David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method (see review) is out this week and will provide some challenging holiday viewing for those of you lucky enough to live in a limited-release city.
The biopic deals with the intersection of thinking that occurred between Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Sabina Spielrein in the early years of the twentieth century. Their shared ideas created the thought and practice of psychoanalysis and shaped the way we think and talk about ourselves to this day, and much has been written about their intellectual (and in Jung and Spielrein’s case, physically consummated) ménage a trois.
Knightly as the troubled Sabina Spielrein in 'A Dangerous Method'
Although its central theme is sex, both the theory and the practice, the movie is, to all intents and purposes, a mannered costume drama, scripted by Christopher Hampton (Dangerous Liaisons, Carrington, Atonement, Chéri) and starring actorly heavyweights Michael Fassbender and Viggo Mortensen. When not whipping each other with belts, the characters ride in horse-drawn carriages through the cobbled streets of Vienna, discuss their latest thinking at dinner parties, and take gentle, parasol-protected strolls along the shores of Lake Zurich.
Could this be the work of the same David Cronenberg who began his career directing lo-fi splatter like Rabid and Shivers? The same guy who defined body horror with Videodrome and took it mainstream with The Fly, Scanners and Crash? Who brought us the eye-popping onscreen pain of A History of Violence and Eastern Promises? The genre auteur whom IMDb describes as “the King of Venereal Horror or the Baron of Blood”?
I caught up with Cronenberg at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills in order to find out.
In person, Cronenberg is relaxed, thoughtful, professorial, careful to explain his eclectic terms of reference, which range from Greek tragedy, to Darwin, to Jean-Paul Sartre. He’s always been this thinking woman’s horror auteur. For him, the genre is less about shock/startle than exploring and extending our shared visual imagination. He has said in the past that “my imagery is very much like the use of metaphor in literature. It’s a way of comparing things, suggesting possibilities that might not otherwise have been imagined”.
So, how does he think the realism of A Dangerous Method, with its keen attention to period detail and historical accuracy, compares to his visceral body of work? The short answer, he doesn’t.
“I don’t think about my other movies when I’m making a movie. It’s as though I’d never made one, other than that I have the craft of having made them. I don’t really try to connect each project with other projects in the way that a critic does. I sometimes have to remind critics that my process and theirs is not the same. These connections, these analyses, they don’t give me anything creatively.”
It’s understandable that Cronenberg uses this kind of all-encompassing defense, given the howls of outrage his films have induced in the past. There’s a layer of caution underlying his geniality. However, he will admit that, however anomalous A Dangerous Method might seem, it does form part of a pattern, if it’s absolutely necessary for this critic to find a pattern in his oeuvre.
“The first film I ever made was a seven-minute short called Transfer that was about a psychiatrist and a patient. The patient is complaining that the only relationship he’s ever had that meant anything was his relationship with his psychiatrist, so he’s kind of stalking him and following him around. So in a way, in that sense, yes, this is coming full circle.”
Psychiatrist Oliver Reed in 'The Brood
It’s not difficult to find a fascination with psychiatry elsewhere in Cronenberg’s early work. This patient/analyst relationship also lies at the heart of The Brood (1979). Psychologist Dr. Hal Raglan’s experimental treatment causes his patient, Nola, to develop an egg sac, and birth all her neuroses as monstrous children. On a metaphorical level, this isn’t so far from the plot of A Dangerous Method, and both Freud and Jung would have plenty to say about these navel-less, malevolent spawn who lurk under beds in order to maim and kill members of Nola’s immediate family. In Freudian terms, they represent Nola’s repressed pain and murderous desires made flesh, while Jungian theory might connect Nola’s bulging exo-sac to our shared dreams of a primitive, pre-mammalian past.
A scene fron 'Shivers'
Freudian theory is also key to both the construction and interpretation of Shivers (1975). Another mad doctor, Emil Hobbes, believes that “Man is an animal, too much brain, not enough guts.” So he develops “a parasite, a combination of aphrodisiac and venereal disease that will hopefully turn the world into one beautiful mindless orgy.” As the infected residents of a Montreal apartment building start bulging with the parasite (in true Freudian style, it’s decidedly penis-shaped, and enters/exits its victims through mouth, anus or vagina), they embody the Eros-Thanatos opposition Freud sought to explain in his later work. Their sex drive leads them into fatal, bloody encounters, the victims and perpetrators of mindless violence. Cronenberg had some specific intentions with these monsters-as-metaphor: “the image of the parasites living inside the human body, controlling that person, can suggest many things, from the Freudian unconsciousness to the embodiment of evil.”
Cronenberg extrapolated the raw Freudian thinking of his early work through the 80s and 90s (especially with Crash), and into the violence explored in his 2000s offerings – Eastern Promises is pure Thanatos. Although Jungian theory takes a back seat, it’s possible to put a spin on Dead Ringers (1988) as a thesis on duality; Elliot Mantle’s singular extroversion oscillates against Beverly’s introversion until neither man can function. They must separate (individuate?), each twin retaining some component of the other, or die.
Through the decades, therefore, Cronenberg’s work has a formal psychological dimension not seen since Val Lewton’s black-and-white masterpieces of the 1940s and has provided rich pickings for psychoanalytic film theorists. Was it inevitable that he would make a movie about the relationship between the fathers of psychoanalysis? Cronenberg says no, it just happened. He “knew a lot more about Freud before I started this [A Dangerous Method] and not so much about Jung”, and, while maintaining a deep respect for Freud, thinks that Jung “went exactly where Freud thought he would go, into a kind of Aryan mysticism and religion and so on and I think, for me, Jung really finally became more of a religious leader than a scientist”. To Cronenberg, a card-carrying atheist, that means Freud has the more integrity of the two.
Cronenberg suggests that, for him, the appeal of Hampton’s script (drawn verbatim in places from the Freud/Jung correspondence) lies in the revolutionary nature of what Freud and Jung (and Spielrein) were doing as scientists. In the context of the stable, hierarchical Austro-Hungarian Empire, discussing sexuality was “very dangerous and very subversive and volatile”. Freud and Jung weren’t just challenging scientific thinking, but a whole cultural identity:
“[The Austro-Hungarians] really felt that everyone knew his place and that they had achieved an incredible level of European sophistication and civilization. They felt that Man had really evolved nicely from animal to super-sophisticated human and here was Freud saying ‘That’s all very well and good but underneath the surface – and not very far underneath the surface – are these forces which we have in us still and we have to acknowledge them. One of them is Sex but it’s not only Sex, it’s tribal hostility, tribal violence’. His words were not welcome. The people didn’t want to think about that, didn’t want to hear those things, and then of course World War I proved that he was completely correct.”
A Dangerous Method references the horrors of the twentieth century only obliquely: Jung tells of his portent-laden dreams of violence that seem to predict trench warfare, and the end titles outline how Freud and Spielrein (both Jews) suffered under the Nazis. The main narrative of the movie doesn’t take Jung, Freud and Spielrein past the brutal end of La Belle Époque, but the coming shadows loom large over our understanding of that era. Says Cronenberg:
“It’s hard for us to realize now how shocking the First World War was to those, at the time, who thought that Man had really now achieved an incredible plateau of civilization. They couldn’t believe that in the center of Europe there would be all this tribal barbarianism – massacres, genocide, hideous atrocities. We’re a little more cynical about it now as there have been so many wars since then, but at the time it was a really crushing blow to idealists who thought that there was a chance that evolution actually meant ‘getting better’.”
Doctor and patient in 'Scanners'
Many of Cronenberg’s past protagonists have been scientists pushing the boundaries of conventional thought, experimenting either on themselves (Seth Brundel in The Fly) or others (Dr. Paul Ruth in Scanners) without much consideration of the consequences. So, in their own way, Freud and Jung form part of that pantheon, even though they were only exploring the previously-forbidden parts of their own minds, rather than the insides of their own bodies:
Freud and Jung in 'A Dangerous Method'
“Here were two professional men, highly respected, in very conservative professions, writing to each other about bodily fluids and erotic dreams and things that men of that time would never ever speak those words, especially to other men, never... ”
Inevitably, scientists need case studies, which is where Spielrein becomes important to the story. She arrives at the Burghölzli clinic kicking and screaming – this is the inciting incident of Hampton’s screenplay – with a diagnosis of the peculiarly female malady of hysteria. Thanks to Jung’s judicious application of ‘the talking cure’, she is able to overcome the blocks in her psyche, and take her place as a student of psychoanalysis. Which involves having sex with Jung. This is manifested in the movie via a series of near-static spanking scenes; a dogged Spielrein watches every aspect of her O-face in a mirror. Of this cold self-examination, Cronenberg says:
“She would, I felt, having plugged in totally to this obsessive psychoanalytic state of mind, be observing herself even while she was having sex, how she felt, what her reaction was, what Jung’s reaction was. You can see the way we played it that Jung was not really enjoying those moments, he’s doing it for her. He would be observing it too, from a sort of clinical distance.”
Cronenberg too, seems to be observing his characters from a clinical distance, focusing on the intellectual, rather than the emotional sparks within their connection. Nonetheless, Mortensen, Fassbender, and to a lesser extent Knightley, pack strength of feeling into their performances. Through the courtly manners, the coded gazes, and the wry dialogue, the audience is never allowed to forget the importance of these people and their story to how we live today. There’s a central irony inherent; without their discussions and experiments, there would have been no Cronenberg movies.
While his glossy version of how modern psychiatric thought came into being might seem worlds apart from his early body horror, all Cronenberg’s work is underpinned by his unique brand of scientific curiosity. It sets him apart from his contemporaries, most specifically the other David, Lynch, to whom he is most often compared. The cool precision of A Dangerous Method gives us a new perspective both on the Cronenberg back catalogue and his consistency of vision. It also reminds us how much the horror genre has been commandeered by Hollywood hacks and copycats. It’s difficult to imagine a director of Cronenberg’s creative abilities and intelligence rising up through the dull ranks of studio remakes and sequels today.
