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| Illustration for David Cronenberg's Scanners, by Connor Willumsen |
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| Illustration for David Cronenberg's Scanners, by Connor Willumsen |
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| Illustration for David Cronenberg's Scanners, by Connor Willumsen |
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| Illustration for David Cronenberg's Scanners, by Connor Willumsen |
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| David Cronenberg |
What did you want to do with your life back then?
I did aspire to be an obscure novelist. I thought you could probably do your best work outside of fame, because you’d be following your integrity. [Like] Kafka, who barely published in his own lifetime. I loved finding people like Djuna Barnes. I figured someone like me would discover me years from then.
What were you writing?
Sci-fi, mostly, but some stuff like Thomas Pynchon. There was that hallucinogenic view of the world, and V. was such a wonderful novel. I read it in the sixties in France, and also Journey to the End of the Night, by Céline, a little later that year. There was a clarity to it, a weird and exuberant cruelty. He was seeing war in the coldest, most revealing light. You would not read that book and think that you wanted to be a soldier. No romanticism. [Read More]
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| William S. Burroughs on the set of David Cronenberg's adaptation of Naked Lunch |
Burroughs’s work tends to affect people like a Rorschach test. It separates cultural conservatives from avant-gardists, social reactionaries from libertarians. Or, to use one of Burroughs’s favorite distinctions, members of the Johnson Family from the Shits. Johnsons have a live-and-let-live, mind-their-own-business mentality. Shits have an uncontrollable need to pass judgment on and be right about everything. In today’s censorious climate, police work dominates the pages of the book reviews: this writer has the wrong attitude and must be done away with.
Burroughs has always elicited a testy response from the cultural establishment. While early support for Naked Lunch from such mandarins as Mary McCarthy and John Ciardi has been matched over the years by encomiums from many of our best writers and by a substantial body of excellent academic criticism, the overall literary world’s recognition of Burroughs has been grudging more often than not. Perhaps Burroughs’s achievement represents a threat to the well-mannered, conventionally crafted, middle-class novel. It could be as simple as that. Burroughs expanded the content of fiction, giving artistic form to extremes of contemporary abjection. Naked Lunch opened a path into the world of the addict, the homosexual, the social outlaw. From this despised and largely unmentionable territory, Burroughs extracted a presiding metaphor of control. Naked Lunch deals with the control of consciousness and behavior through addiction—to sex, power, money, drugs, even to control itself. When themes of this nature, which ultimately have to do with politics, lie at the heart of a writer’s work, appreciation is often checked by the timidity of those who prefer not to think about such issues. [Read More]
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| David Cronenberg |
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| Extreme Metaphors: Interviews with J. G. Ballard 1967-2008 |
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| Robert Pattinson stars as Eric Packer in David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis (2012) |
IFC: You’ve made so many films over the years based on books, what was it about this particular story that jumped out at you?Also at A Piece of Monologue:
David Cronenberg: I was immediately struck by the dialogue [in DeLillo's book]. It was familiar to me because Don’s dialogue is very distinctive. I think of him in the same terms as I think of David Mamet or Harold Pinter — that is to say, it’s the way people speak, but it’s also very stylized. That produces an interesting tension and rhythm. But those two guys are dramatists, and you hear their dialogue spoken often on stage and in movies, whereas Don is a novelist. You don’t hear his dialogue spoken ever, because he hasn’t had a movie made out of one of his books before.
IFC: Does that raise the level of difficulty in making a movie like this?
David Cronenberg: No, not at all. I’m really thinking of that in retrospect now. I wasn’t thinking so much about that at the time. What I was thinking was, I would love to hear that dialogue spoken by some really terrific actors. I think it would be really intriguing and interesting and compelling. That was the hook for me. It wasn’t the theme of the story or anything like that. I like the restriction of one street, one limo, one day, because I don’t shy away from that and rather like it, but I think it was the dialogue first and foremost that was the hook. And the dialogue in the movie is 100-percent from the book. [Read More]
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| David Cronenberg |
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| Patti Smith with William S. Burroughs |
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| David Cronenberg |
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| A still from Chris Petit's The Unmade films of JG Ballard (1990) |
In David Cronenberg’s film The Fly (1986) the unfortunate hero, an ambitious scientist, accidentally fuses his own DNA with that of a housefly. As a result he gradually changes into a giant version of the insect. At an advanced stage of this metamorphosis he finds that he can only eat in the manner of a fly, by vomiting digestive juices over each particle of food then sucking the dissolved liquid back into his mouth.
This nauseating image might be taken as an allegory of our general relationship to the objects around us: first we smother them with our own meanings and purposes, then we suck them back into our psyche and make use of them to further our personal projects. In Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) this is the status of objects, as ‘ready-to-hand’. The world of the ready-to-hand object revolves around human beings, and is permeated with human intentions, drenched with our meanings, imbued with our emotions. Literature is also filled with objects mirroring the feelings and thoughts of the protagonists: sadly drooping willows, or sharply shining jewels. This is a view of an anthropomorphic cosmos, which seems badly in need of a Copernican shift in perspective. Just as Copernicus displaced the earth from the centre of the universe, so some important writers in the twentieth century felt the need to set the egoistic heroes of their novels into orbit, kicking them out of their self-assured centrality. [Read the article]
Naked Lunch was to see Cronenberg working through his long-standing conceptual and visual association not only with Burroughs's work, but with his beliefs that writing is a dangerous business. Cronenberg himself had often linked imagination with the idea of disease: something that is catching and can cause harm.Also at A Piece of Monologue:
David Cronenberg: To make a metaphor in which you compare imagination to disease is to illuminate some aspect of human imagination that perhaps has not been seen or perceived that way before. I think that imagination and creativity are completely natural and also, under certain circumstances, quite dangerous. The fact that they're dangerous doesn't mean they are not necessary and should be repressed.
This is something that's very straightforwardly perceived by tyrants of every kind. The very existence of imagination means that you can posit an existence different from the one you're living. If you are trying to create a repressive society in which people will submit to whatever you give them, then the very fact of them being able to imagine something else - not necessarily better, just different - is a threat. So even on that very simple level, imagination is dangerous. If you accept, at least to some extent, the Freudian dictum that civilization is repression, then imagination - and an unrepressed creativity - is dangerous to civilization. But it's a complex formula; imagination is also an innate part of civilization. If you destroy it, you might also destroy civilization.
We've become very blasé in the West about the freedom, the invulnerability of writers. We take it for granted, particularly on the level of physical safety. But look what happened to Salman Rushdie. And now we find that under their dictatorship, Romanians had to register their typewriters as dangerous weapons! They couldn't own photocopiers. Every year you had to supply two pages of typing using all the keys so anything typed on your machine could be traced back to you. That is true fear of the power of the written word.
But even in the West, writing can be perilous. Taking his cue from Jean Genet, Burroughs says that you must allow yourself to create characters and situations that could be a danger to you in every way. Even physically. He in fact insists that writing be recognized and accepted as a dangerous act. A writer must not be tempted to avoid writing the truth just because he knows that what he creates might come back to haunt him. That's the nature of the bargain you make with your writing machine.
Cronenberg on CronenbergEdited by Chris Rodley
While popularly known as a writer of science fiction, the late J. G. Ballard was a veritable philosopher of contemporary culture, whose keen observations both delineated and anticipated vast, rapid shifts in postwar technology and media—the likes of which, his stories implied, were forever altering the shape of our global environment and of the subjectivities populating it. Artforum asked editor Robert Weil, film director David Cronenberg, artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, and poet Clark Coolidge to reflect on this legendary figure’s legacy in the fields of literature, cinema, and art. Weil and Cronenberg’s contributions have been reproduced below. For the rest, pick up the October issue of Artforum. [Read More]
