YOU SHIVER BECAUSE IT'S GOOD
Why David Cronenberg's The Parasite Murders was retitled Shivers I can't imagine. But even under its new title it continues to suffer the insensitive abuse that was reported (and well rebutted) in Cinema Canada No. 22. What has not been established is exactly what the film is saying through its shocking effects.
Shocking it certainly is. The film is a relentless flood of. murder, rape and upchuck. But complaining about a horror film's nauseating effect is like complain- ing about dancing in the streets in a musical, or horses and jeans in a Western. That's what we go to see one for. Nausea, fear and shock are the conventional effects of the horror genre. The critic's task is not to com- plain they are there (they come with the territory) but to work out how they are used.
The film opens and closes with a media-sell voice- over, detached from the action, oozing the complacency of modern urban man. The opening is a sales pitch for the Starliner apartment building on a Montreal island, where the drama will take place. The closing is a news bulletin by a go-go disc-jockey type, assuring the listener that nothing dangerous has happened. We've seen the danger, though, and been shocked out of the complacency of the frame voices. We must be further shocked at the complacency of the closing media man,
as the Beautiful People drive out in their performance cars to infest the world.
The film is a jeremiad about man's abandonment to the pleasures of the failing flesh. Mad Doctor Emil Hobbes has been experimenting with parasite implants to assume the function of flawed human organs. His pride is, of course, the sexual application: a parasite with aphrodisiac effects. He plants the red little phallic critters in his mistress, then waits for them to spread, turning the world into a great sexual orgy (the global village with a Playboy vengeance), thus saving man, as
Hobbes sees it, from the tragic fate of having lost contact with his body.
The film dramatizes the horror of what we often take to be one of the happiest triumphs of our time, the new sexual permissiveness. The key spreaders of the para- site are figures representative of the modern liberation of sexuality: the precocious Lolita-type, the adulterer, the old man with his megavitamin vitality, the Swedish couple, the bachelor swingers, hetero and gay.
Cronenberg's Emil Hobbes is a direct descendant of Thomas Hobbes, the seventeenth-century philosopher whose Leviathan argued the primacy of the physical nature of man and his universe. Hobbes provided the philosophical rationale for Restoration libertinism, so Cronenberg goes back to his name for his horrific vision of the libertinism of our time. Indeed the shape of the little critters is a cross between your standard red phallus and your swimming whale.
The apartment setting, a self-contained tower on an island, is an image of the isolation of the sensually obsessed. The apartment facilities cater to the appetites
and to the image of the beautiful life, nothing else. The apartment residents are characterized as lonely, insular people, condemned to a sad privacy until the monsters free them for a horrible parody of community, love, encounter session, primal therapy, virtually every mind-blowing, self-exalting fad on the psychological market today.
Cronenberg often seems like an Old Testament prophet in his horrifying vision of what happens when man sells his soul for his appetite, values "guts" more than reason, and labors under the delusion that fulfilment can be had by ingesting something (a kiss, a pickle, a pill, a little critter, or what have you). It should bemuse the reader to find such a traditionally moral work attacked by such traditional critics as Messrs. Robin Wood, Gilmour, Fulford, and Knelman. Are they all secret swingers chafing under Cronenberg's lash?
True to the traditions of the genre, Cronenberg spe- cializes in the slow accumulation of danger, then fills familiar objects with threat. The parasites are passed on by sexual contact at first, but then they take on indi- vidual life and travel independently. They attack from washing machines, mail slots, bath drains, to the point that we're terrified at the opening of a fridge or a contact-lens vial. Such is their independence that one man even converses with his little critters as they throb tumescent in his tummy.
Cronenberg inflects the conventions of his genre. For one thing, his vision is heightened by the fact that these are not monsters from outer space but from within ourselves. The parasites are images of our own sexual compulsions. Thus they pop up in the horny.
One scene is a conscious variation on the famous shower scene in Psycho. Hitchcock had the lonely girl attacked from the outside world when she was most vulnerable. Cronenberg's attack comes from within, as the critter creeps up through the bathtub drain to sexually enter — and this is the crucial point - the girl (Barbara Steele) who has been moping around in pre-masturbatory loneliness and has been lying open in her tub as if in subconscious hope of such a visit.
The final overcoming of our central hero, the doctor (Paul Hampton), occurs in the apartment swimming pooL which is a public extension of that private tub. The doctor's nurse and her initiator (Steele) are in the
pool. That climactic scene has several shades of mean- ing. The wet blanket is finally getting into the swim of things, one might say. The girl's lonely tub has grown. It's also a parody of a baptism, as the community surrounds the pool to celebrate the immersion of their new member. Finally, his nurse's oral insertion of the parasite is a reversal of male penetration. In the last two respects, the scene is a witty play on the missionary position.
The film is most dependent upon its horror genre in its inflection of the traditional threat to human person- ality. In its forebears, the humans are endangered by depersonalizing, de-energizing forces. The film belongs to the tradition of zombie movies, like Night of the Liv-
ing Dead and the pod variant in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But Cronenberg dramatizes depersonalizing in sexual activity, the thing we have come to take as our most personalizing activity. That's what makes the film both so shocking and such a strong moral statement. Where we expect to find zombies we find people who are fulfilling our fondest fantasies, of sex unlimited by law or by physical capacity. The film is shocking because Cronenberg's zombies are what we want to be.
He draws us into this position in the scene where his hero doctor continues to chat coolly on the phone, impervious to his nurse stripping in front of him. He seems to bear out Emil Hobbes' contention that modern man has been cut off from his blood and his impulses. We expect, indeed require, him to make love to her, then and there. But of course he is a man of reason and responsibility. He is not the zombie but the rational man. The real zombies are the orgiasts, whose physical hyperactivity belies their void in will, soul and sense.
Cronenberg's film has suffered the same critical disdain that was accorded Psycho, Night of the Living Dead, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Perhaps serious art in the horror genre must expect to be reviled before it is understood. Shivers (by whatever name) will join those classics. If Cronenberg continues to grow this film will rank with Psycho as a personal stata»nent. At the very least it will rank with those other two films, as a powerful expression of an anxiety of its day, so deep it hurt.
Maurice Yacowar
54/ Cinema Canada
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