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Candice Breitz Candice Breitz, Treatment, 2013

Cronenberg is a filmmaker of ideas, one being the notion that human beings have merged with

technology. His protagonists are often cyborgs as, in some sense, he is as wellnot a

commercial director with artistic aspirations so much as an avant-garde filmmaker who has

contrived a commercial career, in part by remaining in Canada. The dark comedy Videodrome

(1984), a suave, sleazy work of social science fiction with a Salvador Dal taste for extravagant

visual shock, has particular art-world credibility. A TV broadcaster is taken over and mutated by

a malign television signal, illustrating Marshall McLuhans conceit that humans are scarcely

more than an ascendant technologys reproductive organs.

Dense and dark,David Cronenberg: Evolution,is on view at the new TIFF Lightbox in downtown

Toronto through mid-January. It is primarily a fans delight, rich with clips, lobby cards,

sketches, and letters (Saw The Flyloved it, Martin Scorsese writes). Pull-out drawers yield

facsimiles of annotated scripts and unrealized treatments. One, Roger Pagan, Gynecologist,

suggests that years before he made his supremely unsettling Dead Ringers(1988), the tale of

twin gynecologists whose sexual exploitation of their patients veers into madness, the artist

was pondering its subject. A small exhibition could be contrived from Cronenbergs research

materialthe motorcycle motor that served as the model for the pod-like teleportion device in

The Fly, the medieval medical implements he studied for Dead Ringers, or the 1920sphotograph of a professional exterminator in bowler hat and suit, crouched by ornate radiator,

that was used for Naked Lunch.

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Gynecological implements from David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers(1988)

Though not without a few silly digressions, such as the room that allows visitors to have their

picture taken with one of Naked Lunchs mugwumps, Evolution gives a convincing tri-part

form to Cronenbergs career. The first third is devoted to the outr genre films of the 1970s(Shivers, Rabid, The Brood), which followed from his initial forays as a student at the University

of Toronto and are notable for their disturbing premises and disgusting special effects. This

segues into the character-driven features of the 1980s and 1990s, many of them impossible

literary adaptationsWilliam Burroughs (Naked Lunch, 1991); J.G. Ballard (Crash, 1996). Most

of the films of this period involve protagonists who, whether scientists, artists, or thrill-seekers,

perform their experiments mainly on themselves.

The final third considers Cronenbergs recent concern with family dramas and the social world,

refining his overarching interest in subjective psychic states made material. A short film created

for the exhibition and shown, surrounded by artifacts from eXistenZ(1999) and Naked Lunch, in

a space identified as the Canadian Academy of Erotic Inquiry, is a Warholian single-take

interview of a partially nude woman doggedly explaining to an off-screen doctor that she is

undergoing a mastectomy in order to destroy the insects living in her left breast.

David Cronenberg's Videodrome(1984)

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The middle section of Evolution is the juiciest largely because it includes the props fashioned

for his movies: the body slit that turns James Woods into a living VCR in Videodrome, various

insect-human ears and teeth culled from The Fly, the sex blobs and the bug-like Clark-Nova

Typewriter that appear in Naked Lunch, eroticized body braces used in Crash, the sinister

Instruments for Operating on Mutant Women invented by the insane gynecologist in Dead

Ringers. (These fetishes are amplified by the art objects Cronenberg himself selected for thesatellite exhibit David Cronenberg: Through the Eye. Louise Bourgeoiss headless midair

suspensionArch of Hysteriais a sculpture that in its agonized-ecstatic representation of a

disembodied body could have presided over any number of Cronenberg productions.)

Retrieved from the world of images, Cronenbergs props are eerily diminished. They appear as

shrunken heads, supporting actors in a creepy state of suspended animation. Its striking that

eXistenZ, a send-up of computer games that parodied The Matrixavant la lettre, and one of the

great underappreciated movies of the late 1990s, yields the richest trove of relicscutely

deformed amphibious creatures, latex game pods and umby cords thatallow players to

plug into virtual worlds, boxes for imaginary games with titles like Viral Ecstasyand Hit By a Car,

and numerous iterations of the so-called gristle gun which, as an organic thing that eludes

metal detection, allows a disgruntled fan to assassinate Jennifer Jason Leighs game designer

character.

Cronenberg is here revealed as a literalist whose initial response to the rise of computer-

generated imagery was to fabricate a virtual world that was wholly real. But, after eXistenZ, the

artifacts disappear. Cronenbergs twenty-first century films accept themselves as traces; they

are now viscerally cerebral. There are no props from Spider(2002), a movie adapted from

Patrick McGraths novel that takes place mainly inside the mind of its deranged protagonist

(released from a hospital for the criminally insane, he revisits and relives his childhood); the

deceptively normal thrillerA History of Violence(2006), in which the protagonists submergedpersonality shatters the bland faade hes hidden behind, contributes only a coffee cup to the

exhibition. Eastern Promises(2007), a relatively lavish evocation of Russian gangsters in

London, has a few set designs and maquettes of the faux-opulent restaurant that functions as

the epicenter of conspiracy. Period costumes are the lone physical manifestation fromA

Dangerous Method(2011), a movie devoted to Jungslover and Freuds disciple, Sabina

Speilrein. There are only a few images from the artists most recent film, the ultra-formalist

Cosmopolis(2012), which, even more than most late-period Cronenberg, has been

misunderstood and underappreciated.

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eOne Films Robert Pattinson in David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis(2012)

With its synthesized backgrounds, Cosmopoliswas Cronenbergs first movie to make extensive

use of digital photography and CGI. It not only illustrates DeLillos metaphor for global capital

but is a sustained riff on the idea of a virtual world. Indeed, Cosmopolismarks Cronenbergs

embrace of the virtual; fittingly, theres no place for it in Cronenberg: Evolution. The movies

central propthe enormous limousine that creeps through midtown Manhattanwas

destroyed in the course of making the movie. Its only existence is as a memory on screen.

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