Stereo (1969) and Tetsuo (1989)

Starting off this journey are two films designed to throw your senses off: one through deprivation and one through overstimulation. both films are also exploring the way that people connect with each other. The scary parts of us and reckoning with those. Cronenberg's film deprives us of any sort of diegetic audio, no score, no dialogue. Just one narrator dryly reciting research notes. I knew right from the start, just from this, that David would be playing with the entire medium. That he would be infusing meaning into the elements of production. Formal. We the viewers are in the position of academic researchers as we review the footage and try to understand the behavior on display in front of us. This film also has a line that I will be revisiting several times in this write-up: 'in order for research to work, the subject must love the researcher.' We also get several shots of people touching by proxy specifically with a medical mannequin and a man stroking the internal organs of his psychic partner through the mannequin. proxy touching and research as worship, omnisexuality and gender, intangible connections between humans and the growth of new abilities in response to the removal of something else (I need to think of a better term for this to make it more clear, in this case test subjects had their vocal cords removed and developed enhanced psychic ability in response. They also were in a setting where all their needs were provided). We get our first exposure to the ideas of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung in this film and that's going to pop up everywhere through the way he films shadows and reflections. David Cronenberg's very first feature film set the thesis statement for everything that followed. He has been working with these same ideas for 60 years.

Tetsuo: the Iron Man and Shinya Tsukamoto. Why did I pick this movie for this position? Both of these films are an entry into another world. A place where you have to consider new ideas and adapt to new circumstances. We are going to go on a journey with our own body, we need to be thinking about gender, we need to be thinking about romance and sexuality, we need to understand what it means to destroy because we're going to see people give in to their base desires and create beauty from destruction. This movie sets you up for all of that. You have to interpret some imagery about internal spaces and experiences that this movie presents. both of these films actually, they are both right around the 60-minute mark and they carry so much more meaning than what fits in those 60 minutes. Stereo is a great movie for preparing you to psychically connect with the characters in these movies, for you to prepare to project yourself onto them and feel what they are feeling. Tetsuo is a great film for preparing you to physically experience the same sensations that you see on screen within your own body. Don't worry about how clunky that statement is because going to get a much cleaner version from a movie coming up soon (The Brood). I think it is important to have two films that ask you to put work into interpretation at the very start just to set the expectations. It's going to be gross and wet and weird and psychosexual in the movies ahead and almost every film is a love story.

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Crimes of the Future (1970)

I'm going to put this movie off to the side for quite a while because I think it's going to be better discussed with its younger sister in 2020. however I do think it should be watched as the second Cronenberg film so you can get a feel for this story and then experience it in a different way when we revisit it later. some of the themes to consider in this film, some of the overarching ideas and symbols that will pop up in later Cronenberg, are the role that subversive subcultures play in society, revisiting the growth of potential in stereo with the growth of novel organs that serve seemingly no purpose, mating rituals (This movie also has no diegetic audio but scenes of flirtation will have frog mating calls over them, etc), And we are once again in a setting where some need is no longer there. I believe it was a post illness world? certainly post "women." There's also a fascinating undertone where the implication is that, since the world has no more women, some men are changing to take on that role. Tuck that idea away for crimes of the Future part 2 as well.

This movie also starts my favorite David stylistic signature which is having a protagonist who is a weird little spindly brunette freak. That's right, lick those glasses, you weirdo (btw, he is tasting with his mouth what he has seen with his eyes, eating what he sees).

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Shivers (1975) and Infinity Pool (2023)

Shivers sends us to another location where all of your needs are taken care of smoothly and easily, just for you. Everyone is on this isolated little resort island and the place is capital R Repressed. Which rears its ugly head as we keep seeing that people end up controlled primarily by their guts instead of their brains and it causes them to give into those repressed basal desires. Just about everything happens in this movie: incest, pedophilia, rape, homosexuality, bisexuality, threesomes, foursomes, food play, it's all there. There's a fascinating bit at the end where bare wooden pallets replace the apartment hallway set and it really feels like you're looking at a bunch of animals locked away in a zoo instead of people in their homes. It is the growth of new organs that spurs all of this on, by the way, still chipping away at that idea. A lot of the characters end up deviating from heterosexuality once their brain is no longer involved with their impulses. David seems to be making a point about 'who people are behind bedroom doors' and also who they are underneath the layers of repression created by the conveniences of society. This movie also gives us another one of the repeated theses: "everything is erotic." That monologue goes crazy, about the dream of an old man explaining eroticism, that even death is erotic (this actually came up in the prior films but now there are words around it and we'll get even more as we get more Freud. I think maybe he's the old man referenced here. You'll see why later). There's a line from the music project Headaches: love is the only thought and pain is the only feeling. It's a good lens to view Cronenberg's stories through because all of these moments of erotic violence in this movie are predicated on feelings of love that are then betrayed. And through that betrayal, new dimensions of their relationship can be explored. This is something that we'll see HEAVILY in future Tsukamoto projects, the usage of shame and betrayal as an avenue for interpersonal growth.

Infinity Pool and Brandon Cronenberg: why did I pick this film for this slot? I was surprised to find out that Brandon Cronenberg was out here directing movies since the early 201X's. I was also surprised to find out that he's making some pretty damn good ones. unfortunately the lowest one on my rating list is the first one on this watchalong list. I like Infinity pool I just don't love it like Possessor and Antiviral. As for why it's here, it shares a lot of points with Shivers in terms of taking suburbanite people and putting them in a position to release some of those repressed feelings. to answer some of those questions that you carry in your gut. How would it feel to kill someone. How would it feel to watch yourself die, to have an analog that looks exactly like you do so you can project yourself onto it as it has horrible things enacted upon it? And it gets punished while you are allowed to indulge yourself in satisfying sensations. And this all happens on an island retreat. We also get a little bit of that exploration of betrayal. I will have more to say about the connections between Brandon and his father in later entries.

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Rabid (1977) and Titane (2021) and Fast Company (1979)

Rabid is, surprise surprise, another organ growth movie. A woman gets into a traffic accident and a researcher performs experimental surgery on her which causes her to grow a butthole in her armpit that contains an envenomed stinger. Much like the parasites in Shivers, this venom seems to cause people to give in to their physical urges. mostly just violence rather than sex. There is a wonderful example of one of my favorite aspects of filmmaking which is taking the time to dress your sets. A ton of wonderful paintings in the background of this film with some visual motifs that recur. One in particular that I love is the best friend in this movie (she is doomed by the narrative, you know her ass is going to get armpit butthole penetrated and before it happens) framed in front of a picture that looks like a million barbs stabbing into her head. That also plays into the gender dynamics in this movie, where now it is a woman who is doing the penetration in these sexual encounters. because she is seducing dudes before she stabs them, by the way. The friction that her transformation brings to her relationship with her boyfriend feels very similar to The Fly, as we will see. A lot of these movies end up feeling like extended allegories for very mundane relationship problems. I'll dig into this a bit more when we get to The Fly because I think it has a fascinating exploration of this

Titane and Julia Ducournau. Why did I pick this film for this position? It's a good introduction to my favorite French director Ducournau. This movie starts out basically the same way as Rabid. A woman gets into a car accident which forces her to undergo surgery which causes some unique problems in her life. There are so many similarities, a woman whose actions are difficult to understand because she is unique after her surgery, in this case the character is nearly mute. The gender dynamics are a bit more front-facing here because she takes on an identity as someone else's son and performs... ah, "cosmetic surgery" on herself to pass. both films are about women trying to find acceptance but it's much harder for our character in Rabid who is a woman with the penetrator versus this woman who just refers to herself as a man. interesting. fascinating. This movie is fundamentally about the ways that we manipulate our bodies. piercings, surgeries, hormone therapy, violence. It's also a movie about how the way we are interpreted is tied to our body and identity.

And the third movie would almost have been an odd man out but Fast Company plays with women and cars and machines as bodies that we see in David's other films. The plot is not dreadful, the stakes are not high, It's mostly a classic coming-of-age passing the torch film. But if you watch closely, you'll see it. you'll see David. There's a woman known as the fastco girl. She pops up throughout the movie in the form of fastco products. A man talks about the three loves he made that day and one of them was her but she is not physically present so he grabs a can of fastco oil and pours it on another woman thereby making her the fastco girl. The footage of car guts is pretty damn good which really demonstrates how big an improvement this is Visually on his previous work. There's a fun little thematic hierarchy of crawling walking driving and flying that gets played with, and culminates in the final confrontation of plane versus car. "It'll be real classy, just leave it to Meatball." There's some pretty cool ideas with the camera work too, As the character who is known as a legend is always filmed from below so you are always looking up at him in a heroic framing. A lot of people write this movie off when discussing David and his work but you can see him developing skills and ideas that will pay off later. particularly with Crash.

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The Brood (1979) and Possession (1981)

All right, folks. This is one of the big ones. The first 3 minutes of the brood nearly made me start this entire project over so I could rewatch the previous films and make sure I was paying attention appropriately. A lot of my analysis of those works is after the fact, actually. This movie opens with what seems to be performance artists doing a spoken word poetry dialogue. It turns out to be a public demonstration of a novel type of cognitive therapy where this man takes on the role of a significant figure in your life to let you release pent up rage and process it. for those repressed feelings to physically manifest on the surface of your skin and erupt thereby leaving your body. The repeated line is "I hate you because I love you" And you can insert that after almost every sentence in the movie and see how the character is reflecting it. The psychiatrist guy has a book cover showing a screaming face melding with a fist and it's called the shape of violence or something like that to let you know that people are speaking with their fists what they cannot seem to express with their mouths. This movie is full of unsaid things. There is a repeated symbol with attics or upstairs rooms. They represent the psyche of the people who own them. (for instance the large number of photographs of famous psychiatrists like Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung) It is through this mechanism that we get the number one phrase I will be saying for the rest of forever: "a true work of art serves as a bridge between the worlds of feeling and perception." This is the first line on the back of one of the books in the wife's attic; A Concise History of Modern Sculpture by Herbert Read. This is the truest expression of how these movies make me feel. What the characters feel become things that I can perceive and once I perceive them I feel them in my own body. The emotions of rage manifest as sores which indicates to me that the character is feeling that which causes me to feel that. All of the themes that David Cronenberg plays with run through this filter.

This movie also gives us another major Cronenberg symbol in the form of the deformed children. the trauma that has been enacted upon us becoming visual deformities. deformities that we pass on to our children. these little dudes manifest and are fueled by rage And once they run out, they die. They are constantly popping up around Candice and causing violence that removes positive influences from her life. And we find out that these deformed children are coming from Nola, her mother. This is where some of the beautiful framing of this movie took my breath away. There's a scene where grandpa comes home after his wife has died, he's drunk, he's distraught. He crashes through the front door It stops, drink in hand. There's a snarl on his face We are looking up at him from the eye level of a small child. I felt like a little girl who was afraid her father was about to hit her. Just the composition of the shot carried the information that this is one of the reasons Nola is the way she is. This is where one of her deformities came from which she manifests through Candice, through these kids, the deformed children, separating Candice from her father and her mother and her ex-husband's new girlfriend. Every shot in the movie is like this, when I say a film is bigger than its script, this is what I mean because we never get direct discussion over Nola's childhood in these terms, all of this information is carried through the medium. The medium is the message and all that. I mean this is the first movie where I noticed him using shadows and reflections in the same sense that Carl Jung does. The Shadow of the main character reaching for the door as he does, The way his reflection is behind him like with Freudian talk therapy. When David is playing with Shadow and light, it's likely he's doing esoteric psychology symbolism. By the end, you can synthesize all this information into an interpretation of the finale where we are going into an attic which is representative of the psyche, as the therapist who parallels other characters, with a gun -- with violence in hand -- and we see all of the deformed children in her mind and how the conversation plays out between husband and wife compared to the sequence going on in the attic. The movie is trying really hard to talk to you and you have to reach out and try to understand what it is saying. The Brood was the first movie on this list to make me feel that voice that was reaching out trying to make me understand. Like what you will see in Videodrome from Brian O'blivion.

I still have so much more to say about this movie in particular and I'm probably going to keep doing it as I advance in this list, I'm going to keep talking about the brood, I'm going to keep talking about the book on Nola's bookshelf, I'm going to keep talking about the formalist elements that David plays with (FDE: Yeah she barely does this. The movies are not as formalist an endeavor as the screenplay itself. Does that sound weird for me to say? Does that make sense? Whatever, I know what I mean. Figure it out yourself).

Possession by Andrzej Zulawski. Why did I choose this film for this position? both of these movies were made in the wake of messy divorces and oh boy can you feel it. surprisingly these films show some sympathy to the wife. less so in the brood because you are primarily developing an understanding of why she is the way she is more so than the mistreatment she is experiencing. You do get the framing of her death as the wrong solution for preventing deformities in Candice, though. In Possession, the title of the film is a reference to how she is treated like a possession by the men in her life. She behaves in ways inscrutable to either of them because they assume she is being possessed/owned by someone else. She is going crazy specifically because she is being so heavily restricted by the men in her life. these dudes even go into each other's houses and put their hands on each other's stuff and touch each other as if they own each other, it's a struggle for dominance over a woman but it's also very homoerotic This movie goes crazy It's so good. The Berlin Wall is an entire character in this movie basically in terms of examining the marriage. This movie also plays heavily in the I hate you because I love you space. The characters creating or finding idealized forms of each other, the need for each other but the disgust and revulsion at reconnection. The impact all of this has on the little boy. We see these characters reach for bodily expression whenever they are pushed to their breaking points, in a similar manner to musicals and how you sing when you can no longer talk. In Possession, Isabelle Adjani thrashes about wildly and painfully when she can no longer talk. It brings us back to the brood and how the feelings tied up in our guts have to express themselves through our body. It is great watching these films back to back. highly recommend. Sam Neill gets an honorary Brunette Freak label for this one. Zulawski really worked him here.

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Scanners (1981) and Videodrome (1983) and The Matrix (1999)

It must have been so crazy to be a fan of Cronenberg in this time period. imagine getting the brood, scanners, and videodrome back-to-back. The man has vision.

Scanners gives us one of the most direct callbacks in this filmography, something we'll see happen a lot by the way, especially as we get to the final arc of films. In Stereo, one of the test subjects drilled a hole in his forehead because he could not handle all of the psychic presence in his mind. The antagonist of scanners did that exact same thing and it was in the confines of a locked down research area like the one in stereo. Like, it could not get more direct. As in The Brood, this movie is very interested in the way art can be used to process trauma and project visions of our self, convert feelings into something perceivable. making that bridge. At one point we literally watch two characters walk into a giant head to have a discussion. It's not subtle. We return to crimes of the Future with a story about a group of subversives. The way those subversives communicate and connect with each other through symbols more than words, through raw projection, with the new potential they have grown. Of course we have psychic awakenings, A little bit of proxy touching, a great scene where they go over the bridge between feelings and perception again as he has to make a man's heart beat faster without touching him. There's a lot of fun work with eyes in this movie as well, something to take note of when examining the artwork in the movie. And what happens to eyes in the final sequence, what they say in the movie about eyes and how you can enter someone through them. It makes you think about how you look at art, how it enters you and you can feel it inside your body. I think this might be the first one where we also get an overarching theme of humans interfacing with computers the same way they do humans. The circuit board as a nervous system. It definitely shows up in videodrome and The Shrouds.

With videodrome, it's very much the same: When you look at something It can enter you and once it enters you can change you. They talk about shocking and provocative media and the concepts around what does and does not have a philosophy. How it is media with philosophy that's dangerous. because if you don't realize what that philosophy is it can imprint upon you.

This is the first movie where I saw a really good ceci n'est pas une pipe image. Max has a photo on his wall of an astronaut on the moon and pasted over the astronaut's hand is a cutout of a human hand and that hand is holding a picture of the Moon. I posted somewhere on my blog about how many layers there were between the viewer and the reality of the moon in this situation. It's very fun space to work in, Brandon Cronenberg goofs with this in possessor a good bit, it's something that we will see crop up in a few movies on the list, especially The Shrouds.

Videodrome has a really cool concept in it that the red electrified clay room where all of the grisly torture happens is literally the inside of a TV. The screen is an electrified clay that shows images that are carved out of the performances of the people. When videodrome is recorded, you are literally putting your head inside of a TV and the screen is responding to your thoughts. It makes the printout of TV static on the wall of his kitchen more interesting as well. It was obviously true and relevant in the '80s but this movie goes crazy in the 2020s with the way so many people document themselves online as a face talking into a camera and that being a stand-in for flesh interactions. There's also crazy moment where they keep trying to find what disgusting backwater third world country is producing this gore porn and the answer is right smack dab in the middle of the USA. You want to see disgusting shit? It's right in front of you, It's not "backwards foreigners," it's us. The return of the idea of repressed suburbia. I said in The Brood that I started watching his movies as if they were trying to talk to me and then Brian O'blivion does just that to Max. I lost my fucking mind, that I made an observation in my own terms and then the next film started doing that explicitly. I have had my real world everyday philosophy changed by David Cronenberg and the way he infuses philosophy into his work. I haven't even said half of the stuff that I want to say about videodrome but I just don't have the time and space to do it here. I will probably be on Cronenberg for years. Oh and there's a new rendition of bridge-feeling-perception: "What appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience in the viewer. " I hate to call James Woods a Brunette Freak because he suuuuucks but David treats him like his others

And it's in realizing that I've left out so much on videodrome that I remember why I put The Matrix by the Wachowski sisters right here. It's basically the same movie. A guy with a job relevant to the controlling industry is pulled in by a group of subversives that are working to undermine the control that the government has on this particular form of media. We have characters discussing their personal philosophy on how our ideas are shaped by what we see and what we experience. The bridge between feeling and perception. The main character develops capabilities that allow him to freely manipulate the narrative that he is in because the recognizes it as a narrative. both of these movies have a fascinating gender angle on them, what with Trinity being assumed as a man, the various freaks and homos of new zion, And in videodrome Bianca Oblivion being the stand-in for a presumed man, Max getting a pussy installed on his stomach (That is also not the last time we will see this imagery, wasn't even the first time, they did this in stereo with the mannequin, you reach in and touch the guts directly). The idea of free will and whether we have it and what is determined for us shows up in both of these films, Even looking back at Scanners we have Neo and agent Smith standing in opposition similarly to revok and whatever the protagonist's name was. They even do body shenanigans to each other. I would say that agent Smith and Revok have similar ideologies. I would be stunned to find out that the wachowski's did not work directly inspired by videodrome.

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The Dead Zone (1983)

Sadly, as with every list, there does have to be a least favorite and unfortunately that is dead zone. The first third, first half, has some really cool stuff going on with the visuals and with strong mono color lights. There's an atmosphere of spooky mystery as you watch this man navigate the world after his car accident. everything is strange and messy and complicated for him But he eventually reconciles with elements of his past and finds a new niche for himself by exploring this strange bodily connection he has with people. I can already feel myself just repeating what is in my letterboxd review so click that link If you want to see my disappointment at not enjoying a political assassination film. It also feels the most disconnected from the imagery David has developed over his career so far. It feels like Stephen King showed through more than David Cronenberg. perhaps it was just my failure at watching the film though. Chris Walken can have the honor of Brunette Freak, he does have the vibe here.

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Tetsuo II: The Body Hammer (1992) and Hour of the Wolf (1968) and The Fly (1986)

I wanted to put our hour of the wolf right before The Fly because in David Cronenberg's criterion closet video, he cites this film as one of his influences and, in particular, he recreated a scene in the fly that he first saw in hour of the wolf. Tetsuo 2 has an interesting throughline of a husband and wife that I like comparing to hour of the wolf.

We'll start with Tetsuo: This film touches on some of the deformed child ideas we have been following. How does the past manifest on your body, as your body. When something traumatic happens and it brings back your own history in full force, how do you navigate this and how does your wife? When your body transforms into something newly unrecognizable, when you change, and your relationships survive, can it change with you? The connection of machinery and flesh here is now relevant as we get through Videodrome and The Fly. The metal and flesh of the Tetsuo films bloom now next to the Cronenberg examples. This is another Tsukamoto film centering a trio of characters and you will see that almost all of his movies do. This is another Tsukamoto where the antagonist spurs on positive growth in the protagonist by ruining his life. That is also a major thread we will see with these.

In Hour of the Wolf, there's a similar story of a wife trying to understand the past that is tormenting her husband right now (FDE: inaccurate, this movie has a framing device of "the events happened some time ago and we are getting an interview with the woman after the fact" But that is not important right now Go read my review). Ingmar Bergman is much less body focused compared to Shinya Tsukamoto and David Cronenberg; instead the trauma manifests as apparitions that torment him. We are getting perceptions that convey to us the feelings. The shot that David copied for The Fly is one of a man walking up the wall of a room and onto the ceiling. I think David did it better, tbh. What i really love about this one is how the ending just trails away. There are no answers. Bergman also seems to be a fan of using meta layer concepts: the movie is an interview with a woman where she talks about a vacation where her husband wrote about his trauma which includes a play where the character acts out an aspect of his history. We are so separated from the direct information and that makes it so much more engaging to analyze.

So how do these two movies relate to The Fly? Well there's a lot of work around the asymmetry in this relationship but unlike the other two, this film is about New Lovers. They don't have ANY history together. This is where my comment earlier about allegories for the mundane comes into play. I'm going to describe the movie as simply as possible:

A woman gets involved with Mr. Right. They move to sex pretty quickly and he knocks her up. She learns he has a disease that might be passed on to the baby and also he is becoming a controlling asshole. She tries to get an abortion and he forcefully stops her.

That's pretty grounded, this happens to a lot of women in real life. This movie just has a few layers of the fantastical sprayed over it. The connection with the prior films is the way Geena Davis' character is trying to figure out the deal with this fuckin' guy. The exploration of a rocky (recent) past and also the same question of "Can you handle your partner changing?" there's also a banger line about how "You can't get past your sick gray fear of the flesh." I could even say that these three movies have the same core but with a different outcome each. Union, Disappearance, Rejection. The rejection running through The Fly is so heartbreaking, too, because every teleportation session is spurred by the feeling of rejection and it's That Feeling that causes Brundle to transform into a wholly new entity.

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Dead Ringers (1991) and Raw (2016)

Dead Ringers amps the Proxy Touch idea up to eleven and starts off strong with it. The twins don't even consider having had sex with someone until they have BOTH had her. One of them is dancing with a woman and starts directing her puppet style to dance with his brother and they make it very clear that he is imagining himself in the place of the woman. There's a line about how whatever goes in one's veins goes into the others. We have an exploration of adopting roles and performance as these two brothers take each other's places and swap names and transition between their full names and diminutives as They transition between masks. The names tie into the gender discussions in the movie: Bev and Ellie are both men with feminine diminutions of their names, Beverly designs tools and labels them as used for gynecological procedures for mutated women (deformed children). It makes it interesting that he uses these on his brother. You know, it also makes it interesting when you think about a future film and the line surgery is the new sex. There's a concerted exploration on useless organs and a three-headed uterus. Jeremy Irons deffo falls under the Brunette Freak category.

Raw by Julia Ducournau. Why did I put this film in this position? Justine is entering medical school with her bolder sister. They both harbor a secret in their genes, dark desires no one should know, feelings deep in their guts that manifest as eating. We watch characters in both of these movies fight themselves and their sibling as they try to even barely function in a medical context. This movie also ends on an incredible example of a character undergoing drastic bodily change to adapt to a loved one's base instinctual desires. The connection between these sisters is not romantic but it is psychosexual in a similar way to Bev-Ellie (FDE: hey... Beverly/BevEllie? Is that anything?). The protagonists of both features also struggle physically bodily with abstaining from these dark desires and we see a finale in Raw showing a world where the sick grey fear of the flesh can be overcome with love (love you, dad from Raw).

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Naked Lunch (1991) and M Butterfly (1993)

Naked Lunch was difficult. There's definitely some cool philosophy going on but you have to cleave pretty tightly to the dialogue to keep up. The real feature to this one is the typewriters: it's one thing to think of ideas for stories but it's actually sitting down and physically putting the story together that it becomes a sensual experience. It is in the performance of creation that the art is forged. Pin that for M Butterfly. We get that as a sort of conversation between the authors and the typewriters in this movie. a major question in the film is one that I'm asking myself right now which is "does the author create the artwork or does the artwork compel the author to create it?" after all, these things emerge as thoughts first and we feel pulled to put them onto paper. What is doing the pulling? Responding to compulsion seems to be a pretty central theme in this one with drugs and violence and sex. There's good discussion from the characters around ideas like "revisions while writing" and where ideas come from and go, that ideas can be alive, that the idiosyncrasies of individual typewriters are communicating to you. It's another story like scanners and videodrome where a character joins a group and then joins the subversives working against them. There's also a ton of good imagery and wonderful puppets. There's one in particular which you can clearly see the rod they are using to control it as it jumps off a balcony. This is another movie that I failed to properly watch, I think.

M Butterfly is an adaptation of a play about a real life dude. A French(?) diplomat who fell in love with a woman who turned out to be a man in disguise gathering intel from him. A lot of people take issue with what seems like a standard "entrapment" storyline with a transfem-coded character. I think that is not the intent. The movie opens with a scene where Song Liling points out the foolishness of the character of Madame Butterfly but highlights that the story is beautiful because it's "about the music" (yes, the character saying this is named Song). This movie has a traditional non-diegetic score but as this dude works his way into the community, you can start to notice that there are characters singing along to the non-diegetic music. It is a representation of how connected they are through this culture. (The main character in this movie sucks by the way, he's such a dweeb weasel. He's throwing microaggressions left and right.) When song says that it is about the music, this is what she means. She later says the line "the times that she truly existed were with you," this movie is directly discussing the role of performance in identity. song lilling is real whenever he loves her. And she stays with him for so long, you can imagine Sisyphus happy, At least I do. But I'm also very biased as a transgender woman. We spend enough time with her to know how she behaves and what she desires outside of the performance. For both characters, I think we are supposed to read them as being the foolish lovers in Madame Butterfly, that the raw facts of their story are unreasonable for a romance, that their behavior is naive but the music, the beauty in the music and the performance. You can feel Song Liling. She exists, she is real in the performance. She is real and beautiful in the music.

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Dans Ma Peau (2002) and Crash (1996)

James Spader is like the second coming of Mlodzik from Crimes of the Future. Turbo Brunette Freak. I love him so much. But before we get to that, there's a little French film I need to talk about, it is going next to Crash for its raw sensuality but to be honest was just having difficulty finding a spot to place it. The thematic connections are there but not quite as aligned as I want but close enough to be useful.

Dans ma Peau by Marina de Van shows us the story of a woman who develops an obsession with taking her internal feelings and making them visibly external. to physically show the pain and shame that she feels on a day-to-day basis in a humiliating job, social group, society. It also garners her a type of attention that is novel. of all the movies on this list, this one is the most grounded in mundane experience. There is no mystical human connection, there's no substance causing changes. It is a woman suffering in society and harming herself to cope. The exploration of your own body as this luxuriating experience, to revel in the pain and the blood and the many sensations in privacy. something we get in a lot of the Tsukamoto entries is that feeling of shame, there's a good bit in Cronenberg as well. But the reason I put this here in front of crash is that it is a movie about fundamentally permanently irreversibly changing your body in a way that everyone thinks is abnormal and you are doing it by choice and you are thrilled by it.

So that brings us to Crash. I have included a rant I made shortly after watching the film in my individual review that goes over the genius of the choice to make this a film adaptation. This really opened my third eye, similarly to The Brood, But this time about the stories he can tell simply by the choice of medium. He literally got people paid to actually act out the contents of that book. There are literal stunt drivers who crashed cars safely to recreate celebrity collisions so they could be filmed for this movie about a book wherein people do exactly that thing. This is the bridge between the worlds of feeling and perception. He must have felt so fucking smug when he ran into this idea.

This movie really digs into the concepts around consent when it comes to violently charged sexual encounters. This movie goes absolutely crazy around the ideas of actively choosing to mutilate your body as a consequence of getting your thrill (like Dans ma Peau). The end that Vaughan comes to is one that he very much wanted and it's not because he was simply suicidal. He was chasing his vision, he experienced the little death and the big death simultaneously. The group of subversives in this film, classic trope of Cronenberg, all have very similar fetishes but fundamentally different. People who are focused on the car, people who are focused on the crash, people who are focused on adopting the role of a celebrity, they all converge here and bond and bounce off of each other and -- importantly -- fuck. There's a beautiful moment where one of them says she cannot lie down in the back of normal cars because of her brace and mobility aids. There is a scene near the end where she crawls into the back of Vaughan's car with another woman and they are both able to comfortably lie down in embrace within it. It literally brought a tear to my eye. There's so much to be said about this movie that I'm simply not qualified to begin discussing. I watched this movie and I look at cars differently now, I fundamentally watch movies differently now. I didn't know a movie could be like this. every shot manages to elicit a physical sensation in the viewer, you can feel the textures of the leather as their fingers squeak over it, you can feel the catch in your legs as her brace hangs on a seat, you can taste the greasy salt on the thumb that gets shoved into the mouth. There's also a crazy scene of proxy sex between James Spader and his girlfriend where she keeps describing herself as Vaughan. This scene gets almost fully recreated in The Shrouds 30 years later (physical scars are eroticized in this movie in a way that pays off in the shrouds as well). There are some truly beautiful scenes in this movie. It's such a shame its reputation scares people away and the idea of watching a movie where sex dominates the runtime is so off-putting to people. there just are not many movies like this one and you are depriving yourself of something wonderful and wholly unique if you abstain.

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eXistenZ (1999) and Possessor (2020)

Jude Law? Brunette Freak. I have to get it out of the way now: the first 40 minutes of this movie is just a woman trying to talk her boyfriend into letting them do anal. She wants to strap that man so bad. Of course all of this is through the metaphor of access ports for the game system, this fleshy tendril that she wants to forcefully insert into his port, a port that delivers wonderful sensations to him eventually. He even surprises his girlfriend by kissing her port and then they go ass to mouth. This movie is bonkers, y'all. It's so good.

Every time you stop and think oh well that seems odd or oh that was a bit clunky, every bit of it is planned. blows my mind every time I think about it. since this movie is about games, I can talk about something that shares a lot of similarity to it: TTRPG safety rules. The X card, lines and veils, the concept of getting lost in the game, degrees of intensity, all of these come into play as she's trying to convince this man to let her peg him. The reason this movie resembles that to my mind is because all of these TTRPG safety rules were developed first in kink communities so this is all pretty run-of-the-mill normal stuff in the world of eroticism. David knows game. It's fascinating watching the characters build up these layers to separate the intellectual fear of butt play from the positive sensations that he eventually receives from his girlfriend. I'm sure at least one couple out there was influenced to try after this movie. I've been talking about butt sex for so long and that's not even what the movie is about there's still an entire other half and also comparing it to butt sex is reductive of the ongoing plot anyway. It's just such a fascinating element of the movie I can't help myself it's so well done. A lot of people seem to think the ending is hokey but I was clapping and barking like a fucking seal. This is one that I think you just have to watch. Just let it wash over you, take note of things that seem off, then think about them afterward, see how they feel in hindsight. If there is a structural reason it might have been that way. This movie is a delight from start to finish. Willem Dafoe is here.

Possessor is another Brandon Cronenberg joint. I'm putting it right here because there is a device in this movie that lets you take on the role of a person who is not you. And you have to muddle your way through figuring out how this person would behave and trying to fill their shoes. A lot of role-playing going on. A lot of discussion around the concept of consciousness and, again, Identity. There's a scene wherein the main character, the woman who is an assassin, bodyjacks the other main character and has to perform his mundane daily job: staring at brown curtains (they are NOT blue). specifically looking through the body jacking device through his body where he is wearing a VR helmet which is showing him a virtual desk with a virtual computer and on that virtual computer monitor is a program displaying a webcam feed and further a separate window that is zoomed in on the curtains in that webcam feed. That's a lot of layers of separation. David plays with this in the Shrouds, Brandon was already on it with possessor (Yeah he already played with it in videodrome I know). What I particularly like in this movie is the way our main character becomes attached to the bodies like... limbically. It becomes her body, she cannot simply throw it away even if she intellectually knows that she'll be going back to her own a normal body. also this is the first movie on The Codex Cronenberg to feature visible shaft. yet again a movie where I clapped like a seal.

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Spider (2002)

This is a very small film. Not many actors, not many different sets, no crazy effects, just good set design and costuming and acting. It did not work for me so much, the analogy in my review is that it feels like putting together a puzzle and the first bit of puzzle solving is usually setting all your pieces up and finding the corners and edges it's not the most thrilling process. That is my failure as a movie watcher, when I say that. because once this movie does start giving you the payoffs to all the puzzle pieces, it's pretty damn satisfying. I have notes for what I need to consider next time I watch it. But as for the connection to Cronenberg's work, the movie features a man acting out his role as a child he is stuck between past and the present because he is a deformed child and he acts out that deformity in this film.

Throughout the movie he is weaving his web and it is the process of doing that which reminds him of a web that he wove as a child and it allows him to express this experience. It is the performance of spinning a web that reunites him with his identity as spider. And that identity has some baggage attached. It's absolutely worth a watch; weaving a web and weaving a narrative and performing that narrative which manifests the past in the present. There's really cool ideas in here and I need to take another pass at it. Even as I'm thinking about it in hindsight, I'm considering the way spiders always return to the center of their web and this narrative keeps taking us back to the central event in it.

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A History of Violence (2005) and Killing (2018) and Eastern Promises (2007)

Viggo is not your typical brunette freak. No, but he does have a very special relationship with David Cronenberg so i'm putting him adjacent to the list.

A History of Violence takes us back to exploring the idea of what is hiding behind the thin veneer of suburbia. We had that in shivers, we had that in videodrome, the brood, And here it shows up as a wife and husband who consistently actively choose to be together as she learns the dark past her husband carries. This movie has a lot to say about choice and the roles that we choose to play. violence and the active choice it always is, love and the choice that it is, part of what makes these characters so compelling and so real is that they are making choices. Joey exists as a performance of Joey, even when the cat is out of the bag, he still switches between voices and accents. He is still actively choosing his identity from moment to moment. The sex scene on the stairs is honestly one of the most beautiful and loving sex scenes in his filmography in spite of the violence of it.

Killing by Shinya Tsukamoto is almost the same movie. give viggo a katana and send him to the Edo Period. whenever we watched this movie, there was a moment that had us yelling, because we had been drawing the connection between the main character being a physical embodiment of a sword and there's this scene that pays it off where the main character bites down on the blade of a katana. I leapt, pointing, from my seat. This movie asks ton of the same questions as a history of violence in regards to what the purpose of violence is and What good can be found there. a subject that I like in Cronenberg's works that we will see more of ahead is simply asking "what's the point of having something if you don't use it" because This character is constantly being goaded into using his sword to kill someone. What does it mean to be a samurai and what is the purpose of a sword? What does it mean to be a bandit or a ronin? Is the possibility of violence in the future a good enough reason to engage in violence now? This movie does a great job of selling the weight and presence of the sword, these things creak when they are exposed and not being used. these samurai also look like fucking zombies by the end of the movie, they look wrecked. It's incredible. This film serves as a good example of how Tsukamoto uses Nature. The forest, the sky, and the Sun have real character to them and there's some really slick cinematography that makes use of them. Leaves, rain, and flowers play important roles in both Vital and A Snake of June ahead.

For Eastern Promises, we go back into cultural explorations which fits well with M Butterfly and Killing because those movies put a lot of culture on display. This movie gives us Eastern Europe. There are so many delicious sets in this film and so much good-looking food and comforting music. All of the cultures converging in this movie give us another good avenue for exploring roles and roleplay since everyone in this film builds up trust and loyalty and ambition based on the roles they perceive other people as fulfilling. You can really tangibly feel the connection these characters have to their cultures. The permanent marking of the body, a la crash, through scars and tattoos returns. The weight these things carry with organized crime and how some people don't have a single mark on their bodies. And all of this is revolving around the death of a young sex worker. everyone has a different identity they ascribe to this woman, at least what aspect of her identity they prioritize. It feels like this builds directly on a history of violence. It also seems like we have some repressed homosexuality in this movie, with just a whiff of proxy sex. Just as killing asks the viewer to consider what it means to be a samurai and to hold a sword, what it takes to commit to that, this film asks what it takes to commit to an organization. to hold on to two identities fully and simultaneously. another case study on your identity existing in your performance of that identity. viggo mortensen's character in crimes of the Future directly references viggo mortensen's character in Eastern promises and it made me smile like a little goofy idiot.

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Tokyo Fist (1995) and A Dangerous Method (2011) and A Snake of June (2002)

I can feel myself deviating progressively from my initial goal of drawing out the connective webs of themes and it's reaching the point where I'm just too excited to talk about why these movies are so delightful and good and fun to me. Shinya Tsukamoto has a major focus on shame in a lot of his movies and that's what puts Tokyo Fist right in front of A Dangerous Method and A Snake of June right after it. This triad of films revolves around triads of characters, and each triad has a core of shame. Tokyo fist is a tale of cuckoldry, Method is humiliation kink, Snake is exhibitionism.

In the realm of cuckoldry: a story consent through various vectors, like random violence scarring you versus dedicated training doing so. tattoos and scars once again, the marks that we take on for other people, on behalf of them. these characters end up in better positions at the end of the film because they have all rubbed up against each other and fought and argued and changed themselves to be better. They develop roles in a similar way to history of violence As they shift between lover, fighter, prize, independent person. a character reenacts a moment in order to get a do-over at it. He engages with his shame directly and lets it dwell within his body while he improves himself. That's the kind of shit that puts you on the Codex Cronenberg list.

The triad in A Dangerous Method contains two very famous members: Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung (It was writing this statement that reminded me I have so much more to say about stereo and the brood and I had to go back and write about shadows and reflections. When I first started this I was hoping to keep it under 5,000 words. I'm so stupid.) This movie starts with a demonstration like in the brood where Carl explains his psychology methods of sitting behind your head, not letting you look at me, We talk. And what happens for the rest of the film is imagery of people behind each other's heads: statues, pictures, literal people, books, empty chairs. Keira Knightley portrays a woman who is trying to break into the field of psychoanalysis and also has a repressed kink around shame and humiliation. She spends quite a lot of time talking about where in her body feels these sensations and the wet feelings on her skin in the middle of the night. This brings stereo back in full force with the idea of the researcher needing to be loved by the researched in order for the practice to work. therapeutic progress comes from her taking those deeper repressed feelings and letting them come to the surface and be spanked out of her basically. And of course women in the world of psychiatry is already a touchy subject so there are gender dynamics at play and a hearty gander at those realms of consent.

We even get a throwback to shivers, and you think about everything is erotic monologue and how an old man was telling her all of this, here we have Sigmund Freud the old man discussing the inherent eroticism of all things. We also a good little homoeroticism between the two psychological Titans as they use their relationship with this woman as a proxy for each other in certain extents. And it has the best cut to credits I think out of any of these movies where it fades to black on a somber scene and just says a random character from way earlier died of starvation.

and A Snake of June... This movie is so fucking good. It is rendered in monochrome, blue specifically, The look of some film negatives actually, which is thematically relevant. a marriage is gradually wearing away and a stalker discovers the wife has a repressed secret. And he has pictures, film negatives even. The dynamic that unfolds between these three people ends up telling a beautiful story of love. love and loss and life. both spouses are afraid of the wife's body, her desires. both are ashamed of it. We explore the gender dynamics of the household where the husband plays the role of cleaner and does not let his wife do so. The final arc of the movie is preempted by a gender marker showing two male prongs and one female prong in Union. The climax of this film is a literal climax and it brought a teary smile to my face. these characters improve their lives by allowing themselves to be manipulated and directed and instructed to express their repressed desires. It's actually helpful to see a movie with psychologists doing this first and then going into this movie and seeing an expression of all that analysis. I'm actually kind of wondering now why I didn't give it five whole stars. maybe I'll remember next time I watch it. The way this movie is filmed is just incredible. When she feels ashamed, it feels like a fucking horror film. It makes the climax moment all the more special and emotional.

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Cosmopolis (2012)

Robert Pattinson is maybe the platonic Brunette Freak of the generation. David knows how to use him. But I'm going to be honest, when I watched this movie, I was not in the right head space for it. I picked up a lot but I stand by the opening statement of my review about struggling to lift a heavy object. The three-headed uterus from dead ringers makes an appearance as the asymmetrical prostate of Robert Pattinson. finally getting back into Organ Outgrowth territory. There's a scene where he gets his prostate massaged for what feels like 3 minutes straight and throughout the entire scene You can see his forehead bulge larger and larger. A lot of the dense dialogue in this movie talks about the follies of trying to live in the future. It starts off using the stock market as the example for this and it works really well (yes the billboard that says there is a specter haunting the world called capitalism is on the nose but that's not the core message of the movie, you have to actually think about what impact that billboard has on the reading. capitalism is a specter because it is a ghost of Christmas future. projection and analysis of things that have not even happened yet to try and make a good trade. Now apply THAT to the movie) This movie also wants to talk about using things that you have, there are so many objects in this movie that do not get used and when something finally does you go "a-ha." Like what is the point of having a prostate if you aren't going to fiddle with it? What is the point of having a gun if you aren't going to shoot it? what's the point of having a security guy if you aren't going to follow his security advice? I'm learning this is one of my favorite subjects in movies, the film Pornostar really runs wild with the idea. This film strips down the main character of all of his conceptions about the future and society and value until he's left with just his own body and a gun and he then throws the gun away. eventually he makes it to the point where he is living fully in the present (I think?) which happens at the end of a literal 20-minute dialogue. The end of this movie is a 20 minute dialogue. If you lose your grip on what these two fuckers are talking about for even a second it's lost. It feels very much like naked lunch in that way. The dialogue is very dense and carries a lot of meaning but it is a challenge and a half to decipher it. (which is what I would say if I was a stupid idiot. I understood everything on the first try lol I read books.)

But seriously, there's really fascinating philosophical elements to this film that I'm desperate to get back and watch again because I think I'll get it next time. What I did understand was really good. This would make a good double feature with Megalopolis by the way. I wish David had a chance to work with Adam Driver.

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Antiviral (2012) and Maps to the Stars (2014)

BRANDON gets a Brunette Freak of his own!!! It's great watching him work the dude, too. I watched Maps before I watched antiviral but I think it's better to watch 'em in this order. as his first feature film, antiviral gives us a lot of language borrowed from his father. They say deformed children a few times and even before that the deformed faces of celebrities clued me in. The obsession people have with celebrities being intensified to the point that you give your body over to them, but not them so much as a pathogen that impacted them. You are taking something that harmed them and turning your body into a factory that produces it. There is a call out to Henrietta Lacks in this movie, if you can imagine. I even felt a sensual little thrill when the main character shoots a virus into his arm, So Brandon is as good at awakening my senses as David. I'd have to watch it again but I feel like there's definitely an approach to gender in this film and the way our main character is framed, the angles he is shot from in the lighting used to illuminate his features. He takes a substance extracted from a woman and shoots it into his arm and people start treating him more like a woman and he starts withering and dying until he starts behaving more masculine and takes command of profiting off of this starlet's disease. The most significant element in this movie in my opinion is that the woman in question doesn't get to speak to us. She is not in the movie. We don't know what kind of consent she gave because everything we learn about her is secondhand. That aspect alone shines a lot of light (haha) on the message of this film.

In a movie only two years later, David tackles the world of celebrity with maps to the stars and this movie kicks ass. You're probably tired of me just saying the words deformed children but here they are. This movie has almost an identical setup to the brood in terms of proxy therapy, of John Cusack grinding your thigh muscles while talking about your problems from the past. We see three older adults and three younger adults/children And we have the implication of their grandparents. You get to watch All of them act out the traumas that were inflicted upon them multiple times through this movie. You get to see how Havana treats personal boundaries and you know where she learned that. Agatha Weiss calls herself the original bad babysitter. We watch Benji portray his exposure to sexuality on his show bad babysitter, to an even younger child star. And all of this is happening in Hollywood. Carrie Fisher is here. They talk about JJ Abrams and Drew Barrymore but none of the stars are allowed to have their last names, they don't have their family legacies in this movie, you are seeing them first as Carrie, as JJ, as Drew. But they are families with legacy. It's an interesting little bit of scripting. We are being shown a fictional family but the backdrop of real Hollywood families with trauma baked into them makes these people real. We know this is what happens to child stars, we know this is the way Hollywood parents think about their children, we know this is how society responds to these scandals. This is another one of his movies that is larger than its own script, much the same way the brood is. The way these kids portray their love for each other is also really strong. stories of incest are complicated in real life, the feelings are tangled and messy. He's afraid of his sister but he does not hate her. And oh my God the way people go into swimming pools in this movie. dazzling. much like stars. It's good movies.

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Sick: the Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist (1997) and Crimes of the Future (2022)

Sick is a last minute addition to the list. I had no intention of including it until I actually started watching Crimes of the Future 2 and realized how relevant it is. I'm not going to talk about themes and motifs with Bob Flanagan because he's a real person. This documentary takes you into his life and shows you his pain and shows you the art that he pulls from that pain. He's charming and funny and his art is fascinating and he has a very strong and beautiful bond with his performing partner. You get to watch as his body is cut open right in front of you. You get to watch as parts of him are removed and how new things are added to him, how he is placed in a coffin to perform his own "death," every modification of his body. And you get to watch as he is worn down by the disease that was always going to get him. How he struggles to live the same life and experience the same thrills as his illness progresses. to some degree, Crimes of the Future 2 gives him a happier ending. I was thinking about Bob for most of this movie.

So let's talk about that one. We have an artist who's performances are based around the removal of organs that are growing within his body. This is a post sickness world. these situations are the same as crimes of the future 1. in the absence of a need, men have started growing strange organs in their bodies. The rest of this movie revisits almost all of Cronenberg's past work. This is where viggo cracks wise being so deep undercover that he believes it while looking at the camera and big lights flash Eastern Promises in your face. This is the movie where a woman almost directly quotes Geena Davis in The Fly about the weird slimy thing in her body (in reference to her son who eats by throwing up a white substance that dissolves his food before he puts it in his mouth. This is like what if she did not get an abortion in the fly). This touches on scanners and the brood with processing repressed feelings through art. We have a man being operated on by replicas of the gynecological tools in dead ringers. The truth in performance from M Butterfly. The visual metaphor of people in the back of your mind from A Dangerous Method. people are talking about the philosophy of artwork and the government is trying to suppress it like in videodrome. There's the eroticization of scars, There's roleplay and proxy touching, They explore consent, the psychic underlay of society, There's a group of subversives, there's a marital dispute over a child. Kristen Stewart jams a rod into his eXistenZ port. It literally feels like this movie is cobbled together from all of his other movies and we still get new content in here. The old artist is struggling against his own body because he can't sleep or eat like he used to, he takes his meals in a baby chair, you get to watch this kind of thing happen with Bob Flanagan. There is the discussion around tattooing organs and what it means to ascribe meaning to something like that. And then there's the gender stuff:

It is not an accident that the scars he ends up with by the end of this film resemble those you would get from a hysterectomy or vaginoplasty. He has a zipper on his stomach that functions like the hole in Videodrome. People have access to fondle his organs just like THE DAMN MANNEQUIN IN STEREO. FULL CIRCLE. It's not an accident that a major element of this movie is someone having "useless" organs removed. how the climactic performance takes the body of a small boy and tells us how cruel we are for ascribing meaning and identity to these organs, to this biology when the child could not do it themselves, when they didn't get the chance. That the child was killed by the mother before having the opportunity for self-determination. When we look back at Crimes of the future 1, The world without women, and how men grew organs in response to that it certainly... paints a picture.

Caprice worships these changes to Saul's body, by the way. also she got forehead body mods to bring us back into occult symbology with those waxing and waning moons surrounding her third eye. Just wanted to point that out

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Vital (2004) and (The Shrouds 2024)

And here's another one of the big ones: Vital by Shinya Tsukamoto. It's going to take something truly incredible to pull this movie out of my top five. I was desperate to find a good spot on this list to place it because it's just so phenomenal that I want to include it on every project that I do. thankfully, the shrouds gave me the perfect platform. both of these movies are about the process of trying to move on. both of these films are very interested in discussing the ways society approaches death rituals, what it means to have closure after someone has died, And what it means to have a relationship, a still living and breathing relationship with someone who is dead. If you have read my essay about Deep Space Nine, you will know how much I love this topic. both of these films center around a dead body but from two very different directions. There are tears coming to my eyes just thinking about these movies and the things that I want to say about them. It's actually the longest of the Tsukamoto films at 86 minutes which is wild because I've spent probably 20x that thinking about it. The Shrouds is one of the longest Cronenberg flicks as well at 120.

Vital gives us medical students performing full body opening and cleaning and examination of a cadaver. They are putting their hands and eyes and tools all over it, manipulating it, moving it around. in the Shrouds, the exact opposite, there's technology in the way, there are layers, the body is fully sealed and no one is allowed to look at it physically. One movie is about reaching closure and feeling the sun shine on your skin again once you have, The other is about never finding that closure and projecting the love of your life onto every single thing in your life forever.

I should probably dig into the movies individually:

The corpse in vital is occasionally rendered alive, we see her as she was and we see her grinding her skin into the sand to feel, stretching her muscles as far as they will reach so they burn, exhausting herself so her heart beats and her lungs swell. We see the platonic(philosophically speaking) and objective analysis in the drawings and we see those features in action through these dreamy sequences. And that's not even to say the drawings are objective, you can feel the love and care within those as well. There's a moment where taboo is breached and he touches the corpse with an ungloved hand and there's so much anticipation leading up to that moment, you feel, as the viewer, the release in that moment and the thrill of it. You take on the taboo yourself and you support it (if you are watching the movie correctly I guess I'm sure it's still super icky to some people). The textures are filmed so well that you can almost imagine how all of it feels on your own fingers. I was so in tune with the dead girl in this movie that by the end there is a sensory experience that we are deprived of And the realization of what was going on made me gasp and start sobbing. This movie is so fucking good. I can't talk about it analytically because I just get too worked up about it. I haven't even talked about any of the other ideas besides The Body present in the film. I probably won't. I think if you have really tried to absorb the elements of Cronenberg up to this point, this movie will just deliver itself to you. If you are ready to let a movie dictate the sensations in your body and affect the way you think -- which you should be if you are watching David Cronenberg's filmography -- this movie will bloom in your hands. Just go watch the movie while I talk about The Shrouds

If Crimes of the Future 2 was a cobbling together of previous works, the shrouds just takes that and tacks it on top of itself. They basically look at the camera and say surgery is the new sex. Karsh Still cannot move on after his wife died because he refuses actually look at her dead body physically with his eyes. It is a running theme throughout the entire film that almost nothing is delivered to us directly, breaking news comes second hand, information is filtered through an AI, a solid 5 to 10 minutes of runtime is spent with us seeing a phone being held in a hand while we are supposed to watch what is on the screen. This is digging into that layering discussion we had with Possessor and Videodrome and eXistenZ. You also get hints that he wasn't trying to reckon with his wife's ultimate fate when you learn he didn't kiss her before she died on fear of making her sick. she's going to die, dude. kiss her. There are some truly heartbreaking scenes in this film like the one I just described where he discusses this, one where his wife post-amputations asks if she's too mutilated to be loved. We have that recreation of the sex scene in crash where he is with his wife's sister and she is straight up vocally expressing her position as proxy the whole time. riveting scene, just as it was in crash. This movie talks about the relationship humans have to technology and it's use in replacing our senses. We cannot reconcile with a death because technology is keeping the dead present. We can't seem to connect to each other because we are putting layers between each other. Vital goes the opposite direction where we see how the connection to nature and physical existence saves us.

He's getting pretty old so I don't know if David will produce any more films after the shrouds. I think it is a worthy film to be his final entry and it would be thematically interesting for this to be his outro considering it's about letting go. It also makes for an interesting end point as a movie with a rather sad ending. I suppose a lot of his films don't have happy ones though.

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And That's A Wrap, Folks

If I wanted to say more about these movies, I would need to watch all of them again. There's still so much that I did not cover on every single entry here because I simply don't have the time and space to. Even with my reviews, my extended scribblings, and this document right here, I haven't even scratched the surface. I'm not even good at media analysis. I might even read all the Criterion Ingmar Bergman essays and try to do the same thing for David. This many words for each film....... It's a cute idea anyway... There are so many smarter people who have said so much more about these films but this is my own personal journey through the filmography, I have not actually read any academic writing on David Cronenberg yet. I needed to get this out of my system as my own words before poking my head behind the curtain to see what actual academics have to say about the man. Even without the academia influence, what I found in here blew my mind, dazzled me. Going through sequentially actually trains you pretty well to understand the symbols that Cronenberg is developing. When I say this was one of the most engaging and valuable endeavors I've undertaken, I mean it. Even before this I had checked my word count and saw I had nearly 20,000 on the subject of David Cronenberg alone. I'm excited to see what the final word count on this is. There's so much more to say and I have the rest of my life to watch these movies again and again and extract more and more words out of them. I'm so excited to see what comes out of Brandon Cronenberg and Julia Ducournau, I can't wait to dig my way through the rest of Tsukamoto's filmography. ever since starting this project and learning how to analyze David's films, I've had so much more fun watching other films as well. doing a dedicated sit-through of his work has opened cinema to me. There's part of me that wants to immediately buckle down and watch all of these films in a row again like this but I have so much more to explore in the world. David will always be waiting for me right here.

If you have read all the way to the bottom, hi Morgan. You're probably the only person down here. And Megan :^P

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