The idea of auteurship in the cinema has a long history, from its early origins in la politique des auteurs,1 that sought to translate the literary and romantic tradition of individual expression and genius to the screen; to postmodern throries that have sought to reconcile film's status as a mass, industrial art and to understand the film author as merely one of its effects or products.2 As a methodology, auteurism has fallen in and out of favor, but it has a tendency for reappearing as new directors continue to establish themselves as the major stylistic and thematic center of a film's identity.
Cronenberg's films seem to fit seamlessly into this methodology. His works cohere stylisticly and thematically, and document a private and obsessive interest in the body and its intersection with technology. He has throughout his career continued to reveal the grotesque anomalies, transformations, and divisions of the organic, and the mysterious corridors of the psyche. His work is singular and unique, and though it expresses existential themes, it describes them as the concerns of post-industrial, urban, technological individuals. But just what is the individual? And who is David Cronenberg? Film Studies, like all disciplines in the last century, inherited from critical philosophies a deep distrust of humanism and subjectivity, and someone as converned with the limits of existence and experience as Cronenberg, is destined in such an environment to escape understanding. While attempts have been made to think the auteur in postmodern terms-where she or he is not a subject, but a system of signs, a social construction, or a product of the industry3-the term continues to be problematic because, basically, it implies that there is a dominant creative subjectivity expressing itself behind the work. In a certain respect, Cronenberg's presence may seem atavistic, and his complicity in auteurship and existential themes theoretically unfashionable. And yet, Cronenberg's portayal of the experience of the postmodern filmmaker provides an important revision of the auteur that upsets the cohesiveness and unity that has bound this concept in all its versions, and a reinstatement of the subjectivity crucial to the meaning of both the term "auteur" and the content of film works. The existential proves itself not to be containable as passing fad or theoretical movement-it is a concern with the limits of human experience. Its relation to the organic and historical make accusations of its "timeless" or "eternal" structure simply naive. Cronenberg's works raise an unavoidable question, "What is an auteur today, and what might such a figure offer the field?"
Naked Lunch (1991) is a Cronenberg film that takes up the issue of authorship quite literally, but it is his most recent film Spider (2002) that provides the basic metaphor of the web I will use to think through this depiction of authorship. Nevertheless, to understand Spider, it is useful to take a detour. Naked Lunch was based on the autobiographical work of another author, William Burroughs, working in a different medium. Adaptation of the works of others is crucial to his understanding of authorship and he has taken on many projects based of novels of others. The image of authorship Naked Lunch describes is a realm of drug-induced dementia and excessive vulnerability and dependency. The author is not only the producer of his work, but is produced by his work. This is not to say that the subject is merely product or construction of the "social." The author and his characters are as much prisoners of fate, as men of action. Acted upon, as much as agents of action.
It is here that the metaphor of the web begins to eclipse the double, and border crossing becomes infinitely more complex. In the final scene Bill crosses the border between the Interzone and Annexia (two fictional landscapes) and two guards, one on each side of the car, stop to interrogate him. They ask for evidence that he is indeed a writer. He turns to his wife Joan, asleep in the back seat, wakes her, and tells her it's time for their William Tell routine. They enact the game that played such a decisive role in Burrough's own life. She places the apple on her head, and his pocket pen becomes a gun that he aims at the apple. Mistakenly he shoots her in the middle of the forehead. He clutches her to his chest and a lone tear falls from his cheek. The guards are satisfied and allow him to pass, thus acknowledging this act as the beginning of writing. Authorship and action are wedded. Not in a unity of two bodies, or even three, but in a wound that bleeds and gapes endlessly. The web begins to open endlessly as authorship, murder, love, loss, the will, and the accidental echo their meanings and claims on the scene.
The film shares with the novel Naked Lunch an impossibility. It does not answer the myriad of questions opened through its actions, perhaps it even raises more than it resolves. And yet this scene, amongst others, buries not only the one, but the two, and with it the metaphor of the border. Three is just the beginning. To Cronenberg fans the triangular character placement in the opening of this shot is very familiar. In Dead Ringers (1988), for instance, the twin gynecologists are interrupted by the third figure, a love interest. Similarly, throughout the film, Bill Lee is cornered by twin authors: Burroughs, the novelist, and Cronenberg the filmmaker. And the very structure of the William Tell game also serves to unite their fates as authors by exposing a triple possibility:
1. He murdered his wifeBurrough's life was suspended from this particular moment onward within the uncertainty of these possibilities. It was a product of his will, or it was beyond his will. Nietzsche, the master of tragic thought challenged the Hegelian dialectic and pointed out that where there are two, there is always a third. This possibility describes the auteur as both the agent of his text/crime, and its victim. In a documentary Making Naked Lunch, Cronenberg acknowledges that he feels deeply responsible for what he produces, even if it is the product of unconscious desires. He warns us that one must be very careful what they create or bring into the world because it may take us to places we don't want to go. Though Cronenberg comprehends this duality in psychological terms as an interior division between conscious and unconscious desires, the more ominous division stands between subject and object. Though this rupture severs the subject in the act of reflection-for example, to think is to be simultaneously the thinking subject and the object of thought-the tragic auteur is not merely the victim of a psychological rupture, but of a metaphysical one.
2. He and his wife were the victims of a tragic accident
3. The action was both a product of this will and an accident
In an interview Cronenberg recounts a dream that could very well describe his entire body of work in cinema. He recalls,
"I had a dream that I was watching a film and the film was causing me to grow old fast. The movie itself was infecting me, giving me a disease, the essence of which was that I was aging. Then the screen became a mirror in which I was seeing myself age."4The disease he describes is time itself. Its symptoms are transformation, becoming, and eventual mortality. The carrier of this disease is the film, the mirror, or more broadly reflection. In Videodrome (1983), for instance, Max Renn (James Wood) is both playing the video and being played by it. The cassette is literally being inserted into his body, rendering his experience in the world indistinguishable from representation. This merging is taken to its erotic extreme in another adaptation from novel, the film Crash (1996), where the car crash, the collision between flesh and metal, opens up a new orifice in the body. The accident becomes the creation. The creation becomes the accident. From this combination, new form emerges. This intersection, where intention and the accident merge, is described as a violent, obscene, and deeply creative shot of subjectivity. From this wound, the self emerges. The subject is not described as merely a product of institutional, or cultural, forces, but as a maker, creator. And to create one first must be destroyed.
Croneneberg's most recent release, Spider, another adaptation, is the most literal attempt to describe the web, or creation, he has been weaving. This film depicts a divided diegesis that contains simultaneously two different temporalities occupying the same space. Spider, a mentally ill man, follows his former childhood self as the young boy plays out a key drama in his life. Though man and boy are in the same frame their temporal distance renders communication impossible. The spectator is woven into the web that Spider spins, following his point of view as if it were our own. We see alternately through the boy's point of view and the man's. The man witnesses events that the boy does not witness, thus sustaining their credibility and independence.
Spider the man, observes the boy's beloved dark-haired mother catching her husband in an act of adultery and being brutally murdered and planted in a shallow grave by her husband and his vulgar blond lover. Spider the boy, suspects the murder when his mother is replaced by the blond and never returns home. The new couple treats the boy with disdain and he lives the nightmare of the loss of maternal love. Though his father insists he call the new woman his mother, he refuses. Instead the boy constructs a web of rope throughout the house that will turn on the gas stove with a tug of the string. In this web he captures the blond maternal replacement, gassing her to death. When the father rushes to her rescue and pulls her from the home, it is not the blond lover whose inert body emerges, but that of his dearly beloved mother. The spectators at this point realize that they, as well as Spider, have been caught in the web of a fantasy. Spider is mentally ill, and what has been witnessed is not the origin of his metal fragmentation, but its first manifestation.
Just as the game of William Tell played between Burroughs and his wife is both murder and accident, Spider has accidentally murdered his mother. What does this tell us about what it means to spin a web, to depict a narrative, or an interpretation? Who is the spider? The spider is the one caught in the very web he or she is spinning. The author may have caught the spectator (this is the object of suspense), but no one stands outside the web, least of all the spider. Authorship is a tragic enterprise. It is contingent, in that as an act of freedom it did not need to have happened; and it is necessary, in that once this freedom is realized, it cannot be undone. It is the inseparability of these two spheres that renders the situation tragic.5 One cannot will backwards. The mother will not be revived.
The instrument of this action is not without importance. The instrument that Bill Lee pulls from his coat in Naked Lunch is a pen. In other scenes the instrument is a typewriter that transforms into a bug that dictates to the writer through an obscene anal orifice, or that types automatically without his aid or consent. Extermination is the driving metaphor of Naked Lunch. It is Lee's objective to exterminate all rational thought. On a literal level, Bill Lee is employed as a bug exterminator. Joan and Bill become addicted to the bug poison, the drug of extermination. The question of the difference between authorship in the novel and the cinema is the question of the tool of extermination. The pen would not suffice as evidence, and the authorities asked for the act itself. The gun replaces the pen. From behind this gun the cinematic auteur emerges. The auteur points, shoots, and exterminates. The gun is not simply his agency, but also his bug poison, the prison of addiction through which he spins his fate. By pulling the trigger two becomes not one, but three, and four, and five. The link is severed. The tragic auteur with horror sees his mother's face emerge in his victim, so to speak. In this scene Bill Lee cries over the body of his wife. This moment is the loss of the containment or purity of the double, the couple, the twin brothers, etc. And it is the beginning of the disease of infinite representation. The auteur is a figure infected with a highly contagious virus. The vehicle that spreads the disease throughout the population is the screen. In Videodrome, for example, to have watched the video program was to become a part of the world of the program, and to be fated to death. Cronenberg reminds us that representation is lethal.
But just what is this web? Can we compare it to such postmodern structures as the World Wide Web, a space of infinite locations with no central authority? But a spider web bears a center, and a spider, and the ending of Spider bears a truth, tears apart the fantasy, and exposes the mother. To be an author is to make a cliam to a position. Even if the web unfolds endlessly, it is a space with multiple centers; each vector is a potential moment of revelation and "truth." In a documentary on the making of this film, Cronenberg opens the possibility that this final unveiling could also be a veil, and that it is not the end point of fantasy. This postmodernism corresponds to the ethos of his entire oeuvre. There is no endpoint to the reflection of the screen. The moment a film is projected, an infinite progression of fantasy is exposed that will not be eradicated. Existenz (2001), for example, offered no endpoint to the game, no reality that the spectator could be assured was the space beyond the game. But does Cronenberg's model of the web reduce all existence to a game, making it impossible to turn away from art or to declare a space beyond representation? Is the author more complicit in truth than even Cronenberg would admit?
The metaphors employed by Cronenberg (drug addiction, mental illness, disease) compromise significantly the idea of authorship as a realm of the will or intention. As we have seen, Spider is structured in such a way that the spectator is also placed inside of Spider's psyche leaving the viewer in a state of mental illness and unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality. But is the auteur privy to special knowledge? Has he deceived us? Is deception even possible within such terms that have rendered truth unattainable? If in the final frames of the film it is revealed that Spider accidentally killed the mother, and that the spectator has been complicit as well, this would seem to imply that there is a moment in which one can assert what is reflection and what is essence. Spider asserts several levels of interpretation and witness. Spider the man, occupies the same temporality as Spider the boy while the film viewer watches both. This in itself establishes the diegesis as fantasy. We are bearing witness to Spider the man's fantasy narrative of his childhood. And yet, we are fooled.
Critical to the idea of authorship that Cronenberg has described, is the collapse of screen, author, and spectator. Every one who comes into contact with representation is absorbed into its textual uncertainty. The author bears no more authority than the mentally ill Spider and the spectator who accepts his fantasy. But I have argued that the Spider is unreliable. He cannot be trusted because he knows too much. He spins a web of illusions, and yet, this is his greatest link to "truth." The new auteur exposes his "deception," and in doing so declares a center to his web. Though the Spider cannot separate himself from his own web, he is destined to perform a task and occupy a privileged location. He must venture out from the center and bind the victims who have fallen into his trap. Later he will nourish himself on these morsels. And then he too will succumb to the entanglements of the web. The new auteur reminds us that both making and watching movies can be dangerous, and even lethal.
1. The critics who published extensively in the Cahiers du Cinema, Truffaut, Bresson, and Godard, to name a few, inaugurated this school of film criticism and heralded certain authors over others as producers of great works of individual expression.
2. For instance, Dudley Andrew and Timothy Corrigan, who according to Approaches to Popular Film, represents the most recent contribution to the debate. Jancovich, Mark and Joanne Hollows, Eds. Approaches to Popular Film. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995
3. Dudley Andrew's effort to understand the author as a form of ecriture is the most interesting postmodern approach I've found because of the interiority it attributes to language in the author's "...quest for the state of wordlessness through words." In "The Unauthorized Auteur Today," Film Theory Goes to the Movies, New York: Routledge, 1993, p. 84.
4. Cronenberg on Cronenberg, ed. Chris Rodley, Faber and Faber Ltd, 1992, p. 128.
5. This is how Schelling descibes the dramatic (tragedy) in Philosophy of Art. Schelling, Friedrich. The Philosophy of Art. Trans. Douglas W. Stott. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.