Suspicious to the Core (1 / 2)

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Parallel trajectories, parallel narratives, crossing at some points with the Arosteguys’ are those of the couple of journalists Nathan and Naomi. On a business trip, research-meets-journalistic assignment, Nathan finds himself in Budapest at the heart of muddy medical waters. Under the supervision of the respectable Dr. Zoltán Molnár--an influential figure, celebrity of the red market--is Dunja who willingly participates in medical interventions of highly suspicious nature. Her eradicated sense of a future makes her indifferent to the present to the point of subjecting herself to assuming a role of a specimen in a laboratory of organic engineering. She acts as a patient-object of a multiple lumpectomy, a surgery nominally aimed at potentially bringing about improvement of her condition, while actually being a recklessly perverse immersion in thanatos-driven distractions, not unlike her exhibitionist exhilaration with the pictures of her medically mutilated body taken by the dedicated professional -- Nathan.

She is desperately indulging in sex with Nathan who becomes a collaborator in a mindless inversion of the disease-death and youth-ripeness axes (54), darkly shaded attempts at confirming one’s…well, being alive. It is perhaps when he reaches the lowest of the obscure levels of the opaque digression of his narrative that his seemingly quirky, and yet somehow, nevertheless, vibrant affinity for disconnecting dysfunctional umbilical cords resurfaces as a mighty signpost of reshifting.  David Cronenberg, Consumed:

Naomi never let anybody go, and she used her unique, potent mixture of technology and witchiness to do it, whereas Nathan was only too happy to disconnect, to remove you from his Friends list and leave you dangling in the ether of cyberspace. Naomi thought that Nathan was ruthless with his friends; Nathan thought Naomi was compulsively, obsessively possessive. (54)

It is probably when flirtation with disgust becomes truly abhorring that he becomes capable of ruminating about the ideas diametrically opposite to the despicable morbid chasm of dislocated fantasies. David Cronenberg, Consumed:

Could he really say anything about classical concepts of art, and therefore beauty, based on harmony, as opposed to modern theories, post-industrial-revolution, post-psychoanalysis, based on sickness and dysfunction? (57)

It is probably when he becomes vaguely aware of having crudely violating the distinction between himself as a photo-journalist  devoted to the medical feature starring Dunja and a voyeuristic seeker of moribund juiciness who betrays even his voyeurism by somewhat masochistically transgressing another boundary, almost finding himself on the wrong side of the camera. Paradoxically, it is the voice of the subterranean mogul that confronts Nathan with his distastefully gruesome erratic professionalism. Dr. Molnár is blatantly shameless in bowing before glam-divinity of pixilated empire: “For your big New Yorker article. I’ve always wanted to be the subject of a piece in the ‘Annals of Medicine’ section. It’s good for business, good for my vanity” (18).

Doctor’s “earnestness” might be a tactful, distracting technique which by “revealing,” i.e., overexposing obstructs a metaposition, threatens a critical distance. From the same notorious source comes another awakening remark. More precisely, as much as he is an acolyte of the glistening demimonde deity, hence a worshipper of the shrines of dromospheric pollution, he is, at the same time, heretical and subversively sinful. His susceptibility to corruptibility turns him even against the very source of reputation and wealth. He points out Nathan’s making a good choice by opting for taking photos instead of shooting a movie. By so doing, he articulates an observation signaling the potential for reshifting:”It’s a good thing you are not shooting a film, I must admit to myself. Her breasts will soon be radio-active, and your film would be fogged as a result!” (20).

It is the very possibility of the corrosion of the imagery that opens up an avenue for hindering a continuation of abysmal infestation of / by the bugged body-innerness nexus. Thus, Dr. Molnár’s technique might as well be a means of subverting indulgence in the sordid, typical of the endeavors such as Nathan’s task, of which he can even be an epitome, thereby symbolizing a self-dissolving nature of noise.