ABSTRACT
The cinema of David Cronenberg, perhaps more than any other contemporary filmmaker, represents a career-long exploration and dissection of the subject as the sovereign site of intellect, knowledge and power, and, especially, stands as a crucial and unflinching examination of the body in all of its messy, fragile, and fluid glory. An avid anti-Cartesian, his cinema has, for some forty years and across nineteen feature films, sought to renegotiate the way in which we might c onceive of the body and, perhaps more importantly, understand the manner with which it might have intentions all of its own, hidden and secret, and all the more dangerous for that. As I have noted elsewhere (Wilson, 2011), Cronenberg’s fascination with the body has moved through at least three distinct stages, reflected in the ways
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in which the films themselves-both those he has authored directly and those he has adapted-express their various concerns across their narratives and through the bodies of their protagonists. But, laid over these stages, if we are to consider the cinematic body specifically, lies a different alignment of anxieties. In the chapter that follows, I will explore just a few ways of approaching Cronenberg’s experiments and, in particular, seek to understand the role of the body-both the dangerous body and the body in danger-within his corpus.
