Go here to see Chris Driver's Power Point presentation on Cronenberg (Power Point required)

Major Works:
Shivers (They Came from Within) (1975)

Rabid (1977)

The Brood (1979)

Scanners (1980)

The Dead Zone (1983)

Videodrome (1983)

The Fly (1986)

Dead Ringers (1988)

Naked Lunch (1991)

Madame Butterfly (1993)

Crash (1996)

eXistenZ (1999)

Spider (2002)

"[He] encouraged my body to revolt against me."  a character in
David Cronenberg's The Brood*

". . . the idea of a creative cancer; something that you would normally see as a disease now goes to another level of creativity and starts sculpting with your own body." Cronenberg in an interview

The words quoted above are from a character named Hartog, a patient in Dr. Raglan's "Psychoplasmics Institute," where a mad scientist teaches his patients how to cure themselves by manifesting their own neuroses and psychoses physically. Bodies are always in revolt (revolting) in David Cronenberg's films.

It was in his films in the seventies and eighties that we were first "privileged" to witness those images of subcutaneous movement that became his trademark, of something alive and independent moving beneath our skin, of alien presences inside our own bodies.

As one critic (William Beard) has observed, the body in Cronenberg's films is "an anarchic domain," the "untamable half of the human animal--an aspect that forever lies in wait beneath the bland assumptions of control and the airy cerebrations of the conscious mind." Sometimes a truce between mind and body is momentarily established, but it can never be maintained. For if the body's "mysterious needs and mechanisms are tinkered with or denied or ignored," catastrophe results.

As "part of trying to reverse the normal understanding of what goes on physically, psychologically and biologically to us," Cronenberg counsels in an interview, we must learn to understand a disease "from the disease's point of view." "A virus is only doing its job," he theorizes in an interview.

It's trying to live its life. The fact that it's destroying you by doing so is not its fault. . . . I think most diseases would be very shocked to be considered diseases at all. It's a very negative connotation. For them, it's very positive when they take over your body and destroy you. It's a triumph.

Perhaps we are now living in a Cronenberg nightmare. (Though his genius provides premonitions, it certainly offers no antidotes.) Perhaps we will awake from these days to find the house lights going up, the curtain falling, the welcome recognition forthcoming that "it's only a movie." Descartes' Disease could almost be a product of his disturbed and thoroughly Cartesian imagination.¹

Or perhaps history is the nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

Critics during Cronenberg's prime were well aware of his Cartesianism. Writing in The Village Voice, Carrie Rickey spoke of him as "a visionary architect of a chaotic biological tract where mind and body, ever fighting a Cartesian battle for integration, are so vulnerable as to be easily annexed by technology." William Beard discovers the "principal villain" of his films to be "the overweening Cartesian rationalism" of his mad scientists.

In his numerous interviews, Cronenberg shows as well more than passing familiarity with the Cartesian. Consider, for example, the following observation:

Many of the peaks of philosophical thought revolve around the impossible duality of mind and body. Whether the mind aspect is expressed as soul or spirit, it's still the old Cartesian absolute split between the two. There seems to be a point at which they should fuse and it should be apparent to everyone. But it's not. It really isn't. The basis of horror --and difficulty in life in general-is that we cannot comprehend how we can die. Why should a healthy mind die, just because the body is not healthy?