The voice-over tells us that as a result of this neo-venereal disease, his colleague’s body is creating new organs, each one complex, perfect, unique, but without function. Each time these superfluous organs are surgically removed, new ones immediately regenerate inside his body. The patient has begun to steal these organs since he considers his body a galaxy and these new organs solar systems. He cannot bear to part with them. So he steals them. A nurse calls them his “creative cancer.”
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David Cronenberg’s 2022 film Crimes of the Future shares more than the title with his own earlier 1970 film with the same title. Though mainstream reviews by and large eschew this connection (see RogerEbert.com’s review, for instance), the new film carries two key narrative elements straight from the old film: uncontrolled and abnormal multiplication of cells in the human body into large new, superfluous organs; and a skepticism about the temporal limits of human evolution. For instance, is human evolution over? Can we continue to evolve as a species? What is the direction of this new evolution? The fundamental premise of the new film is very close to the old Crimes of the Future.
Exploring the link between the old and the new Crimes of the Future is in keeping with Cronenberg’s own obsessive preoccupations and narrative compulsions about certain themes and motifs throughout his films from the 1970s to the present. In fact, it is possible to view Cronenberg’s entire body of work, with very few exceptions, as one interconnected work in the manner of an auteur. Cronenberg’s obsessions might be characterized as a deep-rooted, repeated, and insistent exploration of the limits of the human body; the limits of natural evolution; the permeability of the human body, particularly the skin; genetics and human reproduction versus technologically engineered bodies; and the porous borders between the human and the machine.
This is his material, and he has worked it over and over again in his films. Like all great auteurs – e.g., Yasujiro Ozu plumbing the postwar, middle-class Japanese nuclear family frequently in his films – Cronenberg has poked and prodded the human body and its cells, glands, tissues, and tumors repeatedly, trying to get to the truth of it all in all of his films. The results are strikingly singular films that cannot be imitated without giving away their source.
Cronenberg’s narrative compulsions have always shown a preference for the surreal image and the syntax of non-sequiturs, in the manner of Luis Bunuel, and the 1970 Crimes of the Future is perhaps his most Bunuelesque film. The film has no dialogue, only a melancholic voice-over by protagonist Adrian Tripod describing his thoughts and inferences as he wanders through the many empty office buildings and uninhabited outdoors of a nondescript, cold, grey, low-lit cityscape.
The “future” in the 1970 Crimes of the Future is one in which all sexually active adult women have died as a result of a deadly disease, a byproduct of the cosmetics industry. The film has no mature women characters/actors. It is an exclusively homosocial space, except for one little unnamed girl. The infected produce a white foam from their orifices – ears, mouth, nipples. Adrian Tripod obsesses over his disappeared or dead colleague (we are never told conclusively if he is dead or alive) Antoine Rouge, the director of the the House of Skin Dermatological Institute, which treated very rich people with very toxic skin diseases. In one of the film’s most homoerotic scenes, Tripod caresses a young male patient’s breasts, squeezing his nipples, which discharge a white foam that Tripod consumes with characteristic Cronenbergian licking motions. As with all Cronenberg films, the setting is more or less anonymous with no easily identifiable spatial markers. Cronenberg shot and edited the film himself, and the interiors filmed in exquisite deep focus feature long desolate corridors with scarcely any human traffic, large French windows that reflect the emptiness inside and outside, empty stairways, empty offices, and empty cafeterias. Exteriors feature the grounds of various official- looking buildings and structures, empty, desolate, except for the four or five characters that pass through the film.
From the institute of skin diseases, Adrian Tripod visits the Institute for Neo-Venereal Diseases where he meets a colleague, a man completely covered in white bedsheet-like attire. Tripod’s meditative voice-over tells us that his former colleague had contracted a venereal disease from one of his patients, and that once a “fierce sensualist, he has now become a metaphysician.” The voice-over rolls over a series of shots of bottles holding what look like human organs immersed in some kind of liquid medium. The voice-over tells us that as a result of this neo-venereal disease, his colleague’s body is creating new organs, each one complex, perfect, unique, but without function. Each time these superfluous organs are surgically removed, new ones immediately regenerate inside his body. The patient has begun to steal these organs since he considers his body a galaxy and these new organs solar systems. He cannot bear to part with them. So he steals them. A nurse calls them his “creative cancer.”
This neo-venereal disease trope of new organs that grow inside the human body without function as a byproduct of an illness is germane to the 2022 Crimes of the Future. In the new film, many humans, including the central character Saul Tenser played by Cronenberg regular Viggo Mortensen, have developed “accelerated evolution syndrome” where they grow new internal organs of unknown function. Since Tenser and his partner Caprice, played by the French actor Lea Seydoux, are performance artists, they make a living by making the surgical removal of these new superfluous organs part of their “performance art.” Saul Tenser’s accelerated evolution syndrome itself mimics the efforts of the pedophile ring in the old Crimes of the Future that kidnaps a little girl and tries to artificially induce and speed up her puberty so they can impregnate her. In the old film, this monkeying with evolution’s human pace does not pan out. Death trumps evolution. Beware the white foam by-product.
Though the film emphasizes “future,” the visual design of the new Crimes of the Future has an anti-futuristic look and feel. It’s almost as if Cronenberg wants to stop time, turn back the clock, and stop the movement of civilization and retard the arrival of the future. Its world is decisively low-tech and seemingly analog; for instance, Djuna, the mother of the little boy who is murdered, uses a walkie-talkie to communicate. The low-key lighting and the overall production design of the film, the dilapidated seaside town, the government offices of the National Organ Registry with its dusty tomes, and Saul Tenser in his large hooded cloak/coat and his face covered like a monk from the Middle Ages all suggest a post-digital (or is it pre-digital?) future that looks very much like a wasteland left behind by an industrial past reminiscent of the 1980s or 1990s.
This is an interesting change in Cronenberg’s conception of the future in both films. In the old Crimes of the Future, “future” was a decisive consequence of the choices and actions of the present. Future was both a temporal and a spatial fact beyond the present. The new Crimes of the Future intentionally looks like a past that we already know; in some ways, it is almost as if the film is breaking a fourth wall and calling out to the spectator to look at it, see what it shows, and recognize what it already knows. This déjà vu is more a reminder, like a myth, than a warning. The biomechanical bed and chair that the Lifeformware Corporation makes for Tenser suggest the sort of mythical apparatuses that we read about in the Greek legends. Perhaps it is just as well, since the new Crimes of the Future was filmed in Greece, the once glorious home of the ancient Western world.
Typical of Cronenberg, the discourse that holds his films together addresses society’s tenuous relationship with science or pseudoscience, and this remains true for the new Crimes of the Future. Almost all of Cronenberg’s genre films in horror feature a scientist or a pseudoscientist character (who is a stand-in for a scientist character; they perform the same function) who is at once a villain and a victim. This is the role played by Dr. Hal Raglan in The Brood (1979), Dr. Paul Ruth in Scanners (1981), Brian O’Blivion in Videodrome (1983), Dr. Seth Brundle in The Fly (1986), and Dr. Robert Vaughan in Crash (1986), to name a few of the more well-known of these misguided apostles of science and technology in the Cronenberg universe. In the new Crimes of the Future, this discourse is primarily carried by a second narrative that features a “creature-child” named Brecken (Sosos Sotiris) who is able to eat and digest plastic and whose murder at the hands of his own mother sensationally opens the film. As with the old Crimes of the Future, where those afflicted with the Rougeian disease ooze a toxic white foam, this creature-kid Brecken also oozes a white foamy substance that is somehow connected to the plastic that he eats and digests. Thus the “future” alluded to in this iteration in the title is one where humans can eat and digest plastic.
However, the film deceptively makes us follow Tenser and Caprice and their performance art with surgery narrative (including the “surgery is the new sex” motif) for the first half only to bring us with absolutely no warning or ceremony to Lang Dotrice (Scott Speedman), the dead boy Brecken’s father and his strange request to Tenser and Caprice to conduct an autopsy on his son. It is brilliant. At age 79, Cronenberg has perhaps made his most trenchant critique of the hubris of the human variable in the process of natural evolution. At the critical moment in the autopsy of the dead little boy as performance art, the spectators both inside and outside the film are shocked to find that the Brecken merely carries the same collection of unidentifiable new organs in his viscera and not a newly evolved divergent digestive system capable of digesting plastic. This is what his father and his anti-government underground want to prove to the world. This iteration of evolution has created a change in the human digestive system – precisely the fact that the government in the persons of Wippet (Don McKellar) and Timlin (Kristin Stewart) do not want the public to know. They want to hide the fact that this evolutionary change is transmissible through genes, from father to child. They would rather keep the freak show with the new organs going, leave it as fodder for performance art, than admit to a loss-loss. It is Cronenberg at his most poignant.
Thus, the ending of the new Crimes of Future is as tender as it is hopeless and aporetic. Tenser eats a piece of the purple candy bar made of earth’s toxic waste, food that kills those who have not evolved to digest toxins. In an early scene, we see proof of its deadly action. It is still the Darwinian world of the survival of the fittest, but Cronenberg has revealed to us the cost of what survival means in the context of such a macabre feast. In a moment of peak irony, Cronenberg resolves the question of human evolution in our contemporary world with a renewed dystopian conviction as only Cronenberg can. As Tenser eats the candy bar that Caprice feeds him, his fatigued and emaciated body jolts and moves around in pain trying to adjust to the new food item. As he chews the candy bar, Tenser gradually becomes stable and quiet. Tenser’s face relaxes with the beginning of a smile that suddenly stops still in a freeze-frame of uncertainty. Is he digesting that plastic? The future that Mr. McGuire enticed Benjamin with in The Graduate (1967) is still here.
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All images are screenshots from trailers of the films discussed.
