The director David Cronenberg claims is “afraid to say the truth”
There’s a deep power in the cinematic medium in how in can explore the deeper truths of the human experience, and David Cronenberg is a director who has unflinchingly tried to access the kind of dark realities that lie beneath all of our lives, whether in his moments of body horror or in his thrilling psychological crime dramas.
In terms of body horror, of which Cronenberg in known as a master of, the Canadian filmmaker has dived into the gruesome nature of the physical corpus we inhabit and are forever bound to in the likes of Shivers, Scanners,Videodrome and The Fly, exposing the limitations of the human body.
Elsewhere, though, say in A History of Violence, Cronenberg has attempted to get underneath the most intense kind of emotions that we all feel, anger, hatred, denial, and in doing so, he has highlighted universal truths quite like any other directors, with his own unfalteringly unique style.
With that in mind, Cronenberg’s movies are diametrically opposed to other directors’ films, which try to detail human history with a close eye but inevitably fail and bring in their own opinions and biases. Cronenberg himself once delivered a damning verdict about the works of Oliver Stone, who has delivered many historical films throughout his career.
Speaking with David Breskin, Cronenberg once explained, “Oliver Stone is afraid to say the truth. For all the shouting, he’s still not quite able to deliver the final blow.” Cronenberg had been speaking in relation to Stone’s Vietnam War drama Platoon and the kind of catharsis it provides at the film’s conclusion, although he feels that truth is not necessarily delivered in such a manner.
In addition, Cronenberg highlighted Stone’s biographical anti-war drama Born on the Fourth of July, in which Tom Cruise played the activist and US Marine Corps Ron Kovic, who was paralysed during the Vietnam War. Discussing Stone’s inability to “[tell] the truth”, Cronenberg explained, “[The truth is] that Cruise had these horrible experiences in the VA hospital, and it didn’t mean anything. And it didn’t have to happen. And it really has fucked the guy’s life, and nothing can be done about it!”
According to Cronenberg, Stone was unable to speak that simple truth and rather had to douse his film in an air of sentimentality and emotion. The “hard truth” is not something that is often explored through cinema because it doesn’t necessarily make for an interesting story, and that’s something that Cronenberg is willing to admit.
“The truth does not really lend itself to the dramatic structures that are immediately available to the Hollywood filmmaker,” The Canadian filmmaker said. “I’m not saying absolute truth because I don’t think there is absolute truth, but in the particular construct which you are dealing with for two hours, there can be relative truths that mean something.”
Oliver Stone has frequently tapped into the past to examine the human experience. Through films like Salvador, JFK and Nixon, he has tried to detail the most significant pieces of human history, but the truth, according to Cronenberg, is that he often layers his films with far too much emotion to ever get to the crux of the matter. Human history is ugly, which Stone has managed to detail, but rather than just laying out the facts as they are, his approach is one that muddles the past and actually makes it harder to understand.
