The facet of cinema David Cronenberg calls “very paradoxical and endlessly fascinating”
David Cronenberg has created some truly unique pieces of cinema, although they have certainly had their imitations over the years. The Canadian director has explored every facet of the human body and psyche with his trademark style of body horror, which equally shocks and scintillates.
Early works like Shivers and Rabid announced Cronenberg as a key figure in North American cinema and he established his early promise with the likes of Scanners, Videodrome and The Fly. It might seem like Cronenberg is all body horror, but the truth is that he has also tackled the crime and thriller genres with admirable effort.
Naturally, given the visceral quality of Cronenberg’s movies, there is often a deep sense of violence that runs amok, which has occasionally drawn criticism and controversy. Still, the very nature of violence has always been something that has interested Cronenberg, and in an interview with Pop Entertainment, the director spoke of his fascination.
At the time, Cronenberg had been talking about his 2005 action thriller A History of Violence, in which Viggo Mortensen plays a diner owner who must confront his dark and violent past to save his family after protecting his community from an attempted robbery. Violence and its meanings play a central facet of the narrative.
“When it came to the depiction of violence, it was where did the characters learn their violence?” Cronenberg said. “And what was violence to those characters, but my idea of what I think violence should be”. The director went on to say that violence is “innate” in humans but added that he found it “strange” that we could conceive of non-violence.
Of course, violence has often been shown in all its bloody and ugly glory through the cinematic medium, and the fact that such movies have often been well-received by critics and audiences is of great interest to Cronenberg, who noted, “The fact that the audience finds the violence exhilarating and that the children find it attractive, even though they are repelled by the consequences, shows the conundrum we have with violence.“
That very conflict between an avoidance of personal violence and a political adherence to it is also something that Cronenberg is keen to point out. “So many people fear it, there’s so much money, energy, and government that are trying to avoid it at the same time that we outfit armies to go and commit it on other people,” he said.
The filmmaker added, “It’s very paradoxical and endlessly fascinating, yet it’s also very attractive, which brings out the animal part of ourselves.” Cronenberg has explored violence to the utmost degree, whether in his futuristic visions of body horror or his gritty crime thrillers like A History of Violence or Eastern Promises, showing that it’s always been something that he wanted to explore through his art.
Violence is indeed a strange facet of humanity, especially considering our supposed morality. In that light, the medium of cinema is the perfect avenue through which to explore the deeper meaning of human cruelty and brutality. Signing off his thoughts on violence, Cronenberg said, “Even the human, intellectual part of ourselves is also attracted to it. It’s not easy to lament that we are violent creatures because that is just too simplistic.”
