To fuse and refuse: The Fly at 25

Seth Brundle, the tragic genius at the core of The Fly (1986), is motivated to crack the secrets of teleportation not only because such innovation will challenge established concepts of time and space, but also because he suffers from motion sickness—teleportation means never having to set foot in a propelled vehicle again. This bit of character eccentricity is one of the many ingenious details that have allowed The Fly to endure these last 25 years, not only as what may be the defining synthesis of every major theme in David Cronenberg’s filmography, but as the modern big-budget genre film that synthesized an intelligent query into the most vital and troubling issues faced by contemporary philosophers, scientists and policy-makers with an absolutely primal and inspired display of body horror theatrics. There is no other movie at once so smart and so disgusting. Indeed, The Fly features what remains the most astonishing vomit scene—wait, make that scenes—in cinema history. (A word of warning to the uninitiated: do not watch this movie while eating yogurt.)

Rooted in the 1957 short story by George Langelaan and, of course, the Vincent Price film of the same title (1958), The Fly is several things: a chamber love triangle between Brundle, a journalist (Geena Davis) trying to file and article for a magazine named Particle, and her editor (John Getz); a science fiction about a man who accidentally gets into a machine with an insect and pays the abysmal consequences; and a shock-meditation on aging, death, and what it means to be human. “Am I dying?” Brundle wonders after his successful self-teleportation with insect co-pilot begins to exact its gooey toll on his flesh. (“His” flesh? Or something else? Teleportation obliterates form in order to recreate it elsewhere.) This being a Cronenberg film, whatever existential terror or grief Brundle feels en route to becoming Brundle-fly is eclipsed by unquenchable fascination. Other versions of Langelaan’s ‘Fly’ had its protagonist lose his ability to speak relatively early in the story; Cronenberg insisted that his Brundle keep his tongue nimble as long as possible—he wanted Brundle to articulate what was happening to him until the very end, at which point a single, unbearably sad gesture is all that’s needed for the experiment to reach its dire conclusion.

Much credit has to be given to Goldblum, whose toothy, lanky charisma, dry humour and quiet showmanship rendered him one of Cronenberg’s perfect alter egos: a smart man of action; a geek with sex appeal; a guy who can endow the word "cheeseburger" with seductive magic. And Davis, Goldblum’s girlfriend at the time, is every bit his match, both intrigued and repulsed, in-love and loving and fiercely self-protective: her alarmed response to the possibility that she’s pregnant with Son of Brundle-fly is deeply affecting. Its fantastic narrative being awkwardly yet necessarily compressed, The Fly is not without its little flaws—a bit of boilerplate dialogue here, some garish lighting there; way too much showy pathos from Getz’s emasculated ex—but the immense power of its unnerving ideas, the complex dynamics of its tautly told story, and the nuanced performances of its two leads earn its status as some very peculiar sort of masterpiece.

Untapped potential: Limitless

Eddie Morra (Bradley Cooper) was just another New York slob dodging his landlord and trying to write a science fiction novel about “the plight of the individual in the 21st century” until he ran into his shifty ex-brother-in-law and got hooked on NZT 48, an experimental underground drug that grants imbibers access to those proverbial underused regions of the brain. Suddenly everything Eddie’s ever read, heard, or seen becomes organized and available. He finishes his book in four days, wins back his girl (Bright Star’s Abbie Cornish), learns multiple languages, and masters the stock exchange. The side effects? Paranoia, some vertiginous crashing, and a nasty addiction. He also has ever-burgeoning gaps of missing time. During one such gap he may have even killed someone—but Eddie’s got other things to worry about. Like getting rich, impressing Robert De Niro’s mega-mogul, and surviving business ties with the Russian mafia.

Pay It Forward producer/screenwriter Leslie Dixon based Limitless on Alan Glynn’s The Dark Fields. Glynn’s novel came out in 2001, but the premise feels more resonant in 2011 and its everything/everywhere/all-the-time access to data via portable technology (which some depressingly predict will eventually be wired into our bodies). Its deeply fertile premise is finally what carries Limitless, which is never less than engaging. Dixon’s script is fun and structurally inventive (including a pleasingly abrupt little bitch-slap of an ending) yet curiously generic (it’s so focused on being a solid, twisty thriller that it seems to forget that it could potentially be so much more). Meanwhile, Neil Burger’s direction mirrors that of his effects-fussy, thematically kindred 2006 breakthrough The Illusionist. His teaser/opening credits sequence feels like a trailer and seems especially inspired by Google Earth. His camera likes to zip through windshields and hair salons. There’s too much music cluttering the soundtrack and far too many cutesy, overly illustrative visual enhancements, such as the fridge magnet letters showering down on Eddie while he plunges headlong into writing. This tale of fantastical drug abuse could have benefited from a sober approach. Or David Fincher. Or, come to think of it, David Cronenberg, and his cool insights into the latent beast within.

As you consider all that Eddie might accomplish under NZT you start to realize not only how frustratingly limited Limitless’ imaginative circuitry is but also how much of a selfish prick Eddie is. Which is a perfectly legitimate way to go: film noir is full of guys like this, compellingly repulsive antiheroes hard-wired to look out exclusively for number one. The problem is that Eddie’s not written or realized in a way that seems cognizant of his character flaws (the movie wants to like him too much), and thus fails to exploit these flaws for good, gritty drama. Cooper’s fine in the role, but brings nothing extra, nothing that imbues Eddie with that special quality that makes you both envious and appalled, wondering how you might get your hands on some of what he’s got. Perhaps we’ll be seeing more stories like this one in the coming years, stories driven by our apparent urge to merge the mind with someone’s ideal computer gadget. Perhaps these other stories will go farther. In the meantime, Limitless is worth checking in with, if only to ponder the outer limits (of which this would have made a pretty good episode).

Cronos: moving parts

An aging seller of antiques is bitten by a strange device, begins to thirst for blood, and is rendered immortal, yet the word “vampiro” is never uttered in Cronos (1993), allowing our experience of the film to expand far beyond the limits of genre or myth. This is a film where the balance of explicit and occult knowledge is kept carefully calibrated at all times. We know only what’s essential, even if what’s essential sometimes includes the seemingly trivial. Every character, even the most minor, is endowed with distinct attributes, eccentricities and preoccupations, most all of them concerning the imperfections of the flesh, while at the film’s centre lies an insectile machine inexplicably compelled to merge with flesh, blood and bone, luring all those who make contact with it into fathomless addiction.

When I first saw Cronos I was delighted to discover a horror film that seemed to share the labyrinthine thematic network of David Cronenberg’s corporeal cinema, so rich as it is in cerebral metaphor and arresting, guttural imagery. Yet Guillermo Del Toro, Cronos’ writer and director, would prove to possesses his own unique imaginative universe, one which embraces the fabulous and the supernatural in ways antithetical to Cronenberg’s materialist sensibility. Cronos was but the first giant step in a prolific career that would quickly, and rather deftly shift between the commercial and the personal. Nevertheless, even after The Devil’s Backbone (01) and Pan’s Labyrinth (06), Cronos remains my favourite Del Toro film. It’s not as lush nor as honed as the later work, but it has a shaggy perfection all its own, and that special air of an exuberant, exacting young artist trying everything for the first time. Del Toro has said that the worst thing a filmmaker can have is everything he or she needs, and maybe there’s something about Cronos that generates some extra electricity out of sheer hunger and determination. The film is now available on DVD and Blu-ray from Criterion.

So Jesús Gris (the great Federico Luppi, giving a marathon performance) unknowingly falls victim to the 400 year-old device. It comes to him by accident, latching onto first his hand and then his heart, its golden claws inserting themselves into his skin. Thenceforth desirous of human blood, Gris is haunted by need, and like any junky he endures humiliating scenes to fulfill this need, such as licking some stranger’s nosebleed off the marble floor of a public washroom. Gris is hunted by one Ángel de la Guardia (Ron Perlman, so funny and precise in his bits of behaviour), the nephew of a dying industrialist (Buñuel regular Claudio Brook) who knows of the device’s powers and wants it for himself. But Ángel would just as soon never find the device; he’s waited too long already for his uncle to die and leave him the generous inheritance which will finally allow him to get that nose job he’s dreamt of for so long.

Death and vanity loom over everything in Cronos, and the film brims with ghoulish humour. It also features moments of touching connection between Gris and his eight year-old granddaughter Aurora (Tamara Shanath). Aurora speaks little and rarely drives the action, yet she might be the film’s real heroine, hiding the device in her teddy bear—just like little Pearl hides the money in The Night of the Hunter (55)—and gradually learning to let go of her grandparent as a child’s first brush with death. That sense of loss and wonder is what lingers in the film’s final moments, and most especially its closing dedication to Del Toro’s grandmother, their relationship having inspired the one shared by Gris and Aurora. It’s a satisfying, somber resolution to a captivating journey through morbid pursuits, one that in all its errant Catholicism, its peculiar relationship to the United States, its wily suspicions about its colonialist past, and its inventive violence, could perhaps have only come from Mexico.

Never Let Me Go: The children are our future

When we talk about “unfilmable” novels we’re usually talking about those deficient in the essentials of classical narrative: a single protagonist, rising action, a satisfying climax, and so on. Yet there are filmmakers who have specialized in ushering such novels onto the big screen—David Cronenberg has performed this feat at least twice, with his highly personal realizations of William s. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch and J.G. Ballard’s Crash, both of which reshape their source material to better align with the time-based dictates of movies while challenging conventional notions of how movies work. Perhaps we’re better off describing as unfilmable those novels that defy cinematic adaptation not on account of their unconventional narratives but rather for their resistance to coming alive in a cinematic context. If we consider literary adaptation thusly, I think Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go might just offer us a textbook example of the unfilmable novel.

Narrated by a young woman looking back on her childhood years at Hailsham, a rural English boarding school, the discreetly dystopian Never Let Me Go is like so many of Ishiguro’s stories steeped in nostalgia, in a longing for an innocence that can’t be recovered. It’s a heartbreaking novel, one remarkable for its ability to sustain the reader’s total engagement while maintaining an almost relentless melancholy. It has a story with a beginning, middle and end, and it has a vividly drawn protagonist, yet these ingredients aren’t enough to keep the film version of Never Let Me Go from feeling somewhat inert. The screenplay is by Alex Garland, himself a novelist, though he claims to feel greater affinity to films than literature. Garland wrote the screenplays for the Danny Boyle films 28 Days Later and Sunshine, and Never Let Me Go follows a route similar to its predecessors, constructing an intriguing set-up, only to arrive at a flat final act, one that appears to misinterpret what intrigued us in the first place.

When I reviewed Never Let Me Go upon its publication in 2005, I tried to assess the novel without giving away its central revelation. The film, perhaps determined to undermine the inevitable spoilers that often accompany film reviews, gets this revelation out of the way fairly early on. I still think I can talk about Never Let Me Go, both novel and film, without completely spilling the beans. Let’s say that Hailsham serves a very special and covertly sinister purpose, preparing its students for a life that’s almost completely predetermined and clouding all this in euphemism. Among the problems with the film version is that once the cat’s out of the bag, once we know what our characters are destined for, the story has virtually no place to go. There’s an attempt to generate suspense in the final act yet it’s almost laughably clear that this suspense is founded on a total sham—the “sham” in Hailsham, as it were—and the result is a deeply somber ending that, rather ironically, inadvertently mocks its own characters for actually believing they’re anything but doomed.

I’m focusing on what strikes me as a major flaw, but I still recommend seeing the film. Directed by Mark Romanek, whose previous credits include the film One Hour Photo and a certain Björk video that in an odd way feels like something of a dry run for Never Let Me Go, the visualization of Hailsham and “the cottages,” where our central characters live for a period following graduation, is rich. There are striking images pierced with loneliness: that dress dangling in the wind, those bits of plastic clinging to a fence. The cinematography, costumes, hair and production design are dominated by dusky light, earth tones, woolen jumpers, and childlike mullets—a pervading coziness undercuts the story’s darkness with a veneer of autumnal warmth. The performances, especially that of Carey Mulligan, our heroine, are most often emotionally complex and touching, though Andrew Garfield’s love interest is a bit too lingered upon in scenes that give him nothing more to do than flip out, something he does with such abandon he might just win an Oscar. If we were to isolate any one part of Never Let Me Go it would seem a perfectly engrossing, beautifully rendered film, and one whose sociopolitical significance is so obvious you can’t even call it subtext. The problem with Never Let Me Go is how the story builds over the course of its entirety. Or rather doesn’t build.

There’s a question prompted by Never Let Me Go that’s curious for never actually being addressed, even indirectly: if these characters know they’re doomed, why don’t they run? In the novel the answer to this is somehow implicit, yet I wonder how it would have worked if the film had used this question as a launch pad for a very different, action-oriented narrative, one less faithful to the source material yet potentially more dynamic. (Having said all this, I'd be curious to hear what someone who hasn't read the book thinks...)

The Thing: Fear the familiar face!

When Hollywood endeavored to remake The Thing From Another World (1951), the late screenwriter Bill Lancaster wisely opted for a radical re-imagining, going back to the source material for inspiration, a novella by John W. Campbell Jr. entitled Who Goes There? Chief among the distinctions between The Thing From Another World and what would simply be called The Thing (82) was the decision, very much in keeping the Campbell’s narrative, to render the titular alien not as an angry salad bar in human form but rather an interplanetary chameleon, a parasite able to rapidly assume the form of whatever host organism it came into contact with after being thawed out by a Norwegian research team in Antarctica. They say mimicry is the highest compliment.

However, Lancaster’s script also differs from the earlier movie in that it features not a single woman. While the presence of women in the earlier movie could be written off as pandering to a broader audience with the arbitrary injection of a love interest, an argument of equal merit could be made that a great opportunity was lost in the resolve to make this an exclusively masculine story. A feminine perspective could have pleasingly complicated the deeply uneasy, paranoid group dynamics of The Thing, and you have to wonder if the absence of women didn’t emerge above all from squeamishness on the part of the filmmakers, all of them men, who may have felt uncomfortable with desecrating female bodies with the same infamously ferocious and nauseating zeal applied to those of men and canines throughout.

The Thing begins with a pretty corny looking flying saucer crashing into Earth, leaving no ambiguity as to what we’re dealing with from the get-go. There’s only a short, divertingly portentous half-hour or so between this cosmic establishing shot and the first manifestation of the alien presence in the encampment’s Husky cage, with flesh flying off of this poor pooch’s skull like a self-peeling banana, and blood-smeared spaghetti whipping around the room to ensnare the other dogs. The alien’s use of familiar flesh as a sort of Trojan Horse reveals a similar tactic to that of the aliens in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (56), which was also imaginatively updated and remade in a version directed by Philip Kaufman in ’78. But in The Thing, directed by John Carpenter, the process of transfiguration is itself the central concern of the movie. It veers away from the concerns of science fiction and into that of horror, emphasizing repeatedly the body as a site of grotesque violence and chilling anonymity.

The Thing, when not making you want to vomit, is pretty fun, another Carpenter siege drama where evil is evil and the good guys do what it takes. But I can’t help but imagine a David Cronenberg version, a movie far more curious, speculative and precise in its biological exegesis and bearing greater pathos. Undoubtedly Cronenberg, like the scientist in The Thing From Another World, would be more sympathetic to the alien than Kurt Russell, who rarely puts on a hat in the –40 tempests and eagerly torches everything in sight. But maybe we should be imagining a Werner Herzog version. Early in The Thing a characters named Windows tries to get in touch with his colleagues at McMurdo Station, the setting of Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World (07). Would those endearing misfits at McMurdo, spanning many countries of origin and encompassing both genders, have been able to fight off the alien? Or might they have embraced it as just another fellow outsider, far from home and in search of communion?

2000s: the decade in horror

What is horror? Something that invokes unease? Repulsion? What does it require? Surely not the supernatural, since so many horror films are grounded in realism and concern real-life horrors, and so many of the best ones are drenched in ambiguity. Is it something to do with how the past clings to us as we try to move forward in life? Something to do with death perhaps—though there are things worse than death. Let’s agree that horror films trade in some form of violence, though psychological or spiritual violence frequently trumps physical violence, which has the potential to just leave us numb or queasy, like a roller coaster ride.

Session 9

The genre seems to shift with every generation. What do the 2000s say about the way we fear and tremble today? Do we need graphic torture to keep us awake through the night? I confess that I can’t get too worked up over novel approaches to bodily desecration for its own sake. Torture cinema is certainly horrifying, but it’s also fundamentally boring. Like a dose of dysentery. The more I look over this list of my favourite horror films of our dwindling decade, the more I see how many endure for pretty much the same reasons the great horror films of the 30s and 40s or of the 60s and 70s endure. They strike a balance between unnerving mystery and a guttural, creeping certainty about something repellant. Something waits for us in the shadows. Something irrational, yet possibly real. Some shard of nightmare that lingers with us when we wake. Something common sense urges us to avoid. Yet we go to the movie anyway.

The Others

The Others (2001) leaned heavily on a hundred-year-old template, yet where the film finally lands is a brilliant twist on The Turn of the Screw. It was also the film that convinced me of Nicole Kidman’s talents. I’d found her too icy to be the sensual leading lady previous roles pitched her as, but playing this stern mother charged with protecting her two weirdly-diseased children in an enormous, apparently haunted house, she was both convincing and transfixing. The film found a strong companion piece in The Orphanage (07), also from a Spanish director, also featuring a woman, a house, and a past demanding to be acknowledged. And Belén Rueda carried that film just as boldly as Kidman did hers. It was a little cornier as I recall, yet there are things in it I haven’t stopped thinking about.

Birth

Speaking of Kidman, I’d propose that one of the most haunting horror films of the 2000s may have suffered critically, and maybe commercially, for not being regarded as horror at all. It’s only in the final moments of Birth (04), when Kidman’s heroine, shattered by her uncertainty over the case of the little boy who claimed to be her dead husband, that its generic status is confirmed. I missed it when it first appeared and only caught up with it later on DVD—and only after I’d devoured Warner’s Val Lewton box set, which greatly informed my reading of the film, which deserves to be considered among the finest works of Luis Buñuel’s old collaborator, the screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière.

The Descent

Speaking of birth, the birthing/cavern imagery in The Descent (05) made for some of the most potent meta-body horror of the decade. As it became more fantastical, aspects of the film were perhaps a little too conventional, and too silly, to maintain suspension of disbelief, but this story about an all-girl spelunking trip was at the same time too effective an exploitation of claustrophobia, both external and internal, to be written off.

The Ring

I’m tempted to include the deeply creepy, if, again, sometimes very silly The Ring (02) on this list. I only hesitate because I can’t quite call Gore Verbinski’s US remake any sort of significant revision of the Japanese original (1998)—except perhaps for whatever fresh resonance it generates from Naomi Watts’ central performance, which offers some vivid emotional variation we just don’t get from Nakano Matsushima. But I’d rather champion something else from Japan altogether. Séance (00), Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s fresh, inventive adaptation of Mark McShane’s novel Séance on a Wet Afternoon, is perhaps the finest example of the director’s unique, hushed horror aesthetic, drizzled with guilt.

The Devil's Backbone

The Devil’s Backbone (01) or Pan’s Labyrinth (06)? Both films involve children, both concern the legacy of the Spanish Civil War, and both were made by the immensely talented Guillermo Del Toro, who hails from Mexico but makes most of his best films, these two included, in Spain. I’ll choose the former, a ghost story, if only because it’s a purer example of the genre, and because the conceit of the unexploded bomb in the courtyard is one of the most inspired pregnant objects in recent film.

Spider

Session 9 (01), featuring a riveting central performance from Scottish actor Peter Mullan, gets my vote for best haunted house of the decade. Okay, it’s actually an asylum, not a house, but this is the movie’s bravura premise, which finds a small group of labourers pulling the asbestos out of the Danvers State Mental Hospital, a decrepit old shell of a building, and combines two of the best foundations for horror: the phantasmagoric and the looming threat of mental illness. The film is nearly as good as David Cronenberg’s Spider (02), adapted from Patrick McGrath. It’s also about the vaporous frontiers between lucidity and madness, between victim and predator, and also a bloody good showcase for a tremendous British acting talent, in this case Ralph Fiennes.

Let the Right One In

Equating the discomforts of lycanthropy with those of puberty, Canada’s own Ginger Snaps (00) was undoubtedly a superb, inventive application of a familiar monster mythology into an adolescent context. But I have to say I was even more impressed by Let the Right One In (08), which took a similar tack with vampires but accentuated its tale with greater specificity of location, period, mood and art direction. It’s just a weirder movie in all the right ways, less generic yet still hugely entertaining, going even deeper into questions about gender, development, and the vertiginous sexual confusion of childhood.

Pontypool

Can I make it up to Canada by declaring Bruce McDonald’s Pontypool (08) as easily the smartest, most deliriously bizarre spin on the zombie movie of the decade? It takes William Burroughs’ notion of the word as virus and runs with it like a screaming, foaming at the mouth maniac. Admittedly, it finally struggles hard to make complete sense, but it generates so many interesting questions along the way that coherence seems of secondary importance. It also the confines of a small town radio station and the deep, dark Ontario winter into a cocktail of serious chills.

Drag Me to Hell

I had a lot of fun with Drag Me to Hell (09), Sam Raimi’s return to horror after a long season of super hero hi-jinx—though like Raimi’s Spiderman movies this feels very much the product of comic books, specifically of the EC variety. A pretty, somewhat conceited girl just wants to manage a bank, but she gets stuck with a witch’s curse she can’t shake off, while Raimi sticks us with a surprise finale that left everyone in the theatre where I saw it reeling. Nothing, however, freaked the shit out of any big crowd I sat among like Paranormal Activity (07/09). Orin Peli’s demonic home movie horror is crude as all hell—it’s supposed to be—but its this very sense of the real, which it firmly held onto until its very stupid final moment, that imbued it with a feeling of campfire tale terror that’s so difficult to work over modern audiences with. Utterly reliant on contemporary technology, the movie is arguably designed for our age, yet more than anything else I’ve written about here it utilizes the most old-fashioned, if not primordial tricks in the book. It also hit number one at the box office last weekend. Go figure.

In the flesh: Cronenberg on Videodrome

The story goes that when Roberto Benigni met David Cronenberg he got down on all fours and kissed the director’s shoes. This was Toronto, many years ago, and it seems Benigni was in a state of euphoric relief. Cronenberg’s films, he explained, made him afraid to visit the city. It came as a surprise to discover that Canadians really were as polite as they say, that head-combusting telekinetic killers weren’t terrorizing Bay Street, that our televisions behaved. Cronenberg told the story when he dropped in on a screening of Videodrome at Jackman Hall last night. He reminisced about his stars, fondly recalling James Woods as the only actor he’s ever yelled at, and explaining how his work with Deborah Harry was essentially a matter of shrinking her performance down from rock-theatrics exaggeration to the eerily sexy hush it became. The film was presented as part of the Cinematheque Ontario’s Toronto on Film series, so Cronenberg was also there to talk about the city. There was something strangely warm and fuzzy about sitting in a capacity crowd to immerse ourselves in Max Renn’s descent into the sadomasochistic, surreal and cancerous world of Videodrome while taking note of the many glimpses of Toronto circa 1982. So much has changed since then, but it was oddly comforting to note that local legend Reg Hartt’s black and white photocopied posters for his “Cineforum” home screenings of classic films, which can still be found on lamp posts all over Toronto, looked exactly the same.

A filmmaker who truly aims for the guts

I have no idea how many times I've watched Videodrome in the last 27 years, but I can honestly say that even after multiple viewings as a child, a teenager and an adult, the movie remains absolutely fucking bananas. In his introduction to Cronenberg’s introduction Adam Nayman recalled the extra layers of taboo the film accumulated by having to be smuggled into his family home on VHS. Indeed, the film’s resonance as a home video product is a central element in its legacy, yet seeing it on the big screen with an audience reminds you how enduringly discomforting—and kind of hilarious—an experience the film offers. “It has a philosophy,” one character warns another about the titular underground torture porn, “and that’s what makes it dangerous.” That’s also what makes it deliciously goofy. The walls are electrified wet clay, the wizard is nothing but a library of videocassettes, and Renn feeds a gun to his stomach vagina cavity. The film wasn’t prescient on purpose, Cronenberg emphasized. In fact it looked backwards to some degree, to the ideas of Marshall McLuhan, who haunted the University of Toronto when Cronenberg was a student there. And it responded to what was in the air in the moment, like the presence of soft-core porn on Canadian television, and fears of the medium’s potentially corrupting powers that had been circulating for decades. “All you have an artist that makes you original is your antenna,” asserted Cronenberg, whose own antennae have been picking up often brilliantly perverse broadcasts from the collective Id for nearly four decades.

J.G. Ballard, 1930-2009

From the beginning he scrupulously surveyed a landscape the rest of us strive to keep at bay. He spent a pivotal portion of his youth in a Japanese internment camp, where violence, death and collapse were regularly on display. He lost the love of his life and mother of his young children while still in his early 30s. Yet despair and hopelessness seemed other to him. In his stories and novels he rendered with great precision and unfettered imagination what other writers merely drape in bathos. In his second novel The Drowned World (1962), he described a London visible only by the tips of its tallest buildings, the remainder completely submerged following a global catastrophe spurred by melting icecaps. “Their charm and beauty lay precisely in their emptiness, in the strange junction of two extremes of nature, like a discarded crown overgrown by wild orchids.” Later in the novel we’re given a tour of an underwater planetarium, which is to say we’re given the stars far below the surface of the sea. Such gifts are common in the work of J.G. Ballard.

When characterizing Ballard’s tales, whether fantastically dystopian or chillingly realist, one’s repeatedly tempted by the term “alienating,” yet what makes the work so arresting and provocative is the fact that his protagonists aren’t really alienated at all. They witness horrors that, rather than simply deadening affect, awake a new level of fascination with phenomena far grander in scale than individual lives or even civilizations. Like the experimental plants and animals bred in the laboratory of Ballard’s ‘The Voices of Time’ (60), his characters break away from conventional responses to their environment by utilizing some dormant impulse locked inside all of us, perhaps in our very genes. To read his books is to stimulate, as Martin Amis described it, “a disused part of the reader’s brain.” Transcending genre, form and, most gleefully, taste, Ballard remains singular. He died last Sunday morning in London, following a long struggle with cancer. He was 78.

James Graham Ballard was born to British parents in Shanghai in 1930. They lived luxuriously in an enclave upon whose fringes existed a world both “extravagant and cruel,” boasting a wild assortment of exotic crime. “Anything was possible, and everything could be bought and sold,” Ballard wrote. “In many ways, it seems like a stage set, but at the time it was real, and I think a large part of fiction has been an attempt to evoke it by means other than memory.” In a transformation that would echo again and again in images of abandoned buildings, empty pools and grounded aircraft, their protected world would be left a spectral cavity once the Ballards were placed in internment in 1943. Ballard received lessons in poverty, charity, starvation, solidarity and pettiness. He ate maggots for protein. And he was always curious, amazed and basically cheerful. “Seeing everything displaced and rearranged in a haphazard way gave me my first taste of the surrealism of everyday life.”

In 1946 Ballard returned to England, bombed-out and miserable, a victorious nation that behaved as though defeated, a place where “hope itself was rationed.” Ballard went to medical school, where he became transfixed by the cadavers he was assigned to dissect, seeing in their faces a palimpsest of experience. He then went to Moose Jaw with the RAF, and it was on the Canadian prairie that he discovered science fiction, the genre that would ignite his mind. He married Mary Matthews in 1955 and settled in Shepperton to have three kids and start in earnest his prolific writing career. Mary would die suddenly of pneumonia in 1963, leaving Ballard to do all the domestic and money-earning duties while still engaging in a dynamic social life in swinging London. His memoir Miracles of Life (08) is dedicated to and named after his beloved children, who he remained close to all his life. Yet happy families, or even unhappy families, were never to be a significant subject of his work.

Apocalyptic scenarios fuelled many of the early novels, yet the more Ballard interacted with the familiar contemporary world, the more truly unnerving his fiction became. The Kennedy assassination, his wife’s death, Vietnam, his memories of wartime Shanghai, and his interest in new feats of consumerism, fetish-making and media sensationalism merged to create the image/event/prose graft of The Atrocity Exhibition (66), aligning Ballard far more with Jean-Luc Godard or Andy Warhol at the peak of their powers than with the likes of Isaac Asimov. One of Ballard’s most infamous novels, Crash (73) encompasses the radical approach to speculation Ballard had taken, subverting our response to trauma into an obsession with configurations of modern embodiments of affluence and glamour. His characters survive car crashes only to then crave and even design more of them, erotically, wholly, seeking some psychotic communion. When David Cronenberg adapted the novel into an equally controversial film of the same name (96), it made for one of the most fruitful collaborations between two uncannily like-minded artists of the late 20th century.

Empire of the Sun (84) ushered him into the literary mainstream. A fictionalized retelling of his Shanghai experiences, it melded Ballard’s crisp, coolly poetic language with nostalgia and tenderness. From here, the bulk of remaining body of work would stick largely to the format most clearly outlined in High Rise (75), tales of cloistered, antiseptic colonies—gated communities in Running Wild (88) and Cocaine Nights (96), an elite business park in Super-Cannes (00), a giant exurban shopping mall in Kingdom Come (06)—where the deadening effects of modern life invites transgression, the promise of control invites tacit agreements to lose control, and a state of anarchy is longed for by exactly those who sought to maintain order. I reviewed most of these when they came out, and it never ceased to amaze me how these explicit variations on a theme in each case the same story could yield fresh insights.

I never met J.G. Ballard but I’ll miss him nonetheless. His voice so rarely gave comfort, but there is a sort of vertiginous exhilaration to be found in his probing of our collective psyche and precarious ambitions. His body of work is too alive with possibility to be considered fatalist. His fecund mind sought to unearth the secret contract between surrealism and social commentary. And he did his part in ensuring that the British novel would not succumb to quaintness. Like the protagonist in ‘The Garden of Time’ (61), he has felt the final crystal of life dissolve in his hands, but he’s left us a vast field of jewels to pick through and marvel at in his absence.

There's plenty more on Ballard to be found at The Daily. 

The Mark on the page: Naked Lunch 50 years on

In the 50 years since its publication Naked Lunch has surely repelled more potential readers than it’s attracted, yet anyone compelled to work through William S. Burroughs’ seminal work knows how eerily fresh it remains, despite the novel’s refrain of putrefaction. Perhaps it endures because of its still arresting insights into the nature of addiction, a public health issue that does not seem to go away, that Burroughs renders in such a multitude of forms it becomes a multi-purpose metaphor of almost singular resonance. Perhaps it’s because the puzzle pattern of the text never yields to full cohesion, remaining tantalizingly just beyond our grasp. After all, Bill Lee, Burroughs’ alter ego and the closest Naked Lunch has to a protagonist, seems always to be departing, always refusing to sit for his appointed interrogations. Perhaps it’s the flamboyant grotesquerie and gallows humour, since besides Swift I’m not sure of any writer who’s mixed this particular cocktail so deftly. Though he’s testified to the contrary, Burroughs was indeed an entertainer.

I used the expression “to work through,” but when I picked up Naked Lunch as a teenager it didn’t seem like work at all. Tom Clancy, John Grisham, celebrity memoirs—now those would have felt like work. By contrast, the series of “routines” that comprised Naked Lunch were so casually inflammatory and recklessly stitched together it seemed positively inviting, something to be picked up, devoured and put aside when you’ve had your fill. Returning to the book for the first time in many years however, I no longer buy the ostensible randomness of its structure at all.

Naked Lunch is a lot of things, among them memoir, satire, science-fiction, vaudeville, metaphysical travelogue, hard-boiled junky pulp, grand guignol, pharmacological dissertation, avant-garde prose poem, hardcore pornography, and, as the author attests in the final passage, “a blueprint, a How-To book,” presumably on how to generate more like material, which Burroughs energetically followed. But while we can argue over how it might be finessed in some parts— personally, I think the abrupt interruption of the ‘Hauser and O’Brien’ sequence so late in the game by the belated “preface” kind of drops the ball—Naked Lunch is not random. Burroughs was a frequently masterful storyteller, if a rigorously fragmentary one. His first editors were Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, friends as well as fellow writers who knew Burroughs probably better than anyone and would have had a keen sense of how best to—literally—collect these pages from the floor and arrange them. For so much of Naked Lunch the accumulation of story fragments follows a propulsive internal logic and thematic causality, developing associations, characters, theses and sense of place, undulating and building like some demented mock-opera.

“I can feel the heat closing in…” It begins as New York crime fiction, allowing us our genre bearings, however briefly, immediately introducing the motifs of escape and paranoia. Bill Lee is on the run, and once he gets going the fleeing from one place to another never lets up. He soon encounters Doctor Benway, the quintessential Burroughs creation, a fountain of sinister wisdom and wisecracks, a villain of vampiric brilliance who represents the most innocuous and dangerous forms of societal control. He’s also good for ribald irreverence toward the human body, bragging about how he once performed an appendectomy with a rusty sardine can. The US will bleed into Latin America, into North Africa, into the fecund and deadly “Interzone,” into the blue movie Edenic deathless adolescent orgy of bizarre intercourse and orgasmic hangings that doubles as a protest against capital punishment. We’re regaled about the man who taught his asshole to talk until the asshole took over, a hysterically funny spin on parasitism, on the habit taking control of its master. It also exemplifies the anal fixation and Naked Lunch’s deep unease with homosexuality, this novel that careens with countless scenes of oddly touching, formative homoerotic bonding between boys and exceedingly graphic and often brutally violent gay sex.

The episodes of Naked Lunch bloom and recede like persistent hallucinations. But hallucinations are not mere fancy; they reconstruct and renovate experience. “Fall asleep reading and the words take on code significance.” Burroughs deliberately blurs the perspectives of half-sleep and wakefulness, trusting that there’s something of value to be found along the frontiers. And at its most lyrical, Burroughs’ prose displays an intoxication with language itself that inevitably aligns it to Joyce, sex and all. The compression of images couples with the ache of flooding memories. Following an act of torrid sexual climax, Burroughs writes, “A train roars through him whistle blowing… boat whistle, foghorn, sky rockets burst over oily lagoons… penny arcades open into a maze of dirty pictures…” And a paragraph later: “Time jumps like a broken typewriter, the boys are old men…” Over the course of this one page we see ecstasy produce an effect most commonly attributed to death: cryptically, William Burroughs’ life is flashing before our eyes.

If you know anything about Burroughs, who died in 1997 at the age of 83, you know that his writing, ideas and biography are inextricably merged. And you probably know that in Mexico City in 1951 he accidentally shot and killed his wife Joan Vollmer while performing a drunken game of William Tell. He would eventually write about this event as forever haunting him yet ironically functioning as the catalyst for his writing career, but in Naked Lunch the only ghost of a memory of Vollmer appears and quickly disappears at the close of one of one of the more lucid autobiographical episodes. In Cuernavaca or Taxco—he can’t remember which—Lee and “Jane” smoke weed with some pimp and Lee flees in a fit of paranoia, finally catching a bus on his own back to Mexico City. “A year later in Tangier,” he then writes, “I heard she was dead.” David Cronenberg was right to make his film of Naked Lunch an overt hybrid of the novel and Burroughs’ life, with Vollmer’s death at the forefront. Burroughs’ novel has been rightfully heralded for speaking dark truths about social evils and human frailty, but in making blatant the loop that keeps Bill Lee circling back to confront the horrific event that formed the poisoned nucleus of Burroughs’ work, Cronenberg’s Lunch was the more Naked by far.

The Walken mind: Brainstorm on DVD

Christopher Walken’s brain got worked over an awful lot in the late 70s and early 80s. He was the guy from the industrial heartland who became severely traumatized as a prisoner-of-war, wound up a sort of gladiator in high stakes Russian roulette in Saigon, and won an Oscar for it. He later survived a car crash, woke from a coma after several years to find his girl had moved on, developed telepathic abilities that seemed to be draining his spirit, inching him closer to death with every use, and helped to fuse the seemingly irreconcilable sensibilities of Stephen King and David Cronenberg. It would not be long before he became an alien abductee.

What made that brain so captivating when in peril? His head did seem to weigh a lot, an effect accentuated by hair that, as years passed, seemed to want to leap off his head. The head, and those pale eyes, made him always appear off-balance, and vulnerable. He went by names as familiar as Nick, Mike and Johnny, yet he never quite registered as a recognizably normal person—admittedly, not an unusual trait amongst the new stars back then. Yet, whether breaking down or lashing out, Walken could convey a woundedness that, as with his flights of nervous charisma, could catch you off guard and become tremendously moving.

In Brainstorm (1983), newly available on DVD, he was again breaking barriers of mental communication, again testing comfortable proximities to death. But in this case he was eager to do it, in the name of science and glory. He was Dr. Michael Brace, a hyperactive, maverick scientific genius of the post-hippie variety, like William Hurt in Altered States (80). And Brainstorm was a movie that, like Altered States, spoke to a new post-hippie caveat on the psychic fallout of excess experimentation on the more nebulous zones of the mind. Along with Dr. Lillian (Louise Fletcher), Dr. Mike develops a technology that records a person’s sensory experience so that others can share it by wearing a sort of headset and pressing replay.

Of course the nefarious US military doesn’t skip a beat, already exploiting the device before it’s even finished, salivating over possibilities running the gamut from flight simulation to torture. And Mike’s coworkers, too, dig in to sample the Pandora’s box of psychedelic chocolates, with one of them finally collapsing from the equivalent of an Internet porn binge. So this is in essence a story about the price of dreaming in the Promethean sense.

Directed by Douglas Trumbull, who made Silent Running (72) and worked effects for 2001 (68), and taken from a story by Bruce Joel Rubin, who’d later script Ghost (90) and Jacob’s Ladder (90), Brainstorm becomes self-consciously trippy and intellectually flabby. It probably seemed too hokey in its time, but reading it with the benefit of hindsight, one of the ways in which it’s aged surprisingly well is in its relationship with numerous movies spawned in its wake. Its promise of artificially reconstructed experience, a virtual reality into which an individual’s memories and other sprays of subjective psychic foam can infiltrate, looks forward to the technologically-enhanced nostalgia of Strange Days (95), the virtual reality addicts in eXistenZ (99), the memory control as romantic catalyst in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (04), and the pseudo-schizophrenic epidemic of A Scanner Darkly (05). We can trace in such films a dialogue on perception whose resonance with our ongoing plunge into electronic everything is so acute it hardly needs stating.

But I got us into this talking about Walken, and the pleasing array of nuance he brings to Brainstorm is surely one of the best reasons to see it. He’s an actor whose little choices intrigue. At one point he blows a fuse and rants while suddenly gobbling from a bag of Ruffles. And I find it extremely interesting that the filmmakers chose to imbue Mike with a very complicated romantic life. Perhaps this man obsessed with the cataloguing of experience has a thing for older women because they simply have more of it then he does. At the movie’s outset, he’s breaking up with Karen (Natalie Wood), his wife and the mother of his child. He seems to be romantically entangled with Lillian. Fletcher would have been pushing 50 at the time of filming, while Wood was 43. True, Walken was already in his late 30s, but he looks strikingly younger than both women on screen, and given that this is a Hollywood movie the difference makes a hell of an impression. Mike’s relationship to these women, and Walken’s different ways of expressing affection and admiration for both, deepens our sense of the character’s conflicting desires, his ruthless drive toward success and his undeniable attraction to woman of intelligence and integrity.

And, yes, Wood was beautiful. Those dark eyes stop Walken in his tracks. The finale has Wood urging Walken back from the brink of death through the sheer intensity of her love, and the scene is made poignant by extra-filmic circumstances. In November of 1981, near the end of principal photography, Wood died when she fell overboard of the yacht she shared with her husband, the actor Robert Wagner. Wagner and Walken were both on board at the time. The yacht was named Splendour.