In the flesh: Cronenberg on Videodrome

The story goes that when Roberto Benigni met David Cronenberg he got down on all fours and kissed the director’s shoes. This was Toronto, many years ago, and it seems Benigni was in a state of euphoric relief. Cronenberg’s films, he explained, made him afraid to visit the city. It came as a surprise to discover that Canadians really were as polite as they say, that head-combusting telekinetic killers weren’t terrorizing Bay Street, that our televisions behaved. Cronenberg told the story when he dropped in on a screening of Videodrome at Jackman Hall last night. He reminisced about his stars, fondly recalling James Woods as the only actor he’s ever yelled at, and explaining how his work with Deborah Harry was essentially a matter of shrinking her performance down from rock-theatrics exaggeration to the eerily sexy hush it became. The film was presented as part of the Cinematheque Ontario’s Toronto on Film series, so Cronenberg was also there to talk about the city. There was something strangely warm and fuzzy about sitting in a capacity crowd to immerse ourselves in Max Renn’s descent into the sadomasochistic, surreal and cancerous world of Videodrome while taking note of the many glimpses of Toronto circa 1982. So much has changed since then, but it was oddly comforting to note that local legend Reg Hartt’s black and white photocopied posters for his “Cineforum” home screenings of classic films, which can still be found on lamp posts all over Toronto, looked exactly the same.

A filmmaker who truly aims for the guts

I have no idea how many times I've watched Videodrome in the last 27 years, but I can honestly say that even after multiple viewings as a child, a teenager and an adult, the movie remains absolutely fucking bananas. In his introduction to Cronenberg’s introduction Adam Nayman recalled the extra layers of taboo the film accumulated by having to be smuggled into his family home on VHS. Indeed, the film’s resonance as a home video product is a central element in its legacy, yet seeing it on the big screen with an audience reminds you how enduringly discomforting—and kind of hilarious—an experience the film offers. “It has a philosophy,” one character warns another about the titular underground torture porn, “and that’s what makes it dangerous.” That’s also what makes it deliciously goofy. The walls are electrified wet clay, the wizard is nothing but a library of videocassettes, and Renn feeds a gun to his stomach vagina cavity. The film wasn’t prescient on purpose, Cronenberg emphasized. In fact it looked backwards to some degree, to the ideas of Marshall McLuhan, who haunted the University of Toronto when Cronenberg was a student there. And it responded to what was in the air in the moment, like the presence of soft-core porn on Canadian television, and fears of the medium’s potentially corrupting powers that had been circulating for decades. “All you have an artist that makes you original is your antenna,” asserted Cronenberg, whose own antennae have been picking up often brilliantly perverse broadcasts from the collective Id for nearly four decades.

The Dying Animal

The final moments of The Wrestler find Mickey Rourke’s Randy “the Ram” Robinson lifting himself off the canvas, crawling to the corner post, climbing wearily atop his makeshift altar, and, to the adoring clamour of his fans, jumping off the top rope into nowhere. That Randy never lands, that the moment we’re left with is one of empty space and suspended breath, speaks to Darren Aronofsky’s shrewdness, his understanding of what this movie’s really about. The basic narrative structure of Robert D. Siegel’s script is rather formulaic, the Sundance-friendly down-and-out redemption tale, if you will, with a number of threadbare contrivances, particularly when dealing with Randy’s attempted reconciliation with his estranged daughter Stephanie, who’s played at too consistently high an emotional pitch by Evan Rachel Wood.

Aronofsky seems aware of the story’s limitations and places his emphasis elsewhere. Coming after the director’s almost oppressively spectacular Requiem for a Dream and The Fountain—a film famous for being booed at the very same festival where The Wrestler later took the top prize—the visual style adopted here seems shockingly low-key, as un-flashy as the wintry Jersey locales. The camerawork, by Maryse Alberti, is hand-held, almost purely observational, willing to doggedly follow its protagonist, a technique that, echoing the Dardenne brothers, leads to an unusual number of shots of the back of Rourke’s head in the opening scenes, as though Aranofsky wants to delay our looking this wounded old animal in the eyes. It’s a brilliant tactic, because this animal, as well as the milieu he moves in, is the true subject of our fascination and our empathy.

While The Wrestler overall feels admirably workmanlike, Rourke’s performance is by contrast a masterwork, though his collaborators deserve credit for helping to cultivate it. On one level the movie’s a sort of documentary, not only about the bizarre world of exhibition wrestling, from the congenial backstage orchestrations of flamboyant combat to the drug culture to enormously entertaining scenes of beefy guys shopping for shit to smack each other with in dollar stores, but about the ways in which our bodies betray us and our movie stars age. Randy the washed-up wrestler who was a star in the 80s is played by Rourke the washed-up actor who was a star, not to mention a pretty brilliant actor, in the 80s. How character and actor align here is transfixing, disarming, and at times affectingly grotesque.

It may sound incongruently highfalutin to speak of a movie as marginal as Jacques Nolot’s Before I Forget in the same breath as The Wrestler, but the two films have something remarkable in common: each one allows us to closely view a man’s once beautiful body wearied if not positively ravaged by time and experience. Rourke’s face has been worked on in more ways than one. His frame is engorged strangely. His flesh has assumed the ruddy glow of an over-roasted turkey. Yet through this battered shell an old charisma achingly radiates, as does a desperation that’s almost palpable. I don’t mean in any way to slight Rourke’s performance or label it artless by drawing so much attention to mere presence. On the contrary, everything Rourke brings to the film is in the service of building a complex, highly specific character and telling this particular story.

Likewise, Marisa Tomei’s Cassidy, the stripper and single mother with whom Randy attempts to forge a relationship once he realizes that health issues are conspiring to end his career—and, most unnervingly, that he’s utterly alone in the world—is at once vulnerable, physically and emotionally, and sharply defined. In a sense Tomei’s efforts are even more laudable since her character is underdeveloped, a deficiency Aronofsky tries in vain to remedy with a prolonged, purposeless scene of her performing at the club. Tomei’s best moments are the ones devoted toward deepening our sense of Randy’s plight, like the scene in which Randy and Cassidy go to a bar in the afternoon and proudly declare their nostalgia for the hair metal days of their youth. Tomei fearlessly embraces the silliness of this shy bit of courtship, and Rourke, doing a little dance to the canned Ratt in his plaid shirt and duct-taped puffy coat, hair extensions swinging, is absurdly endearing.

But there’s another scene these two share that pretty much announces the most troubling theme of The Wrestler in a manner that’s in perfect sympathy with the characters’ relative lack of sophistication. Cassidy raves to Randy about The Passion of the Christ, about the unholy battery of abuse heaped upon Mel Gibson’s gladiatorial incarnation of Jesus, and Randy, though he hasn’t seen the movie, takes its appeal as a matter of course. Both Cassidy and Randy have devoted their professional lives to the exhibition and exploitation of their flesh, and theirs is a masochistic glory that delivers rewards in diminishing returns.

In the movie’s single funniest, most appalling moment, an ecstatic fan, some kid with no legs, begs Randy to beat his opponent with his artificial limb. Randy shrugs and dutifully complies. It’s proposed then that each of us craves this contact with punishment. Each of us wants to participate in the grinding down of our bodies made into theatre. And this might also explain why so many people who might not normally pay tickets for a wrestling match will part with their cash to see The Wrestler and, in some way that can’t quite be put into words, walk away satisfied, and feeling a little more alive.

Written on the body: the generous frankness, smoky pensiveness and silent articulation of Jacques Nolot's Before I Forget

A curious thing about Jacques Nolot’s Before I Forget (Avant que j'oublie): the title implies urgency, yet the film, now on DVD from Strand Releasing, is anything but. The writer/director/actor’s presence throughout seems to be perpetually fixed upon a point of pause, of consideration, we suppose, a cigarette burning away between his fingers like some substitute hourglass to mark time, his largely immobile face betraying no inner call to action. He says at one point that he wants nothing, which doesn’t entirely ring true, but the calming of desire, or at least its complication by age, illness and the small rewards of reflection, certainly appears to have marked this character in some irreversible way. Right up until the final moments, even when he’s radically altered his appearance, his capacity to linger is tremendous.

But then exactly what sort of task is it that Nolot’s Pierre—another variation on the other Pierres Nolot has portrayed in his previous three films, Manège (1986), Hinterland (98) and Porn Theatre (02)—needs to perform in advance of memory’s erosion? With his emotions rarely manifesting in any flamboyant or dramatic manner, what do we really know of the inner life of this guy?

We know he’s around 60, and his health is so-so. He takes pills that he says interfere with his ability to orgasm, and an early scene follows him as he wakes in the dead of night to be sick. We learn later that he’s been HIV-positive for more than 20 years. He makes a habit of hiring young men for sex. In his very particular deadpan, he tells a cop through his building’s intercom system that his lover has left him and that he’s very sad. He bears an exceedingly French moustache that he says he wouldn’t dare shave off, a sign of vanity, or at least a stubbornness about his image, that can be gauged against the sobering effects of time on his body, which we see naked—naked in a way that bodies rarely are in movies—for prolonged periods, especially the pronounced paunch he cloaks with baggy suits. He visits a few friends, other gay men of a certain age, with similarly lonely lives, and he visits a shrink, speaking frankly to all of them. He keeps his dead father’s barbershop in a corner of his Paris apartment. He spends a great deal of time at his desk, trying to write, but distracted by the past. An old lover of his is dying, and he’s to inherit money.

We witness Pierre frequently in moments of monetary transaction. Well, we witness Pierre paying others to be more precise: the young hustlers, the shrink, the cashier at the grocery we see him visit in a striking sequence that cuts between his grocery shopping with the auctioning off of his old lover’s valuable art collection. He lives modestly, yet there is a special emphasis in this rigorously observational, unobtrusive movie on the funds he expends. The diminishing savings, the diminishing desires, the body in quiet, gradual decline: as things fall apart, Before I Forget makes no effort to wring the situation for high emotions of any kind, yet it presents a visually rich, meditative, narratively loose but strangely cohesive experience. It’s about the tasks that fill up a person’s days, and the weight that some of the simplest tasks assume when we take a moment to stop and really see them.

So eventually, those mysterious things, the ones that Pierre is trying to do something with before they’re forgotten, feel like the accumulation of ordinary—or, well, ordinary for some of us anyway—things that define a life as much as the prized memories of outstanding events. All of it falls under the scrutiny of Pierre’s pen. And it’s as though the real testimony winds up being not the things Pierre writes but those that Nolot allows us to see unfold. There is an awful lot of talk about the past here, but the way the past is reconsidered is very much a present tense drama. Nolot is living it for us onscreen, doing as little as possible, which is to say exactly what it needed and nothing more. It’s a full, generous performance because it’s so un-forced, and because the camera is likewise so steady and unwavering. Many great filmmakers over the years have used the real, unbroken passage of time in interesting ways that usually heighten our corporeal experience of movie-watching, but Nolot’s use of it here is to shed light on the corporeal experience his own body is undertaking, a body that has so much memory written right there on its surface for us to see.

Born slippy: too close for comfort encounters with unidentified life forms, too few encounters between James Cameron and editor

Just a glance at the personnel involved in Alien (1979) serves to remind us just how remarkable this movie—at once science fiction and slasher flick, not to mention a chamber drama—truly was. The cast included John Hurt, Harry Dean Stanton, Tom Skerritt, Yaphet Kotto and Ian Holm, while the director came fresh from his in many ways never bettered debut The Duelists (77), and would thereafter make a little futuristic detective yarn called Blade Runner (82) which managed to revolutionize a genre. His name was Ridley Scott, he came from advertising, and while time hasn’t proved him the world’s deepest director the guy had style to spare and a cunning, merciless sense of economy.

The strength of the ensemble cast is emphasized early on, their first scenes being group ones of seemingly regular folks amiably bitching about their jobs. Intriguingly, the film’s hero only establishes herself roughly halfway through. We only really start to notice—if not entirely trust—Ripley (a long, tall and very cool Sigourney Weaver) after we see just how badly things go with the unidentified creature she alone insisted not be let aboard the spacecraft, the first major spasm of mayhem occurring in that still utterly traumatizing “birth” scene where the only overtly sympathetic character dies writhing in his own blood. It's a scene that instills a sort of corporeal discomfort that would undoubtedly make David Cronenberg smile. From there onward a showdown of intergalactic Darwinism locks the movie between its teeth, playing out on a brilliantly claustrophobic set from one of the great periods in sci-fi design, with gear made of industrial strength material, stuff with actual weight you want to wrap your knuckles on.

Edmonton's Metro Cinema is screening Alien this coming Sunday afternoon along with Aliens (86). There are camps that claim the sequel superior, yet to my eye the relationship between the two is nearly identical to that between The Terminator (84) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (91), which Metro screened last week and which were both directed, like Aliens, by James Cameron. Aliens indeed establishes its themes of ruthless maternal and/or propagatory instincts more clearly, and develops Ripley, awakened after a 57-year sleep to help fight an entire colony of the acid-blooded, multi-mouthed aliens, into a fully fleshed out character with a resonant backstory and inner conflicts. Yet after Scott’s style and economy we go straight to Cameron’s workmanlike flabbiness. Like T2, Aliens is another two-and-a-half-hour movie full of over-cooked sequences and abundant redundancies. The climactic scene where Ripley discovers and then escapes from the queen mother’s lair, all goopy vaginal egg pod thingees, smoke and sweat, is masterfully handled—too bad we’re then forced to sit through a “surprise” second ending that’s not half as thrilling and just takes forever.

There are concessions, like a sinister Paul Reiser as the corporate weasel, Bill Paxton, fresh from playing Chet in Weird Science (85) and reveling in playing a babbling human Nerf ball, and Lance Henrikson, proving robot scientists can actually be nice guys, always lending a hand, even when their bodies are chopped in half. For better or for worse, there’s more of everything in Aliens, though I’d pick its predecessor for the stronger, meaner chills and thrills any day of the week.

Body trouble: a short piece on the conflicted aesthetic pretentions and elegant alienation of Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway at the very least deserves to be considered a special case. Not only does Greenaway bring the distinct sensibility of the painter to (more or less) mainstream cinema, not only does he subvert the vocabulary of narrative film to make essentially associational structural explorations: Peter Greenaway is a grand cinematic alienator, wildly prolific and without peer. He doesn’t seem to even want you to like his films, which is fortunate.

I started hating Greenaway with 8 1/2 Women (1999), which I saw at Edmonton's Metro Cinema years ago. It’s Metro again who’ve prompted me to revisit Greenaway’s work for the first time since. Making up one half of their weekend Greenaway double bill, Metro’s screening A Zed & Two Noughts (85), perhaps the coldest movie about grief ever made. A clinically elegant approach to design and symmetry permeates the film from the surface down to its core. A car accident outside the Rotterdam Zoo, on a road titled Swan Way, is caused by a swan. Two women perish, each one spouse to one of a pair of Siamese twins. The widowers soon become lovers to the accident’s sole survivor, the driver of the car, who lost one leg in the violence and, urged by the surgeon brother of a famous forger of Vermeer paintings, is considering getting rid of the other. The twins also console themselves with documentaries about the origins of life and by monitoring of decomposition in various organic subjects: an apple, some prawns, a swan. The march of bloat, bubble and rot whizzes by in time-lapse images set to hyper-speed music.

Seen at the close of the opening credits, the image of the dead wives, leaning almost sensuously against one and other as sparks cascade behind them, possesses a certain perverse pageantry that determines the tone of what proceeds. The spectacle owes something to Warhol and JG Ballard in its transfixing power: morbid, telegraphic, flat, yet layered with meaning. It matches the highly theatrical quality of the film’s lighting, composition, production design and even dialogue. In Greenaway’s theatre, civilization is a sort of catastrophe waiting to happen, where genes dictate destiny and personality melts into base needs and the useless accumulation of knowledge. Incidentally, I don’t recall a single close-up in the whole thing: humans are to be observed from a distance sufficient for erasing the possibility of character identification.

Greenaway has stated that cinema doesn’t connect with the body the way painting has. The two mediums behave so differently that I don’t doubt for a moment that he’s right. Yet, while Greenaway has frequently condemned films for clinging to the aesthetics of the novel, I wonder if he’s aware of just how equally limiting his appropriation of the aesthetics of painting is. The body is often most palpably felt in films that fully exploit the medium’s particular sense of movement and urgency -elements Greenaway frequently avoids. In any case,  A Zed & Two Noughts is compelling precisely for its use of static or virtually static imagery. This is something worth praising, even if it’s a far cry from its creator’s ostensible goals.