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David Cronenberg - director review

If videodrome bothered you, you should stay away from his master piece, the magnum opus ‘naked lunch’. Adaptation of Anthony burgess novel of the same name , who could have had the nerve to depict a novel such as ‘naked munch’ into a movie? Cronenberg spares no one, no object. ‘Literary highness’, the female protagonist murmurs after snorting bug powder; orgiastic typing of the male protagonist on a type writer that transmogrifies into a cockroach seducing him to type more and more; yellowish thick green liquid oozing out of a giant cicada’s antennae on which the author feeds himself voraciously; to stimulate his writing, author’s judicious application of bug powder on a gigantic cockroach’s lips; and the list can go on. Suffice to say that cronenberg has firmly positioned himself at the helm of non-mainstream, the master of visceral art.

Cronenberg’s visceral art captivated me when as an undergrad student I first saw ‘eXistenz’. Everybody was talking about ‘the matrix’, but for some reason, I thought ‘eXistenz’ piqued my curiosity more than matrix. Today, I have seen all of the ingenious director’s movies. My interest took me to the beginning.

‘Videodrome’, an unforgiving cinematic sculpture of television influencing humans’ psyche! who can forget this movie? Who could have thought that cronenberg would literally metamorphose the protagonist into a video recorder. Any other sensible director would have felt satisfied with a figurative allusion. But cronenberg is no sensible man, if anything he has found both for himself and his audiences a deeper level of sensibility stripped of ulterior ornamental work.

Over the last couple of years, I ran my fingers over cronenberg’s collection more than once. He just got bigger and better in ‘the fly’. I wish I had access to all of cronenberg’s movies as a child. Protagonist’s impossibly impervious teleportation process experiences a hiccup. Only, it is irrepairable and a little while later, we see his finger nails coming off- like dust flakes on running water, the protagonist launches into an effusive praise of his experiment, but slowly he acknowledges and later resists his transformation.

Whether its 'Dead Zone' or 'Dead Ringers', Cronenberg's sublime quality of piercing open and spilling out guts, not just of the characters but of the viewers is unforgettable. The clippers that the elder of siamese twins uses in pulling out the other's umbilical cord is a scene that transcends mainstream nomenclature. 'Crash' with the tag line 'most controversial film you will ever see' rests heavily on every viewer's mental hygiene. Like a virus that digs into your skin, this movie digs into your understanding of sex.

Before 1999, the year that saw the scifi trio-Matrix, eXistenz, 13th floor, cronenberg showed us, in one movie, twins with psychological as well as physiological connection; and in another, the man who is running away form his dreams, for the dreams come true and are driving him insane. 21st century was something of an incongruity. For the first time, cronenberg broke into mainstream with the man who is running away from his past in one movie (history of violence); the female protagonist naomi watts, who finds herself caught up in the middle of someone else’s past in another (eastern promises). However, even in 21st century, he soothed himself of mainstream woes with intellectual waters in ‘spider’.

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