Author’s Note: One of my favorite films, The Dead Zone, is free to stream on Amazon Prime right now. I thought I would take the opportunity to repost my tribute to the film, which I originally published on my old blog, Bakhtin’s Cigarettes.
When I was a student at the University of Florida in the late 1980s, I took writing classes under the great novelist Harry Crews. Harry was almost as famous for being a wild man as he was for being a writer, but by the time I knew him he had quit drinking and was leading a simple, almost monastic life of writing and teaching. Like many recovering alcoholics, he had lost many of his old friends, and he was also divorced, so he was alone a lot.
One way he distracted himself was by going to the movies. I knew that he often went by himself (and often walked out of them). One movie he didn’t walk out of was David Cronenberg’s 1988 thriller Dead Ringers. I know he didn’t because, in class the next night, he described how he’d bought a ticket with no idea of what the film was nor any knowledge of the director, David Cronenberg. Harry went on to describe how blown away he’d been by it, using adjectives that he often used when speaking of novels that he admired: vivid, kinky, real, and human.
Human was the big one. In Harry’s literary lexicon, this was the highest compliment. For a work to be human, it must be imbued with sharp, naturalistic detail, which gets at the fundamental strangeness of real people. The characters spark to life, and we connect with them, as human beings. We feel their suffering and participate in their struggles.
I was twenty-two at the time, but I already knew about the human quality of David Cronenberg films. I had been a fan of Cronenberg since I’d seen Scanners, one of his early flicks. Like so many of Cronenberg’s films, Scanners blurs the boundaries between several genres: science fiction, horror, and psychological thriller. This blurring, in and of itself, is unremarkable—lots of directors make movies that straddle different genres. But one of the marks of a great director is his ability to blur these lines with an effortless naturalism, to the point where he makes movies that defy classification. Indeed, such movies are eventually classified by the director’s name alone. Hence, we speak of a Hitchcock movie, or a Kubrick movie, or a Tarantino movie.
Or a Cronenberg movie. Cronenberg is undoubtedly a great director, and, like any great artist, his obsessions tend to repeat throughout his works. The hero in a Cronenberg movie is usually an ordinary, decent man who finds himself going through a bizarre breakdown—social, mental, and (of course) physical. In Scanners, a young drifter is tormented by unwanted psychic powers. And in 1986’s, The Fly, a shy scientist finds out that his body is literally transforming into a housefly. Usually, the breakdowns are violent and shocking, the point that some people have pigeon-holed Cronenberg as a “gross-out” director. But what I admire most about Cronenberg—besides his intelligence—is the level of pathos he’s able to summon from the viewer. These people seem real, with real bodies, in real danger.
This brings me to another aspect of Cronenberg’s movies: they’re deep. But perhaps this is not so surprising, either. One of the great ironies of the 20th Century, after all, is that so-called genre fiction—sci-fi, horror, spy films, and even crime movies—come closer to the essence of modern life than the standard “realistic” drama. From Stanley Kubrick to Star Trek, genre works often get at something that ordinary movies can’t. Perhaps because genre films have a better delivery mechanism—a story. When we become engrossed in a story, and especially when we engage with characters on a deep and intimate level, we become impressionable, open to the themes of the writer or director.
Never was this truer than in Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone, which is my favorite of his films. Based on one of the lesser known novels of Stephen King, the movie didn’t generate much buzz when it came out in 1983. The legion of King fans had already been burned once by a big-name director when Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining came out in 1980, and they weren’t eager to work up much enthusiasm for another cerebral, cold interpretation of a King story.
Of course, those fans were wrong about The Shining, and they were even more wrong about The Dead Zone. I re-watched the film a few weeks ago (I had not seen it in over twenty years) and I found myself awed by how beautiful and layered it is. Once again, it’s about an ordinary man going through a breakdown. Mild-mannered school teacher Johnny Smith (Christopher Walken) is almost killed in a freak car accident. When he awakens, he finds himself in a private medical clinic. He knows something awful has happened, but he is bewildered by his apparent lack of injuries. Soon the truth is revealed to him: he has been in a coma, and five years have passed.
Understandably, Johnny is in shock. He’s lost his job and his friends. His beautiful fiancé, Sarah (Brooke Adams), has married another man. And he’s almost crippled from his long slumber. But the real trouble begins when Johnny learns that his years in the coma—literally the Dead Zone—have changed him in mysterious ways. He is now clairvoyant, able to see the past, present, and future of anyone he touches.
This power takes the form of visions that sometimes seize him when he touches another person—through a handshake, a caress, or whatever. The experience is both terrifying and painful. “I feel like I’m dying inside,” he tells his doctor.
Dying is, of course, the operative word. Johnny has been to the otherworld and has returned with powers which are chthonic in nature, “sucking the life out of him” as his doctor explains.
It sounds like a downer, right? But Cronenberg’s genius (and King’s, too) is in making a genuine, suspense story out of this dark tale. Like so many King novels, the plot turns on the point where Johnny ceases to be a victim and begins using his powers actively to help others. He helps the local sherriff catch a serial killer. And when he shakes the hand of a loathsome politician, he sees that the man will someday, as President, start a nuclear war. Once again, Johnny must act.
Even these rather intriguing plot devices, however, the film might have languished if not for the brilliant performance by Christopher Walken, who, with his pale skin and emaciated features, seems a ghostly figure if ever there was one. Coming just a few years after his Oscar-winning turn in The Deer Hunter, The Dead Zone marks Walken best film performance. His Johnny Smith is a good man who is totally unprepared for the burden his (divine) powers have placed upon him.
The movie has other strengths, too. With Cronenberg’s native Ontario standing-in for King’s beloved small-town Maine, the movie is shot entirely in winter. As befits a story so concerned with mortality, the landscape feels drained of color, just stark black-and-whites. And Walken, with his dark coat and cane, hobbles through it like a modern-day Byron.
This unremitting coldness of the film’s cinematography, of course, make the moments of violence all the more startling and vivid—the one color the film makes use of is blood red. In fact, the way these characters inhabit this bleak world, while at the same time holding on to their humanity and courage, is the essential theme of the movie.
It’s ironic that Cronenberg, an avowed atheist, made such a compelling film about ordinary people facing cosmic tests. Indeed, God is an almost palpable presence, always lurking in the background. When Johnny first awakens from his coma, his mother tells him, “The Lord has delivered you from your trance.” And the sheriff who calls on him for help tells him If God has seen fit to bless you with this gift, you should use it.” To this, Johnny angrily reacts. “God threw an eighteen-wheel truck at me,” he says. “God’s been a real sport to me.” But, of course, Johnny does help the sheriff. His grows into the responsibility that his powers have placed upon him, and this transformation—a spiritual transformation to counteract his physical one—is one the most satisfying aspect of the film.
Other great strengths of the film lie in Michael Kamen’s plaintive, eerie score, which is by turns soothing and suspenseful, and in the fine supporting cast, filled with great character actors, including Tom Skerrit, Herbert Lom, Anthony Zerbe, and the radiant Brooke Adams. And, of course, Martin Sheen as the insane, populist politician who is destined to blow up the world (sound familiar?)
The Dead Zone is a perfect film.
Ash Clifton, Writer 