Infinity Pool (2023)

It’s customary to say that director and writer Brandon Cronenberg, son of David, is a chip off the old block. His first feature film, Antiviral (2012), involved obsessed fans seeking viruses that had previously infected celebrities. Skip ahead eight years to Possessor (2020), which is about assassination via a technique of body possession. And now Infinity Pool, which takes place at a resort for the ultra-wealthy in the fictional island country of Li Tolqa, a bit Central America junta and a bit Eastern Europe satellite state. The political climate is menacing and unstable, let’s put it that way. Novelist James Foster (Alexander Skarsgard) and his rich wife Em (Cleopatra Coleman) are vacationing there, coping with his years-long writer’s block. They meet a woman named Gabi (Mia Goth, the secret sauce in this stew) and her husband Alban (Jalil Lespert), who are familiar with the resort and island country. Gabi says she liked Foster’s novel and wants to get to know him. The next day, even though the resort warns its guests that they should not leave the resort grounds, the foursome takes a day for touring and debauching. Gabi and Alban have been there before and seem to know their way around Li Tolqa. On the way home Foster, who is the least drunk, takes the wheel. But he hits a local farmer with the car and kills him. Gabi and Alban advise fleeing, which they do post-haste. But within hours police are at Foster’s room pounding on the door. All four are taken in for questioning and, to cut to the chase, Foster is quickly found guilty. The punishment is extremely unusual and represents the science fiction element here. It’s there to be discovered. As it happens, Foster and a handful of others find something to like about it, even though it’s pretty horrible. It’s what brings Gabi and Alban back, for example, committing crimes to experience it again. Mia Goth, previously a revelation in Pearl, though maybe not X (and I haven’t seen MaXXXine yet), might be even better here as a young rootless rich woman with an unsettling kink for power. Cronenberg had to endure rounds of edits to get the picture’s rating down from NC-17 to R, which might give some idea of what you’re in for here. Hallucinogenic drug use is a staple and some of the picture’s best scenes and visions take place inside heads with the music playing. Brandon may not yet be up to some of the heights of David, but it looks like he might get there yet. He’s a real chip off the old block.

Crash (1996)

UK / Canada / USA, 100 minutes

Director: David Cronenberg

Writers: J.G. Ballard, David Cronenberg

Photography: Peter Suschitzky

Music: Howard Shore

Editor: Ronald Sanders

Cast: Elias Koteas, James Spader, Holly Hunter, Deborah Kara Unger, Rosanna Arquette, Peter MacNeill

Director and screenwriter David Cronenberg arguably went off the rails after the ‘70s and ‘80s, as his various signature exercises in hilarious, insightful outrage (Rabid, Scanners, Videodrome, The Dead Zone, The Fly, Dead Ringers) gave way to more literary ambitions. You could say it was already there, as The Dead Zone comes from a Stephen King novel, The Fly is from a famous midcentury horror story by George Langelaan, and Dead Ringers (believe it or not!) is based on real true-crime events (committed by a pair of identical twins who were gynecologists in New York City ... n.b., the tools are strictly under Cronenberg’s direction). As if stepping up to the literary plate and swinging for the fences, he next took on Naked Lunch (1992) by William Burroughs, Spider (2002) by Patrick McGrath, and, here, Crash by J.G. Ballard. I’m not sure, to continue the baseball metaphor, that he even gets the bat on the ball in these productions.

Full disclosure, I’m no fan yet of Ballard—or Burroughs, for that matter (except by fragments), though I’ve read and enjoyed a couple novels by McGrath. But I trust the taste of many of Ballard’s partisans and intend to try him again. For now I’ve read only Crash and some stories and haven’t got a lot from them. But the relative difficulty I had even getting a look at Cronenberg’s movie may speak at least in part to its dubious quality. It also has the dreaded NC-17 rating, which doesn’t help either. Our streaming world: I saw it was available a few weeks ago, via Amazon Prime I think, but when it came time to look at it the only way was with a Roku account. That left me with the adventure of an in-home VHS viewing and you know how that goes (see here). Crash (book and picture), to be perfectly reductive about it, concerns a group of polyamory- and BDSM-flavored folks who get off sexually on auto accidents. Quoth the cult leader Vaughan (Elias Koteas): “The car crash is a fertilizing rather than a destructive event.”

Videodrome (1983)

Canada, 87 minutes
Director/writer: David Cronenberg
Photography: Mark Irwin
Music: Howard Shore
Editor: Ronald Sanders
Cast: James Woods, Deborah Harry, Sonja Smits, Peter Dvorsky, Lynne Gorman, Jack Creley, Leslie Carlson, Sam Melkin

I'm pretty sure I've seen Videodrome in the theater, but the first time I saw it and the greatest impressions it has made on me have tended to come out of the semi-degraded VHS tape versions. Back in the day, a friend of mine always seemed to know how to put his hands on them early. Of course, seeing a DVD version now one quickly notes how the whole look and feel is slanted in exactly that direction. For much of the movie, in fact, we are either watching "television," or we are watching people watching televisions. One thing it gets surprisingly right still is the sense of intimate connection that develops between people and televisions—or monitors, I guess I had better say.

In many ways indeed Videodrome appears remarkably prescient now, certainly in terms of today's Internet culture, which is at least as bewitching and entrancing as anything on TV in Videodrome. It also correctly imagined the casual acceptance of pornography we see nowadays. "Got any porno?" says Nicki Brand (Deborah Harry), picking through the videotapes of Max Renn (James Woods), back at his place at the end of their first date. No embarrassment, no self-consciousness. But Videodrome is way more than a science fiction film that happened to get a few guesses right about the future—and quite a bit more ambitious than that too.

Dead Ringers (1988)

Canada/USA, 116 minutes
Director: David Cronenberg
Writers: David Cronenberg, Norman Snider, Bari Wood, Jack Geasland
Photography: Peter Suschitzky
Music: Howard Shore
Editor: Ronald Sanders
Cast: Jeremy Irons, Genevieve Bujold, Heidi von Palleske, Barbara Gordon, Shirley Douglas, Stephen Lack, Nick Nicholas, Lynne Cormack, Jill Hennessy, Jacqueline Hennessy

Director David Cronenberg suffered the indignity of seeing what is arguably his greatest film headed for release in the same time frame as the Arnold Schwarzenegger/Danny DeVito comedy vehicle Twins, which necessitated a retitling exercise for Cronenberg. It's a small thing in the larger scheme, but what a clanking substitution. This is not a movie about the idiomatic senses of the term, a casual way of remarking on a surprising resemblance, but instead more explicitly about profound psychological implications of a reasonably common biological occurrence, identical twins. In many ways it is all about the process of psychological separation—individuation, if you will.

It is also, no surprise, an unrelieved creep show with a masterful performance at its center by Jeremy Irons as a pair of identical twin gynecologists who have their own approach to things. That might just be Cronenberg having fun the way he does (and many parts of this are actually very funny, another of his hallmarks often missed)—but it's also not hard to imagine a case for Cronenberg's entire career having been always pointed, true north fashion, toward making just such a movie about twin gynecologists.

A History of Violence (2005)

USA/Germany, 96 minutes
Director: David Cronenberg
Writers: John Wagner, Vince Locke, Josh Olson
Photography: Peter Suschitzky
Music: Howard Shore
Editor: Ronald Sanders
Cast: Viggo Mortensen, Maria Bello, Ed Harris, William Hurt, Ashton Holmes, Peter MacNeill, Stephen McHattie, Greg Bryk, Kyle Schmid

There are a lot of fundamental flaws to complain about in A History of Violence and I made this appointment largely to do exactly that. The strength of David Cronenberg's best work for me has always lain in the way it so deliberately realizes irrationality, draws from dream states of consciousness, and delivers strange, beautiful, and funny moments and images. But A History of Violence is too often easy and pat about its rationality, proceeding mechanically by the numbers. Serial killers. A mob vendetta. Corpses all over the place (though by his viscera do we yet know him). It's a weak story, predictable and filled with convenient coincidence and cliché. It makes too much sense. It's too easy to understand. The monolithic evil of "east coast organized crime" vs. the goodness of an Indiana family man. Gee, Batman, I wonder which side we're on in that one.

Before long, looking at it again recently, I found myself happily making lots of notes about the overly saccharine family scenes (Howard Shore's thick overlay of orchestral swoonings sets a real Ron Howard mood), the unfortunate Tarantino gestures such as the pro forma thrill kill pair (man and boy) in the opening sequences, lathering on "madness!" to explain various ridiculous plot developments, multiple incidents of distracting stupidity on the part of otherwise smart characters, and the general sense that it is Cronenberg bound up and muffled by some kind of psychic straitjacket. Then along comes the second half, when Tom/Joey (the Viggo Mortenson role, and "Tom/Joey" is how it is played by all concerned) drives to Philadelphia to confront his brother and then returns home again. It is an extraordinary 50 minutes or so that probably didn't need the preamble, which in the light of it feels like so much throat-clearing. I think we should just call the second half an auxiliary chapter of The Decalogue, it's such Old Testament stuff, and forget the first half.

Videodrome (1983)

#45: Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1983)

I like what David Thomson, writing in the 2002 edition of his New Biographical Dictionary of Film, has to say about David Cronenberg: "Anyone born and reckoning on dying needs to confront Cronenberg."

I knew I wanted to get at least one of my three favorites by him in here, all from the '80s—Dead Ringers, The Fly, or Videodrome. Even though it's going to take us six months to get through them, 50 actually ends up being kind of a short list, and sometimes you just have to pick one from among many.