David Cronenberg is certainly one of the most controversial, experimenter and talented filmmakers of our time. His movies shaped the concept of post-modernity and contemporaneity in international cinema. Over the years his poetry has remained very consistent, although it has recently somewhat evolved, by investigating the subject of “body, sex, death”. If in the first films the visual impact employed body-horror features, in his latest creations Cronenberg is seen more dedicated to social themes, focusing on the psychological aspects of reality. Despite the raw visual impact of his movies, the Canadian director managed to impose himself, within a few years, on the international scene; the strong characterization of his work led him to win the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the last edition of the Venice Film Festival.
For those unfamiliar with the director‘s works, here are those that, in our opinion, are the most significant.
Shivers (1975): After his early “do it yourself” films, Cronenberg presents Shivers, the first commercially distributed movie. Seen nowadays, the film may appear trivial but, by contextualizing it in its time, we notice the visionary character that will be always present his later works. The plot is set in a luxurious residence in Toronto’s outskirts, where a parasite is suddenly causing an insatiable desire for sex and a dramatic decrease in its victims’ intellectual abilities. The result will be a crazy deformed orgy, where bodies are glorified in all their squalid sensuality. And here, as said, we already start seeing Cronenberg’s early style: body-sex-death.
Videodrome (1983): In this film, the director begins to investigate the surrounding and evolving society. A man working in a borderline television network stumbles casually into a pirated program that stimulates his attention. Such interest will end up leading him from obsession to madness. The protagonist’s reality becomes a hallucinatory mixture of visions, truths and twisted thoughts.
La Mosca (1986): The Fly is a Remake of a 1958’s film; this movie has shocked generations of spectators immediately becoming a cult. It is the story of a scientist’s crazy venture to build a teleporter machine which ended up producing something of very different: he will be the first one to experiment it and to realize that something has gonevery wrong. The protagonist slowly begins to turn into a misshapen man-fly hybrid. This film represents the essence of Cronenberg’s philosophy: a delirious mind living in a deformed body.
Crash (1996): is maybe the key movie of the director’s filmography since it focuses on the conflicting dialogue between Eros and Thanatos in a direct and unequivocal way. James Spader is a young film producer who leads a perfect life, but behind such semblance, a monotonous existence is hidden as even sex with his wonderful wife no longer gives him any satisfaction. Such gray routine is interrupted by a violent traffic accident that puts him in contact with a sect of insane people who seek their lifeblood by driving recklessly: the closer death is brushed, the more sexually aroused they get. The clear relationship between death and sex is emphasized by an almost obsessive attention to human and mechanical bodies.
Existence (1999): According to critics and many fans, Existence is one of the Canadian director’s best works. In Existence there is a strong return to the body-horror element, but at a higher level: a young and inexperienced Ted Pikul, embodied by Jude Law’s great performance, will participate in the trials of a video game (very similar to our virtual reality) that takes him to a dystopian Thai oriented world where technology merges with biology. This hallucinogenic adventure leads the protagonist, and the viewer, to be no longer able to identify reality from fiction.
Cosmopolis (2012): With the new millennium Cronenberg no longer wants to investigate man through bodily mutations. The body instead becomes a tool to explore the world, in particular, the psychic world. Cosmopolis is based on the novel by Don DeLillo, one of the most famous writers of post-modern literature. Its the story of a billionaire named Eric Packer who travels to New York in his “limousine home”. Throughout the film, the protagonist meets numerous characters, each of whom will leave his own impact on Packer’s paranoid mind.
Maps to the star (2014): In his last work the director analyzes the anguish, megalomania and real folly overflowing Hollywood. At the center of the story, there are several characters, all of them part of the star system. This seemingly normal theme turns into something really new thanks to Cronenberg’s iconic direction which is supported by a masterful photography. A surely different movie from the preceding, but despite its obvious diversity, the director’s voice is heard loud and clear.
