The notion of the money shot is malleable. Scanners (1980) includes one that actually works to demarcate subtext. Here, the mind actually leaves the body, violently. Scanners' "...transitional edits serve as direct, amplifying links where the last moment of the first scene builds a question or expectation that is immediately answered or fulfilled in the next shot..." Filmplan International financed the production, budgeting more than $4 million toward the project. Originally called The Sensitives and then Telepathy 2000, Scanners had been in revision since the early 1970s, trumped by the personal vigor behind both Fast Company and The Brood. Like Crimes of the Future, Cronenberg institutionalizes the Cartesian, Consec housing the balance. The opening sequence, whereby a Scanner is hunted down, is guerilla film-making urban mall style, and is a reprise of Michael Anderson's Logan's Run (1976). The final shootout sequence whereby Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside) and Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack) scan themselves to death happens to be the first film since Crimes of the Future to have a distinct notion of closure, the means to an end, culminating with an optimistic destruction of a character. Scanners is an attempt to make thought visible, the ramifications of which are stronger than the external. Our money shot, a proverbial augmentation: mind out of matter. Subsequence solidified Scanners as Cronenberg's first film to top the Variety box-office chart.
Review of Scanners
