i just saw spider, my second cronenberg exposure, and i need to ask: does cronenberg only do boring films?
this film made me think a little bit about the discussion people have been having about action images vs time images vs protracted, boring images (themselves a kind of time images, in their defiance of normative parameters of cinematic time and cinematic orientation). and the primary thought that gelled in my mind is the following: you can’t have it both ways. if you give us textual clues straining towards a resolution and you then delay the resolution by using loooong descriptive shots (in this case descriptive of mental decay through physical decay), you mess with the audience in an uncool, unproductive, uncreative way. if, furthermore, after all this watching and enduring, you give us a lame resolution, then you are a bad filmmaker and i’ll never watch your films again.
i don’t know what to say gio, i really liked spider. and sunhee did too.
I, too, am a fan of Spider. Tell you what, Gio–I’m gonna bet you just don’t like Cronenberg. But if you’re at all willing to give his more narrative endeavors another shot, turn to earlier stuff. Both The Fly and The Dead Zone do a decent job at allowing DC to get off on his usual obsessions while also playing Hollywood ball. If you’re even more game, go for broke with the early horror stuff, the stuff that first turned me on to Cronenberg–especially Scanners or Rabid. But, again… I’m guessing that it’ll be like trying to make me enjoy mushrooms: no critical appreciation is going to overcome my distaste for the feel of fungi on my tongue. And it appears that Cronenberg is fungus on your tongue.
i don’t know what to say mike, i really like mushrooms.
i’m not a big hollywood fan, mike, so playing hollywood ball wouldn’t mollify me. if you remember it, mike and arnab, can you tell me what you liked about spider? this is what i saw in it: guy is crazy; movie sets you up to discover the traumatic moment that made him crazy; there’s no tramatic moment: guy was always crazy, even as a kid. (SPOILER that he murdered his mother is a consequence, not a traumatic cause of his craziness). there doesn’t seem to me more to the film than the pleasure (a fully understandable one) of watching a schizophrenic individual display a variety of schizophrenic symptoms. i don’t know what to say, guys, that really doesn’t do it for me.
Okay. Hmm–again, this is me saying “But mushrooms taste good…,” but I’ll give it a go.
I went wandering around reviews–and J. Hoberman’s hit on some of the things I remember loving about the movie. It wasn’t a movie “about” schizophrenia, as much as an attempt to get inside the experience of the illness. And I found it to be profoundly sad–not sensational, or grotesque; the film aroused enormous empathy in me. That was part of its genius, for me.
(By comparison, from an interview between Hoberman, novelist Patrick McGrath, and Cronenberg:
“JH: A number of people at Cannes compared Spider to A Beautiful Mind.
DC: If you see that movie, you’re going to say, wow, let me be a schizophrenic.
PM: Yeah, exactly! Shuffling around Princeton half your life.
DC: I’ve got this really beautiful chick who I have no trouble sustaining this relationship with, I have fun with Ed Harris when I’m bored, I win the Nobel Prize, then I have a movie made about my life starring Russell Crowe, and then we win Oscars. So let me be a schizophrenic.”
I hated B. M.. Spider has none of that film’s sanctimony, pity, or odd sensationalizing fascination.)
I also just plain loved the acting, the filmmaking. But that’s dull and vaguely put. How about: it was as close to phenomenology as I think films get. That’s still opaque, but it captures some of what I remember feeling about the flick as I watched.
thank you, mike. i guess i just don’t find schizophrenia interesting enough to watch. it’s such a painful illness. have you read welcome to my country? schizophrenia makes people so deeply incomprehensible, so alien, so unretrievable (although there are more or less serious cases, and some people do quite well) that i find it almost impossible to identify with people affected by it. and i find trying to deeply, deeply frustrating, at a level that comes close to a sense of despair. welcome to my country gives a good and compassionate sense of the depth of uninterpretability of this illness.
I will right now look at my local library for that book–thanks for the recommendation, G.
gio, as with a history of violence i found spider to be another cronenberg film about narrative and metamorphosis–how do we tell who we are and how do we metamorphose/change narratives of our selves? (as mark said at the top of the a history of violence discussion, in a sense all cronenberg’s movies are the same–they’re all about identity and how it is pieced together/falls apart.)
i don’t think the film should necessarily be read as moving towards a big reveal of “what really happened”. spider manages at the end to put a story together but we never really know if it works or is true or what effect it has–the more interesting thing to me was to see that story get put together and worked against the other stories playing out in his head.
but even if we look at the one that comes together at the end as the big reveal i didn’t think it was that trite: a young boy who is very attached to his mother and who is ambivalent about female sexuality–which he associates with predatory women at the bar his father goes to–one evening sees his mother interact with his father like one of those women he is threatened by and turns her into one of them, and then kills her to revenge his murdered mother.
and fiennes and richardson give towering performances (it took me a while to realize that miranda richardson was both his mother and his “step-mother”).
anyway: watch dead ringers before you give up on cronenberg.
Spider deserves its own post, but I’m glad to see it talked about anywhere. I think it’s great too – maybe one of Cron.’s best – and the acting jobs that Fiennes and Richardson do are just great.
It’s interesting to note though that this film was beyond a failure. It barely got released theattrically (showed one week in L.A.), did no box office at all, and I assumed it was the end of Cron. as a director. I thought he’d turn to small films with no name actors, like Van Sant after his Sean Connery debacle. That he turned around and had success with History of Violence is pretty great, even if that film itself isn’t as good.
Not knowing Gio, I can’t imagine that she’s going to like Dead Ringers, but it’s always fun to talk to people right after they’ve seen it.
It certainly is a strong answer to “does cronenberg only do boring films?” oh my.
yeah, this is good, arnab. i see the theme of “who do we tell ourselves we are” as more defined here even than in history. it’s interesting. and it is interesting, too, the way you summarize the narrative of dennis’s life (interesting, by the way, that his name is mentioned exactly once in the film):
that this is the right version of events is precisely what is in question. dennis’s compulsive writing in his little notebook — to which much emphasis is given in the film — seems exactly to be a frantic attempt to piece the delusional fragments of the story together and give it a narrative. i didn’t read it the way you did, though. i didn’t read it much differently either. instead, i felt inclined to dismiss the narrative thread altogether and focus instead on the fact that, contrary to (my?) expectations, there wasn’t a traumatic event that had plummeted dennis into madness, but, on the contrary, his madness had caused the traumatic event. unlike the denouement-driven film i expected, spider turned out to be the depiction of a mind that spins in endless circles without ever reaching a destination.
and yes, i will watch dead ringers.
the performances are, i agree, quite superb.