David Cronenberg

male
Born
1943
in
Toronto , ON
Canada
,
Ontario CA
Lives in
Toronto , ON
Canada
,
Ontario CA
Biography

Director. English Canada’s most famous and prolific heterosexual feature filmmaker is poet of the flesh in mutant revolt, nightmare imaginer of interfaces of body and machine. Far from including Cronenberg as an honorary queer, this listing simply can’t exclude the obsessive homophobe who can’t stay away, the publicly funded Canadian exporter of images of corporal and sexual perversity around the world, whether as stripminer and sanitizer of queer canons (e.g. Naked Lunch [1991], M. Butterfly [1993]), or as mythologizer of queer revulsion (Dead Ringers [1988]) and existential despair. Traumatized by fantasies of penetration of the male body from the start, whether via phallic parasite (Shivers (1975), pulsating mutant video cassette (Videodrome [1982]) or errant tongue/plug (ExistenZ [1999]), Cronenberg resolves the stress by littering the landscape with dead queers: to name only a few of the most recent and prominent, the brothers Mantle in Dead Ringers (1988), Song Liling in M. Butterfly(1993), Vaughan in Crash, (1995), as Christine Ramsay has shown.(1)
(1) Ramsay, Christine. 1999. “Dead Queers: One Legacy of the Trope of ‘Mind Over Matter.’” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 8, no. 1 (spring): 45–62.