DAVID CRONENBERG: EVOLUTION at TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King West), November 1 to January 29. $10.50-$15. tiff.net. Rating: NNNNN
In 1975, former journalist and current wealthy person Robert Fulford, writing under a cowardly pseudonym, railed against David Cronenberg’s Shivers in the pages of Saturday Night. “The most repulsive movie I’ve ever seen,” wrote “Marshall Delaney,” who had probably seen, like, six movies.
The story (urban legend, maybe) was that Cronenberg got kicked out of his apartment following the savaging, effectively forced to take ownership of the opinions Fulford himself was too gutless to account for himself. (To his nominal credit, Fulford signed his real name to a subsequent Cronen-burn, sarcastically praising the director’s ability to “make movies as repulsive as those produced in Hollywood” in an aside in a 1997 lecture on “Canadians in the world’s imagination” delivered at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem a year after Cronenberg had netted a special jury prize at Cannes.)
It’s incorrect to say that Cronenberg has come a long way since Shivers. What’s happened is that those who needed to catch up have caught up. Part of what David Cronenberg: Evolution – TIFF’s new gallery/museum show dedicated to the filmmaker, their best exhibition yet by many, many measures – illustrates so clearly is that Cronenberg’s preoccupations have always been the same. From 1969’s Stereo through to last year’s Cosmopolis, he has been absorbed by the intersections of technology and the human body, and the corresponding questions of what the hell it even means to be a person with a body in the first place.
Like Jeff Goldblum in The Fly – which would be, for my money, the Cronenberg film par excellence if every Cronenberg film weren’t the Cronenberg film par excellence – Cronenberg molts and melts and mutates, but never totally changes into anything that’s genetically 100 per cent different. Even the curiosities of his canon feel reconcilable. What was the drag-racing adrenaline of Fast Company but a dry run for Crash, the most lavish articulation of its director’s own gear-head fetishism? What was M. Butterfly but a primmer spin on the themes of identity and narrative agency explored in Naked Lunch, A History Of Violence and Eastern Promises?
Cronenberg’s not just a techno-fetishist, schlock-philosopher and proto-post-humanist he’s Canadian cinema’s (and maybe cinema‘s) premier auteur. (At least in the more contemporary, non-technical sense, anyway.) He’s the director-as-artist, his films – even the more “repulsive” ones… especially the more repulsive ones – exhibiting traces of the same ideas, all points on his map to stardom charting the same squishy psychological geography.
Cronenberg’s artistic output feels like a singular thing. This is part of what makes it compelling (and, sure, maybe easy) to express Cronenberg as an Idea.
This, essentially, is what TIFF’s Evolution show does, and does splendidly. It’s what they tried to do with their Tim Burton and Grace Kelly shows. But like most of their exhibits, even those seemed guided by a curatorial mandate that never really amounted to more than “here’s a bunch of shit.”
Granted, there’s loads of shit in Evolution. There’s maquettes from The Fly, the icky metal gynecological instruments from Dead Ringers, the Videodrome helmet (long a fixture of the Canadian Film Reference Library), the insect typewriters and “sex blob” from Naked Lunch – and a mock-up of the film’s narcotic-producing Mugwamp monster, which visitors can pose with for a photo (Burroughs wept… or laughed probably) – as well as all kinds of drawings, props, wardrobe items and early script drafts.
There’s also a newly commissioned 10-minute film, The Nest, made by Cronenberg specifically for the exhibition, and something on the Lightbox’s fourth floor called the The BMC Lab, an interactive digital project thingamajig that I don’t really understand. All this bric-a-brac, the “shit,” hangs together exceptionally well, developed around the organizing principle that is Cronenberg-as-Idea. If you’ve ever done the thing where you work through all the special features and extras on a Criterion Collection Blu-ray while simultaneously reading the critical essay that comes bundled with the disc, well, Evolution feels like that.
And Evolution feels totally at home at the Lightbox. Yes, this is a Toronto filmmaker. Yes, TIFF had the advantage of Cronenberg’s full participation. (In a tour provided to press yesterday, TIFF CEO Piers Handling called the filmmaker “an ally.”) But there’s also the role that TIFF – as a festival, as an institution – has played in shaping the reception of Cronenberg’s work, of wresting it away from laughable conservative alarmists like Fulford who were so desperate to write him off early in his career. Mounting early retrospectives of his work in the 80s, and launching the festival with Dead Ringers in 1988, TIFF has helped create a context for understanding and appreciating Cronenberg.
Evolution is the latest, and most fulsomely realized, development in the TIFF/Cronenberg partnership. It represents a merging of artist and institution that’s vital, maybe even necessary, to our understanding and appreciation of art, an interlocutor between the public and the private world of an artist.
It’s another intersection, another merging, another hybrid. It’s all perfectly, beautifully, exquisitely, characteristically Cronenbergian.
johns@nowtoronto.com | @johnsemley3000
