Cosmopolis (David Cronenberg, 2012)

For the last decade, David Cronenberg has retreated from his body horror nightmares of modernity and moved into the traumas that inherently exist in life, well outside contemporary anxieties. The postwar kitchen sink drama cum shattered mental breakdown of Spider. The instinctual savagery of man displayed even in the title of A History of Violence. The histories made visible on bodies via gang tattoos in Eastern Promises. The formation, and potential inadequacies, of theories to explore the psychology of all of this in A Dangerous Method. The old monsters still remain, if they are not as visible. Where the mind tends to ooze out of suppurating wounds in prior Cronenberg films, the dynamic reverses in Spider to make the body horror internal as the body collapses into the mind. In A Dangerous Method, it is Keira Knightley herself, her jutting jaw and angular frame thrown into disarray as her illness complicates the work and professional relationship of its two psychiatrists.

Cosmopolis bridges the earlier, topical body horror with the abstract, unseen terrors of Cronenberg’s late period. Indeed, in this film, the monster may be the camera itself, an Arri Aflexa that renders a picture of undeniable ugliness. Black levels pool like ink, unreal colors bleed into each other, and attempts at old-school in-camera effects make some of Hitchcock’s laughable rear-projections look like location shoots in comparison. That this is all clearly deliberate does not, on the face of it, serve as a full defense of the garish unpleasantness of the frame, and those alienated from this alienating movie cannot be blamed much for pushing outside of it. Speaking for myself, though, Cosmopolis is just about the most enthralling film of the year, capable of sucking in a viewer into the same black hole that consumes the image and the strange (and even more strangely delivered) dialogue. Not explicitly an apocalypse movie nor a Death of Cinema picture, Cronenberg’s latest feels like both, as the sudden meaningless of money threatens to take the world (and film) with it.

A Dangerous Method (David Cronenberg, 2011)

David Cronenberg throws the audience for a loop from the start of A Dangerous Method. The stately opening credits, unfolding gracefully over close-ups of ink blotting the pages of correspondence, is so elegant that it cannot even be taken for a sort of proto-Rorschach test. It is as conventional and soft a commencement to a costume drama as credits can be. Then, Cronenberg cuts straight to a shot of Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) shrieking, cackling and hissing against the glass, resembling less her usual, composed and corseted ladies than Jane Eyre's Bertha, the embodiment of the repressed female id. In an instant, the director pushes under the "proper" surface of the period drama to confront its twisted secrets. The fact that most of the film occurs in bright daylight is no coincidence; the monsters that eat at these characters are not creatures that come out in the night. They are in all of us at all times, whether they're visible or not.

Cronenberg's style has always been formal, but A Dangerous Method is so classically composed that a newcomer would never guess its maker had also directed such body horror classics as Videodrome and Crash. Yet by placing Sabina's "hysteria" upfront, the director clues us in on his basic aim: the film is merely the psychological root of his horror movies. As Knightley writhes around in mental agony, Cronenberg fully subsumes his tumorous grotesqueries fully into the mind, which can torment the body well enough without tumorous growths or other icky, hyperbolic infections. As Glenn Kenny rightly put it on Twitter shortly after the film's premiere, Sabina, and her sexuality, is the traditional monster in a typical Cronenberg film.

Eastern Promises

[This post originally appeared at Cinema Viewfinder as part of the David Cronenberg Blog-A-Thon. Please take the time to check out a few other entries on this incredible director if you haven't already.]

David Cronenberg's movies, to boil them down to their simplest essence, are about identity. In his old body horror masterpieces, The Fly and Videodrome, the Canadian director deconstructed identity via physical dissolution, stripping away literal flesh to show mental breakdowns. Dead Ringers, with its conjoined twins unsure how to operate once separated from each other, visualized a split personality in a manner that even Brian De Palma couldn't have dreamed up when he tread similar waters with Sisters. So fascinated is he by the nature of identity that a director then known for gross-out horror could be the perfect choice to direct an adaptation of M. Butterfly, a play about bent gender, sexual confusion and national and ethnic clashes.

In Eastern Promises, the protagonist literally wears his identity on his sleeve, and his arms, chest, back and legs. So covered is he in tattoos that, when the film arrives to its most infamous scene, one wonders if Cronenberg shot it to show, yes, there are some areas this man has not inked. Nikolai's (Viggo Mortensen) tattoos are tribal, in a sense, coded engravings that signal to other members of the Russian mob his achievements and feats of loyalty. These primitive scrawls, more that Mortensen's imposing presence, strong jawline and impenetrable sunglasses, make him intimidating and unique in the London setting. Both Videodrome and Crash posited modernity and a too-rapid technological advancement for the loss of sanity and self-awareness, but the somber, precise photography of London suggests something else. Here, Cronenberg suggests that the growth of civilization does not force people into erratic evolutionary patterns that strip them of their base of understanding and awareness; instead, civilization simply grows and leaves some humans crushed under progress. Nikolai, with his hulking, Cro-Magnon mass and his tribal tattoos, might be a descendant of a line of people who never could catch up to the change around them.


London, after all, is arguably the most architecturally diverse city in the world. The various fires that ruined sectors of the city while leaving others unscathed have created a patchwork of styles through the various artistic movements. The city cannot seem to catch up with itself, so the prospect of some of its residents failing to adapt to the 21st century does not seem so far-fetched. That Nikolai and the mobsters he chauffeurs about are Russian plays upon another aspect of London life that splinters a single identity into multiple fragments: the ethnic diversity brought on by heavy immigration.

The first scene of the film, in fact, features characters of two nationalities, neither of them native British. A Turkish man, Azim, waits for his nephew to arrive as he chats up a Chechen man. When the boy arrives, he's so shaken up and unable to look the Russian in the eyes that we know why he's there before Azim finally loses his cool urging the boy to simply kill the bastard. Overlapping Russian and Turkish dialogue, some of it subtitled, most of it not, creates a scenario that sounds as if it should be playing out in the Old Country rather than in a barber shop in the middle of a major city.

Cronenberg then jumps from this scene, ending with dark, thick blood bubbling out of the jugular as the hiss of leaking breath churns the liquid to a seemingly unrelated scene that he links to this act of violence with remarkable subtlety. A pregnant Russian immigrant, shivering from what could either be cold or withdrawal, stumbles into a pharmacy bleeding from between her legs. As Cronenberg frames the blood dripping on the floor in close-up, he links the woman's viscous blood with that of the Russian mobster, yet only the woman's bleeding attracts any gasps, from characters on-screen and, likely, the audience. We are conditioned to accept murder in film despite its immorality and horror, yet a natural injury jars and repulses us.

The woman, Tatiana, is taken to the hospital, where she dies in childbirth. The attending midwife, Anna (Naomi Watts), finds a diary on the woman written in Russian and takes it, hoping to find out Tatiana's identity to notify next of kin. Naturally, this small act of involved kindness leads only to trouble as Anna stumbles upon the London branch of the Russian Mafia, the vory v zakone ("Thieves-in-Law"), fronted by a deceptively kind old man named Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl). Anna manages to get inside Semyon's house based on her half-Russian heritage and unknowingly tells the man who raped and impregnated Tatiana about the baby and the diary, instantly placing her on a hit list. When he learns of Anna's naïveté, her uncle, Stepan, cannot contain himself. A first-generation immigrant, he remembers the mob, and even if he mentions a past in the KGB as a drunken bluff, he knows what will come of Anna's snooping.


The tendrils of Russian influence on Anna are at once the driving motivation of the film and a thematic subplot, a microcosmic unfurling of the same forces at work on Nikolai. Where Cronenberg revealed the secret identity of Tom Stall by the end of the first act in A History of Violence, here he withholds the twist of Nikolai being an undercover agent until the end. One could argue that this is the film's chief flaw, as the twist is not so shocking that it deserves placement as a major spoiler and prevents a deeper examination of the identity issues surrounding an undercover cop in a crime ring. Yet this change allows Mortensen to add greater nuance to his acting, resulting in his greatest performance. We spend much of the film watching a man struggle with himself until Cronenberg finally provides the key, even if his easy solution raises many more questions that could have been fleshed out across the entire running time. Nikolai can go from dispassionate violence to a moment of quiet compassion when he secretly gives a prostitute the means to save her life.

By saving the truth of the character until the end, the director doesn't keep the audience guessing so much as the protagonist. From this point of view, Cronenberg's pacing proves how far gone Nikolai is within the mafia. "I'm just the driver," he says throughout the film when confronted with big problems. Rather than hide away and remind himself who he really is, his tether to reality, or his view of it, is one facet of his fabricated identity. And even that isn't really accurate, as he's also a "cleaner" and an undertaker, disposing of any loose ends and winning the admiration of Semyon, who comes to view Nikolai as more of a son than his own progeny, Kirill (Vincent Cassel).

Nothing warps Nikolai's identity like his relationship with Kirill. At first, Kirill's reckless intemperance and emotional instability place another job on the "driver's" shoulders, that of a babysitter. They work as comrades, but also share a brotherly bond. Yet Kirill looks up to Nikolai so much and receives so much more support and tolerance from his peer than his dad that he comes to view Nikolai as a father figure as well. Cassel excels at playing characters on the edge, either of political rebellion (La Haine) or unquenchable hatred and vengeance (Irreversible), and his tyrannical rage finds its perfect outlet in the mob. Like Tommy DeVito in GoodFellas, Kirill dispenses with any glamorous notions of mob life by depicting pure, unchecked insanity. And Kirill doesn't even have the dangerous wit that let Tommy get away with some of his behavior. Watching Kirill vacillate between smug arrogance and unfiltered, sociopathic violence goes a long way toward explaining why Semyon holds Nikolai in such high regard: by keeping an eye on the boy, he has the hardest job in the mafia.

Kirill also sets up a common facet of Cronenberg's theme of identity, that of sexual confusion. The experimentation grows out of their doubt, and the director's focus upon Kirill's closeted homosexuality is perhaps the most typical sexual relationship in any of his films, given that it's something we might expect from a man who grew up in a secluded boy's club that runs on masculine rituals. We learn from Tatiana's diary that he could not bring himself to rape her and instead beat the teenager to vent his sexual frustration until Semyon stepped in to "show him how it's done." Later, Nikolai reveals to Semyon that Kirill had the Chechen killed for telling people that the man was a homosexual. Most disturbingly, Kirill clearly harbors feelings for Nikolai, which would be tragic instead of unsettling if the psychopath didn't force his friend to roughly screw a prostitute in front of him, emphasizing both the father/son relationship (since Kirill already watched his real father rape a prostitute) and the sexual longing he feels for Nikolai that he expels by projecting himself onto the prostitute. Kirill wants to be inside Nikolai, and Nikolai is later tricked into posing as Kirill when the Chechen mob comes to London seeking revenge for Soyka's murder, thus literalizing Kirill's desire to be with (and simply be) his friend.


That continuous layering of identity creates a situation where, as in Videodrome and Naked Lunch, reality and illusion blur. Nikolai does not seem to have a real identity, only a memory of his mission with the mob. He leaves spaces above his heart and on his knees without tattoos not because he wishes to retain something of himself but because he's leaving them blank to be filled by the final markings of the vory signifying that he's a made man. "Sentimental value," he says when Anna refuses to sell him her motorcycle because it belonged to her father. "I've heard of that." It's a humorous one-liner you might expect from a criminal, but it signifies what Nikolai has sacrificed for his job. To have something of sentimental value, one must have some part of a personality that remains constant, and Nikolai has warped and fabricated so much that he cannot carry any objects with an emotional and nostalgic resonance.

The "cop gets in too deep" plot is so overused that Michael Mann has made an entire career investigating it from multiple angles. Yet the storyline persists because the question remains: if the breaking of laws can be forgiven, if innocent people can be hurt or even killed to maintain an identity, what then is the meaning of justice and legality? If, like all deep undercover agents, Nikolai is permitted to break the law in order to maintain his cover, at what point does he cease to become a law enforcement official spying on a cabal and instead morphs into one of the mob trying to buy his clemency through information?

Cronenberg places his own stamp on the material with his minimalistic aesthetic. Building off of the stripped-down Americana of A History of Violence, the director makes Eastern Promises into a film that's both startlingly realistic and ambiguous and suggestive. His mise-en-scène is separated from the action, above it but not looking down upon the action in condescension. While his earlier films suggested morality through Grand Guignol horror-satire, Cronenberg now glides over the action like a surgeon recording an autopsy. His lighting is cold and clinical, the objects in the frame dense but never cluttered, each item standing distinct as if everything is somehow polarized to push all other objects away.

His style is most plainly seen, of course, in his violence. Cronenberg sexualizes and fetishizes the violence in his films, yet he does not eroticize it, precisely because he never eroticizes the actual sex in his movies, instead making them outpourings of despair. Consider the scene of Nikolai having sex with the prostitute in front of Kirill; if Kirill lasciviously watching did not already sap the erotic element out of the moment, the director's decision to lay audio of Tatiana reading a portion of her diary that places this action within the context of a misogynistic, rapacious cycle only makes the scene sadder. That same mood informs the violence, which is more personal than in A History of Violence as London criminals use knives instead of guns to avoid getting brought up on an easy charge where a gangster could easily have a gun permit in the States. But the knife thrusts and slits never draw the audience. Cronenberg has an ability that Tarantino, even Peckinpah, never had: he can depict extreme violence on the screen and never make you get a visceral thrill out of it. He knows just how long to focus on blood before cutting, lingering to let the sight stick in our minds but moving on before he gets a kick out of it. When Nikolai must dispose of Soyka's body, he tells Azim and Kirill, "I'm going to go his teeth and cut off fingers. You might want to leave room." The scene starts on an absurd note, with Nikolai forced to thaw the frozen corpse with a hair dryer, but when the camera stays behind just long enough to see Nikolai start to remove identifying parts of the body with the boredom of an office worker filling out reports, the comedy turns as icy as the body he snips.

The only sequence in the film in which violence is not captured with this detached style is also the one that best proves Cronenberg' mastery. I'm speaking, of course, of the bathhouse scene, where Chechens come to kill Nikolai under the belief that he is Kirill. People discuss the scene because Mortensen fights in the buff, but Cronenberg plays the scene as an explosion of the sexual tension inherent in chauvinist groups. He also uses Viggo's nakedness to turn the stomach when the thugs slice him. We're used to an actor's shirt suddenly opening up a red line appearing as he grasps the wound in pain, but Nikolai has nothing to cover up the blood flow, and he's left slick with red stuff pouring out of him. At last, the de-romanticized sex and violence converge in the last moments, when Nikolai collapses on top of the remaining attack and grunts as he thrusts a linoleum blade into the man's eye to kill him. The quick editing is not simply a means to avoid an NC-17 rating by cutting around Mortensen's penis but a wry subversion of the male gaze, not used in the static shot of Nikolai fucking the prostitute but used here as the men grapple on each other for supremacy. It's the coup de grâce of Cronenberg's understated gore, removing all thrill and confounding the energy of the attack until you're left thinking that all of this might be avoided if these men weren't conditioned to be self-hating closeted gays.

"It's obviously a psychological thing," says Soyka as he looks upon the nervous Turk unwilling to murder him, a line that serves as an ironic joke but could also be a typically British piece of understatement perhaps passed on to the Canadian director to summarize his whole career. A man comes to worship violent TV until he starts a revolution? It's obviously a psychological thing. Unfeeling people gravitate to car crashes because it exhilarates them for one half-second longer than they've ever felt excited before? It's obviously a psychological thing. What passes as a quick gag could well be seen as a fatalistic, mournful admission of powerlessness: how else can one even begin to explain what motivates the characters of Cronenberg's oeuvre without resorting to such a weak catch-all? Yet Cronenberg does not box himself into the Coen brothers' despair, and if he ends Eastern Promises on as ambiguous and threatening a note as A History of Violence, at least he finally introduces the possibility of hope, evidenced by Kirill's breakthrough of humanity when he finally breaks free from his father's will by refusing to drown the old man's lovechild.

In less than two hours, Cronenberg packs Eastern Promises with self-contained arcs that add up to sparse but dense whole. Stepan contributes to the talk of identity by decrying miscegenation, even telling Anna to her face that she miscarried her own baby because her old boyfriend was black, as if blacks and whites were biologically incompatible like two animals from different genii. That outburst is its own moment, but it also explains Anna's quest to help Tatiana's baby, not only to serve as a surrogate but find the baby's own identity. Even cast-off lines like Kirill angrily hissing, "You don't pronounce the name of my father" to Anna when she accuses Semyon of rape develop the themes of the film, briefly bringing up an old ritual that places importance on a name, the most basic form of ID. Much of Anna's presence elicits responses like this, her inquisitiveness sorting out the web of identities jumbled by the mob, and Watts has the thankless role of moving the story along. Thankfully, neither Watts nor Cronenberg can bring themselves to trap the character in so narrow a role, and Anna comes to most conclusions herself and does not simply exist to ask the plot questions. If she does not appear in the film as often as you might expect, it's because Cronenberg makes her the moral core, and thus her routine absence from Nikolai's storyline shows how muddled his ethics are. He's left in charge of the London section of the mob at the end of the film, but we cannot be sure whether he will tear it down and send everyone to jail or if he'll continue to let the crimes they commit pass in order to get only the occasional arrest. That the final shot shows him sitting in a restaurant with the same insulated, self-loathing look on his face that marks Michael Corleone's at the end of The Godfather Part II only stresses the moral complexity and ambiguity of what may be David Cronenberg's barest yet richest masterpiece.

Crash (1996)

David Cronenberg's Crash is a film about desperate people in a situation that is beyond desperate. It is, according to J.G. Ballard's introduction to his source novel, a work of pornography, but also a cautionary tale, as well as a political one. The automobile has long been a sexualized object, sports cars and gargantuan sports utility vehicles (rest in peaces, Hummers) viewed as displays of male insecurity and overcompensation, dilapidated, low-speed compacts the polar opposites of chick magnets. In how many films and television programs (including so-called reality series) have we seen gearheads treating their rides with more care than they ever show a significant other, or a group of ready and willing ladies who get off on nice motorcycles and fast cars? Crash takes this idea to the extreme, crafting an underworld below the excessive tedium of driving in a traffic-stuffed world where people respond not simply to cars but to car wrecks. It's the sort of fucked-up premise that screamed for an adaption by David Cronenberg long before he signed onto the project, but it's still surprising just how thoroughly he adapts the source material while fleshing out themes and styles that mark his auterial preoccupations and approach.

Of course, one cannot simply leap into so out-there a concept as the sexuality of car crashes, so Cronenberg eases us into the story by opening, separately, on the Ballards: Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger) stands in an airplane hangar having sex with a man, while her commercial-producing husband, James (James Spader), boinks a camera girl in his office. Later that day, the married couple engage in sex with each other, without any of the passion of the illicit couplings, intensifying only when they describe their affairs to each other.

On his way home another night, James looks at some storyboards while driving and crashes head-on with another car. Like all the crashes seen in the film, it's over in a flash. The man driving the other car dies instantly, and James looks out to see the driver's wife (Holly Hunter) staring at him intensely. She reaches for her seat belt and instead rips open her dress an exposes a breast. Is this accidental, the result of a dazed attempt to remove a seat belt, or is she a member of the warped section of society we meet later? Cronenberg leaves clues when James and the woman, Dr. Remington, later forge a sexual bond through their experience, and Remington's sexual encounters -- on- and off-screen -- in cars makes clear her infatuation with the fetish.

But there's always a bit of mystery in the character, thanks to Hunter's constant look of shellshocked confusion; you're never quite sure to what extent she participates in these activities out of awakened lust and how much she might simply be too stunned to do otherwise. She, like the rest of the actors, is perfectly casted: Unger effortlessly projects an air of detachment, while Spader has long been a symbol of sexual perversity (that sounds odder written down than it does in my head) and moral erosion in such films as sex, lies & videotape and Less Than Zero. He plays a character who simply cannot exist in the real world, not because I am too prudish to accept or even comprehend the fetish that drives these poor souls but because of the nature of Spader's character.

In order to figure out what about car wrecks so excites them, James and Remington make their way to a secret exhibition run by Vaughan (Elias Koteas), whom we met earlier posing as a medical photographer taking loving pictures of James' leg brace. Vaughn restages "classic" car crashes such as James Dean's death for a small but dedicated crowd of crash enthusiasts sitting in bleachers hollering as if NASCAR fans got turned on by all the wrecks they hope to see. James and Remington immerse themselves fully into this sub-section of society, and soon they peruse photographs of crash sites and view crash test footage as if viewing pornography.

The camera frames these characters in flattened compositions, completely removing us from any possibility of a connection with the people on the screen. Likewise, the score, which alternates between ethereal strings and a demonic electric guitar that makes Neil Young's Dead Man soundtrack sound like a collection of Billy Joel songs, distances us further. That the car crashes are over so quickly is the grand irony of the film considering the extent to which the characters fetishize them, and even as Cronenberg glides his camera smoothly over the aftermath of the wrecks, we cannot understand what about this carnage so excites Vaughan and his followers. Vaughan claims that he sees his fascination with crashes as a means to examine the "reshaping of the human body by modern technology" (a common theme in Cronenberg's films, highlighted in the still-ahead-of-its-time Videodrome and the creature feature The Fly), and in this sense we can view the characters' hangups with the mutilation of car wrecks and the detached direction as reflections of the corrupting influence of increasing coldness in the world due to our fascination with gadgets and gizmos. The eroticization of ripped metal and torn bodies speaks to the growing cult devoted to the worship of all the capitalist idols erected around us.

In the end, though, it's all about the sex, and even Vaughan admits it. He chases the thrill of a good crash because it offers an intensity that transcends sexuality. Indeed, both Remington and James experiment with homosexual affairs in the heat of the moment. The wounds and scars do not typically bleed, and for all the horrific wounds these characters suffer we only see a bit of the red stuff. These dry scars become both reminders of the sexual thrill and representatives of the emptiness of the passion they conjure. One of the crash fetishists, played by Rosanna Arquette, must wear braces on both legs,and she sports a scar on her leg that looks remarkably like a vulva, and James uses it as such in one of their sex sessions. There's nothing erotic about this, only disgusting and sad. Let us return to the nature with which Cronenberg films the crashes: as viewed from the erotic angle, the brevity and instant intensity of the wrecks serves as a sexual release. Vaughan and James tease out their crashes, tailgating and swerving behind intended targets as if acting out foreplay and sex. But actual ejaculation, the moment when all the pain builds to its full climax, lasts less than a second. So, the equation of violence with sex, of Vaughan's belief that a crash is a "fertilizing" act instead of a destructive one, makes for some oddball pornography, but for all the naughty bits on display in the film, is it reasonable to call something porn when it eschews titillation for confrontation?

Crash caused a bit of a firestorm when it premiered, accused by some critics and audience members as exploitative filth. But in an artistic world that constantly weighs the merits of sex and violence in debates of censorship and public acceptability, can the film's reception be at least partially be explained by its commitment to erasing the distinction between the two? Besides, I don't see how anyone could argue that the film exploits any of its grisly -- but never gory -- imagery. It's too detached, too critical, too afraid of what it's showing to glorify anything we see. If anything, it can only look on helplessly as these characters (the ones still alive anyway) seal their fate in the end, as James and Catherine finally bond through a car crash. As James brushes his fingers lovingly over his wife's bruises and scrapes, he wistfully sighs, "Maybe next time." Cronenberg, so removed for the entire film, suddenly seems unsure of what to do, not in an artistic way but in the sense that someone confronted with a terrifying truth about an acquaintance does not immediately know what to do or say. James and Catherine have finally reached a stage of normalcy and love in their marriage through the least normal of circumstances, and their reunion is made possible only through the recognition that they will continue on their path until they kill themselves.

A History of Violence

There's something deliciously ironic about David Croneneberg making a film about our collective obsession with violence. Cronenberg, who came to prominence in the '80s with hits like Videodrome and his remake of The Fly, has devoted his entire career to ultra-violent depictions of bodily functions and transformations. His most beloved films are caked in blood as gory exaggerations of boils, cancers, even sexual organs rip open the flesh of his poor characters to further whatever metaphor he's pushing this time. The thought of him breaking out a soapbox to tell us we need to spend less time watching the R-rated action extravaganzas is downright hilarious.

Nevertheless, some people deserve the benefit of the doubt, and Cronenberg certainly qualifies, so I decided to give the film a shot. Based on the graphic novel of the same name, A History of Violence charts the path of Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen), who runs a diner in a small Indiana town. He's got a loving wife (Maria Bello) and two kids, and he lives in general contentment. Then one day two men walk into the diner at closing time. We know something will go wrong, because we saw them in an earlier scene, and they just look like the sort of people to cause trouble. When they pull out guns, Tom leaps over the counter and murders them both in seconds.

Tom is stunned by his actions, but the media quickly makes him into a hero, as witnesses remark how "amazing" he was in action. Tom looks forward to the whole thing blowing over, but then two more men come to the diner, this time in fancy suits. The leader, Fogarty, has deep scars on his face and calls Tom "Joey," insisting that the two knew each other in Philadelphia. Stall says that the man is mistaken but is clearly distressed. Before long, the man and his thugs show up at Tom's house and, well, watch for yourself.

The plot of A History of Violence is almost too-thin, especially coming from the man who took us on such dense, nigh-impenetrable journeys in the past. But its starkness is its strength: Cronenberg does not revel in blood but restricts it to horrific yet disturbingly satisfying outbursts. It's not exactly tense, but it is taut, and it keeps you riveted even though you can see every twist coming (thanks in no small part to the spoiler-ridden trailer that kept me from viewing this film for years). However, Cronenberg's aim here isn't simply going from A to B, leaving a trail of dead behind him. No, the director uses the rail-thin plot to examine our infatuation with violence and how our bloodlust perpetuates itself. Cronenberg does not spare any gory details -- I don't know what a head really looks like when it's just been blasted off with a shotgun, but I have an inclination now -- but these scenes do not feel gratuitous, instead forcing us to contemplate the consequences of our actions. If any scene could be construed as celebratory, Croenenberg does not allow the feeling to last for long.

Take the scene where Tom's teenage son Jack viciously beats a bully who has tormented him all year. It's shocking but also rewarding, and you can't help but feel a surge of glee as the timid kid finally stands up to the bully. Why is it that I felt somewhat euphoric in that scene, but cool and impassive when Jack first ignores the bully and responds to the kid's insults with some barbs of his own? Before I can mull it over, Cronenberg abruptly cuts to Tom lecturing his son about the futility of violence, only to harshly slap his son when the boy points the hypocrisy of a killer condemning a fistfight. That slap turns the vaguely triumphant mood chilly in an instant. Clearly, in this scene Tom represents the director: a man with a past in gore warning us about desensitization and the admiration of violence even as he fills the screen yet again with death and brutality.

Overall, the film is a successful depiction of how Darwinian evolution has instilled in us all a certain love of violence, but I wonder if the story of this tested family can so easily gloss over the very real problem of violence in our culture. Viggo and Ed Harris put in great work, symbols of rugged masculinity attempting to pull away from the violence inherent in that image but never able to break free. Bello's Edie starts strong as the more aggressive of the couple, but when the roles reverse she becomes almost inconsequential; does her husband's violence scare her, or kinda turn her on? Still, let's not even dwell on how William Hurt's four-minute stint of scenery-chewing garnered an Oscar nomination. A History of Violence is ultimately noteworthy for relaunching Cronenberg's commercial viability and a tonal shift to starker displays of brutality that would inform his superior Eastern Promises (also starring Mortensen), but it's still an interesting metaphor for our unsettling celebration of aggression. So interesting, in fact, that I feel I need to watch the film again, perhaps after revisiting Eastern Promises to size up the two. Who knows; there's a lot to love in this film, quite possibly more than I caught the first time.

Videodrome

David Cronenberg, no stranger to bizarre trips into the horror of the mind, started out in the 70s with a series of audacious yet ill-formed horror-thrillers such as Shivers and The Brood. After a few years of slowly bettering his craft, he hit his stride in 1981 with the enduring cult hit Scanners, the film that will forever be remembered as "that movie where the guy's head blows up." But it is 1983's Videodrome that will likely stand as Cronenberg's most lasting triumph, a well-acted, flawlessly constructed journey through the interim between reality and hallucination so ahead of its time that it may only increase in relevance as the years go by.

Videodrome concerns the trials and tribulations of Max Renn, the president of CIVIC-TV, a disgusting TV station that seeks out the most depraved programs to show its perverse audience. Renn is always on the look out for new shows, and he seems to have hit the jackpot when he and his girlfriend, Nicki, are watching TV one night and the signal picks up a pirate station's feed. The program in question is "Videodrome," a plotless show that simply airs sequences of brutal violence and torture. Nicki, who's into S&M, likes the program, and Max sees potential.

What results is a indescribable orgy of bended reality, social commentary, and innovative special effects. Renn begins to have increasingly graphic and violent hallucinations that concern him, to say the least. Soon he realizes that "Videodrome" has something to do with the hallucinations, and tracks down the owners for answers.

But instead of finding some sadomasochistic, pierced whackjob, he discovers that the true owner of "Videodrome" is a well-mannered businessman who communicates only in video messages because he believes it to be the "new reality." He uses "Videodrome" to broadcast signals that awaken our basest instincts while implanting people with tumors that will birth the "new flesh." Through "Videodrome" he crafts Max into an assassin via horrifying metamorphosis and increasingly blurred lines between reality and fever dream.

These grotesque transformations are where the film gets its reputation, but I wonder if people perhaps focus solely on the gore and gross-out horror and ignore the deeper meaning. Max continues to think about Nicki and one night actually sees her on "Videodrome." While watching, a wound opens in his stomach that look almost certainly vaginal, and suddenly Nicki beckons to him from the screen. In perhaps the most famous shot of the film (it's even the cover of the Criterion DVD), Max presses his lips on the screen and seems to melt into her lips. I watched this on Netflix's Instant Watch service, and I was immediately ready to buy the DVD just to see how they did that.

The vaginal opening in Max's chest takes on numerous meanings. On a surface level, it's Cronenberg's usual gimmick of doing all sorts of weird things to bodies and sexual organs, but it takes on great significance when "Videodrome's" producer begins to actually place video cassettes inside of Max. Not only is he quickly becoming a hybrid of man and machine that opens the door for the "new flesh," by shoving these tapes into this vaginal wound Max is literally being screwed by television and television executives.

Cronenberg forces us to watch the extremities of television, what happens when we become so de-sensitized to pornography and vulgarity that we turn to snuff films just to get it up. At the same time, he condemns both the conservative watchdog groups who try to tell others what they can and can't watch, who claim to be protecting the "innocent" but really just are too lazy to change the channel, and the rise of the television conglomerate that manipulates its viewers by preying on our base desire to see violence. Considering Rupert Murdoch wouldn't even get Fox off the ground until the end of the decade, Cronenberg really was bold as hell.

Of course, anyone who's seen the film will know that you can't possibly understand all of it; it's so intrinsically tied to the director's magnificently warped mind that a great deal of it can only ever make sense to him. Yet this may be the most prescient and intelligent horror film I've ever seen, the Blade Runner of splatter gore. It warns of a future in which man turns not only to violence (which is present is every major sport except golf) but to actual death to get his jollies, and when I turn on Fox or Spike TV and see programs that air police footage of people getting killed in car crashes I can't help but wonder how much longer it will take until Videodrome stops being a deeply metaphorical foreboding and becomes a trippy, effects-ridden documentary.

Videodrome is a landmark achievement of the horror genre: as a comment on the growing insidiousness of the television industry, it ranks with Network in terms of identifying the problem before it ever became apparent, while it also introduced a number of special effects that presaged the CG era yet still stand up today. Combined with Cronenberg's minimalist direction and a strong cast anchored by Woods' commanding performance (he clearly got the film), these effects never overpower the story and the whole thing keeps you on the edge of your seat the entire time. Long live the new flesh.