Thoughts on David Cronenberg and “genre”

This contains a bit of a spoiler for Eastern Promises

Saw Eastern Promises last night. I really liked it, my wife was less enthusiastic but still positive. It was certainly one of the most shockingly violent movies I’ve seen in a while, but I should expect nothing less from the director. David Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen are apparently well on their way to becoming one of those iconic actor/director teams, like Scorsese and DeNiro or Wilder and Holden. Mortensen’s performance was simply amazing, all the more engaging because it was so apparent the actor was having a delightful time. What surprised me more than anything is that the movie was clearly concerned with the same themes present in A History of Violence, namely what happens when the world of crime, bad men, and violence (evil) rubs up against the world of peace, love, and kindness (good). Not to make them sound simplistic: Viggo’s character in both film’s is an odd amalgamation of the two worlds, pulled in both directions at once. In some ways, we might postulate that the choice he makes in both films is the ultimate point: in AHOV, he returns to his family as if nothing has changed, in EP he is shown much the same way Michael Corleone is at the end of the Godfather, a possibly good person now totally immersed in the criminal world. To me, showing the contrast between the two world is the point of the final two scenes (which were the scenes Bridget took special exception to). The other thing seeing these meetings of innocence and evil explores is how they reflect and affect each other. AHOV shows the “good” couple’s sex life altering under the influence, EP has an irredeemably nasty character show a moment of mercy. Perhaps the idea is that even though the regular world is completely unprepared for and unable to deal with an invasion by the twilight one, they are not as far apart, human-nature-wise, as they may appear.

The other thing I got to thinking about was that Cronenberg seems to have moved on from his defining style and genre. He’s made more conventional films before, if The Dead Zone and Crash can be considered conventional, but it seems like he’s really abandoned the sort of slimy, organic surreality that defined his work in the eighties and nineties. I’m torn a little by this: I really like his last two films and they are by most obejective measures probably better than The Fly, Videodrome, or Naked Lunch (to name three of my favorites) but I am saddened whenever a gifted artists departs the genre “ghetto” for a more mainstream style. You could argue that crime films are a genre, and that’s true, but so are oscar-bait dramas and biopics. I’m using genre in the connotative sense of horror/sci-fi/cult. The movement is towards conventionality. There are distinct touches that remind us that he is still David Cronenberg: the scarred and bizarre villians, graphic violence and sex, pervading menace, and a certain rhythm. But there is a sense of reigning in compared to his other work – many critics would call it “maturing,” meaning that the artsist has now become an adult, that there is something juvenile in what has gone before. It bothers me. Not that artsist shouldn’t mature and go in new directions, but when an author or filmmaker goes from a ‘genre’ to a more conventional approach, often something gets lost. It’s the same impetus that drives excellent comedians to take on dramas, something about being taken ‘seriously.’ When it happens, we lose something of the individuality of their voice. Also, as good as the initial products might be, the change inevitably indicates that the downward slope is approaching. Just look at Robin Williams. The more individual and cult films might not make it onto a magazine’s top ten list for the year or be nominated for an Oscar, but they are more likely to really affect people continue to matter to them years down the line when no-one really can figure out why the Best Picture winner was such a big deal at the time. No-one but David Cronenberg could have made Videodrome or Naked Lunch, and those movies freaked me right the hell out. As good as Eastern Promises is, and I really liked it, anyone could have made it.

Then again, maybe Cronenberg’s just going to make a trilogy, like the Korean “Vengeance” trilogy, and then go back and make the film adaptation of House of Leaves. Anything is possible.