Filmmakers: David Cronenberg

Michael Blowhard reviews the latest David Cronenberg film Eastern Promises here.

In contrast with Michael, I’ve always thought Cronenberg's films "clunky, pretentious, and perverse." None of them are exactly examples of meticulous craftsmanship and his narratives tend to ape third rate Hollywood clichés. I often wonder if he isn’t an artist who wandered into the wrong medium. When I think of his films, I don't think of the story or the dialogue or the cinematography or the editing, all of which are usually pretty pedestrian; what I do think of are those appalling gynaecological instruments from Dead Ringers or the meat gun/hand from Videodrome, or the various new orifices he's managed to come up with throughout his oeuvre. Cronenberg seems to belong to a group of filmmakers, like James Whale and Tim Burton, who only incidentally work in film. What they are really interested in is set design or costuming or whatever. I tend to prefer that the films I watch actually work as films, but I can still see what attracts people to the work of these other kinds of artists. However, lately, in films like A History of Violence and Eastern Promises, Cronenberg has seemed to back away from his former preoccupation with the grotesque and the gynaecological to focus on more straightforward narratives, and has been rewarded with much more mainstream success. However, as Michael implies, straightforward narrative would not seem to be his strength. Take away from Cronenberg his high concept scenarios, his crazy props, his over-the-top make-up, and, yes, his newfangled orifices, and there just isn't much left.

One of the most annoying things about each locality's arts scene is that you are just expected to think well of local artists. For example, if you live in Toronto and happen to think Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg are a couple of pretentious windbags, you’re not just expressing an opinion about art, you’re letting down the home team. You’ve diminished the city’s international filmmaking cache. Something of the same problem exists in the Christian community. If anything remotely Christian manages to break out into the mainstream, the bums in the pews are implicitly expected to support it. Aesthetic displeasure wasn’t the only reason I reacted so strongly against The Lord of the Rings, but the implication, at least in the circles I run in, that not liking Tolkien was a somewhat un-Christian thing to do. (The same thing might have happened with regard to Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ, but for the fact that a lot of women in the church did think well of its blood and guts version of the gospel. I happened to like The Passion a lot, but it is a far from perfect representation of the Christian message. It would not be healthy for Christians to just circle the wagons around it.) Now, a bit of local or religious patriotism isn’t entirely a bad thing. As a Canadian, for example, I probably read Northrop Frye and Robertson Davies more than I would if I were born in the U.S., and I have an affection for the works of Eric Rohmer and C.S. Lewis that I might not feel if I didn’t share with them something of a similar outlook on religion. (Though fairly reactionary on canonical matters, I can understand the reasons why different groups, like blacks or Hispanics, would like to read works by authors of their own kind.) But such things can go too far. It is one thing to feel a particular affection for good work that has some extra-artistic connection to oneself, it is quite another to elevate bad work to the status of good for the same reason. The first is a natural extension of particular loyalties, the second it a betrayal of all intellectual and artistic standards. If the only reason you read is to express tribal loyalties, why read at all? No honest patriot, of whatever group, can but deplore the unthinking jingoism of this “my mother drunk or sober” school of criticism.

The problem of boosterism in criticism mainly seems to show up among provincial or marginal groups. If a critic in Los Angeles doesn’t think an American film is good, he will generally say so. He might be tempted to engage in boosterism for some other group he belongs to, but American film so dominates the film universe that boosterism on its behalf would be entirely beside the point. In contrast, the Canadian film industry, when it has existed at all, has always operated in the shadow of the American behemoth, utterly unshielded by language or geography. The best known Canadian director, Norman Jewison, is a full on member of the Hollywood establishment who reached his artistic apotheosis helming such decidedly non-Canadiana pieces as Fiddler on the Roof and Moonstruck. He is beloved here, but only by something of a stretch can his films really be classified as Canadian. The animation and documentary tradition of the NFB has produced fantastic work, but it has had a tiny audience, and cannot satisfy the hunger for more mainstream recognition. I don’t really see much solution to all of this. American movies are more dominant than ever, and overpraising the work of directors like Cronenberg and Egoyan isn't going to change this.