[David Cronenberg’s latest film, Crimes of the Future, is a
return to the “body horror” genre. It brings back the gross-out
gore that first made his career in the 1970s — but without the
thrills.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

DAVID CRONENBERG’S CRIMES OF THE FUTURE HAS ME MISSING HIS EARLY
STUFF  
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Eileen Jones
June 9, 2022
Jacobin
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_ David Cronenberg’s latest film, Crimes of the Future, is a return
to the “body horror” genre. It brings back the gross-out gore that
first made his career in the 1970s — but without the thrills. _

Still from Crimes of the Future., (NEON)

 

I don’t know how David Cronenberg lost me so completely. I used to
be an admirer back in the old days of _Rabid _(1977), _The
Brood _(1979),_ The Dead Zone _(1983),_ The
Fly _(1986),_ Videodrome _(1983) — especially _Videodrome._ But
somewhere between the time of _Naked Lunch_ (1991)
and _eXistenZ _(1999), his visceral impact — for me, at least —
started waning fast, even as he went deeper into images and set pieces
revolving around gore-and-technology, a subgenre his fans call “body
horror.” And now, decades later, here we are at _Crimes of the
Future — _perhaps the ultimate “body horror” film — and
it’s a complete bore.

I didn’t even find the film particularly gross or disgusting —
oozing fleshy computers and sentient insectoid beds and metallic prods
poking around exposed human organs are now just another day at the
office when it comes to Cronenberg. The reports of people walking out,
presumably sickened, at the Cannes Film Festival, where the film got a
six-minute standing ovation — that’s one more minute than the
ovation for _Top Gun: Maverick _— just go to show that Cannes
audiences are, overall, pretty silly, and probably drunk.

_Crimes of the Future_ is set in a dystopian future in which the
decimated population leaves only people who are mutating and losing
their capacity to feel pain, which makes “desktop surgery” a
common practice. Infection is becoming a thing of the past, resulting
in a drop in basic sanitation so that grubby surfaces are everywhere.
A pair of performance artists named Saul Tensor and Caprice (Viggo
Mortensen and Léa Seydoux) are celebrities showcasing the growth of
life-threatening new organs in Saul’s body, by staging their
surgical removal. Their show brings them to the attention of the
National Organ Registry, which is charting the disease Saul suffers
from, “Accelerated Evolution Syndrome.” The registry is run by a
bureaucrat named Wippet (Don McKellar) and his timid assistant Timlin
(Kristen Stewart), who becomes sexually fascinated by Saul, noting
that “surgery is the new sex.”

A radical group of “plastic eaters” led by Lang Dotrice (Scott
Speedman), whose systems contain enough microplastics to make plastic
a nontoxic food source for them, are also of interest to the Registry
and being hunted by the cops, including Detective Cope (Welket
Bungué) who are trying to control the evolution of the human race.
Dotrice wants Saul and Caprice to do a public performance art autopsy
on his son Brecken — who was born with the capacity to live on
plastic and was murdered by his horrified mother — in order to prove
that there’s nothing to fear in this new evolutionary development.

Cronenberg is attempting an ambitious film grappling with big ideas,
one of which confronts aspects of environmental catastrophe such as
microplastics now found in our flesh and bloodstreams with typical
Cronenbergian nonchalance. Acknowledging
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we’re “kind of destroying the Earth” and regarding it as
unrealistic that we can cleanse the world and ourselves of
microplastics, he argues that we might need “something bizarre to
survive as a species.” As he sums it up humorously, “It’s not
exactly Jonathan Swift’s _A Modest Proposal_, but it kind of is.
It’s like, ‘Let them eat plastic.’”

Cronenberg makes Saul the character in the film who hates his own
mutation, which seems to be destroying his bodily functions, and
resists the rise of the “plastic-eaters.” He’s secretly working
with Detective Cope, narcing on their activities, even as he seems to
cooperate, however grudgingly, with Lang Dotrice’s desire to have
his son publicly autopsied. So Saul and Lang trade position points on
this topic, and Saul and Cope, who’s even more opposed to this new
evolutionary subgroup, talks disturbingly of wiping them all out.

Detective Cope also doesn’t understand how Saul’s organ-growing
art constitutes art. This gives them plenty of opportunity, while
standing in some handsomely composed shot placing them in a grotty
abandoned ruin in the dead of night, to thrash out another knotty
topic: the question of how art is defined. What role does human will
play in its creation, and how is meaningful expression constituted?

This movie is loaded with scenes involving two people standing against
beautifully-lit walls, taking opposed rhetorical stances on these
issues. And because some of these issues are in fact of interest to
me, I naturally wondered why I was checking my phone for the time
repeatedly, though the movie only runs for an hour and forty-seven
minutes.

For balance, it’s worth consulting the views of someone who truly
loves the film, and examines it in detail. Amy Taubin, interviewing
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in _Art Forum,_ is in his view the “right audience” for the
film.  She claims to have “laughed throughout” at its dark wit,
and to have “cried a lot too,” having strongly identified with
Saul Tensor and Caprice, “perhaps the last human couple.” She was
enraptured by the film’s location setting in Athens, Greece, “the
cradle of Western civilization,” and suggests that Cronenberg is
dramatizing the planet breaking down, humanity breaking down, and the
narrative breaking down, becoming “so fragmented that the pieces
barely connect into a plot…”

I admit I didn’t share any of her experience. Didn’t laugh,
didn’t cry, didn’t identify with Saul and Caprice, scarcely
registered the importance of the Greek setting. I found plenty of the
usual kind of plot in operation. If only there had been less didactic
wrangling, less heavy-handed exposition put in the mouths of talented
actors struggling to make their lines sound plausible.

But Cronenberg concurs with Taubin, claiming that the “crumbling”
quality of the film’s narrative is a result of its “coming from
the inside of the body now, as if the new organs that Saul’s body
generates are episodes in a streaming series. Saul is trying to
understand the narrative that his body is telling him.”

I think Cronenberg has lost me, in part, because he started taking
these rather lofty, posh-art-student kind of stances and manifesting
them in his ever more beautifully and slickly produced films. _Crimes
of the Futu_re is like the answer to the question, “Why do people
hate art, or what currently passes for it, as well as self-proclaimed
artists?”

Not only do _Crimes of the Future_’s performance artists swank
around self-importantly, making portentous speeches to each other,
with Viggo Mortensen wearing an absurd black hooded cloak like a
character out of a _Harry Potter_ book, but the director backs them
up with similar rhetoric while promoting it. Though at least he
doesn’t wear the black cloak of a Medieval seer while doing it.

However, I’ve got to acknowledge that representing performance art
as the dominant art form of the future, obsessing the mutating
population, is a bleak dystopian vision indeed.

CONTRIBUTORS

Eileen Jones is a film critic at _Jacobin_ and author of _Filmsuck,
USA_. She also hosts a podcast called Filmsuck
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