Cronenberg Afterwa(o)rd: “Crimes of the Future”

It’s fortuitous that Cronenberg’s latest film opened shortly after I finished a piece on his first four features (and his two featurettes). Having early works in mind when you look at current work is instructional and actually a lot of fun if you are familiar with most of an artist’s oeuvre. 

“Fun” may not be a word people typically associate with David Cronenberg, but frankly, I do find engaging with his work fun. He can be opaque, relatively demanding, but he is equally capable of injecting biting humor into his work and frankly, the visual and sound design of his films will keep you engaged, if nothing else. To be sure, there may be scenes of intense violence or grotesquerie, but these serve the material so well, and are executed often flawlessly. 

It has been a bit over twenty years since Cronenberg dealt explicitly with his older themes of physiologically liminal spaces, environmental catastrophe and humanity’s adaptation to it, and the very questioning of what being human is and who gets to decide it. Is that a lot? Sure! You bet your ass! And “Crimes of the Future” is chock full of rumination on all those elements. 

As with much of his work, the various political entities that populate his films and their attendant intrigues are secondary to building up suspense and more integral to acting as thematic structural supports. I mention this at the outset because his latest feature is full of potential

Maybe not everyone’s idea of fun.
An example of the kind  of body mod
performance art that ‘s the rage in the future.

cross/double-cross plot points and they don’t work as elements to ratchet up dramatic tension so much as plot points to ask questions. Sometimes that’s even more fun. Seriously. 

“Crimes” finds Viggo Mortensen and Lea Seydoux as a performance art duo Saul Tenser and former surgeon Caprice. He grows new organs that later prove to have nascent systemic functions but in the moment are harvested as part of live performance for a rapt audience. We are introduced to Saul and Caprice as he wakens in a suspended biomorphic cradle, rather like an infant in a pod that could be either botanical or arthropodic.

Tenser seems to be in pain as he wakens, but we find that pain is one of the sensations that fewer and fewer people are feeling in this era. We also discover that humanity seems to be evolving new organs and there is an agency that is particularly concerned that this needs to be kept in check. After all, what if people are evolving away from being human? Or is the threat more about becoming more than human? The former is voiced, the latter is implied. 

The implications are what drive the spoken moments in the film; for all that Cronenberg’s films traffic in fairly dense symbolism and often oblique dialog, it’s in the quieter moments when the weight of the unspoken or unseen (often some action that takes place offscreen or between scenes) that inform the content of the work. “Crimes” is no exception and proves to be a good example of Cronenberg’s semiology, for lack of a better term.

So when did mankind start developing new organs like this? It began with an eight year old boy Brecken, who could consume and digest plastics and other synthetics. The film begins with his mother smothering him to death. When Saul interviews her in prison, she claims that the child was a monster and left the corpse to be discovered by her husband, Lang Dotrice who later approaches Saul about performing a public autopsy on Brecken as both performance and political statement. 

Cronenberg’s future is not quite as dystopic as some we’ve seen, but rot abounds. Buildings are in various stages of decay, and the club scenes are held in cavernous sets that could be subterranean grottos. In fact, that’s one of the more striking details; so many of the interiors are fairly spacious and open and give a sense of a vast interiority. Despite the decay, there is an expansiveness to the spaces inhabited by Saul and Caprice and though more populated with objects, by the offices of the National Organ Registry and the maintenance workshop of two women who work on Tenser’s bed and other apparatuses.

As with “eXistenZ”, there is less to recount, in terms of plot, than thematic investigation. Saul and Caprice are on the vanguard of surgery as art (and sex: “surgery is the new sex” as one character observes) and this calls back to some of Cronenberg’s earlier works, as well. The difference here is the inclusion of a post-ecological collapse. Cronenberg is very much invested in the question of what we are becoming and one suspects the answers are not necessarily linear. 

On the one hand, there is a segment of the population that holds at bay what humanity is evolving into; the vestigial organs that if left to integrate, are capable of consuming plastic and other synthetic materials. On the other, there are the artists like Tenser and Caprice that push the boundaries of transhumanism for aesthetic purposes and philosophical investigation. But there is also the faction of Lang Dotrice who support the adoption of these organs and the development of whatever the next phase of evolution brings. 

As I wrote that paragraph, it really doesn’t fill out or address the full range of the journey Cronenberg is taking us on. There are also moments of surprising gentleness and the usual Cronenbergian satire. You may or may not laugh out loud, but there are some bits that drew a smile from me, for sure, not the least were most of the interactions between Mortensen’s Saul and Kristen Stewart’s registry agent with a full-on crush on Tenser and his ideas. After she makes her move on him, he apologizes, saying he’s not so good at the “old sex” anymore. 

As with many Cronenberg films, the depth of characters relies much on the performances and everyone here is more than capable of adding nuance to figures that might otherwise fall flat. Seydoux’s Caprice, particularly, in lesser hands might simply appear to be a plot device for cryptic utterances, but she and Mortensen have a fully formed relationship here and we, no less than he, are shocked when she shows up with an altered brow after experiencing surgical enhancement by two other performance artists. 

Lang Dotrice, of all the characters, feels the most sketched-in. Sure, he’s the leader of the movement to allow humans the freedom to grow their organs however. His group manufactures  synthetic/plastic “candy bars” by which they’re known and reviled by the registry (I presume these are regarded as bio-weapons). 

Nevertheless, when he’s assassinated in the third act, it hurts because we have come to understand and even sympathize with what seems to be a not unreasonable idea; shouldn’t humanity be allowed to embrace change? The idea of evolving to have the ability to consume plastic is disconcerting and one wonders at the polemical potential behind this.

In a world polluted by plastics, what would be more logical on Nature’s part than to genetically alter human organisms to consume the crap they make? 

The final scene is Saul Tenser in his “dining chair”, Gigeresque contraption of bone and biomorphic forms, twisting in agony yet again as Caprice attempts to feed him. She gives him one of Lang Dotrice’s bars and his pain subsides as a tear rolls from the corner of his eye down his cheek in an echo from Dreyer’s “The Passion of Joan of Arc” (I was skeptical about this, but apparently, it was intentional).(1) Even then, is Tenser weeping from gratitude? From relief? From fear of the future or from a destabilized sense of who or what he is? 

Cronenberg’s not one for direct answers. Few great artists are and often when they are, there is a didactic element that renders the work less compelling. 

“Crimes of the Future” may not be in the top tier of the director’s work according to some, but for me it is a satisfying entry to his oeuvre. Cronenberg is still asking questions and presenting us with worlds that are only slightly more absurd than the one we inhabit. Very often, they are nowhere near as tragic.

As much as his work is subjected to arguments rooted in the works of Kristeva and Foucault, I cannot help but think of Camus or Sartre. While he may be drawing on odd or somewhat futuristic technologies and social developments, the sense that one’s agency is hemmed in by various organizations and political structures is a recurring challenge to the exercise of that agency. 

We may already live in a Cronenbergian dystopia; I wonder if we could use his films as survival guides. 

Note

1. I don’t know if this is the exact shot Cronenberg had in mind, but it gives an idea of what he was going for.