David Cronenberg on the Nature of Reality

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

David Cronenberg, whose movies include The Brood, Scanners, Videodrome, Dead Ringers, Spider, and A History of Violence, among others, making movies is about more than simply telling a story: “I’m interested in character and concept and philosophy and those things intertwine,” he says in an interview with Chris Wallace of Andy Warhol's Interview. 

Like actors, directors can become typecast, so to speak, Rosenberg suggests, and, when they do, some critics resent their trying something different than the type of films for which they've become known: “Doing a movie that doesn’t fit the mold that has been built for you annoys people. They’ve had you pegged as one thing and knew what to say and think about what you do. But with something that’s not the same, how do they deal with that?”

His first novel, Consumed, which had been a work in progress he recently completed, after working on it “between movies” for eight years, is certainly something that doesn't fit the director's perceived “mold.” Consumed recounts a journalist's obsession for getting a “scoop” on a story involving “the murder and cannibalization of a renowned polyamorous intellectual in Paris and the disappearance of her famous philosopher husband.” 

The novel shares a premise with many of Cronenberg's films: desire drives life forward; without it, people are as good as dead. He investigates the potential meaning of this premise, using various characters who live in different times and places, a process he likens to the scientific method: “I always say that you are a scientist when you’re an artist. You are experimenting with your characters, experimenting with modalities of living that are different than the one that you are actually living yourself. You are transcending your own life.” 

For Cronenberg, reality is organic, a matter of neurology, of “how your nervous system and your sensory organs work.” This reality can be changed by altering one's consciousness, through drug use, drinking alcohol, or otherwise. Both self-destructiveness and creativity arise from the same impulse to transcend personal reality, he believes. This insight, he says, led to such movies as Videodrome and to the creation of body horror: “If neurology is reality, that’s an incredible theme—how to structure a narrative that will discuss that? Immediately you’re into changing the body to change the reality, and that’s what led me to all of those things like Videodrome.”