ABSTRACT
David Cronenberg’s first commercial feature, Shivers, became an object of some notoriety when, in 1975, Canadian film critic Robert Fulford argued that the Canadian Film Development Corporation should not have funded the film in his provocatively titled article: ‘You should know how bad this film is. After all, you paid for it’ (cited in Rodley 1992). Outraged at its perceived violation of certain standards of morality, aesthetics, national prestige and taste, Fulford’s response was to call for the film’s sanitary elimination. Given that Shivers’ concern is with repression, liberation, hygiene and order, it seems almost too obvious to state that its reception is caught up in the dynamics which it interrogates. A cheerfully deconstructive reading might cast the film as itself a part of a horror narrative – whether as the unclean monster that is attacked, or as the hapless victim who is pursued. But what seems more to the point is the extent to which the film whittles away at those very terms, asking what price we pay for the fact that ‘liberation’ is not a term generated spontaneously by the oppressed, so much as one defined and bequeathed to us by the most powerful constituencies of the social hierarchy. Instead, therefore, I want to suggest that the film’s interrogation of the limits of liberation leads us not to affirm it as other to a criticism such as Fulford’s, so much as to place it as all the more firmly consonant with (but therefore, as we shall see, all the more insidiously undermining of) the stigmatizing voice that would name and eradicate it.
