Perhaps the most iconographic film in his oeuvre, Scanners is Canadian director David Cronenberg’s first steadfast effort as the work serves as his first transitional film in many, many respects: Its anticipates his shift to his mature, middle period by foregoing a preoccupation with the social in favor of the psychological and philosophical while the themes of atheism; tyrannical, covert government alliance with multinational corporations; and the influence of American novelist, William S. Burroughs, all make their debut appearances in the filmmaker’s first production to go to Number One at the box office.
A battle is raging between ConSec, a weapons and security systems manufacturer, and a guerilla underground. The conflict is founded upon the telepathic and telekinetic abilities of a select few individuals referred to as Scanners. ConSec desires the allegiance of such individuals for security purposes while the head of the underground, Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside), envisions a superhuman race which could ultimately enslave ordinary people. The final tilt of the scales rests upon whom the only remaining unaffiliated scanner, Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack), will chose to side.
As with many filmmakers, though perhaps moreso with Cronenberg, one can readily watch the intellectual and aesthetic development of the director by viewing his films chronologically. Dependably, a theme or motif will be conveyed through a series of productions by an artist while others, which had previously been mainstays, are abandoned only to be replaced by what will become another ideology to be perpetuated for an indefinite period.
Scanners continues Cronenberg’s fascination with the dominating doctor/father figure in the character of Paul Ruth (Patrick McGoohan), Vale’s temporary mentor though, predictably, the film’s protagonist will–much like its creator–lose confidence in his teacher as the motif is supplemented with the caricature of the scientist-creator in Cronenberg’s later efforts. Intriguingly, the outspoken director first presents his atheism in a cinematic guise with Scanners, a theme which would later reappear in The Fly. The director readily depicts his anti-Cartesian theory of the human body by reducing the mind’s synapses to a series of chemical and electronic exchanges. We watch as Vale, having honed his telepathic abilities, realizes (at the behest of Ruth) that he is able to not only manipulate other humans’ minds but, since the format is the same, is likewise able to control computer programs as well. As Ruth informs Vale, “Telepathy is not mind reading. It is the direct linking of two nervous systems otherwise separated by space.”
Remaining with the theme of epistemological inquiry, by presenting a story in which a person can literally control others by mere thought, the director not only calls into question the legitimacy of the mind-body division, but concurrently poses concerns over free will as well as how the notion of schizophrenia is perceived. With the latter, the condition is typically viewed as an ailment yet, with scanners (whom exhibit schizophrenic patters–untrained, they readily hear voices of others in their heads) we are nevertheless told (and come to see) that such is a gift rather than a handicap for it avails such individuals to other, otherwise unobtainable, realms of experience via extrasensory perspective ability. Interestingly, a minor theme within the work is Cronenberg’s implicit proposal that pharmaceutical assistance may be justified in some cases as the director is, at first, very sympathetic to a drug which blocks a scanner’s abilities, Ephemerol, especially in cases in which harm is enacted upon otherwise innocent individuals as a consequence of his or her “gift/ailment.” Yet he goes on to examine his own ideas more closely as such as the drug is later revealed to have other (negative) uses as well. Succinctly, a leitmotif is presented in a similar regard as, midway through the film, Cronenberg wryly issues Benjamin Pierce, a person whom may or may not (have) be(en) a scanner but has nonetheless found solstice in art as a means of therapy. Sardonically, during the course of the proceedings, Pierce is located languidly sitting inside a larger-than-life human head of his own creation.
Yet another idea which Cronenberg presents is his consistent concern for the bedfellows which are government and big business. Taking a cue from the paranoid conspiracies of William Burroughs (along with the film’s premise, which is comprised of one quarter of the writer’s perpetually conflicting political forces in his masterpiece, Naked Lunch, specifically the “Senders” (the other factions being “Liquefactionists,” “Divionists,” and “Factualists”), an epiphany occurs in respect to the relations between ConSec, the government, and yet another organization (whose CEO is equally revelatory), Biocarbon. By feature’s end, much like the arguably justifiable delusions of Jack Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, we come to jaw-droppingly discover a covert plot perpetuated by Big Pharma and the government at the expense of the general populace as Burroughs’s quip that one is not paranoid if someone truly is following you becomes a mantra after audience confidence is violated by the final frame as only the best thrillers in cinema are able to succinctly accomplish.
Though many of the ideas debuting in Cronenberg’s fifth feature-length film would later be honed, particularly in Videodrome two years later, we find the motif of an innocent individual caught between warring factions for the first time as, oddly, the work serves as one of the few occasions in which sex does not play a primary role (which becomes all the more fascinating considering the director’s proclivity for subversive ideologies in the company of a premise which would readily permit sexual stimulation/violation on a wholly abstract, via mental, plane). Though the theme of anxiety regarding technology and medicine has been expressed by the director many times before in such efforts as The Brood, Rabid, and Shivers, Scanners is the first juncture in which we are given a rounded protagonist proper, who becomes an inadvertent Christ figure (specifically, and especially in a visually regard, during the finale).
However, as challenging and intellectually stimulating as Scanners may be, the work is not as yet the masterpiece which the filmmaker would later become known. Plausibility is threatened by the speed at which Vale garners control of his abilities as Revok’s coincidental (to the point of being forced) shift in careers pushes the boundaries of believability that much further. Also, much like Hamlet’s hesitation, the question of why Ruth does not merely confess his guilt to his student makes the basis for the film viable, yet not entirely feasible, when–on a more realistic note–such an admission would leave little room for an action-filled conflict of epic proportions.
Much like Rope, Scanners is a work which had to be made for its creator to be able to esteem to his masterpieces. With the former, Alfred Hitchcock would not have been able to arrive at Strangers on a Train, Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, The Wrong Man, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, or The Birds without his less competent production concerning ideologues turned serial killers. Without Scanners, David Cronenberg would have been unable to manifest Videodrome, The Fly, eXistenZ, or Naked Lunch. Nevertheless, the transitional, working out feature serves as an indubitable sign of the prowess of an emerging auteur whose vision would be one to be reckoned with in the immediate future.
-Egregious Gurnow
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- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
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- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
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