David Cronenberg: Sexual Genius!

September7

David Cronenberg

This essay arose when Bailey and I (both long time Cronenberg fans) had an opportunity to write an essay about him in the same class. Naturally, a competition ensued. Here was my entrant:

For Cronenberg sex represents intimacy, betrayal, sublimation, absorption and the merging of identities all at once. Cronenberg has stated that the body is the “first fact of human existence” (Günberg 95). For Cronenberg our physicality and sensual experience of the world is all that we can know for sure (Günberg 95) and, because it is perhaps the ultimate physical act, sex is the intersection of thought, identity and biology. Any pretence of a higher, non-physical person is subsumed in this act of raw physicality and passion. Videodrome, Naked Lunch and Crash are excellent case studies in Cronenberg’s obsessive pre-occupation with human sexuality because each features a central character whose latent sexuality blossoms over the course of the film, for better or worse. This essay will examine the methods Cronenberg uses to expose and explore the expansive and polymorphous entity that is human sexuality in his films.

Cronenberg was heavily influenced by C. S. Lewis’ work The Allegory of Love, which puts forward the idea that romantic love, as it is known in the western world, is a construct of poetry that arose in the twelfth century (ctd. in Günberg 117). Prior to that point it was unheard of for a gentleman to kneel before a lady or serenade her from the base of a tower. It is apparent that to Cronenberg the western notion of love is a contrived lie. True love, as it appears in his films (and his philosophy), is a more deep-seeded primal experience with its roots in biochemistry (Günberg 122). In essence, love and sex are tied to “a desire to fuse with, to absorb and to somehow cut beneath the surface of” a lover (Günberg 117). The ultimate intimacy lies within the body for Cronenberg. Furthermore, if the west’s accepted ideal of love was invented and taken up in the twelfth century then the implication is twofold. Firstly, there was another, alien, notion of love prior to that and secondly (perhaps more importantly) concepts like love in our society that are presented as absolutes are “variable and they’re open to change and transformation” (Günberg 122).

This notion of nothing being absolute is essential to understanding Cronenberg. He has an obsession with shattering the aesthetics of the modern age and opening the possibility of new ones (Günberg 92). This has an intimate relationship with Cronenberg’s obsession with the body. His films continually attempt to redefine the definition and limitations of the human body and, as a result, human sexuality. In the Videodrome Commentary Cronenberg states, “I love to re-invent the human body”. He goes on to say, “In society now we are allowing the expression of things that a few years ago would not have been allowed … [people] think of these things as sexual delights or explorations. They don’t even want to call these things perversion … but if you [called them] new forms of expressing love, people would probably get very upset.” (Günberg 123). This is evident in Videodrome in many places (such as the ear piercing and sadomasochistic scenes) but also in Videodrome’s general exploration of society’s limits on what the media can and can’t depict (a debate which Cronenberg’s films have often fuelled). Are sex and violence something that will corrupt people from the outside or are they lying dormant within us? For the protagonist of Videodrome, Max Renn, they appear to be very much an existing part of his psyche, waiting to surface.

With societal restrictions and enforcement of a ‘norm’ we’re much less likely to get to the full spectrum of something as complex and varied as human sexuality. People will not readily admit to being aroused by something that is branded ‘perverse’, so how can we hope to know how ubiquitous any sexual fantasy is? This results in the creation of an outward sexual normality which, Videodrome, Nikki Brand is the physical manifestation of. In the television interview with Max she condemns his TV station’s broadcasting of violent and pornographic material despite dressing in a very provocative fashion and flirting with Max off air. Publicly, she presents herself as socially and sexually conservative but, in private, her social and sexual realm of experience very much align with (and exceed) those of Max. Max, on the other hand, is the physical manifestation of the latent perversion. We know that Max always had sadomasochistic tendencies (as evidenced by his branding the series Samurai Dreams ‘too soft’, expressing a desire for something ‘harder’ and more ‘extreme’) but it took meeting Nikki Brand to bring them out.

It is interesting to note the way in which Nikki opens the dialogue on sadomasochism with Max. She goes through his videos, looking for pornography (which she claims ‘gets her in the mood’) and finds Videodrome. The dialogue is as follows:

Nikki: What’s this? Videodrome?

Max: Torture, Murder…

Nikki: Sounds great.

Max: Ain’t exactly sex.

Nikki: Says who?

Nikki then has Max pierce her ears with a needle. Cronenberg comments “For a kind of mini-sadomasochistic experience ear-piercing was quite potent. If you want to introduce someone into the world of sadomasochism then maybe getting them to pierce your ears is the way to do it” (Cronenberg Videodrome Commentary). Just as Nikki is peeling away the layers of what Max finds sexually permissible, Cronenberg is doing the same to his audience. First we are introduced to the notion that there exists a link between pain and sex. Then there is a miniature foray into sadomasochism with the piercing of the ears. The images layer and accumulate until we are flung with Max and Nikki into an alien sexual space; the Videodrome set. The juxtaposition of strong eroticism generated by the sex scene and resonant violence left by our last experience of the Videodrome set combine to violently change our perception of Max and Nikki’s relationship. As their relationship escalates Nikki leads Max through more extreme acts. When she invites him to burn her with a cigarette Cronenberg comments “Nikki’s drawing him into a part of himself that would be better left unexplored. Does this movie draw its audience into places that would be better left unexplored?” (Cronenberg Videodrome Commentary).

As Max is drawn deeper and deeper into his Videodrome hallucination his body, technology, violence and eroticism merge into a single perverse continuum. Nikki’s image appears on Max’s television, the camera zooming in to focus on her red, luscious lips. Max is drawn to the television set, which grows a series of veins and arteries and begins to sensuously pulsate as Max caresses it. The screen, with Nikki’s lips projecting from it, billows out into a breast shaped dome which Max buries his face in while he caresses the rest of the television set. Beard (134) comments that this organic transformation of the television set “transfer[s] technology into the intimate and personal realm of the body”. For Max and Nikki, Videodrome (and by extension, television) and sex have all bled into one. His aberrant sexual practices with Nikki while watching Videodrome have made television and technology a part of the spectrum of things he finds erotic. When Bianca O’Blivion comes to visit Max, he flies into a rage and slaps her when she mentions Videodrome. For an instant Bianca becomes Nikki as Max slaps her. This is further reinforcement that for Max Nikki, violence and television\Videodrome are intimately linked. We can see from these examples that, at its core, Videodrome is a hallucinatory journey through Max Renn’s innermost desires and this is a common thread that ties all of Cronenberg’s work together.

Of all of Cronenberg’s literary adaptations, Crash and Naked Lunch are the most sexually charged. Both focus on a protagonist who undergoes a journey of transformation in which their latent sexuality manifests itself as a powerful force of change in their lives. In Cronenberg’s adaptation of William S. Burroughs sprawling, anarchic and hallucinatory novel, Naked Lunch, we are presented with a torrent of raw biology and human sexuality. William Beard (282) claims that in order to understand the rampant sexual imagery present in Naked Lunch we must look to Burroughs own psychopathology before we can understand the ways in which Cronenberg co-opts and transforms it in his adaptation.

Burroughs was, at his core, a self-loathing homosexual (Beard 297). He was a man who struggled, through his writing, to rationalize his sexual desires which he equated with “cruelty, violence and a deep [revulsion]” (Beard 297). As a result, Burroughs writings are riddled with images of cruel homosexual sexual predators that prey on young men and transform into monsters during the sexual act. The following example is just one of many:

During the sex act he metamorphosed himself into a green crab

from the waist up, retaining human legs and genitals that secreted

a caustic erogenous slime, while a horrible stench filled the hut.

-Burroughs 91-2

This self loathing resulted in Burroughs developing a number of paranoid fantasies to explain away his sexual urges, most involving a clandestine power conspiring against him and forcing sexual perversion onto him as a means of control (Beard 300). This seems to have been Burroughs’ only way to account for his utter self loathing and ongoing drug addiction. This is the final crucial thing we must understand about Burroughs before we can talk about Cronenberg’s adaptation of Naked Lunch; Burroughs was a drug addict. While heroin played a large role in Burroughs life (as evidenced by his autobiographical book Junky) Burroughs didn’t limit himself to any one drug. In the Naked Lunch DVD Commentary Peter Weller (who stars as William Lee in the film and researched Burroughs extensively) claims that the first thing Burroughs would do when he landed in a new city or country was to explore the drug trade (Weller Naked Lunch Commentary). As a result of his extensive experience with narcotics and addiction Burroughs developed some very strong ideas about the nature of addiction. He felt that drug addiction was an analogy for anything that placed barriers between a person and self understanding or clarity (Beard 2006, Weller Naked Lunch Commentary). For Burroughs drugs, alcohol, sexual pleasure and any number of other human distractions were a part of the aforementioned ‘conspiracy of control’ which prevented people from really living. Ironically for Burroughs, rather than both heroin addiction and homosexual drive being barriers to self understanding, it was perhaps drug addiction that Burroughs used to avoid the ultimate truth of himself; that he was homosexual. When we consider these three elements; self-loathing sexuality, outside control and layers of deception we can see why Cronenberg would be drawn to such a project.

In order to adapt Naked Lunch Cronenberg was faced with the problem of inserting a narrative structure to what was a rambling, incoherent, apocalyptic miasma of social and political discourse. His solution was an elegantly simple one; he took events from Burroughs life and other short works and weaved them together with the hallucinatory discourses and treatments from Naked Lunch. The result is a psychotic hallucination of a man coming to grips with his true nature. Burroughs’ surrogate on screen, William Lee (which was Burroughs pen name for many of his works) frequently encounters giant cockroaches which have a large anus on their backs out of which they talk. Cronenberg claims that this was his way of “employing Burroughs’ device of the talking ass-hole without being censored in every country” (Cronenberg Naked Lunch Commentary). There is more at play here, however. Peter Weller comments that Burroughs uses the talking anus as a metaphor for the part of us that we “don’t want to address” or acknowledge (Weller Naked Lunch Commentary). We cannot ignore the fact that these talking anuses often appear alongside scenes linked to Burroughs homosexuality. In the first instance of the bug typewriter appearing (complete with talking anus) William Lee is instructed by it to “type something into me, it’s not something you’re going to like”. The typewriter instructs Lee to type the phrase “homosexuality is the best cover an agent can have” into his report and seems to receive great sexual gratification from Lee’s touch and typing. This is a clear moment of Lee’s psyche partitioning itself in such a way that it can admit it’s darkest secret to itself. Furthermore, this secret is delivered via the Burroughsian trope of the talking anus which stands for everything about ourselves which we cannot face. Lee would not offer this information freely, it can only manifest itself as hallucination of an outside, controlling force instructing him to associate with homosexuality. It is also significant that Lee’s homosexual subconscious manifests itself as a talking anus when we consider that anal sex is the default association that most people have with male homosexuals.

At first ‘meeting’ (for it was, after all, a hallucination) between Lee and the ‘talking bug’, Lee is instructed (by the bug) to kill his wife. The bug claims that she’s an ‘enemy agent’ and a member of an ‘alien species’ (which alludes to both women and heterosexuals as ‘alien’ and incomprehensible). Not only does Lee accept the bug’s presence and murderous instructions, he actively carries them out, shooting his wife in the head. The hallucinatory bug powder (which is revealed to be a highly addictive substance) which Lee works with on a daily basis has given his homosexual psyche a way to communicate his dissatisfaction with his marriage and instructs him to kill his wife, in effect killing heterosexuality. As we have seen in Videodrome, hallucinations are a vital storytelling device in Cronenberg’s films because they allow him to expose the fears and desires of his character’s subconscious, a device he shares intimately with Burroughs.

Over the course of the film Lee jumps through many addictions in an attempt to hide from his true, homosexual nature. He begins with a bug powder habit, which he inherits from his wife. Dr. Benway exposes Lee to the Tangierian centipede powder, which Lee consumes with gusto, going so far as to move to Tangier after killing his wife so that he can be closer to the source (which his subconscious rationalizes as a trip to get closer to ‘the enemy’, Interzone). Each successive addiction is ultimately unsatisfying and, finally, in his descent into drug induced psychosis, Lee turns to homosexual sex when he is rescued from living on the streets by a Tangierian boy, Kiki. After a brief affair with Kiki, Lee cannot cope with the truth and takes Kiki to the house of the gay sexual predator, Cloquet. He effectively trades Kiki’s innocence for information by allowing Kiki to be raped by Cloquet after receiving ‘dirt’ on Interzone agents. Cronenberg reveals the rape of Kiki in a classically Burroughsian style. Cloquet is transformed into a gigantic crustacean whose pincers painfully pierce Kiki’s flesh, resulting in painful, weeping sores while Cloquet’s giant carapace undulates and thrusts from behind the young boy. When Lee attempted to live with his true nature (by engaging in a homosexual relationship with Kiki) his psyche couldn’t handle it. He rejected it, casting the boy into the hands of a sexual predator and once more seeing homosexuality as a state inhabited by monsters. Ironically, by delivering Kiki to Cloquet, Lee is a crucial component of this monstrosity. Without his interferance, Kiki and Cloquet would not have met.

Finally we turn our attention to Crash, Cronenberg’s adaptation of J. G. Ballard’s novel. More a case study in the evolution of human sexuality than a feature film, Crash explores the marriage of technology and eroticism. The protagonist, James, is involved in a series of car crashes. While in hospital he meets Vaughn, a man obsessed with car crashes and “the eroticism of wounds”. As James spends more time with Vaughn his sexual associations shift and he becomes consumed by an erotic obsession with cars, in effect becoming Vaughn. The parallels with Cronenberg’s other works are clear. Obsession, control, a bridge between the biological and technological and a pervasive, mutable sexuality are present. It is likely that the core of Cronenberg’s attraction to Crash as a novel to adapt to film lies in a simple passage:

The crash was the only real experience I had been through in years.

For the first time I was in physical confrontation with my own body, an

inexhaustible encyclopaedia of pains and discharges.

-Ballard 39

If, for Cronenberg, the body is the “first fact of human existence” (Günberg 95) then this revelation by James is telling. James is a disillusioned, disconnected member of society who has been distanced from his body. It took the violent and sudden trauma of a car crash to reintroduce James to an intimate relationship with his own body. The logical extension of this is the pairing of any intimate experience for James with violence and technology.

James and Catherine (the other crash victim) develop a relationship which quickly evolves into a sexual one. James’ sex with his wife becomes stale and unsatisfying compared to the sex he has with Catherine. Beard (400) asserts that this is because, for James, the sex with his wife is too “beautiful” and “perfect”. After his car crash, James’ marriage and sex life with his wife have become just as stale and superficial as everything outside of the crash. Because Catherine has not only experienced a car crash, but the same car crash as James, his sex with her is filled with the intimacy and bodily communion that he experienced at the moment of his crash.

Catherine introduces James to Vaughn, although they briefly met in hospital when Vaughn admired James’ wounds. If James is beginning to embark on a journey of erotic rebirth then Vaughn is the end-point of that journey. His body a litany of scar tissue, Vaughn is a “creature who delights in [his] creatureness” (Beard 401). Vaughn occupies his time working on “the project”, an umbrella term for a wide range of activities which marry car accidents and eroticism. These activities include photographing car accidents, having sex in car washes and deliberately causing car accidents. Cronenberg films these accidents in a remarkably sexual fashion. Vaughn stalks his potential victims, his gaze upon them a clearly sexual one. He initiates contact with his target by thrusting towards them and breaking suddenly. His thrusts into the car in front of him become increasingly powerful until he connects with them. For Vaughn the separation between man and machine no longer exists. His car is a phallic extension of himself which he uses to violently penetrate the cars of others. This behaviour eventually kills Vaughn, James resurrects his car and assumes Vaughn’s persona in the film. He then uses Vaughn’s car to crash into his wife and has sex with her mangled body while they lie beside her mangled car. It is only after he has forced his wife to endure the same trauma he experienced that James can have a fulfilling sexual experience. He has at once merged his old and new sexualities together by incorporating the extreme elements of Vaughn into his personality and drawing his wife into the same sexual realm.

In conclusion, when we examine Videodrome, Naked Lunch and Crash we can see that not only is the cinema a sexual entity for Cronenberg but his consuming obsession with human sexuality manifests itself in the protagonists his films. In each of the three films we examined in this essay we see character whose latent, abnormal sexual urges are brought to the surface by external forces. For Cronenberg the body is the central focus of human existence, but there could be no body without sex. In effect sex takes on a hyper-real status in Cronenberg’s films. As Cronenberg said himself, during the Criterion Collection Naked Lunch Commentary, “sexuality transforms you into something more than human”. Nothing could be truer for Max Renn, William Lee and James Ballard.

Works Cited

Ballard, J. G. Crash London: Vintage 2004
Beard, William The Artist as Monster: The Cinema of David Cronenberg
Toronto: University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2006
Burroughs, William S. Naked Lunch New York: Grove 1966
Burroughs, William S. The Soft Machine New York: Grove 1961
Crash dir. David Cronenberg. Perf. James Spader & Holly Hunter. Alliance Communications Corporation 1996. DVD Newline Home Entertainment 2005.
Günberg, Serge David Cronenberg: Interviews with Serge Grunberg London: Plexus Publishing Ltd. 2006
Naked Lunch dir. David Cronenberg. Perf. Peter Weller & Judy Davis. Film Trustees Ltd. 1991. DVD Criterion Collection 2003. DVD Commentary by David Cronenberg and Peter Weller.
Videodrome dir. David Cronenberg. Perf. James Woods & Deborah Harry. CFDC 1983. DVD Criterion Collection 2004. DVD Commentary by David Cronenberg and Mark Irwin.