In late 2007, just before getting my first degree, I wrote a paper as part of an independent study project for college. I've been meaning to post this for almost three years, but never did for various reasons. Finally I figured, what the heck, why not! Rereading it three years later, there are many things I would want to alter and add. Indeed, I did edit some of it just now. There were parts that just needed to be changed or elaborated on. One thing that bothered me upon reading this again was the scarcity, throughout the paper, of in-text citations; there should definitely have been more of those in there, and I regret my negligence and overestimation of common knowledge. Regardless, I like this work, and except for the edits today, it is the 2007 original. Please tell me what you think! Deepest thanks to Professor Paula Massood for advising me on this paper.
And now...
Psychosis in Cronenberg's Work
Many of David Cronenberg’s films, especially those released from the mid-80s to the early-90s, explore the theme of psychosis. While psychosis is often thought of in the outdated psychoanalytic sense, characters in Cronenberg’s films, for example Videodrome, exhibit psychoses of clearly biological origin. In this way, the director's films express two important themes: the all-importance of the body, and mind-body connections. His films also attempt to express the experience of psychosis through hallucinatory imagery and a surreal tone, which some have described as “visceral.” The result is an extremely intimate and compelling cinematic experience in which film engages the viewer in an unconventionally physical way. The viewer is placed in a rare and valuable psychological state- an awareness of one’s own body and biology. In order to explore the above, I will discuss Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) and Naked Lunch (1991).
It should be noted that this paper will take for granted the fact that David Cronenberg is an auteur. Evidence for him being one can be seen in the fact that he writes most of what he directs and that he often retains the same crew and actors. What's more, there are recurrent themes and imagery throughout his films, as well as a continuing vision centered on the body. Interestingly "Cronenberg has suffered somewhat from being the subject of a criticism politically out of step with film theory. In practice he is, of course, a classic auteur" (Rodley 18). A robust Auterist criticism of Cronenberg's work is beyond the scope of this paper, but it is important to understand that it is the director who is responsible for the unique and unifying character of all his films.
Our first task is to define psychosis, the understanding of which is crucial to the premise of this paper. Here, I will happily let Dave 'Deprave' (Rodley xvii) have the first word. In discussing his tribulations with professional censors, Cronenberg states that "censors tend to do only what psychotics do: they confuse reality with illusion" (qtd. in Rodley 105). A quick look in the dictionary comes up with much the same meaning; psychosis is a "derangement of personality and loss of contact with reality" (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/). Still, to go along with the psychiatric emphasis of this paper, a modern clinical definition is needed. According to the Diseases and Disorders book on Schizophrenia, "Doctors use the term 'psychosis' to describe mental illnesses like schizophrenia, in which the person is incapable of separating what is real from what is imagined. People with psychotic disorders often cannot comprehend that they are mentally ill" (Abramovitz 12). Schizophrenia is probably the condition that a majority of people now associate most with psychosis. The "positive" symptoms of the disease are the most well known. These include psychotic delusions and hallucinations. The other groups of schizophrenic symptoms, "negative" and "disorganized," (Ibid 13-14) are less relevant to our discussion. Negative symptoms include "a lack of facial expressions and a refusal to make eye contact with others." (Ibid 14). Disorganized symptoms "include incoherent [and] illogical speech and behavior" (Ibid). The protagonist in Cronenberg's Spider (2000) suffers mainly from these latter two types of schizophrenic symptoms.
Throughout Ambramovitz's book, photos of scans of schizophrenic brains show that their brain activity, both in location and intensity, is different compared to normal brains. One fascinating image is that of a schizophrenic brain scanned during a hallucination (Abramovitz 14). These scans illustrate the modern view of schizophrenia; "that the primary cause is genetically determined biological abnormalities in the brain" (Ibid 29). This is in contrast to the now outdated psychoanalytical ideas of Freud who "believed schizophrenia was caused by a person's unconscious memories of traumatic childhood events" (Ibid). The (acute) efficacy of a class of drugs appropriately named the antipsychotics (invented in the 1950s) in contrast to the utter failure of hands-off psychology (Ibid) appears itself to be enough evidence against any non-physicalistic theory. The point of the all of the above is to emphasize that psychosis is strictly a phenomenon of biological origin, and that this viewpoint is held by all serious researchers who use any modern empirical method- both neuroscientists and modern psychologists.
Many films, especially those of the immediate post-war era, embraced psychoanalytical causes and solutions. A perfect example is Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945) in which the protagonist, played by Gregory Peck, discovers a repressed memory during the climax of the film and is magically healed of his amnesia. Hitchcock himself later admitted that all this was "pseudo-psychology" (qtd. in Truffaut 234). Cronenberg's narratives seemingly flirt, initially, with psychoanalytic content. One such example is seen in the beginning of Dead Ringers (1988). The twin gynecologist protagonists of the film are shown during their unusual childhood(†) performing gynecological surgery on small, plastic anatomical models tied down with miniature surgical tubing. When grown, brother Beverly will utilize surgical tubing during role-playing sex with girlfriend Claire. However, constructing a psychoanalytical reading of the film would be misguided, as the narrative and imagery is firmly grounded in Cronenberg's exploration of the theme of "body horror" (Rodley xiii). Psychosis appears in Beverly because of drug abuse, notably stimulants. The solution to the troubling psychological problem of the "mental disintegration of one man made two by an accident of conception" (Ibid) is solved not with a lively talk-therapy pow-wow but with a scalpel. In Cronenberg's films, the body reigns supreme, and it is the very corporeal brain, with all its lobes and sulci, that misfires during psychosis. Memory, personality, emotion, etc. are all just neurons in the brain, which is just another part of the body. Thus, mind and body are one.
†Noteworthy is the total absence of the twins' parents throughout the film, including the childhood scenes.
"Cronenberg tried something new with Videodrome that he has since reformulated for Naked Lunch: a movie which slips, unannounced, into the protagonist's hallucinations" (Rodley 94). Videodrome is about TV station owner Max Renn's obsession with a violent, sadistic, and pornographic pirated video signal. He wants to buy it to broadcast on his station and he searches for its source. He begins experiencing hallucinations from watching the Videodrome signal and this leads him to a conspiracy of sorts. Soon, he becomes (or is forced to become) utterly delusional, and reality never does return. Renn will go in and out of hallucinating throughout the film. This technique makes the viewer question if what she is seeing is still reality in the film. For example, after we learn of the tumor-forming nature of Videodrome, we begin to question if everything on screen after that point is objective reality or Renn's hallucinations. At first, it is fairly easy to make the distinction. When the tape given by Bianca O'Blivion begins to breathe, we know Renn is hallucinating. This hallucination continues when Renn thrusts his face into the ecstasy of the inflating television. The next day when he confronts Bianca warning her that "it bites," we are no longer in the hallucinatory realm. Reality is episodic and is proven or disproven by special effects. Tapes and TVs don't move in real life, so he must be hallucinating. When he slaps his secretary and briefly sees Nicky, we know he is hallucinating because of the impossibility of such a situation. Since our point of view is firmly Renn's, there is no possibility of this being an expressionistic device intended to convey a piece of information to the audience about reality through unrealistic images.
Eventually, this system for differentiating between fantasy and reality no longer works. At the same time, Renn's hallucinations become more public in setting. The break when this occurs is near the end of the second act, in the scene in which Renn puts on the helmet given to him by Spectacular Optical to capture his hallucinations. After his hallucination of being in Videodrome, there is an abrupt cut to him waking up. The result of the helmet experiment is never revealed and is probably even a mystery to Renn. Is Renn in the helmet for the rest of the film? This is more likely considering that he continues hallucinating after he wakes up (he briefly believes he has murdered Masha). A similar break with reality occurs in eXistenZ (2000), which in many ways is a remake of Videodrome. After Ted pauses the game system, he is no longer sure of reality. In both cases, after one puts on a hallucinatory virtual reality device, he may never know if he will ever take it off.
Barry Convex's helmet can be compared to the brain scanning machine mentioned previously that showed the areas of the brain that light up during a schizophrenic's hallucination. (FIGURE 1) Like that machine, the helmet (if we are to believe that it indeed does what Convex says it does) reads the biology of the brain and extracts from it a psychological state. In Videodrome, a tumor causes the hallucinations. In schizophrenia, abnormal brain activity causes the hallucinations. Either way, the source of the psychosis is biological. We can then reason that the brain and body are one, both governed by the same kinds of physiological impulses as our other organs.
Since most of Renn's hallucinations after he puts on the helmet happen in public places, and in scenes of spectacular violence with horrified onlookers, the question arises; are we, at any point, taken out of Renn's point of view and shown the objective, non-hallucinatory, reality? This indeed is the case. Cronenberg uses mis-en-scene to clue the audience in on the objective veracity of events. A memorable example is the scene of Convex splitting apart into a swelling mass of tissue after being shot by Renn. It is divided into seven shots at different angles, all at a medium-shot distance. Only Convex is shown. At no point do we see any member of the audience reacting to Convex's disintegration, (although we do hear their screams). We do see the audience reacting to Renn accosting and firing at Convex. Renn may indeed have shot Convex (and his partners), but what happens to Convex's body is only Renn's imagining, their screams only a response to the assassination. Similarly, when Harlan gets blown up, we see a store patron's reaction to his "bomb hand," but she is out of focus, suggesting that she is reacting to something other than what we are seeing. Shallow focus traditionally implies a separation between the subjects in the two planes.
In Naked Lunch, Cronenberg similarly uses both surreal, impossible imagery and mis-en-scene techniques to take the audience in and out of objective reality. However, this is done so less than in Videodrome. This makes Naked Lunch even more daring in its unconventionality, and an even more unnerving filmic representation of psychosis than Videodrome. Moreover, there is a fundamental difference in the way the films use psychosis and what they say about it. Videodrome is a film that explores a variety of themes: media, censorship, and sex are some, and channels them through a context of psychosis. Connections are made between, for example, violence in the media and psychosis. In Cronenberg's words, the film "posits the possibility that a man exposed to violent imagery would begin to hallucinate" (qtd. in Rodley 94). Cronenberg is always apolitical and his approach is more a scientific "experiment" (Rodley xiv) performed on screen. In other words, in Videodrome he is not concerned about the political repercussions of censorship, even though he is personally disgusted by it (Ibid 158). Rather, his aim is born in the most basic seed of science and art: curiosity. In his experiment, society as whole, as well as Renn as an individual are the subjects, and psychosis is the introduced variable. In these terms, Naked Lunch is different in that the subject is psychosis itself, in the context of the film taking the form, and being indistinguishable from the creative process, specifically writing. "The film is about the "prison [and] self exile called expression" (Peter Weller, The Directors DVD). The exile is in a place far from reality and in one's own mind, not always a pleasant place, but the birthplace of creativity.
Naked Lunch is a based on Cronenberg's screenplay which borrows from William S. Burroughs' bizarre novel of the same name, as well as the short story "The Exterminator" and Burroughs' own life experience. The narrative centers on exterminator Bill Lee, played by Peter Weller, and his surreal espionage adventure in "Interzone," a free city somewhere in north Africa (based on Tangiers in what is now Morocco) (Rodley 158). Lee escapes to Interzone after shooting his bug powder addicted wife in a drunken game of "William Tell," all the while hallucinating talking bugs, alien-looking "mugwumps," and the like. Throughout, he is writing a novel, which he types up as spy reports to insect superiors.
The realization of the script is as unusual as the narrative. Cronenberg's aim was to "show the unshowable and speak the unspeakable" (Rodley 159). He succeeded by making the protagonist live his art. Burrough's and Lee's art is disturbingly sexual and bodily, surreal, and non-linear in nature, and is well suited for a representation through psychosis on screen. Such an execution is crucial because one important aspect of what showing the unshowable means is making a film about writing that wasn't boring. As most screenwriting texts (Hunter 21) will tell you, "the act of writing is not very interesting cinematically" (qtd. in Rodley 165). This is also the case for any internally creative profession, architect, composer, or painter, for example. "It's a guy sitting. Maybe he's interesting , maybe he wears a hat, maybe he drinks and smokes. But basically he sits and types. It's an interior act" (Ibid). This can be seen again and again in movies about artists. In Pollock (2000), for example, the title character, played by Ed Harris, splashes and pokes his canvas in a montage with decisively inspiring music in the background. The audio leitmotif returns when there is a pan of his paintings, and we are thus informed that Jackson Pollock was an artistic genius. What's missing is any substantial insight into the mental processes involved in painting. The music is as close as we get to knowing what is inside his head. This is the case in films I like to refer to as the "drunken artists of the 20th century behaving badly" genre. In The Doors (1991), Jim Morrison drinks, yells, and sings. In Sylvia (2003), Sylvia Plath, drinks, broods, and writes. They all die at the end. By the way, these are all wonderful, entertaining, and rich films, but not because they say anything much about the creative process. Rather, they are portraits of fascinating, troubled characters. In contrast, Bill Lee is a restrained personality, never throwing tantrums or knocking over dinner tables. He is troubled but never lets his problems get the best of him. He is a writer first and a drug addict second, though he doesn't know it.
Bill Lee is clearly psychotic throughout the film. Like Max Renn in Videodrome, his psychosis is of biological origin and often takes the form of hallucinations dealing with the body, flesh, and surreal sex. Lee's psychosis begins in earnest when he first uses "bug powder." Shortly after, he hallucinates a giant talking bug. He seeks help for his addiction from Dr. Benway who substitutes bug powder with an apparently even more mind-altering substance made from "aquatic Brazilian centipede." The fictional nature of the drugs is intentional. Aside from Cronenberg's disinterest in anti-drug subject matter (Rodley 164), which would inevitably be political, the drugs had to be exotic and extraordinary enough themselves to produce their results. No drug in existence will make you believe, for months on end, that you live and work in a place populated by giant talking insects, lumpy aliens, and shape-shifting typewriters. Therefore, the drugs in Naked Lunch serve a metaphorical purpose directly related to our discussion of the biological origin of psychosis. Drug induced psychosis is inherently biological. Drugs alter the brain's chemistry, and in extreme cases (such as neurotoxicity), even its permanent physical structure. Lee is out of his mind because there is something abnormal about his brain functioning, not because he is devastated about killing his wife or distraught about being a failed writer.
The imagery that Lee hallucinates is itself biological in nature, consisting solely
of organic, fleshy images, especially creatures. He hallucinates shooting his wife and using centipdede powder, both body-centric activities. In contrast, he doesn't see any flashing lights in the sky, transparent, effervescent ghosts, or holographic images of Abe Lincoln. All of those don't fit into Cronenberg's style or goals (supremacy of the body). Moreover, like a true deluded psychotic, he completely accepts his hallucinations. He writes, nonchalantly, on a
typewriter shaped like a mugwump's head, casually taking a sip from a cup as a shadow of a mugwump appendage in the foreground creeps across his face and then releases some kind of fluid. There is a slight suggestion, both in Lee's eyes, and from the atonally-influenced background music, that there is something wrong with this, but it never reaches a conscious level in him. Cronenberg here triumphs in showing the true horror of unrelenting psychosis. The horror is that of the audience seeing a man completely unaware of the chaos around him. Naked Lunch, unlike numerous other films that are action flicks pretending to be horror, succeeds in truly disturbing and frightening its audience. In conventional "slasher" films, the protagonist runs away from the monsters. In Cronenberg's body horror, the protagonist accepts, and even absorbs the monsters (as in The Fly). This resonates with almost all audiences because it is more moving and engaging. Most people eventually begin to question the total subjectivity of their point of view and its suggestion of alienation and madness. Are we all living with monsters in our bodies, minds, and homes?
There are several devices Cronenberg uses to express psychosis in Naked Lunch. As in Videodrome, a brief departure from Lee's point of view informs the audience objectively. When Lee's friends come to visit, the broken typewriter we believe to be in Lee's bag is actually full of drug paraphernalia (real drugs- pill boxes and syringes, not bug powder). As his friends leave back home, their tone suggests that Interzone does not even exist. The claustrophobic, and
surreal set design, partly due to an inability to film on location (Interzone [Tangiers] was recreated in a studio in Canada) further suggests this idea. The locals don't seem "real." They shuffle along the streets in a mechanical, robotic way. The reuse of actors is another favorite Cronenberg technique. As in Spider, there is a possibility that the character is mixing up or mistaking faces. There is a specific, mapped out part of the brain known to be involved in facial recognition, and its impairment, as a result of stroke, for example, can cause this phenomenon. The two policeman in the beginning of Naked Lunch are played by the same actors as the two Annexia borders guards at the end. Both duos might be misidentified faces, or more likely, figments of Lee's imagination.
In Naked Lunch, psychosis is also expressionistic. Cronenberg states that you can't get inside the process of writing in a "realistic or naturalistic way" (qtd. in Rodley 165). Lee lives out his darkest fears and wildest desires in Interzone, a "state of mind" (Ibid 168) actualized and visualized as a place. Bill Lee hallucinates his novel into reality. As he and Joan Frost engage in an adulterous act of romance and writing, their typewriter begins to expand and circulate blood in a very Videodrome-like way. As their lust escalates, the typewriter becomes a living creature that attempts to join in. To invoke Brian O'Blivion, who himself rewords the Gospel of John, the word becomes flesh.
Reality is governed by the limitations of the body. For example, we can't live forever, teleport around the world, or break through a prison wall after committing a crime. Fiction fulfills the desire of escapism. However, fiction works best when it feels realistic, since art and entertainment are sensory experiences. This is a matter of both aesthetics and content. Using the single-sense medium of the radio play as an example, a distorted, hard to hear program is inferior to one in which the sound quality is not compromised, and a program with sound effects, such as car horns and weather noise, is superior to one with only dialogue. The filmmaker has an advantage here over any medium, at least until virtual reality is perfected. Film is a more authentic feeling medium than theater, writing, or gaming, because it is capable of perfectly reproducing realistic visuals and sound through mechanical means (Bazin 13). Even fantastic creations tend to look and sound convincing, especially Cronenberg's organic-styled effects.
Cronenberg's success lies in his combination of reality and fantasy. Cronenberg takes the body, the fundamental feature of reality, and then runs with it, placing it in the most bizarre contexts. This is the essence of fantasy, and Cronenberg's output is the most extreme, and therefore the most effective. It is this aspect of Cronenberg's style that the audience both craves and fears in the same way that a hallucinogenic drug user does as he awaits the beginning of his visceral, psychotic experience. Spectators desire temporary psychosis as an escape and artists seek it as part of their process. The more senses that are immersed, the more effective the experience, and the more complete the illusion. Cronenberg's prediction of a brave new world of permanent, technology-created psychosis in eXistenZ is a comment on a basic facet of human nature.
Works Cited
Abramovitz, Melissa. Diseases and Disorders: Schizophrenia. San Diego: Lucent Books, Inc, 2002.
Bazin, Andre. What is Cinema? Vol. 1. Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California P, 1967.
The Directors - David Cronenberg. Dir. Robert J. Emery. Perf. Holly Hunter, Peter Weller, David Cronenberg. DVD. Winstar, 2000.
Hunter, Lew. Screenwriting 434. New York: Perigee Books, 1994.
Rodley, Chris, ed. Cronenberg on Cronenberg. Toronto: Alfred a. Knopf Canada, 1992.
Truffaut, Francois. Hitchcock. Paladin Grafton Books, 1984.
