The Artist as Monster: The Cinema of David Cronenberg (review)

William Beard's revised and expanded paperback edition of his earlier hardback study of David Cronenberg, first published in 2001, runs to over 560 pages and gives an account of the films in chronological order, beginning with Stereo (Canada 1969) and ending with two additional chapters on eXistenZ (Canada/UK 1999) and Spider (Canada/UK 2002). In his preface, the author makes clear what is not to be looked for in his book. He has, he tells us, made no attempt to examine the processes of development or evolution whereby individual films came into existence, nor is he concerned with special effects or with any of the technological aspects pertinent to the films. He also makes it clear that he has no pressing interest in what he calls 'the process of aesthetic evaluation' (xi). In this he sees himself as aligned with what he calls 'the current practice of most scholarly writing on film' (xi). What Beard offers as his major undertaking with respect to Cronenberg's work is the delineation of what he calls 'a huge moral and ethical struggle underlying the surface of the films' (xi). This conflation of the moral and ethical takes place around the notion of transgression; the films in their very delineation of transgressive desire confront the ethical or human cost of that transgression, the effects of transgression on others. For Beard, the films come to identify transgression and its deleterious effects with male heterosexual sadistic desire. His argument is that the male subject, such as Max Renn (James Woods) in Videodrome (Canada 1983), comes to see himself finally as an ethical monstrosity, a monstrosity whose ultimate expression is the eruption, in the form of an abject biological metamorphosis, of the subject's own flesh. The final condition of self-understanding reached by the monstrous male subject is suicidal melancholy. For Cronenberg, as Beard presents him, this is a project resulting not only in moral and ethical monstrosity, but is also the project of artistic creation as such. Examples of artists thus understood include Beverly Mantle (Jeremy Irons), René Gallimard (Jeremy Irons), Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) and, crucially, writer William Lee (Peter Weller) in Naked Lunch (Canada/UK/Japan 1991). In any event, it is this convergence of themes that led Beard to entitle his book The Artist as Monster.

Beard's method is one of interpretation and exposition. He works through each film, covering the narrative events, characterisations and the themes emerging from the narrative and character interactions, before proceeding to describe relevant features of mise-en-scène and style. This leads to a questionable separation of style from meaning. Not only that, but things can soon become tedious. It is easy to get bogged down in the elaborate detail of relations between characters, or, in the case of Naked Lunch, typewriters, and to lose sight of where the argument is meant to be heading. Beard's interpretations draw on the language of psychoanalysis, employing terms such as perversion, sado-masochism, abjection, and so on, and yet the psychoanalytic terminology remains just that: terminology. The accounts of characters read too often like pieces of amateur psychologising, and issues of a rather different order of significance never quite come into focus. One can see this in Beard's use of the word 'abjection'. The theoretical investment in the word derives, of course, from Julia Kristeva and has been applied to cinema by, amongst others, Barbara Creed. Beard employs it with some frequency, working it especially hard in his account of the novels of William Burroughs in the chapter on Naked Lunch. Beard cites a number of passages from the writings, all of them depicting scenes of the atrocious ravaging of the bodies of boys during the course of acts of extreme sexual violation, usually involving the deaths of the boys by hanging. Reference is made in this connection to de Sade, but the comparison is not developed. Beard's point, somewhat obscurely phrased...