When it was announced that David Cronenberg would return to the genre that made him a household name amongst horror fans (and, well, the world at large), lots of folks noticed a slight and interesting choice on the director’s part: He was titling the film Crimes of the Future, which shares a title with a (mostly) unrelated project he made as one of his first major forays into the genre. It was an enticing and quixotic proposition that implied, perhaps, some greater design as to what role the movie would play in a fascinating filmography, and I’m happy to say that I have an operating theory as to why he made this choice, though I don’t know if it’s one that people were hoping for. I call shit as I see it (or at least I hope I do), and this feels less like a grand operatic reunion between Cronenberg and the genre at large than it is an ultimate farewell to it. The film’s been stewing for ages — the director originally wanted to make it as early as the ’00s — and it feels like it’s only accumulated meaning with age, and he himself has seen the fruits that his work has brought to this subsection of the medium, no less by siring one of the best modern practitioners within the field (I wonder if most of the folks disappointed by this would be better served by Possessor, which was Brandon Cronenberg’s attempt to claim the family heirloom). There comes a point, at least in some careers, where you’ve outlived provocation and the world around you has changed, specifically because you’ve had influence within it, and this feels like Cronenberg attempting to put these feelings into meaningful artwork.
Crimes takes place in the near future, where successive advancements in technology have essentially eliminated disease and pain itself, and where radical artists, looking to push whatever boundaries there are still left, turn to surgery in order to provoke the masses. One of the most beloved of these performers, Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen), is essentially a mutant: His body grows random new organs, and he’s made a career out of having these “tumors” removed alongside his partner, Caprice (Lea Seydoux), who was a trauma surgeon years before she met him. Together, they perform these surgeries on a modified autopsy machine and present them as performance art pieces, with the tattooed lumps exhibited for all to see in post-performance soirees. Yet Tenser’s also an informant for New Vice, a police department created to manage human evolution in the aftermath of all of this genetic experimentation. When a damaged father (Scott Speedman) comes to Tenser with an offer for the artist to perform an autopsy on his son — a child murdered by his mother after she couldn’t tolerate the fact that he could eat and digest plastic — he puts all of them on a collision course with the worst that this future has to offer everyone. It is, of course, a very Cronenberg film, and I don’t just mean in the sense that there are skeleton pods and herky-jerky devices meant to help those with organ trouble digest their gruel: there’s an operational awkwardness in the interpersonal interactions within his scenes that can occasionally feel languid, and there are aspects of the film’s construction, mainly the digital cinematography, that I personally don’t care much for. Yet it’s really exciting to see Cronenberg return to this wheelhouse with some amount of perspective, steeped in an evolved understanding of his own iconography within the genre.
As the axiom goes, familiarity often breeds contempt, which is why I think that a number of folks will be turned off by how reflexively self-referential this is, though I think they’re missing the point. In a way, the world of Crimes of the Future is a funhouse mirror image of the one presented to us by Cronenberg in something like Videodrome, where overarching forces — be it through government means or corporate ones — attempt to modify humans (and mollify it as well) in order to ensure that they have a modicum of control over the inherent chaos of the world and can ensure the continuity of society. The Spectacular Optical Corporation wants to ensure that our base impulses to look at violent things can be eliminated so that “cultural rot” can be eliminated and the U.S. saved from its darker impulses, whereas the New Vice and its associated government entities wish to preserve humanity itself from the strangeness of evolution, perhaps as a form of mitigation for the damage that they’ve caused over the decades. Cronenberg’s ultimately aware of the futility of such exercises, which is the point of body horror as a whole: Like it or not, the soul, or whatever spectral metaphor that one wants to use to describe the thing that animates the assemblage of sinew and marrow and skin it’s trapped in, is ultimately at the mercy of that same system, and the parallelism between those governing bodies and the protagonists in each of these films is striking when put into some relief. One could argue that Cronenberg never really left body horror after eXistenZ, but merely took it to a macro level, trying to find the rot within the body politic in films like Cosmopolis and Eastern Promises instead of Seth Brundle’s changing microbiome.
Yet the solutions remain the same as they were in 1983. Cronenberg asks us to embrace the chaos of the uncertain future, though Crimes ends on a significantly more uplifting note than James Woods unloading a round into his temple, it’s similarly enigmatic in what exactly it means. There’s plenty for one to chew over within the specifics of the plot itself, and I don’t plan on really going in-depth so as to preserve some of the surprises for your own viewing, but there are notes of tragedy and bliss as represented by the look on one of the actor’s faces, each of which I believe compliments the period that the artist currently finds himself in. On the one hand, he’s spent the last decade trapped in a sort of stasis, with the cultural winds proving to be too difficult for him to raise a sail to get out back to sea, and on the other, he’s never been more relevant. Just think of how many times in the past decade you’ve heard his name evoked when anybody puts out a moderately gory and fleshy scene in any horror film in the last decade without really considering whether or not said scene is truly “Cronenbergian” (perhaps the only filmmaker to truly get within shouting distance of his particular talents is Julia Ducournou, who attempts to explore the family unit with her films in a similar fashion to how Cronenberg seeks to deconstruct society itself). If Tenser really is a metaphor for how Cronenberg sees himself as a heterodox artist in a stagnated and anesthetized culture, then the suggestion one may walk away with at the end of Crimes is that Cronenberg’s gifts to the world, and the process that he goes through in order to present them to us, may ultimately be holding him back from a true sort of satisfaction. If this is to be his last body horror film (and he hasn’t made a statement suggesting as much), I can’t think of a more interesting statement than for him to make, placing the film in line with something like Eastwood’s Unforgiven as meta-commentary on an artist’s career.