The inside man

Rating: Null/10 (2 October 2011)

It had been a long haul bringing external horror back home, since the 60's at least. But relatively close together in the 80's came two films, both remakes of older films, that made it easier to see how the outside menace, horror that beckoned from beyond, was transferred back inside and was ruled that it was no longer conclusively alien with our point-of-view. In fact, it was our point-of-view in the world of these films that was made to be alien. The human being was invaded by or, as here, melded with the monster.
The Thing was relatively clean-cut, like most of Carpenter's stuff. But Cronenberg goes further; he knows what propels the grisly transformations that we experience on the visible level, and is more interested in exploring the act of the transformation itself.
I am not talking about SFX here, which is pretty good to this day. Both these films I personally feel are vastly hampered by this desire to make overly visible, to please the curious eye. We are no longer teased out with shadows and outlines, but get to see every ungodly detail. It's a painful process we undergo, the birth of new life. But gooey and prosthetic nonetheless, and distracting from the actual transformation that is happening inside.
But with Cronenberg the warts really work in his favor; the gooey and prosthetic help vividly describe a prosthetic worldview. It's a very specific, original cinematic world, fertile with ecstasies of the flesh. The fashions, the technology, especially the technology so crucial in his films, always make me feel like they describe an 80's future that waits just around the corner.
So, sex as what makes the flesh crazy - and being crazy, curious, excited about the flesh as an essential prerequisite of being human. Love as what transports between worlds, the movement itself a transformation. But love tainted by even the tiniest flying speck of doubt, even unbeknownst to the conscious mind, produces a monster of a human being on the other end.
Cronenberg would return to this in Videodrome, there more eloquently: on one hand the burning desire to transcend the body, the old flesh that keeps the spirit caged, on the other hand the impossibility of that transcendence as long as the mind remains impure.
So this is why the attempted transformation is always ugly in Cronenberg, revolting, and why it's always left incomplete; the tainted mind - with ignorance, desire, ego, fear - transforms in its image. In the most unexpected way the monster is our in-sight of the mind. This alone makes Cronenberg a stop we can't miss in our cinematic sojourns.
Brundlefly is not the new flesh then, is not new life. He is the mind-corrupted old flesh regurgitating itself. New life, the old world renewed, is only possible through the pregnant woman, this is the way forward. However corrupted Brundle may be by the end, and this is the part of the film where Cron riffs in and out of the classic Beauty and the Beast story, inside of him remains the man he was. The ending is painful, emotional, perhaps too earnest. The hubris is paid back, but we feel sorry because we know Prometheus meant well.
Emotionally heavy, this is the part I don't care much for, but otherwise intellectually light Cronenberg. On the upside, compact, agile stuff about a man yearning to transport himself where life has purpose again, us getting to see from behind a camera, the woman's, the transformation of that man into what he thinks would make him loved. Of course we loved him just the way he was.