The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say
where the one ends, and where the other begins?
Edgar Allan Poe
The Cronenberg Effect could be termed as one of distance between the observer of the field, the area, the created reality, the genre, the mise en scene of the film and the viewer, allowing a kind of meta-dimensional space to emerge within that distance. In his most personal and best work this area emerges immediately rather than gradually or as a slow burning progression. It’s there from the opening moments of his short films and in each of his features. It seals the content of the film like a water tight valve on a submersible or air tight doors on an aircraft or a washer between lengths of pipe. The content is hermetically sealed from the observer’s expectations and any kind of interference from external reality or film reality. In theoretical physics it might be termed a meta-space in which a narrative can then unfold, a space in which a kind of power ball of consciousness is created, a moveable examination room where film theory, plot, complots of the spatial-temporal unit can be experienced. Within this space a meta-linguistic form of communication emerges. Language is not used to communicate but to puzzle, to misdirect, to hide, to satirize, to reference. In Cronenberg’s films the human body becomes a battlefield in which an invasive agent, a virus, an addiction, a fetish struggles for control of an individual consciousness. The term Body Horror now has become a descriptive term which immediately evokes his filmography. Cronenberg’s films explore these spaces in which negative energy, which physicists estimate can make up in the range of 70 percent of the Universe, which in layman’s terms might be called parallel dimensions or alternate realities.
Karsh, the graying, grieving widower who is the protagonist of THE SHROUDS, is introduced after he has lost his beloved wife to cancer. We immediately are drawn into his grief and offer the character our commiseration. Vincent Cassel, who plays Karsh, physically resembles David Cronenberg, and the film was generated by the director’s own grief over the loss of his wife. Cronenberg has always taken a science based attitude toward the themes, narratives, characters, settings of his films. His first feature, SHIVERS/THEY CAME FROM WITHIN (1975), opens with an advert for a Canadian residential tower where the subsequent action will unfold. This immediately distances the viewer, treating the audience as a potential customer shopping for a living space. Capitalism and its enforcers loom large in his films, if only as a grounding for generic elements, and in his case, strong sexual/violent forces which infect his characters and the environments which they inhabit. STC (sexually transmitted creatures) threaten to envelop and destroy each and every character in SHIVERS. Body invasion becomes a form of alien invasion.
The protagonists of SHIVERS, RABID (1977), THE BROOD (1979) are medical personnel who discover, track and are tasked with destroying or blocking invaders, experimenting with the process of infection. Medical personnel who conduct experiments in geometrically overwhelming clinics are also at the center of his early short films, STEREO (1969 ) and CRIMES OF THE FUTURE (1970), where language becomes a means to theorize. In CRIMES OF THE FUTURE, a rogue clinic named The House of Skin is also the secret laboratory of rogue scientist Antoine Rouge, who has unleashed a transmitted disease known as Rouge’s Malady. His subsequent films are structured on linguistic, rather than psychological models, much like the writing of William S. Burroughs, whose NAKED LUNCH Cronenberg adapted in 1990. For instance, Burroughs’ use of the “cut-up” method of composition, grammar and content generation which he developed with Brion Gysin was explained in the Foreword to his novel NOVA EXPRESS (1964) as, “…the fold-in method has been used in this book which is consequently a composite of many writers living and dead…” A further, more radical example, would be the series of psychic blasts from an endless series of film projections from science fiction, old Westerns, slapstick comedy and horror cinema floating and colliding through rapidly expanding space-time in Burrough’s novel THE WILD BOYS (1969).
After making commercial features for several decades, by the time the feature version of CRIMES OF THE FUTURE (2022) and THE SHROUDS (2024) were released in the 21 Century the medical horror aesthetic was just as crucial a metaphor as his earlier films but there’s now a certain funereal quality to the overall tone and external time seems stopped dead. Cronenberg experiments with time, both cinema time and “real” time, in the manner of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s concept that cinema was more a medium about time rather than action. Both of these films, especially THE SHROUDS, unfold in a trancelike state of mind where the human body is an expendable container for moments of waking consciousness which float in an oceanic unconscious. Karsh is physically and psychically hobbled by his overwhelming grief resulting from the loss of his wife to yet another body invader. The first word of spoken dialogue in the film is “grief”. In VIDEODROME (1983) , Max, the programmer at a cable station who falls into the clutches of a reality generator being secretly tested by a shadowy Hi-Tech agency, is told “Your reality is already half video hallucination. If you’re not careful, it will become total hallucination.” Over forty years later THE SHROUDS illustrates that Cronenberg doesn’t need a rogue technology to achieve a hallucinatory vision. The digitally accessible graves he has developed are designed with technology that is contemporarily feasible. We all have cell phones and video surveillance is omnipresent.
THE SHROUDS opens with Karsh beholding the deteriorating body of his wife as she lies in state in a grave below a monolith (evoking the monoliths in Kubrick’s 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY) equipped with a video hookup which can be accessed by a cell phone app. Karsh lets out a primal scream of grief. He then snaps into consciousness seated in a dentist’s chair and is told that grief is rotting his teeth. The emotion of grief will drive his actions throughout the film. It envelopes him like a cloud. This brooding emotional weather seems to determine the film’s mise en scene. Even the geo-political paranoia of his computer engineer friend cannot penetrate this cloud. He’s enraptured by the phantom of his dead wife who arrives as a sexual object. A Chinese/Russian intelligence cabal is of less concern to him, if it exists at all. Toward the end of the film we get the sense that Karsh is being led to an unspeakable realm beyond human emotions and intellect.
In THE SHROUDS Cronenberg creates an even more hermetically sealed world than his previous films, a fascinating parallel universe, a cold, hushed world, with dialed down colors, establishing a sort of science fiction minimalism. You get the sense that if there’s a world on the other side of death that this is what it might look like. The living world is reduced to a darkened labyrinth which leads through esoteric chambers toward expanded consciousness, a paradigm shift. THE SHROUDS has some parallels with the idea of K-zones in Pupi Avati’s ZEDER (1982), Stephen King’s PET SEMATARY, and Peter Weir’s apocalyptic THE LAST WAVE (1977), the latter visualizing an Aboriginal mythology of the impending destruction of “civilized” technocracy. THE SHROUDS, though, is rigorously concerned with Cronenberg’s journey through his own personal grief and its representation on film. Karsh lives in a fluid state of consciousness where dreams, hallucinations and desires are represented as alternate, but accessible, realities. The “action” of the film is largely interior, and beyond discussion. The Cronenbert Effect here merged. You get the sense that the jet is not taking him toward any earthly destination.
There’s a lot of indicators one might not notice on first viewing THE SHROUDS, that the same actress plays/voices three of the female roles (one of them an A.I. image) or the embedded references to primitive tribal mythologies, the belief systems of certain “primitive” tribes that when the wanderer is ready, a guide will appear. In Karsh’s case a blind woman (Sandrine Holt) appears to become his guide, to help him through what seems to be developing into a final transition. His guide, herself guided by her trusted dog, gradually leads him toward what will be his final journey in the body of the film. We get the sense that she can “see” things that Karsh cannot yet behold. In the final scene as he sits next to her in a private jet, sealed aboard a projectile through space and time, Karsh beholds the transformation of his guide into his surgically distorted wife. Is it a vision, a daydream? His grief is now permanently ingrained in his consciousness yet somehow it has freed him from his previous Self. His “vision” and the film’s “reality” are finally merged and the jet is not headed toward an earthly destination.
Robert Monell