“Oh what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practise to deceive!”
—Sir Walter Scott
schiz·o·phre·ni·a: Any of a group of psychotic disorders usually characterized by withdrawal from reality, illogical patterns of thinking, delusions, and hallucinations, and accompanied in varying degrees by other emotional, behavioral, or intellectual disturbances.
—The American Heritage Dictionary
The best way to describe David Cronenberg’s latest mind-trip of a film comes from the director himself: “It has the feel of Samuel Beckett confronting Sigmund Freud.” Featuring a paranoid schizophrenic protagonist who mumbles a constant stream of unintelligible gibberish and spends much of the time literally dwelling in his past, Spider is a shoo-in for strangest movie of the year. But in terms of how it combines strangeness with sheer brilliance, it’s this year’s Mulholland Dr. It’s the kind of film that demands a few hours’ worth of post-viewing discussion over drinks with a literate friend, and gets better and better the more you think about it.
It’s obvious from the moment we first see him that Dennis “Spider” Cleg (Ralph Fiennes) is a man who Has Issues. Dirty and unkempt, he carries his few worldly possessions in a battered suitcase and an old sock he stashes in the front of his pants. Arriving in London fresh from the asylum, he moves into a boarding house for low-risk lunatics run by one Mrs. Wilkinson (Lynn Redgrave). Once he’s introduced to his extremely modest quarters, his first order of business is to find a suitable hiding place for the little journal in which he records his memoirs in a tightly packed scrawl of invented code.
From there, the film proceeds along a disjointed nonlinear narrative that alternates between Spider in the present, brief scenes of Spider in the asylum, and longer sequences from his childhood, when he lived in a small East End apartment with his parents (Gabriel Byrne and Miranda Richardson). It takes a moment to realize that the kid in these scenes is Spider, because the adult Spider is an unseen observer in them. It’s a great visual device that points to the self-dissociation of Spider’s mental illness. (When was the last time you saw your younger self in a childhood memory?)
Working from Patrick McGrath’s adaptation of his own novel, Cronenberg continues his habit of finding literary sources that let him indulge his own trademark preoccupations—in this case, the blurring of the line between a character’s mental subjectivity and objective reality. In Spider‘s Beckett-meets-Freud context, that means Spider spends a great deal of time alone in bleak surroundings, mumbling pathetically to himself. (In one searing Expressionist painting of a shot, he lies naked in a bathtub full of yellowish water, staring at nothing.) It also means that things get positively surreal when it comes to his memories about his mother. (In a remarkable dual role, Richardson transforms herself with bad teeth and a sleazy alcoholic lisp to play the bar tramp with whom Spider’s father cheats.)
On another level, the film plays with our perceptions and expectations as audience. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Spider is an “unreliable narrator,” but it’s harder to know where and how far his memories diverge from truth. Of course, we also wonder exactly when Spider went mad and ended up in an asylum. Cronenberg keeps us guessing and wondering right up to the end, when he confronts us with a truly chilling question: is it worse to be insane, or to be insane and know it?
(3.5/4)