David Cronenberg: Get Happy

Not black. Black squared. Black as in a shade darker than a mourner's armband. Your ear is falling off. You find yourself in a barn with a bovine addiction. You're an ordinary person in the hell of your own prosaic habits. Procreation is generational horror. Love is deadly. Eating is impossible. "My approach to things," says Cronenberg, "is, well, if this is what we've got here, if this is what we've got to work with, if this is what we are, then we'd better look at it and think about it and accept it. Jeff Goldblum in The Fly is not giving up. He's saying, okay, if I'm transforming, I'm becoming something. Instead of thinking of myself as this healthy person who is now decaying and diseased, I'm going to think of myself as someone who's undergoing a transformation and not prejudge it as something hideous and bad."

The most a Cronenberg character can hope for is to get back to square one. With their personal and professional lives almost completely unraveled, the gynecologist-twins in Dead Ringers go on a weekend binge of pharmaceuticals. "On Monday," Bev swears, "we go straight."

"The Mantle twins were something, weren't they?" marvels Cronenberg. "But you ask yourself, what's the reality? Well, when you're laughing, that's the reality, and when you're crying that's the reality."

Thank you, David.

Michael Jordan pushes Nikes and Gatorade; David Cronenberg could be a spokesperson for Bactine. And yet, the artist's philosophy of metaphysical infection, of biological insurrection, is not easily traced to its roots. The man who has now joined me on the couch is not a hooded Quasimodo with Poe's addictions or a stepchild's nightmares. He wears sweatpants, has three children, and keeps back issues of Car and Driver on his desk. "I had a very lovely childhood," David shrugs. "There's no classic Freudian neurotic thing in my past. But the fact is that childhood's over. Your parents die. Both my parents are dead. They were wonderful--I wish they were both alive. Generally, I'm optimistic. I like being alive." To underline his point, Cronenberg quotes a line from Dead Ringers that wound up on the cutting room floor: "'Happiness might very well be a glandular condition.' So to worry about whether you can find happiness or not is irrelevant. If the glandular secretions are right, you'll feel happy no matter what."

Cronenberg's idyllic upbringing notwithstanding, this is a man capable of blithely conjuring up a fly-man who kills his victims by throwing up on them. What is it that scares Cronenberg? "I'll tell you what's terrifying," he offers. "It's a terrifying thing when you're writing and you're staring at a blank page. And what is terrifying about that--is that everything is possible. Everything is possible."

Conversation with David Cronenberg is like a tram ride at the speed of light through The World Book. One minute we're talking about Porpoises, the next minute Circumcision, then Movie Magazines ("I read them and it makes me never want to make or see another picture again"), and after that, Guilt. "Well, I'm not good at guilt," David confesses. "I believe that guilt is a neurotic, perverse thing, a cultural thing. It's not a natural thing, like anger or happiness. It's not really an emotion, it's another level of something. I don't think animals have guilt." I insist that there's gotta be at least one animal that experiences guilt. He considers that for a moment, then comes up with a Cronenberg creature, if any naturally occurring on the face of the earth could be considered as such: "A platypus. Platypuses have guilt."

I'm still trying to figure out where David Cronenberg's movies come from. Cronenberg smiles quietly at my suggestion that artists-especially artists who make movies about defective gynecological instruments-draw from a backlog of traumatic experiences. He tells the story of a friend who went to hear Isaac Bashevis Singer speak. This friend, concerned that, as an aspiring writer, he had not suffered enough in his life, asked Singer about it. "Singer says, in that very Yiddish accent, 'It's like when I go to my tailor and I say to him, I don't want the pockets to be straight. I want them to be trendy, you know, I want them to be crooked. And the tailor says, don't worry. The way I make pockets, they're gonna be crooked.' And he's absolutely right. You'll suffer enough. Just to be alive under the best circumstances, you will still suffer--you will still crash and burn.

"Maybe the reason I write the films I do is the balancing act that we all do. Whatever you are, you have to balance with whatever you're not. Either by living with a person who's the other thing, or, if you have an art that you do, you do it in your art. In my case, it's almost like a spell that I do to keep it away from me. It's like the Romans with their curses when someone marries--acknowledge the nasty other. If you don't give the devil his due, then he'll take it in spades. So you say, well, I'm gonna give the devil his due."

And, if you're going to give the devil his due, you don't trifle with the cauldron of imagery in Naked Lunch, a hallucinatory pot that melts reality down like suet. "In terms of one's life, I suppose the idea of hell is exhilarating," says Cronenberg. "People are more interested in hell--it's a better story--heaven is just too boring. Heaven and hell is not really a structure that I..." he trails off.

"What did your parents tell you about it?"

"My mother was quite anti-religious. My parents were totally cool about it. My Dad asked if I wanted to go to Jewish school--we were Latvian Jews. I said, you mean another school after this one is finished? He said, yeah. I said forget it. But hell has gotta be here. There's no other place for it to be. What's bad is the human condition, which is also what's good. And that's the conundrum, that's the paradox, that's where the anguish is, that it does make sense that we're born, it makes sense that we die. But it also makes no sense. That we are born, and it really makes no sense that we die. I still have difficulty with this very basic fact."

Paradoxically, Cronenberg is a cosmological loner. "Consciousness is a miracle. I really do think that this is the only planet in the universe that has intelligent life. To me, there's no question about it. The odds against us happening were so immense that it makes perfect sense to me that we should be unique. People don't want to hear that because we have a need to feel that we're not alone and that there's something out there that's different from us and I can understand all that stuff. Still, I think that the reality is probably that we're it-- that we're the only event of consciousness."

For someone like myself, who has carried a book called Interstellar Communication: Scientific Perspectives through almost two decades, these are words that have the deadening thud of THERE IS NO SANTA to a four-year-old. It strikes me as odd that a person with Cronenberg's intellect cannot accept what most exobiologists and the greater portion of the astronomical community already have.

"I understand this yearning people have--it's like the way people yearn for there to be a God. You don't want to be alone, you don't want to be responsible for your own existence--it's too heavy, it's to much to take, it's too difficult to bear. That's why when we think about life forms in the universe, we tend to think of them as superior--we don't tend to think of them as kind of being like frogs--real frogs."

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