Films: 1970s
(1977) Rabid
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Rabid
Director: David Cronenberg
Release: 1977
"Rabid" turns the audience on itself, demanding that it reconcile what it wants from pornography and exploitation and what it concurrently classifies as "horror."
Porn actress/exploitation icon Marilyn Chambers plays Rose, motorcycle accident victim who crashes outside an experimental plastic surgery clinic.
While her boyfriend, Hart Read (Frank Moore) suffers little more than a broken arm, Rose is deeply burned and requires immediate emergency surgery to save her life. Doctor Dan Keloid (Howard Ryshpan) elects to implement a restorative growth serum to her skin grafts. The results should minimize the chance of rejection.
Keloid's surgery is successful, but its end result devastating. Rose develops a kind of parasitic proboscis that can emerge from a cyst in her armpit. No longer able to take food, she aches for human blood - seducing and embrace her victims so that the proboscis can stab them and feed.
A byproduct of this vampirism is that the victims survive but become infected with a rabies-like virus that turns them into murderous zombies. Soon, Rose has escape the Keloid clinic and infects Montrea. Martial law is imposed and Hart struggles to find her amid the madness, unaware that she is the "Typhoid Mary" causing the epidemic.
Each of the scenes in which the mutated Rose feeds is a variation on familiar pornography plots. Rose awakens from her accident-induced coma, semi-clothed, cold and screaming. Her neighboring patient, Lloyd (Roger Periard), hears the commotion, investigates and tries to get her boyfriend. But Rose is cold, and won't he hold her naked body?
Other post-adolescent male fantasies unfold.
A drink-addled farmer (Terence G. Ross) finds Rose in his barn, wearing only a hospital johnny and raincoat. She is all too willing to accept his booze-fueled advances. Back a the Keloid clinic, Rose prompts a lesbian jacuzzi embrace. One the road, a lonely trucker (Gary McKeehan) finds a tough, tight-jeaned beauty ready for companionship. In Montreal, a porn theater regular (Miguel Fernandez) discovers a woman more beautiful than those on the screen among the rows, apparently into a little close contact of her own.
The game Cronenberg plays with these scenarios is that instead of the predictable male-fantasy resulting from these contrived encounters, the would-be shaggers receive a rude surprise in the form of a virtual phallus emerging from a virtual anus in the folds of their female quarry's body.
Rather than spreading their fluids in pleasure, their fluids are extracted by a stinger-tipped appendage. They are left in that "little death," indeed, a sort of post-orgasmic stupor - but it is the stupor of blood loss and infection.
What Cronenberg is doing here is to not only reverse the physical expectations of the victim, but to challenge comparisons of porn and horror. The comparable vulnerability of the sex act and the murder act, the thrust, the stab, the fluids ... the inherent biological attack of the male upon the female. While Rose is a victim herself, she is the living embodiment of revenge upon the culture of insertion, the culture of invasive objectification.
She is also the signifier for of guilt, the result of male decisions that have an effect upon the female body. When she is not the aggressor, she rolls on the floor in her underwear, sweating and gripping her abdomen. She is the stand-in for every pornography actress whose body has been ravaged by the job she performs.
As a porn actress, Chamber's bare breasts - treated with a frequent and unflinching approach by Cronenberg at the lens - are also a challenge. The audience as voyeur is an old story in the cinema. Here Cronenberg asks his audience to feel uncomfortable about the assumptions his audience makes when it comes to certain signifiers - be it an undressed adult-industry actress unable (or unwilling?) to be properly skewered by lascivious males, or the appearance of particularly taboo-looking orifices and what danger they contain.
Cronenberg forces the viewer to look directly into the faux anus, to see what creature of imagination lurks beyond its threshold. As it turns out, Rose is all to willing to offer the aperture underneath her arm. The social and moral implications with which such muscles are imbued are then manifest. Rose's secret hole drives its contactee insane and make them dangerous to everyone - begging immediate parallels to venereal disease, perhaps, but more importantly suggesting social earthquakes result from nontraditional sexual desire.
Then there is the medical construct. Cronenberg explores the theme of control and vulnerability in two major operating room scenes.
In the first, Rose is given the experimental skin graft at Keloid's whim. He narrates to his staff, confident his procedure is not only cutting edge but presuming its success. Rose is a test subject.
In the second, Keloid is infected with the disease Rose has spread throughout the hospital. His nameless patient is under his now-uncertain scalpel and his staff are the prey for his sudden murderous rage. The tools of Keloid's trade are radically transformed from restorative to destructive. Cronenberg plays with his audience, lingering on the details of surgical scissors and what they can do to human appendages.
In the middle of all this uncomfortable material is Cronenberg's smart script and cinematographer Rene Verzier's art-house photography. Half the magnetism of "Rabid" is its pure aesthetics and its ability to keep the absurdity of the biological mess it creates anchored to human emotion. Its characters are somewhat metaphoric - Rose the literally thorn tipped beauty and Hart the faithfully emotional supporter that would save her - but its dialogue is authentic.
"Rabid" also works as a response to George Romero's "Night of the Living Dead" (1968). Like its zombie predecessor, "Rabid" unpacks the disintegration of the family and social structure in the face of human-on-human apocalypse.
There are some direct mirror scenes. Television broadcasts are important in "Rabid," talking heads issuing the new world order and law enforcement lunging at the chance to impose its final, ever-hope-for martial law upon the liberal society it has been previously tasked to serve. In both films, an officer of the law prescribes open murder as the solution to the roaming infected.
As in "Night of the Living Dead" there is a family taboo broken in "Rabid." In Romero's film, matricide was the indicator of complete household dissolution. Cronenberg inverts the image to infanticide - a baby-changing table running red with blood while the mother (Monique Belisle) watches the mortified father (Joe Silver) from the closet.
"Rabid" also ends in what might be a direct homage to Romero - an approximation of the still shots of "Night of the Living Dead" actor Duane Jones being hoisted onto the pyre. Here, Cronenberg takes the porn actress - perhaps the ultimate object - and has her tossed into a trash truck. She is anonymous and discardable.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
Rabid, 1977
In the middle of all this uncomfortable material is ... cinematographer Rene Verzier's art-house photography. Half the magnetism of "Rabid" is its pure aesthetics.
