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.
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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...
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