Design and Desire – a Fly in the Ointment
RABID — a film by Jen and Sylvia Soska — SPOILERS ⁓
Rose Miller
Rose (Laura Vandervoort), her face slightly scarred from the long ago car accident that killed her parents, works for a fashion designer named Gunter (MacKenzie Gray) whose latest project is called shadenfreude. Rose turns up late for work one day and Gunter ridicules her entirely for the purpose of illustrating the shadenfreude in everyone. (Her co-workers are delighted and amused by Rose’s discomfort.) An effort to make Rose feel better results in still more humiliation for her, and as Rose flees on her motorbike she is struck by a car resulting in severe facial injuries and the loss of a large portion of her small intestine.
Dr. Burroughs watches Rose discuss her treatment with Chelsea through his own reflection in one-way glass.
Rose’s reconstructive surgeries are expensive, and her friend Chelsea (Hanneke Talbot) suggests experimental treatments offered by The Burroughs Clinic. Rose watches their promotional video which talks about transhumanism. After she arrives at the clinic, we hear in the background a recording of “Advice For Young People“ by William S. Burroughs in which he speaks of “psychic vampires”, a term which might easily be applied to Gunter and his designing minions. “If, after having been exposed to someone’s presence, you feel as if you’ve lost a quart of plasma, avoid that presence,” says the recorded voice. “You need it like you need pernicious anemia.”.
Cronenberg’s 1991 science fiction film NAKED LUNCH is based on the W S Burroughs novel of the same name.
Dr. Burroughs prepares for surgery
The surgeons who work on Rose wear crimson gowns reminiscent of the gown worn by Dr. Beverly Mantle (Rachel Weisz) in Cronenberg’s DEAD RINGERS, and in the background, we hear a Dr. Mantle being paged. Dr. Keloid (Stephen McHattie) is the referring physician. In the 1977 film, Dr. Keloid is the plastic surgeon. (Keloids are scars caused when excess collagen is present during healing.)
Rose soon recovers. The scarring from the first accident is gone, she no longer needs glasses, and her abilities as a designer improve substantially. But she has a hunger that will not subside and the food supplements provided by Dr. Burroughs don’t satisfy her. Though she doesns’t know it, she needs blood, and Rose goes walking after dark searching for victims. She first bites her prey, then a white, eel-like appendage sprouts from her abdomen and draws blood from the victim’s neck. Her bite transmits a mutant variety of the rabies virus.
One might speculate that a benign virus similar to rabies was present in Rose and the stem cell treatments caused it to mutate. The new strain is incurable and highly contagious, but Rose is immune. The morning after feeding, her predatory activities seem like dreams to her, and Dr. Burroughs tells her she is either dreaming or having hallucinations.
Gunter and Rose
Gunter is impressed with the new, improved Rose. He selects her designs for his Shadenfreude campaign and names her friend Chelsea to close the show wearing one of Rose’s gowns. A fashion show designed to express the dark side of humanity ends up doing that quite literally. Chelsea becomes infected, kills Gunter, and must be shot by police. Rose is taken back to Burroughs’ clinic, and when she challenges the doctor’s explanations, he locks her in a room with a previous experiment and comes clean about his motives.
His intent is to make humans immortal through genetic modification. (And possibly through hybridization as well. The creature in Rose’s abdomen bears some similarity to a lamprey.) His first experimental subject was his wife Cynthia (Lynn Lowry), who was dying of cancer. (To what extent should ontology influence oncology?) Burroughs turned her into a grotesquely modified humanoid, and Rose immediately decides to put the woman out of her misery. Whether this was justified is a matter of conjecture.
Cronenberg’s RABID is an unrelentingly bleak tale, and any villainy on the part of its characters is involuntary. Its colours are so subdued that it sometimes seems black and white. The Soskas’ version is much more colourful, and a scientific zealot is behind it all. At the end, Rose’s situation seems hopeless, but she has acquired immortality despite all her best efforts not to, and one wonders what she will do with that.
Chelsea (Hanneke Talbot) wearing gown designed by Rose — Talbot will be Ronnie in Sean Cisterna‘s Lifetime thriller THERE’S A NEW KILLER IN TOWN.
Sylvia Soska told Heather Wixson of Daily Dead: “David [Cronenberg] originally wanted to hire Sissy Spacek for the role of Rose, but they refused to hire her because of the accent. They ended up having Marilyn Chambers instead, and both of them are awesome actresses in their own right. So we wanted to have somebody who was like a blend of the two. It was so cool because Laura would watch the original film, and there are scenes where we were trying to remake, like re-imagine the original, and she emulated what Marilyn did so perfectly. It almost looked like she was exactly her. It was just such a thrill to be able to have that throwback to the original content in that way.”
Miscellaneous Info
Chelsea reads the Canadian fashion magazine ‘Dress to Kill‘
Mackenzie Gray appears as EMT Barclay in The Soska Sisters’ 2024 zombie horror film FESTIVAL OF THE LIVING DEAD, a “spiritual sequel” to George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead“.
As the Burroughs Clinic video says, Transhumanism was a term first used in 1940 by Canadian philosopher W.D. Lighthall in a paper (described on Micah Redding’s blog) arguing that since light is everywhere in the universe, then life is also everywhere, and that “rationally, the stars are as full of life as they are of light.” Lighthall quoted Dante Alighieri: “Trasumanar significar per verba Non si porria.” (Words cannot tell of that transhuman change.)
In RABID’s opening scene, Rose is on her motorbike in front of “The Mustard Seed”, which was at the time a co-op grocery store in Hamilton, Ontario.
The film is also available on DVD and Blu-ray.
* Last Updated 3 months ago ago