Wide-Angle Madness In David Cronenberg’s Consumed

David Cronenberg is a film director with a flair for the visually abstract (Scanners, Videodrome, eXistenZ, Crash), and a particular talent for bringing tilted landscapes and disturbing concepts to life. There was a period when a single Cronenberg film could be guaranteed to have enough oozing/dripping/undulating appendages (human or otherwise) for at least ten regular movies, and visuals demented enough to make you reconsider your own reality. He even turned Beat-era prophet William S. Burroughs’ mondo-bizarro novel Naked Lunch—which really truly should have been unfilmable—into one of the most mind-altering cinematic trips of the past 25 years.
Consumed is the debut of Cronenberg-as-novelist. It’s an off-kilter yet remarkably linear tale, knee-deep in the trademark abstractions that define the auteur’s films. The camera-centric plot, packed in around digressions on filming equipment, lighting, and lenses, concerns Célestine and Aristide Arosteguy, a pair of aging counterculture icons. When the cannibalized corpse of Célestine is found in their trendy apartment, Aristide is considered the prime suspect (a suspicion strengthened by his sudden disappearance). Investigating the case is Naomi, a young, tech-obsessed freelance journalist who becomes intimately entwined in the mystery, and her rival (and sometime lover) Nathan, who inadvertently discovers a subversive (and equally intimate) link to the murder while taking part in another assignment halfway across the globe. The separate narratives eventually collide as Cronenberg dials up the conspiratorial weirdness to wonderfully absurd levels.
Over the years, the director’s bold visual style has turned his name into an adjective: “Cronenbergian.” Consumed wouldn’t be Cronenbergian if things did not get strange in the nightmarish way he does so well in the movies, and as Naomi and Nathan burrow deeper into their respective investigations, the lines between technology, voyeurism, self-mutilation, apotemnophilia, politics, surgery, and sex become dangerously blurred.
The title may seem like an obvious reference to poor Célestine’s demise (or perhaps the secondary character who enjoys eating bits of her own flesh), but it is really hinting at Cronenberg’s larger subjects: rampant consumerism, experimental sexuality, pervasive social media, and global technological conspiracies. And let’s also not forget insects. Lots of buzzing, chittering insects. What’s a Cronenberg work, really, without a lot of insects? Put all of it together and you’ve got a heady brew—especially for a debut novel—yet he maintains a balance throughout, exploring theoretical, evolutionary consumerism through an array of odd characters more obsessed with viewing reality though digital cameras, audio recorders, and 3-D printers than with their own eyeballs. Even Skype and hearing aids become tools in humanity’s techno-downfall.
Consumed is, in its black heart, a deft satire disguised as a techno-thriller, a breezy 310-pager peppered with masturbatory tech speak, sex, humor, and grotesquery, escalating to a merger of nature and technology that is ultimately, undeniably, pure Cronenberg.
If he hadn’t written it, it’s exactly the type of novel I’d expect him to adapt into a film.
Which director do you wish would write a novel?