Trapped in Cronenberg's Intricate Web:
A Review of Spider
by June Pulliam
Spider. Dir. David Cronenberg. 2003.
Spider is the latest in an increasingly popular subgenre of maniac narratives, those told from the killers' twisted and tortured points of view, rather than from the perspective of the detectives or psychologists tasked with containing the fiend. Very much like the recent high budget film Identity, Spider's narrative is as convoluted as the web of any arachnid because the mentally ill narrator is necessarily unreliable.
Spider opens with the shambling, practically incoherent ramblings of Dennis Cleg (Ralph Fiennes, Francis Dolarhyde in Red Dragon), who is returning to the town of his birth after his release from a mental institution. We learn through "flashbacks" about how he came to reside in the dreary halfway house he now calls home. For someone so incapable of communicating (even the journal he keeps is written in gibberish), Dennis, nicknamed Spider by his mother, has a very clear picture of the events of his childhood that would ultimately send him to the mental institution. In fact, this vision is so clear as to be omnipotent. Young Spider is able to see things he couldn't have possibly been privy to as he would have had to follow his father to the pub, to work, and ultimately, near the bridge where his father is unfaithful to his mother and ultimately murders her. Thus, it soon dawns on the viewer that Spider's reality is wholly subjective.
This might lead someone to believe that Spider is quite similar to another recent film told from the maniac's point of view, Identity. However, this is where the two part company. Identity is entirely too convoluted for its own good (it works too hard at being clever rather than attempting to tell a good story) and has a predictable ending. Spider, on the other hand, doesn't so much wallow in stereotypes straight out of a Hollywood version of Everyman as it gives us characters that are truly grotesque and interesting because they are unlovely and flawed. The whorish women in Spider aren't pretty and thin with hearts of gold, saving their illicit earnings so they can retire to an orange grove in Florida. Instead, these women have cellulite and bad teeth, and the one who is Spider's fathers paramour isn't adverse to flashing her breasts to a child or helping her lover bury his dead wife. Spider's father (the very craggy-faced Gabrielle Byrne) is an alcoholic capable of extremes of violence and tenderness against his son.
Additionally, Spider's mental illness isn't visually demonstrated through the ubiquitous facial tic that has become a popular way of representing such disturbances in mainstream films (I'm thinking not only of Malcolm Rivers from Identity, but of Jeffrey Goins from Twelve Monkeys; both have one eye that wanders independently of the other. Heck, even Norman Bates was fairly twitchy). Instead, Ralph Fiennes communicates his character's mental disorganization through overly cautious movements.
And the sets too aren't a Hollywood version of down-and-out, resembling what would happen if a highly-paid designer combed dumpsters and E-bay for kitschy, mismatched items. Instead, the film's settings are cheerless, devoid of color, with loving attention paid to nicked paint, institutionally drab furniture, and the surrounding industrial landscape. No one would hang out here unless devoid of any other option.
Another refreshing element of Spider is how it explains the anti-hero's mental illness. Young Spider is clearly in the throes of an Oedipal power struggle, but this entire entanglement isn't represented as due to the willful misbehavior of an overly controlling woman or the unchecked desires of a little boy. Instead, Spider's abnormal Oedipal conflict is due to some undisclosed mental illness on the narrator's part. That the story fails to name Spider's specific mental illness is significant. Doing so would only perpetuate the admittedly comforting illusion that violence and mental illness can be contained with only enough scientific study and social control. Spider may be able to show us, the viewer, his perspective, something no one in the film is privileged to see, but that's it. We aren't even left with the comforting illusion that such things can at least be controlled in fictional universes.