how the end always is
cronenberg's the shrouds (2024)
loss is the oldest story in the world. but when it happens to you, you feel like the first person to experience it. you’re the only person who has ever felt that searing pain go up your throat and through your eyes and it’s all over, you’re never going to be you again. it’ll sit in your stomach, and your bones, and spread through the jelly of your eyeballs, and you’ll be forced to go on calling yourself ‘you’ so you don’t freak everyone else out, but you are the only person who will ever know this: you are not, and will never be, ‘you’ again.
david cronenberg is no stranger to irreversible transformations of the body. from the body horror he perfected in the 80s to the conceptual turn that took in the late 90s and through the 2000s, all of that felt like it was leading up to 2022’s Crimes of the Future. the slogan of that film, if you will, was ‘Surgery is the new sex.’ alterations to the body are alterations to the experience of reality, and therefore, reality itself. it felt like the culmination of cronenberg’s practice as an artist. how far do you go? what is the way forward, the ‘new sex’? how do you ‘let the old flesh die’1? The Shrouds, perhaps somewhat jarringly, refuses the idea of the ‘new’. its high-tech premise might trick you into thinking otherwise, but it is evident Cronenberg is not interested in forward movement here.
The Shrouds follows Karsh (Vincent Cassel), the inventor of Gravetech, a cemetery system which allows you to watch the bodies of your loved one decay in real time. he formulates this technology following the death of his wife (Becca, played by Diane Kruger), explaining that the loss of intimacy with her was so unbearable, he was overcome with the impulse to get in the box with her. she leaves behind her sister, Terry (also played by Diane Kruger), who engages in a strange, aggravating dictation with Karsh, where they talk endlessly back and forth about how similar her body is to the way Becca’s was. already, the movement here is recursive and intolerant of the new.
if every Cronenberg film up to this point has been about trying - and failing - to achieve perfect union, this is a film about what happens in the aftermath of having had that connection, and feeling it inevitably severed. in this case, once by death, and again when Becca’s grave is vandalised and the wired connection to her gravesite is destroyed by hackers, cutting him off. this recurring loss sets him off on a narrative spiral, chasing wild paranoid conspiracies from the doctors who treated her to some vague international syndicate.
after this point, the actual conspiratorial machinations of the film are ridiculous. its politics are a disaster. i don’t think there’s much point in laying them out here, because i think that conspiracy is, ultimately, just the narrative structure that Cronenberg nails grief to. he is not concerned with its minutiae2. i also don’t think it’d be going too far, as it’s been pointed out in a lot of the press done for the film, to say that it’s based off Cronenberg’s own experience of losing his wife of 43 years to cancer. that has something to do with how seriously we can take the desperation of its narrative logic.
“Grief is rotting your teeth,” is the first thing we hear about Karsh, while his dentist scrapes away at the bone. teeth register emotion, he says. you can’t keep doing this to yourself. your wife’s dead, but you have to get a grip. Karsh’s eyes are flat. this entirely private pain has both been inscribed in every cell of his body, and is eating away at it. what else is there to do.
he dates, half-heartedly. obsesses over HD, extra-zoomed in pictures of Becca’s disintegrating bones on his iPad, wholeheartedly. conspiracy is, first and foremost, verbiage. digging up a conspiracy means an excuse to talk endlessly about everything to do with Becca’s last few months, in the care of doctors. Karsh and Terry, Becca’s sister (also played by Diane Kruger) egg each other on with this paranoid thinking, talking in stark detail about the radiation and the experimental treatment she was subject to. it’s horrible, but when you do live through something like this, you find yourself wanting to talk about it endlessly. not even with the hope of ever really getting it out of your own body, but just because. in Crash, one of Cronenberg’s earlier films, there is another incredibly wordy and clinical sex scene, in which verbiage is used as an attempt to achieve union. it fails, as it always must, but that is what this film reminded me most of.
and of course it’s not lost on me that conspiracy is the narrative impulse turned cancerous. in the wake of losing a loved one, when you don’t have the convenient narrative structures supplied by religion, you feel compelled to invent your own. conspiracy, to me, even outside this context, has always been a sort of replacement for religion, that grand unifying theory of surveillance and continuity that guarantees everything has its own place. it is an ordering, made by force. in this case, conspiracy helps the grief make sense. it provides meaning through its structural nodes, builds the scaffolding of some sort of story Karsh can cycle through again and again, and convince himself his wife didn’t die for no reason. this logic is formed from a tumorous connecting tissue. it doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, so long as it exists to hold its form.
all of which is to say that it’s disease, all the way down. conspiracy is not the new sex. there is no new sex, new flesh. it’s just rot, and the yellow of old bone3.
if you’re not sick of me yet, i do have a new poem out in the latest edition of Anti-Heroin Chic, and will have a couple others out in the next few days. i’ll post about them somewhere so they don’t slip through the cracks. thanks for sticking with me this year.
Videodrome, 1983.
i do think the subject matter/the politics will put people off - it’s laughable, in that its literally like every other conspiracy theory you’ve heard, because all conspiracies are fundamentally tedious and overblown. that is what its narrative structure demands as substance, but it does make the film hard to watch. i’m still going back and forth about whether it works. also, having read Cronenberg’s 2014 novel Consumed, i think he has a tendency to use the details of conspiracy theory as convenient placeholders (like..Russian spies, Chinese involvement), in a way that is clumsy and doesn’t mean anything, because it is so clumsy.
cover image is one of Peter Hujar’s pictures from the catacombs of Palermo.
you already know everything i think about the film itself i just have to say it's always a breath of fresh air to hear YOU make sense of it... verbiage slashpos. "when you don't have the convenient narrative structures supplied by religion, you feel compelled to invent your own." -> as much as i'm not sure the extent to which this worked for me, i think this is really important to point out and something that is missing in a lot of the conversation surrounding the film. it's easy to pick up on surveillance technology as giving rise to heightened paranoia and conspiracy, but without coming back to the chasm of loss (something waiting to be replaced, something that can't and maybe shouldn't be replaced but nonetheless an empty yawning space that is there) i think that analysis is very much incomplete for a film like this
as a massive cronenberg lover this was a very succinct look into the film and the idea of connection and how far you’d go just to justify your own pain that surely only “you’ve” felt before. safe to say i will be giving the film a watch as soon as!