Photography has no language

I was chatting with some colleagues about god knows what, when one fellow said, it's like those people who shop around for a doctor to amputate a perfectly good body part — people do that, you know; it's a condition. And I said, someone should write a novel about that, that would make for some great doctor and patient characters; maybe I should write that novel. And I proceeded to look it up and find that it's called "body integrity identity disorder." Several months later I would discover that David Cronenberg had in fact written that novel; it's called Consumed.

I should've recognized the Cronenbergian appeal of this theme straight away, and he does touch on the issue in Crash and in the short film The Nest, both of which I'd seen. While Consumed is not consumed by this theme, it does flesh it out.

Just how many senses of the word does the title capture?

transitive verb
1 : to do away with completely : destroy
2 a : to spend wastefully : squander ; b : use up
3 a : to eat or drink especially in great quantity ; b : to enjoy avidly : devour
4 : to engage fully : engross
5 : to utilize as a customer

intransitive verb
1 : to waste or burn away : perish
2 : to utilize economic goods

It starts off as an investigation into a murder. Photojournalist Naomi flies off to Paris to delve into the lives of the Arosteguys, famed philosopher couple. But Aristide appears to have fled the country, while Celestine's remains are scattered around their apartment. It appears that parts of her had been prepared, cooked, and eaten.

Naomi's partner Nathan meanwhile is in Eastern Europe photographing the work of a shady doctor who performs operations for the truly desperate. Nathan's dream is to be published in The New Yorker's Annals of Medicine section.

There's a lot of technogeekery in this novel, mostly cameras and lenses, but also hearing aids, 3D printers, and some run-of-the-mill gadgetry.

There's also a peculiarly warped penis. And the sense that everybody is sleeping with everybody else, although they don't; but I guess, you know, the French and the medically perverse, they cast that aura.

Nathan contracts a rare STD and heads to Toronto to talk to the elusive has-been of a doctor after whom the disease was named. Naomi meanwhile follows Aristide's trail to Japan.

"I only smoke Japanese now. I want to become Japanese. I'll never speak French again. Never. They say that Tolstoy learned classical Greek very quickly once he put his mind to it. I'm learning Japanese very quickly. Until then, I speak English or German. For philosophy, at least, you have to speak German. Perhaps I will make Japanese essential for contemporary Western philosophy. If I live long enough."

Naomi was groping. "Photography has no language. Is that why you're so interested in it?"

Cronenberg's expression of journalism puzzles me. Here are these photojournalists following these really complex stories — stories that, in my view, demand more (much more) than pictures to tell them — but for them, the words are an afterthought, easily dashed off, filled in later. It's the picture that makes the story. I can't tell if Cronenberg is saying this is how it is, or how it ought to be. Of all the perversities in this novel, this is the one I can't get past, the one that feels wrong. I guess it's natural for a filmmaker to fetishize the view through the lens; but why then is he writing a novel?

Believe it or not, Naomi's and Nathan's stories do intersect, quite satisfactorily. These characters' narratives are wholly intertwined, even though they barely share any screen time.

Oh, and there's also a North Korean conspiracy, that's involved even in the politicking at Cannes.

I hope Cronenberg writes another book.

Nest

David Cronenberg's short film The Nest documents a medical consultation with a woman who wants her left breast removed because she believes it to be full of insects.



I love how it's set in a garage.

I was lucky enough to see The Nest during the Christmas holidays of 2013 at a TIFF exhibition exploring Cronenberg's work.

Cronenberg's novel, Consumed, explores the same subject matter further. It's just one of several weird and typically Cronenbegian narrative threads in the book, but having watched this film gave the novel another dimension — it's become a kind of multimedia experience.

Bug music

With dusk begins to cry
the male of the Waiting-insect; —
I, too, await my beloved,
and, hearing, my longing grows.

— from Kokinshu, by Tsurayuki (~900 AD)

Graeme Revell (once best known for fronting industrial band SPK, now probably more readily recognized for his soundtracks) produced The Insect Musicians in 1987. (I listened to a lot of experimental music in the mid 80s.)

This orchestral wall of sound consists entirely of modulated insect sounds.



I owned and loved that album, and shared it and it was lost. (All praise the Internet, restorer of lost treasures!)

The liner notes summarize Revell's concept and describe the techniques used in transforming insect "noise" into "music."

To me this album signified a world of (alien) beauty at our feet, if only we cared to look, listen.

Insects feature in Consumed, by David Cronenberg, inhabiting the left breast of the woman who as the novel opens is found apparently to have been murdered and cannibalized. The book embraces entomologists and state-of-the-art hearing technology. So this music formed the soundtrack for my weekend reading.

Word neutrality is destabilizing

We were enclosed in Audio Booth 4, basically an audio recording cabinet floating on foam and designed to be sound-neutral. Words spoken in Booth 4 sounded unnaturally deadened, like inanimate objects. The walls of the booth, the floor, the ceiling, none of it added any energy or shape by reflectance or geometry to the sounds that came out of our mouths, and this had a mysterious effect on the meaning and the impact of the words themselves that was hard to calculate. It made me realize that word neutrality in human communication is destabilizing; there is a paper to be written there.

— from Consumed, by David Cronenberg.

Why is this a book?

I'm mildly obsessed with Consumed, a new novel by David Cronenberg. I haven't actually read it yet — I'm still hoping someone will think to buy it for me for my birthday next month — but I'm reading every review I can find.

I'm not even that big of a Cronenberg fan (excepting Naked Lunch, which is one of my favourite films ever). I just feel compelled to watch his films, and now read his novel, even though I fully expect it to be an unpleasant experience.

According to Jason Sheehan on NPR (In Cronenberg's 'Consumed,' An Appetite For Sex, Death And The Latest Gear):

Here's everything you need to know about Consumed in one sentence: This is a book that is unmistakably written by David Cronenberg.

Not so much the newer, grayer Cronenberg either. Not Eastern Promises Cronenberg or A History Of Violence Cronenberg. No, this is something that feels more like the young, perverse, freakishly laser-beam-obsessive and deeply, deeply strange Cronenberg.

But what I desperately want to know, and which no reviews that I've found address, is, why is this book? Did this need to be a book? Is it better as a book than it would be as a movie? What is it about the narrative that makes it better suited to this medium?

David Cronenberg’s consuming obsession, by Geoff Pevere in Quill & Quire:
"I really wanted to become an obscure novelist."

And I come to understand that Cronenberg's influences are more literary than filmic, which may explain my interest in him.

What Cronenberg says
Virtual Reality, Corporeality Collide In Cronenberg's First Novel, NPR:
"I always thought I'd be a novelist. I never thought I'd be a filmmaker."

Flavorwire Interview: David Cronenberg on Body Horror, Dick Pics, and His First Novel, Consumed:
"Movies, in some way, are very restrictive — compared to what you can do in a novel."

It came from within, The National Post:
"Seduction of the reader is definitely where it’s at. In a novel it’s much more intimate, because you can be in the interior of these characters."

About the book
David Cronenberg’s debut novel, Consumed, is one of the strangest books you’ll encounter all year, by Pasha Malla in the Globe and Mail:

It’s really, really weird.

All Atwitter, by Jonathan Lethem in The New York Times:

The book presents a locked-room mystery of sorts: Can it be possible that a woman said to be dying of cancer, and whose philosopher-cannibal-husband left a record of her ­dismemberment, is still alive? Or was she a consensual accomplice to her own murder? This core plot is elaborated in a highly traditional (and satisfying) way: twin investigations, apparently unrelated, which gradually entwine. Amateur detectives who become complicit — and, of course, involved sexually — with their suspects.

and

These passages are typical of the book's descriptive exactitude and flatness, its use of banal signifiers like "GarageBand," and the constant germane ­citations of psychoanalytic or philosophical brands. The book seems to desublimate itself for you: No sooner does the reader think, "This is like the case of Louis Althusser's murder of his wife," than some character makes the comparison for you. The result is provocatively comic, and surreal in the manner of a Max Ernst collage.

The Strange and the Familiar: David Cronenberg's Consumed, by Karin L Kross at Tor.com:

So much of it exactly what you would expect from him — especially if your ideas of his films are shaped largely by his earlier work; pre-M. Butterfly, to put an arbitrary stake in the ground — that you occasionally wonder if he's not deliberately sending himself up.

[...] In its energy and content, Consumed feels like a younger man's work — specifically, a younger David Cronenberg's, though with the confidence of someone who has been telling stories for decades.

Body horror and techno lust in director's debut novel, by Steven Poole in The Guardian:

The 21st century's version of the hall of mirrors is the infinite regress of embedded recording devices. Naomi and Nathan are always stealthily recording their conversations with other characters by means of some hidden app on a MacBook Air or iPhone, when they are not overtly putting obscenely expensive Swiss voice recorders on glass coffee tables. Cronenberg's fiction is one of omnipresent multimedia surveillance and retention, though we never witness the heroes performing the subsquent grunt work of transcription and editing. Perhaps deliberately, because a major plot question becomes what one can trust of electronic recording, and what was only cleverly fabricated using Photoshop or its video equivalents.

Other
Excerpt.

David Cronenberg becomes novelist; other directors decide to pull a Cronenberg, by Mark Krotov at MobyLives:

A connoisseur of violence, brutality, and grotesquerie — all of which are banned in Canada, where he was born — David Cronenberg has been making dark and weird masterpieces since the late 1960s. And while he has directed films based on novels — including such conventional, mainstream, user-friendly books as William Burroughs's Naked Lunch, J.G. Ballard's Crash, and Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis — he had never actually written one himself until Consumed.

Body mind change

A while ago I attended an exhibit exploring the work of David Cronenberg. That visit included a tour of BMC Labs, after which I engaged in the experience of personalizing my own pod (a biotech enhancement) for brainstem implantation.

At its core a series of psychological profiling questions, the customization process was dressed up with audiovisual clips and social media interactions for an unsettling, emotional, but also weirdly satisfying narrative exercise.

Once calibrated according to my personality, the pod was brought to maturity in optimal lab conditions.

The implantation ceremony was held a few weeks ago. I was unable to attend, but it's been reported on at Fangoria.



My own pod is being delivered to me by mail.

Interzone

Last week I went to Interzone. David Cronenberg: Evolution, an exhibition exploring the filmmaker's oeuvre, is on at TIFF until January 19.

Seeing as my brother's a film buff, and an enthusiast of Cronenberg in particular, this seemed like an appropriate event to make a present of over the holidays. My sister joined us (she drove).

While I wouldn't exactly call myself a fan of Cronenberg — I've seen his work from The Fly through Crash, and a smattering of more recent movies — Naked Lunch is one of my favourite films of all time (perhaps because it affirms that art is shit).

You don't need to be a film geek to appreciate this exhibit, though there were plenty on the premises. You don't need to know anything about Cronenberg going in; you will know plenty when you come out. It would help at least to like movies, and be open to exploring one of the twisted minds that creates them.

The minutiae of film-making

Multiple drafts, discarded drafts, deleted scenes. Promotional material. Comment cards from focus group screenings (of Videodrome, "awful").

The periodicals strewn across coffee tables. The letterhead notepads on desks. Those horrid surgical instruments from Dead Ringers. The Telepod. Labels on pill bottles, labels on bus spray. Storyboards, designs, mock-ups. Loads of props and costumes.

Film clips on monitors throughout the exhibit give context, as well as behind-the-scenes footage and commentary.

Here's a picture of my brother sidling up to a Mugwump.

One employee (at least, I think he was an employees) approached us to share anecdotes of Cronenberg's early days of filmmaking in Montreal. When he found a suitable apartment complex for his film location, he rewrote the characters of the neighbours to match the actual residents. The employee was brimming with enthusiasm for this method, as if he'd just learned of it and was dying to share.

Cronenberg on Cronenberg
Three short films were being screened on a loop just outside the main exhibition space. They are framed as being an autobiographical commentary.

Camera (2000), created as part of the celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Toronto Film Festival, features an older man being filmed by a group of kids who've found a camera, and sharing his internal monologue while he experiences it. He comments that we think of a camera as recording a moment, but rather it records the death of a moment.

At the Suicide of the Last Jew in the World in the Last Cinema in the World (2007), commissioned by Cannes Film Festival for its 60th anniversary, is hilarious, in a very dark way (as if that really needs to be qualified). Reality-TV style, the title character, played by Cronenberg, prepares to shoot himself, while the annoying commentators natter on about Jews and Hollywood.

The Nest was made expressly for this exhibition. It's weird in a way that's precariously balanced between funny and uncomfortable. This is a recording of a woman's presurgery consultation filmed from the perspective of the doctor, as if he has a camera strapped to his head. Her top is bare; she wants to have her left breast cut open in order to remove the nest of insects she hears rustling around in there. The "doctor" — who denies being a psychiatrist, she thought she'd be meeting a psychiatrist — is hesitant about the procedure and wonders about consulting with an entomologist, although he makes some pretty precise observations for someone who claims not to know anything about bugs. Also, the consultation takes place in what is obviously a dingy garage, complete with air pump, paint cans, gardening tools, and a pile of old fluorescent tubes.

Ongoing immersive narrative

Upon exiting the exhibition space, one is encouraged to visit "the lab." Serious stuff — 3D printers, walls of jars, embryonic pod structures in fluid. The narrative begins with the activities of BMC Labs, a fictional biotech firm that has partnered with David Cronenberg to develop biotech accessories inspired by the intellectual property found in his films.

(The white-coated lab technicians are remarkably straight-faced, but I managed to reduce one to laughter.)

The real adventure is online. Body/Mind/Change uses an "artificial intelligence recommendation engine" to custom-design a POD (Personal On-Demand), a biotech enhancement for implantation into your brain stem.

A series of unsettling questions is used to calibrate your personal pod with a psychological profile on scales of fear, anger, joy, sadness, regret. The experience unearths flashes of memories that you are asked to respond to and to interconnect. My pod's story has now been woven into that of other pods, and the narrative continues. The algorithm also offers suggestions for books to read, personal challenges to undertake, and career choices.



A wholly unique and clever exercise to undertake if you're at all interested in how we construct identity and tell stories: www.bodymindchange.ca.