Cronenberg (pt. V)

Rabid

A Dangerous Method

Well, dear readers and consumers of culture, we have survived the Oscars and awards season, pat yourself on the back! After stretching myself not to loathe last week’s Oscar nominees, I am more than ready to stop discussing this set of awarded and debated films. We can now take a brief reprieve from film discourse until the next block of films that are deemed “prestigious” are released, and focus on watching movies for fun, rather than for the sport of keeping up. My favorite way to ring in the end of awards season is by celebrating the birthday of one of my favorite directors of all time: David Cronenberg. This Pisces prince of the peculiar turns 81 tomorrow and throughout his time on Earth he has unleashed some of the most bizarre and bewitching films that this critic has ever seen. I’m sure by now, on what is my fifth installment of Cronenberg double features, you’re well aware of how transfixed I am by his work. No matter what era or genre or tone Cronenberg operates within, he never seems to run out of new, daring ideas. There is always an air of weirdness to his films, no doubt, but it never ceases to amaze me just how many different flavors of weird Cronenberg can introduce us to. Even with films like eXistenZ and Crimes of the Future, some of my least favorites of his, I cannot fault them for lacking intriguing concepts or hauntingly clever ideas. He has influenced several other auteurs like Julia Ducournau, Guillermo del Toro, and of course, his son Brandon, and his perplexing and prolific use of body horror can seemingly be tailored to any generation’s paranoias. His preferred genres seem to be horror or drama, but both of tonight’s films are proof that Cronenberg can extend himself into any kind of narrative territory, and offer a healthy mix of both horror and drama. And, as I’ve said before, his family dramas can, at times, fuck me up way worse than any of his body horrors. In Lianne McLarty’s “‘Beyond the Veil of the Flesh’; Cronenberg and the Disembodiment of Horror” she discusses the many contradictions to David Cronenberg’s filmography—how specifically his horror films can somehow teeter between misogynistic and feminist, depending on how you read them:

“A critical Cronenberg appears when the text’s focus is on threatening social practices; a very different, indeed a misogynist, Cronenberg appears when the body, particularly the female body, is constructed as the site of the monstrous… Otherness remains a central feature of the horror film, and the embodiment of it in the feminine throws the politics of paranoia into question. Opposition in horror depends on a construction of a monstrous that is not the feminine body but the body politic.”

Regardless of how you read/watch Cronenberg, you cannot deny his innovation of the horror genre, and the unique ways in which he distorts the human form. Tonight’s first film, Rabid, has often been grouped into Cronenberg’s less-than-feminist crop of films, but this critic found this horror story to be surprisingly empowering and deliciously compelling. His 1977 film Rabid stars adult film actress Marilyn Chambers as Rose, a young woman who unfortunately finds herself in a brutal crash while riding on the back of her boyfriend, Hart’s, motorcycle in the Quebec countryside. The nearest emergency room happens to be an experimental plastic surgery and new-age health spa—The Keloid Clinic—a suspicious but attractive center who’s aesthetic and mysterious practices mirror the new-age health clinic Cronenberg transports us to in The Brood. Dr. Dan Keloid decides that the best way to save the near-death Rose is with a highly-experimental skin-grafting process where he affixes morphogenetically-neutral grafts to her chest and abdomen in the hope that it will differentiate and replace her damaged skin and organs. After a month, Rose’s boyfriend Hart is released with minor injuries, and Rose remains in a coma. For the first twenty minutes of Rabid, we do not hear Rose speak. That is until she wakes from her coma, screaming, realizing she is utterly alone in a completely unknown place, with only strangers to comfort her. One of these strangers is another patient at the Keloid Clinic, a man who wears a sweatshirt that says “Jogging Kills”, who runs into Rose’s room upon hearing her screaming and attempts to console her. But what happens instead is much more gruesome, as Rose wraps her arms around this man and seemingly hugs him to near-death before returning to her slumber. He begins to bleed out and moan in agony and yet the next day, he cannot remember what happened. The doctors cannot figure out what is plaguing this patient, and seemingly can’t connect his injuries to Rose, and her healing process is seemingly going quite smoothly. But the next night, she awakes again and finds herself another victim at the clinic—a woman who’s father keeps periodically sending her there to get nose jobs. As Rose becomes more aware of what she has done, she tries desperately to get in touch with her boyfriend back in Montreal, but she cannot reach him. So her unwitting reign of terror and blood-sucking continues, and by the time Dr. Keloid discovers that Rose is the cause of several mysterious deaths and random attacks around town, it is already too late. He asks her if she feels weak, to which she responds, “No, I feel strong. I feel very strong.” Rose then opens her arms and embraces Dr. Keloid, exposing a butthole-like orifice on her armpit that, when threatened, extends a phallic serpent-like parasite that feeds on the blood of other humans—and before he can react, the doctor is her next victim. But just like the other people she’s attacked, Dr. Keloid survives and contracts a butthole-like orifice-residing parasite that only reveals itself after several hours. Dr. Keloid’s appears just as he’s about to perform plastic surgery on a patient—one of the more disturbing and shockingly frantic scenes in the film. As her victims rise in numbers, Rose escapes the clinic and the surrounding vicinity—just in time for the police and her ineffectual, absent boyfriend to arrive. As her victims create new victims, an epidemic of butthole-like, orifice-residing, blood-thirsty parasites takes over Quebec and eventually Montreal. Those affected have bloodshot eyes, foaming mouths, and an insatiable rage and hunger—all of it being mistaken for an outbreak of rabies. Rose is a fascinating patient zero / Typhoid Mary because she was an unwilling victim herself who still appears perfectly healthy, unlike her victims. This zombie outbreak is also unique because it is caused by well-intentioned plastic surgery, and because Rose does have some agency, but her apetite outweighs her will power. What I loved about this premise, and the way Rose systematically chooses her victims, is that for the most part Rose kills/infects in self-defense. Whether it be the well-meaning male patient at the clinic or the predatory man who approaches her at a pornographic movie theater, Rose is never the one putting her (particularly-male) victims in a state of harm, they happily walk right into it. I am always compelled by any subversion to firmly-established horror tropes like zombie apocalypses, and as with his horny zombies in Shivers, Cronenberg reinvented this subgenre once again with Rabid. Cronenberg carefully plays out the suspense in Rabid, and finds a healthy balance between slow-burning fear and break-neck-speedy chaos. Several terrifying scenes in this movie reminded me of other zombie / outbreak films that have come since, but there’s something about this particular 1970s brand of pop-psychological anxiety mixing with the timeless terror of pandemics that makes it so memorable—and I’m not just talking about the eye-popping special effects and groovy shag-carpeted furniture we see throughout. I can certainly see how Rabid may not satisfy every feminist critic, with half of the film showcasing Marilyn Chambers’ titties just as much as her terrifyingly-bloodthirsty body part, but I found the film to be surprisingly satisfying in its attempts to marry the concepts of damsel and destroyer. It somehow reminded me of The Howling’s tricky combination of psycho-sexual thrill ride and anthropomorphic creature antagonists. As with The Brood and a handful of other Cronenberg projects, I would’ve liked a happier ending for Rabid’s monstrous feminine, but I thoroughly enjoyed this film—and far more than I expected to, given the criticism I’ve read of it. Just as Rabid begins in the immediate chaos of a violent motorcycle accident, our next Cronenberg film—A Dangerous Method—opens with the chaos and confusion of an inconsolable Keira Knightly being transported via horse-drawn carriage to a mysterious location. I’ve been wanting to see A Dangerous Method basically since it came out in 2011, and not just because it stars Cronenberg’s muse and my crush Viggo Mortensen as Sigmund Freud, but because I’ve always been fascinated with this era of psychoanalytic experimentation and discovery. A Dangerous Method is based on writer Christopher Hampton’s 2002 stage play The Talking Cure, which was based on the 1993 non-fiction book by John Kerr, A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein—and after watching this film I’m dying to read more about these three puzzling figures. Michael Fassbender stars as psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who has accepted the troubled Sabina Spielrein (Knightly) as a patient at his clinic in Zurich in 1904. Fassbender was a chic Carl Jung, adorned in cunty little glasses and handling Sabina with gentleness and patience—for perhaps the first time in her tumultuous life. Sabina has suffered abuse at the hands of her father, and her trauma has caused her to act out in violent or resistant ways when faced with humiliation of any kind. But Sabina is also very intelligent, and skilled at articulating her neuroses as well as the neuroses she observes in Carl Jung, causing him to remark that she would make an excellent psychoanalyst herself one day. Jung’s wealthy and pregnant wife (Sarah Gadon) suggests that Sabina may be the one who he’s been looking for to test new, experimental psychoanalysis on, but she also proposes that he contact Sigmund Freud, as his knowledge of sexual repression and trauma may be of some help. The two scientists begin corresponding via letters and eventually the two meet—resulting in a rousing conversation and informed-discourse of their field that lasts over thirteen hours. While Jung disagrees with Freud’s insistence that all trauma and mental illness has a sexual root or manifestation, the two quickly form a professional relationship and a personal friendship that rapidly evolves into some Freudian-form of a father/son, mentor/mentee dynamic. Years go by and Sabina has been nearly cured of her hysteria, and she begins studying to become one of the first female psychoanalysts of all time—she also lets Jung know where her dormitory is, should he ever want to come visit her. At the same time, Freud sends another brilliant but disturbed psychoanalyst, Otto Gross (Vincent Cassel), to be observed by Jung. Otto is an unethical non-monogamist who suffers from some form of a sex addition, and cannot believe that Jung has never slept with any of his patients. Jung wonders if Otto is as interested in exploring the sexual side of psychoanalysis as Freud, to which Otto shadily remarks: “I think Freud's obsession with sex has to do with the fact that he never gets any.” Tortured by Freud’s persuasive theories and hung-up on Otto’s plea for freedom at any cost, Jung eventually decides to sleep with Sabina—not only satisfying his curiosity but fulfilling Sabina’s desire to be punished sexually with her consent. Things only become more tense and psychologically spiky when Jung stops hooking up with Sabina, and she goes off to Vienna to study under Freud. Sabina and Freud are both clearly in love with Jung to some degree, but Jung is so tortured by his lack of control with his once-controlled experiment that he cannot bear to be around either of them. I had a feeling that A Dangerous Method would be scientific and kinky—which it was thankfully—but I didn’t expect this dizzying and damaging love triangle to materialize, at least not so explicitly. Cronenberg is the master of creating confusingly-sexy content, and every player here understood the assignment of “sterile-but-scintillating” perfectly. It’s anyone’s guess if the exact events in this film actually took place, if Freud proved his own incestuous theories to be at least somewhat true by engaging in a frenzied familial dynamic of his own, but I was really entertained by A Dangerous Method. Viggo and Fassbender were perfectly-cast as these problematic favorite doctors, and with peace and love I have never seen Keira Knightly act this well or this much (if that makes sense.) I would give anything to time travel back to the turn of the last century, just to see if Sigmund Freud actually kept a photo of Carl Jung in his office, but for now all I can do is speculate that they had their own form of combustively-romantic, scientifically-sturdy chemistry. Surely there is fanfiction that depicts such an academic fantasy but my search history is complicated enough already. As per usual, both of tonight’s Cronenberg features were shocking, enthralling, and gorgeously-grotesque. I know I’ll eventually run out of Cronenberg movies that I haven’t seen, but I’ll forever soak them up for all of the authentic weirdness and creative chaos that they have to offer. Happy Birthday, David Cronenberg: Canadian legend, master of body horror, innovator of familial dramas, and artist of never-boring cinema. Ta ta for now!