David Cronenberg - Consumed

“ But very helpful? You mean you would have preferred North Koreans?”

“For my research, yes. That would have been better. More direct. But these were two lovely, helpful men.” Célestine patted my thigh in an attempt to be comforting, but it only irritated me and made me more suspicious.

“They’re film people?”

“No. They’re insect people. I mean, they’re from the Entomological Society of Korea. I was curious about the accuracy of that film, the Judicious film, its approach to insect life in Korea. I want to write a piece on it for Sartre magazine. Jean-Louis Korinth there is extravagantly enthusiastic. Of course he always is, and then he kills it when he actually sees it. He has an idea in his head immediately, and then what you write never matches what he has in his head…”

She was rambling now, wandering off into the deep woods of the Korean Peninsula, her head turned away from me, not seeing the streets slip by. I wondered if she had drunk too much. Alcohol had really been deranging her brain these days, her short-term memory, her emotional responses. I tried to bring her back.

“And so they were able to illuminate some things for you? Insect life in North Korea as portrayed in the Judicious film?”

She turned back to me, and her face opened and blossomed and became joyous once again, this time without distraction. “Oh, they did more than that,” she said, and she dug around in her coat pocket and brought out the manila envelope, which I had not dared to mention. “They gave me the movie. They gave me a DVD of The Judicious Use of Insects .”

WE SAT WATCHING THE DVD as soon as we got home. Dinner for me was coffee and cigarettes, something that Tina would normally never allow, but I and my ragged metabolism did not at the moment exist for her. She stopped and started the movie as she made notes on her spiral-bound bloc de journaliste , her focus intense, her gaze transcendent. Our copy of Judicious had French and English subtitles and had obviously come from the Cannes Film Festival, where it had probably been used as a screener for potential distributors. Célestine had found, above a Korean travel agency on the Rue de Rivoli, the minuscule Paris office of the Entomological Society of Korea—an outpost of shadowy purpose, one might imagine, for how useful could it really be?

But apparently the fraternity of entomologists and insect enthusiasts of all stripes was well established and seemed to be somewhat free of the usual politics. As I mentioned, she had gone there to verify the facts of village life as they pertained to the insect-eating depicted in Judicious . She had assumed that she would have to educate her new entomologist friends about the very existence of the movie, but to her surprise they had copies of the film and were very proud of their connection to it: the society had gotten a consulting credit which was very prominent in the end-credits roll. The two men she had met in the office offered to take her to the Eternal President for dinner after pointing out that credit to her, promising to discuss their involvement with the movie in detail, and then surprised her with the supreme gift of the rare movie itself. They also promised to send her a copy of the newly revised edition of Korea Insect Names when it became available, as well as enrolling her as a subscriber to their journal Entomological Research , which she said she preferred to see in Korean rather than in English, and assured them that she was already beginning her Korean language studies. They assured her in turn that to have the searchlight of the mind of a genuine philosopher illuminating the subject of Korean insect life was an excitement beyond imagining for them, and would surely be for their colleagues as well. They would eagerly await her Sartre piece on Judicious and would definitely consider it for publication in their official journal, as destabilizing as such a piece would be, nestled between “Evaluation of Larvicidal Potential of Certain Insect Pathogenic Fungi Extracts Against Anopheles stephensi and Culex quinquefasciatus ” and “Electroantennogram and Flight Orientation Response of Cotesia plutellae to Hexane Extract of Cruciferous Host Plants and Larvae of Plutella xylostella .”

Célestine believed they were just being fastidiously polite, but she would submit it eventually nonetheless. Her ineluctable attraction to hard science was not uncommon among professional philosophers, who often found themselves adrift in abstraction and politics and longed for what seemed at a distance to be gloriously earthbound and thus substantial and undebatable. It seemed to me now that she was playing entomologist in front of our sad, outdated, cathode-ray-tube Loewe TV (at one time the crème de la crème), whose blurry image frustrated her constantly, so that she sometimes fell forward on her knees to squint up at the screen, hunting for details, studying the world of the movie as though it were a tropical rain forest in Papua New Guinea and she were living inside it. I anticipated an eight-hundred-page monograph called The Judicious Consumption of Korean Insects , perhaps in the Korean language, perhaps in fifteen years. She had that look as she worked, that look into the far distance, the future, a ferocious look that always terrified and thrilled me.

Watching the movie with Célestine controlling it, rolling it backward and forward, freezing frames of obscure interest and providing a rambling, improvised narration, was to witness the creation of a new movie related only vaguely to the one the Cannes jury had judged some weeks ago. In the new movie, the one co-directed by Célestine in our humid, cramped living room, the enlightened elders of the fictional North Korean village of Chosun (an ironic reference to the ancient Hermit Kingdom of that name, immediately positioning the village as primitive and isolationist and floating in time) have decreed that insects of all kinds shall be bred and harvested as the main source of nutrition, and that the traditional crops of rice, maize, and cabbage shall be used only to feed those insects. In this version there was some bizarrely deformed—not to mention anachronistic—Atkins nutritional dogma about vital insect protein replacing woefully deficient and health-destroying grain carbohydrates which fostered dependency on the West and its stooges.

Babies are, of course, exempted from the new insect diet, and so there were seen in profusion the peasant breasts of the village women, always presented in connection with the breastfeeding of infants and never sex, or at least overt sex (some of us on the jury found the breastfeeding sequences extremely erotic; others did not). Though we of the jury had been assured that the version we saw was the official one approved by the Workers’ Party of Korea, and that this version would be shown everywhere in the country with no excisions, there was great skepticism among us as we were wary about this possibly being a ringer tailored specifically for our decadent Western tastes. Would there really be bare breasts and engorged nipples on screens in puritanical Pyongyang, never mind Kaesong or Chongjin? Undoubtedly, these questions hurt the film during our voting, but of course they were irrelevant to Célestine, for whom Judicious was a love letter from Romme Vertegaal.

And the occult (in the medical sense) key to the message from the kidnapped film director seemed to be the sequences in which the now happy, radiant, nutritionally enhanced village is raided by a fierce mountain tribe of warrior priests who violently subdue the men and rip innocent babies away from their blissfully nursing mothers, not incidentally exposing those aforementioned engorged nipples. The warrior priests worship insects as sacred beings, and believe that the ingestion of insects ennobles man and keeps him from descending into bestiality; thus even infants are not to eat anything but the sinister black insect mush which forms the priests’ diet. After the initial conquest of Chosun, there are occasional winklings-out of brave, clandestinely nursing mothers who have fled to the mountain forests, followed by their execution by strangulation.