David Cronenberg’s Lens on Death
In 'The Shrouds,' the latest film from the godfather of body horror, a grieving man finds a way to see his wife after her death, highlighting the perilous relationship between technology and human longing.
Photograph by Andrea Montano
With his new film The Shrouds, David Cronenberg remains faithful to the themes that have fascinated him throughout his 55-year career as a filmmaker: the body in all its states, and the relationship between humans and technology. In the film, Vincent Cassel plays Karsh, an entrepreneur who, following the death of his wife, creates a technology service called GraveTech, allowing people to monitor the deteriorating bodies of their dead and buried loved ones.
Brilliant, elegant, sometimes facetious, operating at a high intellectual altitude without an ounce of pretentiousness, the 82-year-old filmmaker meditates on mourning and death, artificial intelligence and his cinematic legacy in the following conversation.
Did the idea of The Shrouds come from your grief after your wife’s death?
DC Yes, it did. A lot of what Karsh says he is experiencing, I’ve experienced as well. Some of the dialogue comes directly from that, including the bad date in the beginning of the movie! Of course, as soon as you start to write about it, it becomes fiction, but what you create always comes from your own experience, from what you understand about the human condition and how people interact with each other. Your experience of life is what you have to work with. I acknowledge the autobiographical element, but I don’t think people should be too obsessed with that. People who watch The Shrouds may know nothing about me, but the movie must work for them nevertheless.
Let’s talk about GraveTech, the technological graves in the film that allow people to watch the decaying corpses of their loved ones. Did this idea occur to you in real life?
DC Yes. The idea is that you continue a relationship with a person after they die. Karsh says he wanted to get into the coffin with his deceased wife, and I felt that strongly with my wife. I didn’t want to lose her, but she was in a coffin, being lowered into the ground. Of course, I couldn’t get into the coffin with her – there wasn’t even enough room – but I wanted to. That surprised me – I hadn’t anticipated that I would feel that way. If you’re a tech entrepreneur, you might say that the next best thing to being in the coffin with your wife is to look inside the coffin anytime you wanted, and then you wouldn’t be separated from her. What you have to be willing to do, then, is to see what happens to her body. For most people, it would be strange to find this comforting or to want this. I spent nearly two years taking care of my wife as she was dying, and we were hoping we could find some treatment. So, in a way, that was like being in the coffin with her.
Later in the movie, Karsh engages with a blind woman, and they have a relationship centered on touch rather than sight. What do you miss most when a loved one has gone: seeing or touching them?
DC When my wife died, I read books on grief, especially The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. It’s about her husband’s death. What struck me is that it’s disembodied: she never talks about their sex life or about missing his body. She missed his voice, his humor, his intellect, but there was no body there. That’s very strange! Whatever it was, it was completely different from my grief, which was very physical.
You can connect this with my general understanding of the human condition, my own existentialism: our life is finite. When we die, it’s like we never existed. It’s like we were before we were born, which is nonexistent. To be human is to be a body, first of all. And the body is endlessly fascinating. We only recently discovered that the brain doesn’t simply develop up to a certain point and then gradually decays. Instead, it’s constantly changing. The scientist Gerald Edelman says the brain isn’t like a computer, but rather like a rainforest, with all these neurons struggling for dominance. The brain is constantly growing and changing right up until death – and beyond, actually. That struck me because, until not that long ago, people thought our brains developed until we were 20 or 21, and then stayed the same. Edelman changed our understanding about knowledge, about how we learn and think. It’s a fantastic understanding, and it’s verifiably true. That means that, yes, we are bodies. When you’re a filmmaker, what you film most is the body. That is our subject.
Where does your fascination for the human body come from?
DC It comes from life! Kids are obsessed with their bodies. They have to learn all the things that people do: sleeping, eating, peeing, etc. As we get older, our parents may have problems: they may need a pacemaker or a heart operation. People, old or young, talk about what’s wrong with their bodies. Everybody does. So, my fascination comes from observing modern life.
Young people today transform their bodies in ways that older generations did not. It’s as if they’ve caught up with your movies!
DC I think young people are not surprised when they see my films because it’s their own life, their own obsessions. They are not as shocked as older people. Now, you can easily have parts of your body replaced.
To continue reading this interview, purchase Mastermind 17, available online via this link. The Shrouds, produced by Saint Laurent Productions, is in cinemas now.