Scanners · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man is scavenging for food in a shopping mall. He is hunched, filthy, flinching at sounds nobody else can hear, and if you came into the film cold you would take him for a patient who had walked out of somewhere. That is the protagonist. Fifteen minutes later, in a corporate auditorium with good chairs, another man settles in front of an audience and makes a stranger's head come apart from across the room. The whole film sits in the distance between those two bodies, and the difference between them is not good and evil. It is timing.

Deleuze, borrowing from Bergson, has a name for what is missing in the first man and abolished in the second: the centre of indetermination. The idea is plain once it is said. Push a stone and it passes the force straight on; matter is a system in which movement never stops to consider. Living things are the exception. A living thing takes in more than it gives back, holds the received movement for a beat before responding, and everything we call perception, memory and choice happens inside that beat. In this account the brain is not a thinking substance. It is a delay. An interval.

A scanner is that interval broken, in two directions at once. Cameron Vale in the mall is all intake. The film tells us most scanners are destroyed by the uncontrolled voices of other people, driven to madness or the street, and he is most of the way there: perception floods in and nothing converts into an act. The demonstration's guest at ConSec, who turns out to be Revok, is the opposite. Nothing is held at all. What he perceives passes without pause into somebody else's capillaries. That is why the head explosion disturbs more than its gore accounts for. It shows perception discharging completely into matter, the one thing Bergson says cannot happen to a living being. Deleuze also has a name for a mind conceived as something operable from outside — the spiritual automaton — and he pairs it with Artaud's idea that cinema's real power is to put thought in front of what it cannot think. Scanners takes both literally, then detonates the evidence.

The gag was made by packing a plaster head with latex scraps and leftover food and firing a shotgun into the back of it, off camera, once. What runs on screen is that take. This is not just trivia. Bazin's case for cinematic realism was largely a rule about when you are forbidden to cut: if the point of a scene is that two things share one space at one moment, montage cheats it. Cronenberg's most famous shot honours that rule in a genre Bazin never had in view. Nothing is assembled afterwards. The thing came apart in the room, at that speed, in front of the lens, and digital compositing has never quite reproduced the quality of the violence.

The clinical framing arrived with the technique. Dick Smith supervised the makeup, bringing the foam-latex appliance method he had built on The Exorcist and, with it, his habit of shooting bodily invasion in flat, procedural, medical-documentary coverage. Mark Irwin's photography agrees: cool, desaturated, evenly lit institutional interiors with no expressionist distortion, Montreal winter greys standing in for an unnamed North America. The style makes no promises. When a body ruptures it ruptures inside a frame that gave no warning.

Which leaves Cronenberg a real problem, and his solution is the film's actual invention. Telepathic combat has nothing in it to photograph. Two people sit still. Ronald Sanders cuts the duels almost entirely as shot/reverse-shot between faces and paces them like a gunfight rather than a conversation. Deleuze's affection-image is exactly this: a face held in close-up, carrying a feeling that has not yet turned into an action. He separates two kinds. There is the reflecting face, a contour holding one quality without moving, and the intensive face, where small movements climb toward a threshold; that second one he calls the icon of power. Scanners casts the difference. Stephen Lack, a visual artist rather than a trained actor, offers an inert reflecting surface, which is what forty-five years of argument about his performance has really been about. Ironside can play escalation with almost nothing on his face. Each duel is therefore a contour set against a rising feature, and the cutting supplies the pressure neither body is permitted to show.

The grammar is inherited. Village of the Damned had already staged psychic coercion as frontal, symmetrical shot-reverse-shot between unblinking faces at a fixed eyeline. Cronenberg keeps the geometry and throws away the glowing eyes, handing the whole effect to strain. Carrie codified the other half: a held close-up of a sweating face intercut with practical destruction happening off-screen, power shown as a cost to the performer's body instead of an optical overlay, and it proved the commercial case that got Scanners financed. What is new here is aiming two such faces at each other.

Deleuze has a category for films in which a recognisable social setting turns out to be the thin surface of something older and appetitive underneath. He calls the visible one a derived milieu and the thing below it an originary world, and usually that world is a swamp or a slum. Cronenberg relocates it inward. The originary world of Scanners is the nervous system, and the boardroom is its skin. Hence corporate architecture photographed the way The Parallax View photographed its own: wide desaturated geometry that shrinks the figure to a detail. Hence the ConSec demonstration staged the way The Manchurian Candidate staged its, pharmacologically conditioned subjects displayed to an audience in a symmetrically blocked room, the presentation itself serving as the delivery mechanism for the horror. And hence ephemerol, a tranquilliser prescribed to pregnant women, which made the scanners. The plot is built openly on thalidomide and DES. The monsters came off a prescription pad, which puts the horror in corporate medicine rather than the paranormal.

Then there is the sequence nobody in 1981 had any business writing. Vale presses a telephone receiver to his temple, scans a computer down the line, enters the machine's nervous system and burns it out. Three Days of the Condor had supplied the shape: a hunted man working the phone system and the paper trail against his own employer. Cronenberg takes that manhunt and puts the man inside the wire. Late in his work Deleuze describes a cinema that stops depicting brains and starts adopting their architecture, the screen organised as circuit and relay rather than as a world people cross. Scanners gets there by refusing metaphor at every step, which is Cronenberg's signature move: telepathy here is nosebleeds, seizures, ruptured capillaries, plumbing. If a nerve is a cable then a cable is a nerve, and a mind can be routed through a handset. That handset is the film condensed into one prop. It runs directly to Videodrome two years later and eXistenZ eighteen years after that, and it lands three years ahead of Neuromancer, though it cares about wetware where cyberpunk would come to care about data.

The film is lumpier than The Brood or Videodrome, and it is fair to say why. The tax-shelter calendar forced it into production before the script was finished, and Cronenberg has said he wrote pages the night before shooting them; the middle act improvises between set pieces. There is a rhyme in that, a film about nervous systems with no delay in them made with no delay in it, and I would not lean on it, but it is there.

Past the two seconds everyone remembers, what Scanners did was prove that an entire mode of conflict with nothing photographable in it can be built from faces and cuts, and that horror's engine could be a pharmaceutical company instead of a haunting. The last duel commits all the way down: veins bulging, skin blistering, eyes hemorrhaging, a body burning from inside, because if a mind is a nervous system then a psychic fight is an injury. The reveal makes the war a family matter and a corporate crime in the same stroke.

Watch it again for the delay. Every scan in the film is a question about how long a nervous system can hold what it has received before it has to let it out, and about what is left of a person once the answer is no time at all.