intellect Book Focus

6 | Thinking in Colour

Film Studies

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“If my film makes one more person miserable, I’ve done my job.” – Woody Allen

For more than 25 years, Cana-
dian director David Cronenberg has
adapted the literary works of others,
including Naked Lunch (1991) from
William Burroughs’ 1959 experi-
mental novel, Crash (1996) from J. G.
Ballard’s 1973 cult text, Spider (2003)
from Patrick McGrath’s dark 1990
account of a mental patient’s subjec-
tive universe and A History of Violence
(2005), based on John Wagner and
Vincent Locke’s 1997 graphic novel.
Even films not seemingly adaptations
draw on previously-written mate-
rial, for example, Dead Ringers (1988)
derives directly from Jack Geasland
and Bari Woods’ novel Twins (1977).
Cronenberg’s literary awareness is
present in abandoned projects, such
as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Brett
Easton Ellis’ American Psycho and Total

Recall, based on Philip K. Dick’s short
story ‘We Can Remember It For You Whole-
sale’. It is also apparent his own acting
career, in films such as Nightbreed
(1989), where he shares Clive Barker’s
celebration of monstrosity and in po-
tential future projects, such as Martin

Amis’ London Fields (1989). Looking
closely at such texts reveals fascinat-
ing features of Cronenberg’s work,
e.g. his frequent use of a perpetual
present tense, narrative structures
that might be described as spiral
or centripetal and the direct and
unattributed ‘borrowing’ of images,
plotlines and dialogue from a range
of literary texts.

The idea of using literary texts

to illuminate film is not new. In
1969, Peter Wollen asserted that ‘we
need comparisons with authors in
the other arts: Ford with Fenimore
Cooper, for example or Hawks with
Faulkner’ and it could be argued
that, as Leonard Bernstein believed,
‘the best way to “know” a thing is in
the context of another discipline’.
However, there remains a stubborn

Leavisite tendency that implicitly
values literary works as superior on
the grounds of being the more estab-
lished art form, that film can only be
visual, whilst literature is linguistic,
and that film cannot emulate fiction’s
ability to convey the profundity of hu-

man thought. Theoretical discussion
of adaptation is often bogged down
in repetitive case studies, partly due
to what Brian McFarlane terms ‘the
fidelity issue’. Notions of remaining
faithful assume that there is an ir-
reducible core meaning to an original
source text but it is not always obvi-
ous as to precisely what the film-mak-
er should be faithful. More precisely,
as Neil Sinyard reminds us, ‘adapting
a literary text for the screen is es-
sentially an act of literary criticism’,

which should serve to illuminate both
source text and filmic version drawn
from it. By drawing on literary texts
that are by reputation infamous and
experienced primarily on Higher
Education courses, and by choosing
to retain their titles, Cronenberg ap-
pears to seek the endorsement of the

Below
Naked Lunch
Novel by William Burroughs

Bottom
Naked Lunch (1991)
By Hillary Mushkin and S. E. Barnet

‘By drawing on literary texts that are by

reputation infamous and experienced

primarily on Higher Education courses,

Cronenberg appears to seek the endorse-

ment of the very cultural establishment

against which he seems to rebel.’

David Cronenberg

An Author Looking for a Text

By Mark Browning

FURTHER READING

David Cronenberg:
Author or Film-maker

By Mark Browning

£19.95 / $40
ISBN 9781841501734
Published October 2007

Over the past three decades, the
director David Cronenberg has
drawn upon themes prominent
in works of literature by William Burroughs and J.G. Ballard to sur-
prising and often shocking effect. This volume looks at the literary
and psychological motivation behind Cronenberg’s fi lm releases, but
also discovers how other underground and mainstream fi ction can
help the viewer to unravel his fi lms. Browning investigates this at
a deeper level, examining Cronenberg’s fi lms and comparing them
to works of literature by innovative authors such as Angela Carter,
Vladimir Nabokov and Bret Easton Ellis.

This book is only the second single-authored study on Cronen-

berg and as well as containing the fi rst detailed analysis of eXistenZ
(1999), Spider (2003) and A History of Violence (2005), it applies
contemporary criticism to the director’s work and explores how
prominent texts can shed light on the often disturbing and puz-
zling world of Cronenberg’s fi lms. It links to the wider context of
adaptation and interpretation studies and seeks to address the
fundamental questions and literary aesthetic behind Cronenberg’s
challenging works.

IQ Spring 2008 | 7

David Cronenberg

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“A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.” – Edmond de Goncourt

very cultural establishment against
which he seems to rebel.

Largely missed by critics, in

2005 he produced a coffee-table
book, Red Cars, a history of the 1961
Formula One Championship battle
between Ferrari rivals Phil Hill and
Wolfgang Von Trips, including a
script for an unmade movie. The
book, hand-bound with an alumi-
num cover and limited to only 1000
copies, is a self-conscious object
d’art and Cronenberg describes
how it is a ‘way for me to create my
fi lm without actors and fi lm crew
this book linked to a website and
to an exhibition’. However, even
here the multi-media ‘Red Cars’
project, including lectures and a
Cronenberg retrospective, echoed
very similar activities by Ballard in
the 1970s. Cronenberg likes to cite
Borges’ statement that ‘a phenom-
enon like Kafka actually creates his
own precursors, linking together
strings of writers not seen to be
connected before’, but it is highly
debatable to what extent Cronen-
berg does create his own precur-
sors and to what extent his work
is ever truly free of infl uence from
source texts.

{

Above and below
A History of Violence (2005)
Directed by David Cronenberg

Bottom
The 1997 graphic novel written by
John Wagner and Vincent Locke

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