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I. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust… the journey of the flesh. If there is indeed a soul or an immortal being it will pass on perhaps into another vessel of flesh, perhaps oblivion. But it is a realm still unknown. What is known is the body and that it will perish and rot. The flesh is a witness and victim of time. It is young and supple at birth. As it ages, it bears the experience of the world- it wrinkles, scars, portions of it drop off, rigor mortis and then dust. Such is the way of the flesh. For all the cosmetics in the world, man is still animal.

II. William S. Burroughs calls it ‘the cellular equation’, the insatiable cravings of the flesh that bring out the savage within. David Cronenberg who adapted Burroughs’ seminal “Naked Lunch” to the screen is the auteur of ‘the cellular equation’. In his breakthrough horror films of the 70s, he exaggerated this equation and the cravings to monstrous dimensions. The damnation of materialistic excess. The ugly spectacle of the flesh taking over the soul, of Jeff Goldblum turning into a fly. This genre of the philosophy of flesh epidemic and glut was termed ‘Body Horror’. Not to be confused with the splatter flicks of the day.

III. They were cautionary tales- Rabid, Shivers, The Fly, Videodrome, Existenz. All seemed to envision a future where humankind’s excess did them in, of radical experiments go Kafkaesque haywire. There was morbid clinical humor satirizing the aspirations of the flesh. The new man, the homo sapien 3.0 was a pathetic figure. A mutant fable of a greedy man receiving just retribution. Only he wouldn’t have any time to apologize and set things right. Only he wouldn’t be the only greedy man. That much is taken care of by advertising conditioning propaganda.

IV. With 2005’s ‘A History of Violence’ Cronenberg was widely thought to have swapped his radical technopunk chic for a more mainstream approach. What fell into a collective amnesia was his 1983 Stephen King adaptation ‘The Dead Zone’, seemingly a lean straightforward Hollywood approach to a King novel. It was a movie that made us cheer and root for a protagonist about to assassinate an all-American presidential hopeful. These days such a character would be termed a ‘terrorist’. Cronenberg is one of the most subversive of directors. Part of his subversion is that one can perhaps not locate his critique as clearly as in a Romero.

V. ‘Eastern Promises’ is a classic narrative. Steven Knight’s screenplay seems generic as if ticking off prerequisite specifics for a gangster epic- family traditions and tensions, dark scandals, raw machismo, chewable dialogue etc… the works. Perhaps like any established master, Cronenberg has decided to do away with the high-concept. Perhaps it is a world increasingly finding its identity in the past that has Cronenberg resort to a traditional narrative. Perhaps it is that his violent futuristic visions have lost shock value with ‘body horror’ being a term that is loosely employed and violence on screen becoming more comodified value-for-money titillation than an exploration of human nature and psyche. It is a fear that he had expressed in ‘Videodrome’. To compare ‘Eastern Promises’ to ‘The Godfather’ is to play right into Cronenberg’s subversive ploy.

VI. In Cronenberg’s vision, ‘Eastern Promises’ becomes a corporeal experience. The brutal opening sequence is at once proof of his command over the medium. A virgin innocent hand wields the blade that cuts through the flesh, spills blood and takes a life. There is no reason for the bloodshed but that it is tradition passed on to the young assailant in a hierarchy of flesh and blood. The act of violence is a coming of age ritual. The hierarchy is of the Vory V Zakone, the Russian mob. That is but a plot specific as Cronenberg lingers on the eyes and face of the young assailant as he reacts to his own brutality. Here lies the true horror. Later on in the movie as a jaded career gangster Nikolai Luzhin tries to ‘process’ the dead body for a water burial the world weariness of his face is chronicled- a cold gaze with all life extinguished by God knows how many years of such vicious and inhuman desecration. He even extinguishes his cigarette against his tongue without a least bit of a flinch.

VII. Flesh and blood are the recurring motifs in the interplay between life and death. A throat is sliced, an umbilical cord is cut. A mother dies but the baby lives. A baby dies but the mother lives. The dead rest in peace while life is a burden for the survivors. There is guilt in their survival- internal as well as external impressed on them by family and society. Anna the nurse who had a miscarriage is constantly nagged by her uncle while the newborn Christine may well be a bastard child of the Vory V Zakone and for her the implication may be death. Cronenberg finely etches the many layers of ethnic pride and xenophobia. It is not just the aristocratic hierarchy of the Vory V Zakone that subscribes to this Nazi point-of-view, it is also Anna’s harmless looking codger of an uncle who pronounces her miscarriage as an effect of her ex-boyfriend being ‘black’. Cronenberg relates this ever-increasing and pervading ethnic identity as an issue of male sexuality and machismo being threatened. A theory espoused by Ananth Pathwardhan in his documentary ‘Father, Son and The Holy God’ explaining the rise of Hindu religious fundamentalism, Cronenberg subverts it in biting fashion as he portrays the only son of the Vory V Zakone boss as an aggressive frustrated closet homosexual.

VIII. Cronenberg’s narrative is charged with a cackling undercurrent of homo-eroticism. Anna the heroine actually occupies the proverbial noir hero role. She has a broken past of lost loves and promises and is currently employed in a bleak dead-end job as mid-wife. Stumbling upon the diary of dying 14 year old prostitute she finds herself in an unfamiliar world of decadence and violence that rapidly closes in on her. The hero or rather anti-hero Nikolai Luzhin, chauffer and fixer to the family becomes the enigmatic femme fatale. He exudes a cold sinister and complex sexuality. His relationship with Anna will never be requited but a third act twist will hint at him seducing the queer mob heir Kirill. The scenes with Anna and Nikolai seem somewhat stunted but there is animal intensity to the interplay between him and Kirill. One can almost sense Cronenberg’s perverse delight.

IX. In the tradition of Vory V Zakone all mob members sport tattoos on their skin that are hieroglyphics for their life stories. They form running living metaphors to the trials of the flesh and the body. As a processed dead body devoid even of fingertips reaches the police, it is the tattoos on the flesh which will tell his tale. As Nikolai gets made into the higher echelons, there is an occult initiation ritual during which he stands half naked with the horrors of his past embroidered on him and declares,” I am neither alive nor dead. I’ve been living in the zone since I was fifteen” after which he reclines on a couch sipping vodka as an artist with an archaic and painful looking tattoo machine paints the higher orders in ink and blood on him. In the scene that will make the film a classic, a stark naked Nikolai with every tattoo gloriously on display is attacked by two assailants with blades. It is an unabashed phallic ballet but Cronenberg invokes the savage within and some of the morbid humor. As Nikolai’s lean, muscular body grapples and crawls with his would-be assassins, losing all tact and poise in a moment of surprise, he seems almost pathetic and less than human.

X. Cronenberg regulars cinematographer Peter Suschitzky evokes a London of dreary skies, dull neon and haunted faces while composer Howard Shore’s evocative score brings out a grand scheme of melancholy and tragedy. Naomi Watts is terrific as Anna. Vincent Cassel as Kirill, Armin Mueller Stahl as his father and mob patriarch deliver superlative performances with Cassel performing the frustrated Euro-ruffian with full tilt frothing psychosis while Mueller Stahl is a sheer presence who can change the tone of the scene from playful to menacing with a single expression. But it is Viggo Mortenson as Nikolai Luzhin, driver-undertaker, world-weary, exuding a cold charm, the puzzle at the center of the movie who delivers one of the greatest performances I have ever seen. It is difficult to spot the Mortenson in Nikolai as the actor sublimates himself into the character. The sharp Russian drawl, the posture of his tattooed and beaten body, the dead eyes, it is a performance on the such nuanced scale that sometimes a mere muscle on his face moves to convey emotion. It’s a performance that will draw you as he says,” Sentimental value… I’ve heard of that” in the beginning and keep you pinned till the end without actually ever coming out of the darkness.

XI. In a wrenching scene, Nikolai is forced to have sex with a whore before Kirill’s eyes. Kirill being Nikolai’s captain in the Vory V Zakone hierarchy he cannot be refused. At the end of this brutal sequence as the flesh looses whatever dignity it had left, Nikolai puts on his clothes as the young whore lies across the bed in a trance looking like a melancholy painter’s muse and hums a Russian melody. Nikolai asks her where she is from. From a small village in Ukraine. He drops a bundle of notes on her bed, covers it with a picture of The Holy Mother and tells the young girl in the weariest of tones,” Try to stay alive a little longer”

( Leornado Da Vinci’s Virtuvian Man by Wikipedia, Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son by Marxist, Blake’s Blasphemer by Tate, Blake’s Red Dragon and Pity by Encyclopedia Britannica, Bacon’s Two Figures by Francis Bacon.cx)