watch one “flaming creatures” and stfu.

The scene where drone workers suckle from the teats of moist fleshy typewriters is worth the price of admission. Classic!

so bad it made me call into question my admiration for a lot of his other films.

Wow, what crawled up your urethra tonight, Stencil?

not a damn thing, have you tards never heard of hyperbole on the internet? sheesh.

disappointing then, would be curious to watch it again now and see if i like it better.

I pretty much got off the Cronenberg bandwagon after Dead Ringers, that’s still my fave

I thought the The Fly-Dead Ringers-Naked Lunch sequence the best of Cronenberg’s career.

I watched it again about six months ago and still liked it a lot.

Love it.

c

Pretty good movie, but Ornette Coleman/Howard Shore score=WHOOOHOOOO!

Great Burroughs movie — not really “Naked Lunch” but how could it be? Cronenberg is infallible.

Infallible? Hey, I love the guy, but I saw a “A History of Violence.”

don’t forget “crash,” that movie sucks donkey balls too.

I deny the existenz of History of Violence

M. Butterfly is the craptastic crapfest that needs to be expunged.

Naked Lunch was great when I first saw it in the theater. Subsequent viewings fall off, but agree with the fantastic soundtrack.

‘a history of violence’ is great. ‘naked lunch’ is good. ‘crash’ is okay.

I can think of at least two things wrong with that title.

Anyway, yes, I like it. Once you accept that it’s not going to be an actual attempt at filming the Naked Lunch book, then it’s very easy to settle down and enjoy it for what it is.

Hstencil, please tell more about Flaming Creatures.

‘crash’ towers over ‘history of violence’, and it’s better than ‘naked lunch’ which is okay but ech, it’s no ‘towers open fire’. really unsure what ‘flaming creatures’ has to do with anything.

i was thinking about eXistenZ the other day, when i saw “allergy” misspelled as “allegra”

I think it’s his worst film, and has virtually nothing to do with the novel.

On a purely artistic judgement level, I give it a value of a D- to maybe a C for good cinematography.

Personal taste level I give it an F.

i like it a lot. it has hardly anything to do with the novel, true, but it appropriately conveys the mood of a lot of burroughs’ writings, and it looks really good.

i think it has quite a lot to do with the novel. i’m not a big fan but the idea of literally trying to ‘film’ the ‘novel’ here seems more redundant to me than what d-cro went for.

C—very faithful to Burroughs’ vision, if not the substance of the novel itself

“Crash” does not suck donkey balls. “Crash” fucks a donkey in a wound in its leg.

(I actually kinda like it—the movie, not the act of bestiality via open cut.)

“Crash” fucks a donkey in a wound in its leg.

Ah, been reading Hogg lately?

Never really dug Naked Lunch (the film). Not a huge fan of the book, either, but at least I respect Burrough’s novel for its originality, humor and possession of vast balls.

The movie seems like a cop-out to me. A pedestrian biopic dressed up in “surrealist” clothing. Nowhere near as transgressive, intelligent or exhilarating as the source material. And not nearly gay enough. Not even close. It’s fun to watch, sure — trippy, cool special effects, a decent story — but it doesn’t seem significant in any way.

Had the same problem with Crash. On its own, its ... okay. Not great, but not terrible, either. Kinda misjudged, but interesting enough, and certainly watchable. But it’s a terrible disservice to the novel, and one that makes me doubt Cronenberg’s committment to his own material/ideas. Both of these films are ultimately rather cowardly. Where Burroughs and Ballard were monsters, punching terrible, yawning holes in humanity’s vision of itself, Cronenberg reduces their profoundly violent anti-art to kooky sci-fi titillation.

Crash>>>>History of Violence>>>>>>>Naked Lunch

Crash is a pretty fab fetish movie. Car salesman: “This is very bad.” Ain’t read the Ballard but, on its on, it’s hardly kooky sci-fi titillation.

Naked Lunch was kinda meh as a hetero version of book/ film ABOUT Burroughs. But then, aside from some of the funny bits like Benway’s surgeries, and the passages of boys being eaten, I don’t much like the book either.

one thing i’d never fault cronenberg for is lack of commitment to the material. adam, i don’t get where you’re coming from. but then, i could care whether or not an artist has balls, and i don’t know what respect means with regard to art

the film Crash does a massive disservice to the book, in my opinion (much moreso than Cronenberg’s version of Naked Lunch)—but I think that’s to be expected with any book that is constructed almost entirely out of interior monologues.

eh, it is what it is—why worry about a debt owed to the book? it’s not a book, it’s a film

xpost

Yeah Shakes — watch out, here come another oppinion — no film could properly “service” Crash, could it? You pretty much have to take the position that films can’t generate thought the way novels can, and I don’t adhere to that. Just diff beasts.

^I mean, to argue that you “expected” a disservice to the novel^

crash is fucking terrible, you people are nuts.

fwiw, ballard REALLY liked Cronenberg’s Crash (from memory, Burroughs was more ambivalent abt the Naked Lunch movie)

Anyone see ‘Spider’? I sat through it with a reverential festival audience, and it would take an awful lot for me to give the benefit of the doubt to any project with Cronenberg’s name on it ever again.

Abducted by aliens after ‘Dead Ringers’? Could be.

yeah I agree abt the inherent difference in mediums, etc. It just makes me wonder what the point of using something like Crash for source material is... its probably safe to assume Cronenberg just digs the challenge of filming notoriously “unfilmmable” books. In the case of Crash, I was just bored—it lacked the erotic frisson that drives the book. Or maybe I just found the fetishism too opaque, like I had no understanding of the characters’ drives or motives.

x-post!

(btw judging from the interviews on the DVD, Burroughs seemed pretty damn happy with the film version. issues of de-gay-ifing it a bit aside).

Anyone see ‘Spider’? I sat through it with a reverential festival audience, and it would take an awful lot for me to give the benefit of the doubt to any project with Cronenberg’s name on it ever again.

I need to see it again; I left thinking that Ralph Fiennes may be a post-nasal drip, but I’d rather see him speak dialogue than pretend he’s Emil Jannings.

Aw, Spider was great! What’s not to love about Ralph Fiennes muttering inaudibly for 90 minutes?

xp—apparently it’s pistols at dawn for me and Soto.

this is like one of those Woody Allen threads where nobody agrees on when he jumped the shark or what his best movies are

(I really liked Existenz and History of Violence but was thoroughly put off by Dead Ringers, for ex.)

I liked Spider, eXistenZ and just about every other Croney mentioned here more than the inexplicably revered A History of Violence.

Crash: no understanding, no frisson.. that was deliberate if I recall correctly what he’d said he was trying to do with the film. it was supposed to be flat. ballard liked it very much

Someone with such a mixture of the tony and the pulpy in his blood is always capable fo producing crap.

Or maybe I just found the fetishism too opaque, like I had no understanding of the characters’ drives or motives.

I think a strong subtext through Ballard’s body of work is that the characters don’t understand their own drives or motives either, and for the most just let themselves be carried along by them without facing them. A lot of the creepiness in his work comes when the question “why are you the way you are?” starts to worm its way into characters’ heads, not just the reader’s head.

Dead Ringers is prolly my favorite, thanks to Jeremy Irons, Genevieve Bujold, and the art direction.

Cronenberg’s greatest cinematic moment is when he does the cameo as the creepy button-mask dude in “Nightbreed”.

Outside of that, I like “Naked Lunch” (although I never seem to remember why when I watch it), love “Dead Ringers”, hated “Crash”, and “Spider” has been sitting on my shelf unwatched after finding it on clearance at Blockbuster a few months ago. Also, where is teh love for “Videodrome”?

long live the new flesh!

i liked spider, i adore eXistenZ. i kind of see the fly/dead ringers/mme butterfly as opera.

The five films he made in the ’80s, with The Fly being the masterpiece and Dead Ringers close behind, are my favorite “run” of DC’s. The earlier stuff is too grotty for a non-horror-lover like me, and he’s hit-and-miss since.

...but I remember Judy Davis being spectacular in NL.

She was a better fictionalized Jane Bowles than Debra Winger was too.

in what?

yeah she is. The early stuff—the Brood, Scanners, etc.—all have their moments (Olver Reed and Crazy Paddy MacGoohan respectively) but yeah it was in the 80s that he really hit his stride. Def. hit and miss at this stage in his career.

(er xpost)

Alfred must be referring to the Sheltering Sky...?

Yup.

no, i think he’s better now. more unfathomable, which i appreciate

Where Burroughs and Ballard were monsters, punching terrible, yawning holes in humanity’s vision of itself, Cronenberg reduces their profoundly violent anti-art to kooky sci-fi titillation.

kooky sci-fi titillation >>>>>> profoundly violent anti-art

Judy Davis had a pretty great run in the early nineties: Impromptu, Barton Fink, NL, capped by Husbands & Wives.

c

Naked Lunch is classic if only for the line “If you look carefully at my lips, you’ll realize that I’m actually saying something else.”

old cached Cronenberg thread

xpost

yeah Winger, but Davis played fictionalized Joan Burroughs — Jane Bowles in something else?

Ian Holm and Judy Davis played variations on Paul and Jane Bowles.

Bill played “William Tell” with Jane TOO?

yeah the biographical “facts” are deliberately obscured and mixed up—just as Burroughs would prefer, I imagine.

anyway Davis basically plays two characters in the film—Joan Lee/Joan Frost

Cronenberg is coasting on the hipster/film-geek cred he built with the early horror flicks and capitalized on with the amazing one-two punch of “The Fly” and “Dead Ringers”.

Since then, he’s done almost nothing of note:

“Naked Lunch”—Silly. Cowardly with regard to Burroughs’ sexuality.

“Crash”—Sillier. Why adapt a book if you aren’t comfortable with the content/ideas?

“M. Butterfly”—Boring. A waste of a whole bunch of perfectly decent costumes.

“Spider”—Boringer. A glass box full of dirt in which nothing happens.

“History of Violence”—Pointless. A film of ideas that doesn’t actually have any.

I mean, I guess “eXistenZ” is okay, but it’s basically just an updated, rationalized version of “Videodrome”. And nowhere near as brain-fryingly tawdry/weird as that opus of depraved incoherence.

OTM. With both ‘Crash’ and ‘Naked Lunch’, Cronenbeberg somehow manages to leach out almost all of the really shocking and disturbing stuff which made the books famous in the first place. A lot of the elements are still there, but somehow rendered utterly inert.

Maybe what made the books famous didn’t interest him. Certainly what made Naked Lunch “shocking” in the ’50s was no longer a generation later.

Does anybody really like Burroughs’ Naked Lunch anyway?

I prefer Burroughs’ later work.

Naked Lunch needed more sci-fi gangs of feral, cocksucking, boy-assassins, that and be 1000X more non-linear. They’ll get around to filming a proper Red Night Trilogy about the same time they get Lovecraft right.

Well, there was that scene in which Julian Sands turned into a mugwump while buggering Kiki in a parrot cage.

Yeah, but in a Burroughs book, shit like that happens every page.

“Certainly what made Naked Lunch ”shocking“ in the ’50s was no longer a generation later.”

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.

In some ways, Matrix Reloaded is closer to Naked Lunch than Naked Lunch

This movie makes an EXCELLENT Peter Weller trilogy when combined with Robocop and Buckaroo Banzai.

(I like Naked Lunch, but yeah prefer Burroughs’ later stuff as well)

Hang on a second, if we’re talking about his other work too, then why has nobody mentioned Shivers? That is quite probably my favourite Cronenberg.

Does anybody really like Burroughs’ Naked Lunch anyway?

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.

Cities of the Red Night trilogy is some kind of career-capper masterpiece, for sure. Its weird how writers, unlike artists in almost every other creative medium, tend to get better as they get older.

x-post I’ve always been curious about Shivers. I still haven’t seen any of the pre-Scanners stuff.

everything up through Scanners is of middling quality—lots of ideas, not always well executed.

i found burroughs unreadable..

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

i mean, who knows, maybe ballard wanted to write jane austen novels but he was afraid, people are afraid of all sorts of things

It would have been better if Bruce Conner made the film version of “Crash”

I loved the book of Naked Lunch. But then, I haven’t read any of his stuff for almost ten years: I was a huge fan aged about 14–17.

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.

I was a huge fan aged about 14–17.

Me too! That was my big Burroughs phase.

I’ve gotten a whole different set of ideas out of Burroughs as an adult than I did as an adolescent.

Yeah, I went through a major Burroughs obsession, and Naked Lunch is definitely one of the key books. The “Literary Outlaw” bio kind of killed it for me, though.

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.

The “Literary Outlaw” bio kind of killed it for me

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

yeah, never read the bio, not interested. the Collected Interviews, however, is fantastic.

i like that bio

Gentleman Junkie is pretty cool, though. A very quick reading bio with lots of pictures on full color pages. Worth seeking out a used copy.

“Literary Outlaw” is a pretty thorough literary bio, it was just a bit too much of the man behind the curtain for me. He certainly doesn’t come out of it as the all-seeing guru the industrial bands of the early 80’s had him cracked up to be.

I can already guess at all the dirty laundry he’s got (a closeted homo and avowed mysognist who murdered his wife, hmmm) I don’t need to dig through it with a fine-tooth comb.

Yeah, it’s tedious.

xpost; Not so much the dirty laundry, which I more-or-less knew about anyway, what came through for me was an unmerciful picture of a rather hapless and gullible flake.

Haha I like the part where he talks about Lou Reed being a moron while completely misinterpreting the lyrics to “I’m Waiting For The Man”.

“the one thing a drug addict would not do is chase black women.”

Dar1a:

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.

Videodrome is the shit.

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.

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.

I used to have the terrible habit of discovering artists like that.

The common thread seems to be an initial lack of concern for the ‘rules’ of their choice of medium and/or media.

They slowly develop their OWN rules and their scope gets narrower and narrower and it takes a shit, because their rules are based on odd personal quirks rather than generations of research.

What was particularly weak about A History of Violence? The previews put me off, but fortunately it was one of those movies that’s nothing like how the previews suggest it’ll be. Much more straight-up than your usual Cronenberg (didn’t see Spider), but with some seriously blacke humour in parts. Very enjoyable.

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/