Robert Collins

Cronenberg attempts a teleportation from cinema to fiction. Cover your eyes…

A review of Consumed, by David Cronenberg. The Canadian director-turned-author has arrived in his new medium with a number of unfortunate mutations

issue 01 November 2014

Following his beginnings as a science-fiction horror director, David Cronenberg has spent the past decades transforming himself into one of cinema’s most literary filmmakers. He has adapted for the screen — often brilliantly — novels by J.G. Ballard, William Burroughs and Don DeLillo. In each, he has paraded his obsession with lurid mutations in human form wrought by technology, disease and the imagination. In Crash (1996), he had
bodies melding with machinery. In Naked Lunch (1991), he had bodies melding with insects — plus insects melding with typewriters.

Most memorably, in his biggest commercial success, The Fly (1986), he had Jeff Goldblum melding with a housefly — after Goldblum’s scientist, attempting to teleport himself, failed to spot that winged hitchhiker had joined him for the ride in his teleportation device.

Now aged 71, and with his latest film, Maps to the Stars, just out, Cronenberg has finally attempted his own perilous teleportation, from cinema to fiction.

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