David Cronenberg has been firing up and freaking out audiences for well over 50 years. But as writer Violet Lucca attests in “David Cronenberg: Clinical Trials,” the Canadian filmmaker widely regarded as a master of horror is also something of a misunderstood auteur with a lot more on his mind than visceral shocks to the system. From his earliest low-budget horror films, “Shivers” and “Rabid,” then moving into the dark, twisted science of “Videodrome” and “Scanners” and the disarmingly tender and brutal tragedies “Dead Ringers” and “Crash,” the director has used his hyperbolic visual vocabulary as a vehicle for nuanced sociological and psychological exploration.
With her lavishly illustrated book, Lucca has given us the most rigorous critical analysis of the director’s work to date, reframing Cronenberg’s career as something more than the work of a master of “body horror,” a term that she regards as reductive and dismissive. Instead of a facile thrill-seeker, Lucca locates in Cronenberg’s work the mind of a moralist and social critic with a taste for blood, writing that his films can be approached through various critical entry points: as cautionary tales about demagoguery in the age of scientific progress, or the dissolution of the self when confronted by a world thrown out of whack by money and desire.
Lucca, a former digital editor for Harper’s who has written for the New York Times and Sight and Sound, was first drawn to the director’s work while a student at the University of Iowa “because his work had the same openness, ambiguity and fierceness” of the midcentury European art-house cinema she was then studying.
In her introduction, she refers to the “wonder and terror” that characters in his films negotiate. “Many of Cronenberg’s films strike me as profoundly sad,” she says. “There’s this tremendous loneliness that I find really affecting.”
One film that Lucca cites as an example of this strange melancholy: Cronenberg’s 1996 adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s novel “Crash,” in which a film producer who is the victim of a horrible wreck falls in with a group of fetishists who are aroused by auto collisions. It is Cronenberg’s empathic, almost tender approach to the material that humanizes the film; his tonal approach is redemptive rather than grindhouse exploitative.
“Sex and violence are inextricable from the start of his career, whether you’re looking at ‘Stereo,’ a 65-minute, black-and-white pseudo-documentary he made in 1969, or ‘Crash,’” says Lucca. “Yes, his use of sex and violence are provocations. But they’re also a means of being more honest about what we are: flesh that bleeds, flesh that is desirous. I feel that his use of sex has been more revolutionary, largely because it’s considered the bigger taboo in MPAA terms.”
In the first half of the book, Lucca lays out some of Cronenberg’s films along a map of the subconscious, so that 1988’s “Dead Ringers,” the story of a deadly co-dependency between twins, becomes an example of Carl Jung’s theory of the “anima” and “animus,” of the twins desire to reconcile their male and female sides, and 1986’s “The Fly” becomes a speculation on whether illness can alter one’s identity. Lucca doesn’t need you to agree with her: She just wants you to hear her out.
“These films are so rich in subtext that you can approach them in many ways,” Lucca says. “I wanted to push past the surface weirdness of a film like, say, ‘Naked Lunch,’ and figure out what else they are trying to say to us.”
For Lucca, Cronenberg’s trademark anatomical derangements — all those slimy, mutant body organs, guts and intestines spilling out of his characters like slinky toys — are how the director makes a character’s anxieties manifest: the deliquescing body as a metaphor for spiritual imbalance. “Cronenberg takes these concerns that we all have and runs them through this fantastical wringer, so that we come to see ourselves in some new way,” says Lucca.
Critics tend to draw a hard line between the early, in-your-face garishness of Cronenberg’s low-budget films and the more polished, less bloody psychological meditations starting with 2005’s “A History of Violence.” Lucca rejects that categorization, finding the same preoccupations with the mind-body problem and the riddle of identity across Cronenberg’s career. 1999’s “Existenz,” for example, is a prophetic film about our rapidly encroaching technological singularity, featuring as it does a video game that plugs directly into the spine. There is also the classic Cronenberg archetype: the technology guru who hard-sells scientific progress as humankind’s salvation but is in fact consumed by his own greedy messianism. In that sense, Cronenberg’s films are eerily prescient allegories of our present-day techverse and proselytizing profiteers like Sam Altman and Elon Musk.
Starting with his film-school projects in the early 1970s, David Cronenberg hit the ground running with projects that tucked sharp social critiques into ominously portentous narratives. His radical vision emerged from a nascent Canadian film industry that, in the early ’70s, was still trying to gain purchase in the global marketplace. Cronenberg’s first efforts were financed by private investors eager to take advantage of generous government subsidies and tax breaks: low-risk capital enabling high-risk creativity. In return, Cronenberg became a breakout star and planted a flag for Canadian film in America and beyond.
This is also the time when Cronenberg began to assemble his enduring team of collaborators: composer Howard Shore, production designer Carol Spier and a small ensemble of Canadian character actors, many of whom have worked on multiple Cronenberg films. “Being surrounded by people he can trust, and who understand his vision, has definitely influenced how Cronenberg makes his films,” says Lucca. “They have all developed the shorthand, which helps to not burn through days on a tight production budget. But there’s also a continuity as to how the films look. Carol Spier is responsible for so much of the tactility of Cronenberg’s visual palette.”
Like Stephen King, another artist who uses horror tropes to explore deeper truths about the human condition, Cronenberg is undervalued because he has often worked within the confines of genre storytelling. Lucca’s book puts the lie to that misconception. King is a literary giant who will be read long after he stops writing, and if there is any justice, Cronenberg’s films will live on, as well. “The fact that some critics and audiences continue to disregard Cronenberg’s films is only a testament to their power and necessity.”
