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.

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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...

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Maps To The Stars:
What's it about?
A teeth-gnashing satire of Hollywood and its rich, successful, and damaged inhabitants from David Cronenberg with a script from Bruce Wagner. The lives of various Tinsel Town oddities - from an ageing actress desperately trying to secure the lead role in a remake of her famous (and dead) mother's iconic film, to a limo-driving screenwriter wannabe - intersect in what becomes a spiralling tale of madness.
Who would I recognise in it?
Julianne Moore, John Cusack, Mia Wasikowska, Robert Pattinson, Olivia Williams, and more.
Great/Good/Alright/Shite?
A return to form from David Cronenberg after the frustratingly obtuse Cosmopolis that took itself far too seriously while lacking any warmth or access for a generally bewildered audience. It takes about ten to twenty minutes to settle into the rhythm, but Wagner's script gleefully piles increasingly bizarre and jaw dropping events on top of one another. Just when you thought it couldn't get weirder and more messed up - it does. Top performances all round, but particular kudos to Julianne Moore who goes all-out towards crafting a multi-dimensional and hopelessly damaged person who attracts the audience's sympathy and vitriol in equal measure. There's one decidedly dodgy moment of CGI that sticks out like a big old sore thumb, but apart from that it's a superb venture into Hollyweird ... although certainly not to everyone's tastes. Great.

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Cosmopolis:
What's it about?
A successful rich bloke hops in his limo to go and get a haircut. He then proceeds to talk utter bollocks with a random collection of arseholes for 105 interminable minutes.
Who would I recognise in it?
Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, Paul Giamatti, Samantha Morton, Kevin Durand, Mathieu Amalric, Jay Baruchel.
Great/Good/Alright/Shite?
Exceptionally stylish, David Cronenberg's "psycho-thriller" is a visual treat, but the script (by DC, based on Don De Lillo's novel) is wilfully obtuse and keeps the audience at a belligerent arm's length for the entire duration. Side characters drift in-and-out for vignette's where people we don't know, or understand, talk in the most poncy, inaccessible manner about stuff we - at best - only half-get in general terms. It's an audience-splitter to say the least. The DVD comes with a making of as-long as the film itself - but I've not braved it yet - perhaps that'll shed a bit of light on all this malarkey, but I just couldn't access this Cronenberg outing. It's a shame as I usually enjoy his work so much (I recently checked out A Dangerous Method, and rather dug it). Alright.

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