Love in The Age of Cronenberg

Early in A History of Violence, the man calling himself Tom Stall walks into his diner. The line cook, Mick, and a regular are talking about the women they’ve dated.

Mick tells Tom that one ex “used to have these crazy goddamn dreams where instead of her boyfriend, I was some kind of demented killer. I woke up one night, she stuck a goddamn fork in my shoulder.” Tom expects the story to end with a breakup. Mick instead says he married her, even if it didn’t last. Does “Tom” later think of this story once his family discovers his true identity as Joey Cusick, a legendary Philly gangster? When his horrified wife demands the truth, having seen him become Joey, he tells her, “I didn’t (kill)…Tom Stall didn’t.” Near the end of The Fly, the increasingly inhuman Seth Brundle explains to his love, Ronnie, “I-I’m an insect who dreamt he was a man…and loved it. But now the dream is over…and the insect is awake.”

David Cronenberg’s filmography, from Stereo to Shivers to Crimes of the Future, famously centers on the existential, physical, and technological transformation of the body and mind. Identity is never a fixed element in the Canadian director’s universe: his characters change rapidly. They literally and figuratively mutate in response to “the new flesh”: fresh stimuli, biomechanics, primal drives, and sudden urges. Critics often dismissed his early work as overly “cold” or “alien.” However, Peter Ludlow in The Philosophy of David Cronenberg observed that rather than being truly detached from his subjects’ emotional states, the filmmaker approaches each story with an anti-essentialist view stemming from his background in science and biochemistry. 

“I-I’m an insect who dreamt he was a man…and loved it. But now the dream is over…and the insect is awake.”

This objectivity, obsession with personhood in flux, and the director’s manifesto of “Body is reality” have inspired a strong following, especially among trans cinephiles and film critics. As part of a Reverse Shot roundtable discussion of Crimes of the Future, Mackenzie Lukenbill observes, “In all of his ‘body horror’ films, Cronenberg wonders how a non-normative, non-complicit body can survive in society, and also how it can fuck.” He’s concerned as well with how a non-normative body and identity connects to others – can love, and remain loved, after shedding the old flesh. This is a core theme that’s often overlooked in the analysis of his films but is crucial to the characters’ ongoing turmoil.

Over the course of nearly two dozen feature films, Cronenberg has evolved as steadily as Seth Brundle or Saul Tenser, moving out of psychological determinism and towards existentialism. He is ever fascinated by what we mean to one another, by monogamy and non-monogamy, sexual jealousy, fluidity, and whether those connections weaken if one party literally becomes someone – or something – else entirely. His portrayals of relationships cloaked in BDSM, casual affairs, and fragmented identities have become increasingly mainstream. 21^st-century North American twenty- and thirty-somethings cope with increasing isolation while simultaneously engaging with virtual spaces, kink, polyamorous relationships, queerness, asexual orientations, and many different forms of intimacy from what their parents shared. Love isn’t dead, but in a Cronenbergian era, it has interesting, even exciting new organs and growths. 

Cronenberg is a scientist-artist. As Ludlow writes, he approaches his subjects like a clinician, studying patterns and behavior from the outside looking in while holding back from moral judgment. The director’s best movies balance this rational perspective with gut-wrenching tragedy and deadpan humor, especially A History of Violence, Crash, Dead Ringers, and The Fly. He approaches emotional bondage with curiosity, and he lacks social conditioning, able to capture unconventional relationships that run the gamut from passionate – even naïve – to codependent or detached. 

In Crash, a non-monogamous married couple discover that they are turned on by grisly car crashes and, by extension, the automobile itself. Roger Ebert while writing about Crash observed the inner workings of (the character) J.G. Ballard and Catherine’s relationship: “Notice how they talk to each other: It is a point of pride to be cold and detached. That’s not because they don’t care. It’s because they do. They are fascinated by each other’s minds, and by the tastes they share.” At the end of the film, Ballard deliberately rams Catherine’s car off the road to fulfill her death wish. He crawls over to her, seeing that she’s injured but still alive, and calls her name with genuine tenderness. “Maybe the next time, darling,” he says as they couple. Cronenberg describes the film in his DVD commentary as “existential” and implies that a subject should pursue their own meaning, even if this requires self-annihilation. Loving someone means you may destroy them. 

This is also the case in Dead Ringers and The Fly. During the latter’s finale, Ronnie is forced to shoot the horribly injured, mutated “Brundlefly” once he silently asks her to kill him and end his suffering. Part of the film’s horror lies in its starting point as a sexually charged love story before Seth Brundle’s teleportation device accidentally merges him with a stray housefly. The result, to paraphrase Francis Dolarhyde’s description of his transformation in Red Dragon, is the character’s great Becoming into “Brundlefly.” Ronnie adores Seth, the human, and a complication thus emerges. She also loves the creature who wall crawls, who digests his food with acidic vomit, whose teeth and nails fall out, one by one by one. The feelings mutate alongside Brundle’s torso. Ronnie observes, fears, and pities him, before he eventually tells her to leave for her own good. “I’m saying…I’ll hurt you if you stay.” 

In Dead Ringers, twin gynecologists Elliot “Elly” and Beverly “Bev” Mantle tumble into drug addiction and madness once Bev begins a relationship with actress Claire Niveau. Bev, in a tailspin, sobs pitifully that he’s in love with her. Elly muses, dripping with dramatic irony, “It can’t be love if it does this to you, can it?” Claire is never the monstrous party here, either – once she helps Bev get sober, she begs him to stay, knowing he’d never come back. Elly allows his twin to disembowel him so Bev can “separate” and live his own life, but Bev quickly discovers he can’t forgive himself, or ever be truly independent of his brother. 

Cronenberg’s 1991 version of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch is, unlike many film adaptations, more of a hybrid between fiction and literary essay about the book’s origin point – namely, Burroughs’ accidental shooting of his wife, Joan Vollmer, during a drunken “William Tell” game. Yet whether William Lee, Burroughs’ stand-in, wanted to kill Joan is always in question. Not only is the exterminator hallucinating under the effects of insecticide, but his insect boss claims she’s a double agent. Later, when he walks into the apartment, she’s openly having sex with his writer friend Hank. Only then does he suggest the game. Sexual jealousy and suspicion rear their ugly heads, and the result lies dead on the floor. (Brundle’s downfall in The Fly is similarly sparked by his drunken jealousy over Ronnie.) 

After fleeing to Interzone, Lee struggles with his sexual orientation and the espionage game he’s gotten locked in. He tells Tom that the death was an accident, but the rival spy and husband of Joan’s doppelganger, Joan Frost, insists, “There are no accidents.” More irony follows at the end when Lee, now Dr. Benway’s double agent, asks for the second Joan to come to Annexia. “I can’t write without her,” he tells Benway. Wrong, wrong, wrong – the misogynistic concluding action is a sacrifice, a ritual where the writer, in order to go on, must kill his darling. 

Speaking of misogyny, there’s The Brood. Frank Carveth strangles his estranged wife, Nola, in order to protect their daughter, Candice, from the “children” that emerge from Nola’s body as a result of intensive therapy. Frank is a genuinely protective father, but he is motivated as well by his own exhaustion with his wife, his disgust with her new flesh. Nola clocks that he’s lying about wanting to be together, telling him, “I sicken you! You HATE me!” Earlier, he confesses to Candice’s teacher, “I tell myself – you got taken in. You got involved with a woman who married you for your sanity, hoping it would rub off.” 

The Brood is one of Cronenberg’s saddest and most personal movies, though it gives away his early limitations as a storyteller. He based the script on the custody battle over his daughter with first wife Margaret Hindson, who’d joined a New Age cult in California, and perhaps because of the director’s own turmoil, Nola doesn’t have much interiority. She went through an awful childhood and is clearly motivated by the need to purge herself of her abusive past and keep her family together. Still, there’s no real agency to the character until she’s become a gruesome, archetypal Mother, licking her newborns clean. She’s even willing to kill Candice to “claim” her, continuing a cycle of violence and parental abuse. 

Robin Wood criticized the film for its reactionary politics, arguing that The Brood made the Feminine monstrous and that Cronenberg’s films depict repression as a necessary societal force. It’s hard to counter the first point, but the director very obviously sees repression as an unhealthy aftereffect of life experience. Repression subdues strong, often unconscious desires and urges, and when those feelings are released via unhealthy methodologies, such as, oh, creating new gynecological instruments for “mutant women,” the results are disastrous. 

Shivers focuses on a slug-like parasite that turns the tenants of a Canadian high-rise into horny maniacs. Easy enough to read the plot as fundamentally conservative, except Cronenberg is neither for, nor against, the parasite – the thing simply serves its purpose: “turn the world into one brilliant, mindless orgy.” One character’s extraordinary monologue draws a blueprint for the rest of Cronenberg’s career from here on out. 

Roger, I had a very disturbing dream last night. In this dream I found myself making love to a strange man. Only I’m having trouble you see, because he’s old… and dying… and he smells bad, and I find him repulsive. But then he tells me that everything is erotic, that everything is sexual. You know what I mean? He tells me that even old flesh is erotic flesh. That disease is the love of two alien kinds of creatures for each other. That even dying is an act of eroticism. That talking is sexual. That breathing is sexual. That even to physically exist is sexual. And I believe him, and we make love beautifully.

Kink, sexuality, and identity increasingly intertwine over the course of these films, to the extent that by his latest release, 2022’s Crimes of the Future, surgery is a natural form of intimacy, “the new sex.” Saul Tenser implicitly trusts Caprice with his insides during their performances, and though he’s exasperated when she gets her own modification, horns sprouting out of her forehead, he accepts it as her choice. Gender and sexual norms aren’t the universal law in Cronenberg World. A real scientist, mad or not, understands that animals may pair for life, but this doesn’t necessarily mean total sexual exclusivity, and the corporeal body is not a stable object. It ages, breaks down, dies, mutates, and transforms itself. 

Is Max Renn still “Max Renn” once the Videodrome tumor dwells inside his brain? 

Eastern Promises centers on London’s Russian mafia and the actions of two soldiers, Kirill, the boss’ son, and the driver Nikolai. Midwife Anna is drawn to the enigmatic Nikolai, as is the insecure, closeted Kirill. The audience discovers the driver is secretly an FSB double agent, but never finds out his real name. Part of the gangster’s induction into Wory w Sakone is a renunciation of his parents and his past. Is he now Nikolai, or is he still the undercover officer? 

French diplomat Gallimard in M. Butterfly has no passion for the male Chinese spy, Song Liling. He does love Liling’s disguise as a beautiful female opera singer. Gallimard is eventually arrested for giving the spy state secrets. When Liling visits as his true self, even stripping naked, the heartbroken Gallimard rejects the “pretender.” “You’re nothing like my butterfly,” he tells him.

A History of Violence contains two contrasting sex scenes. Tom and his wife Edie first make love as part of a sweet but uncomfortable roleplay. (“We never got to be teenagers together.”) The second scene takes place after a vicious fight where the man, Tom/Joey, alternates between personalities (“Fuck you, Joey!”) But when Tom pulls back, Edie specifically grabs and kisses Joey before they have rough, literally bruising sex on the stairs. They cum together, and after, when Tom reaches for her, Edie refuses him. Who do you love? How many people can you love simultaneously? Can you live comfortably with two souls dwelling in the same body, as Joey Cusick and Tom Stall seem to?

The director’s current relevance is so obvious that one could call the modern era “the age of Cronenberg.” The prophesied new flesh has arrived – technology merging with biology, sex, and the longing for personal connection. Observe the wretched Metaverse, where you can exist in a pathetic, uneasy virtual reality somewhere between eXistenZ and Interzone, hoping to get laid or make friends. There’s the app Feeld, or 3Fun, each used by swinger couples engaged in a lifestyle similar to the Ballards’. A crucial statistic: the Kinsey Institute’s findings that 1 in 9 Americans have engaged in polyamory or consensual non-monogamy. Cronenberg saw, even if only unconsciously, how our definitions of love and friendship would radically deviate from the nuclear family and traditional heteronormativity by the late 20^th and early 21^st century.

As a result, younger queer viewers have naturally found kinship with his work. One Twitter post even calls him a “trans icon.” To say this about an 81-year-old heterosexual man is questionable, and in the Crimes roundtable, critics Willow Kate Maclay and Sam Bodrojan emphasize the limitations of reading his work as direct metaphor compared to actual trans filmmakers. Still, unlike many senior citizens, Cronenberg himself has spoken in support of trans rights: “They’re taking that idea (the evolution of the body) seriously. They’re saying ‘Body is reality. I want to change my reality. That means I have to change my body.’…I say, go ahead. This is an artist giving their all to their art.” When Saul finds true rapture at the end of Crimes, with Caprice’s help, it is by rejecting authoritarian control over his anatomy. 

In a recent Rolling Stone interview, Cronenberg confessed, “I’m basically a romantic… I was married for 43 years, and had children, and grandchildren. That, to me, is essential to living a really full human life. So it’s in the movies. Each movie is a weird love affair. Or even, up front, a normal love affair.” The interviewer is surprised, given the man’s reputation as the “king” of body horror. They shouldn’t be. Look at how Gallimard in M. Butterfly is a racist, Orientalist fool, yet holds a kind of purity because of his devotion to an ideal. “You’ve shown me your true self, and what I love was the lie, perfect lie, that’s been destroyed.” Look at Claire’s face when Bev says he’ll come back, or Ronnie acknowledging that she had to see Brundle before he lost his humanity. The pain and ambivalence of devotion to another is a primary feature of Cronenberg’s art. A loved one can stick a fork in your shoulder, become a different person entirely, or an outright monster. The real horror lies in how your feelings may stay the same regardless. Mick, imitating his ex’s plea for forgiveness, foreshadows the last shot of A History of Violence, an actual demented killer’s desperate stare into his wife’s face: “‘Baby, I love you, I love you.’” ~