SOURCE: “The Canadianness of David Cronenberg,” in Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, Vol. 27, No. 2, 1994, pp. 113–33.

[In the following essay, Beard discusses Cronenberg’s work in the context of the debate on what English-Canadian culture is and means. He asserts that Cronenberg’s male protagonists mostly resemble “the long line of Canadian cinematic and literary unheroes and their pattern of failure, powerlessness and hopeless waste.”]

It is becoming more difficult, in a postmodern environment, to speak with any confidence of “national character” or to define nationality in broad cultural (as opposed to sociopolitical) terms. In English Canada, where “national character” is famously weak and ill-defined, especially in contrast to the clearer and more confident cultural nationalisms of the United States and Québec, what was always uncertain has now become theoretically impossible or at least undesirable. The “what is Canada?” debate is a relatively recent one, but its vague and tentative wafflings—themselves very “Canadian”—have already been historically subsumed by the project of multiculturalism. The consequent attempt to define Canada actually as a place which has no “identity” other than the collective identities of its individual components, the project to strip Anglo-Canada of any claims to dominant cultural legitimacy (while affirming the cultural legitimacy of other ethnicities), is not only politically irreproachable but may even have been greeted with relief by those same theoretically disenthroned Anglo-Canadians who had become exhausted in the effort to find a stable Canadian cultural identity. In any event the older attempt at a relatively monolithic account of Canadian character, the attempt perhaps most effectively begun by Northrop Frye and seconded by Margaret Atwood to analyze Canadian literature and visual arts for a coherent set of social and psychological characteristics, has been so eclipsed as to be practically extinct.

While recognizing the inevitability and even the desirability of present cultural-theory revisionism, I believe that the Frye-Atwood model has not lost its relevance, even though it is now necessary to restrict sweeping generalizations about “Canadian character” to a more narrow cultural/historical base. If it is not adequate as a complete theory of English-Canadian culture, it retains, as it were, a local truth to the broad patterns of a particular once-dominant Anglo culture, and to particular members of that culture.

It is in this context that I wish to examine the work of filmmaker David Cronenberg, whose peculiar history as a cultural icon has always left him outside the dominant models of “Canadianism.” Although his particular subjects and artistic practice have encouraged his recent inclusion in a non- or supra-national paradigm of postmodern art dominated by a thematics of gender, the body and technology, I believe that such an analysis neglects an important aspect of Cronenberg’s artistic character, and that this “missing” aspect may be partly accounted for by a consideration of his work against the template of the older Frye-Atwood model of Canadianism in the arts. I would assert, then, that David Cronenberg is a profoundly and typically “Canadian” artist according to this paradigm, and that although he conforms rather idiosyncratically to the model, he finally does so in a clear and unmistakable fashion. Moreover, he conforms in ways which appear not to have been noticed and which, I believe, may help to “place” this troubling filmmaker.

For there has been a difficulty in thinking about Cronenberg within a Canadian-cultural context. He has somehow, without a lot of people in the Canadian “culture industry” quite understanding how, progressed from being an embarrassing figure who used Canadian Film Development Corporation (taxpayers’) money to make disgusting exploitation movies like Shivers (1975) and Rabid (1976) to being an internationally-celebrated film artist who has, in the past few years, adapted a modernist literary classic (Naked Lunch) with the blessings of the author, and been the subject of serious books in French and German. It is now widely accepted that Cronenberg is the most, or one of a handful of the most, interesting and valuable filmmakers in English Canada. Yet he has never really been integrated into our “cultural history” (Piers Handling’s 1983 essay stood for a long time as a lonely exception, and has only recently been joined by Gaile McGregor’s distantly related essay of 1993). Whatever place Cronenberg may come to occupy in a new, decentered Canadian culture model, it would be a shame to overlook how fully he conforms to the old monolith of national character.

Even in the context of an ongoing desperate search for a national filmmaking hero, Cronenberg is not usually the first name that arises in discussions of English-Canadian film, and particularly its role in the national culture. Sometimes his name does not arise at all: Bruce Elder’s Image and Identity, in 440-odd pages of “reflections on Canadian film and Canadian culture,” relegates Cronenberg to one dismissive mention in a footnote—referring to “schlock commercial vehicles like Parasite Murders [i.e., Shivers]” (420n6). There are a number of explanations for this fact, several of them obvious. From a traditional high-culture perspective, the mere fact that Cronenberg’s work is genre cinema, and in a particularly disreputable genre (horror), is enough to disqualify it. Although academic film studies and cultural studies have increasingly turned their attention to Cronenberg—as signalled for example in recent essays by Barbara Creed, Marcie Frank, Adam Knee and Helen Robbins, and an entire Cronenberg number of the journal Post Script (forthcoming)—interest in these (non-Canadian) quarters has centered on his astonishing co-incidence with the heavily theorized “hot topics” of gender, the body and technology.

At the same time, Cronenberg is certainly not valued for the characteristics which have attracted this attention. Current academic film studies assigns only political, not esthetic value: notions of “quality” have been rendered nonsensical. So arguments as to the quality of Cronenberg’s work fall on deaf ears. His subject matter and his treatment are anything but “progressive.” Moreover at a time when the whole concept of authorship is problematic, his obsessively personal themes and distinctive style have the status of valueless currency dating back to an antiquated auteurist misperception of cinematic significance. From a nationalist perspective, Cronenberg’s films look too much like American movies. Again, their genre status with its strong commercial associations have been perceived as originating in a Hollywood model of the crassest American cultural-imperialist variety—although in point of fact, Cronenberg has remained in Canada, refused to disguise Canadian locations as American, and generally succeeded in carving out a niche from which to make Canadian films with American money and with good “market penetration” in the U.S. (thus actually attaining the historic economic Grail of feature film production in Canada).

In traditional assessments of the history and status of culture in English Canada, fiction cinema is represented by that line of essentially art-filmmakers from Don Owen to Atom Egoyan, whose mostly tortured history inscribes the struggle to offer a worthy and clearly indigenous alternative to what was inevitably perceived as the predatory Hollywood colonizer. Cronenberg’s films (again, with the recent exception of Naked Lunch) are nothing like this anti-commercial model and make no effort to proclaim their difference from commercial cinema; hence there is some difficulty in thinking of them as really “Canadian.” Moreover, the famous documentary or “realist” impulse in Canadian film is inimical to the whole notion of genre and its conventions, and especially to an expressionist fantasy-based genre like horror.

In today’s postmodern environment of cultural production, where high-culture and mass-culture characteristics are so intermixed that the older modernist dichotomy between those two spheres is becoming harder and harder to enforce or even discern, it is easier for the cultural establishment to embrace Cronenberg’s films, with their “popular” elements, than it used to be. In an equally postmodern moment of celebration of cultural diversity and the destruction of normative attitudes, it is also more possible to find a place in the Canadian cultural mosaic for even a politically questionable (or indecipherable) presenter of quasi-pathological sex and violence like Cronenberg. This, indeed, appears to be the uneasy place which Cronenberg now occupies in the “national cultural consciousness.”

Cronenberg, however, is not a postmodernist—if by postmodernism is meant any kind of essential “playfulness” or emotional detachment, any radical heterogeneity of form or content, any effacement of high/low boundaries or other “fundamental” definitions, any embracing of difference. Rather, his work hovers in an idiosyncratic space between classicism (Hollywood) and modernism (film “art”), committed to the totalizing assumptions of traditional narrative practice and traditional “meaning.” Chris Rodley’s book-length interview-compilation, or virtually any of Cronenberg’s other interviews, demonstrate Cronenberg’s conscious identification with the role of the modernist artist, and his self-modelling in this capacity after the example of such heroes of literary modernism as Burroughs, Nabokov and Beckett. The films themselves reveal general affinities of this kind underneath a surface layer of “popular” genre characteristics. They display, for example, a fear of the destruction of defining boundaries, a longing for wholeness and an agonized sense of its irreparable loss which is, in narrative-thematic terms, entirely rooted in traditional practice, both classicist and modernist. In short, Cronenberg’s films, however momentarily ironic or selfconscious, are at base as traditionally serious as any art can be.

Worth noting, in turn, is that Cronenberg’s formative years were spent in Toronto in the 1950s and 60s, the same environment in which such monolithic cultural critics as Frye and McLuhan were working. In making this observation, I am not suggesting anything as absurd as a direct influence on Cronenberg, a conscious desire on his part to produce works of specifically Frygian “Canadianism”—though anyone as manifestly well-read as Cronenberg might well have been familiar with Frye, and Videodrome contains what is clearly a kind of twisted version of Marshall McLuhan in the “media prophet” Brian O’Blivion. My point is simply that Cronenberg’s “Canadianism” probably sprang from the same general cultural and intellectual environment as that which produced Frye’s, and, later, that of those who followed him along a similar path. I am saying, I suppose, that Cronenberg’s own idea of “Canadianism” is fully compatible with the Frye model. Once again, supporting evidence for this assertion may be found widely scattered through Cronenberg’s interviews (see for example Rodley 22, 25, 97, 118). Yet while it is common sense to say that a self-consciously “typical Canadian” will produce works which manifest “typical Canadian” qualities, it is quite unnecessary—and even counter-productive—to try to prove that these “Canadian” characteristics were deliberately put into the films by the actual author. What needs to be done is to interrogate the works themselves for any such qualities: to compare the films to the Frye-Atwood model and see what the comparison yields. Such a comparison reveals startling similarities. What Northrop Frye found in E. J. Pratt, or Margaret Atwood in Susanna Moodie, can also be found, more or less, in the films of David Cronenberg.

It is my contention, therefore, that Cronenberg, despite his anomalies, is a Canadian artist in this sense, and that his work reflects and embodies the national culture by existing firmly within the boundaries of that culture’s most central traditions and attitudes—again, according to the Frye-Atwood paradigm. The relation of his films to Hollywood models is not imitative but dialectical, and the result of this dialectic is amongst other things a simulacrum of the Canadian-American cultural configuration. Cronenberg’s cinema is most “Canadian” in its bleakness of Affekt, its overriding sense of defeat and powerlessness, its alienated dualism of nature against consciousness, its fearful cautiousness in the face of a hostile universe, and its powerful feelings of isolation and exclusion. The fact that these characteristics exist within a narrative context also populated by excremental sex-parasites, exploding heads, horrific cancerous transformations of the body and obsessive representations of sexual pathology should not distract one from a recognition of their determining importance.

Tony Wilden, in his Marxist/psychoanalytic exposition The Imaginary Canadian, finds a concise distillation of the national attitude in an entry quoted from Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English:

you can’t win. A Canadian catch-phrase, dating since ca. 1950 and “expressing the impossibility of coming out on top and the futility of kicking against the pricks.”

(4)

The idea that Canadian art reflects a fixation on defeat and failure is a feature of the first “identity” models of English-Canadian culture, and has been explicitly articulated in commentaries ranging from Northrop Frye’s analyses of Canadian literature and painting to Robert Fothergill’s well known essay on Canadian cinema. George Grant similarly depicts Canada as a nation founded on principles of greater order and self-restraint than the United States, but isolated from the crumbling European roots of the virtuous society and finally succumbing to the soulless and manic Calvinist techno-liberalism of the Americans. As recently as 1985, one finds Gaile McGregor consolidating the model in exhaustive detail: Canada as the place of anti-heroism, and encapsulation and defeat as a condition of existence. This Canadian emotional paradigm is one of solitude and isolation; of an ever-present looming sense of immense surrounding wilderness which can never be physically or even mentally encompassed; of a Nature which is treacherous, violent and unknowable; of self-repressive passivity and caution; of feelings of impotence and hopelessness and marginalization.

The great problem of Canadian culture, especially Canadian popular culture, is of course the terrible contrast between these waif-like self-imaginings and the trumpeting self-confident mythology of mastery emanating from the United States, a contrast which is bodied forth in the economic domination of American popular culture in the Canadian marketplace. Certain that nothing real can happen in their own frozen, atomized psychic landscape, English-Canadians have a positive thirst for the imaginary and are virtually designed to be spectators. Canada’s national per capita consumption of movies is greater than that of the United States, and far exceeds that of Western Europe. Canadians have become expert appreciators of American culture, though because of their actual exclusion from it the very act of imaginative identification has come to be associated for them with vicariousness and un-actuality. George Woodcock, in a sour essay entitled “McLuhan’s Utopia,” insists that McLuhan’s theories of a media-united global village are prompted by a desire to cancel acute feelings of isolation and alienation in a new tribal community created by the electronic media’s ability to give everybody the same vicarious experience. One of McLuhan’s own comments is that Canada is “a country without an identity” and “a perfect place for observation” (qtd. in Powe 31). McLuhan is another exemplary Canadian: his essay “Canada: The Borderline Case” is full of generalizations about Canadian cultural identity, conceived mainly as a lack.

Canadian cinema was at one time distinguished for the truly impressive defeatism of its narrative content. It is not necessary once more to recount in detail the didactic depressiveness of such canonic pillars of English Canada’s national film culture as Nobody Waved Goodbye, Goin’ Down the Road and Wedding in White, nor to note again the absence of anything remotely reflecting self-esteem or a belief in the possibility of accomplishment in the whole of English-Canadian fiction film during that Golden Age of the 1970s. Since that time there have followed the co-production horrors of the Capital Cost Allowance (which unleashed a host of “commercial” movies nobody wanted to see), followed by a wasteland of non-production during the early 1980s. During the past decade there have been a number of signs of new life and direction: the work of Atom Agoyan, William McGillivray, Patricia Rozema, Sandy Wilson, Anne Wheeler, Guy Maddin and Bruce MacDonald seems both relatively vigorous and quite distinct in its diversity from the almost entirely depressive model of its predecessors. It would be wise, however, to recall that the history of Canadian feature film is largely one of repeated “rebirths,” but no actual subsequent life. In other words, the relatively optimistic nature of current English-Canadian feature film culture may yet turn out to be a temporary phenomenon. Certainly it is a little disconcerting for champions of a Canadian national cinema to realize that just as the era of maximum bleakness in Canadian film coincided almost exactly with Hollywood/America’s astonishing nihilist-modernist period inaugurated by Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider and The Wild Bunch, so the petering out of this bleakness more or less coincided with the arrival of Hollywood’s feel-good postmodernist period inaugurated by Rocky, Star Wars, and Close Encounters; equally disconcerting might be the way that the relative cheerfulness of much late-80s Canadian cinema parallels the plastic happiness of much post-Reagan American cinema.

Cronenberg is one Canadian filmmaker who has emphatically not followed any such trend toward a more positive view of things. In fact the reverse is the case. His films have described a line of increasing desperation: from the cool alienated humor of Stereo (1969) and Crimes of the Future (1970) through the relative ironic detachment of Shivers and Rabid to the arrival of straightforward despair in The Brood (1979) and an ever-growing sense of nightmarish anxiety and hopeless entrapment in Videodrome (1982), The Dead Zone (1983), The Fly (1986) and Dead Ringers (1988). The one meaningful exception to this trend is Scanners (1980), certainly Cronenberg’s most optimistic feature. Yet it achieves its equanimity by omitting the most virulent source of trouble in Cronenberg’s world—namely sexuality—and it is not all that optimistic. At the same time, even the early films contain at least an undercurrent of sadness and powerlessness, and it is only by comparison with the oppressively tortured later works that one would think of calling them unperturbed. Only the camouflage of genre and commerciality in Cronenberg’s films can disguise, for example, the way that the Cronenberg male protagonist resembles the long line of Canadian cinematic and literary un-heroes and their pattern of failure, powerlessness and hopeless waste. Piers Handling drew attention to this likeness (105), but the point can be made even more strongly now that the pallid, confrontation-avoiding passivity of Cronenberg’s early heroes has given way to a series of centralized narratively-dominant male protagonists, and within the context of these characters to an intense and self-critical examination of male agency in the world of the films. In fact Cronenberg’s correspondence to the “Canadian model” extends to many aspects of his basic narrative stance and his evolving thematic concerns.

In the earlier films the clearly unbalanced and dangerous state of things, the condition which gives rise to violence and suffering, is attributed to the disequilibrium of human nature, posited as innate and universal. The “Cartesian” separation of rationality from nature (to use the description Cronenberg has frequently formulated in interviews), and the tyranny of rationality over the body and the instincts, produces a tension which causes nature to rebel. The films present this rebellion in the form of destructive sexually-based plagues unleashed by the hubristic projects of patriarchal-rationalist scientists. Since the scientists are usually motivated by prosocial aims, however, and since in any event the problems arise from a tendency felt to be innate in human nature and hence inescapable, nobody can really be blamed, and the films can be described as manifestations of philosophical pessimism (for a more extended discussion see my “The Visceral Mind” 3–39). In Shivers, a modernist high-rise apartment block is turned into a bedlam of orgiastic sexual feeding when its inhabitants are “occupied” by foot-long wormlike parasites living in their viscera (the parasites were developed by a messianic scientist who wanted to put people in touch with their sexuality). In Rabid, a sweet young woman (played by porno-star Marilyn Chambers) develops a penis-like armpit spike and a need to consume human blood through it after undergoing radical experimental surgery following a road accident; her victims develop terminal rabies, and soon all Montreal is overwhelmed by an epidemic of people biting each other. In The Brood an emotionally troubled wife and mother is enabled by radical new psychoanalytic methods actually to embody her destructive feelings in the form of dwarf-like living creatures, to whom she gives birth from an external abdominal sac and who roam through the world killing people she resents (e.g., her parents) without her knowledge. The male protagonists in all these films (though not their patriarchal “mad” scientists) are powerless and ineffectual, especially in contrast with the liberated sexual-destructive energies attached to the female characters.

Beginning with Videodrome, the films begin to look more closely at the psychic origins of the schism between rationality and instinct, and particularly at the mechanisms of desire, fear and repression which are seen as the matrix of imbalance. At first there is a tentative effort to assign responsibility to extra-personal, socially-based sources, especially predatory corporations exploiting the appetites of individuals (e.g., Consec in Scanners and Spectacular Optical in Videodrome). However, the films eventually abandon this explanation in favor of the competing one: namely, that the catastrophic disfunction in the world (of the films) stems from the particular psychology of the narratively privileged male self, a self not easily severed from the narrative voice itself. That self is discovered to be a psychological failure, a sick animal, a subject whose structuring elements render him incapable of physical or emotional intimacy and by extension of a real and workable relation with the human world around him. So in Videodrome (Cronenberg’s first film with a dominant male protagonist), Max Renn, a Toronto TV-station owner looking for provocative quasi-pornographic programs to broadcast, runs into a satellite-pirated program called “Videodrome,” featuring real Sadean torture and murder, and simultaneously enters into a sadomasochistic sexual relationship with a young woman; he begins to hallucinate astounding things, notably transformations of his own body such as the appearance of a vagina-like abdominal orifice (through which videocassettes may be inserted) and of a penile flesh-gun hand (with which he murders people at the command of various individuals, real or hallucinated); in the end he kills himself. Videodrome is so complex and delirious that it is almost impossible to “read”—or rather it seems to want to be read in a number of conflicting ways—but in the end it exemplifies very well the change in emphasis in Cronenberg’s work that I have just described. More and more the hero’s destructive acts, and self-destruction, are rooted in his own psychological structure: his emotional isolation, his hubristic belief that he can control his feelings and actions, his dangerous and unacknowledged appetites for “sick” sex. As the film progresses he emerges from his “Cartesian” controlling ego-shell and encounters forces, both without and within but mostly within, with which he is utterly unable to cope; he becomes their puppet and dies as a result. His successors in The Dead Zone, The Fly and Dead Ringers trace a broadly similar path: emergence from an isolated ego-shell; contact with nature/woman/sexuality/the body; destruction.

That this central psychology conforms to the first dominant Canadian archetype seems very plain. Frye, Atwood and McGregor have all described at some length the recurrent appearances of a fearful, hopeless and self-oppressive psychology in the English-Canadian imagination, and speculated about its genealogy. The first thesis is that the Canadian sensibility has been dominated from the beginning by the dreadful consciousness of a vast, unknowable, threatening Nature empty of human life and human values. In The Bush Garden, Frye describes Canada as “above all a country in which nature makes a direct impression of its primeval lawlessness and moral nihilism, its indifference to the supreme value placed on life within human society, its faceless, mindless unconsciousness, which fosters life without benevolence and destroys it without malice” (146).

In Canada, moreover, the enormous tracts of unpopulated nature have not been seen as a challenge to be overcome, a linear progressing frontier to be settled, as in the case of the United States; instead, in Atwood’s phrase, Canada is “a circumference with no centre” (Second Words 379). According to McGregor, whereas the American “western frontier” is perceived as a challenge to be overcome, the Canadian “northern frontier” is perceived as a “line between the ‘self’ and the ‘other’, between what is and is not humanly possible,” as a boundary of which there is no question of overcoming, only staying clear; “[t]he frontier did not play a positive role in the Canadian experience” (Wacousta 59). The terror of nature and the sense of fragility and vulnerability of human life in its midst leads to an overconsciousness of the contrast and indeed enmity between nature and culture, between nature and the mind. This is Frye’s famous “garrison mentality.” Atwood describes it in terms of the human struggle to impose order on the chaos of nature, where order is “straight lines” and nature is “curves”; the attempt is inevitably frustrated and the human agent often destroyed or driven mad by the impossibility of the task (Survival 120–24). Nature, though unconscious, is seen in the end as striking back against the violations and unnatural orderings of human endeavor. Moreover, the internalized struggle against the perceived chaos and unknowableness of nature uncovers a parallel demon of irrationality and disorder inside the human mind itself. Describing stories of exploration in Canadian literature, Atwood says:

Pushed a little further, the “exploration” story takes on overtones of another kind of journey into the unknown: the journey into the unknown regions of the self, the unconscious, and the confrontation with whatever dangers and splendours lurk there.

(Survival 113)

Frye crystallizes the idea: “Whatever sinister lurks in nature lurks also in us … the unconscious horror of nature and the subconscious horror of the mind thus coincide” (Bush Garden 141). And McGregor is still more explicit: “The unknown landscape within … is exactly equivalent to the wilderness without” (Wacousta 301).

In the process of living within and trying to master this monstrous-seeming nature, the early inhabitants of North America fostered in themselves an alienation not only from nature in general but from their own bodies. George Grant depicts the Europeans and their descendants confronting the immensities of nature on this continent with the tools of Cartesian dualism, Lockean rationalism and Calvinist notions of the supremacy of the individual conscience, and mastering it through a psychological abstraction from it and a successful manipulation of it:

When one contemplates the conquest of nature by technology [in North America] one must remember that the conquest had to include our own bodies. Calvinism provided the determined and organized men and women who could rule the mastered world. The punishment they inflicted on non-human nature, they had first inflicted on themselves.

(23–24)

Atwood contributes this gloss:

What is natural is not always external. As George Grant points out … attitudes towards Nature inevitably involve man’s attitude towards his own body and towards sexuality, insofar as these too are seen as part of Nature. It doesn’t take much thought to deduce what “Nature is dead” and “Nature is hostile” are going to do to a man’s attitude towards his own body and towards women....

(Survival 63)

To this general North American neurosis may be added a particularly Canadian characteristic: the mental and emotional conservatism of a people whose natural surroundings enforced isolation and discouraged confidence, and whose history was the direct consequence of an opposition to the social and political daring of the American Revolution. The result is a psychological regime of self-repression whereby the desire for order, restraint and control is paramount as a response to a condition of solitude in a dangerous and unfathomable environment; and it necessitates an acute alienation from both nature and the body.

In Cronenberg’s films, it is true, nature as an external presence plays almost no part; yet this very absence may reflect a kind of alienation and isolation. In any case, the dualistic and unstable relationship of mind and body, of conscious order and natural chaos, of ego-self and id-other—these configurations of the Canadian psyche are overpoweringly present. Mistrust of the world outside consciousness and the self, mistrust of the body, terror at the inevitable subjection of consciousness to the forces of organic life and death, are as central to Cronenberg’s world as to any described by the paradigm. Nature, routinely represented as female or associated with female qualities, is so depicted once more in Cronenberg, where natural forces are connected with female characters and with the idea of sexuality as an irruption into the (male) rational self. Terror of nature becomes terror of woman in Cronenberg, or more accurately terror of what the male self’s aroused sexuality will do to the emotionally repressed and isolated but still more or less functional ego-habitation of reason and control. Sexuality not only threatens to overwhelm the rational ego in a flood of chaotic desire but also brings forcibly into consciousness the subordination of the ego-self to the body and by extension to the threatening bodily developments of disease and death. In this construction, nature is synonymous with the annihilation of the self. In one traditional kind of science-fiction narrative, attempts to separate the brain from the body always meet with failure; in Cronenberg, it is the process of joining the cognitive self to the body that results in horror and death.

The best examples of this pattern are found in Cronenberg’s relatively recent films, especially The Fly and Dead Ringers. In The Fly, a nice, repressed scientist trying to develop a teleportation device meets a woman and begins a serious relationship with her; the physical and psychological liberation he experiences as a result allows him to realize his invention successfully; but in a moment of carelessness caused by celebratory alcohol and a spasm of sexual jealousy he teleports himself together with a fly, causing a genetic fusion of the two and a subsequent horrific physical transformation into a monstrous fly-human. The solitary rational self, cut off from the body and from human contact, cannot be saved: even an “ideal” relationship will result in destruction of the self. In Dead Ringers the twin Mantle brothers become successful gynecologists, maintaining a privately-shared and manipulative relationship with the outside world and especially practicing a quasi-predatory deception of women; when one of the brothers, craving a deeper relationship, begins to love and need one woman in particular the process of “separation” from the other (less emotional, more rational and controlling) brother drives him to drug addiction and madness; in the end the brothers both die in a kind of double suicide. The complementary halves of the ego-self, representing the respective principles of yearning and detachment, cannot endure a breaching of the hermetic shell of ego-isolation. In both films a relationship with a woman (i.e., aroused sexuality and emotional intimacy) opens the door for nature’s entrance into the domain of bodiless consciousness, and what this entrance signifies is the arrival of sickness, decay and death.

Cronenberg’s films, however, cannot be described as totally privileging consciousness over nature, either. “Cartesian” dualism is what he is stuck with, but it is not very attractive or healthy. The separation of consciousness and nature leads consciousness to an arrogance of supposed mastery. Frye speaks of this tradition as “the Baroque sense, most articulate in Descartes, that the consciousness of man created an immense gap between him and all other living creatures, who belonged primarily in a world of mechanism.” This belief, according to Frye, leads to an “attitude of arrogant ascendancy over nature. For the white conquerors of the continent, creation does not begin with an earth-mother who is the womb and the tomb of all created things, but with a sky-father who planned and ordered and made the world, in a tour de force of technology” (Divisions 19–20). The patriarch in the sky has his homuncular embodiment in the hubristic scientists who play a crucial part in virtually every Cronenberg film. These scientists are forever tinkering with nature in an effort to make it serve more fully the convenience of the rational consciousness. It is their machinations which are the first catalyst of the plagues and terrors which invade the Cronenbergian world.

This is very clear in the earlier films, but it is equally true of several of the later ones, where the protagonist also assumes the function of the scientist: in The Fly the hero is an actual scientist, while in Dead Ringers the gynecologists are not only clinicians but inventors. Much more than the female “carriers” of destruction, these male originators may be seen as causing the explosive rebellion of nature in response to the effort to force its “curves” into the “straight lines” of rationality, to put its chaos into some kind of order. Of course they are merely reflecting their social environment, and are acting “in good faith.” Disaster in Cronenberg’s world devolves from the mistaken belief that nature is knowable, that nature is not the enemy, that rationality can be naturalized or nature rationalized. In this respect, Cronenberg is true to the Canadian model: nature is the enemy of consciousness; it is unknowable, unconquerable. Nature is death.

In the early films the dialectical clash of rationality and instinct was universalized, and the authorial attitude to the spectacle was one of alternately ironic and sorrowing detachment. Obviously rationality was not right to behave in this way—it was too repressive and confining—but after all this was the (“Cartesian”) human condition, was it not? More recently the films have come to situate the clash in a perspective carefully designated as subjective. The alienation from nature is situated in a single personality, the male protagonist, and is presented as incomplete or crippled. The solitary heroes of Videodrome, The Dead Zone, The Fly and Dead Ringers (if the twins are seen as parts of a single personality) are cut off from social warmth and, especially, constructive relations with women, not as a result of the iron laws of human existence but because of psychological disfunctions in themselves. Moreover in these later works, woman as the bearer of natural forces is seen more clearly in a positive (one might even say idealized) light, even if her ultimate effect is still to open the door to destruction. The central female characters especially of The Fly and Dead Ringers are clearly depicted as possessing a psychological wholeness which the male characters do not have and cannot attain. The heroes of all the later films feel immensely liberated and renewed by their relationships with women, and receive what few (brief) glimpses of wholeness and contentment they will ever have as a direct result of them. So nature/sexuality/woman is death, but also wholeness from which the male protagonist, and by extension the authorial sensibility, is exiled. It is a dismal, intolerable situation. Action brings disaster; inaction is withering and ultimately destructive too. No movement is possible: hopeless passivity and impotence are the enforced conditions. This is the “Canadian” paradigm of isolation, alienation, powerlessness and stasis.

It is, of course, the element of genre that separates Cronenberg’s films from the depressive English-Canadian cinema they might otherwise clearly resemble. With its horror/science-fiction/fantasy heritage whose most visible avatars lie in comic books, pulp fiction and Hollywood B-features, the genre he works in not only infringes on high-culture taboos but also shows a genetic similarity to a strictly American popular culture of the most invasive sort. Violence is no stranger to Canadian narrative, of course (John Moss devoted a whole book to Sex and Violence in the Canadian Novel), but the sensationalist foregrounding of spectacle-violence with elaborate special effects is a particularly American formula associated with the “limitations” of popular genre (indeed it is often labelled as one of the principal limitations). The American commercial film—driven by the engine of classical narrative with its causal relations, goal-orientation and narrative closure, and privileging the dynamics of successful problem-solving and action as spectacle—stands in strong contrast to the relatively drab “realist” (more properly, “documentarist”) world of Canadian features: where progress toward goals is illusory or non-existent, where narrative tends to meander and stop, where characters and events are structured in an absence of heroic or dynamic models, and where things are, to paraphrase Atwood, all circumference and no center. And although the formation and evolution of Canadian cinema has occurred to some extent actually on the basis of non-similarity to the Hollywood cinema, it is also true to say that the differences between the two cinemas conform to the broader cultural differences between the two nations as they have traditionally been theorized. In its loud dramatic gestures and poster-paint hues, as well as in the systematization of its thematics, American cinema often approaches the expressionist model. Canadian cinema approaches instead the documentary model.

How then can we define the “American” component of Cronenberg’s films? The thematic dualism of his works is accompanied by a dualism of articulation, found in both narrative and mise en scène, wherein the elements associated with consciousness are quiet, controlled and receding, while the elements associated with nature are violent, chaotic and brash. These may be said to correspond respectively to the “Canadian” and “American” aspects of Cronenberg’s cinema. Narratively, the world of a nice repressed (“Canadian”) protagonist is invaded by loud unrepressed (“American”) convulsions of feeling and explosions of violence and horror. Concomitantly, the “American” narrative of mastery, wherein the subject is able to exert control over nature and existence, is controverted by a “Canadian” disaster which follows any such attempt (all of those scientists whose projects blow up in people’s faces; Max Renn in Videodrome who thinks he is an “American” but who is revealed to be “Canadian” after all). In the visual realm, the (“Canadian”) detached wide angles, static controlled compositions, and sense of cold foreboding which constitute the basic cinematic stance of the films is inflected by danger-signifying “hot spots” and by despairing motifs of dereliction and decay; eventually this gives way to the far more noticeable (“American”) explosive expressionist outbursts of spectacle-violence, garishly colored and often accompanied by frenzied montage or camera movement. In short, the Canadian drama of restraint, internalized violence and stasis, and the American drama of freedom, externalized violence and progress, have their equivalents in the frozen despairing inner identity and explosive visceral outer genre-qualities of the films.

Moreover, there is a sense in which the relationship between the two facets—one overpowering and horrifically transforming the other—may be said to replicate the relationship of Canadian and American cultures in the marketplace. The fact that in the later films, particularly, the violent “natural” elements are seen as coming from inside the protagonist’s self rather than having some outward origin merely reproduces that scenario in which Hollywood values become internalized by Canadian audiences, as in Wim Wenders’s famous comment (via a character in Kings of the Road [1976]): “The Americans have colonized our unconscious.” I would not wish to emphasize this correspondence too much, but the similarity is there.

The Canadian cinematic model I am applying to Cronenberg here is not so much the messy handheld vérité of, for example, Goin' Down the Road; it is perhaps rather the alternate National Film Board (especially the B Unit of the 1950s and 60s) or CBC prototype of distant, balanced, slightly melancholy omniscience and control. The drab cardigans worn by Johnny Smith in The Dead Zone, the interchangeable grey sports jackets which constitute Seth Brundle’s wardrobe in The Fly, the cold blues and slate greys of the Mantles’ living environments in Dead Ringers—that is to say, the style and surroundings of all of Cronenberg’s recent protagonists before the invasion of nature—all evince a neatness, repressiveness and self-effacement that defines this “Canadian” mode. The blood and guts and disease, in contrast, are those of low-budget American horror movies from Night of the Living Dead onwards, and closely related to the gaudy plebeian traditions of Hollywood in general. The Cronenberg film which most clearly articulates the pattern of restraint is The Dead Zone, probably because of its special emphasis on the passivity and repression of its protagonist (for a more extended discussion see my “Anatomy”). Thematically, this is the work which most fully explores the (non-) option of meeting the consciousness/nature crisis by doing nothing. Johnny Smith is drying up of loneliness and sadness caused by his largely self-imposed isolation from sexuality and emotional intimacy until nature comes along and hammers him over the head (a milk truck runs over him); thereafter his consciousness is periodically invaded by violent and terrifying telepathic visions of catastrophes befalling others; these waste him even further until he decides to commit suicide by attempting to assassinate a dangerous politician. Johnny’s actions are not an attempt to bridge the consciousness/nature split (as the protagonists of The Fly and Dead Ringers try to do), but simply to avoid it and stay enclosed in consciousness.

This attempt at stasis is characteristically “Canadian,” and characteristically it does not work. Moreover in The Dead Zone nature itself actually plays a part. Outdoors it is winter, and the lethal, numbing cold becomes a tangible correlative of the emotional desolation slowly killing the protagonist. Here, very plainly, external nature is not beneficent or generative; it is frozen and deadly. Although ironically The Dead Zone is the only Cronenberg feature explicitly set in the United States (New England), it is probably his most Canadian film. The same pattern, however, may be traced in almost every one of his features: a repressed protagonist forced to confront the “natural” powers of the unconscious, and being destroyed in the process.

I have attempted to show how the violent dualism of Cronenberg’s films reflect a “Canadian” pattern. Although his films might appear to differ from the examples used by Frye, Atwood and others, I would assert that the difference is superficial. The glaring contrast between the “substantially colorless, odorless, noninfectious and nonoffensive” Canadian exterior of archetype (Friedenberg 152) and the potentially riotous and even monstrous disorder occurring within is perhaps simply more obvious in Cronenberg’s films than in most other cases. Consider, for example, Margaret Atwood’s comment on the reputation of a former Canadian Prime Minister:

Mackenzie King, formerly a symbol of Canada because of his supposed dullness and greyness … is enjoying new symbolic popularity as a secret madman who communed every night with the picture of his dead mother and believed that his dog was inhabited by her soul. “Mackenzie King rules Canada because he is himself the embodiment of Canada—cold and cautious on the outside … but inside a mass of intuition and dark intimations,” says one of Robertson Davies’ characters in The Manticore, speaking for many.

(Second Words 231–32)

In Cronenberg’s films the inside and the outside are both manifest: the work of repression is visibly countered and reversed in the most spectacular way. Yet at narrative’s end it is very clear why the dominant attitude in the Cronenberg world is one of stasis and repression, and the moral (for the protagonists and the authorial sensibility, if not for the viewer) is that no constructive action is possible. The idea may not be as didactically presented as in the “definitive” Canadian features of the 1970s, but the resemblance is strong. That Cronenberg’s work has persisted with the themes of isolation, failure and despair when the national cinema (such as it is) seems perhaps to have abandoned this stance serves once more to distinguish his films from their Canadian contemporaries. Yet in maintaining a perspective of alienated dualism and in suffering an emotional burden of pessimism and anguish, Cronenberg seems very much an Ur-Canadian.

Works Cited

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———. “An Anatomy of Melancholy: Cronenberg’s Dead Zone.” Journal of Canadian Studies 27.4 (1993): 169–79.

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———. Divisions on a Ground: Essays on Canadian Culture. Ed. James Polk. Toronto: Anansi, 1982.

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———, ed. The Shape of Rage. Toronto: Academy of Canadian Cinema, 1983.

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———. “Grounding the Countertext: David Cronenberg and the Ethnospecificity of Horror.” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 2.1 (1993): 43–62.

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