SPIDER (2002) 5/10

Published on: November 29th, 2009

   Opening titles : just great*. Warren Brown and Hector Herrera should have directed the whole thing.
   John Neville : marvellous (in the vein of Ralph Richardson in O Lucky Man!, but even more underused.)
   The rest : only so-so. A minor, semi-experimental breather between Cronenberg masterpieces (eXistenz on one side, A History of Violence on the other.) Anything-goes, nothing-really-matters nightmares in a solipsistic, time-hopping damaged brain – mostly overlit, especially the night-sequences.
   Air of gimmickry and archness is pervasive: Spider (Ralph Fiennes, sub-Beckettian), stranded in grim, underpopulated, London halfway house after exiting mental-hospital, revisits traumatic scenes from his childhood, in scenes mood-disruptingly reminiscent of Alvy Singer's memory-lane wanderings from Annie Hall. No spiders to be seen!
   Cronenberg's literary-adaptations (this is based on book by Patrick McGrath, adapted by himself) seldom match his other stuff – A History of Violence, based on a graphic novel, is the exception that proves the rule.

Neil Young
29th November 2009

SPIDER
5/10
UK(/Canada) 2002
directed by David Cronenberg
98m (BBFC)
[13/28]

seen on DVD in
Rotterdam
28th November 2009
with thanks to Tonio Van Vugt and Helmi Scheepers

*
The film begins with another of Cronenberg's wonderful credit sequences. Is there another filmmaker who can match his run of credit sequences (especially since Dead Ringers) that are not just beautiful and compelling, but function so intensely to essentialize the films' meaning and direct the emotional attention of the viewer? I don't think so. Despite very strong competition, Spider's credit sequence is, along with the one for Dead Ringers, perhaps Cronenberg's finest. The images are of stained wallpaper, mildewed plaster, or discoloured wood or concrete, but 'folded' to produce Rohrschach-like butterly or insect shapes, their colours and textures simultaneous decayed and beautiful. They brilliantly encapsulate and abstract the film's environment of dereliction, and the fantastically patterned and vibrant nature of Spider's inner life. Their Rohrschach overtones also gesture at the activity of psychic projection that those tests are intended to reveal in subjects, and thus already present themselves as a symbol of Spider's wild subjectivity and also his attempt to read the world.
   Usually the images of Cronenberg's credit sequence are governed by, or at any rate work indissolubly with, Howard Shore's music. Shore's probing, anxious score for Spider is as interesting and important as his other work for the director, but for the credits the music comes from another source. It is the English folksong 'Love will find out the way' (dating back to the seventeenth century) as sung in a simple arrangement with piano by a mature female singer, not at all professional but not exactly painful to listen to either. The aura it creates is Victorian or early twentieth century, a simple, heartfelt song that carries us back in time, since the era when songs like this were truly folkish, or even parlour standards, is gone.
… Cronenberg remarks in the DVD commentary: "The music at the head of Spider … has a very melancholy, sad feel to it, and it's sung by a woman who is of middle age, and the idea was that it was really a maternal song, it's Spider's mother singing to him."
   The Artist as Monster : The Cinema of David Cronenberg by William Beard
   University of Toronto Press. p482

Over the mountains,
    And over the waves,
Under the fountains,
    And under the graves;
Under floods that are deepest,
    Which Neptune obey;
Over rocks that are steepest,
    Love will find out the way.

Where there is no place
    For the glow-worm to lie;
Where there is no space
    For the receipt of a fly;
Where the midge does not venture,
    Lest herself fast she lay;
If love come, he will enter,
And will find out the way.

You may esteem him
    A child for his might,
Or you may deem him
    A coward from flight;
But if she, whom love doth honour,
    Be conceal'd from the day,
Set a thousand guards upon her,
    Love will find out the way.

Anonymous, cXVII.

   "Because 'Spider' is about a schizophrenic, Rorschach's psychiatric tests were brought up in our discussions as a concept for the titles" explains creative director Warren Brown. "Earlier in the development stage we read Patrick McGrath's novel upon which the film was based. There is a scene in the novel which didn't make it into the screenplay, where Spider's mother makes up stories about the images they see in the stains of their walls. We thought that combining Rorschach tests with the notion of looking for meaning in abstract stains was an interesting way to foreshadow the plight of the main character.
   "Not only did we creep through alleyways and basements of old buildings to gather the images for the titles, we also had the opportunity to photograph the wallpaper and walls used on the sets of the movie. Picking from hundreds of digital stills, we cut and flipped the images to create symmetrical Rorschach images."
   "David Cronenberg described film titles to us as a vestibule before the film; a time for the audience to segue into the world of the film. When I went to see the film at a local theatre, I was amazed to hear people in the audience whispering about what they saw in the images!"
   Warren Brown and Hector Herrera, designers of the main title sequence for Spider