Dr. Hobbes's Parasites: Victims, Victimization, and Gender in David Cronenberg's "Shivers"

Abstract

In the opening sequence of David Cronenberg's Scanners (1980), we find ourselves in the food court of a brightly lit shopping mall. A young man enters the scene, his protuberant eyes crisscrossing the tables as he searches for scraps of food. Two well-dressed, middle-aged women stare at him, disgusted that their environment should be violated by such a disreputable figure. One observes, Will you look at that fellow over there. I've never seen anything so disgusting in my life. Her friend concurs with this characterization and inquires whether the young man might harbor some undesirable sexual interest in the two of them. Oh, it's awful. I don't know how they let creatures like that in here, the first speaker remonstrates as the young man gazes more and more intently at the pair. A highpitched hum abruptly dominates the soundtrack. All of a sudden, the first speaker grasps her chest and falls to the floor with what appears to be a stroke or heart attack. In response, the young man flinches as if he too were stricken by some overwhelming and undetermined affliction. He flees the scene while a crowd hovers solicitously over the woman, who continues to thrash about on the floor. Such sensational and viscerally upsetting events typify David Cronenberg's narratives. The first scene of Scanners immediately makes audience members ill at ease, not knowing where they are, who these characters might be, and what precipitated the unpremeditated collapse of an apparently healthy woman. More often than not, when viewing a film by Cronenberg, we find ourselves in effect the uneasy object of the first line of his 1979 film The Brood spoken by the experimental psychotherapist Dr. Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed). He barks at Mike, a young man undergoing treatment, You're not looking at me! and adds that the failure to acknowledge that which we find fearful or repellent constitutes what the therapist deems an unmanly form of weakness. Some individuals, both men and women, might reject Raglan's belligerent admonition to Mike, specifically in a cinematic context where the victimized character reminds them of their own vulnerability.