David Cronenberg’s “peerless series of gross-out mindfucks and philosophical schlockfests have shaped art-making in the movies and beyond,” brofromanother writes.
David Cronenberg’s breakout film, “Shivers,” was both a success story and a scourge for the Canadian film industry. Released in 1975, it told the tale of a parasite that spreads through a Montreal high-rise, turning residents into sex-crazed zombies. The movie cost a hundred and eighty thousand dollars and brought in some five million, making it the highest-grossing film Canada had ever put out. Alas, it was not to everyone’s taste.
“Crimes of the Future,” Cronenberg’s first feature in eight years, marks something of a return to form. In the twenty-first century thus far, Cronenberg has made a string of relatively refined films, including literary adaptations such as Don DeLillo’s Wall Street odyssey “Cosmopolis” and the when-Freud-met-Jung period piece “A Dangerous Method.
Since the late nineties, Cronenberg has lived in a three-story family home in the prosperous Toronto neighborhood of Forest Hill. One afternoon in April, I visited him at the house, which is shielded from the street by several trees. Martin Scorsese once wrote that he’d been nervous to meet Cronenberg, given the nature of his films, and then was surprised to discover that he looked like “a gynecologist from Beverly Hills.
In search of other kindred spirits, Cronenberg contacted the low-end Montreal-based distributor Cinépix Film Properties, whose founders had cornered the French-Canadian softcore market. They were receptive to the script for “Shivers” , but they struggled for several years before persuading Canada’s government film program to contribute to the project. In an interview clip from 1976, a journalist asks a boyish, bespectacled Cronenberg whether he’s out to “create a body of art or a fast buck.
In contrast to such provocateurs as Lars von Trier or Nicolas Winding Refn, who bracket their cinematic endurance tests in compulsory irony, Cronenberg is in some senses a peculiarly earnest filmmaker. Over the years, many people have wondered how a seemingly well-adjusted person can produce such disturbing art, but Cronenberg speaks of his work as a friendly invitation to follow his wandering mind. “I’m not making a movie to assault anybody,” he told me.
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