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| From http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Y2fXCAEB8Xk/Tt-3XYOlyEI /AAAAAAAAAbE/YDvguCQA2QA/s640/scanners_ver1.jpg |
Director: David Cronenberg
Screenplay: David Cronenberg
Cast: Stephen Lack (as Cameron
Vale); Jennifer O'Neill (as Kim Obrist); Patrick McGoohan (as Dr. Paul Ruth); Lawrence
Dane (as Braedon Keller); Michael Ironside (as Darryl Revok)
A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #26
In Scanner's world, one is plunged into a reality still far into our
future which is yet entirely analogue and antiquated now at the same time. The
difference between boundaries between people physically is blurred because of
the titular scanners, people existing with ESP powers since they were born,
able to read others' minds and manipulate another person's reality, even
connect to computers on a neurological level. Cronenberg was always prophetic as far back as his early
"dirty" Canuxploitation films, able to touch on ideas briefly or for
whole films which startle still despite the significant shifts in technology
and culture surrounding items like television. His films from this era are
entirely retro, where the computers are tape reels and digital readouts of
green text on a black background are used brilliantly for the end credits, but
they still contain a shock which extends out and still touches a viewer in the
2010s.
Canadian modernist architecture
is a large part of this in hindsight. His films shot in Canada still impose a
sense of dread on the viewer because of this, even above his more grander
dramas of later years, because of their uniquely cold and cerebral locations of
offices and conglomerate buildings of companies like ConSec, swallowing their
protagonists such as the naive, blue eyed Stephen
Lack here in their vast corridors and claustrophobic rooms. Scanners takes this even further, when
Lack's Cameron Vale has to search for
fellow scanner and villain Darryl Revok (Michael
Ironside), with a character having built their own head laid on the side as
a hideaway to sit in as part of his art channelling the pain of his scanning
ability. This aesthetic, bleak and paralysing the environments, prevents the
films from becoming kitsch as they exist within their own Cronenbergian worlds
the more they age, the only sense of datedness found here being able to ogle a
vinyl record store a large vehicle crashes through and spot copies of Frank Zappa's Sheik Yerbouti (1979) on the shelves. Howard Shore's score gives as much to Scanners in terms of its visceral power, beautiful and sickly early
synth, his importance to Cronenberg's
career emphasised here and as the composer of the artificial chrome surf rock
chords of Crash (1996), becoming as
much an important part of the director-auteur's DNA as Cronenberg's own voice.
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| From https://schlockwave.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/scannerart1.png |
Is it horror though? For the
most, Scanners is a strange
netherworld of conspiracy, Vale a rogue scanner acting more like a Cold War spy
as Revok has an infinite army of shotgun carrying goons at his disposal. Corporate
espionage if rife as the mysterious underground group of scanners led by Revok is
a Hitchcockian McGuffin off-screen, left as an implied force as ordinary
Canadian locales like doctors' offices and cafes are invaded by tranquiliser
gun shots and backstabbing is done covertly on subway line seats. The horror is
found in how Cronenberg depicts
telekinetic powers as a violent intruder on the human organism's existing form,
not easily introduced but the result of an accident and, even if transcendental,
involving mass destruction of the original human form and pain to work. Mind
reading is not a pleasant superhero ability but literal violation of another's
mind causing nausea and nosebleeds, a horrible whining noise when it's done
which seers the viewer's head as much as the participants onscreen. The head
explosion by itself has become legendary but the real horror is seeing how
scanning, without a single medical chemical called ephemerol to control it, leaves
people invalids homeless on the street because the thousands of voices of
others they can hear prevent them from functioning. Vague details are enough to
present a world that, if Cronenberg
continued it, would've added more questions, where Revok literally has to drill
his third eye open through homemade trepanning to relieve his pain.
A lot is not covered in Scanner's plot, enough left to add to
its bones to open up a greater narrative scope, but I have loved Scanners because it manages to create a
full plot through a few minimal pieces of exposition and visual and audio
signposts to evoke full emotions. Like a scanner able to know what someone is
thinking immediately upon contact, you learn instantly all the information you
need and spend the rest of the time feeling the world of Scanners fully, tiptoeing between reality and the subconscious. Either
side pierces the other without little resistance, as people move somnambulistically
to shot themselves in the head through another's will and Jennifer O'Neill, a elegant actress who looks like she's from a
forties Hollywood film than to the teens of eighties slash films, can make herself
in a brief visual edit become a guard's mother and cause him to break down into
tears of guilt. One scene compelling undermines reality entirely, becoming one
of the strangest and best parts of Cronenberg's
career, where Patrick McGoohan,
playing the rational scientific expert on scanners who leads Vale like a child
into honing his skills, has a breakdown when a plot point takes place; suddenly
the viewer can heard his thoughts projected to them subconsciously as he
thinks, as if he's secretly been a scanner all this time, eventually muttering
to himself aloud in a room in his own traumatised world. The actual climax of
the film is in danger of an obvious jokes about psychic battles being depicted onscreen
- the furrowing of two sets of eyebrows until someone falls over - but the real
damage is so horrifying from make-up artist Dick
Smith that it becomes a violent, spiritual mutilation that ends in the
least expected way.
Abstract Spectrum: Expressionist/Psychotronic
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low
Paradoxically one of Cronenberg's most accessible films, and
one of his most financially successful, yet interprets the idea of psychic
power and the subconscious through currents rippling underneath the surface. The
minimalism and the strong effect of audio on the structure leads this to having
a further dimension to work with.
Abstract Tropes: Minimal Narration; Textured Audio; Conspiracies; Psychic
abilities; Subconscious Thought; Body Horror; Avant-Garde/Installation Art
Personal Opinion:
Likely the sequels missed the
point, yet to see them, more concerned with doubling the exploding heads and
writing plots about scanner cops form what I know. Cronenberg's films always had a greater purpose in implanting
uncomfortable theories of the body and mind into a viewer be it into genre or
drama. Because of how concise Scanners
is, every moment evoking both an important plot point and a sharp effect, I
find this superior than others which elaborate further in plot and dialogue in
his career.
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| From http://bloodygoodhorror.com/bgh/files/promos/ironside.jpeg |
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