David Cronenberg in a Blu-ray box, interior detonator-Liberation
The mark of a large filmmaker often is due to his faculty to invent a territory, an incredible language, of the images which are specific to him. And the work of David Cronenbergobsessive if there is one, will have ceased to rehash his metaphysics retort from the mutant, increased, hypersexualized bodies. The thrilling flesh « plugés » with technique, human magnetoscopes (Videodrome), gaping wounds with crumpled sheet metal (Crash), outgrowth assigning the porosity of the carnal to digital and reality to the aesthetics of video games (exissenz), anomaly and aberrant as a surreptitious critic and intestine of the social body in its most coercive manifestations. A unprecedented way to secure the fantastic to our world, its fears, its challenges, by relieving it from the use of the supernatural and all its Gothic tinters. The most fascinating being that this furious coherence emerged from his first films, and that he almost never diverted from it.
After first swolders in experimental cinema (Stereo, crimes of the future), then a detour by television, its entry into the commercial circuit with Chills (1975) and Rage (1977), forming a sort of diptych, would sign the birth certificate of theInner Terror – The terror which comes from the inside, nestled at the heart of the intimate, in the hallucinated exuberance of a physiology of hybrid, where the mutant organ seems to live an autonomous life, and arouse imperious desires capable of overcoming the incompleteness of beings.
Having in common with Chills The theme of the pandemic falling on Montreal (the two films were shot thanks to Quebec denarius), Rage, edited in a beautiful bluray box by Carlotta Films with the clearly more dispensable Fast Company, However, it is distinguished by its geographical ambition: evil is no longer circumscribed to a single building, but tried throughout the city, metro, shopping center, highway, cosmetic surgery, etc. The opportunity for the filmmaker to try a postapocalyptic fable, not far from the dystopias of a George A. Romero – We obviously think of Zombie and even more The Craziesof which he shares the blurred and scratchy aesthetics – vector of a scathing criticism of the security drifts of a society dominated by fear.
The zero patient of this epidemic of « rage » transforming the inhabitants into a furious crazy foaming the drool on the lips, it’s pink, a beautiful breech with a diaphanous complexion and with a brass view. Following a serious accident having required an experimental skin transplant, the young woman (camped with an impavid and melancholy grace by Marilyn Chambers, icon of porn illuminating the cult Behind the green door) wakes up with a coma endowed with a strange scar under the armpit, a vibrating and living orifice living with starred folds from which emerges an erectile dart calling crazy orgasmical embraces allowing it to feed on the blood of its partner; His victims after a short lethargy then becoming enraged and contagious. Vampire film without the decorum-with the Cronenberg bite substitutes skin contact with skin, the compressed flesh as if to signify the unalterable and tragic desire to make shape with the other-then zombie film, premonitory of the great contemporary pandemics (AIDS, COVID-19, with the curious sequence of the vaccination pass required to circulate, which reminds us of something) Rage is also a great film on solitude and the fundamental incompleteness of beings, the Cronenbergian hero always aspiring to merge with another, a pure otherness, whether animal or mechanical, visual, digital or twin projection.
