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In the first part of our look at David Cronenberg's career, we discovered a filmmaker in love with the deep, dark recesses of the mind. Cronenberg trafficked in grotesqueries, mixing and mingling sex and violence into a cacophony of ghoulish visions, seemingly one-upping himself with each successive film. After 1991's Naked Lunch, however, Cronenberg begins to tone down the outlandish symbolism of his films, opting instead to show how easily humans can destroy one another—and themselves—without the influence of outside forces.

The back half of Cronenberg's career is filled with characters wallowing in sexual depravity, abnormal behaviors, and general self-destructiveness. As his films become more overtly sexual, they also become more explicit, with the director constantly pushing the boundaries of the ratings system to ever more disturbing ends. There are no mugwumps or stomach vaginas to be found in this era of the director's career, with him leaning hard into the dark, swirling vortex of humanity's soul and all the many things people can do to one another without the aid of external monsters or boogeymen.

The monsters in Cronenberg's later work are all too human, stand-ins for our darkest impulses. Sex is omnipresent throughout these films, but he manages to resist the urge to ever make sex and nudity "sexy." Cronenberg's films deal with sex as a release, characters fumbling toward a resolution with no other way to purge their compulsions. Prepare yourself for an even darker set of films, ones where discomfort reigns supreme and people play elaborate mind games with one another in order satisfy their urges—sexual or otherwise.

M. Butterfly (1993)

Easily Cronenberg's most straight-forward film at this point in his career, 1993's M. Butterfly is a film about disguises, some which are worn on stage and others necessary for basic survival. Cronenberg reunites with Dead Ringers star Jeremy Irons, here playing René Gallimard, a French diplomat in Beijing. Here, he falls for a performer in the Peking opera named Song (John Lone) a male performer well-versed in playing female roles on stage, and who has also been assigned to spy on Gallimard by the Chinese government. Gallimard is something of a cad, maintaining a façade of heterosexuality while also being sexually obsessed with a man.

Right around the midpoint of the film, Gallimard exits his bathroom to findFrau Baden (Annabel Leventon) undressed and ready for sex, though Irons plays the scene as a man lost in the midst of sexual confusion. The 51-year old Leventon is still rocking a hot body, though, and were the protagonist a little less sexually confused, he might have gotten lucky...

A SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of David Cronenberg's Films Part Two: 1993-2014

Crash (1996)

A SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of David Cronenberg's Films Part Two: 1993-2014

Violence and sex collide in spectacular fashion in Cronenberg's next film, an adaptation of J.G. Ballard's 1973 novel "Crash" about people whose sexual fetish involves car accidents and the resulting bodily damage they incur. The film centers around James (James Spader) and Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger) a married couple who have an open relationship, but whose own sexual relationship is desperately and hopelessly boring. They recount the stories of their dalliances to one another in hopes of rekindling their own relationship, and the film opens with Catherine telling a story about getting sexed up by an unidentified man in an airplane hangar...

A SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of David Cronenberg's Films Part Two: 1993-2014

James, meanwhile, attempted to have sex with Alice Poonin his office earlier that day, but they were interrupted and he couldn't climax...

Soon after this, Jamesis involved ina car crash, killing the passenger in the other vehicle, who is the husband of the driver, Dr. Helen Remington (Holly Hunter). As James attempts to get her out of the car, she pulls down her top, exposing her breast, and sending James into an exciting new world of sexual discovery...

A SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of David Cronenberg's Films Part Two: 1993-2014

While in the hospital, he once again sees Dr. Remington and meets a companion of hers named Vaughan (Elias Koteas), who decide to bring James into their world of car crash fetishism. James and Remington begin an affair, one that takes place almost exclusively in cars, and one which brings James' dying libido roaring back to life...

A SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of David Cronenberg's Films Part Two: 1993-2014

James and Vaughan, meanwhile, become fast friends and James is soon fully invested in Vaughan's world of fetishizing car crashes. James even takes the wheel at one point to allow Vaughan to have sex with a prostitute (Yolande Julian) in the back seat...

A SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of David Cronenberg's Films Part Two: 1993-2014

James, meanwhile, becomes obsessed with another member of Vaughan's group, a woman named Gabrielle (Rosanna Arquette) who wears leg braces and has a scar on the back of her thigh that resembles a vulva, received during a near-fatal car accident. In the film's most talked about scene, James and Gabrielle take a car for a test drive, before pulling over to have sex, though James doesn't want to penetrate her vulva, he wants to have sex with the scar on the back of her leg...

This is, of course, right in line with Cronenberg's love of putting vaginas where they don't belong and then having his main character abusing them, much like in Videodrome. Crash's explicit sexuality and violence, with copious amounts of pubic hair shown, leg wound-humping, and even a homosexual encounter between James and Vaughan all helped earned the film an NC-17 rating upon its release. Twenty-plus years on the film still packs a wallop, strongly tying sex and violence together in ways that audiences, even now, are unaccustomed to from a marquee director.

A newly restored 4K print of the film will screen at the Venice Film Festival this week, with hopes that this version will come to disc format here in the States. The film is obviously in need of some digital TLC and hopefully we can soon revel in all of this film's dark sexuality in all its glory soon enough.

Spider (2002)

Perhaps Cronenberg's most "inaccessible" period is the one in whichhe made both1999's eXistenZ and 2002's Spider. While eXistenZ is a skin-free affair, the same can't be said for Spider, which has two fairly twisted nude scenes. Ralph Fiennes stars as Dennis "Spider" Cleg, a mentally disturbed man living in a halfway house and wrestling with his past, which seems to constantly encroach upon his present. Plagued by near-constant flashbacks to his childhood, Spider is a broken man as we discover rather quickly.

27 minutes into the film, young Spider remembers sitting in a diner, staring at some women who don't take kindly to being ogled. Alison Egan reaches into her shirt and pulls out her right breast to taunt the disturbed young boy...

Not long after this, he discovers some risqué photos of her mother, played by Miranda Richardson, though the breasts in the photo obviously aren't hers...

A SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of David Cronenberg's Films Part Two: 1993-2014

While the film itself is something of an anomaly on Cronenberg's resumé, it's got a lot of those Cronenbergian touches that make the film distinctly his, namely the psychological trauma associated with sex, triggered at a young age. It's a fascinating character study of a man losing touch with what little reality he has left, but it's definitely not a film for everyone.

A History of Violence (2005)

A SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of David Cronenberg's Films Part Two: 1993-2014

With his next film, 2005's A History of Violence, Cronenberg finally achieved the level of mass critical, commercial, and awards success that had eluded him throughout the first thirty-plus years of his career. Easily his most "accessible" film, thanks in no small part to it being an adaptation of a graphic novel from the late 90s, Cronenberg fully left behind the visual hallmarks of his early work here, adhering to an intense brutality reinforced by the otherwise bucolic setting.

Working for the first time with actor Viggo Mortensen—then only two years removed from his breakthrough role inThe Lord of the Rings—Cronenberg exploits Mortensen's stoicism by wondering if such a seemingly normal and quiet guy could be hiding a past spent as a vicious and merciless killer. Mortensen stars as Tom,your run-of-the-mill diner owner in small town Indiana—though the film was shot in Cronenberg's native Ontario—who fends off an attack by two hitmen in his diner, garnering the attention of the local press, and stirring up new kinds of trouble for his family.

One of the first things the film establishes is that Tom has a healthy sex life with hiswife Edie (Maria Bello), demonstrated by their role-playing wherein she seduces him by dressing up like a cheerleader. Just 18 minutes into the flick, the two 69 on the bed, giving us a quick look at Bello's buns...

It's a surprisingly sexy scene for how honestly it portrays married life. Most sex scenes between married couples on film are startlingly vanilla, reserving the really hot and steamy stuff for extramarital dalliances or new relationships. These are two people who have been together for a while, but still have a smoking hot sex life, not unlike the protagonists at the heart of Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now.

Later in the film, when it's all been exposed that Tom is actually Joey Cusack,younger brother of notorious Philadelphia gangster Richie Cusack (William Hurt), he and his wife have to confront their secrets. Cronenberg uses this opportunity to take that to a literal extreme, by having Maria Bello bare all in an open bathrobe, marrying the mundane to the shocking in a way only Cronenberg can...

A SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of David Cronenberg's Films Part Two: 1993-2014

A History of Violence remains a towering achievement in Cronenberg's catalog, a film that seemingly bares no resemblance to the films around it on his cv, yet right at home tonally and visually with everything else he's done over the years. Cronenberg never "sold out" or "went commercial" in the way many of his contemporaries did. Rather, he waited until societal norms changed so much that they caught up to his work and delivered something spectacular.

Eastern Promises (2007)

Cronenberg and Mortensen reunited two years later for Eastern Promises, an original screenplay by Steven Knight (Dirty Pretty Things, Serenity) that deals with the influence of the Russian mob in modern day London. Here, Mortensen plays Nikolai, an enforcer working for mob boss Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), who crosses paths with a midwife (Naomi Watts) trying to findthe truth behind a teenage girl who died in childbirth. As the film goes along, the midwife discovers that Nikolai is actually a Russian Secret Service agent who has infiltrated the gang and is attempting to bring it down from within. The longer the film goes along, however, the more blurred those lines between good and evil become.

Perhaps the most famous nude scene in the film—and perhaps in all of Cronenberg's work—involves a fully nude Mortensen fighting off two enormous thugs in a bathhouse. It's a bloody confrontation, one that bears all the hallmarks of Cronenberg's active camerawork in moments of intense violence. He doesn't shy away from showing us how ruthless such a battle would be in real life, and Mortensen's efforts helped earn him his first Oscar nomination. You can check the scene out on our sister site MrMan.com, if you're so inclined.

The film's only female nudity comes from Tereza Srbová, who bares all playing a prostitute that has sex with Mortensen while Vincent Cassel—playing Kirill, the dim-witted son of Semyon—watches in rapt amusement...

A Dangerous Method (2011)

A SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of David Cronenberg's Films Part Two: 1993-2014

For his next pairing with Mortensen, Cronenberg selected this sordid tale of the fathers of modern psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud (Mortensen) and Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender), based on Dangerous Liaisons scribe Christopher Hampton's 2002 play "The Talking Cure." In the film, Freud and Jung maintain a correspondence that shows their diverging philosophies on the doctor/patient relationship, and how Jung's more hands-on approach puts him, in Freud's view, too close to the patients to properly assess their mental needs.

Jung's resolve is put to the test by a woman namedSabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) who is committed to Jung's psychiatric hospital in Vienna suffering from hysteria. Jung discovers that the root cause of Sabina's hysteria is the frequent spankings she received as a child from her father, arousing her and instilling sexual confusion in her at a very young age. Jung is both compelled by Sabina's psychological issues and attracted to her, complicating his theories on transference and also putting him in direct philosophical conflict with his colleague Freud.

Perhaps no character this decade has a name so befitting the content of his character than Otto Gross, played here by the always delightfully slimy Vincent Cassel. Gross is responsible for instilling in Jung the notion that monogamy is a useless construct, and that the good doctor should indulge in his baser desires, just as Gross does with a maid, played by Sarah Marecek...

A SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of David Cronenberg's Films Part Two: 1993-2014

Emboldened by Gross' methods, Jung decides to go full bore into a sexual relationship with Sabina, forsaking his martial bonds with his wife Emma—played by another Cronenberg regular, Sarah Gadon. The titular "dangerous method" involves him stimulating Sabina through spanking and other forms of SM, awakening new prospects in Jung's mind...

The fatal flaw in A Dangerous Method, and why I feel it doesn't quite come together in a satisfying way, is the cold, clinical distance maintained by Cronenberg throughout. Cronenberg places his faith in his actors and the material to do the work, stepping almost too far back and keeping an aesthetic detachment that does a disservice to the material. Perhaps Hampton's screenplay kept things more theatrical in nature, never opening up the world enough to prove truly engrossing. It may be a failed experiment, but it's a damn good one.

Cosmopolis (2012)

If there's one thing Cronenberg was undeniably great at by this point in his career, it's taking premises that aren't inherently cinematic and making great cinema out of them. This made him a perfect fit with novelist Don DeLillo, who operated not unlike Cronenberg in the world of literature: A jazz musician in a musical landscape of sameness. DeLillo's 2003 novel "Cosmopolis" is a sort-of digital age reimagining of James Joyce's "Ulysses," following a man on a journey through New York City, and whose fortunes are completely upended by the end of the day.

Cronenberg's film of Cosmopolis marked the first time he had written, produced, and directed a film since 1999's eXistenZ, so it's easy to see this as his most personal film of the new millennium. Cronenberg has always worked with the precision of a forensic pathologist and his dissection of the 1%—as they were just coming to be called—was a perfect fit for the socially aware times in which the film was made.

Robert Pattison, doing his best to break free from the shackles of the Twilight Saga, stars as Eric Packer, a wealthy businessman, who wants to get a haircut. Hermetically sealed in his limousine, Packer stays cordoned off from the chaos outside his car as he navigates the streets of New York City. When his cold and detached wife, played by Sarah Gadon, refuses his sexual advances, he instead hooks up in the back of his limo with his art dealer Juliette Binoche, who curiously doesn't go nude here...

A SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of David Cronenberg's Films Part Two: 1993-2014

Another stop along the way takes him to the home of his bodyguard, played by Patricia McKenzie, with whom Packer has been having an affair. Patricia bares all, wearing nothing but a vest, for their latest rendezvous which will sadly end with him killing her...

A SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of David Cronenberg's Films Part Two: 1993-2014A SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of David Cronenberg's Films Part Two: 1993-2014

Cosmopolis more or less represents the pinnacle of latter day Cronenberg. It's a film about people who attempt to seal themselves off from their problems until that tactic doesn't work any more and they must stare their destiny in the face. Sex isn't the main focus of the film, but rather used as an escape by Packer for the rest of the trauma that surrounds him.

Maps to the Stars (2014)

A SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of David Cronenberg's Films Part Two: 1993-2014

Cronenberg's most recent tale, Maps to the Stars, is a bullet aimed directly at the diseased heart of Hollywood's legacy for chewing people up and spitting them out. Mia Wasikowska stars as Agatha, a woman with horrific burns across much of her body, who comes to Hollywood looking to track down child star Benjie Weiss (Evan Bird). Benjie is the son of Dr. Stafford Weiss (John Cusack) and his wife Cristina (Olivia Williams), whom we later learn are not only the parents of both Agatha and Benjie, but also brother and sister.

Agatha takes a job working as a personal assistant for fading star Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore), the daughter of the famous deceased actress Clarice Taggart (Sarah Gadon). Havana lands a role in a remake of one of her mother's classic films, but she is constantly haunted by the apparition of her dead mother. 26 minutes into the flick, Moore is having a steamy threesome with Jennifer Gibson and a guy, who excuses himself to take a phone call, but ends up enjoying watching the two women enjoying one another without him...

Then things take a turn for the surreal when Gibson is suddenly replaced by Gadon, a hallucination brought on by Moore's fragile mental state...

Later in the film, when Olivia Williams' Cristina learns that her daughter has come back into the picture, she has a nervous breakdown while topless in the tub...

While not as overtly disturbing as some of the things found in any number of Cronenberg's films, the nudity here is always a double-edged sword. There's nothing especially sexy about any of the nudity in the film, but it all comes from the same place of brutal honesty in the face of the seemingly insane.

This seems to be Cronenberg's thesis statement. Sex can be pleasurable and enjoyable, but there's a darker side to it, one which we as human beings seek to constantly suppress. Cronenberg has never been shy about holding up a mirror to our enjoyment and showing us a seamier side of any sexual encounter. It's a bold, brilliant, and cunning way to operate as a filmmaker, and its why hispresence over the last five years has been sorely missed. Everyone may not like Cronenberg's films, and most certainly everyone does not, but he's an essential filmmaker for going to the places many others can't or just simply won't.

Check out the Other Directors in Our Ongoing "SKIN-depth Look”Series

David Cronenberg: Part One

François Truffaut

Bernardo Bertolucci

Roman Polanski

Mike Nichols

Louis Malle

Steven Soderbergh

Kathryn Bigelow

Oliver Stone

Nicolas Roeg

David Fincher

Francis Ford Coppola

Ken Russell: Part One

Ken Russell: Part Two

Pier Paolo Pasolini

Park Chan-wook

Robert Altman: Act I

Robert Altman: Act II

Adrian Lyne

Martin Scorsese

Jane Campion

Bob Fosse

Dario Argento

Wes Craven

Tobe Hooper

Todd Haynes

Danny Boyle

Stanley Kubrick

Paul Thomas Anderson

David Lynch

Brian De Palma

Paul Schrader

Paul Verhoeven

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Non-nude images courtesy of IMDb