In David Cronenberg's new picture Spider (adapted by Patrick McGrath from his own novel), Ralph Fiennes plays Dennis "Spider" Cleg, a psychotic young man released from an asylum to a halfway house in the part of London's East End where he grew up. His return to the neighborhood sparks flashbacks in which the adult Spider is present at scenes involving the young Spider and his plumber father and housewife mother, played by Gabriel Byrne and Miranda Richardson. (This is the staging technique famously used by Alf Sjöberg in his strong 1950 adaptation of Strindberg's Miss Julie, starring Anita Björk and Ulf Palme.) Spider mutters the remembered dialogue slightly out of sync with his younger self and his parents, giving you a sense of our schizzy relationship to our memories. But once you notice that the adult Spider is present at scenes that the young Spider didn't witness, you realize that his memory doesn't represent a straightforward access to the past. Something schizzier yet is going on.
We first see Spider's father as a brutal heavy drinker who escapes to the pub from which he then slips off with a bottle-blonde tart with a haggy cackle. (This woman flashes a tit at the boy when he comes to the pub to bring dad home for supper.) Spider's mum is a well put-together, respectable working-class woman and has a protective bond with her sensitive, alert only child, who keeps his big eyes on her while she's cooking, putting on makeup, trying on a new satin slip. But later, after Spider "remembers" the tart replacing his mother in his father's bed, the memories shift. The father seems more sensitive, frustrated that he can't get through to his alienated little boy, fearing he's delusional. The respectable mother may be the mother Spider wishes he had instead of the tart, or the tart may be the result of the boy's irrepressible sexual fantasies about his respectable mum. What seems relatively clear is that the boy's ending up in the asylum is connected to his mother's fate--he spun a web of twine through the house that he could pull on from his bedroom to turn on the unlighted gas stove downstairs in the kitchen.
The adult Spider is a full-blown psychotic obsessive-compulsive. He wears four shirts at a time, mumbles incoherently to himself, keeps his tobacco and rolling papers in a tin in a sock stuffed down the front of his pants and smokes until his fingers have a Rembrandt varnish of nicotine, and scribbles in a private language in a notebook he hides under the floor covering. Cronenberg's way in to Spider's story is to suggest the connection between Spider the spinner of webs, the artificer, and himself as artist. As he said in an interview for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation:
For example, in Patrick's original script Spider writes English words in his journal and you hear the voice over telling you what he's writing. I wanted it to be incomprehensible. I wanted it to be Spider's own language. And, not intentionally I must say, the idea emerged that in a way Spider is an artist, that he is the emblem of an artist.
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