Exploding heads, techno-genitals, mutant offspring, a humanoid fly. Such are some of the monstrous images in David Cronenberg\u2019s early \u201cbody horror\u201d films, a la \u201cVideodrome,\u201d \u201cScanners,\u201d \u201cThe Brood\u201d and, of course, 1986\u2019s \u201cThe Fly. \u201d Now Cronenberg\u2019s 32-year-old son, Brandon Cronenberg, has spawned his own distinctive contribution to the body horror genre: the viscerally gruesome dark satire \u201cAntiviral,\u201d which won the best Canadian first feature award at the Toronto International Film Festival in September and will screen at the AFI Film Festival Nov. 4 and 7 before opening theatrically in April. <\/p>\n
The movie revolves around Syd March (Caleb Landry Jones), who works at a clinic that sells injections of viruses cultivated from sick celebrities to obsessed fans. \u201cIt\u2019s biological communion, for a price,\u201d the younger Cronenberg said by phone from his home in Toronto.<\/p>\n
Syd also sells some of the more select germs on the black market, smuggling them out of the lab in his own body, meaning that he is always nauseatingly ill. Plenty of disturbing images ensue, from viscous blood pouring out of sickened orifices to needles penetrating pale tissue to gray-colored steaks \u2013 also for fan consumption \u2013 cloned from the flesh of the stars.<\/p>\n
When Syd becomes infected with what turns out to be a deadly virus courtesy of superstar Hannah Geist (Sarah Gadon), he must unravel the microbiological mystery before he, too, becomes dead meat.<\/p>\n
Here are some excerpts from my conversation with Brandon Cronenberg this past week:<\/p>\n
Q: Your father is a well-known (Jewish) atheist\/existentialist who has said that his grisly images are meant to remind people that life and death begins and ends with the body. Do you have a similar outlook about religion?<\/p>\n
A: I identify as Jewish, and I feel totally Jewish, but not in a religious sense. I\u2019m a total atheist, but I think that came to me on my own. My parents never pushed me; they were very careful not to tell me how the universe is or to expose me to atheistic propaganda. I guess I never did believe in God. I was never told that God exists and I never experienced anything that led me to believe that God exists.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t believe in the soul, that the body is this inanimate thing that then becomes animated by a life force and then at a certain point stops being animated by a life force. I think the idea of the soul comes from the desire to see ourselves as somehow perfect and immortal despite the physical reality of our bodies.<\/p>\n
Q: Is that why you use such visceral physical imagery in the film?<\/p>\n
A: Part of it is that; and part of it is to show the divide between celebrities as ideas, as cultural icons, media constructs, and then to contrast that with the human beings behind those constructs. I think we\u2019re very uncomfortable with our bodies; we don\u2019t want to look at ourselves too closely and see the decay, the animal reality of the human body. So in the film, making the body so explicit was partly because of this theme.<\/p>\n
Q: How did you get the idea for \u201cAntiviral?\u201d<\/p>\n
A: It was 2004; I had just started film school, I had a baddish flu and was very sick in bed. And I was having a kind of fever dream where I was half awake and sort of obsessing over the physicality of my illness and how I had something in my body, my cells, that had come from someone else\u2019s body. The penetration of the virus into your cells is totally erotic and intimate, if you see it that way. Afterwards, when I was more sane, I started thinking about who might see disease as something intimate, and I thought a celebrity-obsessed fan might want to be infected with a virus from the object of their obsession as a way of feeling physically connected to them. And that developed into a metaphor for dissecting celebrity culture.<\/p>\n
Q: You\u2019ve been able to witness some of the unpleasant aspects of celebrity through the public spotlight on your own father. What kinds of things did you want to explore about celebrity culture in the film?<\/p>\n
A: The commodification of celebrity is a huge theme. The cannibalism aspect, for me, becomes a metaphor for (literally) consuming celebrity. I think the film may take things to the extreme, but I think it\u2019s only a slight exaggeration of what\u2019s already out there \u2013 like people buying John Lennon\u2019s teeth, which sold for quite a lot of money recently. Or people will buy scraps of someone\u2019s underwear. Anything that is associated with a celebrity immediately has some market value because there\u2019s this kind of physical fetishism. <\/p>\n
And speaking of religion, I think this fetishism is very connected to the religious impulse. I was thinking about, say, sainthood, which is sort of like the creation of celebrities in a way; saints are people essentially elevated to the status of gods, and there\u2019s also that element of deification when it comes to celebrity. And just as with sainthood, where old churches claim to have the finger bone of such and such saint, we fetishize celebrity \u201crelics.\u201d (Coughs.)<\/p>\n
Q: Are you sick?<\/p>\n
A: Yes, I have a cold.<\/p>\n
Q: Can I have some?<\/p>\n
A: (Laughs.) Yes, come to Toronto and you can catch my cold.<\/p>\n
Q: Was there a limit on how far you would go with sickening imagery in the film?<\/p>\n
A: I think that that imagery feeds the satire, because the film is meant as a commentary on a part of our culture that I find disgusting at times \u2013 so the film makes it viscerally disgusting as well. But I wasn\u2019t just trying to be gross for the sake of being gross; I think it\u2019s thematically relevant and also ties into the themes I mentioned about the body.<\/p>\n
Q: Did you use fake needles or dummy arms to create the injection effects?<\/p>\n
A: No, we used real needles \u2013 we had a medical professional on board \u2013 and yes, there were quite a lot of them.<\/p>\n
Some people have fainted while watching the movie in the theater; the thing I didn\u2019t realize is that [viewers] are very uncomfortable with needle imagery. I didn\u2019t realize how extreme it got, so now it feels like a kind of cheap way of freaking people out.<\/p>\n
Q: For a long time you told people you didn\u2019t want to be a filmmaker. What changed your mind?<\/p>\n
A: There were people who approached me with all these preconceptions based on who my father was or who they felt he was and to a certain extent that turned me off to film, because people assumed that I absolutely must be a huge cinephile and that I must want to follow in my father\u2019s footsteps. It was very obnoxious, so it gave me great pleasure to say, no, I have no interest in film whatsoever. But then at a certain point that seemed like a bad reason not to do something that could be potentially interesting.<\/p>\n
Q: How do you feel about being compared to your father as a filmmaker?<\/p>\n
A: I don\u2019t mind being compared to my father if it\u2019s legitimate, but I do think some people overstate the comparisons. We do share the interest in issues of the body and technology; those are some of the things he explored particularly in his earlier films, although I think he\u2019s really evolved as a filmmaker over the years.<\/p>\n
Q: What do you like about the horror\/science fiction genre?<\/p>\n
A: It\u2019s a good medium for caricature, and for dissecting our culture, because you can take things that we\u2019ve become habituated to, or become too used to to see clearly, and exaggerate them to heighten the context.