Cronenberg's "Naked Lunch" C or D?

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/