 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 | 🎙️ EPISODE 595: 11.10.22 When I began this journey over a year and a half ago with the one-two punch of Cronenberg's first short features — 1969's Stereo and the original Crimes of the Future (1970) — I had no idea what to expect. I'd only seen a smattering of his movies before, having offered up early reviews of The Brood (Episode 2!) and Scanners (Episode 18) well before this show took form. So this was almost all new to me. What I knew of that 70s and 80s period was the first thing most people think of when they imagine Cronenberg: body horror through fascinatingly beautiful practical FX. And on that front, he delivered almost every time. The early works are a joy, pure fun even when the subject matter is so bleak and dystopian. |
This movie begins with a small child eating a plastic trash basket before getting smothered to death by his own mother (!) ...
And that is one way to start a film! We're dropped into this strange and ultra-dystopian future without any setup. This is a puzzle. Whereas before — even in his last foray into the sci-fi/horror subgenre, 1999's excellent eXistenZ — Cronenberg would have felt compelled to offer SOME context, here we're left to figure it out on our own, at least for a little while.
We're next introduced to one his favorite collaborators, Viggo Mortensen, appearing in his fourth D.C. movie. He plays the performance artist Saul Tenser and we first see this character in what can only be described as an alien walnut bed...
In this time and place, mankind has forged a new symbiotic relationship with biotech devices which assist them in the very core elements of living, like sleeping, and eating...
The practical FX border on the almost crude, almost comical if you don't buy in, but they're perfect for this vibe.
Lest you thought this was going to be totally void of exposition, we're quickly introduced to two members of the "National Organ Registry" who are concerned with / suspicious of / intrigued by what's referred to as "accelerated evolution syndrome," in this case: Saul Tenser's ability to spontaneously grow new organs, which are then surgically removed in front of a live audience as part of he and his partner Caprice's (Léa Seydoux) performance art act. They discuss this insane way of life and its implications...
Every characters' motivations are cloaked in obscurity. This is a world where human pain has almost entirely been eradicated and everyone wants to be a performance artist (lol). It's impossible to glean what the intentions of the National Organ Registry are (they say themselves that they don't even exist) and our principals, Saul and Caprice, have equally vague goals beyond "why not?" It makes deciphering the conflict an act of attrition and that's the point.
Saul and Caprice use an older biotech machine called Sark, originally designed for autopsies, for their performance surgeries. And we get to see it in action next...
The big calling card for Crimes of the Future (among fans anyway) was that it was Cronenberg's return to body horror. And he certainly did not disappoint. This one can be stacked up against any of the classics in that department. The two-person Organ Registry department attend the show and they've strangely transitioned from bureaucrats to fans in a blink of an eye. One of them, Timlin (played with an extreme awkwardness by the great Kristen Stewart), declares, "surgery is the new sex" ...
Timlin is probably the most fascinating and also the most difficult character in the film. While everyone's intentions seem, at best, shrouded, her's feel almost arbitrary. She is tantalized and sickened simultaneously, curious and close to the vest. Ultimately, an agent of chaos. Who's truly working for whom and who wants what are constant questions. We don't so much as get answers but rather more questions.
A subplot involving the father of the murdered boy from the beginning emerges (and eventually merges with the greater plot). Scott Speedman plays candy bar fanatic Lang Dotrice. But not everyone is such a fan...
(That will make more sense later.)
Timlin and partner Wippet (Don McKellar) are visited by an agent from "New Vice" (the fantastically named, Detective Cope) who wants to discuss Saul and this new organ phenomena. They contemplate whether or not the human body and its increasingly strange mysteries can be considered art or not in this meme-worthy scene that Stewart hijacks..
We then catch a greater glimpse of this performance art saturated world: the notorious ear man dances as spectators cut themselves...
That might be the single weirdest thing in the filmography. To see this in a through-line with his two greatest works, Videodrome and eXistenZ, is easy enough. Each film is about an obsessed future: television, video games and the natural conclusion... performance art? It's, at first, a comical notion. But when you step back and consider where we're heading, it really feels like a fitting end. It's at the heart of so many Cronenberg works — from Benjamin Pierce in Scanners to the Rothko-obsessed Eric Packer in Cosmopolis: what is art and why do we feel the need to make it?
There are various threads which seem setup to misdirect or go (mostly) nowhere (Saul's undercover dalliance with the vice cop guy, for example). But the most resonant one begins to take form in the story of Lang and his deceased son. Saul visits the murderer mother in prison...
The boy could digest plastic. His father surgically altered his own digestive system to be able to do this (the purple candy bars from before? they'll kill you if you haven't had your system changed, but the son's evolved naturally on its own. On the heels of the "micro plastics debate" currently swirling around culture IRL, this is a fascinating concept. Lang wants Saul to perform an autopsy on his boy as part of his show, to let the world know what's happening to the human body, the next step in evolution. First, he meets with Timlin to see if she's aware of this development. It gets awkward...
There isn't much connecting this to the 1970 Cronenberg film it shares a name with, although there's some spiritual connective tissue. In that film, the crimes are pedophilia (the entire population of sexually mature women have died off after a plague spurred by cosmetic procedures). Here the actual crimes are more obscure, but they lie somewhere between the lines of the new and old sex. The idea that everything we do and become is a product of our environment and what that means when the future consists of an environment almost exclusively constructed by us: synthetic. While the morals are clear in the first movie, they're anything but here. We see a world where humanity is really confronting the crimes of the past. They're left with a choice whether to adapt, however unnaturally that may seem, or not. It's really neither right or wrong. It just is.
Saul and Caprice meet with Lang who has the boy's body on ice. He explains why he wants them to publicly open up his son. And also, more candy bar chat...
The candy bars are plastic food. Lang is convinced that Saul's natural growths are part of a process of his body changing into something else. That they aren't the cause of his constant discomfort, their removal is. This is later expanded upon...
The plot is esoteric and purposely fleeting but never uninteresting. Saul performs the public autopsy and it does not go as plans. The organs they remove are the marked and engineered apparatus of biotech. Not the naturally unnatural system Lang hypothesized. He leaves the performance and is murdered. Afterwards, Saul goes to the new vice agent looking for answers...
They sabotaged the body and Timlin did the work. This was information they couldn't let escape to the masses. There's an entire system of governmental control which is only ever alluded to and never really seen outside of this single character and his shady connections to the various subjects and players. One of the greatest developments in Cronenberg's work over the years, especially his original screenplays, was how he allowed these shadowy entities to, well, remain in the shadows. Here, he pushes it to the extremes. What are the goals of "New Vice"? The name itself implies that it's a substitute for some other, not-so-distant failure. (Same thing with the National Organ Registry, for that matter.) Gone are the rather intricate and tangible agencies like The Brood's Somafree Institute of Psychoplasmics or Scanners' ConSec. As we move further into the future, the only that's clear is that things get more confusing and more secretive. And it's not that the audience thinks that their solutions are evil or wrong, it's that we don't think they have any answers at all. That they probably don't even understand the questions.
They say there's almost no pain in this world now. But everyone seems so constantly anguished. This is one of Cronenberg's greatest works of contrarianism, perhaps his greatest. Their IS a plague in this infection-less future: one of emotional pain. The movie ends with Saul hooked to his eating chair, choking and in unbearable pain. Caprice unwraps a plastic candy bar, he swallows it as the chair shuts down and... he seems to smile...
And that's that. It's really been a pleasure to do this series for the last 18 months or so, and I hope you've enjoyed it. Onto the next DIRECTOR FOCUS soon.
𝚃𝚑𝚒𝚜 𝚒𝚜 𝚝𝚑𝚎 22nd 𝚒𝚗𝚜𝚝𝚊𝚕𝚕𝚖𝚎𝚗𝚝 𝚘𝚏 𝙲𝚑𝚛𝚘𝚗𝚎𝚗𝚋𝚞𝚛𝚐 – 𝚖𝚢 𝚌𝚑𝚛𝚘𝚗𝚘𝚕𝚘𝚐𝚒𝚌𝚊𝚕 𝚠𝚊𝚝𝚌𝚑/𝚛𝚎𝚠𝚊𝚝𝚌𝚑 𝚘𝚏 𝙳𝚊𝚟𝚒𝚍 𝙲𝚛𝚘𝚗𝚎𝚗𝚋𝚎𝚛𝚐'𝚜 𝚏𝚒𝚕𝚖𝚘𝚐𝚛𝚊𝚙𝚑𝚢. 𝙲𝚕𝚒𝚌𝚔 𝚑𝚎𝚛𝚎 𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝚏𝚞𝚕𝚕 𝚛𝚊𝚗𝚔𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚖𝚘𝚛𝚎...
CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 594 - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 596 ⫸
⫷ EPISODE 594 - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 596 ⫸
Crimes of the Future is a 2022 science fiction body horror drama film written and directed by David Cronenberg. The film stars Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux and Kristen Stewart. It follows a performance artist duo who perform surgery to audiences, in a future world where human evolution has accelerated for some individuals. Although the film shares its title with Cronenberg's 1970 film of the same name, it is not a remake as the story and concept are unrelated. The film marked Cronenberg's return to the science fiction and horror genres for the first time since eXistenZ (1999). It was released on May 23, 2022.
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