The direction Cronenberg ultimately chose illuminates his own contradictions as much as America’s. All his movies are trapped between the violence of the images and the characters and the intellectual discussion of his chosen theme. His 1996 film “Crash,” for example, about strangers coming together over a car crash fetish is violent and sordid, but also an earnest examination of the place machines hold in our lives.

In the beginning of his career, the balance tilted more heavily toward violence and sexuality, leading Cronenberg to pick up nicknames like “The King of Venereal Horror.” His response: “that’s a very small Kingdom. I’d rather be the King of something bigger.”

Although he seems to feel somewhat maligned by the pigeonholing implied by such a nomenclature, Cronenberg comprehends that this reputation is heavily of his own making. He says that “the truth is that I deserve what I get because when I was a kid, making movies, I called myself things like the ‘Baron of Blood.’”

The Baron’s directorial signature has certainly stayed consistent. The lingering shot on the drifter’s shotgunned head near the opening of “A History of Violence” is an unmistakably Cronenberg moment.

And yet it is not the violence but his directorial professionalism that brings interesting actors into some of the best roles of their careers. Cronenberg notes that while studio execs don’t always understand him, “in terms of actors, for example, my reputation is very good.”

The King of Venereal Horror is aware of the extraordinary carnage throughout his films, but “nothing happens in the frame by accident.” The visceral quality of his images strike at one part of the mind, but it is only this opening that allows him to dually engage his audience with the meaning behind his stories.

Cronenberg repeatedly stresses that he is not interested in horrific imagery for its own sake; looking back, Cronenberg insists that “obviously, anybody who has seen my movies, including those early movies, knows that I was always after bigger game than that.” And luckily for his audiences, Cronenberg is now skilled enough to balance his two strains in a manner that makes him one of the world’s most unique and interesting hunters.

—Staff writer Scoop A. Wasserstein can be reached at wasserst@fas.harvard.edu.