“Mugwump jism can’t be beat”
A writer and exterminator starts feasting on his own bug powder, and his typewriter takes on the form of a bug, giving him instructions against mysterious forces aligning against him. The main narrative never makes too much sense, with various agents confusingly labelled, and apparently involved in double crosses that are hard to follow or understand, but there’s certainly a lot of creativity in the various creatures and scenarios that occur on screen; full of mugwumps with cum spouting antennae and massive beetles with vaginas on their fleshy backs.
I suppose the film is meant to show one man fleeing from a murder into a world of fantasy; of sex and drugs and violence, of people returning from the grave – in order to avoid the guilt of a possibly accidental, possibly deliberate homicide. I think on that level it is something of a success, but this meta-narrative is only a part of a confusing whole, which means we’re faced with large sections of dull, meaningless but creative scenes that never really hang together well, that aren’t entertaining or compelling, but generally confusing or suffused with a seemingly impenetrable importance.
There are times when Peter Weller, the lead, starts quoting from the source novel, and these sections are beautifully worded and strange narratives, but they make little sense in the context they’ve been placed, and seem to give him a much greater eloquence than he has in other scenes. It’s a bit of a mess, but then I suppose that dreams are messy. So yes, Cronenberg has managed to create a artistic interpretation of one man’s flight from reality, it’s just not a particularly compelling flight.
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