The Spectacle of Resignation
Crimes of the Future, 2022
Regi: David Cronenberg
Med: Lea Seydoux, Viggo Mortensen, Kristen Stewart, Don McKellar, Scott Speedman
På kino fra 4. november
How does one talk about a David Cronenberg film without talking about the body? The auteur’s career-long motif endures in both the literal and the abstract, servicing as a mirror for whichever existential dilemma he chooses to untangle. Whether it be a hellish metamorphosis from man to insect or an exploration of intergenerational trauma through the lens of Hollywood, flesh serves as a membrane with which Cronenberg communicates. It will then come as no surprise that Crimes of the Future, his first feature in eight years, leverages the director’s ongoing predispositions for a dour and melancholic rumination on a crumbling world. The bombast and gross-out splatter that characterised his earlier work is long gone. The organs and viscera have instead been weaponised for some thoughtful reflection on both what exactly we have done to our planet as well as the filmmaker’s own career.
Cronenberg makes no bones about his fears surrounding the climate crisis. The film’s first image is of a young boy named Brecken quietly playing on a beach with a capsized cruise ship laying just behind him. Shortly thereafter, we see him eating a plastic garbage can, to the horror of his mother. Just after that, she smothers her son to death with a pillow. That’s one way to cope with the guilt and grief of a decaying earth: to put the coming generation out of their misery.
Brecken, we learn, is the next step in humanity’s evolution. For some, this means the digestive tract can accept harmful – even poisonous – materials. For others, such as Saul Tenser (Mortensen), new and never-before-seen organs can grow within them. Saul and his partner Caprice (Seydoux) take advantage of his so-called “accelerated evolution syndrome” as a performance art duo, growing and removing said organs in front of live audiences. If the opening act of infanticide is a rebuke of our culpability for climate change, then Saul represents an acceptance by way of nihilistic peace. Using special apparatuses to eat and sleep, he’s resigned to a life of discomfort, and even found a way to profit off of it.
Cronenberg doesn’t spend too much time asserting his pessimistic stance on the not-too-distant-future before proposing questions evidently much more personal to him. After setting up other key players in this fatalistic yarn of erotic espionage – Timlin and Wippet (Stewart and Mckellar) from the National Organ Registry and the father of the father of the slain boy (Speedman) – we’re left wondering what role art plays in a world void of outward inspiration or hope. The question is not how can we forgive ourselves? – but instead, what should we do with ourselves?
It’s difficult to divorce this anxiety from the 79-year old filmmaker’s own career. His return to body horror, in the more blatant sense of the term, comes just one year after another contribution to the subgenre he pioneered, Julia Ducournau’s Titane (2021), won the Palme d’Or. Cronenberg’s relationship to Cannes has been a storied and at times contentious one, with six of his films playing in competition and none winning a competitive prize. With his latest film, he seems keen on reaffirming himself as the master of the grotesque. As part of their performances, Caprice tattoos each of the new organs Saul grows, a personal signature on their shared body. Cronenberg clearly feels a level of ownership over legacy. At the same time, he knows he’s getting older.
His 2021 short The Death of David Cronenberg – which he co-directed with his daughter Caitlin – shows an unabashed introspection, with the filmmaker confronting, kissing and embracing his own corpse. It’s like opening one’s own stomach cavern and taking a look inside: the self-flagellation is part of the charm. Whether it be environmental catastrophe or his own internal clock running out, Crimes of the Future sees Cronenberg actively struggling to reconcile the current moment. Even his technical approach has this air of someone out of their depth: the use of digital effects and imagery feels unfinished and distant. One is left longing for the visceral and analog quality of his canonical works, although this artificiality does add to the numbness and despair that lurks around every corner.
This distance is ever-present in how Cronenberg characterises the film’s protagonists and their interactions, or lack thereof. The principal actors are all excellently equipped to demonstrate a desperate search for purpose while being visibly disillusioned by circumstance. In a world that equates pain and pleasure, reactions range from codependent and aloof to completely neurotic and socially inept. The same inert quality is found in the facile contemporary arts scene of which the film takes place. Saul and Caprice are respected, and undoubtedly pretentious, figures in the performance art world. Yet, no one bats an eye at their corporeal mutilation. This is because there is nothing left to mine from spectacle – neither from the splatter and gore of Cronenberg’s totemic works nor the sensational headlines about extreme weather events and mass displacements that we are bombarded with. The bodily evolution which the film is preoccupied with is not one of advancement, but of resignation. When there is so little left to explore of the remnants of the human condition, then an artist is left no choice but to open themself up, quite literally. It’s fitting, then, that the only characters who take any substantial interest in Saul and Caprice’s performances are the sheltered bureaucrats. The artists of the future are depressed and despondent, while those tasked with indexing a nonfunctional society are too preoccupied to see their world for what it is.
We as viewers are left not shocked or disturbed by the film’s transgressions, but perhaps thrilled by its uncompromising bleakness and equally poignant coda. The film shows us an artist dispirited by the state of the world he inhabits and frustrated by the ineffectiveness of his old bag of tricks, both in front of the camera and behind. For Cronenberg, the world has been neutered. Not in the severity or perversity of its crimes, but in how disaffected we are in response.
Publisert 3. november, 2022