Cars and Girls and Corpses
On David Cronenberg's 'The Shrouds' (2024), wanting to be a corpse, listening to Prefab Sprout, and the beauty of ruining your life
To E.W., C.C., E.T., O.W., P.R., and J.M. For all the hospitality, kindness, patience, conversations, friendship, and love
The hugs are eager but the kisses are shy at LAX. Having just arrived back there from a three-day trip to Chicago, I stood in the midst of other tired and excited travelers, all waiting to recognize the familiar color and shape of the cars coming to pick them up. I, however, had no idea what I was even looking for. Time had been dilating, making days feel like weeks, weeks feel like months, new acquaintances feel like old friends. In my head I had traded a grounded and level-headed gray for deceptive perma-sunshine and ominous colorfulness the minute I stepped off the plane. The air smelled different and so did the people. So much time in cars, not a single second on the inside of a bus or a train though I suppose there is something to the intimacy of a car ride shared between two people, the possibility of running your hand up someone’s leg, under their skirt, over the seams of their jeans. A stranger is driving this car, a secret lover is driving this car, a partner is driving this car, a friend I can’t keep myself from wanting is driving this car. Hovering through stores and restaurants are the only times I make eye contact with strangers — I don’t go to parks and walking around feels strange. The sidewalks seem to swallow people whole.
We start a day as one person and end it as a different one without ever truly realizing it. By the time my first week in America was over I wasn’t sure I still recognized the person I was when I left for the airport back in Germany, his hopes, wishes, and dreams all written in water. My second Monday in L.A. I went to a screening of The Shrouds, David Cronenberg’s latest film, with three people who had essentially been strangers to me not too long ago. The film centers on Karsh (Vincent Cassel), who looks an awful lot like Cronenberg himself, a businessman still mourning the death of his wife Becca (Diane Kruger) four years earlier. To cope with his loss (and to make money, of course) he invented GraveTech, a macabre bit of technology that broadcasts a live feed of a deceased’s corpse for their loved ones to look at.
The Shrouds — the film takes its title from the modified shrouds the dead bodies are wrapped in — is funny, smart, strange, and unbearably sad but it’s the kind of sadness that isn’t conjured through big tear-jerking gestures or a sappy string swells. Rather, it unfurls through a variety of tones or, more accurately, it emerges from the very tonal juxtapositions that make Cronenberg’s late era so fascinating. “Grief is rotting your teeth,” are the first words spoken in the film, intriguingly stilted and Holzerian the way only the body horror pioneer’s dialogue is. In the next scene, we see Karsh on a blind date where he is charming, funny, intelligent but also clearly unable to connect with others in a meaningful, let alone a romantic way. His date asks him to show her a GraveTech tombstone but is soon overwhelmed by what she sees and the eerie intensity of Karsh’s words as they look at his wife’s decayed remains. Tears welled up in my eyes as I watched him struggle to let go of his grief and cling to this technology which, in his mind, keeps him tethered to her.
It’s not merely a perverse fantasy for the living but also for the dead. The thought of someone coming across my dead body on my bedroom floor, arms and legs splayed out, head twisted awkwardly to the side, eyes staring blankly into the void, it still fills me with a sick pleasure. Family, friends, and lovers weeping over my remains — it’s perhaps the ultimate narcissistic fantasy. Watching Karsh look into the dark sockets where his wife’s eyes once were, I picture myself not as the widower but as the deceased, my mouth permanently contorted into an toothy grin or even a vulgar laugh, wanted and missed and pitied desperately by those I left behind. I imagined what the people I came to the screening with would do if they saw me that way, whether it would be disgust or sorrow that overcame them.
Throughout the film’s two-hour runtime, Karsh keeps bringing up his wife’s body, how much he misses it, how much her identical twin sister Terry’s body looks like hers, the jealousy he felt over the fact that the doctor who treated her was also her former lover and therefore “had her body” before him. During my brief trip to Chicago the previous week it was the body of the person sitting to my left in the dark theater that I missed more than anything. Not “having” it, per se, but having it in my proximity, being able to reach my hand out and, theoretically, brush against skin, feel flesh, blood, and bone beneath it. The four of us stepped out of the theater when the lights went on, stimulated and puzzled. “That was weird.” It was. “There was almost too much going on.” Yes. “The film should’ve ended differently.” Maybe. “He was wrong to have sex with his dead wife’s sister.” He certainly was.
At the film’s halfway point, Karsh’s wife appears to him in what is either a dream or a particularly vivid memory. Her left breast and forearm have been amputated but there is nothing grotesque or “body horror” about her missing body parts or the scar tissue that has taken their place. Instead, it allows for what is likely the film’s most moving exchange:
“They’re chopping away at you.”
“We can still have sex, though. Would you like that? Am I too mutilated? Do you still desire me?”
“I still do.”
As I get older and have more life to look back on (and less to look forward to) a film like The Shrouds exemplifies the kind of complicated and uncomfortable honesty and open-wound vulnerability I relate to more and more. Obviously working through the grief of losing his wife in 2017, Cronenberg seemingly indulges in a death fantasy of his own when he shows a rubber likeness of himself being dug up at the cemetery Karsh owns. (Karsh also owns a Tesla, an inadvertently pointed detail three months into Donald Trump’s second presidential term.) The same rubber doll also makes an appearance in his one-minute 2021 short film The Death of David Cronenberg which sees him embracing his own corpse in a gesture of acceptance of his mortality but also in acknowledgment of the fact that part of him died the day his wife did. The Canadian filmmaker put it bluntly in an interview about the short: “[…] it felt like when she died, partly, like I died, and I still feel that. That corpse is my wife to me.”
In the car ride from the theater it occurred to me that in my thirty-three years on this planet I’ve watched about a million different parts of me die and that I now wanted nothing more than to let a couple other ones die as well. The parts that still held on to bad memories, the parts that made me listen to everyone but myself, the parts that are wracked with guilt. The first night at my friend’s empty apartment — my first night in L.A. — felt like shedding skin. Sitting in a Korean restaurant a few hours later, I stared into the faces of the person I had been and the person I could be. The former looked like a corpse to me but it was disgust I felt, not sorrow. Its stench filled the room I sat in, across from someone I had never seen before, whose voice I had only heard a handful of times, whose presence, whose entire being were suddenly and forcefully revealed to me in a few short, metamorphic minutes. I had been seeking stability for so long — routine and repetition as an antidote to self-destruction — but as the night went on I began to think it might be time for me to ruin my life once more.
A lot can happen in two weeks: I fall in love with people, places, homes, pets. I drink so much I wake up with a hangover for the first time in years. I drink so much I wake up on the bathroom floor, my head under the toilet bowl. I drink so much it makes me throw up. I smoke cigarettes. I buy so many books I don’t know where to put them all. I go out to eat more often than I had in the previous four years combined. I talk so much I become hoarse — jokes, promises, confessions, and tears during what turned out to be the most beautiful dinner of my life. I finally arrive somewhere, finally recognize the contours of the life I want to live. A future, my future reveals itself to me and I want to lay the rotting corpse of my old self to rest, eager to leave it and its stench behind me for good.
In the final moments of The Shrouds, Karsh’s new lover, the blind Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt), appears to him with the same scars his wife had but the moment doesn’t signal inescapability but rather the possibility of new beginnings even as the past continues to linger. May comes around and I return to the place I’ve called home for almost a year now and go back to not talking, to running my thoughts through a translator whenever I do, to practicing my facial expressions because they suddenly don’t come naturally to me anymore, to the grounded and level-headed gray, to the self I no longer recognize. A week after my return, the future I saw for myself feels elusive and delicate again, unattainable even — maybe it wasn’t the future I was seeing.
My trip is not a pleasant memory as much as it is a ghost that stalks me wherever I go. I think about it whenever I speak to people in this language that sounds increasingly foreign to my ears, whenever I wretch at the sound of my own voice saying words I don’t want to be saying, explanations I don’t want to be giving. There have been so many new beginnings these past few years, each one bringing me closer to some abstract notion of an ideal life I’ve concocted in my brain and yet I often wonder just how many more new beginnings I have in me. Lying on a strange bed, I dared to put my arm around this person who I’ve come to feel so startlingly close to in just a few days’ time. A song blared from the speaker standing on a skinny metal shelf: “Will heaven wait all heavenly/Over the next horizon?” For some reason, the ambiguity felt hopeful and, looking back, perhaps I did see the future after all. Something new is waiting to be born but some old things will have to die first.
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