The man without a movie camera
Consumed is a mutant thing, morphing in our hands as we read
David Cronenberg loves cameras. As extensions of our nervous systems; as mediating instruments; as fetish objects of haute design; as devices made to capture motion and emotion, sex and death, eruption and decay; as the primary tools with which he has, until now, forged his career. Cameras are at the nucleus of the Cronenbergian cosmology of accoutrements and they, along with sundry other sleek machines, are all over Consumed, the septuagenarian filmmaker’s debut novel, which renders its dual photojournalistic escapades with arresting visual precision and loving attention to what the choice of lens, aperture, body or brand says about an individual. “Desire for a camera,” one character proposes, “is enough to keep death at bay.”
Set in Paris and Budapest, Tokyo and the author’s native Toronto, Consumed alternates between the parallel trajectories of Naomi Seberg (a name that summons cinematic images of pretty Americans in France) and her boyfriend Nathan Math, both of them impulsively globe-trotting (and apparently independently wealthy) freelance journalists. Naomi is on the track of French philosopher Aristide Arosteguy, accused of murdering and cannibalizing his philosopher wife Célestine, who may have been terminally ill or mentally ill or both or neither. Nathan starts out profiling a mad maverick Hungarian surgeon (Doctor Benway, I presume?) before contracting a rare sexually transmitted disease from a radioactive woman. Nathan then travels to Canada to meet the doctor after whom his disease is named and attempts to get close to the doctor’s unstable daughter, who, it turns out, might possess some connection to the Arosteguys. Naomi and Nathan cross paths only once over the course of Consumed, but their existential itineraries nevertheless overlap like twin pathogens inhabiting the same host.
A murder mystery in which murder may not have transpired, a science fiction in which most every fantastic item of technology or biology is grounded in fact, a critique of consumerism that’s wholly immersed in the pleasures of acquisition, Consumed is a mutant thing, morphing in our hands as we read, and ultimately as sui generis as anything in Cronenberg’s formidable filmography, which includes Videodrome, Dead Ringers and A History of Violence, not to mention numerous adaptations of literary works, including Stephen King’s The Dead Zone, William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, J.G. Ballard’s Crash, Patrick McGrath’s Spider and Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis.
Of these authors, the one with whom Cronenberg shares the most obvious affinity is Ballard. (Cronenberg’s self-penned feature debut, Shivers, could be read as a loose adaptation of Ballard’s High Rise.) Consumed seems to have generated an artistic hybrid organism: the CronenBallard, a fusion of cool surrealist investigations into modern civilization as a Petrie dish for psychopathology and the body as a nest of unprecedented transformation. Ballardophiles will feel spinal tingles of familiarity when the Arosteguys’ extol the owner’s manual as “the only authentic literature of the modern era,” or when Cronenberg describes Naomi and Nathan’s shared penchant for perusing the electronic stores of airports, which they coat in their respective effluvia. “It got to the point that they could sense traces of each other among the boxes of electric plug adapters and microSD flash cards.”
There’s no question as to whether Cronenberg can use the novel to transmit fresh data from the rich field of provocative ideas for which he’s revered, but whether Cronenberg’s use of the novel distinguishes itself in any meaningful way from his cinema is a more complicated matter. Consumed originated as a premise for a film, its possibility as a novel emerging only after Cronenberg received much encouragement from his publisher. I was repeatedly fascinated by the ways in which passages in Consumed echo Cronenberg’s coverage and cutting patterns, his selective but pointed use of establishing shots, and those cutaways to more closely examine an object, appendage or wound of interest. Yet Cronenberg’s best films employ a clean balance of mise en scène, underscoring ferociously skilled actors as leverage against the audacious, sometimes preposterous actions his characters undertake.
Perhaps the single-strongest argument for Consumed as a uniquely literary achievement comes in a mesmerizing monologue that occupies a significant portion of the novel’s second half. Narrated by M. Arosteguy, this monologue, permeated with grief, wonder and desperation, facilitates an intimacy and vulnerability found only in diluted form in the novel’s dominant detached third-person prose. The firstperson brings out a side of Cronenberg we haven’t seen before. Perhaps it’s the closest we’ll come to a manifestation of Cronenberg’s love of Nabokov, to my knowledge the sole author whose work he’s often declared ardent admiration yet hasn’t translated into cinema.
Consumed’s title addresses both the sociological and biological. We crave, we devour, and Cronenberg has a special gift for projecting an aura of eroticism over virtually anything, be it an act of self-mutilation, an African tree frog’s trill, a North Korean hearing aid or a Nespresso machine. His ways of seeing are singular — who else would compare a turntable to zooplankton? But for all the alienation and dearth of affect, this novel hasn’t entirely extracted love from its network of need. Consumed is, among other things, a tale of two couples, their extreme appetites and the negotiations undertaken to sustain long-term love. For all the bizarre or heinous objects of fascination running through this novel, its most potent allure is the fathomless mystery that one human poses to another. It’s a mystery mightier than any meaning we might distil from it, which is probably for the best. As Arosteguy warns: “meaning is a consumer item.”