A BEAUTIFUL TWISTED MIND
A Beautiful Twisted Mind
No one was more surprised than horror master David Cronenberg when he realized, during filming of his new feature, 'Spider,' that the title character had to be Jewish
Sheli Teitelbaum Los Angeles
DAVID CRONENBERG'S latest movie "Spider" contains none of his trademark obsessions. As intended by the director. What it does feature, to his surprise, he says, is a Jewish subtext.
There's no trace here of those pesky venereal parasites and repulsive biological appendages that powered his earliest, and, to some, most disturbing commercial films, notably "Shivers" (1974), about an outbreak in a Montreal high-rise of a plague of lab-created parasites that turn those infected into libidinous ghouls; "Rabid" (1975), about a young woman inadvertently transformed, through plastic surgery, into a vampire; or "The Brood" (1979), about an abused woman whose rage spawns a gaggle of murderous humunculi. Neither is there a hint of the cancerous transcendence of "The Fly" (1985), Cronenberg's stomach-wrenching yet heartrending remake of the 1950s horror film about a matter-transmission experiment gone very awry; not to mention the sexual-, mind-, gender- and taste-bending that informed such projects as "The Dead Zone" (1983), "Dead Ringers" (1988), "M. Butterfly" (1993) and "Crash" (1996).
Starkly naturalistic, "Spider," which was adapted for the screen by Patrick McGrath from his 1988 novel of the same name, is set in London's East End slums shortly after World War II, and then later, in the 1960s, as well as within the labyrinthine recesses of the mind of a newly deinstitutionalized schizophrenic.
The Jewish subtext of "Spider" only became apparent to Cronenberg and his leading man, Ralph Fiennes, about halfway through the shooting of the interior shots in the director's native Toronto. A lifelong atheist whose parents chose not to saddle him with a traditional Jewish upbringing, Cronenberg nevertheless delighted in the recognition that the film possessed a Jewish angle or subtext at all. Yet the 59-year-old director, who in December visited L.A. to promote the film, told The Report that it still came as a bit of a shock.
"Spider" tells the story of Dennis "Spider" Cleg, so nicknamed because of the webs of string with which he used to festoon his boyhood bedroom when he was growing up in the slums of East London shortly after the war's end. A schizophrenic, Cleg committed a horrific crime as a child that led to decades of incarceration in a hospital. Prematurely released into a shabby halfway house near where he grew up, the fragile and damaged Cleg combats his own ever-shifting memory in a desperate attempt to grapple with the seminal act of his earlier life.
"Ralph (pronounced Rafe) and I spoke frequently of who our touchstones were for the film," Cronenberg recounted. "They were Samuel Beckett, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Franz Kafka. But at a certain point, I said that if Spider is indeed a Kafkaesque character -- as I was by then certain he was -- then Spider was unquestionably a Jew.
Indeed, like a character out of Kafka, Spider is the perennial outsider who must overcome the universe's best attempts to keep him from figuring out what is real and what is not. He does not always succeed -- indeed, he seems doomed to failure. But in his ability to conduct an internal monologue with himself, he comes close, at least for Cronenberg, to embodying the archetype of the artist in a 20th century cut almost whole from the cloth of Kafka's paranoid sensibility.
The qualities that led Cronenberg and Fiennes to conclude that Cleg was a Jew do not assault the senses quite so vigorously or directly as, say, the Kafkaesque qualities of "The Fly," a film that takes its cues from "Metamorphosis," the quintessential story of man overtaken by the insectile.
Sporting a greasy raincoat, badly fitting trousers and several layers of moth-eaten shirts and sweaters, Fiennes's Spider is as ill-kempt as he is ill at ease. He also has a propensity for compulsively inscribing an inscrutable, nearly runic handwriting into a notebook he studies and reveres almost as a kabbalist might, if he were trying to ferret out the secrets of creation from the Zohar.
"Whenever I talk about an artist, am I talking about a Jew at the same time?" asks the director, rhetorically. "I'd say, probably. Yet this wasn't consciously intended." Spider is unable to communicate, even though what he thinks is important about his life and his past is clearly in this book he is writing.
The idea of someone writing with so much obsession and paranoia in a language no one can understand is the archetypal nightmare of the artist. In a sense, however, Cleg's predicament almost mirrors that of Cronenberg during his formative years as an intellectual and a filmmaker.
With his love for American science fiction and horror, Cronenberg created a cinematic language and repertoire entirely his own, presenting visions of imminent chaos and anarchy within a cultural milieu that valued somber reflection over flights of wild imagination, and a calm social order over individual freedom. Though revered in Europe and initially respected in the United States, Cronenberg spent the early part of his career in the native country he has never abandoned, fending off attempts by critics to dismiss him as the crass and exploitative "Dave Deprave."
DAVID P. CRONENBERG WAS born in Toronto on March 15, 1943, the second child (after sister Denise) of Milton and Esther Cronenberg. Milton was a stamp-collecting columnist for the Toronto Telegram and freelance writer for a magazine called True Canadian Stories. A rabid bibliophile, he had run a bookshop during the Depression, and, his son has reminisced, lined every hallway of his house with books.
Esther Cronenberg (nee Sumberg) was a choir pianist and rehearsal pianist for the National Ballet of Canada. David's sister, Denise, would ultimately join the National Ballet as a dancer, and upon concluding that career, would become a costume designer on her brother's films.
Though the Cronenbergs always lived in heavily Jewish neighborhoods, religiously, they remained almost entirely out of synch. "My parents were huge atheists," Cronenberg told The Report, "and I had a completely non-observant upbringing. But that didn't mean that we … didn't know that we were Jews. That didn't mean my mother didn't speak Yiddish to me, because she did. So in a cultural way, as opposed to anything to do with religion, I was totally Jewish and had a totally Jewish upbringing. It just hasn't impacted my life and work in the same way that it has, say, Woody Allen's."
Although his parents imbued him with a sense of the world as his oyster, Cronenberg would eventually have to come to grips with the fact that, for some people, oysters are treif. Not surprisingly, he once described himself as feeling "mildly but definitely like an outsider at any Jewish function." He later declared that he would "much more likely be put in jail for my art than for my Jewishness."
That declaration probably stemmed from his earliest critical reception as a commercial filmmaker in his home and native land. In 1975, following the release of Cronenberg's debut commercial film, "Shivers," Robert Fulford, then editor of the national magazine Saturday Night, branded it the most repulsive film he had ever seen. Fulford's panning, which came in the form of a piece called "You Should Know how Bad This Film Is, After All, You Paid For It," sparked a national uproar because the movie had been funded, in part, with a Canada Film Development Corporation grant.
Never mind that "Shivers" made back that investment with interest. Or that the film triumphed at Cannes, was sold to 35 countries and ended up being translated into 14 languages. The country's buttoned-down cultural literati had little use for such lowbrow Yankee contrivances as horror or science fiction.
Indeed, they almost went berserk over Cronenberg's debut effort. Typical of the opprobrium heaped upon him was a review in Canada's Southam press syndicate that called "Shivers" "one of the sickest, most repulsive movies ever to hit the circuits." Upon learning of his alleged depravity in the Toronto Globe and Mail, his landlady evicted the newly married director from his apartment for having violated the morality clause in his lease.
Nearly 25 years after this baptism by fire and despite such recent critical and box-office debacles as his 1996 adaptation of J.G. Ballard's fetishistic fender-bending novel "Crash," Cronenberg's artistic reputation at home and in Hollywood is not only secure but continues to flourish.
He is revered in Europe, and is considered Canada's most bankable director by American producers, who are constantly sending blockbuster commercial scripts his way for consideration. And he keeps turning them down -- most recently, an offer to direct "Basic Instinct II."
Yet the man who continues to avoid Hollywood as if it has been overrun by the same parasitic pandemic that broke out of the high-rise in "Shivers" was somehow able to muster the $ 10 million in financing to make so quiet, dark and ultimately despairing a study of human (in)sanity as that found in "Spider."
The positive buzz already surrounding "Spider" (the L.A. Times called it "compelling and provocative," and the L.A. Weekly referred to it as a "deliciously wicked, strangely poetic portrait") and the concurrent release of such other dark, serious or otherwise adult-oriented small films as "Love Liza," "About Schmidt," "25th Hour," "The Pianist," "The Hours" and "The Guys," suggests that the tenor of the times and the tastes of movie audiences may have finally caught up to Cronenberg.
Forty years after embarking upon a film career, and a quarter century since "Shivers" won Cronenberg the dubious "Dave Deprave" epithet, science fiction and horror have become the twin engines that sustain Hollywood, with films like "The Lord of the Rings," by Kiwi shockmeister Peter Jackson, earning best picture nominations and enough money to bail out an Enron.
For Cronenberg, the film retrospectives, critical anthologies and popular acclaim are doubtless preferable to being booted out into the cold Toronto night by one's landlady. But acceptance poses other dangers, not the least being the kind of compromise that would lead to the dilution of his singular, if to some, demented, vision. For a genuine auteur who has often said he was afraid he could end up with "an audience of one, namely myself," this could prove the scariest prospect of all.