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RESEARCH PRODUCT

David Cronenberg : une mission utopique

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This essay is meant as an introduction to the body of Cronenberg's work up to and including Spider. It is an attempt to analyze what Cronenberg calls his mission in aesthetic and ethical terms, Cronenberg having admitted to Serge Grünberg that he wanted to participate in changing contemporary norms by encouraging the spectator to see something beautiful when his initial reaction is repulsion. I argue that the utopian/dystopian aspect of the diegeses of Cronenberg's early films becomes a structuring element in his later films. I first examine Cronenberg's approach to the fantastique in Shivers and Rabid, with particular interest to the monster as a metaphor of the repulsive. In the later films, this metaphor makes way for the body as a synecdoche of the repulsive. I then deal with the relation between self and body, which intimately reflects the relation between self and other, before arguing, in my last part, that the body is at once what enables and what frustrates Cronenberg's project,. Indeed, the body always bears the marks of the past norms it attempts to transgress through metamorphosis, as is best illustrated by the ends of Cronenberg's films which shift from the death of the transgressive hero (from Scanners to M. Butterfly, not including Naked Lunch) to the repetition of the same (Naked Lunch, Crash, eXistenZ, Spider).