Fragmentation.
Like the shoestring webs Dennis "Spider" Cleg (Ralph Fiennes) weaves in his room slice space into fragments, Cleg's mind is splintered, broken. Those who fail to see evidence of Cronenberg's "body horror" aesthetic in Spider are fixated on the gore and violence of his early career. One need only look at how Cleg's mind betrays him—a subtler but just as threatening betrayal to his identity as Seth Brundle's reluctant metamorphosis in The Fly (1986)—to see that the physical has now become metaphysical. Spider is a turning point where the maturation of this director fuses many elements from his oeuvre, internalizes them, and launches his body of work in a new direction.
