by Victoria Potenza, Staff Writer

When I started writing this series in 2018, it seemed unlikely that Cronenberg would direct any more films for the big screen. At the time, the most recent interviews with him stated that he was much more interested in television as a medium for his work. So I put most of my big screen Cronenberg hopes on his son and daughter: Brandon’s new picture, Infinity Pool, is coming out this month, and Caitlin, whose first feature, Humane, is in post-production. So when David announced his film Crimes of the Future, I was thrilled to say the least. When I went to the theater to see it, I was overcome with a wave of emotion and when his name came up on the screen. My eyes welled with tears. This was the first new David Cronenberg film I got to see in theaters and knowing that my favorite director still had so much to say filled me with joy. Crimes of the Future is a meditation on many of the concepts that he focused on in his earlier horror films, but now with new ideas about sex, humanity’s future, and a more personal lens of what it means to be an artist. 

While Crimes of the Future (2022) shares the same name as his very early hour-long feature from 1970, they vary greatly in their subject matter. The 2022 film focuses on an artist duo, Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) and Caprice (Léa Seydoux). In this not-too-distant future, human evolution has begun to change rapidly. Most humans can no longer feel pain, and some humans grow brand new organs that doctors know little about. Saul frequently grows these organs and his partner Caprice removes them in front of an audience as a form of performance art. Their art puts them on the radar of the Organ Registry run by a strange duo, Timlin (Kristen Stewart) and Wippett (Don McKellar). A man named Lang (Scott Speedman), also wants them to do a live autopsy of his dead son. These fateful meetings bring them into a much larger world of human evolution that has the potential to give Saul insight into his rapidly changing body. 

Much of Crimes of the Future is dedicated to themes around sex. One of the most popular lines of the movie being “surgery is the new sex.” As humans continue to evolve and grow a tolerance to pain, they move away from traditional sexual activities and instead find new ways of cutting each other open to get a new kind of sexual pleasure. Therefore, it becomes the “new sex” while sex and we think of it now is the “old sex”. Sex is discussed as some sort of generational trend with younger generations more interested in picking up a scalpel than a condom for their arousal. Dirty talk moves from “I want you inside me” to “I want you to cut into me”. If surgery is the new sex, Saul and Caprice are essentially making love in front of a sea of onlookers as a form of artistic expression. In one of the more tender expressions of  the “new sex” that the movie gives us, we see Caprice and Saul get undressed and go into their “Sarc” unit where they perform their art. They hold each other as they let the machine cut them up and relish in the pleasure they are feeling together. While it looks different from the old sex, there is a similar tenderness and pleasure to it that is unmistakable. 

It also becomes a form of self-expression. The scars people accumulate become artwork like tattoos. Someone describes their bodily discomfort as a “compelling fullness,” which is an interesting way of thinking of pain and discomfort. Those things can ground us in our bodies when our mind tends to pull us away from our physical presence. Saul and Caprice both have different sexual journeys in this respect. An artist Caprice admires has a surgeon cut up her face in front of her crowd. Afterwards, she and Caprice talk and she tells Caprice that “I don’t want to be beautiful— I enjoy trauma, what I do to myself is very traumatic.” This is the push Caprice needs to make modifications to her own face and feel more comfortable and free in her body. Meanwhile,  Saul is made aware of an “Inner beauty contest” in which people enter to have people explore their organs and judge which ones are the most beautiful. Saul is encouraged to join because of the extra organs he produces. To facilitate this,  he has a zipper-like opening cut into his stomach so people can see what’s inside. The idea of “inner beauty” being about the beauty of our insides and not the beauty of the person we are is a humorous addition to the story. Saul focuses more on his inner body while Caprice focuses on her outward appearance. But both are playing around with these ideas about beauty, pain, and bodily trauma as a way to explore and grow. 

The new opening in Saul’s stomach also becomes a new point of pleasure. When he shows it to Caprice, she likes it and plays with it like she would a traditional sex organ and it is clear that Saul gets immense pleasure from this encounter.  This new way of looking at sexual pleasure is an attempt to get more inside one another. Even when Timlin attempts to seduce Saul, she is obsessed with looking inside his mouth, wanting to go deeper into this man she admires. The search for human connection goes further and further as people attempt to meld into each other and through this deep physical connection, make more of a personal, psychological connection as well. People also find arousal in their technology. The women that come to fix Saul’s bed are overcome with sexual arousal when they see the Sarc unit that Caprice and Saul use for their art. Later they undress and get into the unit, incorporating it in their sex play. Similar to eXistenZ, in which video game units look like human appendages, the beds and chairs installed in peoples homes look like they are also made of flesh and bone. Saul’s bed in particular looks and moves in such a way that he looks like a baby in the uterus while he sleeps. There is a comfort in merging tech with the flesh.

In the world of Crimes of the Future, politics, crime, art, sex, human evolution all flow into each other as opposed to being separate.  People try to find distinctions between these different ideas and concepts but they ultimately always come together in some way. Cronenberg’s films often become about the melding of people with machines, other beings, and/or each other.. While art tries to be divorced from and even looks down on the government agencies in this movie, we find them more and more aligned. They all believe in the notion that what is happening is “Human evolution has gone wrong.” Because the government cannot control the way people's bodies are changing they try to catalog and track those that show signs of evolution. They also try to write the narrative that these changes are bad or parasitic, and with artists like Saul and Caprice removing these organs they are showing signs of believing these narratives. They say that they are making “art out of anarchy.” Yet Saul’s rapidly changing body shows signs of organs that must be born, as opposed to letting human nature take its course and believing that evolution is proceeding correctly. When looking through a catalog of Saul’s organs, they remark that it is like “discovering a new species of animal” and in response someone else remarks that “it's more like discovering a new Picasso.” Here we again see a connection between nature, evolution, and art. 

As the movie goes on, we learn that there are groups of people that have taken it upon themselves to go through body modifications that would allow their bodies to process plastic and other human waste. But the government works to cover up that people have begun to evolve with these tendencies on their own. Evolution wants humans to take care of their own pollution by ingesting it, but it is easier for these agencies who protect “law and order” to write these people off as freaks as opposed to seeing the benefits of this evolutionary process. The same process Saul’s body wants him to go through. As Lang says to them, “it’s time for human evolution to sync up with human technology,” suggesting that it is human destiny to feed on our own waste. This is how humans can live in peace with the technological world they created. In their final performance with the dead child, Caprice discusses how we must dive deep inside the body to look for answers to philosophical and societal questions. When the movie ends, Saul begins to realize that his body is in fact changing to consume waste, and we see him run through the emotions of pleasure, pain, despair, and joy. Through accepting these changes–as opposed to attacking them–he finds peace and more human emotion than he expresses through the entire film. 

Crimes of the Future makes an interesting comparison piece to Hellraiser. In Hellraiser, the Cenobites bring people into their world that can be heaven or hell, they can experience pleasure or pain. Crimes of the Future posits similar ideas in a grounded way, which makes it seem plausible in the future. Humans don’t need Cenobites to explore these bodily sensations, they can act upon them of their own accord. Through this exploration, there is an interconnectedness between various concepts related to human nature, society, politics, the environment, sex, romance, and all parts of our world. It’s a strangely beautiful connection, even in its most disturbing moments. 

Cronenberg is also giving commentary on the human need to control. Saul wants to believe he is taking control of a body that wants to do him harm. In discussing him they even say that “we believe on a certain level, perhaps a subconscious level, he wills these organs to grow”. Similar to how the government and “New Vice Unit” wish to control human evolution, we see that it is something that cannot be stopped. The more we accept and let it take its course the more free we become. 

Crimes explores so many aspects of human nature, and while it is not fully discussed it even makes commentary on how human relationships have changed and continue to change. There do not seem to be traditional monogamous relationships. People do not refer to each other as boyfriend, partner, husband, wife, etc. Saul and Caprice clearly live together, work together, and have sexual relations but also go off to have their own trists and explorations without needing to include the other. Often, people are together with no distinctions on what relationships they have, again everything seems to flow and just “is.. Similar to Crash, the sexual connection between technology and surgery is so essential that the need for traditional romantic distinctions is not important. The same thing goes for gender. We see little distinction between what any of the people in the film do or how they act in regards to gender. As sex is thought about in new evolutionary terms, it makes sense that gender is also part of the fluid themes in the film. 

In an Indiewire article, Cronenberg explains that Crimes of the Future came from a screenplay he wrote decades before. He goes on to say that “when I wrote this in 1998, it was very theoretical — unlike now, when everyone’s talking about microplastics in their bloodstream”.  When comparing it with Videodrome, he says that:

Crimes of the Future doesn’t just revel in the interplay of art and technology; it gets inside the humanity at the core of that intersection. I personally do not have an agenda as a filmmaker, but I’m interested in people who do, because that reveals many things about how they struggle with who they are and who they should be. 

His exploration is a very human response to understanding the world around us and shares so much with his other films. The melding of humans and technology is essential to Videodrome, The Fly, Dead Ringers, eXistenZ, and Crash.  Themes around human evolution and bodily change are essential to The Brood, Rabid, and Shivers. And of course the exploration of sexual boundaries is essential in many of the aforementioned movies, but especially with Crash and Shivers. 

As we begin a new year of 2023 new movies from David and his “Cronenbrood” are all on the horizon with new ideas on humanity and technology. At the same time I am hoping to wrap up this series as I begin putting together my “Cronenbook” in which I will expand on these themes and others within his works. This series has changed me and I look forward to moving into my next stages of evolution and “new flesh.”