The Artist as Monster: The Cinema of David Cronenberg (William Beard)

Spring 2002

The body is absolutely subjective: Your body is like that of nobody else. It is absolutely objective: As Camille Paglia wrote in Sexual Personae, “We cannot escape our lives in these fascist bodies.” William Beard, a professor at the University of Alberta, places the work of Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg right in the middle of this contradiction and follows the films’ attempts to escape it. That there is no escape is no matter: if this struggle is the human condition, there can be no end to the stories it will generate.