If you’re reading this website, you’re probably aware of the movies of David Cronenberg. Almost certainly the greatest filmmaker Toronto ever produced, Cronenberg established his reputation in the 1970s and early 1980s with a series of ecstatically cerebral and creepy sci-fi/horror movies that led to the coinage of a new adjective, “Cronenbergian,” which was understood to mean something to do with uncontrollable manifestations of human flesh. Cronenberg was one of the few filmmakers with the balls to tackle the works of J.G. Ballard and William S. Burroughs, although if Steven Spielberg ever decides to adapt Junky, he’ll join the club as well. But I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Cronenberg’s great crossover hit came in the summer of 1986 when he released his remake of the 1958 movie The Fly, starring Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis. On the occasion of the UK release, which happened in February of 1987, an intriguing 50-minute TV documentary about Cronenberg was shown on British TV.
Long Live the New Flesh was directed by Laurens C. Postma, whose main directorial credit had been a 1984 program about The Prisoner. In the years to follow Postma would also direct documentaries about Derek Jarman and the Christian rock band Stryper.
The documentary shows admirable discipline in restricting the informational flow to a series of interviews with Cronenberg, Martin Scorsese, Stephen King, and movie critic Robin Wood, as well as miscellaneous clips from Cronenberg’s movies. At no point is an actor interviewed about anything. Wood has some criticisms of Cronenberg’s approach to horror, and Postma shows Cronenberg’s response to Wood as well.
Cronenberg had adapted Stephen King’s The Dead Zone a few years earlier, which explains his presence here. Scorsese and Cronenberg had become buddies a few years earlier, after Scorsese overcame his intuited dread at meeting his Canadian colleague, as he explained in an issue of Fangoria from 1983:
I’ve also had a chance to strike up a friendship with David, whom I would never have cast to play himself. I expected somebody who looked like a combination of Arthur Bremmer and Dwight Frye as Renfield in Dracula this is a go meet at driver, slobbering for juicy flies. The man who showed up in my apartment in New York looked like a gynecologist from Beverly Hills.
Commenting on Scorsese’s presumptions, Cronenberg later told David Breskin in Inner Views,
This is the guy who made Taxi Driver and he’s afraid to meet me! This is a guy who knows from the inside out that there’s a complex relationship between someone who makes films and his films. But he still was taking the films at face value and equating me with them, and the craziness he saw in the films, and the disturbing things he saw in the films, he felt would be the essence of me as a person.
Amusingly, Scorsese admits during his interview that half the time he can’t understand all the intellectual stuff Cronenberg says to him about “Marshall McLuhan” and so forth.
As a bonus, here’s Scorsese’s article on Cronenberg, which appeared in a 1983 issue of Fangoria:
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Apparently David Cronenberg is a huge ‘Dilbert’ fan
Watch ‘The Italian Machine,’ David Cronenberg’s Ballardian motorcycle fetish short