If this film were a book it would have become a classic, a Snow Crash, Vurt, or Neuromancer sort of classic. And oddly enough it was a book, in the form of six graphic novels commissioned by Richard Kelly to lead audiences up to the premiere of the actual film which served as the narrative conclusion to the entire series. These six novels were compacted into three, largely unread, and then the film opened to mild derision at Cannes.


Which is unfortunate because it simply is a masterful riff on the near-future fiction of Gibson, Stephenson, Sterling, and a few others. The film seems intent on sprawl, the quintessence of all things cyberpunk. The sprawl of urban planning, social systems, information, and eventually the biographies of people affected by these emerging structures. After a long time, Kelly’s film sprawls to a conclusion that to those uninitiated by the graphic novels is as senseless as it is hypnotic. (The storyline wanders quite a bit, which seemed to be the main contention people have had with the film. But it seems to me that this is more a result of the film being the conclusion to a series of six largely unread graphic novels than Kelly's inability to direct the film. The story isn't contained by the film itself, which exhausts itself on tying up loose ends from a broader story.) His knack for the transcendent and uncanny again proven, Southland Tales collapses in a heap of memes orchestrated by perfectly cast pop-culture icons like the Rock, Mandy Moore, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Justin Timberlake, and Seann William Scott. There is a floating ice cream truck, spiritually powered by Scott (yes – Stifler), at the end that works well as an example for the way the rest of the film develops. It is an utterly unpredictable cultural reference that will leave all but the most oddly equipped audiences in the dust. If there is a future for a Tarantino-like fascination with 1990’s pop culture done in Snow Crash mode, then Kelly may have identified its path of least resistance.


Additional comments penned elsewhere:


There is a large difference between interpreting something and alluding to it, or even aping its narrative trajectories. And the sorts of allusions that lead to allegory are much different than the allusions that occur in the cultural web of reference that typifies cyberpunk lit and Kelly's film. This latter context is more Eco than Bunyan. He has said things about the film like: "It’s like if someone took mushrooms and read the Book of Revelations [sic] and had this crazy pop dream… that’s the film in a nutshell." And: "I think for me, I think of a way I guess in which the world could end immediately, and there's obviously the theory of the second coming, the Christian theory of revelation [also sic]."


So he isn't interpreting Revelation at all, rather using it as a structural starting point for this giant sprawl of a film that touches on a lot of current issues and references (that second link is helpful in this respect). When he says things such as, "It was like the city self-destructing, a big comedy about the city self-destructing," it becomes clear that allusions to Revelation are just one of many devices that build this momentum. There is a small collection of films that do this with other sections of the Bible, most often the Gospels, but this is one of the better purely aesthetic uses of Revelation imagery in film I can recall along with films Notre Musique and Heaven. It really is wonderfully poised, Southland Tales being what would happen if MTV ingested the Left Behind series, guzzled a few years of Drudge Report links, and then got sick all over the director's cut of Donnie Darko.

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.