The Dead Zone (1983)

"The Dead Zone" is an interesting film in David Cronenberg's career because it seems to have opened up a new avenue for him in his work. With this adaptation of Stephen King's best novel, he invented a new genre, which I can only describe as Romantic Tragic Horror. Other film makers have dabbled in this - Roeg's "Don't Look Now" and DePalma's "Carrie" are similar - but Cronenberg developed it in a trilogy of films which become increasingly emotional in their impact. "The Fly" is perhaps the first gore-film which is primarily a love story, and "Dead Ringers" achieves an emotional wipe-out that is only matched in recent years by Lars Von Trier's "Breaking the Waves".

At the centre of "The Dead Zone" is the question of what you would do if you lost five years of your life. In the case of Johnny Smith, played to perfection by Christopher Walken, he wakes up to find his life has disintegrated, and in trying to build a new one he is constantly hindered by a "second sight" that seems to be connected to his coma. There is a big ellipsis here, because the audience is never told precisely how and why this power developed. Fortunately, Walken is convincing enough to get around this, and we come to accept it as part of his illness, much as we come to accept Marilyn Chambers' phallic appendage in "Rabid", or Samantha Eggar's children of rage in "The Brood".

Christopher Walken has always had a slightly distracted quality that serves him well in this role. It also allows him to underplay some incredibly emotional moments, which ironically heightens their impact. Time and again, Cronenberg pulls off scenes that in other hands would have become grossly sentimental. He seems to have enjoyed having a hero who is uncompromisingly good - it's a big development from "Scanners" where the good-evil conflict was fatally weakened by the awful performance of Stephen Lack. Perhaps Cronenberg had simply got better with actors - there are no bad performances in this film, and actors like Herbert Lom and Anthony Zerbe, both prone to hamming it up, are restrained and very effective.

The love story in the film is effectively played down, with a beautiful "if only" scene when Brooke Adams comes to visit Johnny after he learns to walk again. There are no big confrontation scenes between Adams and Walken, just quiet resignation and sadness; the final scene with Adams holding Walken's dead body is very touching, again because it is underplayed, and speaks for itself. In "The Fly", the romance would be put at the heart of the film, and there are big emotional scenes that work very well, but there's nothing as poignant as the scene before the crash, when Johnny refuses to stay the night.

The film tends to be rather episodic, as is the book, and after the crash and the recovery, it focuses on the hunt for the Castle Rock killer. Again, Cronenberg gets his points across with a subtlety that other directors could learn from. We see a murder in brief, simple details; the blow to the head, the undressing and the scissors coming down. Quick and shocking, it's a great bit of film-making, as is the later suicide of the killer. The actual death is, again, not shown, but we see the horrific aftermath, in the only gratuitous gore in the whole film. The suicide is almost like Cronenberg apologising to his fans, and offering them some gory stuff, albeit very briefly.

Virtually all of the film is seen from the perspective of Johnny Smith, which is very effective. There is then a bizarre, and completely unnecessary, cutaway to a scene where the crooked politician, Greg Stillson, is blackmailing a newspaper editor. It gets a point across about Stillson's corrupt ways, but we already knew about that from a conversation between Walken and Anthony Zerbe. It would have been better for Johnny to have had a flash of this blackmailing, perhaps after touching the badge that he's given by Stillson at Zerbe's house. As it is, it disrupts the flow of the second half of the film. Two things hold it together; the force of Walken's performance, and the great caricature of a corrupt politico by Martin Sheen. Sheen manages to make us understand why Stillson is so popular, and why he's so dangerous.

By the end of the film, Johnny has died heroically, and has found a reason for his "gift", which he decides is not a curse but a blessing. Except, of course, that it has led him to his inevitable death with the inexorable force of a classic tragedy. In a way, though, Johnny has been dead ever since the night of the crash, and he seems to welcome death as a release from the burden of knowledge and responsibility.

I think this is a very good film, although at the time, it seemed a real disappointment. After the glory of "Videodrome" and its extraordinary images and ideas, I thought Cronenberg had sold out by filming a King story. This was at the time when everyone and his wife was making films based on Stephen King's stories. The worst, by a long chalk, was "Firestarter", but I think "The Dead Zone" has turned out to be the best of that cycle. It doesn't stick rigidly to King's story, but it respects it and turns it into something very moving. Looking at the film with the benefit of hindsight, it seems clear that this was the film in which Cronenberg began reaching for something that would later serve him well. I think he wanted to be more than just a clever director with a talent for icky special effects. In "The Dead Zone" he goes all out for emotion, and he succeeds pretty well. This success was built upon by "The Fly", where all the gore couldn't disguise that he was making his own "Love Story", and ultimately by "Dead Ringers" where the gore was almost non-existent and the focus was completely on the characters and the impossibility of love ever working out the way it's meant to.

Mike

"Tchaikovsky - was he the tortured soul who poured out his immortal longings into dignified passages of stately music, or was he just an old pouf who wrote tunes ?"

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