When it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, David Cronenberg made headlines because viewers booed and even walked out during its screening. In the UK, it was described by a critic as "beyond the bounds of depravity," and when it premiered in the country, the Daily Mail demanded that it be banned. The film in question? The 1996 symphorophiliac masterpiece Crash, which follows a jaded couple's obsession with and immersion into a cult fetishizing car crashes.
Something similar took place recently with Cronenberg's latest feature, Crimes of the Future. Before its premiere, and before anyone had even seen it, the film was marketed as something that would elicit primal revulsion and ire from audiences. Cronenberg expected people to walk out within the first five minutes, and people apparently did. In a climate of a relatively tame mainstream, it was something to get excited about. We might be getting some good old-fashioned Cronenberg body horror, and audiences rejoiced.
In replicating buzz created around Crash, Crimes of the Future can't escape being compared to it. For all its outrage marketing, Crimes of the Future doesn't live up to its hype.
While Crash — and many of Cronenberg's other greats, like Dead Ringers — is a sprawling tale like an octopus with limbs flailing that you can never pin down, with a narrative arc that coalesces in the mind after some time away from it, Crimes of the Future is much easier describe, as it takes pains to explain itself throughout. The film takes place in the near, garbage-laden future, with flies constantly buzzing just out of frame, capturing the human population amid a Darwinian shift: as everyone spontaneously grows extraneous organs, some bodies are forced, by human intervention, to complement the synthetic environment, while others are superficially mutilated for aesthetic reasons as surgery becomes hyper-privatized, increasingly mechanized and highly fetishized.
Viggo Mortensen is famed performance artist Saul Tenser, who can grow organs apparently at will. His art is simply the act of having himself cut open by his professional partner, Caprice (Léa Seydoux), and having the unnecessary organ extracted. His art is the moment of being observed as his insides are exposed and his viscera removed.
All beings in this world are unable to eat organic food. The film's drama follows the murder of a boy whose digestive system craves and can process plastic. Saul is dragged into the mystery swirling around the boy's death, as the various rival parties involved come to him for his surgical expertise and his curious bodily abnormalities, in order to either spearhead or curb the next stage of human evolution.
Classic Cronenbergian themes of bodily mutation, voyeurism and sensuous masculinity are all here. In the future this film paints, surgery is the new sex — the only kind of satisfying penetration is that of scalpel through skin, and the only fluid that flows and is shared and smeared is blood.
The film offers obvious commentary on climate change, and whether people can naturally evolve to fit a world that has escaped the organic bounds of evolution. The was also explores surgery and what it means to make art, half-heartedly plucking the frayed edges of a conversation more satisfyingly pursued in Dead Ringers. Here, surgery is a tool that not only mediates evolution, but could soon be the only activity that offers meaningful human connection. These arguments are apparent because the film's dialogue takes pains to make them clear. Again and again we hear that "surgery is the new sex." While Crash made it difficult for viewers to understand what Cronenberg was going for, his theses are clear in Crimes — making this one of his most accessible, least offensive works.
In one scene, as Tenser walks through an exhibition of mutilations, a woman is having an aesthetic, superficial surgery performed on her, she groans and moans with pleasure, but the camera passes over her in favour of a conversation between characters. It seems that dialogue holds more currency in this film than the visuals.
Ultimately, Crimes of the Future is a curiosity in Cronenberg's oeuvre — a palatable introduction to a genre filmmaker, but far from one of his most outrageous pieces.
(Sphere)Something similar took place recently with Cronenberg's latest feature, Crimes of the Future. Before its premiere, and before anyone had even seen it, the film was marketed as something that would elicit primal revulsion and ire from audiences. Cronenberg expected people to walk out within the first five minutes, and people apparently did. In a climate of a relatively tame mainstream, it was something to get excited about. We might be getting some good old-fashioned Cronenberg body horror, and audiences rejoiced.
In replicating buzz created around Crash, Crimes of the Future can't escape being compared to it. For all its outrage marketing, Crimes of the Future doesn't live up to its hype.
While Crash — and many of Cronenberg's other greats, like Dead Ringers — is a sprawling tale like an octopus with limbs flailing that you can never pin down, with a narrative arc that coalesces in the mind after some time away from it, Crimes of the Future is much easier describe, as it takes pains to explain itself throughout. The film takes place in the near, garbage-laden future, with flies constantly buzzing just out of frame, capturing the human population amid a Darwinian shift: as everyone spontaneously grows extraneous organs, some bodies are forced, by human intervention, to complement the synthetic environment, while others are superficially mutilated for aesthetic reasons as surgery becomes hyper-privatized, increasingly mechanized and highly fetishized.
Viggo Mortensen is famed performance artist Saul Tenser, who can grow organs apparently at will. His art is simply the act of having himself cut open by his professional partner, Caprice (Léa Seydoux), and having the unnecessary organ extracted. His art is the moment of being observed as his insides are exposed and his viscera removed.
All beings in this world are unable to eat organic food. The film's drama follows the murder of a boy whose digestive system craves and can process plastic. Saul is dragged into the mystery swirling around the boy's death, as the various rival parties involved come to him for his surgical expertise and his curious bodily abnormalities, in order to either spearhead or curb the next stage of human evolution.
Classic Cronenbergian themes of bodily mutation, voyeurism and sensuous masculinity are all here. In the future this film paints, surgery is the new sex — the only kind of satisfying penetration is that of scalpel through skin, and the only fluid that flows and is shared and smeared is blood.
The film offers obvious commentary on climate change, and whether people can naturally evolve to fit a world that has escaped the organic bounds of evolution. The was also explores surgery and what it means to make art, half-heartedly plucking the frayed edges of a conversation more satisfyingly pursued in Dead Ringers. Here, surgery is a tool that not only mediates evolution, but could soon be the only activity that offers meaningful human connection. These arguments are apparent because the film's dialogue takes pains to make them clear. Again and again we hear that "surgery is the new sex." While Crash made it difficult for viewers to understand what Cronenberg was going for, his theses are clear in Crimes — making this one of his most accessible, least offensive works.
In one scene, as Tenser walks through an exhibition of mutilations, a woman is having an aesthetic, superficial surgery performed on her, she groans and moans with pleasure, but the camera passes over her in favour of a conversation between characters. It seems that dialogue holds more currency in this film than the visuals.
Ultimately, Crimes of the Future is a curiosity in Cronenberg's oeuvre — a palatable introduction to a genre filmmaker, but far from one of his most outrageous pieces.
