It is with great glee that I came across this tidbit on boingboing: David Cronenberg has finished production on a film called A Dangerous Method. Based on Christopher Hampton’s stage play, The Talking Cure, it stars Viggo Mortensen as Sigmund Freud, Michael Fassbender as Carl Jung, and Keira Knightley as Sabina, a patient of Jung’s who would become his mistress. (Bad therapist!)
I unapologetically love David Cronenberg and he is one of a handful of directors whose films I will see in the theater regardless of plot, stars, or reviews. In many ways I feel like we’ve grown up together. Why, it seems like just yesterday that my friends and I piled into a car and drove to a theater in Paramus, NJ. We were excited to see a promising new horror film, Scanners. I didn't know who David Cronenberg was yet and I hadn't yet started keeping track of a director's oeuvre. No, back in 1981 I just wanted to be frightened and I wanted to see some gore. Scanners delivered. The climactic scene where two telekinetics battle it out and the loser's head explodes was like nothing I'd ever seen before. It was over-the-top grisly and squirmingly funny. I have been a fan of his ever since.
I don't think Cronenberg is the greatest living filmmaker, but I do think he's one of the more interesting ones. Say what you will about him, there is no denying this man has a vision and he's not afraid to share that icky, yucky vision with his audience. He is more audacious than most and has a total lack of restraint and I admire that greatly, probably because I am on the other side of the audacity and restraint spectrum. In his early films he shows an obsession with body transformation (Rabid, Videodrome, The Brood, The Fly) and those films are much more disturbing than watching real-life surgery on TV. I’m still fond of those films, especially Videodrome, but these days I prefer the more recent Cronenberg.
Maybe because like many of us, he’s slowing down (look at the rate of his output on imdb.com), becoming a bit more reflective, thoughtful, mellow. Yeah, I hear you, “Cronenberg? Mellowing? Licata, are you insane? Did you actually WATCH A History of Violence?” Yes, I did. And like Spider and Eastern Promises, it’s much more about inner transformation. Gone is the horror brought about by the external--technology, medicine, and disease; in its place the horror of complex psychological workings. And now with A Dangerous Method it seems he’s really delving into the messiest, slimiest, murkiest place yet.
So, as I no longer need to see someone’s head blow up on screen, he no longer feels the need to show it. (Okay, sometimes he does: gurgling jaw in A History of Violence. Yikes!) Instead, he seems content to want to blow our minds, and once again, I’m there with him.