Review: Cronenberg’s Consumed

Cronenberg’s ‘Consumed’ is a whirlwind tale into the fetishisation of commodities, lives and feelings that sees its characters become increasingly absorbed by their own drives. I use the word drive, rather than desire because what we are presented with here, is not the unanimity and unity of desire but rather the multiplicity of the drives.

Driven by seemingly incomprehensible, naked, raw drives, each of the characters never gets to experience the climax of desire. No - just like Tina’s butchered body, Chase’s bitten skin, or Dr Molnar’s subservient patients, desire is mutilated and broken down into its chopped-up form and presented to us as drives. Cronenberg skillfully plays with the juxtaposition of the character’s drives and their biological, human needs. Here, hunger is de-rationalised via the hallucinatory drive to consume one’s own skin in order to forge or relive old connections. The concept of disease is broken down by the drive to penetrate the other, this ‘other’ being that which is furthest removed from the human in the biological spectrum: viruses, bacteria, cancerous cells. The idea of love is also torn apart, both by the drives of each of the couples, such as Tina and Ari’s permanent desire for the other (in the form of Romme, Herve, Chase etc…) but also by the ever-so present and penetrative role of technology, a penetration that, despite present, is not felt.

The amalgamation of technology and sex, in this case, is not by chance: our characters, driven by their prohibitive drives, appeal to technology for answers. Nathan and Naomi seek togetherness, yet all they get is the artificiality of camera lens, computer screens and the broken communication of text messaging. Chase and Herve try and make sense of their lived experience via the mediation of 3D technology, his erect penis now sublimated into the form of larvae, just a ‘piece’ in the attempted reconstruction of broken lives. Even Ari’s biological function of hearing is broken down by technology and dissected into 5 modes: five ways of dealing with lived experience, five ways of escaping from the wearing pressures of existence. Technology becomes the refuge and answer for their inability to process biological needs. Medicine and disease play an important factor here. Each of the characters displays the symptoms of disease: be it the sexually transmitted Roiphe’s disease, cancer, Peyronie, body dysmorphia culminating in apotemnophilia and childhood illnesses impairing hearing. Arguably, the only character to resist disease is Ari, whose only bodily ailment, namely his deafness, comes as a result of old age, rather than imposed from an othering agent (might explain why he is given the large explanative monologue, does he represent the only attachment to reality?)

Is Ari the victim of a more insidious type of condition though? Is Ari the victim and epicentre for the circularity of the others’ drives? His ambiguous death at the presumed hands of drive-driven-technology seems to allude to this. The characters’ drives, unable to develop into full-on desires and impossible to actually achieve, are mediated via the undoing of the body (hence the various references to medicine and disease) and the attempt (but failure) to recreate and recompose this body via technology. The body is undone: desires are broken into drives, human contact is disassembled into jpg, txt scripts, codes, numbers… The Symbolic structure of lived experience collapses into the realms of the Imaginary and the Real (Lacan) and with it any signifying connection to actual lived experience falters. The characters enter a state of psychosis and paranoia. Chase rejects the French language altogether: language, being the predominant feature in the construction of our Symbolic order and the first to collapse when the structure of the signifier and signified fails. Tina’s obsession with the unattainable other manifests itself via the delusion of love: she departs with one of her erogenous zones: the breast now no longer signifying motherhood, sexuality and womanhood but rather a breeding ground for asexual reproduction, the undoing of the body in all ways, the desire to be annihilated and recomposed, transported into another world (here signified by the socio-cultural opposite of western civilisation, namely, North Korea).

To a certain extent, all the characters display signs of paranoia, the whole being epitomised by the delusional fantasy of the French media in regards to the disappearance of the notorious philosophers and the fabrication of the conspiracy theory in North Korea. When the Symbolic world collapses and all that remains are fragmented bits of bodies, concepts and impossible drives, the quest to make sense, the want for answers, the need for a ‘story’ consumes the characters (here best portrayed by Naomi and Nathan who, as investigative journalists, embody this need for answers and stories most profoundly). The answer, displayed here in the form of a psychotic delusion, desperately tries to give a meaning to the world in the face of a profound lack and obliteration of signification. In other words, the delusion and eventual conspiracy theory here serves the purpose of giving sense, albeit derangedly, to the absence of meaning, the absence of desire, the absence of key Symbolic functions. It is not by chance that the intellectual figure of Tina is the mastermind behind this delusion: the psychotic, in an attempt to find meaning where there (potentially) is none, attempts to make sense of everything using discarded bits, something that requires reason and the most rigorous use of logic! It is perfectly logical, if one thinks about it, to think of the proposition: if you love someone, you want to be incorporated and become one with them. It is impossible to negate the logical truth of this sentence, it makes sense. Yet, it is an impossibility, for even if you eat your lover, that drive that propelled you to make this action, would remain unconsumed.

This takes me to my concluding statement, Consumed, despite the name, is a story on the impossibility of consumption. For Freud, what distinguishes humans from other animals is our ability to have drives over simple instincts. Instincts are biologically dependent and fixed: for example, an animal’s mating season. Drives, on the other hand, are volatile and entirely dependent on the case history of the subject. Drives, as opposed to instincts, cannot ever be satisfied, in other words, drives cannot ever be consumed. All the drives thrust towards is a convulsive and perpetual circularity around the chosen object, namely, the fatidical ‘other’. In the end, Consumed presents us with an ironic twist, a tragic play within the impossibility of the name it bears on the cover. Consumed ends with the break down of all communication and the failure of technology to bring respite to the human quest for answers. Ari’s technological device explodes, the communication between characters is lost and, most importantly, the dissolution of the promised love unit is made-real. All the characters, or should I say, components, of this story should have been reunited in the othering-par-excellence North Korea, but none of this happens, of course. Romme and Herve’s line breaks as the reality of the totalitarian regime looms over their disillusioned pixellated faces. At the end of the day, nothing was actually consumed, in the sense that, it is in the very nature of the drives to continuously circle around the object of desire and never achieve it, never obtain it - for a drive can’t ever be consumed but is always and forever presented as the lack, the void, the, in Cronenberg’s own concluding words, “sinister new hole in the universe”.