By Greg Reifsteck
(Moving Pictures, Oct./Nov. 2005) A slimy tentacle going into a fleshy portal - check. A gratuitous sex scene with ample nudity - check. A fast car - check. A lead character with an obsession for technology or carnality, leading him or her down a self-destructive path in search of the truth -check. Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg is a true auteur. His films might all be about different subjects, but the themes and motifs he repeatedly uses reverberate so intensely through his films that die-hard fans can end up keeping a subconscious tally as they watch his films: The Dead Zone, Videodrome, The Fly, Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch, Crash, eXistenZ, Spider. Cronenberg's latest New Line release, A History of Violence, may be a meditation on Midwestern family life, but it's no less stocked with the director's signature blend of sex, violence and obsessive compulsion. Viggo Mortensen plays Tom Stall, a man who has lived quietly with his attorney wife (Maria Bello) and two kids. But when he plays hero, killing two shady criminals who try to rob his diner, the media attention forces him to deal with his violent past. Still, as a $32 million studio film - his largest budget to date - A History of Violence may be the director's most mainstream effort since he helmed the 1983 screen adaptation of Stephen King's The Dead Zone. So we won't see a fleshy, pulsating videotape being shoved into James Woods' gut (Videodrome). We won't see a typewriter with a mouth talking to William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch). But not to worry, Cronenberg freaks. Mortensen and Bello execute the director's requisite sex scenes - one in bed, the other on stairs - that are just as psychologically intense and brutal as the piston pumping between James Spader and Holly Hunter after a multi-car pile up in 1996's Crash. "It is interesting to note that they are both between a couple that has been married for 20 years and has children, which is itself unusual in movies where the general feeling is, once you get married, sex is like, forget about it," Cronenberg says of the coitus maximus between his Violence leads. "And to some, it might not be interesting cinematically, but of course it is, and maybe even more interesting." We also get mobsters with exploding heads, a la Scanners, Cronenberg's 1981 breakout hit, only in this case it is shotgun blasts, not mind control, that do the dirty work. "It's not like I have a checklist of things, and sex is one of them and body portals is one of them. It just naturally comes, especially in A History of Violence, out of the characters and their relationships; it comes out of the concerns of the film," Cronenberg explains in a phone interview from his home. Born in Toronto, Cronenberg says he always knew he was going to have a creative career but wasn't certain celluloid would be the canvas that would put him on the map. "Movies have always been a part of my life, literally before television, and so seeing movies was like breathing air. It was a natural thing," says Cronenberg. "It never occurred to me that you could make a movie until I was at the University of Toronto and saw a film that a friend had made. Up to that point, I thought I was going to be a novelist, because my father was a writer and I loved literature. But I'm also a techno freak, so the technology of cinema intrigued me as well, and holding a camera is pretty nice." Cronenberg cut his teeth in Canadian television and was soon showing his bite in low-budget horror fare. He made Shivers in 1975 - it was retitled They Came From Within when it was released Stateside - and then 1977's Rabid, starring porn princess Marilyn Chambers, which showed that the filmmaker had a style all his own. Both films fed on audience paranoia: One dealt with a parasite and the other with a vampiric disease, ravaging every victim in their wake. And in both cases, medical experimentation was the trigger that started the viral spread. Cronenberg quickly brought this personal obsession with medical malpractice and experimentation to America via Scanners, which featured 237 genetically altered mind controllers who literally had thoughts that could kill. It was two years later, in 1983, that Cronenberg's other obsession - the power of technology and the media - brought forth a film that, in retrospect, seems eerily prescient. "With Videodrome, people felt it was an anticipation of many things, including the Internet and interactive computer stuff. And certainly I think it's probably interesting to look at it in that way, because it seemed to connect with those things," says Cronenberg. "But really it was in the air at the time. If you're an artist you have antennae that are more sensitive than other people, or at least you don't repress the information that you get from them."
Videodrome was about a TV show which turned out to be an evil experiment designed to permanently alter viewers' perceptions by giving them brain damage. With its tagline "Long Live the New Flesh," the film stands as a scathing statement about how media would one day become hard-wired into our everyday lives, whether we liked it or not. "In drama, obsession is very interesting because obsessed people are very interesting," Cronenberg says of one his pet themes. "They focus the audience and the filmmaker through their obsession, and allow you to cut through - or give you a sharper point - to cut through some veils and look at something that is real beneath the surface. "By dealing with characters like that, in Videodrome in particular, I was able to sense things that eventually did develop into recognizable techno forms that we are now living right in the midst of." The theme of media power returns in A History of Violence, but now Cronenberg's focus is more toward America's obsession with sudden celebrity. "The media are not portrayed in a particularly hideous way in the movie," Cronenberg says, as a sort of disclaimer. "You could do it with a lot more negativity, really. At the same time, there is a sense now with the whole celebrity culture thing, that you don't really exist until you've had your 15 minutes of fame. There is a suggestion, and it's a gentle one, that there is a rotting effect that the media can have. It is the intensity of it, the unceasing scrutiny of it and the energy that goes into it, that can be very destructive." One area of Cronenberg's oeuvre, and his background, hasn't received much scrutiny: A former race-car driver, he made 1979's drag-racing film Fast Company; a need for speed would also explain some of his attraction to J.G. Ballard's Crash. He says he's got another auto-fixated film in the hopper. "I wrote a script called Red Cars, which is actually about Formula One racing in 1961, when the American driver Phil Hill won the world championship for Ferrari. It's a racing movie but it's not a sort of traditional sports movie in its structure," says Cronenberg. "For various complex reasons that I won't get into at the moment, I have not been able to get that movie made." Maybe it's because Hollywood doesn't exactly think of Cronenberg as the go-to guy for sports films, non-traditional or otherwise. His next project is London Fields, based on Martin Amis's 1991 novel, which centers on a promiscuous psychic who senses she'll be murdered by one of two men she meets in a seedy pub. Now that sounds more like the Cronenberg we know. | 
