During the first act of the film Scanners (VF), a lecturer is seized with spasms before his head explodes. The scene, gory at will, shocked in 1981, but immediately entered the annals of cinema. Scanners isn’t all about that bloody bit of bravery, however. Forty years after its release, it is clear to what extent this film was pivotal, transitory in the development of the artistic identity of its director, David Cronenberg, who is these days the subject of a vast cycle at the Quebec Cinematheque.
The “scanners”, for the record, are powerful telepaths capable of controlling the actions of others by invading their thoughts: a mental invasion that can culminate in the kind of demonstration mentioned in the introduction.
The plot focuses on Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack), a singularly gifted scanner tasked by Doctor Paul Ruth (Patrick McGoohan) to infiltrate a group of scanners led by Kim Obrist (Jennifer O’Neill). This, before they are eliminated by another scanner: the vile Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside). In a twist (and whistleblower’s opinion), Cameron and Darryl are actually brothers AND sons of Doctor Ruth, whose experiments in utero, an echo of the Thalidomide scandal, once gave birth to scanners.
Shot in Montreal and Toronto, Scanners was, until then, David Cronenberg’s most ambitious film. After the success of his horror films Shivers (The chills of anguish, 1975), where the inhabitants of a building in L’Île-des-Sœurs are contaminated by a libidinous parasite, Rabid (Rage, 1977), where a woman who received an experimental phallic stinger-like graft causes a pandemic, and The Brood (The Terror Clinic, 1979), where a divorced father faces small homicidal mutants born out of his ex’s wrath, the filmmaker made a shift to science fiction with Scanners.
In doing so, Cronenberg enhanced his exploration of bodily horror (“ body horror », A sub-genre that he has all in all invented) of more openly cerebral considerations, sketched out in his early works Stereo and Crimes of the Future, and which subsequently became an intrinsic part of his approach.
Unconscious identity quest
Scanners is above all his first film in which the theme of identity is also central. Indeed, Cameron is initially a homeless person with amnesia. He does not know anything about his gifts or his past. His identity takes shape as the story unfolds, as he learns more about himself.
Fascinating anecdote: the film was financed at the time of the “ movies of the era of tax shelters ”(1975-1982), where the money allocated to production had to be spent by a certain date. Gold, Scanners went into production even before Cronenberg had finished the screenplay, which he wrote much of during filming:
“I had only written a first draft, which took me three weeks. It meant that a lot of things were not ready ”, he confided in 1981 to the magazine. Fangoria.
Ultimately, it is as if, forced to create in a hurry, without the luxury of reflection, Cronenberg had channeled unconscious concerns. Cameron Vale launched unwittingly on the trail of his own identity, it is a little David Cronenberg discovering his – artistic – also groping.
Be that as it may, the theme of identity became recurrent in the filmmaker’s work. In a 2009 interview accompanying the DVD edition of Mr. Butterfly (1994), Cronenberg said: “All my films deal with identity, among other things. “
A merged shape
Striking, the final of Scannersshows the confrontation between Cameron and Darryl, between their two wills, their two identities. In an essay written for the Criterion Collection, film critic and historian Kim Newman sums up: “The finale of Scanners can be seen as an optimistic mirror of that, pessimistic, of Dead ringers, allowing the mutual survival of the brothers doppelgänger in a merged form, rather than ending with their joint death. “
We could add that, metaphorically, David Cronenberg himself thus managed to reconcile “in a merged form” the two antithetical elements which animate his cinema, that is to say the bodily horror and the intellectual impulse – a marriage which characterizes all the second period. of his filmography.
This idea was already stated in 1990 by Professor William Beard in Inner horror. David Cronenberg’s films, a work edited by Piers Handling and Pierre Véronneau. “There are nevertheless important elements which allow us to perceive a continuity in the evolution of Cronenberg. Of Shivers To Scanners, we can observe a decline in front of the physical aspect of human duality to go a little more towards the mental aspect of it […] By this evolution, the horror becomes much less physical and much more psychological. “
After playing on this tension between physical horror and psychological horror by granting the ascendant to one or the other pole according to the project, Cronenberg arrived at the end of the said second period with eXistenz (1999), in many respects an update of Videodrome (1983): after the horrors of television, place for those of virtual reality.
Crisis and serenity
Interestingly, the third period continues to be dominated by the theme of identity, but now from the angle of the identity crisis: the characters of Viggo Mortensen in A History of Violence (A story of violence) and Eastern Promises (Theshadow promises) remain its best representatives. Devoid of physical horror, this period is decidedly psychological.
Paradoxically, in the author’s recent films, we perceive a creative serenity absent from his first films which are sometimes sketchy, but always teeming with invention.
Thus the artistic identity of Cronenberg, like the bodies and / or minds of his characters, continues to change. Here again, Scanners will have proved to be decisive, even a posteriori prophetic. In any case, we can conclude this from reading this passage from William Beard’s text: “In Scanners, the fierce war being waged by the elements of the fundamental Cronenbergian dichotomy is almost entirely appeased, and human nature is portrayed – at least latently – as an ordered tone that can control its inner fires. “
The film Scanners premieres at the Cinémathèque on December 10 and is available to rent and buy on iTunes.