Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 11/13/23

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Monday, November 13, 2023

The Brood (David Cronenberg, 1979)

Cindy Hinds in The Brood

Cast: Oliver Reed, Samantha Eggar, Art Hindle, Henry Beckman, Nuala Fitzgerald, Cindy Hinds, Susan Hogan, Gary McKeehan, Michael Magee, Robert A. Silverman, Joseph Shaw, Larry Solway, Reiner Schwarz. Screenplay: David Cronenberg. Cinematography: Mark Irwin. Art direction: Carol Spier. Film editing: Alan Collins. Music: Howard Shore.

Creepy children have become a staple of horror movies ever since Patty McCormack terrorized everyone as Rhoda Penmark in The Bad Seed (Mervyn LeRoy, 1956). The key here is the depiction of evil lurking behind a façade of innocence. Actually, the creepy child in The Brood is not Candice Carveth (Cindy Hinds), an otherwise ordinary 5-year-old, except as a vehicle for bringing out the creepy childlike creatures that are the movie's menace. It's a good, bloody, somewhat queasy film that plays on all sorts of phobias, including our suspicions about psychiatrists, and our tolerance for bodily functions. It proved too much for some of its early critics, including Roger Ebert, who dismissed it as an exploitation film, "reprehensible trash," and a bore. It may be the first, and perhaps the second -- given that one person's trash is another person's genre classic -- but it's certainly not the last. David Cronenberg is an insidious filmmaker, who constantly plays on our nerves without resorting to cheap jump scares. He makes you back off at times: In the scene that made most people feel at least faintly nauseated, I found myself saying, "It's only corn syrup and food coloring." We may also debate whether the film is fair to the psychiatric profession and even if there's a touch of antifeminism, but that means he's left you with something to think about. To dismiss The Brood as exploitative is to overlook the satire with which it's laced.