The Shrouds

 

The Metaphysical Shrouds of David Cronenberg

The Shrouds may be our octogenarian David Cronenberg’s richest film. Like Prospero he looks back upon his life and marshals the magic at his disposal for one climactic statement.  

As the reviews have dutifully revealed, the script and film are his most personal. Lead Vincent Kassel is as sharp a Cronenberg lookalike as you’ll find outside his mirrors. The face, hair, build, quiet intensity — he’d pass anywhere. Almost. The hero’s obsessive grief over his wife’s death grows out of Cronenberg’s loss of his own Carolyn to cancer in 2017. 

Where does the film go beyond that?

Kassel plays Karsh Relikh, a super wealthy financier emotionally as well as fiscally invested in “the shrouds.” In this new technology a corpse is buried in a special covering that enables an outside viewer to watch the body’s decaying on video. This truly “still life” is additionally manipulable to provide intense closeups and 3-d rotation. Paradoxically, the “shroud” that normally conceals here is made to reveal. Science trumps history.

But Karsh’s ideal has been compromised. His technical whizkid Maury Entrekin (Guy Pearce) proves the obligatory Evil Scientist. He has opened Karsh’s personal project into an international snooping system torn between Russia and China. 

However unnervingly current that international overlay, it’s not as compelling as the love-story. Becca (Diane Kruger) has been compromised dead as well as alive by her college prof seducer Jerry Eckler (Steve Switzman). Karsh’s last romantic commitment to Becca — to be buried beside her — is violated when vandals attack the graves. Karsh finds his planned burial site with Becca’s filled with Eckler.

As Karsh now finds, a blind date may not share his fascination with watching his dead wife rotting. But for him the tech keeps her “still” with him. This literalizes our standard hope that our dearly departed remain always with us. 

But hey, what kind of first name is “Karsh” anyway? An echo of “harsh”? Or the “marsh,” swamp, that the international shenanigans make of the romantic financier’s dream? 

Of course the name pays homage to the late Yousuf Karsh, Canada’s most famous photographer, best known for his celebrity portraits. Karsh and Cronenberg are Canada’s most distinguished workers in film art, David in moving pictures, Yousuf in evocative stills. Here they merge. Additionally, Karsh himself found an afterlife in Canada when he fled the Armenian genocide. 

Then there’s that “Relikh.” Karsh’s family name suggests an object recovered from a buried past. The archaic spelling compounds the antique. But it also recalls John Donne’s famous poem, “The Relic.” There the bedded lover muses that the blonde hair he has just wrapped around his wrist may in some distant future be found and taken for a religious relic. That “bracelet of bright hair about the bone” would elevate their sexual engagement to holiness, them to saints. Her enveloping hair transcends his dead bone, in a miniature of the sex act.

“What miracles we harmless lovers wrought,” muses the poet. The speaker assures his bedmate that their carnal relationship has achieved spirituality. But also: it’s a sad miracle that lovers die and  “rot.” Here Cronenberg’s first line of dialogue is “Grief is rotting my teeth.” His characters’ high-tech technology reveals the beloved rotting — as appears Karsh when he briefly dons the titular x-ray suit.

Indeed Donne even provides for Eckler’s displacement of Karsh in Becca’s tomb: “(For graves have learn'd that woman head, To be to more than one a bed).” 

Donne was one of the great Metaphysical Poets, with a  belief and intensity that T.S. Eliot famously regretted we lost through our “dissociation of sensibility.” Eliot argued that after the seventeenth century English poetry lost its ability to poetically amalgamate disparate experience. Poetry began to separate thought from emotion, whereas the Metaphysical poet “could devour any kind of experience.” After the Donne peak, English poetry no longer united the sensational and emotional with thought, the body with the idea.

Cronenberg has achieved in film an equivalent to Donne’s Metaphysics. His “body horror” is a contemporary equivalent to the poet’s uniting of thought and emotion, spirit and flesh, high and low. Cronenberg blends  the human with the technological. Shoving a video cassette into a man’s belly is a neo-Metaphysical moment. 

That was Videodrome. What here?

Here the extension of what we might consider humanity is exemplified in Diane Kruger’s casting. She plays a spectrum of realities in Karsh’s relationships. She is the scarred and dead beloved Becca, by name the most enterprising of the Biblical matriarchs. She also plays Becca’s twin sister, Terry Gelernt, who — turned on by conspiracy theories — has a fling with Karsh. Kruger also provides image and voice for Karsh’s “personal assistant,” the avatar Hunny. That Germanic twist on “Honey” proves human enough to be treacherous. Kruger thus plays the new human range from the flesh to the tech fantastical. 

As Karsh’s sister-in-law, Terry is also his connection to his primary aid and ultimate undoing, Entrekin. That off-family name says “between family” —which is what Maury thus is, literally “only by marriage” but metaphorically unrooted himself in any relationship. He is obsessed with recovering the wife he rejects as mad. 

The Becca/Terry family name, Gelernt, is yiddish for “learned,” which helps to validate both Becca’s experimentation with the mad science and her sister’s grounded suspicions of its abuse. 

As an old English major, Cronenberg knows the thematic potential of characters’ names. Here the nominal characterization is another delightful fusion of the old with the new. Specialty of the Cronenberg house — at least this first generation. 

Given that range of human existence, here a love survives not only death but the interpolation of separate bodies. A passion and commitment can transcend individual relationships. In the film’s most extensive sex scene, Karsh obsesses over Becca’s professor while Terry urges him to think he’s making love to the dead sister/wife. Eckler’s replacement of Karsh continues in death. 

Karsh ultimately accepts a compromise to fulfill his eternal promise to Becca. He takes his Grave Tech to Budapest with his beautiful blind new lover Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt). Blind, she is not restricted by her senses from attempting unusual experiences. In Barbara Kruger’s last casting, Karsh projects on to Soo-Min Becca’s voice, scars, deformity, love and commitment to be buried with him. She allows him the eternity that Eckler’s grave highjack denied him. She enables him to maintain his ardor into eternity. 

In Cronenberg’s new Metaphysical the visual preservation of the dead woman here achieves substance. The spirit turns into a body. In Donne’s terms, Soo-Min enables Karsh and Becca “to make their souls, at the last busy day, Meet at this grave, and make a little stay.” The “little stay” is their brief visit in life, but also stretching their moment into eternity.

With this substitution Relikh pragmatically avoids himself becoming a heartbroken relic from our restrictive past. Our new science extends not just our life but our power over reality, its defeats, our losses. That reality may be of our mind as of our physical world. The new tech may expand the human not necessarily destroy it. In our new life, our new flesh, we might still sustain our old values, like fidelity — with new flex. We might really reanimate that bracelet of bright hair about the bone. From that frightening science — a happy ending.