David Cronenberg
The term "Cronenbergian" is immediately evocative for those familiar with director David Cronenberg. Usually, the term summons specific unpleasant images, because the director's films tend to establish his preferred themes in visceral terms–sometimes literally visceral. In Rabid, accident victim Marilyn Chambers receives a skin graft that turns phallic and vampiric, infecting victims as it feeds. Obsessed with a telecast of unknown origin, James Woods internalizes his desire in Videodrome, developing a videotape-shaped orifice for private screenings. Working feverishly in Naked Lunch, Peter Weller (as William S. Burroughs) composes on a typewriter that writhes at his touch, turns pliable, and demands a taste of the substances that fuel the author's delirium. Technology shapes the body, the body shapes the world, and the mind often gets dragged along and battered in the wake. But as shocking as they can be, Cronenberg's films never seem intended solely to shock. Even in the high-rise madhouse of Shivers, his first feature, the naked pandemonium and subcutaneous invaders never obscure the philosophical inquiry and social satire. As Cronenberg's career has progressed, he's come to underscore his themes with masterful directorial control and new degrees of emotional richness. His new Spider continues a pattern of seemingly unfilmable book-to-movie adaptations, begun with Naked Lunch and carried on through M. Butterfly and Crash. Taken from Patrick McGrath's script of his own novel, Spider follows Ralph Fiennes as he leaves an asylum for a London halfway house, in which he's forced to reflect on the childhood moment that first sent him away. Recently, Cronenberg spoke to The Onion A.V. Club about why Spider isn't really about mental illness, why he never wanted to be a prophet, and why he doesn't make more movies. (Editor's note: Cronenberg reveals a key plot point about Spider in this interview. A spoiler warning is provided beforehand.)
The Onion: How would you say that Spider fits or doesn't fit the tradition of portraying mental illness in film?
David Cronenberg: My take on this whole movie is that it's not a movie about mental illness. It has a character who is what we would call schizophrenic, although the word is never mentioned. For me, it's a study of the human condition, focusing on a particular character who has a lot of trouble with his life and his past. I never really did a study of movies about mental illness. I don't know that I've seen that many, but I suppose if I listed them in my head, I could probably come up with a lot. I've never even thought about that.
O: The novel, and Patrick McGrath's work in general, tends to take place in a more classically Freudian universe than your own work. Did you find you had to bend at all to fit into this film?
DC: Well, no. I did at one moment say to him, "Okay, Patrick, let's have the Freudian discussion." The Freudian discussion involved my asking him how obsessive he was about maintaining this strict Freudian sub-structure within the movie. And he was not obsessive about it. Because the movie does not hold up as the Oedipus complex. Let me put it this way. I recently read a wonderful book called Why Freud Was Wrong, by Richard Webster. Maybe it's not the greatest title, but it's a fantastic book. He pretty effectively dismantles Freud as a theorist, and a psychologist, and a scientist. Nonetheless, Freud is an important figure in psychology. Even before that, I was not an adherent of the Freudian theory, just from my own experience. All makers of monolithic theories want their theories to explain everything, and they want them to be strong and relatively simple. That's just the way it is, whether you're Marx or Freud or Christ. Freud simplified things, I think, much too much for it to really cover the incredible variety of human nature, human personality, context, and upbringing. I said to Patrick, "As much as I don't want this movie to be a clinical study of schizophrenia, I also don't want it to be a classic Freudian tale." So I messed around with it. But I don't think Patrick's stories were ever perfectly either of those things.
O: Some passages in the novel describe delusions that sound like they could have been inspired by your films, although they didn't make it into the movie itself. Has McGrath watched your work?
DC: I don't know that he did. By the time I met him, he was certainly well aware of it. I hadn't known about him until I saw his script, and then I read a lot of his books. I think not, though. I'm pretty certain, really, that his book came out of his experiences with mental illness in a clinical context. His father was the medical superintendent at the Broadmoor Clinic For The Criminally Insane [a British hospital/prison dating back to the 19th century]. He was raised there, on the grounds. And then he came to Canada and worked at another institute for the criminally insane in Ontario. At that time, he was becoming a follower of R.D. Laing, who was then considered a revolutionary psychiatrist in terms of his understanding of schizophrenia in particular. He wrote The Self And Others. These are things that I read in the '60s. It was all very controversial. I think that Patrick had a great clinical knowledge of schizophrenia, and the symptoms of it, and the dynamics of it. And I think that's where he got all of those things. I don't think it had anything to do with my work at all. All of those things in Patrick's novel are very accurate in terms of the kinds of things that schizophrenics sometimes get into in terms of hallucinations and delusions. I was on a panel with Patrick, and I said what I just said: "I don't want to do a clinical study of schizophrenia." And Patrick would say, "Well, that's exactly what I did want to do when I wrote the novel. In fact, I gave the book to my father to check it for accuracy. To make sure that he, as a psychiatrist who had a great deal of experience with schizophrenia, would read this book and say, 'This is accurate. There's nothing in here that's all theatrical or overdramatic.'" Which his father did. [Warning: spoiler ahead. –ed.] In fact, his father told him that people like Spider do not survive. And that's why the end of the novel got changed by Patrick to have it understood that Spider would kill himself after he finished writing his journal, which is the novel. When I got the screenplay, it had the ending that you've seen–that Spider was not going to commit suicide. Obviously, in thinking of it for the screen, that was [producer] Catherine Bailey's responsibility… I think she might have told him, "Patrick, if you have him kill himself, no one will come see this movie." But that wasn't my doing, and I felt that that was the good ending.
O: He wouldn't be alone among Cronenberg protagonists had he killed himself at the end of the film.
DC: Not at all. [End of spoiler. –ed.] But on the other hand, I don't impose myself on myself. I really don't. I've been saying this to the writers I've been speaking with: "You must not confuse your process with mine." I don't do a survey of my movies and pull out all the themes, and then use this as a checklist to see if the next project covers enough of them to make it be one of my movies.