Quote of the (Other) Day

Nathan Lee At the Village Voice interviewed David Cronenberg the other day about Eastern Promises; reading through it today this bit caught my eye:

"Compared to the carefully neutral mindscapes of eXistenZ or Crash, the expat Russian underworld of Eastern Promises feels unusually specific — and less resonant than the hallucinated England of Spider or Naked Lunch's Tangier of the mind.

"To be universal," Cronenberg counters, "you have to be specific. You hope there will be abstractions that resonate from what you've done." Creating the world of Eastern Promises, he says, "wasn't that much different than getting into the Peking Opera for M Butterfly. Once again, we're dealing with a kind of strangely hermetically sealed subculture that has its own rules and logic and protocols. And for me, you have to understand, to get into Midwestern America for A History of Violence was no different than getting into this Russian subculture. It's just that to Americans, one is invisible and the other is exotic. So it's a matter of perspective.""

Well actually, one of my main issues with A History of Violence was that exact divorced feeling of specificity of place, exactly what Cronenberg is speaking of here, albeit with a different purpose. You could tell that the Midwestern landscape was as foreign to him as the tenth level of video-game hell he wandered into in Existenz, and that friction, while usually something I admire about his films, didn't totally work for me in History. I never felt any sense of real place even at the start. One could argue that, because Tom Stall was living a fraudulent life at the story's start that a dissonance of reality was apt, but the cookie-cutter small-town Americana heaped onto the front-end of History was always the weakest link in the film, for me.

None of this defeats the argument that Cronenberg's making here, with which I totally agree - I just think the specificity he craved in detailing the world of History's story missed the mark, and his admission of how foreign that world was to him is revealing. I still think History's a fine film, mind you!
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