Long Live the New Flesh: David Cronenberg's Exhibition
Tuesday, November 12, 2013 at 11:00PM It’s Amir here, reporting on a couple of films I saw at the David Cronenberg exhibition currently held at TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto. As the biggest Canadian director working in cinema today, the master of body horror is held in high esteem in national circles. This comprehensive tribute to his body of work is a tremendous showcase for a filmmaker whose work has done a major service to the Canadian film industry over the past three decades.
Running alongside the exhibition that includes all things Cronenberg like film memorabilia, set props and a life-size mugwump, Long Live the New Flesh also hosts screenings of the director’s films with lectures and Q&A sessions. I had the chance to attend two of these events: a screening of Naked Lunch introduced by David Cronenberg and his longtime producing partner Jeremy Thomas (Oscar winner for The Last Emperor) and my first big screen experience with his seminal science fiction film, The Fly, which was followed by a Q&A with the film’s Oscar-winning make-up artist Stephan Dupuis. Both conversations were illuminating though the films didn’t quite affect me in equal measure.
Naked Lunch, adapted from the William S. Burroughs novel of the same name, is one of the more personal projects in Cronenberg’s canon, born of his passion for the writer’s work. Cronenberg described the film as both a dream-come-true for allowing him the opportunity to adapt one of his personal favorite novels, but also one that made him extremely anxious as he felt the necessity to get the Burroughsian elements just right. Asked if adapting the supposedly unfilmable novel was a difficult task, Cronenberg referred to the project as one of the easiest screenplays he’s written for the way Burroughs’ prose and his dialogue transfers itself directly to the screen.
I’m afraid to say I wasn’t as enamored with the film as the director himself seems to be. Naked Lunch, the novel, deals with a wide variety of themes ranging from gay acceptance, gay identity, substance abuse, writer’s block and the mechanisms of dealing with grief. Though on the surface Cronenberg transfers all that material to the screen, he doesn’t convincingly explore any of them with the depth and efficiency that the source novel does. It lacks both the immediacy and verve of the book, despite transforming its structure into almost entirely linear form.
In fact, Naked Lunch is unsuccessful precisely because Cronenberg’s formalist approach to narration is an odd fit for the material. His distancing, icy mannerisms – something that serves a film like Dead Ringers so very well – fail him at the film’s most intimate moments. Naked Lunch always remains too structured, too rigid for such a wild, unhinged vision. Of course, this being a Cronenberg film, it isn’t entirely without pleasures, particularly in creating an absorbing visual atmosphere with the intricately designed mugwump, the grotesquely hilarious living typewriters and the terrifying Fadela; but that’s the extent to which the film intrigues.
The Fly, on the other hand, remains as fresh and exciting as the day it was released. If anything, its outdated, though still immensely impressive, mechanical effects lend the film an anachronistic sweetness that few sci-fi’s exhibit today. It’s a spectacle to behold, but the spectacle isn’t the film’s raison d’être. This is the point in Cronenberg’s career at which he reached total maturity, where his outlandish ideas of the body and the horror it could bear found a human dimension unmatched by his previous work. The Fly is tragic and gentle, and as ironic as it may sound for a futuristic film about a man turning into an insect by malfunctioning machinery, it remains his most accessible work to date.
Dupuis, who won an Oscar for his work on this film, called it one of the most engaging experiences he has had in his career, and had a blast talking about it on the stage too. He spent ample time criticizing CGI for draining the life out of films, but commended actors who now have to emote against virtual surroundings. Calling the '80s "the pulsating decade", when an abundance of films featured pulsating body parts like in An American Werewolf in London, Dupuis spoke at length about the tenuous process of creating Brundlefly in that spirit, the chronological progression of his make-up in eight or nine completely distinct stages and the films that influenced him, particularly The Creature from Black Lagoon.
On working with Jeff Goldblum, Dupuis stated that he was perfectly cast for the part “for having big eyes, for being eccentric and twitchy, and for being really into the role and into… Geena.” He also spoke at length about the experience of accompanying David Cronenberg throughout his career. It’s a filmography full of challenges for visual artists and naturally Dupuis had a lot of delicious stories to share, from one about the design of a monkey/cat hybrid that was eliminated from the final cut of The Fly to the challenges of designing the mugwump because of the thinness of his arms – the creature was rendered to look like Burroughs, by the way!
The highlight of his session was when a member of the audience asked whether Dupuis likes all the films he’s worked on – something I’m always curious to know about craftsmen – which he answered with brutal frankness:
I once did this film called Deep Rising. If I had done that a few decades earlier, the Second World War could have ended much sooner. You could show that film to Nazis and confessions would stream right out of them.
That almost makes me want to watch it, ironically. If you’ve seen it, share your opinion in the comments! And if you happen to be in Toronto, be sure to check out the exhibition.
Reader Comments (5)
Naked Lunch isn't about adapting the source material but the creative process and the life of Burroughs. It is several things without satisfying any core group. Lunch is the most fucked up movie I own, there are a couple of foreign language titles that I adore that could beat it in that area. But as far as English language genre movies are concern it has no equal. And my precious Judy Davis is in it. Kind of strange she would lose her best shot at Oscar from a rival nominee for a Fox movie. Davis was apart of '91 auteur greatness: Barton Fink and Naked Lunch, both Fox movies. Both about the creative process, done in a creative fashion that someone just don't get.
3rtful- Barton Fink is an infinitely superior film to Naked Lunch. And as I mention in the post, my problem with the latter was that it isn't quite fucked up enough.
I prefer Barton Fink. But the urge to revisit Naked Lunch is frequent. How can anyone say that a movie which basically says our hero can't become the writer he's meant to be unless his wife and her doppelganger is dead isn't fucked up enough?
i wish i could teleport all over the world to attend every cool film event. until then, reading about it will have to do!
I miss David Cronenberg.
But even if he isn't quite what he used to be anymore,
he's probably also the last man standing among his greatest Horror/Sci-fi golden age peers.
They're all (effectively) dead now.