New Books In Dance

From his early horror movies, including Scanners, Videodrome, Rabid, and The Fly—with their exploding heads, mutating sex organs, rampaging parasites, and scientists turning into insects—to his inventive adaptations of books by William Burroughs (Naked Lunch), Don DeLillo (Cosmopolis), and Bruce Wagner (Maps to the Stars), Canadian director David Cronenberg (b. 1943) has consistently dramatized the struggle between the aspirations of the mind and the messy realities of the flesh. “I think of human beings as a strange mixture of the physical and the non-physical, and both of these things have their say at every moment we’re alive,” says Cronenberg. “My films are some kind of strange metaphysical passion play.” Moving deftly between genre and arthouse filmmaking and between original screenplays and literary adaptations, Cronenberg’s work is thematically consistent and marked by a rigorous intelligence, a keen sense of humor, and a fearless engagement with the nature of human existence. He has been exploring the