If Cronenberg is going to be remembered for body-horror, for the representation of trauma to North Americans for whom trauma is predominately conceived of in social rather than physical terms, then the now famous scene in the middle of Eastern Promises where a nude Viggo Mortensen graphically subdues two Russian hitmen may be one of his most personal statements to date. The contemporary mind is typically unfamiliar with the physical experience of trauma, our terrors being more immediately related to social or psychological states-of-being such as being imprisoned, alienated, ignored, poor, lost, or any host of conditions related to our preoccupation with wealth, information, and technology. Cronenberg has himself been preoccupied with these emerging forms of trauma, documenting the horror of technology (Rabid, Videodrome, The Fly), information (Naked Lunch, ExistenZ), sex (Crash), and justice (A History of Violence).


We have come to expect some sort of specific intention to Cronenberg’s more unsettling images, and this is certainly the case for Eastern Promises, which at first glimpse is far less cerebral or ideologically intentioned as his other films. The scene in question is literally stripped down, unattended by the thoughtful aspects of Cronenberg’s other body horror. It simply seems an exercise in brutality, an action film where the camera is allowed to watch for a little longer than we are used to. But this seemingly hostile gaze, perhaps in theory similar to the awfully extended scenes in the recent Rambo, is yet another revision of Cronenberg’s fascination with trauma and our responses to it.


In interviews Cronenberg related this particular scene to his personal atheism, explaining that “To me an act of murder is the act of total destruction, it's absolute. There's no comeback, there's no going to heaven, that's it. And it is very easy for that to be veiled or covered up, in a movie especially.” Which, by and large, is a point worth making. But the Cronenbergian rubber hits the road when such points are read in light of previous musings on the body and mortality such as: “For me, the first fact of human existence is the human body. But if you embrace the reality of the human body, you embrace mortality, and that is a very difficult thing for anything to do because the self-conscious mind cannot imagine non-existence. It's impossible to do.”


The relevance of this to similar statements made by Dumont about the body begs for further discussion. But as far as Eastern Promises is concerned, it seems fair to say that the naked Viggo scene is Cronenberg 101, an initiation to the base principles of his body horror. Perhaps in an anti-Bazanian move, Cronenberg looks for these moments in film where life (or at least “life as we know it”) is irrevocably extinguished. And where his body horror often manipulates flesh into enduring reminders of Western presents and futures gone awry, here it simply ruins it, tears it, and breaks it until it ceases to live. This scene certainly isn’t as high-concept as Cronenberg’s previous representations of techno- or info-trauma, but it is as every bit relevant. Perhaps it is even more relevant in an age where videos of beheadings and images of corpses, killings, and assorted physical trauma have become such a viable virtual commodity. The simple conscience of the naked Viggo scene really is what Cronenberg’s body horror is all about.