Crimes of the Future (2022)

 

To call David Cronenberg one of the greatest living filmmakers would be true but misleading.  He's 79 years old and of the 22 movies he's made, the most well-known are from the 1980s, though his films from the 90s, 2000s, and 2010s are as remarkable as his earlier films. The point is, whatever his role is for the future of cinema was probably defined a long time ago, and the impact of his films would be clear even if he was no longer working.  

Crimes of the Future was originally planned for 2003.  Viggo Mortensen said that Cronenberg "refined" the story he wrote between then and now, but did not say when or how much.  In any case, Mortensen and several film critics saw the film as a return to Cronenberg's "origins."  One review referred to the film as Cronenberg's "foray" into body horror, apparently unaware either of Cronenberg's filmography or what the word "foray" means.

If you are aware, though, you will not be surprised when you see this film.  The human body is altered to the extreme, and the alterations become objects of sexual attraction and a potential basis for radical change in social relationships.  The tools of the future are made of malleable flesh, and merge with their users' biology.  The characters speak almost exclusively in detached conversations about cerebral concepts.  You've seen it all before.

Cronenberg's characters have always enjoyed having unhinged philosophical discussions in quiet monotones.  Cosmopolis and Crash are similarly full of characters who voice their bizarre opinions, and it was because their worlds were insular, and their dialogue was that of people reveling in their status as elites or outsiders.  Likewise, the characters in Crimes of the Future are part of an avant-garde art scene.  This is also an insular world, but not of the same type as what we see in those films.  It has prestige to those outside as well as those inside, and as such, the characters' idiom is a public badge of status, not just a personal badge of honor.

But Crimes of the Future is more obviously political.  Only Cosmopolis outdoes it on that front.  The ways in which bodies are changing seems to arise from industrial pollution.  The film's conception of environmental catastrophe suits a film originally meant for 2003.  The emphasis is on pollution and recycling rather than climate change, which is more salient now than it was back then.  And, more importantly, the perspective we get on the catastrophe is that it's something that threatens everyone's survival.  This is admittedly still a current view, but one that is probably not true.  Climate change will probably not spell the end of humanity.  The problem is that it's not survivable for everyone.  Many people and staggering numbers of nonhuman animals have already died, and many more will die, even if we don't go extinct.  The question is whether anyone not directly threatened will bother to do anything about it.

Mortensen's character, Saul Tenser, is the foremost practitioner of a new kind of performance art consisting of public surgeries that showcase new developments in the human body.  He has a condition such that his body spontaneously grows new organs.  Much is made of how cutting-edge his art is, but in reality he's in the business of keeping things ordinary: his performances are about having his new organs surgically removed before audiences.  Afterward, he dutifully reports his new organs to the government, and lets them medicalize his condition as "accelerated evolution syndrome."  An easily-missed point in this film is that Tenser's art is in fact not very good.

I've read reviews of this film which complained about this: it's too literal, spends too much time bluntly explaining what its events mean.  But there are many films that do this not with the purpose of introducing the themes to the audience, but because the world the film depicts would realistically be populated with the kind of people who would have such discussions.  Their kind of talk is part of Cronenberg's formal apparatus, something meant to affect your experience in a way that can help you see the ordinary world in a different light.  

The question is, does it work?  Do we get anything more out of it if we look at it like this?  I think in some scenes it does.  It works when Tenser attends another surgical artist's performance, but criticizes it for being gimmicky.  It works when Kristin Stewart's character, Timlin, always seems to be running ideas by him, hoping for a reaction.  

Most importantly, it works to the benefit of the film's climax.  Tenser's removed organs return later in the film, lifeless and laid out in a random jumble inside Brecken's corpse when Tenser opens it in front of an audience.  Those with "accelerated evolution" are, with one hand, pushed into the spotlight as symbols of freedom.  With the other hand, they are killed, dissected, and made examples of.  The struggle plays out for Tenser too, but inside his own head as he attacks his own body.  The pathos of this film comes from this pattern of struggle, and in how it destabilizes our sense of business-as-usual in art and in the medical condition of our own bodies.  Whatever you think of the rest of the film, the final shot is the best of the year.  It shows us Tenser's last act of artistic expression, in which he moves past the depiction of suffering and the struggle for some kind of control and portrays, simply, the happiness of someone with a nonstandard biology.