Crimes Of The Future

 

Crimes of the Future (2022)

Dir. and written by David Cronenberg

Starring Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, Kristen Stewart

 

CRIMES OF THE FUTURE has been billed as a return to form for director David Cronenberg (JASON X), his first relapse to his "Baron of Blood" body-horror roots since  back before the turn of the millennium. And I mean, there’s definitely some truth in that; this is unmissably, unmistakably a return to the aesthetic of slimy, gnarled bio-mechanical mutation that he has been toying with, on and off, since at least 1970's um, CRIMES OF THE FUTURE (despite having identical titles, the films are apparently unrelated). And I mean, it’s got all the classic Cronenberg moves. It's almost a Greatest Hits album! There's goopy bodily transmogrification à la THE FLY, bio-mechanical synthesis evoking eXistenZ, the squirmy surgical invasion of VIDEODROME, the perverse, subterranean sexual fetishization of deformation from SHIVERS, RABID, DEAD RINGERS and CRASH, the lurking sense of subversive, clandestine conspiracy from SCANNERS and NAKED LUNCH. And to that list of influences, it adds… not a whole lot. Indeed, to a longtime Cronenberg fan this might actually seem a little quaint, more a Crime Of The Past than the future, pushing the boundaries of 30 years ago but more comfortingly familiar than disturbingly transgressive when viewed from the year 2022.

Which is why it matters a great deal that although the method is a familiar --even nostalgic-- one for Cronenberg, the motive is entirely different. What was once the province of grubby, perverse little mindfuck thrillers has itself mutated into something far stranger and less classifiable, retaining something vaguely recognizable as a thriller structure flitting around the margins somewhere, but letting itself drift into far less familiar waters tonally. It is at its core, I think, something like a romantic comedy --though such a ridiculously dry and bleak one that this could hardly be called obvious or indisputable-- which is more interested in examining (and sometimes satirizing) the transformative nature of art than it is in playing its central premise for anything remotely resembling thrills.

Still, there’s something like a genre structure knocking about. It’s unambiguously a Sci-Fi film, for starters, set in an unspecified shambolic, run-down future. The first image of the film shows us a child playing on the beach next to a giant overturned cargo ship, which tells us all we really need to know about what kind of world this is: one in which some major civilizational collapse has occurred, but either long enough ago or slowly enough that the humans grifting along in the aftermath have come to take it entirely for granted. The ubiquitous decay found everywhere in the movie’s design (and especially in the sets) evokes a familiar post-apocalyptic aesthetic… except that one doesn’t get the sense here that there has been a specific, identifiable apocalypse; more like people just gave up on maintaining their world, and it gradually rotted away around them while they retreated into a catatonic haze of amnesic detachment, the crashed cargo ship not the result of a sudden nuclear conflagration so much as its crew simply abandoning any attempt to steer it and wandering off. It is a portrait of a society not so much dying as already dead, grinding on only out of simple, mechanical inertia. The empty shell of civilization putters on --there are government bureaucracies, cops, corporations—but a sense of purposeless entropy pervades everything, casting these pursuits as meaningless rituals which persist only out of the complacency of those involved, too checked-out to bother resisting the accumulated momentum of the past, which is gradually winding down of its own accord in any case. A phrase from THE DARK CRYSTAL comes to mind, there referring to the marginalized race of Mystics, but just as applicable to the humans of CRIMES OF THE FUTUE: a dying race, numbly rehearsing the ancient ways in a blur of forgetfulness. The inhabitants of this future feel utterly alienated from the world, their futile play-acting lacking even an emotional connection to the bygone past they’re half-heartedly acting out. That latter fact feels particularly significant here – despite the evidence all around them of a catastrophic decline, no one in the film seems to harbor any belief that it would be possible to reverse. The hubristic glories of the past are as omnipresent but remote as the gods themselves, and the conflict here is entirely between the forces that seek to chart a path to an entirely new future, and those who will savagery fight to defend the miserable status quo.

Our protagonist, as it turns out, fits neatly into neither category, though he may embody both. He is Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen, PRISON), a “Performance Artist” who, along with his partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux, THE FRENCH DISPATCH) has a wildly popular act. To explain what that act is requires a little more backstory. One other thing about this strange future, you see, is that the human body itself is changing. Most humans no longer feel physical pain –Saul is a rare exception—and are no longer susceptible to disease, both facts which would seem ideal, utopian even, but here just serve to further alienate people from their lives and bodies. But humans are changing in other ways, too – many people are experiencing strange and seemingly random mutations. The government is extremely suspicious of those with “accelerated evolution syndrome,” and many reactionary citizens are zealously hostile; in the opening scene, we witness a disgusted mother murder her son when she catches him using a newly-evolved digestive system to consume plastic. But of course, anything that gets The Man this riled up is going to intrigue the counterculture crowd. And so we return to our “Performance Artists’” act: Saul is constantly growing new organs (if I understand correctly, these were originally duplicate organs, but have recently begun to manifest as unique and never-before-seen organic structures, and maybe even whole organ systems). His act is that Caprice carefully tattoos these organs as a means of categorization, and then removes them during live surgeries for awed crowds. The official line is that their act is a sober warning about the horror of genetic mutants. But of course, this being a David Cronenberg film, not-so-secretly everyone is super turned on by it, it’s the most exciting thing going on in this horrible, dead world. “Surgery is the new sex,” mousy bureaucrat/fangirl Timlin (César Award winner Kristin Stewart) whispers to Saul at an afterparty. But their countercultural success comes with a note of danger: they’ve attracted the attention of an underground group fronted by Lang Dotrice (Scott Speedman, “The discount Bradley Cooper”), father of the plastic-eating boy we saw murdered. He has a proposition for a new act, which might have explosive revolutionary potential.

This sounds like thriller territory, and there are a few other spoiler-y wrinkles I haven’t mentioned which might support that impression. But the movie doesn’t pursue any of this with the least bit of vigor. It’s always rattling around in the background, but the pace is so glacial and the mood so elegiac that it never even flirts with excitement. At most, there’s a tendril of that ol’ Cronenberg icy paranoia hanging in the air, but the things the movie seems most interested in are strange little meetings with the various inhabitants of this world, mostly in small groups, having quiet but often rather funny offbeat conversations about what exactly it means to be this kind of “performance artist,” much of which reads pretty easily as Cronenberg directly addressing his own career as a seemingly normal, dignified guy who grows weird, mutant things inside himself and then, with help, removes and displays them for our –what, enjoyment? Edification? Titillation? All of the above, none of it? Is it a courageous act, or perverse folly, or just a meaningless geek show? Is art itself a method of evolution, or is it a purging of our malignant growths so that we can be more fully human? Despite the outré nature of the visuals, this is where the movie wants to go, for better or worse. It’s more LA BELLE NOISEUSE than HELLRAISER (which is not to say there’s no HELLRAISER in there; it does still want to get a rise out of you). 

This is a choice which is not going to please everyone, obviously. Fans of the “Baron Of Blood” lured in by the promise of a return to perverted body horror may find themselves baffled to get exactly that, but in the context of a bunch of semi-comic vignettes and small, intimate emotions which the actors allow to just barely peek out of their meditative stoicism. And the movie is hardly lazer-focused even on that; it’s mainly interested in creating a peculiar sort of mood, letting the somnambulistic editing of Christopher Donaldson (Penny Dreadful, The Handmaid's tale, American Gods) combine with the moody, classical camerawork of Douglas Koch (THE SEXIEST ANIMAL [documentary], Perverts Anonymous: Episodes 1-3) and then drenching the whole thing in the austere, anxious score by MVP Howard Shore (a longtime Cronenberg collaborator going back to THE BROOD, and yet it's still kind of a shock to see him on a tiny-budget movie like this after having done the LORD OF THE RINGS movie and such*). Which is no small thing! Combined with the ragged, post-apocalyptic setting and, of course, the movie's pathological fetishization of grotesque physical disfigurement, and it adds up to a powerfully oppressive, disquieting atmosphere. But not a lot of action.  

And yet, for my money it may just be the most powerful thing Cronenberg's ever done. And it manages that in part by turning our (or at least my -- I don't want to speak for you!) expectations about a Cronenberg movie on its head. Because ultimately, I think this story of fetishistic underground surgery cults and escalating body dysmorphia is actually surprisingly sweet, even optimistic. In fact, it turns the logic of Cronenberg's other bio-horror films entirely around. Whereas SHIVERS, THE BROOD, or THE FLY invite us to view the disintegration and displacement of the human organism with horror, CRIMES OF THE FUTURE sees it as perhaps the only glimmer of hope in a world which has become so horrifically intolerable that the only way forward is to cease being human and become something else entirely. That something else might seem disturbing and shocking to those of us who are stuck in the past, but the past is unquestionably dead here; its decaying corpse is visible all around. Still, there is a future --or can be one-- if we are simply willing to change, to become something completely new. Not that there aren't still forces, even in a society rotted practically to the bone, that won't work hard to make sure that we die rather than change.

If one wants to find a straightforward metaphor in this –and there’s no particular need to do so, but the film certainly leaves itself open to it—it isn’t hard to come up with one. Or many, depending on what (or who) you think the new organs represent, and the degree to which you want to assume this scenario is or isn’t essentially autobiographical for Cronenberg. Like all movies with a vague revolutionary metaphor at their center, it’s easy to project whatever you want on it. If you see “accelerated evolution syndrome” as a metaphor for burgeoning gender fluidity, for example, it’s not hard to make the plot hew pretty snugly to that interpretation, making it a paean to a bold new world which might be scary and disturbing to those stuck in their old ways, but will ultimately allow for a more functional world where people can be true to themselves. Of course, if you want to imagine the movie’s underground revolutionaries as patriotic and persecuted Q Anon believers, it wouldn’t be hard to do that, either. In my formative years (perhaps not coincidentally, when this script was originally written) the social left felt so disenfranchised that we saw basically any revolutionary concept as intrinsically “our” story. Since then we’ve managed to stake out enough ground in the middle that it seems like the hub of revolutionary fervor has shifted to the reactionary right. I was well on my way to middle age before I ever even considered that neo-Nazis and anti-government Militia types and so on might see their own grievances in the anodyne revolutionary narratives of THEY LIVE, or THE MATRIX.

So does it all mean nothing? Not at all! Whatever you want to place as the central metaphor here, and even if you want to resist that urge entirely, there’s one thing beyond dispute: the movie is a soul-wrenching howl against a world that simply doesn’t work. And that resonates deeply – whatever your politics, don’t we all feel it? Don’t we all feel like Saul Tenser, contorted and uncomfortable, body constantly in revolt, trying vainly to scratch out some kind of feeble existence in a world which never seems the right fit for humans, even as we transmogrify it more and more until it’s hardly fit for anything? For all its offbeat humor and light meta commentary, there’s a crushing and deeply poignant sense here of the of generalized wrongness of every second spent in this fictional world, which feels so uncomfortably close to our own even if it doesn’t much resemble it.

And that, I think, is what makes it such a powerful experience. With the exception of FIRST REFORMED back in 2019, I don't know that I have seen another movie in the last decade that so exactly captured my own experience of this rapidly metastasizing culture  -- so perfectly captures the disquieting brokenness of the world right now, the feeling of utter, irreversible entropy all around on ever side, and both the resigned near-catatonia it triggers, and also the curious feeling of seeing a glimmer of hope in the strange things the young people are into, the things I will never entirely understand or be capable of wholly becoming part of, except that somehow there's something in me that begs to change and grow and find something, anything that works, that doesn't feel fundamentally at odds with the basic facts of existence. Something that doesn’t rely on phony optimism or reactionary nostalgia – a way forward, whatever that may look like. And David Cronenberg, of all fool people, is here with a parable about that very feeling. Once upon a time we told stories about heroes saving the world. Now, faced with a world beyond any meaningful hope of saving, that our very bodies are rejecting, the only thing to do is adapt and survive, and find beauty in that. In a world of plastic, learn to eat plastic. In an inhuman world, stop worrying about trying to be human.

I love that Viggo's the only one who dresses like a Ninja Monk, and everyone is totally cool with it. You know how these "Performance Artists" are.

It's not going to be an easy transition. There are powerful forces who are very comfortable with the miserable status quo and will push back savagely against any attempt to change it. And even if we win, even if we persist, there’s no knowing how this turns out. We don’t know if we’re going to be able to eat the plastic candy bar or not. Some of us won’t make it. And even those of us who do will have to come to terms with a new world that in many ways feels strange, even grotesque, a world where our old aspirations and values and very sense of self are mutated and adulterated and twisted into something unimaginable and new. It is not necessarily a “better” future, by any kind of metric we currently possess – it is, in a way, an admission of defeat, a concession that our hopes and dreams for the kind of world we wanted are really and truly dead, along with the world that spawned them, and that the only hope is to adjust ourselves to the strange and terrible world we have made for ourselves by becoming strange and terrible ourselves. But as bleak a hope as it is, at least it is a hope, a real one – and it’s been a long time since I saw another piece of fiction which offered even that. At some point the Crimes Of The Future cease to be crimes, and simply become the existence of the present, and the young people wonder what we used to be so hung up about, and get down to the business of making their own hubristical assumptions about the finality of their own sense of the world, and condemning their own crimes of the future. And so it goes. The name of this blog is We Are Cursed To Live In Interesting Times. Well, maybe we always have. But rarely have I experienced a movie which felt so achingly close to this particular present.

 

 

PS: Also, what’s up with the voice Viggo is doing here? Is he intentionally trying to do a George C. Scott impression or what?