SCANNERS (1981)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

Full disclosure: I've never had much use for the horror-plays of David Cronenberg, which one might gather from the fact that in the twelve years of this blog I've reviewed none of the movies he directed and only two in which he acted. I can loosely respect the basic inventiveness of his ideas, but he's not good with characters. Any time I watch a Cronenberg film, I feel as if he's playing puppet-master with the players, putting them through certain plot-based actions without any sense of internal conflict or decision. In my view he has some of Hitchcock's tendency to reduce characters to schematic designs, but without Hitchcock's saving grace of idiosyncratic humor, which makes that director's characters seem more alive.

SCANNERS's main character is bland everyman Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack). He has nearly no history, for his affliction-- that of hearing voices in his head-- has made him into a wandering vagrant. He's first seen through the eyes of a dowager who fancies that he's sexually attracted to her-- after which she succumbs to a spasmodic attack, as if she's been cursed by Cameron's "evil eye." Also in the early scenes is a demonstration of the film's best known effect: a man's head exploding as the result of psychic invasion.

Cameron is captured by a secret institute, Consec, which is overseen by obsessed scientist Ruth (Patrick McGoohan), although the real authority is security expert Keller. Ruth explains that Cameron is one of several dozen individuals termed "scanners," all of whom have mind-reading and telekinetic powers. The scientist further explains that the scanners were created by in utero exposure to the analgesic drug "ephemerol," though Ruth does not immediately mention that he invented said drug. Ruth enlists the somewhat pliable vagrant into the world of espionage, claiming that another scanner, Revok (Michael Ironside), is going around assassinating any scanners allied to Ruth. Though Cameron is logically indebted to Ruth for giving him greater control over his malady with injections of ephemerol, Cronenberg's script provides no solid justification for Cameron to plunge into the world of sci-fi spy adventure. 

I found most of the set-pieces of the film competent but somewhat dull, whether dealing with gun-battles or exploding heads. I concede that the concluding psychic battle between Cameron and Revok deserves its fame, but the revelation of a filial relationship between the two, brought about by Ruth, strained my credulity.

The most interesting aspect of all these spy-fi antics lies in Cronenberg's treatment of psychic phenomena. I've seen thousands of fictional representations of mind-reading, for example. However, most of these depictions show the psychic gleaning the thoughts of his subject as if he were doing nothing more strenuous than thumbing through the pages of a book. One might deduce from this common depiction that most writers think of the interaction of two minds as being (appropriately enough) "ephemeral," as if the mental energies produced by both minds were utterly intangible. Instead, Cronenberg sees psychic force as FORCE in the true sense. A scanner's scans invade a subject's body the same way any physical object would, disrupting the normal functions of the organs, causing nosebleeds, headaches, and exploding heads. In my long experience I can't think of any other metaphenomenal authors who have followed Cronenberg's unique take on mental powers, and I have my doubts that even the various SCANNERS sequels-- none of which included participation by Cronenberg-- even bothered to pursue this unusual story-trope.