David Cronenberg: Interviews with Serge Grünberg (review)

Serge Grünberg, a staff critic for Cahiers du Cinéma, has long been deeply engaged with the work of David Cronenberg. In 1992, he published a monograph in that journal's 'Auteurs' collection, surveying the Canadian director's films through Naked Lunch (Canada/UK/Japan 1991) and celebrating him as a quintessential 'cinéaste post-moderne'. In 2000, he released, again via Cahiers du Cinéma, a collection of interviews, entitled simply David Cronenberg, which updated his coverage of the filmmaker's career to eXistenZ (Canada/UK 1999). The current volume is an English translation of that text, with a new final chapter devoted to a discussion of Spider (France/Canada/UK 2002) and A History of Violence (US/Germany 2005). It is the second book-length collection of interviews with the director, following Chris Rodley's Cronenberg on Cronenberg (1992), which pursues a similar chronological trajectory – from early 'underground' efforts such as Stereo (Canada 1969) and Crimes of the Future (Canada 1970), through innovative genre-based works such as Rabid (Canada 1976) and Shivers (Canada 1975) and the crossover successes Videodrome (Canada 1982) and The Fly (UK/Canada/US 1986), to the mature triumph of Dead Ringers (Canada/US 1988), and so on.

This basic structure provides the framework on which are articulated a series of dialogic musings on Cronenberg's characteristic obsessions: the metamorphic horror of embodiment, the perplexities of personal identity, the invasive intimacy of modern technology. Because Cronenberg is such a fluent raconteur, he is incapable of being boring, and so his comments throughout remain at the least involving and interesting. The model for all such extended exchanges with famous directors is, of course, Hitchcock by Truffaut (Secker and Warburg 1968), a top-notch pairing of cinematic minds that resulted in some of the most luminous discussions of filmic technique ever committed to paper. Unfortunately, Grünberg is not an intellectual match for Cronenberg – despite his persistent quotation of various theorists – and as a consequence the conversation tends to stall, never finding the gear that will kick it into a higher register. How, after all, can one be expected to respond to pretentious questions such as 'a creator always wears a mask?' (126) or 'is otherness the ultimate monstrosity?' (93). Cronenberg seems game to chat, but Grünberg is trying much too hard, and the result is occasionally embarrassing – as in an exchange where the interlocutors compete to show who remembers the plot of Madame Bovary more precisely (141).

Though the path of Cronenberg's career provides a clear, if arbitrary, structure for the volume as a whole, the individual chapters are woefully disorganised. Grünberg leaps from topic to topic breathlessly, sometimes giving the director time to catch up, sometimes not. At one point, four consecutive questions address, respectively, the role of animals in Cronenberg's films, his understanding of virtual reality, his appreciation for the literary-ontological experiments of William Burroughs and Luigi Pirandello, and the images of disease and contamination in eXistenZ (166–7). Cronenberg parries these helter-skelter queries as best he can, but one senses a vague irritation and boredom underlying his responses. Grünberg's random displays of erudition – for example, 'Antonin Artaud said in one of his texts: "I, in my body, know all"' – inspire such gripping rejoinders as 'Yes, I like that. It's wonderful' (147). When he is permitted the opportunity to discourse at length on an issue close to his heart – the absurdity of censorship in the face of art's power to shatter taboos, for instance (113–14, 123–4) – Cronenberg can be eloquent and even riveting. But Grünberg manages, again and again, to dissipate the energy of these exchanges with his pompous banalities.

Unlike Rodley's Cronenberg on Cronenberg, which is excellent on the production history of individual films, Grünberg seems uninterested in such trivial business, preferring to expound on such matters as Lacan's model of desire (132) or the usefulness of 'French academic term[s]' such as...