The short film The Death of David Cronenberg, published on September 19, 2021, is only 56 seconds long.
But these 56 seconds are disturbing, touching and unforgettable.
Signed by Cronenberg himself together with his daughter, the photographer Caitlin Cronenberg, it is a stripped-down scene focused on confronting one’s own mortality.
The Death of David Cronenberg is, according to the director himself, “a little metaphorical piece about a person embracing his own death. I embrace it, partially, because I have no choice: this is man’s fate.”
A brief and essential vision that is also intimately personal.
The director’s last years, in fact, were marked by two difficult griefs: in 2020 he lost Denise Cronenberg, his beloved sister and costume designer in most of his films, and three years earlier his wife Carolyn Zeifman had also passed away.
“[She] died in that house, in a bed, and it felt when she died, partly, like I died, and I still feel that. That corpse is my wife to me. […] It is a film about love and the transient aspect of being human.”
This dimension of personal confrontation also emerges from the peculiar genesis of this short film.
It all started with when his daughter Caitlin Cronenberg proposed him to make a short film to be tokenized as NFT.
Thinking of a possible project, the director was reminded of an episode that happened to him on the set of the SLASHER series, produced by Shudder.
As Cronenberg himself recounted, when he was working on the fourth season of the series “there was a moment, when the special effects people said, we’ve got a surprise for you,” Cronenberg said. “I was introduced to my corpse, and it was terrific.”
So, thinking back to that silicone prosthetic body, Cronenberg contacted Toronto’s Black Spot FX in order to borrow it, because “I have unfinished business with this dead version of me.”
Once the body was brought home (well hidden, so as not to alert the neighbors!), it was placed in Caitlin’s childhood bed. Cronenberg wasn’t immediately sure what to do with it: “I left it up there for a couple days and I’d occasionally just go and check it out. It had an emotional resonance for me.”
Therefore, in a sense, the short film accurately reflects the actual situation of the author, who in those days was locked in the house with the simulacrum of a corpse with his own features. A kind of bizarre shock therapy, as Cronenberg jokingly confirms: “To be able to actually kiss your [dead self], there’s no question it’s fantastic. I think everyone should do this. Everyone should have a corpse made by Black Spot FX.”
David Cronenberg’s cinema, in its entirety, proposes a complex artistic-philosophical reflection that is both surreal and materialistic: for the Canadian director, the exploration of the human psyche necessarily passes through the body, whose incessant and unpredictable mutations are the expression of the quivers of identity.
It is therefore not surprising that even his meditation on death and impermanence is rendered, in this very brief but incisive vision, in dramatically concrete, physical terms.
And at the same time the film is about the paradox of not being able to imagine one’s own death: even if I try to imagine what my funeral will be like, I need a hypothetical observer, because no image can exist without a point of view.
Even the death of others is no less elusive, because it is not empirical but on the contrary translates into a failure of the senses. I can depict in my mind the presence of a person but not their disappearance, which is expressed only “by proxy”, that is, in a sensory absence (all those moments in which the presence of the deceased was normal).
Figurative art — pictorial, plastic, photographic — has always been a way to overcome this impasse. As Mirko Orlando writes,
Death can only exist within the open circuit of life […] because its experience does not concern the deceased (those who die) but the community of survivors who mourn (those who survive). Death is an image because it is first of all imagined, because it can only be encountered on the horizon of its reflection; on the threshold of the corpse, of the photochemical or pictorial traces, of the imprecise boundaries of memories or in the labyrinths of the oneiric dimension. Only there can I meet the dead, only in their double, because it is clear that nothing else is allowed to me as long as I am alive.
(M. Orlando, Ripartire dagli addii, 2010)
That is why Cronenberg’s operation is also a hymn to the power of cinema: every artistic work is a representation, and this mise-en-scène makes it possible to manifest the impossible. Thanks to cinema, Cronenberg even allows himself to visualize the most elusive and inconceivable double: his own corpse, his own future “not being there”.
Finally, and it’s an even more subversive idea, he accepts that corpse, kisses it, cuddles it.
In an era in which at the center of every concern is the healthy body, whose failures (old age, illness, death) are not admitted or tolerated, this image is particularly unsettling and — a rare thing in his filmography — truly sweet.
