The Chills #2: Insect Politics
This clip is from a horror movie, but that’s not actually the kind of chills I’m talking about. What this is, is a collection of those film scenes that rend the veil of mundanity and make you feel hooked into the Great Beyonderness of Things, that bring a poetic, indefinable insight to bear and open up possibilities undreamed-of, and make you feel awe and panicky joy and the exact physical sensations you felt that time Hervé Villachaise caressed your spine with an icicle.
[Spoilsports at Fox don't want me promoting their film so they've removed the clip.]
Here’s Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis and John Getz in Cronenberg’s THE FLY. I would have to say this sequence, which GETS ME every damn time, is a compendium of many different emotions produced by many different things.
Howard Shore’s music is a huge part of it — if you watch a string of early Cronenbergs you get to hear Shore go from barely adequate to really, really good, quite rapidly. THE BROOD is kinda bland. SCANNERS is a rather weak PSYCHO riff, then VIDEODROME starts to get better and then THE FLY arrives and kicks ass.
And the performances are lovely, especially Goldblum, who’s perfectly cast and has perfect counterpart in Davis. John Getz properly comes into his own in THE FLY II, which is a pretty bad film but his single scene is TERRIFIC.
It’s really the dialogue that’s the core of it for me. The script is by Charles Edward Pogue and David Cronenberg, one of the few times Cronenberg adapted another writer’s script. Pogue has been very complimentary about the results, which is rare with screenwriters — we’re so used to having people trample our work with hobnailed boots while jabbering inanely like a Barbary macaque. It’s humbling when somebody comes along and actually IMPROVES what we’ve written, and is SENSITIVE to what we were trying to do with the thing in the first place.
Back in 1986 it probably couldn’t be predicted that Cronenberg would soon be concentrating more on adaptations than on originals, subtly Cronenbergerizing them while remaining very true to the values of the source material. He’d already made THE DEAD ZONE, one of the very few decent Stephen King adaptations (the key would seem to be excavating the valuable stuff that touches chords and makes King’s work so popular, and finding a new shape for it once you’ve removed the buckets of MATTER that fill out King’s doorstop volumes – perhaps exploiting the lacunae created by swinging cuts to create mystery, the way Kubrick did in THE SHINING) and was about to bring us NAKED LUNCH and M. BUTTERFLY and CRASH…
Dialogue often gets short shrift in discussion of cinema. I take the view that great cinema is that which uses its tools to create a unified effect that is either powerful or complex or both, and dialogue can as well be a part of that as anything else. It can’t totally dominate, but then to get a unified effect from cinema, which is kind of a fusion of many art forms, no one part can completely dominate. If it’s JUST cool photography or great editing, that doesn’t make great cinema either. I heard Richard Stanley say the other day that cinema “doesn’t LIKE dialogue,” which struck me as, well, WRONG, and certainly out of keeping with my experience of cinema. Stanley, like his idol Argento, doesn’t write good dialogue, or film it particularly well, or get very good performances, so maybe it’s a matter of being attuned to the virtues of screen talk. It’s true that cinema started off without the ability to talk, but it started without precisely synchronised music and sound effects too, and I know of few purists who think those are a burden on film art (though there are certainly people who choose not to use them, which is just fine).
So, the dialogue, the score, also the lighting, the rather lovely creature make-up, the way Goldblum’s eyes move (and when he looks UP and his eyes roll, he’s strangely reminiscent of Michael Anderson, the Man from Another Place in TWIN PEAKS — something about the cheekbones, I think) and when Goldblum is on the roof, he’s suddenly Lon Chaney in our memories of both THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA and THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME and the film we’re watching suddenly seems not only thematically super-rich (disease, aging, love, death, rebirth) but hooked into a whole rich history of monster movies.
What we’ve got here is SCREEN POETRY my friends. And what I’ve got is the chills.
(More chills soon. And I would LOVE for you to nominate your own examples.)
March 2, 2008 at 3:13 pm
I’ve had very mixed feelings about Cronenberg ober the years. His talent is undeniable. It’s uses are what I find at issue. The Fly seriously upset me because at the time 3/4 of my nearest and dearest friends were dying of AIDS, and falling apart physically in ways that make the disintegration of Jeff Goldlum marketed as mass entertainment seem. . . crass.
I went head-to-head with him over Naked Lunch, specifically for his de-gaying of Burroughs text, and his weird inclusion of Jane Bowles into Burroughs mythology (via Judy Davis of all people.) William Burrough and Jane Bowles were the world’s least likely love match not only because they were wholely devoted to their own sex but because they could not stand to be in the same room with one another,
. Paul Bowles was forced to execute all sorts of baroque stage-managing whenever his dear pal Bill was in town, in order that he and Jane be kept at a significant distance.
Cronenberg did, however, make amends with Crash. Especially the climax where James Spader fucks the living shit out of Elias Koteas. (And the crowd cheers!)
His last two films have been just super. A History of Violence finds newer darker undersides to supposedly placcid middle-class life, and Eastern Promises re-rigs the British gangster film by making all the characters Russian. In both instances the babe-a-licious Viggo Mortensen distinguishes himself offering subtle menace (in the first) and even subtler heart (in the second.) And that’s not to mention the steam room scene where a stark naked Viggo bests two fully-clothed knife-wielding would-be killers.
Fun stuff, boys and girls
March 2, 2008 at 4:46 pm
Cronenberg argued that The Fly could as well be about old age as about disease — but he’d been making films about disease since the 70s, so I tend to think only the timing of The Fly is a problem. And if you do take it as an AIDS metaphor, it’s a more sensitive and interesting one than, say, Fatal Attraction.
I like Naked Lunch as a paranoid adventure story, but like you say, it has problems both as adaptation and biography. Cronenberg had admitted early on that there would be problems for him, as a heterosexual, adapting Burroughs. I think he’s overcome some of that resistance in later work.
I like Crone’s comments on the Crash same-sex scene: “The guys in the audience were into the movie until that scene, then a lot of them walked out, and they had to DRAG their girlfriends…”
I was bothered by the script of Eastern Promises, which has a number of implausibilties (Viggo’s new tattoo is inexplicably supposed to be mistaken for an old one) and lapses into cheese at the end, but it’s smartly directed and beautifully played, which mostly saves it. Saw it with Romero associate John Harrison, who chuckled “Welcome to Cronenberg-land!” when we got to the finger-lopping.
March 2, 2008 at 4:51 pm
>I heard Richard Stanley say the other day that cinema “doesn’t LIKE dialogue,”
Three words for you: HIS GIRL FRIDAY. In that film – for me, at least – dialogue *is* the (usually missing) style, it’s as beautifully choreographed as any Berkeley composition and would easily satisfy anyone seeking action (of the semantic kind).
David E: As someone who’s only read Naked Lunch, what else would you recommend from his writings?
March 2, 2008 at 5:09 pm
I don’t think Hawks is missing style, he’s just refined classic Hollywood decoupage to the point of invisibility. Filmmakers like HH make dialogue highly cinematic because their sense of rhythm and mastery of camera blocking is so sure.
You can get Naked Lunch-type thrills from most of Burroughs work, although maybe not quite as intensely, but Junky and Queer offer another, more human side.
March 2, 2008 at 5:40 pm
Well, technically there’s no such thing as “no style” (conformity?) because even that, in itself, is a style. I’m someone who reads form first (everything stems from that) and in that sense, nothing is invisible stylistically, though I appreciate how it works for a conventional audience. What I like about Hawks, for the most part, is the distance he maintains with his “eye height” camera (I see more extreme examples of it in the works of directors like Rivette and Hou Hsiao-Hsien) and when he does go in for the close-up, hopefully the characters are defined enough for him not to dwell on irritating emotional clauses (I particularly like Geoff Carter in ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS). HIS GIRL FRIDAY simply adds extra semantic assault to the proceedings. At times I’ve found it’s like watching those Japanese animes whereby you can’t keep up with the multiple subtitles…
Junky and Queer it is then.
March 2, 2008 at 7:34 pm
I would reccomend The Wild Boys and Cities of the Red Night.
Love Viggo’s tattoo’s. There’s butterfly tattoo just above his butt crack visible in Gus’ Psycho.
Re those Crash walkouts, in the immortal words of Jim Morrison, “The men don’t know but the little girls understand.”
March 2, 2008 at 8:39 pm
I’ve never managed to get hold of Burroughs’ screenplay, The Last Words of Dutch Schultz. The last words themselves are quite something though, like proto-Burroughs beat poetry.
March 2, 2008 at 9:27 pm
I personally think THE CUT UPS should be projected over electronic billboards worldwide.
“Look at that picture.”
March 2, 2008 at 11:18 pm
It should be tattooed on our world leaders!