If Scanners, Videodrome, and Dead Ringers didn't lift your spirits, you missed the point. David Cronenberg, director of the new Naked Lunch, talks about life, death, pain, guilt, heaven, hell and, yes, happiness.
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The first time I saw David Cronenberg was from the nose up, behind a surgical mask. Playing an obstetrician in his own smart remake of The Fly, he was assisting Geena Davis in the delivery room. His voice soothing and reassuring, he rooted her on, urging her to push. And then, with a mixture of professional pride and detachment, he displayed the newborn--a giant, squirming larva.
If the eyes are the windows to the soul, I am tempted, in the case of director David Cronenberg, to request frosted glass. Because here's what I see: someone (not Sean Young) plunging an arm up to the elbow into James Woods's chest in Videodrome, a head exploding like a detonated cantaloupe in Scanners, Genevieve Bujold biting through the tree-root-like flesh joining twins Jeremy Irons and Jeremy Irons at the stomach in Dead Ringers.
I have seen only Cronenberg's eyes, the filmmaker as a bank robber, just a glimpse. Now I am visiting him in his hometown, where he has just finished his screen adaptation of William Burroughs's brilliant, idiosyncratic 1959 novel Naked Lunch, wellspring of the late 20th century cyberpunk movement, a modern day odyssey of illusory freedom and dissipation.
Toronto is haunted by the murmur of derivative French and the scrawl of graffiti in the train yards. Hacks of Greek, Croatian and Bahamian descent slalom their cabs between the oily sparks of trolley cars that look like crimson beetles on NutraSlim. Providence, comptroller of life's dosages, has mixed my medicines. I am alone in a city peopled by businessman, skateboarders, artists, hashish peddlers and the homeless man who writes "Like clockwork, she was always late" on the sidewalk in front of the train station. And for the first time in 11 years I am going to miss my wife's birthday. True, somewhere in Toronto, David Cronenberg, master vendor of psychic infections, is waiting to show me the lower half of his face. But that is of no consequence to my wife, who was not amused by that delivery scene in The Fly. Perhaps there is some minor solace to be found here; I'll ask Cronenberg to help me decide on a birthday present for her. Chances are she'll end up with something she's never gotten before.
Prudence Emery scolds me for climbing into her car, arguing that she could've been anyone--Toronto is filled with red Datsuns. Right away I see that this woman, unit publicist for Naked Lunch, is like bingo night at the skeptic's lodge, with a bullshit detector like a radio telescope. The numerous little dents in her car, however, indicate benign recklessness. And when she talks about Cronenberg, I'm reminded of the way my sister's eyes rolled into the back of her head when the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan. "David is a sweetheart. When you're on the set of a Cronenberg film, it's like a love-in. Nobody wants it to end." Prudence, whose production notes for Naked Lunch run to novella-length at 60 pages, has the fever. Despite being a woman, she is an apostle of David Cronenberg.
The prototypical Cronenberg disciple (and there are many) marches to a different drum machine. He is a blend of extremes--synthetics and wool. He ranges from the car mechanic with a six-pack looking for a cul-de-sac to the dweeb with a stratospheric IQ. The hacker who fixes my crashed hard drive knows exactly who David Cronenberg is. The guy who comes around on Fridays to air-blow the leaves and flick slugs off the porch thinks Cronenberg is the name of a standup comic, but he damned well knows The Dead Zone and Scanners.
Prudence's agenda has me spending my morning at a facility called Cinematheque, where she has arranged screenings of older Cronenberg films. Employee/Cronenberg disciple Michael Anderson, a mild-mannered human bookmobile in sagging black nylon socks, approves of my selections, especially Stereo. "You'll like this one. But don't be alarmed when you don't hear any sound for the first 10 minutes."
Stereo has the feel of a documentary in the way that our national anthem might be thought of as an opera aria. Institutionalized patients, later described as suffering from "telepathic dependency," "an electro-chemical addiction," wander about a postmodern stone building in Hamlet attire, with piercing expressions of profound mental disclosure. Halting narration is eventually provided by the saccharine voice of a clinician. In one scene, a topless woman makes passionate advances to a medical school mannequin, its chestplate removed to expose its inner organs. Another woman, fully clothed, "witnesses" the event with her eyes closed. I find more laughs in my viewing of Rabid, a hysterical indictment of cosmetic surgery set against a sunless Canadian winter (there's no daylight savings time in a Cronenberg film--all afternoons are suicidally bleak and night comes on like liver cancer), starring seminal porn star Marilyn Chambers as the victim of third-degree burns from a motorcycle accident.
The couch in David Cronenberg's office is too low, with a pitch that replicates an on-your-ass condition, as if the room were a bronco and I've been thrown. I have just apologized to the director for not being entirely familiar with his body of work and not being the kind of movie buff who knows all the dialogue to The Third Man. "That's okay. That's really the way I am, too," he assures me. "You'll never hear me say that movies are my life."
The lower half of Cronenberg's face fits the upper half just fine. The hollowness of overwork set in shades of purple around his eyes is offset by smooth skin and a jowl-free, Balkan jawline. He has the mannerisms of someone who's spent his entire life wearing glasses. The look is spring practice and L.L. Bean, the flagship of his wardrobe being the knit shirt. "When you show Stereo to a sociologist or a psychologist," he says, when I've told him what I thought of this short film, "they laugh all the way through, because the jargon is pretty accurate, pretty funny. And underneath, all of it means something. In a way, it's like stereo. The whole film together takes an hour. But you should listen to the sound first, then start over and watch the picture. That way you get a two-hour movie."
Cronenberg obviously does not go out of his way to take himself seriously. Oliver Stone plays a film school professor in The Doors, Cronenberg casts himself as a baby doctor who brings ghastly mutations into the world. Stone's Bible is probably a dog-eared copy of the Pentagon Papers; Cronenberg's is the latest issue of the Journal of Abnormal Psychology. "Penis! Penis! Penis!" says a self-righteous Ron Kovic in Born on the Fourth of July; "I sure as hell don't want to become the Colonel Sanders of plastic surgery," a specialist complains in Rabid.
"I think the only two movies I've done that didn't have laughs in them were probably The Brood and maybe The Dead Zone. Otherwise, there are hefty comic elements in everything and to me that's just part of the territory. But it's not genre humor, or spoof stuff. Not that that's not legitimate, but it's not something that I want to do. My humor is more like what used to be called black humor."
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."
Suddenly we're interrupted by an aide bearing a tray of refreshments. My remark of "Here's God now" evokes a chilly smile from the aide, another Cronenberg disciple, who sets the tray down and all but sprints from the room. "Yes. God is in coffee and cookies," Cronenberg says, only kidding a little. "What is here is in fact complex and difficult enough to occupy more than one lifetime. We are responsible for what we do. And any morality that we have is not something some guy from outer space is gonna impose on us. You look at The Day the Earth Stood Still--what a wish fulfillment. Guys will come from outer space and they're gonna tell us to be good boys and we must do what we're told. And if we're not we're gonna be punished. And that's the only way we're gonna have peace on earth--a kind of an English schoolboy view of the universe, you know? That the headmaster will come and punish you if you're not good.
"One of the themes of my version of Naked Lunch is a man who's sort of living his life out of the corner of his eye. And is not accepting his homosexuality and is not accepting his art and is not accepting a lot of things. We're constantly running away from our own reality and our own selves. In his life, Burroughs was kind of fleeing the death of his wife-- it's kind of implicit in the novel. In my movie I make it explicit. But where the movie is quite different from the book is in the sense that it's more traditional, in that you have a real character who undergoes changes from beginning to end."
Hearing Cronenberg say the words "more traditional," I make the mistake of uttering the word "mainstream." "Where?" Cronenberg challenges. "Who said mainstream?"
"There was some mention of it in the production notes."
"I didn't say it--Pru must've made that up." David is laughing now. "It'll never be, it can't be a mainstream film because I know what mainstream really means. I get scripts that arc mainstream all the time and I'm not interested in doing that. The only reason it's mainstream is it's going to be distributed by Fox and it has some recognizable names in it who have done mainstream films and it should get decent distribution. But in terms of its sensibility it's not as mainstream as the book Naked Lunch is. The book was an incredible event when it came out and there's no way the movie's gonna match that, and I wasn't trying to do that. Burroughs's book took a number of years to suffuse through the consciousness of North America, but when it did... 'Saturday Night Live' humor in the early days was all Naked Lunch stuff."
David is excited about a packet of proof sheets that have just come in. The photographs are of Cronenberg behind the wheel of an old formula one car, competing in his last car race. "I just find a bunch of stiffs I know I can beat," he says. But those who have followed his racing passion claim he knows his way around the track well enough to win on his own. And not only that, he wants to make a racecar movie, Raceline (road warrior Mel Gibson has been rumored to be set for the lead). "I made a movie about racing a while ago called Fast Company and no critics ever want to talk about it because it doesn't fit." Cronenberg, who counted the number of German cars in the parking lot on the way in, naturally has seen every racing movie made in Hollywood.
"Grand Prix was successful. Steve McQueen did Le Mans, but he was so anti-melodrama that the movie's almost a documentary. There was a movie called The Racers, with Kirk Douglas, directed by Henry Hathaway in CinemaScope, Stereo Sound, made in 1955. I love watching it because all those cars are vintage cars now. When I saw Bobby Deerfield, I thought, this movie was made by someone who hates cars. It turns out that Sydney Pollack loves cars and is a total car freak, all that stuff. And something like Days of Thunder--it was damned before the elements were brought to it because it was misconceived and it was made for all the wrong reasons. I mean, I love racing and I was bored. It's sad, because it makes it difficult for the next person."
Cronenberg's movie will deal with "things about racecar driving that just haven't been said yet. Some things about racing are really fascinating and it's not all fear of dying and technostuff." Will he do it straight? David takes a small bite of God and gently whisks crumbs from his lap. "Yeah, well... sort of..."
My wife, who knows Toronto, has encouraged me to have dinner in Chinatown. But on my way there, a Croatian cab driver warns of shootings and gang wars. The possibility exists that my wife is distressed about my missing her birthday. In the morning, David is running late, which allows me to call her. "Tell David Cronenberg I appreciate what he's doing, but I still had to walk out of the room when I tried to watch The Dead Zone last night," she instructs me, not the least bit intolerable about my being away on her birthday. To avoid falling into a depressive stupor over her heartbreaking knack for being reasonable, I flee to the insensate comfort of television. Sally Jessy Raphael's show is on grannie-strippers. An 86-year-old woman can't manage to get out of her clothes before the stripper music ends. Well, when the reality is age, then age is the reality. I think I'm catching on.
"It's nice to be wanted," David remarks, hearing about the octogenarian stripper. Having discussed God, consciousness and the nature of reality, we're now discussing Hollywood. Cronenberg is accomplished at buffering his general disdain, but I'm still reminded of a few lines from Dead Ringers: "I have the residue of another life. I have to scrape it off of my shoe, once and for all."
"What goes on in Hollywood fascinates me as it does many people--there's some amazing people there, good and bad. And I have no qualms ... everybody goes to Hollywood to make deals whether you're Bergman or Bertolucci, or whoever--if you want U.S. distribution, presales and all that stuff. But I do think that I couldn't function in the system. There are directors who thrive on it--they love it, they do great. But for my art, I can't imagine writing in Hollywood. You write in Toronto in the winter, it's great. You're isolated, you're thinking only about what you're writing. I don't read the trades, I don't want to know who's doing what. You know, when my movie Dead Ringers came up, there were five other twins movies, including Big Business and Twins. There's always something vaguely similar out there and it's best not to hear about it."
It's here, perhaps, where David Cronenberg's subtly skewed perspective, like an Andrew Wyeth painting with a small ear painted on the side of one of those lovely farm houses, really hits me. Putting Dead Ringers in the same category as Big Business or Twins is like saying The Exorcist and Heidi were movies about little girls. Cronenberg probably thinks his upcoming project M. Butterfly is in competition with Batman Returns. A recurring phrase in Prudence's epic production notes comes to mind. Does "the danger of being creative" lie ultimately in operating with no point of reference?
"People who create art but don't realize that it can be dangerous often pay the price. There are a lot of suicides and a lot of slow deaths by drinking. So, it can be fatal. Part of it is yes, there's a thrill, and a desire, and a necessity to reveal yourself, but you want to do it cleverly, you want to do it in a way that you still feel protected."
The discussion turns to the recent death of Colleen Dewhurst (who appeared in The Dead Zone). It occurs to me, this late in the game, that I'm killing time with the Woody Allen of horror films. Death and dying are preoccupations of Cronenberg's. "She was a sweetie," he recalls. "It's sad--she had such force and presence. Then you hear about these 86-year-old strippers and it's like ah, fuck--I hope I'm able to stand up on a stage and take my clothes off when I'm 86--I'll tell ya, I wouldn't mind, if it meant a little more time. Ars longa, vita brevis--and that's no joke--I feel I'm just starting to get started. Talking about revealing your innermost vulnerabilities: the image of John Huston on the set with the oxygen mask in a wheelchair--I love it! You know, I want to say"here Cronenberg imitates the emphysemic Huston by growling into his palms to make his voice sound like it's coming from beneath a mask"Cut! Cut!"
It's my turn, now, to scrape the residue of another life from the bottom of my shoes. The reality is birthdays and having not found a suitable present for my wife--hashish makes her eyes water--I'm faced with the prospect of presenting myself a day late, without a gift, wearing the same socks I've had on since I left for Toronto. I wonder if my socks smell.
"They look okay," David reassures me, "but I'm not gonna sniff. Why?"
"It's my wife's birthday."
"Oh, really? My wife's was yesterday."
I learn that some of the most terrifying visions of reality have been conceived by a man who just gave his wife 41 roses for her birthday. With baby's breath. As we're walking out, David Cronenberg wants to know what I'll be giving to my wife for her birthday.
"Well, she just got a short hairdo."
"Ah... then she needs earrings."