Show Cronen Cronenberg berg says a nonviolent message lurks in his films' films gore Desson Thomson 1 The lie Washington Post y When en David Cronenberg brings violence to the screen it feels like something directed at our moral consciences as much muchas as as s at the dead bleeding bodies sprawled in front of us r His is not the popcorn exhilaration of The Bourne Ultimatum with punch- punch shoot run fast editing Or Orthe Orthe Orthe the adrenaline buzz in the campy campy thons gore-a-thons of Quentin With Cronenberg a. a well lets let's just say ay dont don't read on if youre you're not pot prepared for gore even gore with a message at its center enter In his new film Eastern Promises about nef nefarious rious doings within the Russian underworld of London an assassins assassin's attempt to slit a aman's amans amans aman's mans man's throat isn't quick and glean clean He has to saw and saw until the blade finally cuts through h to the jugular iu ular In his 20 2005 5 A History of W Violence olence Cronenberg ends a heros hero's triumphant gun gun battle not with reaction shots hots of admiring onlookers but with a gruesome close- close up p of his shooting victims victim's bloody shattered head And in his 1981 film Scanners a persons person's head explodes in a mushroom cloud the cloud the image rendered more disgusting than cinematically spectacular His brand of violence is apparent in virtual virtually ly all of his 17 features which include The Dead Zone The Fly Dead Ringers and Naked Lunch The plot of his 1996 film Crash Crash ev ev violence as sexual stimulant these scenes different is that they resonate beyond simple grotesquerie and plot development They give a quite literal lesson esson albeit gruesome and backhanded about the sanctity and preciousness of life The uncomfortable timbre of Cronenberg's violence makes us realize how insulated we are from reality in other films And how most Hollywood movies have conditioned us to the C B response to violence fear shock relief The violence in action- action oriented movies such as The Bourne Ultimatum matu n nis is impressionistic theres there's almost no physicality to it says Cronenberg 64 in Washington recently to promote his new film Its easy to lose sight of the fact were we're talking about the destruction of a body and a unique human whose experiences are never to tobe tobe tobe be replicated again I want the audience to take it as seriously as I do Its It's not just an aesthetic thing Its It's a tragedy on some level that they should feel and I think the only way they can feel it is emotionally and physically Which is why in Eastern Promises Cronenberg emphasizes the onus of severing a human throat an idea that occurred to him after watching a terrorist beheading video The would-be would assassin in Cronenberg's movie is not very experienced at this he explains He discovers the human body is a complex thing with sinews muscles and tendons It resists destruction to the last drop of blood So its it's not a nice clean cut Its It's messy and horrifying for him and us Cronenberg concentrates his fullest attention on moments that other directors might gloss over In places they edit for viewing speed or audience squeamishness he keeps the cameras rolling In Cronenberg's hands a bathhouse battle between Viggo playing a Russian hit man and two killers in Eastern Promises becomes a sensual bloody treatise on the inefficiency and horror of real fighting not the slick action sequence wed we'd normally find in a conventional crime picture Shunning professional stuntmen the Canadian director insisted and his fellow performers create a fight that looked like hard physical labor It doesn't go smoothly and things dont don't quite connect and things are missed and you screw up and all of those things should be in there screen On-screen the scene seems to run for an eternity ty as character character- caught unarmed and nude nude nude- fights for his life sustaining painful slashes and stabs from his opponents' opponents carpet knives After the gruesome conclusion we have a new palpable appreciation for forthe forthe forthe the sheer grunt work of killing and dying The scene is designed to get right under your skin and anc make you feel vulnerable says Stephan Dupuis the makeup artist who created and monitored extensive body tattoos and the fake flesh used to hide the blood bags Cronenberg's passion for whether physiology its it's severed necks or Jeff Goldblum's oozing flesh fleshin in The Fly is of the underlying theme in all his films says Dupuis who won an Oscar for his work on Fly Earlier in his career Cronenberg found himself labeled the king of venereal horror and associated in press reports with horror- horror such as George Romero Night of the Living Dead and John Carpenter Halloween Cronenberg says he has not watched the grisly Saw or Hostel films which he describes as nothing more than torture movies a atheme atheme atheme theme he explored in his 1983 film in which a sleazy cable television owner owne James Jamest Woods broadcasts a pirated video of torture and mutilation only to discover the violence on it itis itis itis is not staged Cronenberg's work is different in that instead of shock for shocks shock's value hes he's using the form subversively against itself to promote nonviolence A conversation with Cronenberg about his use of violence quickly veers to talk of body consciousness which for him started at the age of 10 when he says he stopped believing in God To a accept the body is to accept death and people will do anything to avoid that reality he says in a voice almost as soft and evenly measured as that of HAL the computer voice in 2001 I A Space Odyssey Art and religion he declares are just some of the ways that humankind attempts to minimize the reality of the body to say w well ll your body can die but you'll still be alive or whatever Or that this artist is immortal Well hes he's not immortal you know he interjects a momentary ironic laugh here hes dead Perhaps surprisingly it was a western Shane that first influenced his body- body based approach to screen violence and filmmaking in general he says Watching the 1953 film as a boy he recalls seeing Jack Wilson the heavy played by Jack Jaek Palance fire a bullet into a rancher that visibly propelled the victim through the air Before that in the westerns Id I'd seen people would go bang-bang bang and other people would just fall down Cronenberg says This was the first time Id I'd seen that effect the the idea a bullet could lift you off the ground and blow v you away That really was horrifying and suddenly this had an impact You really felt the death of that person as a physical thing The filmmaker is unafraid of intimacy with violence and sex says Holly Hunter who played one of the characters in Crash He ta takes es you on the inside track of it which is nothing to do with slickness or glamour and it can actually be quite blasphemous and macabre Theres There's a coolness to Davids David's movies cool coolin coolin coolin in temperature I mean and in that way they're not pornographic or thrill- thrill seeking To Toldo Id 0 fH un ter's comment Cronenberg responds I think people are curious drawn attracted repelled I II I I ia c r rl l I i II t I Washington Post photo by Man Margin Manin in Joseph When David Cronenberg brings violence to the screen it feels like something directed at ones one's moral conscience conscience conscience con con- science as much as at the bodies on display I and afraid all at the same time about violence and they're right Theres There's an eroticism i involved certainly in Crash and I really saw that in the beheading videos They looked I like ke homosexual gang rapes with all the chanting and so on It lt was pretty obvious to me though the terrorists would be in total denial about that There are strange perverse elements to violence Ultimately Cronenberg says he hopes his message reaches beyond movie audiences There are so many ways to make murder abstract abstractor or killing if you dont don't want j to call it murder or war You can go to statistics Youve You've got language which is always a great curtain such as collateral damage and all these other othet euphemisms for ripping bodies apart throwing heads around But if the bodily consequences of war were the first thing you thought of war wouldn't happen pen |