David Cronenberg: Collected Screenplays 1: Stereo, Crimes of the Future, Shivers, Rabid

Rating:
Summary: A Must for Cronenberg Completists
Review: For a good part of the century, the vanguard thing for a writer to do was to renovate his medium importing techniques from film: montage, jump cuts, close-ups, slow motion, and so forth. But if the writer with cinematic influences has since become a familiar -- perhaps a too familiar -- type of artist, the literary director is still something of an anomaly. When asked for their influences, most directors cite other filmmakers, and yet David Cronenberg tends instead to name William Burroughs, Samuel Beckett, Philip K. Dick, the Existentialists. Before undertaking a career in film, there was a brief moment when Cronenberg even toyed with the idea of becoming a writer. In a series of fascinating interviews with Serge Grunberg, Cronenberg once admitted that he always dreamed of being an "obscure" writer along the lines of Kafka. But instead of languishing as an obscure writer, ultimately Cronenberg switched disciplines and became what he is today: a director remarkable less for his cinematic qualities -- you can't credit him with purism or much innovation in film technique -- than for the unique vision and literary sensibility he brings to his films.

Given this literary outlook, you might expect that Cronenberg's screenplays are writerly tours de force -- which they manifestly are not. In a slightly puzzled preface to this introductory volume of his screenplays, Cronenberg emphasizes that the screenplay is not the venue for literary pretention. "Screen prose," he writes, "is rigorously functional. Its focus is narrow, narrower than a haiku, and its purpose is very limited... In fact, profound, complex prose just gets in the way of the real business of a screenplay, and thus is generally derided, considered pathetic." Accordingly, the two screenplays of Cronenberg's first feature-length films -- Shivers and Rabid -- are best read in conjunction with the films themselves. They're study aids, production documents that can help in the analysis and understanding of the films -- and they're not much more than that.

But what about the screenplays for Stereo and Crimes of the Future, two of Cronenberg's early attempts at avant-garde cinema? Most readers won't have seen these films, since about the only way to get them is to purchase an nth-generation VHS from ebay. What's more, neither text was really a screenplay in the proper sense, since each was written not before but after the film was shot. So what are you to make of these ex post facto voiceover monologues? Are they hybrids of the writer that Cronenberg wanted to be and the filmmaker that he eventually became? Or are they just juvenilia?

The script for Stereo introduces a world similar to the one Cronenberg created in the film Scanners. Volunteers at the Canadian Academy for Erotic Inquiry submit to telepathy experiments that lead to unexpectedly erotic results -- to "omnisexuality," an "expanded form of bisexuality." As a text, the script closely prefigures the type of pseudo-scientific prose perfected by J.G. Ballard in The Atrocity Exhibition (aka Love and Napalm), which is ironic given that Cronenberg has claimed not to feel much affinity with Ballard upon first reading.

Crimes of the Future also introduces familiar Cronenberg themes -- essentially pathology and perversity. Here it is easy to detect a young cineaste deeply under the influence of Burroughs. For example, Cronenberg writes that a colleague's body "has begun to create puzzling organs, each one very complex, very perfect, unique, yet seemingly without function. As each is surgically removed, it is quickly replaced by another, equally mysterious. He has taken to breaking into the specimens room and stealing the jars containing the organs. His body, he insists, is a galaxy, and these creatures are solar systems. He becomes melancholy when they are far from him. His nurse says that his disease is possibly a form of creative cancer." This, of course, is almost a paraphrase of a famous passage from Naked Lunch.

Given the obvious immaturity of these early pieces and the narrow functionality of the screenplays of Shivers and Rabid, is it worthwhile to read -- to buy -- even to publish -- this first volume of Cronenberg's collected screenplays? For the casual fan, the answer is probably no. These screenplays will not give you literary kicks independent of the films. But for those who are fans of Cronenberg the director, these screenplays are indispensable for understanding how the would-be author became the cinematic auteur.

Rating:
Summary: An essential for fans
Review: I agree with everything the reviewer says in "A Must For Cronenberg Conpletists," but I would like to add that "Stereo" and "Crimes of the Future" are now available on DVD. Blue Underground very recently released Fast Company, Croneberg's drag racing film (try it, you'll like it!) and included the two short films on an extras disc. The transfers are excellent, and yes, Cronenberg fans should have these DVDs and the book of screenplays. The screenplay is especially helpful in understanding and appreciating "Stereo."

Rating:
Summary: Cronenberg Asks "Why?"
Review: In the brief (page and a half) introduction to this collection of his first four feature scripts, David Cronenberg is clearly puzzled and typically provocative. One can almost hear him getting the phone call from the publishers saying they'd like to publish his first four scripts as a book, followed by a looooong pause, and then Cronenberg's response "Why?" For, as he quite fairly asks, "How can anyone possibly read a film script? A script is not writing. A script is a ghost of something not yet born." He elaborates: "Screen prose is rigorously functional.... its purpose is very limited.... Screenplays are scrutinized, not read.... elegance and beauty in screenwriting are qualities not responded to, not rewarded, not actually noticed..." Finally, after challenging the notion of a script as something to be read at all, he then goes on to question the reader: "How can you possibly approach reading these four odd scripts...? ...you have no function... What, in fact, are you?"

And he does have a point. After all, why exactly would anyone be interested in "reading" the scripts for Stereo (1969) and Crimes of the Future (1970), scripts that are nothing more than after the fact transcriptions of voice-over monologues. The only reason one can imagine is if the reader is attempting to chart the early fumblings of the stylish, but self-indulgent Canadian writer-director. However, even at eleven and four pages respectively, the "scripts" are tedious and pretentious in the extreme, and the idea of spending an hour watching the actual films (they are both just over an hour) strikes me as a singularly bad idea. More useful are the scripts for Shivers (1975) and Rabid (1977), solid horror/sci-fi pieces that clearly demonstrate Cronenberg's gradual progression to such works as The Brood, Scanners, and Videodrome. These, at least, can be examined and deconstructed by writers seeking to unlock the secrets of the decent horror script. Realistically though, it's hard to imagine anyone other than the hardcore Cronenberg fanatics finding this early work very interesting on the page. Those seeking to gain better insight into Cronenberg are much better off reading Chris Rodley's series of interviews with him in Cronenberg on Cronenberg.