The director David Cronenberg called his polar opposite: “I like to have the appearance of logic”
It takes a very special person to have their name turned into a style of filmmaking. David Cronenberg is one of those people. You can’t talk about the subgenre of body horror without mentioning the squelchy, squishy genius. His movies, including Scanners, Videodrome, and The Fly rank amongst some of the most viscerally disgusting films ever made and have left a massive footprint on the horror movie cano—a big, red, sticky footprint.
Many filmmakers have spoken openly about their love of Cronenberg. Martin Scorsese once said he was ‘terrified’ to meet him at first, having been enraptured and horrified by some of his early work. There’s also the case of his son Brandon, who has carried the body horror torch with the likes of Antiviral and Infinity Pool. Then there’s David Lynch, who has often been mentioned alongside his namesake. Although, the man himself cannot see why.
“He’s got a very Jimmy Stewart aspect to him, which I definitely don’t have,” Cronenberg told The Guardian when this comparison was raised. The interview mentioned some of the proposed crossover points between the two, including their iconic quiffs of white hair and reluctance to conform to any sort of cinematic normality. However, according to one half of this equation, these similarities are merely skin deep. “He likes the dreamlike, surreal thing,” Cronenberg continued. “I like to have the appearance of a rigorous kind of logic – a rationality, and from that, I subvert it.”
Cronenberg has a point here. Whilst both auteurs like to stretch the boundaries of what is possible in a movie, they go about it in very different ways. Lynch’s work is often left wildly open to interpretation, inviting the audience to draw their own conclusions from the many, often disparate-seeming pieces he has laid out for them. While the director’s most outlandish work is very high concept, it pays close attention to its own rules. Take The Fly, for example. Seth Brundle’s deterioration is governed entirely by the fictional science of his human-insect metamorphosis. It’s this rational approach to a fantastical idea that generates the tension of the movie’s in-built countdown.
This might explain why Cronenberg never limited himself to one strand of filmmaking. Body horror might be what defines him, but he has ventured out into other subgenres, too. A History of Violence is thriller with socio-political undertones, whilst Cosmopolis is a claustrophobic drama set primarily in the back of a car. Lynch’s least ‘Lynchy’ movies are The Elephant Man, which he made early in his career, and The Straight Story, which was pitched to him by his frequent collaborator and ex-wife Mary Sweeney. It’s also the only Lynch movie that he didn’t write the script for, which might explain why it’s relatively normal.
Whilst lynch seemingly didn’t offer much commentary on Cronenberg, there is proof that they met. In a separate Guardian article, a reader asked Cronenberg the excellent question, ‘Could you beat David Lynch in an arm wrestle?’ He replied by telling a story about the time both of them were working for the same producer, Dino De Laurentiis, and met for lunch at Lynch’s favourite spot, Bob’s Big Boy Burgers.
“That’s when we got to know each other a little bit,” he said. “I think I could take him. Especially if he was meditating at the time.”
