1983 @ 40: THE DEAD ZONE

Johnny Smith crashes his car and wakes up in hospital. All well, except that it's five years later and he's been in a coma all the time. His fiance is married with a kid. His job as a teacher is long gone. He has an uphill battle with his own body to rehabilitate and whenever he holds onto anyone he has visions of terrible things happening to them or their loved ones. He goes back home with his dad, after his mum collapses and departs the world. Word of his power gets around and he solves a serial murder case. After that, he flees from the attention that gives him, holing up in a house out of county while the mail from everyone who wants him for lost dogs or cancer cures piles up. Meanwhile, a troublingly populist politician is running for the senate and his presence is getting uncomfortable. So, as he asks his compassionate doctor who has helped him through all of this, if you could go back in time, knowing what you do now, would you kill Hitler?

This sombre but highly engaging near-supernatural thriller is an adaptation of a Stephen King novel. It's from the era when putting that name first on the poster sold tickets and ushered masses of audiences into cinemas that blazed with mediocrity. You can't blame the audiences; the exceptions were already impressive with Brian De Palma's Carrie and Stanley Kubrick's The Shining as counter weights the odds of finding a good King film adaptation were promising, if eroding with each passing year of the eighties.

The early signs were promising with the veteran craftsman Stanley Donen on board to direct Jeffery Boam's screenplay keeping close to King's novel. Then it all fell apart. Donen bailed. The production company dropped it. When Dino De Laurentis picked it up he dropped Boam, tried King himself to rewrite the script, fired King and rehired Boam who tightened it up. Hi and bye to directors John Badham and the epic waster of time and talent Michael Cimino later, the then sub-radar Canadian David Cronenberg was given the gig. He beat the screenplay into shape and delivered the movie.

I seldom go into any production detail on the movies I celebrate on their anniversaries but this one is interesting as its gestation marks a few vital points in the cinema of the time. It's not just the King adaptations which would go into the decade to come and well beyond, it was the shift in what thrillers looked like. The early '80s saw a slicking up of the harder edged political/social speculative fiction like Parallax View, Capricorn One or Network into highly polished fare like The Star Chamber or Thief. The sense of lessons learned and quality raised was strong. Dead Zone is a perfect fit.

It's also a David Cronenberg film, an early one, from the time when he already had a string of horrors so individual that a sub genre had to be named to accommodate them: body horror. With each next film from the creaky but compelling Shivers through to the apex of paranoia science fiction Videodrome from earlier in the same year, Cronenberg had lifted his production game as well as skill with actors and discipline with ideas. Now, with some guaranteed big bucks to play with, this should have been a mega Cronenberg film of alienating visual power and heavily disturbing notions. Well, no.

What we get is a lean Stephen King story told with great economy and elegance. The still young auteurist film maker, given the opportunity to outgun himself with bigger money and distribution than the arthouse and drive-in outlets he'd had so far, stepped back from himself and told the story. The result is that any retrospective viewing done after Cronenberg's style had become more familiar to audiences in general (his next feature was the mega hit The Fly) usually involves a comment that it doesn't feel much like a Cronenberg film. That's true enough but it holds an interesting portent for the director's career from the end of the decade onwards which veered from his reputed visceral horror into far more subtle territory. By the time he got to Dead Ringers the physical disgust element was almost entirely offscreen. Naked Lunch might seem to stick out here but the skilful use of altering mind states to discover the path through that unfilmable book demonstrates restraint as well as acumen. Then there's M. Butterfly and most of his career after. When he returned to his signature m.o. it was remarkable and always compared to his earliest features. Dead Zone showed that he could do him even when he wasn't.

My conviction is that Cronenberg movies always contain a Cronenberg scene, no matter how conventional or mainstream they get. Kiera Knightley's facial contortions in A Dangerous Method or the sauna fight in Eastern Promises qualify. Even the largely forgotten Fast Company from his earliest phase with its fetishised engine oil threesome and animal-like screaming race cars might surprise. In Dead Zone it is the suicide of a character that stops time briefly by confronting us with its bizarre violence (again, mostly off screen but clearly suggested).

But the centre of this effect of slightly flavoured conventionality is the performance by Christopher Walken as Johnny. Herbert Lom, Tom Skerritt and the gang of faces familiar from the director's works to that time provide faultless support but it's Walken's gamut from understated gravity to sudden rage to pain so apparently held in that it's hard to tell if it's emotional or physical. The still young actor's strange, bug eyed alienness never served him better than here. His foil is Martin Sheen whose intensity in the then recent Apocalypse Now is all but erased by his explosive would be demagogue. This proto Trump roaring and gladhanding monster lines up perfectly in counterpoint. His surprising fate is a departure from the novel that King highly appreciated. 

Cronenbrerg's films had been settling into a more polished look for the past few outings but even his strongest to date, Videodrome, was obliged to plunge into heavy physical freakouts. The Dead Zone could not afford this if it was to effectively engage with the story of the magic powers and the political weight it needed to maintain. While Videodrome's continually disturbing suggestions and freakiness demanded a bloodier pallet the smooth winter whites and sable browns had to build the world that could make brain damage look like a miracle. David Cronenberg interrupted the world building of his own paranoia feasts to test himself. It worked. He made a Stephen King film, a good one.