Recently I watched the shrouds with a friend from college. We don’t see each other often, and I'm known to my acquaintances (and friends) as the person who’s always in struggle and drama, so I tend to feel awkward catching up with people. Additionally, we don’t talk about movies ever, and I was not sure what kind of conversation a first Cronenberg would kick up. We both walked away not particularly liking the movie, but didn’t have time to really discuss it.
I’m a big Cronenberg fan, and watching this film I was conflicted about the possessiveness of body on display. From what I’ve seen, Cronenberg bodies are often in flux or limbo, mutating, fusing, self-amputating, but not usually iron-gripping each other. Not emotionally, at least? The way the main character spoke of his dead wife’s body, as if it’s all she was, struck me the wrong way initially. It definitely made for an awkward experience sitting with my lesbian friend in a near-empty theatre. She was certainly unsympathetic to Karsh’s reflections. Lesbians feeling abraded by possessive men - nothing new, nothing wrong.
Thinking about the movie a week later, though, it feels true. I miss the bodies of my dead loved ones just as much as their spirits - sometimes even more. Bodies are uncomplex and warm, bodies cannot argue, as much as they injure. The push and pull of a fistfight feels more real than all the vaporous conversations in the world in hindsight. Of one friend, I wrote ‘I wish we were back in that uber and she was screaming and pushing me again’. I refused to go to my best friend’s burial because I wanted to keep my memories of her body. Memories of touch are what contextualise a larger history in my mind - holding hair above a toilet bowl, being crushed under full body weight, being shoved too hard or hugged quickly over the decks, holding hands and faces and kissing. I’m glad I never saw either of their dead bodies. It aches to think of one of them cold or crumbled to ash, the other burning from the inside out. I dread the times when the memories of touch are all I will have of either of them, when words exchanged at fourteen or nineteen are unreachable. Worse still, a time will likely come when all there is of our relationships are photographs. At least a photo can hold proof that there was a time when our bodies came together.