Eviscerating Middle Class Comfort: David Cronenberg's Rabid and the City of Montreal

by Nick Thomson © 2024

N.B. The following is an updated version of an essay that I wrote in April 2005, titled “Tearing Apart Stuffy, Middle Class Comfort: David Cronenberg's Rabid and the City of Montreal”, for a third year course called 'Canadian & Québecois Cinema', during my degree in Film & Television Studies at the University of East Anglia.

Do also note that the following contains SPOILERS for the films discussed.

********************************************************************************

 

David Cronenberg's second full-length feature film Rabid (1976) became a conspicuous financial success, emerging “unexpectedly from a country at best in the twilight zone of film-consciousness”ⁱ focusing on a “disease-driven apocalyptic revolution”ⁱⁱ set in the city of Montreal, in the Canadian province of Québec. The film centres on Rose (Marilyn Chambers), who suffers severe injuries after being involved in a motorcycle crash on a lonely country road with her boyfriend Hart (Frank Moore). She is whisked away to the nearby Keloid Clinic – a private health centre for plastic surgery – where the opportunistic Dr Keloid (Howard Ryshpan) uses her as his guinea pig. Cronenberg's disparaging reaction to institutional life is central to his films, most potently in his early works, from the Somafree Institute in The Brood (1979) to Consec in Scanners (1981) and Spectacular Optical in Videodrome (1983), in which they all lead towards disease, trauma, and death.

Foreseeing present day skin graft and stem cell techniques, Cronenberg introduces the viewer to 'neutral field tissue', which has the ability to rebuild damaged flesh and conform itself according to the characteristics of its new locale on the human body; this is a continuation of a thought process started in 1975 with Shivers. In that film, within the Starliner Tower (an apartment complex on the outskirts of Montreal, designed to house every consumer need) a parasite has been developed, intended to replicate human organs, but which instead turns the host into a sex-crazed lunatic intent on only three things: lust, murder, and the spreading of their disease. The final shot of the film sees the contaminated inhabitants of this secluded, stylish, and modern community heading off to corrupt the rest of the world, an infection aimed outwards by comparison to the inward spread of disinhibition and social collapse witnessed in J.G. Ballard's novel High Rise, also released in 1975; Cronenberg would adapt Ballard's 1973 novel Crash to much controversy in 1996. Building on this shared fascination, Rabid continues Cronenberg's critique on a progressive society by subtly undermining comfortable middle-class idleness as a predatory civilisation obsessed with cosmetic surgery...

Click READ MORE below to continue...

The bulk of the surgeries performed by Dr Keloid, who is named after a type of scar tissue formed from collagen, revolves around affluent patients – many of them returning customers – who are obsessively having small tweaks made to their eyes, ears, nose, and hands. Cronenberg presents a corruption of the natural human body through medical science, the Keloid Clinic standing as a spa resort palace for plastic surgery. An early scene between Dr Keloid and his business partner Murray Cypher (Joe Silver), lays bare Cronenberg's scathing satire. Cypher describes the notion of a franchise of Keloid Clinics as a “magnificent, inevitable idea”, to which Dr Keloid uncomfortably intones that he doesn't want to become “the Colonel Sanders of plastic surgery”. Cypher considers that a great idea, to which Dr Keloid wearily acquiesces with “Just make the pill easy for me to swallow”.

Such a casually fluid sense of medical morality underpins the clinic in Cronenberg's film, as Dr Keloid's reaction to news of a nearby motorcycle accident shows. At first disinterested, functionally upholding his Hippocratic oath, he senses opportunity like a wolf sniffing blood. Fully justifying his actions – the nearest state hospital is three hours away while Rose has thirty minutes to live – Dr Keloid races into action, with Rose's broken and bloodied body wheeled through the clinic's lobby. The witheringly caustic response from a patient, dressed as if ready for an expensive cigar before bed? “You think they could cover it with a sheet or something”. Proudly appearing as a progressive medical institution, the Keloid Clinic unexpectedly transforms Rose, through experimental surgical techniques, into a 'biologically correct' vampire, who in-turn usually preys upon sexually 'predatory' men in a consumerist society, with Rose's actions leading to a viral epidemic throughout the province of Québec.

There is a dark irony to this, considering that the actress playing Rose – Marilyn Chambers – was a star of pornographic movies (most famously the 1972 film Behind The Green Door), and unfortunately found herself under the influence of Chuck Traynor, the notorious man behind Linda Lovelace (star of Deep Throat); and, indeed, upon the theatrical release of Rabid in 1977, the AIDs crisis was about to explode in the public consciousness.

The link between tales of vampires and notions of sexuality are intrinsically linked, and true to form, Rabid shows Rose utilising her sexuality to ensnare her victims, male or female, with her role as subordinate or dominant changing to suit. Her first attack, upon waking from a month-long coma, finds a concerned patient (obsessed with precise readjustment of his ears and eyes) drawn into a deadly embrace with Rose, whose breasts are exposed with evidently erect nipples. “I'm so cold”, she says, playing helpless victim in order to victimise.

Dr Keloid's technique of removing the 'specificity' of human tissue has wrought a new disease upon mankind, which speaks to an air of suspicion surrounding private medical facilities in Canada, where such businesses were rare at the time, their infiltration in an otherwise state-controlled model meaning either great wealth (of both the patients and the doctors) or of secrecy. The latter, in particular, is not such an outlandish belief, considering that the USA's Central Intelligence Agency's clandestine research into brainwashing – the notorious MKULTRA programme – had ties with certain educational institutions in Canada in the mid-20^th Centuryⁱⁱⁱ.

Such frictions between traditional values and a progressive outlook has often led to controversy in many facets of Canadian culture. In 1967 Canada's first Playboy Club (an import from the USA) opened in Montreal, to which the press noted it would be no competition for the already established strip joints “which never pretended to be wholesome or civic-minded”^iv. Then, in 1969, the Official Languages Act recognised that English and French should enjoy equal status, and Dr Henry Morgentaler succeeded in his campaign for amendments to legalise abortion, the Montreal family physician heralded by some as a hero while still “many Canadians maintain that abortion is murder”^v. Continuing this cultural tug of war, controversial (yet popular) Montreal artist Mark Prent, unveiled an installation entitled A Human Meat Market in 1973, which featured “bloodied human torsos, butchered and arranged for consumption”^vi – chocolate box bucolic scenery, it most certainly was not. After the death of Québec's conservative premier Maurice Duplessis, who had championed urban growth and extended electricity to rural communities, there was a period known as the 'Quiet Revolution'. This was a time of rapid social, political, and cultural development marked by Liberal leader Jean Lesage convincing the people of the province that it was time for change. Québec in the 1960s experienced reform to its educational system, social liberalisation, and an unbuttoning of public morals in the wake of a much more conservative style of living.

While Montreal culture appeared to travel on a bold and contemporary, but positive trajectory, the political climate became rife with violence and repression. Montreal had long experienced the conflict inherent in their culture and language – never 'fully' Canadian nor French nor, even, Colonial British in a broader national sense. By 1968 the government of Pierre Trudeau was in power and facing the grievances of French-speaking Canadians, and especially those from Québec – but any change was too little, too late.

Rabid is a spin on the traditionally gothic or supernatural horror mainstays – vampires in particular, but also the then-new ghoulish creature of the zombie – as well as a reaction to “the power allocated to governmental social systems”^vii. The violence and martial law laid down throughout Cronenberg's film is not far removed from Montreal's then very recent past, which despite showing steady movement towards a greater sense of modernity, fell victim to the separatist, ultra-nationalist actions of the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ). The violent turmoil and dark corners of mid-20^th Century Québec would find its way into Cronenberg's film, strained through the prism of the horror genre. Building upon the crisis of Québecois identity, the FLQ were involved in more than one-hundred-and-fifty violent incidents, including the 1969 bombing of the Montreal Stock Exchange.

Initially an underground splinter group, the FLQ rose from troubled waters very publicly in 1970 while seeking an independent and socialist Québec. They “introduced terrorism to Canadians with painted slogans and Molotov cocktails”^viii, targeting anything Anglo-Saxon or Federal. Frustrated French speaking Québecois sought acknowledgement from their government, wanting to sever ties and stand alone, like removing a cancerous tumour from healthy flesh (or removing healthy flesh from a cancerous body, depending on one's viewpoint) as if ensnared in some Cronenbergian body horror.

October of 1970 saw what became known as The October Crisis, at which point the FLQ, bolstered by some favourable public opinion and support from student rallies, kidnapped James Cross (the British Trade Commissioner) and Pierre Laporte (the Québec Minister of Labour). In exchange for release, the FLQ demanded their manifesto be spread and that twenty-three of their comrades be released from custody. This was chaos in the province, but particularly in Montreal, and resulted in strong and unpredicted action from Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau on October 16^th 1970: the peacetime implementation of the War Measures Act. Surprisingly, despite the temporary federal revocation of innocent people's civil rights, it was generally accepted by the public, who just wanted the situation resolved. However, the following day, Pierre Laporte's strangled body was discovered in a car boot (subsequent investigation revealed that the strangling was likely accidental).

Prime Minster Trudeau had little time to mess around:

“There's a lot of bleeding hearts around that don't like to see people with helmets and guns; all I can say is go ahead and bleed. But it's more important to keep law and order in this society than to be worried about weak-kneed people who don't like the looks of a soldier.”^ix

What followed, before the 1971 annulment of the War Measures Act, were many months of darkness: violence, paranoia, arrests, and the daily negative impact on the lives of countless innocent civilians caught in the middle. During the later stages of Rabid, as the epidemic sweeps the province, a news report somewhat ironically announces that the Prime Minister is reluctant to declare a state of emergency, as if wary of reigniting the controversies of 1970. Despite this, the reporter goes on to say: “But, as any citizen on the streets will tell you, Martial Law has come to Montreal”. In real-life, the streets of Montreal were suddenly trampled by tanks and troops, who raided the homes of suspected FLQ sympathisers (not necessarily active supporters) resulting in 465 arrests. Would the people of their neighbouring nation to the south have put up with such measures? George A. Romero's 1973 film The Crazies depicts a chemical leak, which causes civilians to 'go crazy', and necessitates the deployment of the National Guard. These faceless, gun-toting men, rendered identically inhuman in gas masks and hazmat suits, encounter violent resistance from the residents of a rural community, strongly suggesting that the right to bare arms would be vigorously utilised.

But the October Crisis and its wake was not the last time the city of Montreal would see soldiers armed to the teeth providing strong-arm security, as the 1976 Summer Games witnessed, at great public expense, thousands of soldiers, policemen (trained in terrorist negotiation), and even rooftop snipers keeping the Olympic village safe in response to the eleven Israeli athletes who were killed at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

Such scenes are overtly reacted to in Rabid, where the threat of terrorism is replaced with the terror of a disease spreading throughout the streets of Montreal and rural Québec. “It was really quite shocking for everyone to see martial law invoked”^x by Trudeau, his actions further shredding the quiet middle-class ideology, which had already been sorely disrupted by the FLQ. The real-life scenes mirrored a hunt between the old and the new – established government and the ultra-nationalists, or even native people and descendents of immigrant settlers – an idea at the core of Cronenberg's film and its 'Loud Revolution', which even features a scene in which two inebriated native men are breathalysed by a quietly frustrated white police officer.

Considering such a noteworthy and bleak stain on mid-20^th Century Canada, and its wider appearance to the outside world, the bi-lingual nation, with its diverse national and cultural groups, is an intriguing subject of study. As the second largest country (in area) in the world, Canada is only inhabited by 1% of the global population, and of this number, four fifths live in the urban centres, which hug the border with the United States of America.

The majority of the land is uninhabitable and rugged terrain, which leads itself to a mystical “nostalgia for a rural past that has never actually existed”^xi felt by a people who set out to construct a moral community opposed to the Yankee Republicanism at the end of the American Civil War. Whereas its North American neighbour's disrespect shown to the country's native people upon discovery of the new land is well known, the invading populace of Canada experience an “alienation felt by Europeans in a new, not inherited but rather a conquered land”^xii – a shared guilt. It is not unreasonable to suggest that in America's shadow, Canada is a 'little brother' figure by comparison, a non-offensive and generally easy-going country – at least from an outsider perspective. An established peace-keeper in world politics, but never shy of criticising its own practices or creating its own disturbances to deal with themselves, could they be considered an isolationist realm to some extent? Certainly, with the bulk of its population born of immigrants from many different countries, Canada inherently possesses a nomadic spirit.

Many of Cronenberg's films suggest an anti-postmodern attitude (horror movies are traditionally reactionary), showing us a fragmented society in which we live. The evolved architecture of the 1960s, especially that of well-known Montreal architects, comes under fire at first in Shivers as the Starliner Tower's cold, concrete exterior houses fashionable, isolated living. Much the same can be thought of the Keloid Clinic in Rabid, with its clean brickwork, precise corridors, and gleaming slabs of glass, which create “a boundary between inside and outside, whose reality from the point of view of literal vision blocks off all human contact”^xiii.

While the USA can easily be thought of as a compulsively modern society, Canada seems to tread a fine line between rural and contemporary yearning. However, amidst this uneven feeling there were signs of revolution: 1962 saw the opening of the Trans-Canada Highway, which allowed easy travel across the country, something that would have otherwise proved impossible. The idea of transport is inherent to Canadian society, the populace born of wanderers facing a relatively harsh terrain, meaning any mode of transport is an important tool, especially in rural areas, while in the urban centres such as Montreal, there was opportunity to explore the cutting edge.

For example, the Montreal Metro that was “the pride of city hall”^xiv, was built in preparation for Expo '67 and went beyond the typical dirty and noisy subway systems of the era. Nitrogen-filled rubber tyres made it the “quietest system in the world”^xv and even the stations were designed to be aesthetically pleasing. But the system, unable to work in the icy cold climate of Montreal, drove the metro totally underground before leading to “one of the worst fires in Montreal's history”^xvi, resulting in one death, many injuries, and $7 million worth of damage after the terminal at Henri-Bourassa station had to be flooded to douse the flames.

Although an ultimately flawed venture, this demonstrates the ideology of urban progressivism in Montreal during the 1960s and 70s, and speaks to a scene in the film in which the representative of Montreal's Mayor states “The city is a complex machine … it needs constant attention”, as if some sort of wounded body, like the victim of a horrific motorcycle accident requiring cutting edge medical intervention. This scene also hints at the film's ruffling of middle-class feathers, when the Mayor's aide remarks of a roadblock: “It may be strike trouble – be careful!”, before two working class 'crazies' assault the vehicle with a jackhammer. In another twist of irony, and converse to the urban impingement on rural life in Canada, Rabid presents a scenario in which urban catastrophe is birthed from rural isolation – the explosion of violence shattering two distinct but overlapping ideals: the pastoral peace of the countryside and the upwardly mobile affluence of the city.

Eerily similar moments, to then very recent past events, occur in Rabid with soldiers patrolling the streets armed with sub-machine guns, snipers sitting atop refuse trucks taking down potential threats, and the public being searched prior to entering a shopping mall decorated for Christmas: could there be a clearer image of the interruption of middle-class consumerism than this? In spite of a serious viral outbreak, the task of Christmas shopping is still of paramount importance – but considering the laissez-faire reactions of many civilians around the world to the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020, such a scene becomes less absurd. Similarly, under the guidance of Dr Gentry from the World Health Organisation (flown-in to assist the federal government), the uninfected citizens of Cronenberg's Montreal nightmare are vaccinated – but is it a public placebo or a Hail Mary hope to quell this viral fire?

In scenes now chillingly prophetic of the Covid-19 pandemic, residents are urged to stay in their homes unless absolutely necessary, carry cards identifying their vaccination status and, in one scene, the passive disinterest in compliance by the public can be seen when a young male quietly meanders through a vaccine checkpoint before being accosted by the military. In yet another twist of the ironic knife, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (son of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau) would, in reaction to the February 2022 'Freedom Convoy' protest (in regards to the recent pandemic and government policy), enact the 1988 Emergencies Act for the first time in the nation's history. This move “breached the country's charter of rights and freedoms”^xvii, according to the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA), and was deemed 'unreasonable' by a federal court Judge.

Cronenberg's images of the festively-decorated mall touch upon fears that Canada had moved from 'spiritual' status to North American consumer zombies – after all, does the “average citizen in this country want to be a Canadian”^xviii? In Rabid, Cronenberg criticises the actions of Pierre Trudeau by showing the military occupation of rabid Montreal as mere panicked, violent reaction – the shoot first, ask questions later method employed to deal with the FLQ crisis. In the film Dr Gentry of W.H.O. states: “I don't think there is any question that Martial Law is needed in the city. It's a necessity. It's already been established that the victims of the disease […] are beyond medical help once it has established itself to the degree of inducing violent behaviour”, almost mirroring how even a passive sympathy with the FLQ was enough to warrant arrest. An attack by a 'crazy' in the shopping mall is met with immediate lethal force: a jittery policeman opens fire amidst the crowds to take out the threat, but in the process kills a man dressed as Santa in front of a line of children – perhaps the ultimate anti-consumer statement. “Excessive order – surplus repression – thus leads to a breakdown of order”^xix.

Montreal is further examined under a steely gaze when a 'crazy' pounces on a subway commuter amidst a car load of unaware commuters, resulting in a panicked mob fleeing for the exits in scenes reminiscent of the Henri-Bourassa station fire. Meanwhile, the interiors of residential buildings contain cold, hospital-like corridors, splintering from which are units decorated with luxury furnishings, and it is in settings such as this that we spend much of our time throughout the film, our sporadic excursions outdoors using the same critical eye to peruse inner and outer Montreal. The schism between these two is writ large when Rose visits her best friend Mindy (Susan Roman), whose apartment is doused with on-trend 1970s furnishings, almost as stylish as the Keloid Clinic itself. From the safety of her upwardly-mobile, educated, career-oriented slice of middle-class cosiness in the sky, she only pays fleeting attention to the starchy discussions on television about the exploding epidemic – practically just outside her window – while she prepares dinner, quite unwittingly, for patient zero.

Similarly, Murray Cypher is shown to be the epitome of suburban affluence, living in a nice home in a quiet and leafy area on the outskirts of Montreal. Close enough to city-based conveniences, but distant enough to retain some sense of arcadian harmony, even this liminal space is far from safe in Cronenberg's brink-of-the-apocalypse vision. Arriving under the cover of darkness, almost as if returning home from another day of planning franchised cosmetic clinics, his traditional existence – with a stay-at-home wife and an infant – is destroyed: the baby bath is filled with blood, and his wife (who presumably killed the infant) murderously sets upon him. This scene alone is both a desecration of middle-class suburbia and motherhood, with the latter expanded upon in Cronenberg's 1979 film The Brood.

Indeed, the casting of Marilyn Chambers carried layers of taboo-tickling rebelliousness: producer Ivan Reitman saw her appearance in the film as a business coup, what with her in-built audience from her pornographic film career, which itself brewed a storm in a teacup when it was discovered that Chambers had, in an earlier modelling career, posed on the Ivory Snow soap box as the mother – not the child, as some morally biased pearl-clutchers believed. All these aspects, and especially the bullet-spewing chaos in the shopping mall, suggest that Rabid takes some glee from rocking the moralities stocked in supermarkets.

However, despite scenes in such glossy surroundings, we see no 'wholesome' Playboy Club, instead we join Rose amidst a sea of flashing neon, lurid imagery, and grotty porno theatres hiding in the darkness of the night – a seedy and sleazy portion of the city, like Canada's answer to New York City's 'The Deuce', a Sodom and Gomorrah-esque section of 42^nd Street between 7^th and 8^th Avenues, at this same point in history. We may not find such images during scenes set in the rural outskirts of Montreal, but we still witness the fusing of man, machine, and environment – another common theme in David Cronenberg's work.

The isolated Keloid Clinic, with its ultra-modern block structure architecture, more at home within the concrete confines of the city of Montreal, appears like a trespasser, invading rural Québec life to conduct its advanced surgical research away from moral stricture and prying eyes. “We've never accepted the environment as it was given to us, we want light at night, we want heat when it's cold … for humans there is no such thing as a natural environment, we invented our own”^xx – which translates into the cosmetically-minded patients at the clinic. The human race has spent thousands of years trying to understand how we work and just as much time modifying ourselves – from fashion and jewellery to cosmetic surgery, altering our own bodies like one might with a consumer product. But Rabid explores additional notions surrounding the human body, machinery, and the environment playing host.

The Trans-Canada Highway, that is spliced rudely into the countryside, remains sparsely populated with vehicles in Cronenberg's film, and yet, it is hectic in comparison to the opening sequence that is the precursor to the motorcycle accident. At a ramshackle roadside rest stop opposite a near-derelict barn, Rose waits for her boyfriend Hart – the pair dressed in leather riding gear, appearing like future-beings by comparison to their humble, paint-peeling surroundings. Hart, evidently a fan of Route 66 dreams from posters adorning his workshop, speeds along a deserted and winding country road with Rose. The growl of the engine, thrusting at us in a series of close-ups, interrupts the peaceful atmosphere – before Rose ends up crushed and burned beneath a flaming wreck of metal parts scattered in the dull, tough grass of a lifeless field.

With numerous scenes of Hart and Cypher travelling through the frosty landscape as the epidemic escalates, the highway becomes an artery carrying the infection at speed. Chaos ensues as Rose's prey in-turn become predators, vehicles smashing into one another, toppling from an overpass into the path of a bludgeoning truck. Such themes – the violent meeting of human flesh and vehicular steel – would be the focus of Crash, which would also continue his examination of the human body in relation to medical intervention (also see the ghoulish gynaecological instruments in 1988's Dead Ringers).

In Cronenberg's work there is a pantheon of doomed protagonists, many of whom suffer or even meet their end, due to the pursuit of the human body as bio-machine. Videodrome (1983), The Fly (1986), eXistenZ (1999), and Crimes of the Future (2022) all fit into this space. So, too, does Rose become a victim of machinery and technology, before ultimately falling foul of her own victimisation – her body literally thrown out with the garbage to be scooped-up by roaming soldiers adorned in hazmat suits, come the apocalyptic final shot. With her body placed into one of a legion of refuse trucks, we have the horror film version of the War Measures Act – hoovering up 'infected' people (by a virus in the film, or by dangerous political sympathies in real life). Cronenberg's interpretation of the October Crisis even mirrors the discovery of Pierre Laporte's body – both he and Rose packaged into the rear of a vehicle, their dead flesh cocooned in cold metal. While Rose might be the accidental progenitor of the virus overtaking Montreal, she is still, like Laporte, a victim of violent unrest and the strong-arm tactics of the federal government. The discarded nature of Rose's body – once beautiful, seductive, and powerful – amidst the detritus in a filthy alleyway enclosed by a dank, crumbling building overlooked by fresh and new towering apartment blocks, might suggest a warning to all city dwellers if they don't tread carefully.

The cinema of David Cronenberg is of “nightmarish logic, based on the premise that as technology develops, new diseases, desires, even a new flesh, will arise”^xxi, with Rabid coming at a time when many films, especially in the horror genre, “tended to dwell on the nature of domination and fear … with more sinister and pessimistic overtones than before”^xxii. His translation of Montreal is a dark and grisly vision, a society swamped in ideologies of American consumerism, modern living, and cultural advancement. A community of people living out their lives in comfort, with transportation readily available, the irony being that progress has dissolved safe isolation, and so an epidemic is now free to take over the land unimpeded. What society will come to, it would appear, is a series of porn theatres and shopping malls occupied by a community of ultimately enslaved people, perhaps suffering this infection as punishment for losing their way. Despite porno theatres and shopping malls now becoming relics of the past, the former most assuredly, their spread has moved online instead, the virus now propagated through Web Browsers, Social Media, and One-Click Shopping. The prophecy may be altered, but is no less true.

Despite this, though, there is still a glimmer of hope, and even a degree of trust in the apparatus of the state, in Rabid. The availability of a vaccine should protect people from the virus, but not the crazed actions of the infected, yet even then – to the rescue of a disbelieving, dismayed Hart – there will be a roaming band of men dispatched onto the streets to disinfect. There may be a bite of satire to it, but there's also a whisper of the civilians who endured the War Measures Act of 1970-71 so as to have order and their middle-class comfort restored.

The perception to have started out as an anti-Yankee Republican ideal only to end up as just another part of North America – the loss of one's own national identity – suggests the idea of the far-reaching and pervasive culture of the United States of America as some form of viral infection, spreading to other hosts and transforming them, as if two bloodstreams merged to birth a new form: body horror on a national scale. However, Cronenberg's film does not denounce all progress, but rather the sort of growth which strips us of our individuality: the pursuit of the 'perfect look', refining oneself to the point where you become something removed from what you were intended to be. Those who emigrated to Canada were given a fresh canvas and built urban centres, which not only intruded upon the original landscape, but ended up isolating four fifths of the population from the 'real' Canada. They dream of a pastoral life, yet have become reliant upon commodity culture and the need to continually improve their society. While the dangerous freedom of the rural areas is gradually trampled by man and machine – like Rose and Hart shattering birdsong and a cold winter stillness with the fiery internal combustion of a penetrating motorcycle – those remaining in the urbanised blocks of tarmacadam land can eschew their nation's predominant and harsh wilderness to have everything at their fingertips, but must linger under state control and risk a repressive way of life.

 

iRodley, Chris (ed), Cronenberg on Cronenberg, (London, Faber & Faber, 1997), p65

iiIbid, p64

iiiJanisse, Kier-La, Plastic Surgery Disaster: Rabid, the October Crisis, and the Pathological Body Politic, (Arrow Video, Rabid Blu-Ray supplementary material, 2015)

ivhttp://archives.cbc.ca/IDC-1-112-1311-7740/1960s/1967

vhttp://archives.cbc.ca/IDC-1-69-107-781/life_society/morgentaler/clip1

vihttp://archives.cbc.ca/IDC-1-68-300-1602/arts_entertainment/art_censorship

viiMiller, Rhett, http://home.ica.net/~paulc/canux/review/rabid.html

viiiFLQ Backgrounder, October 10^th 1970, http://archives.cbc.ca/IDC-1-71-101-596/conflict_war/october_crisis/clip2

ixOctober 13^th 1970, CBC Television News, http://archives.cbc.ca/IDC-1-71-162-429-21/unforgettable_moments/conflict_war/trudeau_just_watch_me

xCronenberg, David, Rabid DVD Audio Commentary

xiHarcourt, Peter, The Canadian Nation: An Unfinished Text, Canadian Journal of Film Studies Vol. 2 Nos. 2-3, p9

xiiIbid, p13

xiiiIbid, p177

xivCBC Reporter Alan Yates, October 14^th 1966, http://archives.cbc.ca/IDC-1-75-1099-6101/science_technology/subways_history/clip5

xvIbid

xviDecember 10^th 1971, “Fire Hits The Metro”, http://archives.cbc.ca/index.asp?IDLan=1

xviiCecco, Leyland, “Judge rebukes Trudeau for ‘not justified’ use of Emergencies Act to break convoy”, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/23/canada-trudeau-emergencies-act-trucker-protest-covid

xviiiGagnon, Jean Louis, CBC Newsday, October 4^th 1978, http://archives.cbc.ca/index.asp?IDLan=1

xixHumphries, Reynold, The American Horror Film: An Introduction, (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2002), p178

xxCronenberg, David, Rabid DVD Audio Commentary

xxiAndrew, Goff, The Director's Vision: A Concise Guide to the Art of 250 Great Filmmakers, (USA, Prion Books, 1999), p50

xxiiClandfield, David, Canadian Film: Perspectives on Canadian Culture, (Toronto, Oxford University Press Canada, 1987), p75