With such a title, one would think Crimes of the Future might show a more escalated version of cyber warfare or even technological advancements in elder financial abuse and/or general conning. But no, the real crimes, it appears, are those against the human body. The very sort that humans have brought upon themselves. And David Cronenberg is just the man to describe how horrific these bodily crimes (against nature) can be. Repurposing somewhat the concepts he explored in his original 1970 film of the same name (back when he was just a wee bairn), his 2022 edition is sure to cause a mixture of both fascination and revulsion—a reliable combination of the “Cronenberg formula.”
The full-circle quality of choosing to film the narrative with Greece (specifically Athens) as its backdrop also lends a portentous feeling to the Crimes of the Future universe. For not only did Western civilization have its roots in Greece as we now flash forward to the future to see it in total decay, but Cronenberg has his own roots in what is now called body horror, which he’s decided to return to with a vengeance. There’s also something telling about him titling the movie after one from the very beginning of his career, as though he knows his number is up and he wants to look to the past as part of his anticipation of everyone’s inevitable future: death.
But not all are impressed by the discussion Cronenberg wants to contribute to, with rags like The New Yorker mocking that its moniker ought to be Themes of the Past. For yes, the fear of what technology could and will do to our bodies has been around since the Industrial Revolution. And the movie has a decidedly late 90s feel in its imagining of the future. Though that’s likely, in part, due to the fact that Cronenberg started the script decades ago, around the time eXistenZ was released. And, undeniably, many of the themes explored in eXistenZ are wielded in Crimes of the Future as well in terms of a battle between what’s natural versus what humans have allowed to happen to themselves in order to conform to so-called “advancement.”
Like an institution out of George Orwell’s 1984, the National Organ Registry has cropped up in the wake of this type of human “advancement.” As we see at the beginning, such “progress”/bodily evolution means that certain people have been born with an entirely different digestive system. One that allows them to consume toxic and industrial waste without any issue. In fact, it’s preferable to that “natural shit.” But not everyone left in the dystopia is open to this form of “evolution,” of a variety that conforms to the new world order that humans hath wrought. Those averse to entirely new internal systems include the likes of National Organ Registry workers Wippet (Don McKellar) and “attractive for a bureaucrat” Timlin (Kristen Stewart). It is the latter who creeps out Saul’s (Viggo Mortensen) performance art partner in crime(s of the future), Caprice (Léa Seydoux). Something about Timlin’s overt obsessiveness that she tries to pass off as aloofness rightly gives Caprice a proverbial “bad vibe.”
A feeling that’s compounded by Timlin showing up to one of the “performances” by Saul and Caprice (because things have become so dire on the entertainment front that people will pay to see surgeries in Victorian-style galleries—yet it’s almost hope-giving to artists who might be fearful of dystopia seeing that, given no other option, the hoi polloi would finally be forced to look at tangible art again—yes, that’s shade at NFTs). After watching the extraction of his newly-evolved organ, Timlin can’t help but approach Saul to tell him with lascivious gusto, “Surgery is the new sex.” And sure, there are obvious visual parallels between the insertion of a scalpel into a part of the skin that will cause its owner to let out a groan of some variety, even if pain is no longer felt. For, like self-mutilators, the logic in future inhabitants of the world getting their jollies from being sliced up seems to be a testament to the desire to “just feel something,” however faint of a glimmer it might be.
Indeed, part of the reason human internal systems have started to evolve is because of the species’ present numbness to pain, without which, the body can’t anticipate needs as it was once designed to. This, clearly, seems to be a statement on the particularly American obsession with painkillers, which has offed many a pop star in recent years (see: Michael Jackson, Prince). And, of course, the likes of Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland knew all about the many ins and outs of numbing.
So it is that Saul later misquotes Timlin with, “Sex is surgery.” Caprice reminds him that’s not how she said it. But no matter, she’s down to prove the platitude by getting on her knees, unzipping his stomach and “sucking him off.” “Don’t spill,” he urges while on the verge of something like orgasm. This is one of the two moments where we see them being “intimate” in this new-fangled manner—the other time involving lying on a surgery bed together and getting their skin sliced at random as they hold one another. Yes, the future is fucked (complete with the disturbing furniture that Cronenberg imagines will come with it).
And yet, despite being “futuristic,” as mentioned, there is something decidedly quaint about the visual style in which the story is portrayed. Even in terms of the idea that we’re supposed to buy into performance art making a miraculous comeback just because the internet is gone (?). Granted, when another performance artist attaches all manner of ears to his body while his mouth and eyes are sewn shut (an ultimate form of sensory deprivation, if you will), one can understand the sudden renewed appeal. Nonetheless, it’s almost as though we’re still in the Crash era of Cronenberg, complete with technology that looks decidedly 90s. As though Cronenberg had imagined it from a 90s perspective (and, actually, in the “original” Crimes of the Future, said “future” was set in 1997).
Cronenberg’s enthrallment with the commingling of human flesh and the cold, hard metal signified by technology is rebooted here from J. G. Ballard’s Crash, which he managed to bring to life onscreen in a way no one thought possible (same as he did with William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch). Just as he has managed to bring to life concepts in Crimes of the Future that should theoretically be difficult to reveal onscreen. And yet, by keeping the specifics of this future society vague, Cronenberg is able to achieve quite a bit by doing very little.
After all, this is more about themes than visuals, believe it or not. For instance, the idea of artists deliberately seeking out pain to inspire their work comes up a few times… but one tends to think this veers a little too much on the Woody Allen side of dialogue. There is, however, a certain allegory about how the true and pure artist gives absolutely all of himself—mind and body—to the work. In this regard, Cronenberg further explained of his lead character, “Tenser is really an avatar, a template or model of the artist who is actually giving everything he could give, opening himself up and giving what is the deepest, most intimate part of himself hidden inside. He’s offering it up to his audience and therefore being incredibly vulnerable to ridicule, to rejection, to misunderstanding, to anger. And to me, that is the model of a true passionate artist.” Who should know better than Cronenberg, who has clearly done the same repeatedly over the course of his controversial career?
At a certain moment during one of the “performances,” a TV screen (again, a very 90s-looking one) displays the words: BODY IS REALITY. This was a phrase that was created when Cronenberg initially started working on the script decades ago, spurred by the “mutations” in his body as a result of aging. As he stated, “I could see changes in my own body, and even then, I had a lot of friends who had died. You start to think about your vulnerability and mortality. I’ve always been basically an atheist and the understanding is that we’re here for a short time. We are a body. Body is reality” (Megan Thee Stallion would tend to agree, based on her own sonic opus called “Body”).
But in this new evolved world, it has become a form of unreality as it mutates and adapts to the unnaturalness of what humans have done to Earth. As a victim of Accelerated Evolution Syndrome himself, Saul is game for trying to make it “mean something.” Which has been the job of the artist since time immemorial. And yet, seeing the way humanity is going, it’s a challenge for even the most brilliant of artists to find meaning in this decay; instead, as Caprice phrases it, they’re “creating meaning out of emptiness.”
The notion of the government trying to mandate people’s bodies in the future is also, unfortunately, all too relevant in the present. Even if, so far, it’s only affecting women. Cronenberg remarked, “The movie is about control of the body by [a] police state, so it spookily… becomes relevant in the U.S. right now because of the Roe v. Wade decisions and so on.”
With the internal being so highly regulated, maybe that’s one reason why the notion of “external surgery” becomes even more appealing in the future as well, with plastic surgery taking on a new form via outright facial mutilation. At one point, Caprice approaches the subject of such a procedure and tells her that watching it performed on her gave Caprice the urge to do the same. The woman replies that all it requires is “being open” to new things. Cut to Caprice with moon-shaped nodules on her forehead. This, too, speaks to the current fixation that women in particular have with altering their face and bodies, typically in a bid to remain youthful.
But what does youth really matter amid the environmental breakdown of the planet? Even if humans could adapt to it, who would want to live in such bleak conditions? Well, sadly, a lot of people, as proven by 28 Days Later. People like Lang Dotrice (Scott Speedman, who, like Paul Rudd, never really gets older). The leader of an underground coterie of plastic and toxic chemical-eating folks that want to spread their revolution. This includes Lang spawning a child named Brecken (Sozos Sotiris), who is the first to be born with an entirely new digestive system. “Organic,” as it were. As opposed to manipulated the way Lang and his cohorts have done to their own internal organs.
Brecken’s mother doesn’t much care for that, seeing her child as a monster and suffocating him within the first few minutes of the film. Of this plot point, Cronenberg elaborated, “It’s like Jonathan Swift’s ‘Modest Proposal,’ where he suggested the solution to the Irish famine was that the Irish eat their children. My satire is a little more gentle, saying, ‘Well, maybe the solution to plastic pollution is that we teach our bodies to feed on plastic and take nutrients from plastic.’” A chilling thought indeed, and one that ignores the real problem, which is that humans can’t resist the urge to destroy the very planet that nourishes them. But it won’t for much longer if and when it continues to be treated in this fashion.
So is Crimes of the Future a commentary on what we’ve done to Mother Nature and a rallying cry to stop at once? No, not really. Cronenberg (and any other realist) knows that it’s already too late for that, remarking, “When Darwin talked about evolution, he wasn’t talking about it leading gradually to something superior. Evolution does not mean going to something better, it means something different.” The question is, who among us really wants to live in this kind of “different”? If the worldwide uptake in suicides is an indication, it would appear the answer is: not everyone.
