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The
Modern Fantastic: |
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Graham Barnfield
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David Cronenberg tends to incite hatred on the part of middlebrow newspapers. As editors reach for the metaphorical sick bag, Cronenberg fans and those generally suspicious of sermonising also want to vomit. This is appropriate, since copious quantities of bodily discharge characterise much of Cronenberg's work, from the drooling hedonists of Shivers to Brundlefly's grotesque cake eating. Whereas his 1970's contemporaries fashioned their works from fake blood and gore, the pale Canadian was always more interested in other fluids and their ability to make our skin creep. Thoughtful and spooky in equal measure, the creator of Scanners and The Brood regularly steps out of the Fangoria ghetto to transcend his 'baron of blood' reputation. It's unfortunate he was dropped as director of a proposed sequel to Basic Instinct: imagine the squeamish fun to be had with Sharon Stone's leg-crossing antics. The classic collision of moralists and SFX gorehounds occasioned by Rabid and The Naked Lunch can lead to us overlooking a third constituency in the debate over Cronenberg. For academics, particularly those wrapped up in the sociological sub-genre studying the human body, on-screen images like William Burroughs (Peter Weller) drinking hallucinogenic jism from a mugwump's head are an opportunity for reflection and speculation. What either the tabloids or the hardcore horror fans make of such discussions is anyone's guess. These debates characterise The Modern Fantastic, an anthology written by those for whom Cronenberg's CV is more than the sum of its parts, offering a clear-cut chance to analyse 'body horror' and much more. (Notably, several authors choose to emphasise the significance of Dead Ringers and M. Butterfly, neglected by critics, in comparison to 1970s parasites and psychoplasmics and 1990s auto erotica.) As a resource, The Modern Fantastic is... fantastic, comprising a complete filmography, a round-up of past press coverage and a post-eXistenZ Cronenberg interview in which his literary background and spiky relations with film critics are laid bare. As for the substantive meat of the book, the quality of the essays varies considerably. Once the contributors start casting a PhD-trained eye over popular films of varying seriousness, there's much here that is open to caricature. One can almost hear the complaints of public money being pumped into ivory towers churning out incomprehensible prose investigating the bleedin' obvious. Sure enough, we're told M. Butterfly was successful because of "its disclosing to us a sense of what an authentic experience of the proximity of nothingness might mean in terms of one man's life, a disclosure never stated as such, but which emerges as a consequence of the retrospection and onward thrust integral to the film's vitality and movement" (Michael Grant, 'Cronenberg and the Poetics of Time'; p.141). Bring a thesaurus, preferably one that plugs directly into your spinal cord. It would be mistaken and philistine to dismiss this collection on the basis of the sometimes opaque language used throughout, notably by Xavier Mendik and Barbara Creed. Moreover, one would risk echoing the Cronenberg-bashing losers who like to dismiss the movies they don't even try to understand.There are real insights here, from Murray Smith's consideration of how the 'post-human' world of Shivers helps us to get the parasite's perspective, to Jonathan Crane's location of Cronenberg in the gothic tradition. Ian Conrich shows us the specific relationship between the 1970s commercial features, the horror fan and changes in distribution and exhibition. All the contributors would complicate if not challenge the conventional wisdom that suggests Cronenberg is a misogynist misanthrope. This - and for three of them employment in the University of Kent's Film Studies department - is about all the chapters have in common. (Half of Andrew Klevan's chapter is spent disagreeing with Creed and Grant over how to interpret the mise-en-scene in Dead Ringers.) Given the subject matter, the book's illustrations seem rather cheapskate, but this is a minor quibble with an otherwise useful paperback. Although hard work in places, The Modern Fantastic is great for anyone wishing to beef up their defence of Cronenberg as an artist. The
Modern Fantastic: The Films of David Cronenberg. Edited by
Michael Grant. Flicks Books.
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