"I think he's such a superb filmmaker," Fiennes goes on. "He's not, like, a commercially grotesque horror stylist. He's an incredibly disciplined, controlled artist. I love the way he frames shots, he creates extraordinary sequences."
"Spider" certainly demands a close relationship between director and star, since Fiennes' shambling, mumbling character, Dennis "Spider" Cleg, is on-screen in almost every scene, generally wearing at least four shirts and scratching indecipherable hieroglyphics in a private diary. Spider cannot quite settle into the routine of life at the boardinghouse presided over by stern Mrs. Wilkinson (Lynn Redgrave) because he keeps rehearsing childhood scenes of turmoil between his working-class parents, played in extended memory sequences by Gabriel Byrne and Miranda Richardson.
Cronenberg shows us these increasingly ominous flashbacks as Spider sees them; sometimes he's present as a little boy (Bradley Hall) and sometimes the adult Spider is skulking outside the kitchen window like a spy or lurking in the corner of the room like an overlooked dog. Boy Spider is sent to the pub to retrieve his drunken dad and taunted by a trio of chain-smoking "tarts"; later man Spider must watch as Dad ventures under the bridge along the gasworks canal with one of these overripe nubiles for a nastily hilarious bit of recreation. But as the tale of his father's infidelity moves toward a startling climax, it becomes increasingly hard to say where the boundary between memory and delusion lies. Like many of Cronenberg's movies, "Spider" is to some extent a puzzle concerned with subjectivity and reality, with the way we create our own identities.
Spider's memories make him who he is today, and neither he nor we know how much to trust them. While Spider is a deeply troubled character who may sometimes seem alien and repellent, there is no cruelty in Fiennes' portrayal or in Cronenberg's view of him. They want us finally to identify and empathize with Spider; like all of us, he is fumbling in the dark places of his own personality, trying to achieve as much self-knowledge as he can.
In "Spider," Cronenberg convincingly captures the jellied-eel, smoky-pub decrepitude of 1950s London and creates a compelling portrait of schizophrenia. (One woman came up to him after a screening in his native Toronto, he says, and asked him how he knew about the huddled position her schizophrenic son assumes in the bathtub.) But as he puts it, it's less a naturalistic movie than an expressionist one. Its true terrain is that of ideas and psychology, which has been Cronenberg's turf since he emerged from the nascent experimental-film scene of mid-'60s Toronto with early features like "Stereo" and "Crimes of the Future." (Good luck finding those in any video format.)
With "Shivers" in 1975 (released in the U.S. as "They Came From Within"), a fable about sluglike, sexually transmitted parasites who cause the residents of a high-rise apartment complex to revert to anarchy and barbarism, Cronenberg pioneered the blend of art film and low-budget horror that became his trademark. Pilloried by the mainstream Canadian press and celebrated by horror fanzines as "Dave Deprave" and "the Baron of Blood," Cronenberg drew his core audience from the intersection of the suburban-bedroom horror freaks and the weedy grad-student set.
He made horror intellectually respectable for the first time, inspiring hundreds of dissertations and dozens of cultural-studies courses. It's a mixed legacy, to be sure. The combination of disreputable genre movies and postmodern theory has resulted in much unbearable claptrap, and I'd be happy not to listen to another director talk blithely about Mesoamerican human-sacrifice rituals or Foucault's notion of the polymorphous perverse.
Since backing away from Hollywood after "The Fly" (as he once put it, a love story about someone with a horrible wasting disease), Cronenberg has defied any genre categorization. His recent films have been a mix of "respectable" literary adaptations and low-budget Canadian-made indies, and he's become less devoted to grotesque special effects (although 1999's "eXistenZ" was rife with gruesome Cronenbergiana).
Unlike many of the pseudo-intellectuals in movieland, moreover, Cronenberg has always been able to walk the walk and talk the talk. Sitting in a room with him and talking about Vladimir Nabokov's conception of memory, or Samuel Beckett as the iconic existential hero, as I recently did, might sound, in the abstract, unbelievably precious and pretentious. In fact, it was a totally relaxed and good-humored conversation with an elegantly dressed, gray-maned artist -- he'll turn 60 on March 15) who's always looking for the primal, pragmatic human emotions behind complicated ideas.
You've always been perceived as a director who came halfway out of horror movies and halfway out of the avant-garde. Is that fair?
I think it's fair. I've often said that Toronto is halfway between Europe and Hollywood and I was influenced both ways. Also, when I started filmmaking it was the New York underground that was the main inspiration. It was the '60s: Grab the camera and do your own thing.
Do you mean, like, John Cassavetes?
No! I mean the Kuchar brothers and Ed Emshwiller and Kenneth Anger. The real underground. Meaning you wouldn't be making features, pretty much. You'd be making shorts. They made Cassavetes look commercial by comparison. Not that I didn't like Cassavetes. I did, and I saw his films. He came to Toronto with "Faces," I remember. They had a couple of screenings and it was sold out. We were all waiting in line and he came out and walked along the line and told us that we couldn't get in but there would be another screening in two hours. He apologized and was very gracious, and we all came back two hours later, which meant, like, 2 o'clock in the morning. Those were good times.
But I've always taken myself seriously as an artist. I remember being on a panel with [fellow directors] John Landis and John Carpenter, and I kept talking about art and saying, you know, artist this and artist that. After the interview was over, they both looked at me. I said, "What?" They said, "You called yourself an artist." I said, "Yeah." They said, "We would never do that." They were embarrassed by it, and shocked. It just wasn't a California, genre-filmmaker thing to do. Whereas for me it was absolutely natural to talk that way and think that way.
Next page: The failure of memory