Cinematic Apparatus as a Disciplinary Structure

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Cartesian Difficulties

As discussed in the previous chapter, Cronenberg utilises the body onscreen as a means of revealing previously effaced disciplinary structures that govern not just the body but, through what Sontag identifies as ‘disease metaphors’, the subject constituted by the body. The Cartesian mind / body dialectic is obviously called into question and Cronenberg’s bringing-forward of the body, usually ignored in favour of the mind-as-subject works to reveal the elided tension inherent in this dialectic. A more considered examination of the way this tension plays out in Cronenberg’s films reveals not just an exploration of these terms (‘mind’, ‘body’) as stable referents, but also a desire to destabilise these terms and undermine their unquestioned discursive validity. Hence while the body might ordinarily and conventionally serve (at least on screen) as the unquestioned vehicle for the mind, for Cronenberg there exists the distinct possibility of an alternative bodily agency, or the possibility that a bodily agency might form some kind of visceral opposition to the disciplinary forces of culture and society through which the subject itself is articulated.

De-Eroticising Sex

Starliner Towers represents, for the film’s diegesis, an apogee of social and cultural order and an “… antiseptic bulwark against urban life” (Bokamper). The film’s introductory sequence, delivered as a dead-pan sales-pitch slide-show by the building’s administrator Merrick (Ronald Mlodzik), promises that we will be “secure in the knowledge that it [Starliner Towers] belongs to you and your fellow passengers alone”. Through a series of oddly composed photographs, the opening demonstrates that this apartment complex is a “… microcosm of the modernist urban aesthetics of middle-class materialism …” (Beard 2001: 30) within which one can “sail through life in quiet and comfort” (Cronenberg 1976). However, the life that is actually offered at Starliner Towers is not so much a sanctuary as a kind of deadening, leaving the inhabitants “emotionally distant and socially dislocated” (Sanjek). The film constructs the inhabitants as so bereft of actual human warmth and contact as to potentially benefit from a parasitic infestation that forces them to renegotiate the social structures that have left them isolated (both from each other as inhabitants of this apartment complex.

Rabid

Rabid, when compared with Shivers, is a far more conventional film, despite the content of its narrative. As has been noted elsewhere24 , the story contained in Rabid is, in many ways, a straightforward extension and elaboration of the ideas and plot of Shivers. What is different between them is their scale: where Shivers discusses the development and spread of a body-altering plague amongst the inhabitants of a single apartment block, Rabid plays out the concept of a body-altering plague within the populated cityscape (again it is Montreal that gets it, this time literally, in the neck). Rabid details the story of Rose (Marilyn Chambers), a young motorcyclist who with her partner Hart (Frank Moore) is involved in a serious motorcycle accident.

Shades of Transformation

While it is clear that Rabid continues and develops the themes of Shivers, there are notable changes and alterations to the themes themselves. Most obvious of these is the fact that the transformation that occurs in Rabid takes two forms and has two different narrative functions, whereas the transformation in Shivers is the same for all participants. Clearly Rose’s post-operative status as, essentially, a vampire figure is the central focus of the film’s narrative and it is her story that occupies the majority of the film’s screen time. Nevertheless, the secondary transformations, of her victims into rabid raving creatures 26 , are equally important and serve to demonstrate that Rose’s own transformation is itself primarily generative. None of her victims develop similar supplementary organs – hers is the result of Keloid’s surgery – and yet her victims emerge as a result of her transformation and, once infected, are able to themselves infect other people.

Rose’s Ambiguity and the Porn Aesthetic

Rose’s presence as a site of ambiguity in the film’s narrative, and the various interpretations we might come to make of it, are nowhere as visible as with the various attacks she performs during the course of her transformation. The first of these, which occurs as she awakens from her post-operative coma, is confusing for both us and her, and this confusion is reflected in the ways in which the film does not, at first, seek to explain what is happening. Rose, awakened from a coma in a state of comely undress, is comforted by Lloyd Walsh (Roger Periard), a fellow patient in the clinic. Despite his insistence that he get further medical help, she holds onto him and, without fully realising her actions, punctures his neck and begins to feed upon him. This sequence is itself punctuated by an extreme close-up shot of her hypodermic phallic spike emerging from its neo-anal sheath. This image, while horrifying, occurs without any kind of framing or context and so hangs unresolved amidst Rose’s actions, which are more conventionally framed.

Table of Contents :

• Abstract
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter One The Filmmaker as Heretic
  • Introduction The Politics of Insects
  • The Filmmaker as Heretic
  • Cinematic Apparatus as a Disciplinary Structure
  • The Canadian Heretic
  • A Cinema of Perversion, a Cinema for Perverts
  • Fast Company
• Chapter Two The Body Explodes
  • Cartesian Difficulties
  • Shivers
  • De-Eroticising Sex
  • Overcoming the Porn Aesthetic
  • Rabid
  • Shades of Transformation
  • Rose’s Ambiguity and the Porn Aesthetic
  • The Fly and Agency of the Flesh
  • Self Knowledge and Knowledge of the Self
  • The Flesh as Agent
• Chapter Three The Mind Erupts
  • Frames and Framing
  • The Dead Zone
  • Saving Amy
  • Smith’s Dream
• Chapter Four Functions of Failure
  • Escaping the Genre Bind
  • The Focus on Sex
  • M. Butterfly
  • The Film Itself
  • When a Woman is Not
  • Dead Ringers
  • Multiple Monogamies
  • Dead Ringers and Issues of Form
  • Marvellous Mutations
  • Crash
  • ‘Sex and Car Crashes …’
  • Sexual Heresy
  • Crash and the End of Desire
• Chapter Five The Subject Under Examination
  • Shadow Texts
  • The Brood
  • Layers of Discourse
  • Producing the Brood
  • Scanners
  • Scanning the Permeable Body
  • Scanning and Surveillance
  • Naked Lunch
• Chapter Six “All Agents Defect …”
  • Can We Call for Meta-Heresy?
  • Videodrome
  • The ‘Videodrome’ Project
  • The Pre-Ontological and the Real
  • The Trajectory of Perversity (I)
  • A History of Violence
  • Millbrook, Indiana
  • The Trajectory of Perversity (II)
  • Surprising the Non-Duped, or, The Emperor’s New Clothes
  • “… All Resistors Sell Out”
  • Bibliography

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The Politics of Insects Discipline and Resistance in the Cinema of David Cronenberg