What follows is a short paper I delivered during a panel discussion on David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future. The screening event was part of a screening series called “Cinema Thinks the World,” a partnership project between the University of British Columbia and Vancouver’s Cinematheque. The essay includes some material from the introduction I wrote to an interview between Cronenberg and Don McKellar for Cinema Scope, but I’ve been told that this variation on those ideas is more to the point. In any case, since I’ve had occasion to draw from Arthur C. Danto’s After the End of Art before, I should mention in passing that while I consider the book perceptive on matters of historical change, I think it rather less so on aesthetic theory.
Before saying anything about the movie specifically, I want to start by telling two stories—each related to the history of art. The first is one that the American philosopher Arthur C. Danto tells in his book After the End of Art. There he mentions a 19th century German artist named Anselm Feuerbach. Feuerbach, we are told, was an exponent of the so-called “Grand Manner” expounded in 17th-century Italy, and embodied in the paintings of Nicolas Poussin, among others. Furthermore, the Grand Manner was considered suitable to historical painting, which at the time was considered the highest and most superior of genres. In 1869 Feuerbach produced the Symposium, an exemplar of the genre, produced in this Grand Manner. The painting, which depicts a climactic moment from Plato’s Symposium, now hangs in Berlin’s Alte Nationalgalerie, and within Feuerbach’s body of work, it is considered his masterpiece.
Before reading Danto’s book, however, I had never heard of Feuerbach. And what I find interesting about his situation is that though he was working in a respected, even exalted style, one that his contemporaries fully recognized, he was from our perspective already a minor figure. Feuerbach’s Symposium, as I said, was exhibited in 1869. But in 1863 Manet had already shown his Dejeuner sur l’herbe; Olympia was shown in 1865. Danto reminds us that the first impressionist exhibition took place in 1874, just five years after Feuerbach’s painting. So, although Feuerbach would not, and perhaps could not see things this way, his work was already dated by the time it was produced. History had already passed him by.
The other story I want to tell is that of Balzac’s short novel The Unknown Masterpiece, which you may know was adapted by Jacques Rivette in 1994, as La Belle Noiseuse. The story Rivette tells there has a somewhat different emphasis, and it’s Balzac’s original that I want to consider. The Unknown Masterpiece is set in Paris in 1612, and it features two real painters: a young Poussin, before he became famous, and the Flemish painter Porbus. The main figure of the story, though, is fictional—a painter named Frenhofer, who we learn has abandoned a great, unrealized work called “La Belle noiseuse,” which has tormented him for ten years. With the inspiration of a new model, Frenhofer eventually finishes his long-awaited masterpiece. But when he finally shows Poussin and Porbus the work, they are completely baffled. They whisper to each other that they see “nothing” on the canvas. One of them says: “All I see are colors daubed one on top of the other and contained by a mass of strange lines forming a wall of paint.” The other responds: “We must be missing something.” And coming closer, they discern, in one corner of the canvas, out of a chaos of colors, shapes, and vague shadings, the tip of a bare foot. Frenhofer is distraught by their remarks, distraught that they cannot seem to see the masterpiece he has painted. He bids Pouissin and Porbus goodbye. We learn that later that evening, Frenhofer burns all his paintings and dies.
In the first story, about the German painter Feuerbach, we see someone who was working in a genre and style fully recognized in the present, but whom history had, again from our perspective, already passed by. In second story, we have a different sort of parable. Balzac there offers us a tantalizing ambiguity: We imagine that perhaps Frenhofer has painted an artwork from the future, some sort of Impressionist painting, perhaps—or Abstract Expressionism before its time. But the paradox of the story, and the reason for its title, The Unknown Masterpiece, is that his contemporaries are not just unable to appreciate it as good art, but they are unable to consider it as art to begin with. They cannot even see it as a painting.
Now I tell both these stories because they illustrate something of our paradoxical relationship to historical change—and of course to the future, which Cronenberg has always been interested in. I think it’s significant that this film’s title refers not to crimes in the future (as we might think of in something like Minority Report), but crimes of the future. Because a crime of the future much like the art of the future, cannot in any real sense be thought or conceived. As these stories show, its very nature is to escape our present understanding. The paradox, which I paraphrase from Danto, can be put something like this: If it were possible for someone to know what the art of the future would look like, it would be useless knowledge, because no one else could recognize it as such (as in the second story). If other people could recognize it (as in the first story), it would belong to the present, after all.
With this in mind, we can go back and consider Crimes of the Future. Like any good work of speculative fiction, the film may be linked to several real-world phenomena. The pandemic context resonates clearly with the film’s concerns around bureaucratic bio-control as represented by the organ registry; the disappearance of pain puts a literal twist on our so-called “desensitization” to images of violence and suffering; the activities of the dissident group directly confront looming food shortages and recent findings that we ingest micro-plastic on a daily basis. As Crimes goes on, however, we are also made to feel the limits of thinking about its world by analogy to our own. That is, we feel the limitations of reading its future solely in relation to our present.
When we consider how sweeping historical changes arise, we might have a somewhat caricatured view. We might think of a few people floating around with great ideas in their heads just waiting to be realized. But the two stories I’ve told should give us a different idea of what it means to relate to the future. Again: If it were possible for someone to know what the future would look like, it would be useless knowledge, because no one else could recognize it as such. If other people could recognize it, it would belong to the present. The tension that Crimes embodies so fully is that, try as we might, we cannot think the future. Historical narratives are only articulable—only thinkable—in retrospect. Which should give us a deeper sense of how historical change arises. Philosophers of history have long observed that genuinely epochal changes—those shifts that transform what we think of as possible in any given age—do not happen incrementally or progressively but all at once, even as those living through them may have only a dim feeling that anything profound is happening. And what is remarkable about Crimes of the Future is that it gives us this picture of historical change. For the majority of its runtime, the film maintains this hypnotic, almost glacial flow, where many things happen, but we are never quite sure of their significance—that is, until that astounding final image gives us a sense of total transformation, pointing to a future populated by forms we cannot, from our present vantage point, even begin to imagine.