I stayed up late watching a bunch of David Cronenberg movies (Patreon)

This will by my first video using the “18+” feature, because YouTube doesn’t let you rate your video as like a PG13 or whatever, but this video is definitely not for children. This essay is about famous body horror director David Cronenberg, so it’s going to contain lots of gore and horror, so if you are squeamish please look away, mum this means you.
So this essay will just be a look at the filmography of David Cronenberg. There won’t be any talking about fascism, there won’t be any shilling for Big Communism, we won’t even play a clip of Libertarians having slugs for brains and salt for an ideology. Okay, but just one:
https://twitter.com/EricDJuly/status/1146141619546140673 
This video starts, like all good horror stories do, with a peek inside the dark and terrible life of the YouTuber. I was up at about 1am one night (...morning?) when I decided now is an excellent time to finally watch David Cronenberg’s 1983 classic Videodrome.
Now if you don’t know, Videodrome is a dangerous, controversial movie, about staying up late watching spooky television. Naturally at the end of this first film I decided I needed to watch every other film Cronenberg has made, also very late at night, for maximum spoooooky.
So let’s talk about that.
Videodrome
There are a lot of think-pieces about Videodrome. Videodrome is covered by film and media courses. Maybe I don’t need to add my take to the blazing inferno of Videodrome takes, but I’m sure as hell going to anyway.
Videodrome concerns itself with the ongoing culture war discussion of what media should be censored, and how violent, gory or pornographic media can be before it becomes dangerous, and then it rips the fucking wallpaper off that conversation and says this is the wrong fucking conversation. 
The contention at the heart of the film is that it is the messaging, the subtext, the meaning of media that can make it dangerous, not the textual presence of acts that society deems bad. Videodrome rejects the monkey see, monkey do approach to media that censorious critics of films like Cronenberg’s had at the time, and additionally shows us the protagonist, sleazy profit driven creep Max Renn, who only wants to find the most outrageous, controversial media possible, as being a product of that spurious debate.
Max has, metaphorically, a gaping hole in his chest which is hungry for media and can never be satisfied, and it doesn’t care what messages or ideas that media contains, it just wants more. This is ultimately the undoing of Max, as he continues to consume, and even be directly fed media that fills his mind with brain worms that make him do bad things.
Also he fucks a TV.
Now that's what I call a Videodrome! Now that’s what I call a Videodrome? Now… that’s… a Videodrome?
The Fly
The Fly is about how scary and upsetting is when people you care about change. Brundle, played by Jeff Goldblum is cute and sexy and nerdy and passionate and he and Veronica have this fantastic chemistry, and then it all goes wrong, and much more than the creature he becomes, the horror comes from the loss of the sweet innocent person he was before.
Dead Ringers
At this point in my viewing pilgrimage I realised that that mode of storytelling - creating a feeling that gets under your skin rather than an allegory or metaphor - is Cronenberg’s MO. Videodrome was the exception, not the rule. Dead Ringers is about codependency. These twin brother share an uncomfortable amount - not just a house, and a career, and sexual partners but just their entire lives.
What the movie wants you to get is that feeling. Even though practically nobody who watches this film are going to be twin brothers who live together and fuck each others’ girlfriends, this film makes the twins relatable. It makes you recognise relationships you’ve had in the relationship they’re having, in an unsettling and thought-provoking way.
This means that I end up covering The Fly and Dead Ringers in very brief sections, not because there’s nothing to say about them, and not because they don’t want to communicate anything to you, but because the feeling is the message, so unless I were to make whole separate essays going in on these films in much more detail - not off the table - all I can tell you is that you should probably go watch them.
Before we continue, I just want to say that the themes I’ve talked about that are in Videodrome have been touched on by lots of movies since, partly because of the wide-ranging influence of Videodrome. Just the other day I watched Mandy for the first time and there’s a knowing use of a radio broadcast from America’s “moral majority”, saying that America is in moral decline, which contrasts the plot of the whole film, in which a cult of jesus freaks commit horrific crimes in the name of holy righteousness. However, I have to say the best film yet to have re-examined the themes in Videodrome, and I think that did an even better job than Videodrome, was made by a little filmmaker you might not have heard of, called David Cronenberg.
eXistenZ
Two people on the run from anti-art assassins who hate video games for blurring the line between fiction and reality travel through bizarre VR dreamworlds before eventually emerging from the game you didn’t know they were in and it turns out they were the anti-art assassins all along. This film fucking slaps. Holy shit.
Ted, one of the protagonists, admits to Allegra, the other protagonist, that he's afraid of being “penetrated” - he says surgically, the joke is that we assume sexually, but actually it's emotionally and intellectually. He is afraid of being penetrated by art.
Cronenberg is saying if you don’t like art and don’t care about themes you’re straight and I think that fucking rules.
In Videodrome, the straight guy is literally and figuratively penetrated with media, and it's presented as a scary and bad. It’s part of the horror. In the superior film, eXistenZ, the straight guy is afraid of getting penetrated but he starts to like it and that's a better film and I don’t care to question why I will not be reading comments at this time.
I always say that when it comes to comic books, or video games, or anything else that isn’t well-respected in the mainstream as an artful medium, there are basically two kinds of people: people who don’t read comic books because there’s no metaphors in them, and people who read comic books because there’s no metaphors in them. Now from that standpoint it can be pretty hard to convince people that there are, in fact, metaphors, subtext and themes in your beloved problematic-fave-medium of choice.
In Videodrome, Max Renn is a sleazy guy. He knows that getting a rise out of people is all that matters, because that’s what drives ratings, which drives profits. He has a nose for provocative media, but yeah: he loves gore and horror and porn because there’s no metaphors in them. And then the metaphors start getting to him anyway.
My problem with Videodrome though, is twofold - firstly, it puts forth an individualistic understanding of cultivation theory. Media affects individual people, and that makes them do things. Max Renn has VHS tapes plunged into his chest and then he does murders. Media affects him directly and I don’t think that’s how media works.
I think people are like individual water particles in a river and the effect media has is like a rock in that river. Not nothing, but not absolute either. It certainly doesn’t dictate the motion of one specific particle.
Furthermore, Max Renn isn’t a sympathetic protagonist, he’s part of the horror that Videodrome is trying to communicate. The fact he puts out media that affects people this much without knowing or caring is scary and is the point, to some degree, and for me the consequences of Videodrome being broadcast would be easier to connect with if the consequences weren’t happening to the person responsible for broadcasting it.
By contrast, in eXistenZ the horror is communicated by these two characters who go on a journey together through a powerful piece of art, who turn out to be the threat, not the sympathetic characters at all but clearly part of the horror of the film. It also acknowledges that media is a conversation between audience and author by having the game become the narrative that they expect, and I think that slaps.
These characters go through this whole intersubjective reality experience together and learn nothing. They go into it hating art, and they come out of it still hating art enough to murder the author with Big Gun. I think it’s much more compelling to focus not on the person who doesn’t believe media contains metaphors, but on the people who know media contains metaphors and have a phobia of being penetrated.
eXistenZ is also probably the best dream world I’ve ever seen in anything, even speaking as a long time David Lynch fan. The fact that Cronenberg deliberately cast actors to do accents that aren’t theirs sets you on edge from the start, and the fact that certain consumer electronics (phones, games consoles) but not others (tools, radios) are bizarre fleshy body horror devices but they never acknowledge it is fantastic. I know we’re only four films in but I’m just going to say right out: this is my favourite Cronenberg film.
Scanners
Scanners really starts out looking like it has a solid core theme. In Scanners there’s this guy, and he’s too sensitive. In fact, he’s so sensitive that it causes him pain, and there’s an artist and that’s a good outlet for the pain of being too sensitive… but then the movie just goes off the rails. The bad guy is his brother… and then they swap bodies. This, one of Cronenberg’s most well known films, primarily because of that shot in Scanners you know which one I mean, and that is a huge road-block for me because it doesn’t seem to have consistent themes at all. Maybe my powers of analysis have simply failed me. If you understand what Scanners is about, write me a letter and then open up a fleshy pulsating whole in your chest and just jam it the hell in there. Or leave a comment, I guess.
I will say this starts to establish for me one returning piece of cinematography. Where Spielberg has “the oner” and Kubrick has the “deranged protagonist looking at you through their eyebrows”, Cronenberg has the “look at all this mess, how did we get here”. He really likes to end his films on a slow panning out shot that shows the audience the cumulative chaos of the entire story. Wasn’t that spooky? That was spooky, eh? Aren’t you glad that isn’t you? That would suck…
I like it. I think it’s nice to end out the movie with one of these shots, giving the audience a moment to consider just how fucked up all that was.
The Dead Zone is an adaptation of a Steven King book. See, my zoomer audience may not be aware that back before we had the Marvel Cinematic Universe or the DC Cinematic Universe, Hollywood used to churn out new adaptations from the same intellectual property by just locking Steven King in a room with a bunch of cocaine and a typewriter.
This is much more of a Steven King story than a David Cronenberg story. The framing and general cinematography is functionally practically identical to something like The Langoliers or The Mist. I don't want to accuse Cronenberg of just doing this one for a paycheck but…. 
Here’s the big clue: the score was written by Michael Kamen, and the costume design was by Olga Dimitrov. 
Howard Shore, who you may know from the Lord of the Rings score, and Denise Cronenberg who you may know as Ed Norton Incredible Hulk’s Costume Designer and also David Cronenberg’s sister, worked on practically everything else Cronenberg ever made.
Okay Denise was actually working on Dead Zone as wardrobe mistress so maybe she was still training… I just wanted to mention that Cronenberg employs his sister on every film he does I think that’s really nice.
Another aside - some of Cronenberg’s work can be summed up in about a line and somehow I ended up watching a bunch of that in a row.
Rabid
What if a woman grew a new organ for penetrating men with?
Crash
What if people wanted to fuck a car?
The Brood
Cronenberg was divorcing his wife when he made this film

A Dangerous Method 
This piece of historical fiction about the relationship between Carl Jung, his mentor Sigmund Freud, and his protegé/lover Sabina Spielrein is… not great. Actually, it glorifies Jung and Freud to near sainthood. An academic psychologist I know told me about just saying “wank” over and over watching because of the absurd fluffing that Freud and Jung got in this film. 
In most cases it’s not so much about historical inaccuracy - not about pointing to something and saying “that didn’t happen” or “that happened differently”. Instead it’s about framing. One character is portrayed negatively, and a part of that is their use of cocaine, even though in real life Freud also used cocaine (and it shows in his fucking books). 
At another point, Jung’s wife is the bad guy for exposing him for objectively being a little shitheel. Probably the most strange aspect of the framing is that the film shows us Jung abusing his power over a woman who is in his professional care, letting her be involved in psychological experiments and then getting romantically involved with her, but the film doesn’t show us this as evidence that Jung was an unprofessional raging dingus, instead it… just sort of happens. The interesting thing to the film is the emotional situation of Jung and Sabina.
Worst of all, A Dangerous Method was competent but… boring? Hmm.. put a pin in that.
Naked Lunch 
Wowzers… Naked Lunch. Really quite seminal both as the original book and as the film, Naked Lunch is about a drug addict and the internal life of someone who slips through the cracks in the system and is just high all the time. He loses everything, his whole life melts away, and he just barely shows any interest or care whatsoever. He accidentally kills his wife, he loses his job, he goes on the run, he has sex with a very young looking male escort, he engages in bizarre deceitfulness around his friends and colleagues, the true nature of which is never revealed, and the order in which he loses things isn’t poetic. It’s not Dante’s Inferno - he isn’t travelling deeper into the rings of hell, he shoots his wife in the head in the first sequence of the film and then again in the last, right before shedding a tear to demonstrate that he is aware of how hopeless his situation is but can’t make heads or tails of it. Grim. This one… is grim.
Shivers
Originally “Orgy of the Blood Parasites”, Shivers is a perfect example of how Cronenberg, especially in his early period, constructs his horror around one big spooky idea. “Man and woman in bed and he looks at her and a spider crawls out of her mouth”. Not to say that figuring out how to spook people isn’t a valuable thing to do, just that his new story ideas don’t come from a wellspring of Cronenberg’s personal ideology.
A History Of Violence is about Viggo Mortensen as a nice family man Tom Stall who is recognised by a gangster played by Ed Harris as “Joey Kusack” but Tom isn’t Joey Kusack and he doesn’t know what Ed Harris is talking about, except really he is and then he kills a bunch of guys. This film was called near-perfect film noir by one reviewer, and what I take from that is that I must really hate film noir because I found this so boring. Like god damn. So boring. It was absolutely a competent film with great performances from some people I know are great actors. There were also bits where Cronenberg really played with his usual style that complemented the material well - like in the scene where Tom thinks the gangsters are coming to his house, so he tells his wife to get the shotgun, and she drops the box of ammo on the floor, and the camera pointedly shows us where the ammo went, and then when the gangsters aren’t there, they put down the shotgun on the table, and the camera pointedly shows us where the gun is - that created a fantastic tension and throughout the scene I kept thinking about where the gun is and how far they are from the table, even though the gangsters never came.
It reminded me of some of the stuff I liked best about eXistenZ, when the camera would focus in pointedly on a soda cup or something and I would wait for it to become relevant again in the scene, but it never would, and that really added to the dreamlike quality of the film.
But those good bits weren’t enough to save this one. I’m sorry History of Violence, you’re not for me.
Eastern Promises is also about Viggo Mortensen as a gangster, and also extremely did not grab me. It was also competent, also had good bits that I found compelling, but also just bored me.
Both of these Cronenberg films were really boring, both of them starred Viggo Mortensen. Coincidence? Eh, sort of.
Cronenberg made these two films consecutively, while trying to break the curse of genre-pigeonholing that so many horror directors face, and I think that’s why both of these, despite being so competent, felt so hollow. It seemed to me like Cronenberg was very aware he was stepping out of his comfort zone and so made everything very carefully, but ultimately forgot to put the filling into this delicious cream bun film. Film bun. Bun film. Choux-nema…
M Butterfly is an adaptation of a play that forcibly fights back the racism and American imperialism of classic opera Madama Butterfly, but it’s also about what if you were tricked into being gay and doing the gay with a man, who’s definitely not a woman despite living as a woman for twenty years… he’s definitely a man. Spooky right?
I will say there’s a scene where Sun Lilong is on her own and her government spy handler comes to see her, and asks why she dresses like a woman when nobody is watching, and she says incredibly dead-pan no I despise this costume, I’m just uhhh practicing and I had a good chuckle.
Maps to the stars
Let’s talk about incest. Thanks, Dave.
This film really demonstrates a key thing about “Late Cronenberg” which is that he clearly learned how to use the other elements of his movies to create the effects on the audience without the actual body horror. It’s really redeeming after Eastern Promises and A History Of Violence. That delicious filling has arrived. Yum yum yum.
In his early period he had a lot of gore and body horror without, in my opinion, particularly effective emotional reality. Then in the middle period he created really masterful stuff by uniting incredible practical effects and genuinely upsetting body horror and gore with conceptually scary emotional themes. Looking at this later film, he isn’t always trying to create fear, or discomfort, but he’s using the same mastery of character and emotional reality to tell stories that he learned to over the course of his career.
When Havanna fucks Agatha’s boyfriend in front of her, and then comes into the house and immediately starts berating and belittling her, it’s one of those counterintuitive things that can show that you really understand how people work. Against our rational impulses, when we’ve done something shitty to someone, we sometimes try to justify it by convincing ourselves they are a bad person and doubling down on how shitty we are towards them.
It’s really a perfect example of Cronenberg’s filmmaking at its best - using the film to create a strong sense or feeling. You wouldn’t describe it using a thesis, and if you did, the thesis would be Hollywood is really incestuous, which sounds insanely simplistic and reductive, but it is actually the point.
The film wants you to really understand the way that Hollywood is a community built up on layers upon layers upon layers of trauma, and the toxic power dynamics between generations are treated as the normal way of things getting done.
The film has a married couple who are actually brother and sister, and constant allusions to other incest. The film has Carrie Fisher, real life actress daughter of a famous actress and person who had a terrible relationship with her mother, come on and tell the fictional protagonist with an even worse mother/daughter dynamic that “everyone should get the chance to play their mother”. The film has teen movie stars casually chatting about doing drugs and having sex while at the same club as adults as if these children aren’t tiny babies who should be being protected.
And when the film starts to pull the thread of some of that incest and trauma and abuse, and the woman from the brother/sister/husband/wife couple goes from comically saying “Now everyone will know we’ve done crimes” to literally self-immolating in a shockingly short amount of time.
It thoroughly and carefully builds up a picture of a whole community of people who know that they’re treating everyone else the worst possible way, but have no clue how to even begin to deal with it.
So, having looked at Cronenberg’s entire commercial filmography I can say that he makes, what french existentialist, Jean-Paul Sartre, would have called “films”.
What did I learn from all this? Well if you’ll let me, I want to spend an inordinately long time explaining how and why I learned absolutely nothing.
It struck me pretty early on that Cronenberg’s commercial filmography can be split into three periods: early, mid and late. In his early period, Cronenberg was coming out of the filmmaking underground, making controversial body horror on a deadline and a budget with the aim of getting under people’s skin. His first commercial film, Shivers, was discussed in Canadian parliament because it was considered so shocking and even “pornographic” at the time. I’d call the early period everything from Shivers to Scanners. 
In his mid period Cronenberg progressed to making far more thematically potent films like Videodrome, The Fly, or Naked Lunch These were largely just as controversial and shocking as his previous ones, but in my opinion are much more masterfully created films. This period stretches roughly from Videodrome to eXistenZ, so really from Videodrome to when he realised how to Videodrome right. From Videodrome to Videodrome II: Videogame.
His late period, from A History of Violence onwards, sees Cronenberg clearly step away from making horror films, and instead try to show his range as a filmmaker. At first he was making films I’d say were competent but not confident. He was experimenting with new genres and the end results were fine but suffered from the deficit of him changing to a new type of filmmaking.
From my surrounding conversations as I worked through these films what I picked up is that if you’ve seen Cronenberg, you’ve seen his mid-period, specifically Videodrome; if you like Cronenberg, you’ve seen his mid-period and also early-period work; and nobody has seen his late-period work. Me. It’s just me. I’ve seen Eastern Promises and nobody else has.
But before we really get into it can we just spend a little moment in the Denise Cronenberg appreciation corner? Across these movies there are some absolutely cracking costumes, that subtly add to the weirdness and beauty of the worlds of these stories. The practical effects get all the attention in Cronenberg’s body horror in particular, but would Dead Ringers be the same without the freaky cultist clothes the surgeons dress in during the surgery scene? Would I see Jude Law as the powerfully hetero Ted Pikel if he wasn’t rocking his beige-grey fleece and jeans combo? Would I see James Spader as a rich pervert who wants to fuck a car if he wasn’t dressed like this?

I don’t think so. Big props Denise, this one’s for you.
There are inarguably some themes that Cronenberg likes to come back to over and over. I’ve even said here that eXistenZ is a better version of Videodrome. But sometimes channels like Wisecrack - for example, just picking them at random from the list of channels I have no ongoing grudge with that I frequently rant about on twitter - create the impression that artists usually focus on one idea or ideology across their whole career. It ends up being their brand, making The Philosophy Of videos.
For example: It kinda goes without saying that Cronenberg really really likes Freud. You’re watching his movies and thinking damn this is some freudian shit and then you get to Rabid and this woman is penetrating people with her new organ, and someone just comes on screen with a Freud textbook. And then you get to A Dangerous Method and you go oh fuck of course you made a Jung and Freud biopic. Cronenberg clearly believes in a subsconscious and in fears and thoughts that people have hidden deep inside.
“You wanna get under the surface to see what’s really going on, and how things really work. That does upset a lot of people, and to me that’s an inevitable consequence of being a serious artist.” - Interview with Cronenberg.
However, if I wanted to call this his philosophy I would feel incredibly disingenuous. Do I think that Freud could be a useful lens to understand Videodrome, and Shivers, and Maps to the stars? Sure. But I think that Dead Ringers and Naked Lunch and Scanners don’t really benefit from it. I also think Cronenberg’s horror is often psychological, so me claiming that his work is in line with the philosophy of one of the foundational thinkers of modern psychological canon would be putting a hat on a hat.
I think I could make a solid 15 minute video where I convince you very thoroughly that Freud is the key to the Philosophy of David Cronenberg by referencing only his 5 most famous films. I could probably do the same but with Foucault, Hegel or Nietzsche instead.
And then there are themes that run through everything an artist makes. I found an academic article examining the references to the AIDS virus in the critical reception of Cronenberg, and I’ve certainly got some questions about Cronenberg’s relationship to homosexuality after watching all of his films, and I’d probably say there’s some pretty interesting queer subtext to pretty much every one of his films, and in some of them just textual queerness.
Between Jeremy Irons’ and Jeremy Irons’ codependent twins in Dead Ringers, the anti-art heteros of eXistenZ, the gay scenes in Shivers and Maps To The Stars, the protagonist getting so high he doesn’t have a conception of being straight any more in Naked Lunch, the whole of M Butterfly, the guy who watches Viggo Mortensen having sex in Eastern Promises - you know, to make sure he’s not gay - the way that the car accident fetish in Crash bleeds into homosexual attraction when James Spader’s protagonist encounters a man with a big sexy car, there’s definitely something going on, and you’d have to watch very closely to tell what exactly.
On the other hand a lot of adaptations or stories based on real events that Cronenberg has produced tend to cut down on the amount of queerness, including some of the things I’ve just mentioned. He does present a pattern of at least slightly removing homosexuality from these stories, but on the other other hand - the third hand - he does keep coming to stories where homosexuality is an important part. In particular stories in which eroticism spills over and protagonists drift through bizarre worlds that, in a dreamlike state might involve them engaging in sexuality outside of heteronormativity. If I’m honest what it reminds me most of is my contention earlier in life that everyone was probably bisexual, while at the time identifying as a straight man myself .
However, there is a quote commonly attributed to, of all people, Sigmund Freud. Supposedly a student of his, learning his theories about sexual attraction and the subconscious, asked him what his pipe represented - this thing he would continually stick in his mouth endlessly day in day out - and so the story goes, Freud replied “sometimes a pipe is just a pipe.”
On the one hand I think this is very fair, and is something that we should all bear in mind, to avoid chasing our tails over whether David Cronenberg is a secret gay, and on the other hand this is fascist propaganda and must be destroyed at all costs! A pipe is never just a pipe!
Okay, yes it is, but also, it isn’t. This is what we do aggressive readings of media for.
But the point I really want to get to is that themes like this elusive queerness can be in every single one of Cronenberg’s films, just like Denise Cronenberg and not make up what you’d call The Philosophy of David Cronenberg.
I get it. Sometimes to make your point it isn’t convenient to include all of someone’s work. Sometimes it feels more exciting and romantic to talk about the character of an artist based on the works people will be most familiar with… and sometimes it’s 3am on Christmas Eve and you have to have this essay written before you get back so you can post it to patreon by mid-January and it would be so easy to just pretend that Davey Cronchingbirb’s films all revolve around one central idea.
But art is messy, and horror is messier than that, and body horror doubly so, and Cronenberg is a perfect example of how body horror constructs a feeling.
I think it’s important to this discussion that he has spent most of his career as a horror director, which means that his art at its most psychological, visceral intense and upsetting still might not be social commentary. The art in horror films, the genius of getting under people’s skin, is not necessarily prescriptive commentary, not necessarily laying out a set of morals, but simply providing a jumping-off point. Not necessarily what should we do about this but simply this scares you, doesn’t it?
I also think it’s important to this conversation that he spent most of his career as a horror director but isn’t any more. Around about Eastern Promises Cronenberg clearly wanted to step away from being the body horror guy and then he made some really boring films for dads and that’s fine too, because then he made Maps to the stars which fucking owns!
Considering that Cronenberg didn’t want to be pigeonholed into one genre, I would feel like I was personally betraying him if I pigeonholed him into one single idea.
In Breakfast of Champions Kurt Vonnegut described his characters as having their own real lives, and internal motivations, and his control over them as an author being not like a puppeteer with taut strings, but like he was attached to them by stale rubber bands. I think about this a lot, not just in the sense that Vonnegut meant it - that with a fictional world entirely under his control his art still runs away from him - but also in the sense that artists working on a budget don’t necessarily get to create exactly what they envision. Their control over their art is like being attached to it by stale rubber bands.
I definitely think about this when I think about Scanners. If Cronenberg was really getting up, writing pages, filming and then scouting locations in the evening, he didn’t have that level of auteurish control that everyone on YouTube is obsessed with discussing.
We all like to imagine the big powerful Director Man crafting his art like a Randian superman, but not only are they sometimes constrained by budget, time or other factors - film is an essentially collaborative medium. 
As someone who’s made one very small short film, and would like to make more film projects in the future, the way Cronenberg talks about making films speaks to me. He talks about getting started as an underground director because he could just pick up a camera and go without working as a boom mic operator for a decade to work his way up first, he talks about appearing in friend’s films, he talks about being inspired by something he thought was spooky and building entire large, complicated stories around them, and sometimes that ends with Shivers and sometimes that ends with Videodrome.
He’s an artist, and I don’t feel alright taking an artist’s whole career - which is also their whole life - and crunching it down to one single ideology or idea. When you make essays about your hot take, the pressure is on to twist the facts to suit your theory, and when you spend four months watching all the films by one director, the pressure is on to develop a theory you can twist the facts to. Essays about artists and art are gonna be biased and twisted to some degree - I’m guilty of it myself - but they have to leave room to let artists be human beings, living their lives.
Sometimes a pipe is just a pipe. Sometimes things are messy, and there isn’t one big central point, and that’s fine.