CRONENBERG

 

Cronenberg’s Dystopia

 

          The history of David Cronenberg’s films frequently demonstrates a fascination with the intersection of the organic and the mechanical, a perfect subject for science fiction and horror, both forms he has explored in the course of his career.  Though the details are hazy, in Crash (1977) people enjoyed a connection between automobile accidents and sex; in Videodrome (1983) as I recall, James Woods has a VHS cassette (remember them?) inserted into his abdomen, though I do not now know exactly why.  In his fine remake of The Fly (1986) he shows the unexpected consequences of the accidental incorporation of an insect into a device for teleportation; as the now famous lines from the movie tell us, “Be afraid, and be very afraid.”  And in the generally abysmal eXistenZ (1999) a character uses a gun made from a human jawbone—it may be some other bone—and shoots the teeth like bullets.  Think about that for a moment.

          His latest work, Crimes of the Future, continues the theme in a perhaps even more bizarre direction, signaled by the opening sequence of a young boy eating the plastic wastebasket in the family bathroom, not an especially auspicious omen.  The future of the title, to begin with, resembles a kind of random assemblage of junkyard material, with apparently foundered ships in some backgrounds, dark streets, shabby offices, and an overwhelming atmosphere of squalor.  The central figure in this dismal, depressing dystopia, Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen), demonstrates what might be the logical evolution of today’s organ harvesting, with his ability to grow new organs, which his colleague Caprice (Léa Seydoux) removes by means of some odd remote control instruments.

          A number of unclear events revolving around the harvest and a number of strange people participate in the whole process, including some odd folks from an organization called the National Organ Registry, whose offices look like something from an abandoned building, and a pair of female automobile mechanics who end up boring holes in a character’s skull with cordless electric drills, for no apparent reason.  Perhaps worst of all, the usually intense and excellent Viggo Mortensen walks around wrapped almost entirely in black, with only his eyes showing, looking rather like an obedient female in Saudi Arabia; he spends a good deal of the movie uttering horrible choking, coughing, gasping sounds, again for no particular reason.  Crimes of the Future may surpass eXistenZ in sheer awfulness, but it’s a close contest, with a winner that most of us wouldn’t care to crown.

 

 

NORTHMANThe Northman To begin with, not too many movies these days feature dialogue in Old Norse and “chapter’ headings in Runic letters, so The Northman initially deserves some special attention, if merely as a curio. My knowledge of ancient languages is limited to Latin and Anglo-Saxon, so the Old Norse of The Northman, to make a bad joke and mix a metaphor, is Greek to me. On the other hand, in a movie where characters hiss, howl, bark, scream, and whisper most of the dialogue, the subtitles for Old Norse, paradoxically, provide most of the clearest and most comprehensible speech in the film. Beyond linguistics, the movie also shows what appears to be an accurate picture of the Vikings, whose power spread all over Northern Europe for something like three centuries, embarking on amphibious landings in the British Isles, conquering an impressive amount of territory. As one would expect, they do a great deal of their traditional raping and pillaging, a Viking specialty, and demonstrate further cruelty when they pack a crowd of their victims into a kind of oversized thatched hut, then burn it down. Most of the plot revolves around their enslaving a number of their captives, who are set to work rowing the long ships, building structures, and suffering. Allegedly and very vaguely a kind of Ur-Hamlet, the film shows a very different protagonist from Shakespeare’s hesitant, indecisive, introspective hero, here named Amlith (Alexander Skarsgård), who also suffers the murder of his father and the betrayal of his mother (Nicole Kidman). After a Viking raid destroys his town and murders most of its inhabitants, he decides to allow himself to be enslaved so he can wreak revenge on his captors and his betrayers. That revenge perfectly suits the general bloodiness of the movie, resulting in a multitude of stabbings, slashings, decapitations, and a quite graphic evisceration, pretty much something for every taste. The general picture of life under Viking conquest in the ninth century seems quite authentic—violent, dirty, dangerous, and generally most uncomfortable, nicely foreshadowing Hobbes’s famous dark judgment of human life as nasty, brutish, and short. It also includes a good deal of puzzlingly extreme behavior, as when characters don wolf and bear skins, growl and shout before attacking, proclaiming that they are the animals whose fur they wear. In another strange scene early in the movie, young Amlith and his father strip naked, crawl in some sort of cave, and drink blood under the direction of a shaman played by Willem Dafoe in his best high hysterical mode. That bizarre and essentially pointless exaggeration, accompanied by its usual screams, grunts, and howls, sums up the general tone of the work. Oddly, for a work grounded in a bleak reality, the movie ends in something like pure myth. With all the action and conflict, however, there is rarely a dull moment in The Northman, but there are a great many unpleasant ones.