Cronenberg's "Naked Lunch" C or D?

I don't think that's at all true of Crash. Crash isn't like most novels. It isn't like most anything, except perhaps a really, REALLY bad drug experience. It's just a series of obsessive repetitions and reconfigurations of one primal image/scene: car-crash-sex-death. The novel burrows into you, repelling you (and it's as cripplingly repellent in its pathological, violent, insanely detailed obsessional imaginings as any medical or atrocity footage) but also drawing you in.

A narrative and characters eventually emerge out of the novel's pornographic, carnage strewn fugue-state, but the whole thing feels like a weird, alien parody of both the novel as art form and of human thinking in general. It feels wrong at a very deep level, like the art-product of a profoundly diseased and profoundly inhuman mechanism.

The funny thing is that while it was often called an "unfilmable novel," it would easily lend itself to faithful, literal adaptation. While Crash consists mostly of interior imaginings, its general topography and themes are quite cinematic, and Ballard describes its world in almost exclusively visual terms. The book is a series of repeating images and scenes: people fucking each other in cars or being injured by cars, sex organs being mutilated in car accidents, and people interacting with cars in various other ways. Viscera, semen and broken glass. Over and over and over and over. And over and over. With the ostensible narrative only slowly emerging from the weirdly staggered rhythm of terrible violence and the charged calm that preceeds and follows it. While that might not be watchable by most folks' standards, it's eminently filmable.

The book isn't just about how people relate to technology, but how people's deepest selves are transformed by their relationship to technology. How we see the world as a playpen of technologies, and what it might mean to see ourselves in similar terms. How we now see everything by agency of technology, and how that commodification of perception changes the nature of the seen. It's not a nice book, and it's hard even to call it a good book, but it is an important book, and I expected a more serious, challenging, morally & intellectually engaged response from Cronenberg.

I do. I've spent a lot more time reading stuff like With William Burroughs, The Job and Burroughs Live than any of his novels, though. I'd still like to read the trilogies. I've got Soft/Ticket/Nova and Cities of the Red Night sitting on the shelf.

The Naked Lunch movie is ok, but when I had VHS tapes of them both I'd usually go for Burroughs: The Movie instead.

Videodrome, The Fly, Dead Ringers and eXistenZ are my favorite DC films.

re: balllard, again, I'm not quite understanding why fidelity to the novel is owed. but also not understanding at all how, going by what was filmed, one might really think the director wasn't comfortable with the book - that aesthetic choices were made out of fear/cowardice rather than based on experience re: what works in film? it strikes me that it's very easy to reject a work of art by saying the artist is a coward, but I don't believe you. maybe ballard wanted to write a book that looked like cronenberg's film but he was too afraid

Marmot, the early stuff is ace, but it is very silly. I consider Shivers to be proper joyous pulp, and it is one of the reasons I still want to watch his more recent output.

Me too! That was my big Burroughs phase.

There's what sounds like a fairly faithful indie version of Ballard's "Atrocity Exhibition" out on DVD now. Less filmable than Crash, you would have thought. Haven't seen it, but the stills look cool, though the reviews I have seen haven't tempted me to spend the money.

Ugh, I never even finished that thing. The interview books are much better.

Cronenberg strips Crash of all intent to harm (not to offend, shock or transgress, but to somehow do real damage to those who encounter it). He strips it of its formal inventions and radical intent. He strips away most of its thematic content, and presents the core narrative (thin, strange, fascinating) as Crash itself. Why? Why did he do this?

Only David Cronenberg knows his own mind. I can't say anything convincing about what his choices REALLY reveal. But I can talk about how those choices strike me, as a viewer. With Crash, he implicitly asks us to acccept that he was attracted to the narrative and the narrative alone. To the simple human story underneath all the superficial carnage. And I just don't buy it. Crash's narrative is only a very small part of its strength and function as a novel.

But Crash is (or was, before Cronenberg filmed it) a famously "unfilmable" countercultural novel, and one with seemingly "Cronenbergian" themes. [Please excuse all the quotes and parens, I'm doing the best I can.] On paper, it's a match made in heaven. It reeks of late-80s literary cred and intellectual self-regard. And I can certainly see why he might not have wanted to devote significant time, effort and money to crafting the sickening meatgrinder that a TRULY literal adaptation of Crash would resemble. I'm not saying that he should have taken a strictly literal approach.

But that's the really interesting question. How do you do something like that, and still produce a releasable, watchable, compelling film? How do you honor the spirit of this stupendously fucked-up, misanthropic, borderline psychotic text within the cinematic medium? 'Cuz if you don't really want to try, why not film a different book? Or, why not make something that deals with similar themes and situations without linking it by name to a celebrated, challenging and widely-respected work of literature?

I'm not saying that David Cronenberg shouldn't have made Crash the way he did. It's his right to pursue his artistic vision wherever it takes him, and if the copyright holders were okay with it, then more power to him.

I just didn't like it much. I felt let down. Cheated. I felt that Cronenberg was attaching himself to the notoriety and (perhaps overblown) intellectual/literary cache of the novel without rising to meet it on its own ferocious terms.

His early films are very good.
He seems to be one of those artists who starts at the top of their game or near it and then slowly drops to nothing.

This is very OTM, my earlier silly hyperbole aside. History of Violence is by far his weakest effort yet.

Also.... ballard on cronenberg

When people say, well, “A Dangerous Method” doesn’t seem very Cronenbergian — I always say I prefer “Cronenburgundian” — it’s irrelevant to me. Creatively it means nothing.

As a director you’re literally making 2,000 decisions a day, and no one else is going to make those same decisions. So it’s definitely going to be your movie, in the sense that everything filters through your nervous system and your sensibility, and you don’t have to worry about it beyond that. Whether it’s obviously what people think of as a Cronenberg movie or not is irrelevant. And when I’m making a movie I forget all my other movies. It’s as if they don’t exist, other than the craft and the experience, which of course is there. As I say ad nauseam, the movie tells you what it wants, and you give it what it needs, in terms of style, in terms of what lens you choose for the close-ups — the classic long lens, or the more interesting wide-angle lens where the camera’s closer to the person and the background is more in focus than it would be otherwise.

http://www.salon.com/2011/12/03/david_cronenberg_its_as_if_my_old_movies_dont_exist/singleton/