SHIVERS – Thought I'd check out my Arrow replacement disc. It's odd, watching it now from the standpoint of Cronenberg's later work, just how confidently 'Shivers' lays out its director's preoccupations and themes. Not only that, but it's fully invested with that essential Cronenebergian quality, 'chilly detachment'. This is only slightly undermined by the obvious awakwardness of a first time (feature) director, though the moments of clunk give way surprisingly easily once the sexual holocaust at the heart of the movie is in full swing. I don't know whether Cronenberg has ever acknowledged a debt to J G Ballard, but it seems strange that 'High Rise' was published around the same time as 'Shivers' came out. The two make wondeful companion pieces, and I'm keen to see what young Ben Wheatley has made of Ballard's visionary dystopia. I imagine it'll be infinitely better made, but somehow less impactful, than 'Shivers', a film which remains genuinely haunting and disturbing in places, with imagery and scenes which are so obviously of their times, but are somehow also beyond them. There's something about 'Shiver's philosophy which is difficult to define, but which has the potential to offend just about anyone – from groovy sixities lifestyle experimentalists to social right wingers to Freudo-Marxists to today's 'sex positive' generation. It's hard to pin the film down, either as an gleeful attack on sterile bourgeois values, or as a conservative exercise in equating sex with destruction, but maybe it works best as a disappointed satire on sixties radicalism – weirdly, for me one of the most chilling scenes is the last one, where we see the newly liberated denizens of Starliner towers file out of the parking lot car by car. It's obvious in narrative terms that they're going to 'spread the disease' etc, but you're left with a feeling that they might just be going to work, or to the movies... the same old alientated trudge. Whatever, 'Shivers' is necessary viewing, and the Arrow release has to be the best it's ever looked.
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