David Cronenberg
Caitlin Cronenberg
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Caitlin Cronenberg
The loss of a loved one can link his life in the darkness which apparently consumes all around them. Some can drown in their sorrow, and others can ask “how much do I want to go dark?”
In The shroudsKarsh, played by Vincent Cassel, loses his wife and cannot let her break down alone.
“When they lowered my wife, Becca, in the coffin, I had an intense desire to get into the box with her,” said Karsh in Cassel to a blind meeting at the start of the film.
When we meet Karsh, he has lost Becca for four years (one of the three parts played by Diane Kruger in this film) against cancer and he cannot bear to let her go. Thus, he creates a funerary shroud technology which allows him to look at his body where to keep us away in the grave.
David Cronenberg told NPR that although the character he has written always feels a lot the presence of his wife, she is “obviously not physically with him and that is really what drives him crazy”.
Sorrow can be a waking nightmare
Although Karsh is able to see the body of Becca – which is mainly skeletal when we meet her – he can only speak to her in her dreams. Or, more specifically, nightmares.
“There are moments which, I think, are clearly somehow dream sequences in the film where he does not lose his head, but his unconscious brings him the images of himself and his wife,” said Cronenberg.
With each ghostly visit, we see a more disfigured Becca, which becomes more and more mutilated in the horrible dreams of Karsh – she loses a breast, then a lower arm. It is riddled with surgical scars.
These images “are not exactly realistic”, said Cronenberg, “but (these are) emotionally realistic moments … And although it is presented with a kind of dreamlike dream, you can understand that in real life, basically, he would have lived it with her.”
On the loss of his wife
“Well, it was, of course, the impulse for me to start writing the script for this film. But in a situation like this, when I start writing the script thinking about the things that have happened in my life, it becomes fiction,” he said.
Cronenberg’s philosophy here is simple: be inspired by your life, but remember that the characters you write must be different from who you are in real life. It is despite the fact that Karsh de Cassel presents an almost strange resemblance to Cronenberg, and that Karsh and the director underwent similar losses.
Vincent Cassel playing Karsh in “The Shrouds” alongside Diane Krueger playing both the wife of Karsh Becca and his sister Terry.
Sideshow and Janus movies
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Sideshow and Janus movies
“You want them to (the characters) become alive in their own way and tell you in a way that they are and to say things that you do not expect to say that you do things that you do not expect to do. And when you write a script, you want the characters to do it because it means that … they now have their separate existence.”
Morbid technology
The grave Karsh invented in The shrouds is clearly intended to wiggle the public – as well as other characters. We see a perfectly adapted blind meeting being frightened by Karsh’s corpse at the start of the film.
But Cronenberg is not so sure that people would be entirely deactivated by the idea that they can be corpses voyeurs. In fact, he said that a journalist had recently told him that he had conducted his own 28 people inquiry, asking them if they would use this technology if it was available.
“Like 11, they said they (interviewed) would not do it, but 14 said they would do it. And I was a little surprised by that. I don’t think I am the only human being in the world to do this, but I did not think that the report would be so close,” said Cronenberg.
“If you are a religious person and you think you will meet this person in paradise or something like that, a kind of life after death, you might not have an interest in doing this kind of thing. But if you did not believe that, if you were really atheist and you thought there would not be another way to connect with this person other than physically, when you may not have a different attitude.
When sorrow becomes objectification
“In my last film before this one, Crimes of the futureThere is the Mantra spoken. It is “the body is reality”. And if you believe that (your) body is really your reality, and that is how you understand reality, then the burial suddenly becomes a separation of the reality of this person, “said Cronenberg.
You don’t really learn a lot on Becca in the film. You only see it in these dream sequences similar to horror. Cronenberg said it was by design.
“I did not deliberately do the kind of traditional flashback thing when they met for the first time and when they made their first vacation and all these things you usually see in a film that concerns someone who died, because for him (Karsh), his death was a physical event,” said Cronenberg.
“So, he is naturally focused on what he has left her, which is, of course, memories. But beyond that, it is her body. So, yes, I mean, I think that people who are in love and who are not romantically involved, there is certainly a feeling of possession of the two, of the body of the other.”
Can technology help us deceive death?
David Cronenberg did not find catharsis in manufacturing The shrouds Either he said that cinema is simply not “therapy”. And making this film, as inspired by its own sorrow as possible, certainly did not erase it.
The same goes for any attempt to redo a loved one using AI or another technology.
“It is (sorrow) always there, as it was always the case, just as powerful as it has always been. And of course, you must remember that the deceased has died. So, this person is not really going to talk to you. It is a construction that speaks to you now,” he said.
“For some people, it may be helping them. And yet, don’t forget, this person is actually dead. So that does not really help them in a life after death. This gives you the illusion that the person is always alive.”
The shrouds is in theaters now.
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