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Grotesque Normals: Cronenberg's Recent Men and Women

2010; Wayne State University Press; Volume: 32; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/dis.2010.a454077

1522-5321

Aron Dunlap, Joshua Delpech-Ramey,

Cinema and Media Studies

Grotesque Normals:Cronenberg's Recent Men and Women Aron Dunlap (bio) and Joshua Delpech-Ramey (bio) It's a terrible thing to be a cliché, it really is. And it's inevitable. —David Cronenberg, Cronenberg on Cronenberg Every man is womanized, merely by being born. —G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy A major shift seems to have occurred in the recent work of David Cronenberg. Known as a master of comically grotesque horror films that delve deeply into paranoia, technological obsession, and the impasses of gender difference, Cronenberg's films have almost always involved the suspension of ordinary reality, usually occurring when a fantastic or impossible physical aberration, abnormality, or alien presence invades human life. But in Cronenberg's two most recent films, A History of Violence (2005) and Eastern Promises (2007), the grotesque appears not as that which violates the mundane, but rather as that which informs the mundane at its most banal and unremarkable core. Unlike the protagonists of earlier Cronenberg films, who actively seek out dramatic confrontation with the bizarre, the alien, and the forbidden, in A History of Violence [End Page 321] Viggo Mortensen's Tom Stall is a man who wants to leave a gangster's life of violence behind, and in Eastern Promises Mortensen plays Nikolai, a secret agent who accepts the violence of his task with a mixture of humorous detachment and slapstick chagrin. What can be made of this shift in Cronenberg's work? It would obviously be impossible to speculate here on all its causes or potential ramifications. But we want to explore one central feature of this shift in Cronenberg's approach to the grotesque: the change in gender roles that seems to accompany it. Whereas in almost all previous Cronenberg films the protagonists are masculine figures whose truck with the grotesque is tinged with a scientific or capitalistic tragic fascination, in both A History of Violence and Eastern Promises a kind of specifically feminine agency and subjectivity seem to emerge as decisive forces. Cronenberg claimed he wanted to understand things "from the disease's point of view."1 But the disease in Cronenberg films is not essentially physical. What is ill, in Cronenberg, is a series of conflicts between man and woman, nature and machine, science and society that seem somehow to traverse and manifest the grotesque. This is why, despite being filled to the point of comic saturation with images of bizarre, diseased, and alien bodies, Cronenberg's films have never been simple exercises in graphic kitsch. The grotesque has always functioned in Cronenberg to reveal the limits of human willing, knowing, and desiring in the context of technological capacities for the invasion and transmutation of material existence. These capacities, like the uncanny vendettas of H. P. Lovecraft's eldritch gods, tend to overwhelm and finally destroy those fascinated by them. And almost always, in Cronenberg, the problem of technological power seems uncannily linked to a certain impasse between men and women.2 In Crimes of the Future (1970), for instance, men are forced to confront a world without sexually mature women—one man responds by spontaneously producing organs that are continually removed like babies from his body. In Rabid (1977), a woman who has been the victim of a car crash receives an experimental skin graft that forms an anal orifice under her armpit within which hides a phallic stinger. She then proceeds to feed off the blood of male victims through this immaculate (mis)conception, killing with an organ that is itself the bastard progeny of a technological scheme to perpetuate survival beyond normal means.3 In the background of this victim/host woman's vampiric fate is her strange nonrelationship with the male protagonist, who over the course of the film does not manage to reach her until it is far too late, [End Page 322] and she becomes the victim of her own violence when a rabid man she has infected finally kills her. The desolate bleakness and lack of hope at the end of this film is absolute, as we watch garbage trucks pick up the corpses of the dead, and we are almost galled into imagining another kind of ending for this unresolved film...