with the advent of video: “body horror.”
“The contemporary horror film tends to play not so much on the broad fear of Death,” film scholar Philip Brophy wrote in a special issue on the subject, “but more precisely on the fear of one’s own body, how one controls and relates to it.” Body horror, Brophy explains, “conveys to the viewer a graphic sense of physicality.” The consensus remains that Cronenberg is its first and greatest practitioner. But if I had to pick one word for what obsesses him, it would be metamorphosis.
In the 1990s and 2000s, Cronenberg gradually moved away from body horror proper to make a series of more realistic movies. But even when he left sci-fi behind, he remained fixated on people who become other people.
Take M Butterfly (1993). In Cronenberg’s adaptation of David Henry Hwang’s play, lust for a cross-dressing Peking opera singer turns Jeremy Irons from an uptight accountant working in the French consulate, into a traitor, and finally into an Oriental “butterfly,” who wears lollipop red nail polish, a wig, and a makeshift kimono. Viggo Mortensen’s characters in Cronenberg’s History of Violence (2005) and Eastern Promises (2007) undergo equally radical changes.
If you were trying to capture Consumed in a few words, they would include: cannibalism, consumerism, Cannes film festival, elective amputation, 3D flesh printing, insect larvae and Kim Jong Un. The book’s real subject, however, is the one place where all these things coexist: the internet.
Google “David Cronenberg” and you learn that Consumed is his first novel, and that the “Canadian filmmaker, screenwriter and actor,” also known as the “King of Venereal Horror” or “Baron of Blood,” was born in 1943. Recent photos show a shock of white hair raked back from sharp blue eyes and a brow that is usually furrowed in bemusement. The effect is a wry kind of sternness reminiscent of late photos of Samuel Beckett, or what Beckett might have looked like if he had grown up in “an ordinary, middle-class progressive Jewish family.” That’s how Cronenberg describes his childhood in Toronto. His mother was a pianist. His father was a writer. As a child, Cronenberg remembers falling asleep to the click of fingers on the typewriter. He started writing short stories when he was very young. He also became obsessed with science, especially insects. He spent his first year at the University of Toronto majoring in cell biology before switching to English. After graduation, he began making underground films, learning as he went.
In the 1970s, the Canada Film Development Fund was offering subsidies to independent filmmakers, and after a few years in television, Cronenberg went to work at Cinépix, a company that used state funds to put out soft porn and horror movies. His first two feature films, Shivers (1975) and Rabid (1977), contained elements of both. The films turned big profits but Cronenberg decided to stay in Canada rather than head to Hollywood. Relying on state funds, he developed an idiosyncratic “trash” aesthetic that used low genre themes and conventions to tell highly inventive stories. In time, he turned himself into a strange crossbreed: a B-movie auteur.
Videodrome (1983) was his international breakthrough. James Woods plays a sleazy executive at a public TV station in Toronto, who stumbles upon a snuff broadcast called “Videodrome” and becomes obsessed with it. The film blends reality and hallucination to the point where it is pointless to debate where one starts or the other leaves off. Cronenberg presents actual and virtual life not as opposed, but as continuous. TV screens become pulsing, pixellated lips that suck characters into them headfirst; TV sets explode, and fling out sizzling guts. The film’s success paved the way for Cronenberg to take on bigger budget projects, such as his 1986 remake of the 1950s cult classic The Fly, about a brilliant scientist (Jeff Goldblum) who builds a teleportation machine that accidentally turns him into a giant insect.
In this, and his next two films, Cronenberg moved fluidly between the “real” world and characters’ hallucinations. He made bodies spray stage blood and break apart into oozing hunks of latex and wax. In January 1986, Screen magazine coined a term to describe the renaissance of low-budget gore that took place with the advent of video: “body horror.”
“The contemporary horror film tends to play not so much on the broad fear of Death,” film scholar Philip Brophy wrote in a special issue on the subject, “but more precisely on the fear of one’s own body, how one controls and relates to it.” Body horror, Brophy explains, “conveys to the viewer a graphic sense of physicality.” The consensus remains that Cronenberg is its first and greatest practitioner. But if I had to pick one word for what obsesses him, it would be metamorphosis.
In the 1990s and 2000s, Cronenberg gradually moved away from body horror proper to make a series of more realistic movies. But even when he left sci-fi behind, he remained fixated on people who become other people.
Take M Butterfly (1993). In Cronenberg’s adaptation of David Henry Hwang’s play, lust for a cross-dressing Peking opera singer turns Jeremy Irons from an uptight accountant working in the French consulate, into a traitor, and finally into an Oriental “butterfly,” who wears lollipop red nail polish, a wig, and a makeshift kimono. Viggo Mortensen’s characters in Cronenberg’s History of Violence (2005) and Eastern Promises (2007) undergo equally radical changes.
