The Future (2011)

A film that moves in a circle, that moves though time, also passes the limits of a kind of pedantic reality that is common in its expression and negligible in its impact. If anything, 19^th century literature did what it could to offer a joiner for the middle class. Now that the middle class is an abstraction, perhaps it would not be so bad to realize the illusion that sustains naïve belief in possibility: that the only way to open the box is to stop everything else. To suggest that The Future (2011) represents the Schrödinger’s box of life-change is difficult to chew.

Spit it out, quick!

Someone once said: “the most real is the least real once the quotient of rationality exceeds the possibility for insanity.” I forget who it was, they must’ve been quite mad.

It comes down to a cat, in fact, to express this quotient in terms of suffering (antagonism + crisis = death; in film at least). This cat is what is definitively not saved as the outcome of the subjugation of reality to the possibility of the endless night.

If you are confused, good, so am I. Now that we share our confusion, let me point out that the confused are always more willing to admit that they know nothing; lest you begin to understand, remember that the moon speaks only to the ocean, it knows nothing of time.

Pretense emerges in the shadow of possibility, failure is the admissible outcome once the dream is understood; a comprehensible dream is either reality deferred or the deferral of reality; once it is dealt with it either explodes or implodes. Which is preferable? In the film we have explosion, I would tend to favor implosion as a means by which psychic structures are destroyed allowing for infinitely greater freedom of mind.

The external explosion of the dream means its ruin, means, reflected in the rough illusion of normalcy, that the little girl buries herself in the ground, and lets the grownups have sex (or fuck, as the golden chain would have it). But really, it is quite cold in the dark outside, as Paw Paw would tell you, and she cannot leave herself outside. A knock, knock, knockin’ comes and she realizes that she is moving towards the end. It is the shirt that explodes this last vestige of explosion, furiously burning itself as an iridescent music-mass. Her dance emerges, but it simultaneously alienates the illusion of the subjugation of her adult-self, and reveals her child-self that she has so unsuccessfully repressed.

And time begins again, and again, but Paw Paw is gone. The cat is out of the bag, out of the box. Does the possibility exist to stop everything again, to take a peek? Yes, and no. The pause is eternal, and it is never. Paw Paw always dies, is always alone, the repetition of film does not yield a different result, or an alternate possibility. This is both the truth of film and its greatest lie. There is no going back, only forwards, but everything pauses if you look in the box.