Movie Notes: “Crimes of the Future” (2022)

(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…”

Wiki image of David Cronenberg

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.

Viggo Mortensen and Léa Seydoux

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.

Not unheard of- see Stelarc

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!