(Note: David Cronenberg’s film “Crimes of the Future” opens today in general release. I caught a press screening in New York recently. Here are my thoughts.)
Imagine a New Yorker cartoon: “Birthdays at David Cronenberg’s house” a dejected-looking child unwrapping a present and thinking: “Great. Another ‘Cronenbergian’ birthday gift…”
Okay, maybe it’s not a great joke, but David Cronenberg is one of only a handful of film directors to have been turned into an adjective: “Cronenbergian” cinema is basically synonymous for work dealing with “body horror”- art in which the human body is radically altered or destroyed by new technologies. And yet, genre fans would not be off base in finding it a bit ironic that the director’s own films haven’t been exactly “Cronenbergian” in quite some time. Disturbing? Yes. Still singular in their vision? For sure. And certainly, they’ve been worth watching- I think Spider is one of his best. Nevertheless, the last undiluted peak into the weird mind of this visionary Canadian was eXistenZ back in 1999.
So, it’s a definite thrill to be pulled back into the Cronenbergian plasma pool with Crimes of the Future, a movie that could not have been made or even approximated without the mind of this visionary weirdo. Given the last few years of real-life body horror, however, it’s not inconceivable that the future we’re creating is already catching up with him, or vice-versa.
Really, what’s most striking about Crimes of the Future is how un-futuristic the world depicted actually is: there are no digital screens or iPhones, no automobiles or space travel; the only vehicles we see are half-submerged rusting ships. There are hardly any people in this world, and the ones who are left have been changing their bodies in adaptive ways to a mysteriously threatening environment. We’re told that physical pain has almost entirely vanished and are introduced at the beginning of the film to a child who apparently eats plastic. Yet, we have no idea what could have happened. It’s as if there was a cataclysmic apocalypse that no one finds worth mentioning anymore.
Instead, they’re seemingly obsessed with the creative potential offered by self-surgery and spontaneous internal mutations. The closest thing to a celebrity in this strange new world is Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) a man who has responded to his body’s perpetual creation of new, and seemingly useless organs by remaking himself as a performance artist whose former surgeon partner Caprice (Léa Sedoux) takes part in operating on him and removing these new bits for rapturous onlookers. If artists are a type of mutant, it seems, it’s time for people who find themselves mutating to get artistic about it.
But Saul and Caprice not alone with their audience: there are fellow body artists Saul considers poseurs, visual references to real-life body artists Stelarc and Orlan, “new vice” police officers investigating his work, underground cells of political activists who’ve aspired to a new stage in evolution beyond the human, and a bureaucratic government office intent on preventing any unforeseen changes to the human body from spiralling out of control- something that sounds farfetched until you remember how many politicians are intent on legislating transgender surgery into the black market. Some would rather none of us change our bodies or our lives.
Things get complicated, and the stray plot threads proliferate- and it’s a fair criticism that there are perhaps more stray threads than the film can handle- but the story keeps coming back to the different ways that our minds deal with the changes our bodies throw at us, a theme in the director’s work since the very beginning.
Cronenberg has also spoken about the influence of Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan on his work, and there’s something particularly charming about how he’s still riffing on McLuhan’s central idea that the technologies of man should be seen as evolutionary extensions of the human body: the car an extension of the legs, the house an extension of the skin, etc. Cronenberg has always seemed to be saying, in response, that we should expect our new technologies to change the human body itself; and for the body to make its own unexpected changes in response. Even the notion of a new adaptive organ goes back to Rabid from 1977.
The unique wrinkle that Cronenberg has usually added to this is the idea that bodily mutations can be horrifying or grotesque, while also liberating new potentialities. They can even be kind of hot. His characters struggle with their own ambivalence about a process that is making them something more or other than human, or maybe killing them; should they fight their mutating bodies, or embrace the chaotic possibilities?
Think of Max Renn whose addiction to the hallucinations of Videodrome might be growing a brain tumor. Or James and Catherine Ballard getting off on what car crashes can do to human bodies. Even Seth Brundle felt himself becoming something more than human before crashing back to earth in a twisted goopy mass. Saul Tenser is Cronenberg’s most complete embodiment of the notion that our physical’ mutations might be best treated as creative and fecundate, rather than cancerous and destructive. He is, in the flesh, proof of the axiom that artists have to keep evolving, even if it terrifies them.
So, in a sense, we’re back to the director’s classic themes, and something of a continuation of his earlier work, although I personally think this is his best film since Videodrome. Seriously. Cronenberg hasn’t been so bizarre and heady, and downright funny, in some time. But it also resonates differently now that he’s a 79-year-old man, because as we age, all of us will find our bodies changing in new and disturbing ways, whether we like it or not, heralding the most difficult transition is right around the corner. How do we process that? Maybe like Saul Tenser, and Cronenberg, by embracing the creative material within.
Long live the new flesh, and everything beneath it!
So it’s worth seeing I take it?
I like Videodrome, Scanners, etc. but I’ve always thought eXistenZ was sort of the unheralded masterpiece where the ideas all mature into a plot that doesn’t rely on the core Cronenberg motifs. The acknowledged classics were just steps along the way to getting there from Rabid, the Brood, etc. I will patiently await being pelted with tomatoes in retribution for that opinion.
Only semi-related, but speaking of Rabid, a friend of mine still gives me a hard time for insisting on streaming it after way too much to drink one night a few years back. ‘What the hell even was that?’ I assume the esteemed director would be pleased that one of the earlier efforts still elicits that kind of response.Report
Yeah, it’s definitely worth seeing. I think Neon kinda made a mistake by hyping all the supposed walk-outs (happens every Cannes anyway) because it’s not some shock fest. But Cronenberg’s movies are always more sedate than horrific. Mostly, it feels like a natural progression from the stuff he was writing on his own versus the adaptations. I could easily see it coming after eXistenZ. I’d probably put eXistenZ in the top 10 anyway. I guess my issue was it felt like a reworking of Videodrome- although to be fair, Videodrome feels a little half-finished anyway.
I will say my girlfriend was less enthused about Crimes of the Future. Her main complaint was many of the plot threads are left dangling, so it feels like it ends too early. I would agree, but he does that a lot. Naked Lunch is pretty much exactly the same way, but you accept it because it’s about drug hallucinations. This one is more like some weird fever dream Cronenberg had- it doesn’t all make sense at first.
I was surprised (not that much though) that Rabid didn’t come up when Ivan Reitman died. He went from directing Cannibal Girls (and almost getting kicked out of university for producing a hippie sex movie!) to one of the world’s most beloved filmmaker for Ghostbusters. I am glad Cronenberg never tried to go the same way though.Report
Yea, my similar complaint with Videodrome is the abruptness of the climax. I feel like it’s the kind of thing that makes sense on paper but you put it on film and it comes off like they couldn’t figure out how to end it. Debbie Harry though.
And that is an amusing point about Reitman I never thought about!
Anyway I assume I will see this newest one once it hits the streaming services.Report
While in Hamilton, I was always looking for someone who’d seen the Velvet Underground when they played the campus or someone who was there for the premier of The Columbus of Sex, Ivan Reitman’s “16 mm experiment in softcore pornography” that got the McMaster Film Club in hot water. It’s kinda typical for Canada. Cronenberg’s movie Shivers (then called The Parasite Sex Murders) led to a long debate in the house of parliament!
https://www.cracked.com/article_32669_ghostbusters-director-ivan-reitmans-first-movie-was-raided-by-the-cops.htmlReport
That is just hilarious. Also I’ve never seen Cannibal Girls but that preview with the warning for audiences members with a ‘squeamish or prudish disposition’ has me dying.Report
back when the “other” crash movie came out, my boss (a very proper new york jewish woman a few decades my senior) popped her head in to recap the weekends and check in on the week. she told me she saw crash over the weekend, in the theater.
i was surprised, because it’d come out in the mid-90s. maybe she went to a retrospective?
i had no idea this other film had come out. zero idea.
so she sits down and says “i have a lot of questions about that movie.” and i am straight up panicking, because like…yeah. car crashes and sexy leg braces! elizabeth taylor! james spader doing creepy stuff!
none of which is work appropriate! i’m in my mid-twenties and very uninterested in talking about this with my boss, who was an otherwise amazing boss in all respects.
so she keeps going on and on and finally she says something about matt dillon and i say “wait, do you mean james spader?” and she finally describes the plot. “oh!” i say, flooded with relief.
“what film did you think i meant?” she asks.
“oh just some jg ballard adaptation by david cronenberg…it’s very good, but, uh, it has a lot of mature themes.”
a few years later she ended up seeing it and thanked me for the recommendation.Report
That is hilarious! And yea, in your position I too would have been wondering ‘how do I navigate this without some kind of outreach from HR?’Report
When I read this graph:
There are hardly any people in this world, and the ones who are left have been changing their bodies in adaptive ways to a mysteriously threatening environment. We’re told that physical pain has almost entirely vanished and are introduced at the beginning of the film to a child who apparently eats plastic. Yet, we have no idea what could have happened. It’s as if there was a cataclysmic apocalypse that no one finds worth mentioning anymore.
My immediate thought was Cronenberg meets The Road.
And then a graph later I see it stars Viggo Mortensen. Of course it does!
Will definitely check this out.Report
Yeah, there was a story that Viggo was a little reluctant to play the starring role in this one, which struck me as amusing because it really is a classic Viggo Mortensen role. I mean, it’s not like he’s going to be up for a ton of rom coms at this point.Report
It is a classic role for him but it also falls into the movie cliche of having the female lead be much, much, younger than the male lead. Viggo Mortensen is 63. Léa Sedoux and Kristen Stewart are in their early 30s. He is old enough to be their fathers. I find that kind of disappointing.Report
Eastern Promises is still my favorite Croneberg movie but I’m told this is an outlier take.Report
The nude sauna fight definitely has to be one of the wilder things that’s ever made it into a mainstream movie.Report
It’s probably his best-made movie by quite a bit. I’ve definitely known people who say it’s their favorite of his movies and I do get why. He’s definitely been improving as a filmmaker over the past few decades.Report
Although, now that I say that, Maps to the Stars is *not* a step up from Eastern Promises or A History of Violence.Report