Guest post by Chris Forrester.
The king is back, they say, with Crimes of the Future, and he’s promising walkouts. Eight years after his last feature film — Maps to the Stars (2014), then thought of as something of a frustrated sign-off from the once horror titan — just shy of two-and-a-half decades after his last horror film — eXistenZ (1999), a trippy, comic coda to his early mappings of techno anxieties onto human flesh — and more than half a century since his last movie of the same name — more on that, Crimes of the Future (1970), shortly — the master returns with a film as gnarly as his early work and as slippery as what came after. But in spite of its descriptions across the board as a “return” of many sorts — to form, to the genre over which he once reigned supreme, even just (thank god) to filmmaking at all — Crimes of the Future is anything but.
In it, Viggo Mortensen plays Saul Tenser, a performance artist who removes the new vestigial organs grown by his rebelling body in avant-garde live shows (and an instant great in the tradition of protagonist as director avatar). The future that backdrops it is unspecific and unrecognizable: biotechnological advancements have created machinery that renders pain and discomfort nonexistent for most people, but others (Tenser among them) live in a state of constant bio-turmoil. New government entities catalog novel organ growths and political radicals push for acceptance; there is strife over the future of human evolution. The setting is desolate — vaguely European and ominously vacant; it resembles almost nothing in Cronenberg’s past. Rather than a “return” to anything, the film seems a brave step into a new world — and along with his protagonist he considers the artist’s place within it.
The cinema of David Cronenberg feels easily, almost lazily, categorizable into two distinct periods: the body/venereal horror films he made between 1975 (Shivers) and 1999 (eXistenZ), and the non-horror films he made after, from 2002 (Spider) to 2014 (Maps to the Stars). The former group hardly need introduction; among them are stone-cold classics (Videodrome, The Fly, The Brood) and cult favorites (Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch, Crash) and taken together they merit a colorful reckoning with technological anxieties by way of oozy, throbbing venereal horror. The films that come after are more contentious: formally masterful but bloodless by comparison, often cold and dryly funny at the same time, conceptually simple but belied by an underlying complexity of theme and narrative detail; they’re challenging, but absent the familiar genre framework.
Crimes of the Future, then, proves similarly challenging because it retains the slipperiness and dreary rigor of late Cronenberg, but returns quite gleefully, and amusingly, to the fleshy grotesqueries of his horror cinema. Indeed, a number of its greatest pleasures stem from an almost gleefully humorous approach to its sexual and corporeal components: the breakfast chair that jostles Tenser around as he eats for pain relief, the man covered in ears who dances as onlookers criticize his performance, the surgical orifices that become sex organs. Alongside that humor, too, Cronenberg often relishes in the rich plot detail that fleshes out this brave new world, devoting great time to the bureaucratic organizations, terror cells, and capitalist backdrop of Tenser’s artistic struggles. To a viewer only familiar with Cronenberg’s 20th-century work, Crimes of the Future might feel nearly unrecognizable; rather than a return or step backwards, it’s a rebirth.
Also supportive of this reading is the reuse of the title Crimes of the Future, originally given in 1970 to the second of two short films that preceded his theatrically released work, despite the rejection of its original premise. That film was about a dermatologist seeking out his insane mentor after a plague emerging from cosmetic products has wiped out the entire population of sexually mature women. It’s also, notably, the first true body horror film he ever made. The repetition of the title only, then, might suggest both a return to, and abandoning of, Cronenberg’s roots: he might be working in familiar territory, but his perspective and aims are fresh.
Crimes of the Future (1970) offers a loose narrative blueprint of the body horror films that would define Cronenberg’s career in the 20th century: from a mysterious institution emerges a threat not only to the social order or status quo, but also to the sanctity of the human body. Crimes of the Future (2022) flips much of this on its head. The human body has changed in unpredictable ways — and for unknown reasons — and the most notable institutions within the film exist as a response to this, rather than a cause. Each, in its way, grapples with one simple fact: to be human is not what it once was, and our future is thus uncertain.
This backdrop proves a refreshing mode of engagement with the state of the world outside the film. Cronenberg seems disinterested with specific political comments or allegory; rather, his fascinations are chiefly with the place of the artist in an uncertain society, with Tenser as his avatar. It’s a self-portrait in perfect conceptual synchronicity with Cronenberg’s own return to the horror genre after two decades honing a different side of himself, and it cuts just as deep as anything in Videodrome or Dead Ringers. The senior Cronenberg might be aging, but he remains as vital an artist as ever.
Crimes of the Future also draws more directly on the style of acting and character work developed in other contemporary Cronenberg films — the uncanny, non-physical transformations and states of being in A History of Violence, A Dangerous Method, and Cosmopolis especially. Mortensen’s lead turn in the film marks his fourth collaboration with Cronenberg, and it draws on his performances and place in the filmmaker’s oeuvre to fashion him into something of an avatar through which to reflect on Cronenberg’s legacy and place in the contemporary landscape of filmmaking. The Tenser character allows Mortensen to draw quite satisfyingly on the austere sadness that defined his turns in A History of Violence and Eastern Promises, but also the perverse humor of A Dangerous Method. It’s painful, candid, and one of the actor’s greatest performances, full stop.
It’s through this deployment of Mortensen as the aged, withering face of “new Cronenberg” amidst a film and narrative that feels like a similarly austere, modernized iteration of “old Cronenberg” that enables the filmmaker to so thoroughly reflect on himself and his legacy. Tenser seems both an artist ahead of his time, and out of it. He’s respected but no longer universally revered, afraid of change as much as desperately in need of it. As such, the film feels like both a curious, pondering “Have I still got it?” — he very much has! — and an achingly sincere answer to the artist’s eternal question: why make art at all?
The answer is rather simple. Cronenberg is Tenser, the man who still feels pain when those around him seem not to, and making art is quite literally his only means of coping with it. No matter the hurt it takes, he’ll do it for us all to see.
Crimes of the Future is being screened at IU Cinema on August 19 and 20 as part of the New Americas Cinema series.
Chris Forrester worships at the church of Claire Denis (and really wants you to reconsider High Life). Also an admirer of Kelly Reichardt, Wong Kar Wai, and Michael Mann, he’s an IU journalism graduate, a film student at heart, and a lover of genre movies.