From the Blog “Dispatches from
Zembla”
David
Cronenberg in an interview, rather interestingly titled as The
Baron of Blood Does Bergman, says that his favourite writer is Nabokov.
When asked if the idea of the fragility of memories and self-knowledge that he
explored in his film Spider
has anything to do with Nabokov, he replies:
In his case very specifically, yeah. A past that he was severed from
before he wanted to be. He's one of my favorite writers. He was an important
figure for me. One of the reasons I'm not a novelist, probably, is because I
kept writing pastiches of Nabokov. Whereas when I came to filmmaking I felt
quite free.
I personally found Cronenberg's Spider to be extremely pessimistic about the
nature of memory and the possibility of self-knowledge and coming-to-terms with
one's past, and so poles apart from Nabokov's Speak, Memory which is a homage full of
love on the altar of Mnemosyne (the goddess of memory). Can we recreate through
artistic imagination what has been irretrivably lost? Nabokov and Proust surely
think we can. Cronenberg is not so optimistic. He thinks that even if we are
able to recreate our pasts it will be nothing but the sum of our delusions.
Self is an illusion, only fear, anxiety and sexual pathologies are real (a very
David Lynchian concept!).
Suellen Stringer-Hye
Website:http://staffweb.library.vanderbilt.edu/libtech/stringer/
Email: suellen.stringer-hye@Vanderbilt.Edu
From: Vladimir Nabokov
Forum [mailto:NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU] On
Behalf Of Joshua Roberts
Sent: Tuesday, September 25, 2007
8:06 PM
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Subject: [NABOKV-L] Nabokov in
Eastern Promises
There are fleeting but quite
significant references to Nabokov, specifically The Defense, in
Eastern Promises, the new film by David Cronenberg presently playing in North
American theaters.
Late in the film, the last name of Viggo
Mortensen's character, a serious Russian gangster, is pronounced: Luzhin. Also,
the set piece of the film, an incredibly violent fight between a naked Mortensen and
two men armed with knives, occurs in a bath house whose black and white tiles
clearly suggest a chess board.
Joshua Roberts