2148 Beard, William. The Artist as Monster: The Cinema of David Cronenberg. Rev. ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 568p. biblio. index. $53.00. $35.00pa. ISBN 0-8020-3569-8. ISBN 0-8020-3807-7pa. CCIP. DDC 791.43 02'33'92.

The films of David Cronenberg continue to exert in their proclivity for the strange and disorienting a fascination among popular consumers and dedicated interest from a reach of feminist, psychoanalytic, Marxist, cultural-studies, and especially postmodernist or proto-postmodernist scholars. The prevailing literature would see in Cronenberg something “that seemed particularly symptomatic of the age, an idiosyncratic but acute reflection of contemporary perspectives and anxieties.”
        Following a persuasively contrary line of thought, William Beard distinguishes Cronenberg as a “modernist” artist all too sensitive to the terrifying conditions of a new age, reminiscent of premodernist writers like Coleridge and Poe and modernist ones such as Kafka and Sartre. Cronenberg’s body of work, moreover, bears all the essential features and status of an “authorial cinema.” It is on these multifarious threads on which Beard anchors his highly meticulous and thoroughly accessible study of Cronenberg’s feature films, organized chronologically into 15 chapters from Stereo (1969) through eXistenZ (1999) to Spider (2002) — a revised and expanded edition of his seminal earlier publication. Beard’s point of departure is the goings-on “in the films,” and his central preoccupation the “huge moral and ethical struggles underlying [their] surface” illustrating the developing “human cost of transgression.” That cost, Beard argues, rebounds inevitably on the central (male) protagonist, rendering him an ethical and biological “monster” in his own eyes and in the extreme stage of the metamorphosis, a self-loathing suicidal monster-melancholiac. This self-reflexive depiction of the male protagonist’s terrifying progression, put side by side by Beard to “something like artistic creation,” is a consciously marked development in Cronenberg’s cinematic vision, emerging in full force in Videodrome (1982) and subsequent films. That Beard’s analysis is lucid, carefully researched, and thoughtfully argued comes as no surprise.
        Dispensing with the standard filmographies and histories of production, areas amply covered in existing works, the overall design and substance of The Artist as Monster can hardly fail as an insightful, instructive, and essential point of reference to the subject of Cronenberg’s inimitable filmic creations.