Ageing in Style

On The Shrouds & David Cronenberg's Late Style

By making the body central to his films, David Cronenberg has established himself as a fastidious chronicler of our shifting anxieties and desires by grafting them onto the contours of our body. Thinking is grounded in the realms of corporeality, upending Descartes’ famous “I think, therefore I am” maxim to chart our interactions with and assimilations of technology. While thousands of think pieces are written on the deleterious effects of technology and the necessity to detach from them, Cronenberg realizes that technology has been firmly embedded into our skin, irrevocably morphing our bodies, desires and thoughts in ways that can’t be simply discarded. There is no return to a “primitive” state of being, as technology’s overwhelming ubiquity is felt in the simplest of actions. Character development in Cronenberg’s films is a matter of recognizing this fact as much as it is an exploration of their evolving perversions and morphologies, all while critiquing the system that gives rise to these rapid transformations.

However, as Cronenberg gets older, the natural process of bodily decay collides with the shifting technological landscape, and this informs the attitudes of his protagonists, who are noticeably older than the volatile youths of his 70s and 80s films. To watch Cronenberg’s films across the years is to witness the struggle being gradually whittled down to acceptance, even embracement. What emerges as jolts in his earlier films is a mere eventuality in his later ones, as his protagonists are now much more in command of their bodily mutations. The blood-and-guts grotesquerie, which saddled his films with the tag of “body horror” manifests as routine now, with Cronenberg just calmly drifting along the waters of disease, decay and desire. This leads some of his later films to be described as “frigid” in some quarters, but Cronenberg’s trysts with body horror are also reflections of his protagonists’ states and moods, and this means reckoning with age as much as bodily transformation. While the scars of technology are noticeably apparent on the flawless skin of his youths, becoming an object of revulsion and fascination, they form a mere speck in the transforming tapestry of his older protagonists. If his earlier films are about adjusting to the shocking disgust of the mutating flesh and understanding how it affects desire, his films from the 90s especially plunge into this heady fascination, while his later films are more about following the threads of these transformations. Naturally, his films from all these periods contain elements of the other, and there is always room for variations and exceptions, but there’s no doubt that his recent films are as informed by age as they are by his more lauded themes.

The Shrouds, his latest feature, is in communion with his earlier one, Crimes of the Future, in this regard, with both films involving aged protagonists embracing bodily changes. Both films involve the endless scarring of the body through surgery, and the protagonists’ attempts to reconfigure their desires with each surgery, embodied in the all-too-slick slogan from the earlier film, “Surgery is the new sex.” Both are films dealing with the embracing of these changes in disregard of the advice of others, informed by hot-button topics such as the invasive preference of screens in the former and microplastics in the latter. Crucially, both are films made by an older man, a man fully cognizant of the natural life cycle and death’s continual presence. For a director whose latest films have been termed “cold,” one of his most sublime scenes comes at the end of Crimes of the Future, where Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) revels in relief when he finally consumes plastic, embracing the “inhuman” requirements of his body.

A crucial difference separating The Shrouds from Crimes of the Future is that in the former the decay and mutations happen in another person’s body but mutate the desires of her sexual partner, as opposed to Crimes of the Future where Cronenberg directly delineates the experiences of the affected. Conceived as a means of mourning the death of Cronenberg’s own wife, The Shrouds follows Karsh (Vincent Cassel, bedecked with black shirts and his hair coiffed like Cronenberg’s), a rich businessman, still grieving over the death of his wife Becca (Diane Kruger). To cope with the loss, he finds a company called GraveTech that allows people to monitor the decay of their loved ones’ corpses in their shrouds. Liberated by the climactic scene in Crimes of the Future, Cronenberg immediately plunges into the perversity of Karsh’s griefs and desires without any of the shocks or struggles. Karsh’s attempts at dating again naturally stumble whenever his dates question him on the specificity of his grief, which leads him to tactlessly describe his technology in detail. This lends itself to some laughs, but Cronenberg slowly blurs the background and closes in on Karsh, turning the comedy into a ritual of mourning.

Karsh’s fixation on Becca’s decay stems from the protracted disease (presumably cancer) which Becca suffered from, involving the removal of her breasts and the gradual withering of her body. Being connected emotionally and sexually to each other, they were able to refract and reroute their desires through the lens of her disease, to the extent that it offers Karsh a means of connection even beyond the grave. Flashes of their sexual encounters appear in Karsh’s thoughts whenever he has sex with another woman, and these fantasy sequences are possibly even reimagined and embellished with new details of her corpse’s decay. Loved ones remember the death, duration and some of the disgusting details of the disease, but only a sexual and romantic partner is able to transplant these changes onto his desiring body, which is why Cronenberg stages these scenes with an exploratory curiosity. Karsh isn’t like Videodrome’s Max Renn, whose perverse fascinations with the hyperrealistic textures of TV are equally driven by the horror at the degree of his mutation. Karsh has dived so deep into the waters of grief and sexuality that he’s only driven by discovery and memory, disregarding all societal conventions on the acceptable modes of grieving and female courtship.

The Shrouds, therefore, is a film both of mourning and moving on from death. And while the personal element is indeed strongly felt, even and especially at moments of absurdist comedy where what might be perceived as depravity is actually a form of twisted romanticism, Cronenberg doesn’t separate Karsh’s desires from his milieu, a milieu of corporations, surveillance, big money and conspiracy. Aside from his initial failed attempts to date women, Karsh’s scattershot desires land him in semi-relationships with an investor’s wife, Soo-Min Szabo (an otherwise excellent Sandrine Holt playing a Korean), Becca’s conspiracy-loving twin sister Terry (Diane Kruger again, played with more winking delight), and his digital assistant, Hunny, created by his brother and Terry’s ex-husband, Maury (a jittery Guy Pearce), modelled after Becca (no points for guessing who voices her), all while being poisoned by the memory and decay of Becca.

Soo-Min is blind, and physical touch becomes both her means of vision and desire. Her scenes with Karsh give his mourning and masturbation through memories and screens a much-needed tangibility, allowing him to fantasize about Becca through her exploratory caresses. Aside from Karsh’s solitary mourning, the scenes with Soo-min are the most moving in the film, injecting it with a much-needed tenderness. Terry, on the other hand, as written by Miriam Bale, epitomizes the family member perennially suspicious of the circumstances surrounding the death of her loved one, only that Cronenberg explodes her cooked-up conspiracies onto the digital space to the extent that they become intricately woven with her desires. Her ex-husband, Maury, a socially awkward IT whiz, is naturally embroiled in an outlandish conspiracy that is meant to disrupt GraveTech, and his hyper-sexualized creation, Hunny, is used as a means of spying on Karsh under the pretext of offering him comfort. Once Karsh figures out this conspiracy after Hunny’s exaggerated strip-tease, he uses this as a means of both connecting with Terry and inflaming her desires.

By subjecting timeless themes such as grief, ageing and death through such strange perversions and conspiracies, Cronenberg risks alienating his audience by seemingly cheapening the emotions. But Cronenberg is no stranger to controversy, and what seems slight is very serious for him. Our obsession with screens and the inundation of all kinds of information almost leads the screen to become a bodily appendage, with the verisimilitude of images and the control of it subsequently grabbing hold of our desires. Contrary to expectations, Cronenberg’s older protagonists are more accepting of these changes induced by technology, even if there is a greater tendency for them to gravitate towards conspiracy. This is where his chronicling of technological changes meshes with bodily changes, and while he has spawned countless imitators, few successfully grapple with the meaning of the term “body horror” as Cronenberg does. The rather loaded term, as Nathan Lee discussed in Mubi, tilts the scales heavily in the favour of the body in the eyes of his lesser-minded imitators who mistake punishing spectacles of intricately-detailed innards for profundity. But this dichotomy between body and mind is meaningless for Cronenberg, and this is especially the case in his later films, which teem with dialogues in their delineations of decay. The Shrouds and Crimes of the Future interrogate the “late” in late style, risking being called “uncinematic” by foregrounding their protagonists’ discussions on desire as much as the fantasies of desire themselves, refusing to cleanly separate the two. However, amidst all the muckraking in change, confusion and conspiracy, I am hard-pressed to find a critique of the system, a key aspect of his earlier films which I dearly miss.

Anand Sudha has a PhD in Applied Physics and tries to squeeze film criticism into his spare time. He has been published in InReview, Film Companion, Ultra Dogme, among others.