The Brood · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A woman stands in front of a class of small children. A hooded figure about their size walks into the room. What happens next happens in full daylight, with the other children watching, and the camera stays where it is and stays lit. No shadow moves in to help. Nobody's face swells up on screen to tell us how bad this is. The Brood does its worst work in rooms where you can see everything.

That is Cronenberg's invention here, and it's formal, not shock. In 1979 Halloween is a year old and horror is going subjective everywhere: the prowling point of view, the breathing on the soundtrack. Cronenberg and Mark Irwin refuse the whole apparatus. Medium shots held at a slight remove, even institutional light, camera movement that stays smooth and motivated when the content turns violent. The camera never tells you to be afraid. It declines to look away.

Deleuze has a category for what that evenness is protecting, and it isn't the one horror usually gets filed under. Between the close-up, where a feeling registers, and the action, where somebody does something about it, he puts a third kind of image: the impulse-image. In an impulse-image film people don't really have psychology. They have appetites. Behaviour reads as the surface twitch of a drive that was there before the character was, and the film's job is to follow the drive down. Deleuze builds the category out of Stroheim and Buñuel, and he gives it two halves that The Brood separates more cleanly than almost any film he had to work with.

The first half is the derived milieu: the ordinary social world, furnished and lit and speaking in complete sentences. Somafree is one of the great ones. Raglan explains psychoplasmics in the affectless calm of a case conference; the light is flat overhead light; the corridors are real corridors. The dossier is right that this register descends straight from The Exorcist's arteriogram sequences, where technicians say terrifying things at normal volume, and from Gordon Willis's underlit clinic-and-tape-recorder interiors in Klute. The point of the borrowing is credentialing. A man in an office who is not lying to you.

The second half is the originary world the milieu is a crust over. Not a place, in Deleuze — a field of pure appetite where the only verbs are want and punish, and where nothing individuates. Nola's originary world has an inventory: her mother, her father, her daughter's teacher. The brood go and get them. There is no plan, no motive that could be argued with in court, just resentment supplied with legs.

Why does this lens earn its keep? Because the standard horror contract is metaphor, and The Brood cancels it. Normally the monster stands in for something and we decode: the creature is the repression, the plague is the permissiveness. Here the film's arithmetic is flatter and much worse. The brood are not figures for Nola's rage. They are the rage, gestated externally, born from sacs on her abdomen, alive exactly long enough to finish an errand. The impulse-image is Deleuze's name for cinema where the drive doesn't hide inside an image but manufactures one. Nothing waits to be interpreted. You just watch it complete.

That collapse also does something strange to the symptom. In naturalist cinema, acts are symptoms: you read the tic back to the buried cause. Raglan's whole method is symptom-reading, and it works appallingly well — psychoplasmics converts repressed feeling into physical change, which is to say it promotes the symptom out of the realm of evidence and into the realm of agency. The symptom stops being something a doctor reads. It gets a body and leaves the building.

Deleuze's naturalism always throws off a fetish, a part-object torn loose and charged past all proportion. Cronenberg's is the external womb, and the film hoards it. Rick Baker's era had made visible transformation the thing audiences paid for, and The Brood withholds its one great effect until the last reel, then gives it whole: Nola tearing a sac open with her teeth, licking the newborn clean, explaining her own body with the pride of a woman showing off a nursery. That economy of concealment is inherited, and the dossier names the creditors precisely. Rosemary's Baby staged reproduction horror inside plausible professional authority and kept the offspring out of frame until the final reveal. It's Alive made the delivery room the crime scene and rationed the infant to glimpses. Cronenberg takes both and adds the thing neither had: pride.

Two more debts do heavy work. Village of the Damned had blocked children as a single organism — uniform dress, no dialogue, synchronized advance in wide shot — and Cronenberg reuses that grammar exactly. His brood are choreographed as a swarm, never individuated, which makes them a dividual: a group presented as one affective unit rather than several small performers. And from Don't Look Now he takes the cruellest shape in the picture, the small coated figure you pursue as a child. Deleuze calls this a demark: an object that breaks its customary chain and forces you to think. When you see a child-sized shape in a snowsuit, you expect a child. The film breaks that chain once, and after that every hooded figure in a wide shot is a question. Casting real children under the prosthetics isn't a budget solution. It's the whole idea.

The therapy scenes are doing a different kind of work. Raglan performing Nola's father, in character, in front of an audience: that's Deleuze's gest, a posture that exposes a social relation instead of arguing about it. Psychoplasmics is theatre, and the film stages it as theatre. Frank's half of the picture, meanwhile, runs on the small form of action, where a deed discloses a hidden situation rather than a situation demanding a deed. Each killing hands him another piece of Somafree. Custody disputes work the same way.

And everything runs downhill. Deleuze's line of slope is the irreversible descent naturalism can't climb back out of, and The Brood has no recovery in it anywhere: mother, father, teacher, marriage, the Ontario winter with its bare trees and bleached light and the reds standing out against it. The last look the film takes is at the daughter's arm, which is the slope continuing past the end of the reel.

What it changed: Cronenberg moved his horror out of buildings and into a family. Shivers and Rabid had been outbreak films, the body as a contagion problem. After The Brood — made, as he has said for decades, out of a marriage coming apart and a fight over his daughter, his Kramer vs. Kramer — the horror goes interior and gets sadder, through Scanners, Videodrome, The Fly, Dead Ringers. He learned here that a monster's best address is a household, and that grief outperforms infection as material.

The open question is Raglan. He isn't a fraud. His method does exactly what he claims. Watch it again and see whether the film believes the rage would have been better left where it was.