David Cronenberg on Genre

I didn’t get into Cronenberg’s films until The History of Violence. (Which is probably on my top, um 25?, films of all time.) That’s a lie. I did see Crash. And I probably saw bits of The Fly. And I saw The Dead Zone on TV, but didn’t connect it with Cronenberg. To me, he was known for horror and pushing the limits in a gazillion ways that I wasn’t particularly interested in. Horror was not my thing.

Back in the 80′s I mostly knew of Cronenberg because of the controversy he was causing in Canadian politics… All of his early films were funded in part by taxpayer money and it became a huge “thing” that taxpayers were funding “pornography”. And his work, especially the early stuff, really does cross some creepy lines between horror and eroticism.

Anyway… the Toronto Film Festival has had an exhibit on the director (closed last weekend) and I figured I’d finally check it out. Wow. I was kind of blown away. It was a really well put together exhibit with tons of cool artifacts and it made me curious to see all his films from the 80′s that I was too scared to see at the time.

In fact, the same night I went to the exhibit, they were showing Videodrome — a film from 1983, starring James Woods and Debbie Harry. (Yes, Blondie — although she’s a brunette in this film.)

Anyway, even after seeing the exhibit, I was scared to go to the movie. But I’m really glad that I went. Most of the really hard-to-watch stuff, I’d already seen photos or clips of in the exhibit, and the movie actually had some interesting ideas. It was eerily prescient about the ever increasing influence of video images — especially pornographic ones — on society.

And that brings me to the thought that inspired this post. In a clip of an interview shown in the exhibit, Cronenberg is talking about The Fly. I’m paraphrasing, but he basically says:

The Fly is about a couple who fall in love. He contracts a disease and she helps him commit suicide. That’s what the story is about. And if it were pitched that way, no one would make it. It’s too dark. But wrapped up in genre it’s more palatable, because those dark elements are acceptable, even desirable in the genres of horror and sci-fi, so genre allows me to tell the story I want to tell.

Wow.  That summed up who I want to be as a writer.