“Have you ever heard of insect politics?” Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) urgently asks Veronica Quaife (Geena Davis) in The Fly, the 1983 sci-fi horror classic directed by David Cronenberg. “Neither have I. Insects … don’t have politics. They’re very … brutal. No compassion, no compromise.”
As an Iowan, I’ve heard of it. Our senator blankly stated, “Well, we are all going to die.” Perhaps Cronenberg knows a thing or two about what’s going on Iowa.
Violet Lucca, too, knows about Iowa; she grew up in Cedar Rapids. Lucca has been interested in the films of David Cronenberg since she first encountered them as a student at the University of Iowa. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle, whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Sight and Sound, Film Comment and many other publications, Lucca examines the Canadian auteur’s films, from the well-known Scanners (1981) and A History of Violence (2005) to the largely forgotten ones, such as M. Butterfly (1993), a romantic drama adapted from the play of the same name, in her new book, David Cronenberg: Clinical Trials.
The Los Angeles Times called Lucca’s book “the most rigorous critical analysis of the director’s work to date, reframing Cronenberg’s career as something more than the work of a master of ‘body horror,’ a term that she regards as reductive and dismissive.”
In the book, Lucca steps past the usual canned controversies about the director’s work, and uses Jungian psychology to structure a fresh analysis on identity, potentiality and art’s place in human experience. For Cronenberg’s films, often marked as being cold, flagrant or unapproachable, Lucca’s book is like a good friend next to you in a theater — one who keeps talking (and you don’t mind), who not only asks you “what did you think?” but will wait as the credits roll for you to pull all the pieces of yourself back together.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Reading your book and rewatching these films I wonder, why don’t I want to casually watch a Cronenberg film? How do you think one should prepare to watch one of these films, and is this important?
I’m interested in that you’re kind of hesitant to put them on, even though you enjoy them, because I have very much the same experience, and sometimes I think it’s a fear of not even the ideas, but the depth of feeling. Cronenberg is someone whose work is talked about as emotionless but I find these films incredibly emotional. Painfully emotional. Scanners is a profoundly sad movie, as is The Dead Zone, this crappy Stephen King book that Cronenberg made so sad, like unrelentingly sorrowful.
So why Cronenberg’s films as the subject? And why a book using Jung’s theoretical and therapeutic structures?
I thought of books that I liked that had unique structures, and I was reminded of William Gresham’s [1946 novel] Nightmare Alley, which has a lot to do with psychoanalysis, and every chapter has a different tarot card that’s related to what happens in the chapter. And I had done some creativity seminars, and Jung kept coming up. Cronenberg is definitely a Freud guy, but that’s been done a lot. And with structure, Jung is interesting because he has certain concepts about personal growth and theories of growth. And so I thought, what if I applied these to the films and associated different groups of films from different periods in his career, together through this lens?
Could you talk about the inclusion of your lived experiences and those close to you? In the book, you interweave film industry content, Canadian tax structures, political elements like the CIA’s MK-ULTRA experiments, the dark history of gynecology and art history aspects, like the “The Sorcerer” painting in the Cave of the Trois-Frères in France. Which gives us a certain type of context (including your connections to Iowa).
A lot of film books try to situate a filmmaker or films in a specific decade within a specific system and that’s sort of the best you can do. But art is something that is universal to humanity. And a side interest of mine is the history of ancient civilizations, not alien shit, but actual stuff that happened. And so I was thinking about how the first films or the first moving pictures were those cave paintings, right? And how do those cave paintings relate to what’s happening in his films in terms of removal of reality? Or to use the word they use in eXistenZ, this deformation of reality.
How important is it to consider an artist’s intent? And what does it mean to write, read about and watch these films in this current time of ecocide, ICE disappearing people, the missing and murdered Indigenous Women and People crisis, genocide in Gaza, attacks on trans personhood, just to name a few crises? Is it fair to say you were using the films, not the person or persona, for dialogues on other things?
Cronenberg is so good at talking about his own films, and in this era so much film criticism is just a rehash of the press release. What he says can be insightful, but that’s not the only thing to be said about the films, and that is also my frustration with the body horror aspect. There’s so much else going on in his films and ways you can spin off on them. It’s hard for me to say I have a favorite, but the two toward the top for me are M. Butterfly and Maps to the Stars. And those were two films where even his fans were like, “What the fuck is this?” And for so many years, people acted like these films didn’t exist. Or rather, with Maps to the Stars, that it killed his career for a good 10 years. So I think looking at those films and giving them their due and connecting them to these issues that are more visible at this moment — I definitely wanted to do that.
Not to keep us on body horror, but your book brings us back to the body, or perhaps in a more expanded way, the self. And body horror has me thinking also about horror placed on bodies, or rhetoric that speaks of certain bodies as horrific. So a crossroads of morality and reality. I’m thinking of the politicizing of bodies, weaponizing, disappearing or policing bodies, or simply dehumanizing people into only being bodies. The politics of the body and the body politic as interconnected.
I think the issue is that there is this division, right? It’s like the mind and the body. And that’s absolutely not true. I think Freud said that our first ego, like when we’re a baby, is our body. And I think that’s sort of where Cronenberg is coming from with a lot of those problems. These different characters, these mad scientists, start with this false mind/body dichotomy. With Rabid, a surgery happens at this plastic surgery clinic and think about how different plastic surgery was then, versus how it is now, how [now it’s] much more open and common and less stigmatized, and how back then, it really was for the ultra-privileged. Some of these films are trying to blast apart this mind/body thing, and that the mind is the body and the body is the mind.
That grounding aspect has me curious about Iowa and how do you see these films being pertinent for folks connected to this place.
That’s a huge question. So much of who I am is because of where I grew up and where I went to college, which is such a formative experience and was a time of many things, including realizing how a family deals with something or chooses not to deal with something like mental illness. And when you grow up in a place where there aren’t that many things to do, your imagination is bigger and you have more time to explore things. Iowa is a great place to grow up. And what’s happening now in the state, and more broadly, is absolutely fucked, and I hate it.
Thinking about formulas and a more “mainstream” director like Martin Scorsese — his films tend to give you a full formula, a full plate. Take Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises. I can see Cronenberg and Scorsese in dialogue, but Cronenberg’s film lingers on the violence, holds on it, makes it naked in a way where Scorsese’s films feel more dressed up, packaged with a bow. And frankly it’s that bow that terrifies me.
Scorsese is so stylish, and he was dissecting toxic masculinity decades before anyone else was fucking talking about it. Half of Scorcese’s characters are godawful and you would never want to be around them. He is not saying “be like this person.” But because his films are stylish, people get lost in that, and it becomes like this whole thing.
I think Cronenberg is someone who is dragging you back down to earth and when two guys are fighting [in a sauna], it’s these two bodies fighting. It is just two naked men. It’s all about bringing us back down to this more primal place of humbling us. You think you’re special? You think this isn’t what it is? Actually, sorry, there is no escapism here.
Not that all art needs to be everything and solve everything, but what are the limits of Cronenberg’s films? What can’t they do, where does his POV end?
Thinking about M. Butterfly, the fact that he even auditioned people who were drag queens or trans themselves was completely unheard [of at the time] and for most of the 20th century. And Cronenberg said about M. Butterfly — this isn’t an exact quote— “biological gender is completely irrelevant, because Song (John Lone) is a creation of me and John Lone and the camera.” So he was saying, essentially, that whatever is assigned at birth is not the limit of what gender is; it’s a construction. That’s very forward-thinking. And even if the terms he used weren’t right, that idea is completely correct.
For most of his career, Cronenberg was considered a misogynist, and now many see him as respecting women. He clearly respects women, but there were so many campaigns to get his films out of the theaters, and so even something like eXistenZ, with the amount of emphasis on a man having anal sex and being penetrated anally, like, I’m sure if that was shown in in a theater with an audience in the ’90s and everybody’s snickering, I would think this is making fun of gay men. And people were very upset about Naked Lunch too, with it not really dealing with homosexuality — it’s sublimated. But I think that’s more interesting because William S. Burroughs [who wrote the book the film is based on], while his attitude is to be emulated, his actions are not.
And this is true with David Lynch, but it’s also true with something like Sleepaway Camp. The first time I saw Sleepaway Camp was around 2008, with a bunch of gay friends, and they said this film is extremely transphobic. And now there are a ton and ton and ton of trans critics who say this film is great, and I’m like, OK, I can see it. But whenever I think of it, I think of that first time I saw it, before there was this larger kind of conversation.
I’m sure there are plenty more things in culture that I’ll live to see their readings changed, and the understanding of them undergo these complete 180s. That’s what culture does. It’s always moving. It’s always changing.
