Relief and Revulsion

Writer-director David Cronenberg might insist that his latest feature is not a remake, but it's clear that the germ of the present Crimes of the Future, which goes into wide release this weekend, took root way back before the now 79-year-old filmmaker even really began to make his first infamous impressions on the North American film scene.

The "original" Crimes of the Future, completed in 1970, was an avant-garde science-fiction movie. In the mold of its black-and-white predecessor Stereo, this color film was produced by its self-taught Canadian creator without the benefit of synchronized sound, the loose plot-line cryptically narrated by star Ronald Mlodzik in the role of Dr. Adrian Tripod, an increasingly dissociated dermatologist adrift in an apocalyptic world where a cosmetics-induced plague has wiped out sexually mature females, and is seemingly accelerating both the biological and psychological degeneration (or, some might say, "evolution") of what remains of mankind. There is an episode in this odyssey in which Dr. Tripod encounters a former colleague, now institutionalized with a "neo-venereal" disease that causes him to "create puzzling organs, each one very complex, very perfect." We are told, but not shown, that Tripod's colleague now undergoes frequent surgeries so that doctors can remove and study these growths that are each so compellingly unique, but also without discernible function. In response, the now quite mad patient has taken to stealing his organs back from the specimen room of the institute, arranging them near him like self-described "solar systems" of his own bodily "universe," slipping into profound depression whenever they are apart from him.

This sort of spontaneous, apocalyptic mutation of the human species would continue to be a key point of visceral fascination and horrific disturbance in Cronenberg's films as he settled into the more conventional kind of genre cinema for which he became infamous in the '70s and '80s, with such gory and psychosexual films as Shivers, Rabid, The Brood, and Scanners. The reluctant evolution depicted in his films is driven by all sorts of new environmental triggers of the late-industrial age: cosmetics, radio waves, even virtual reality. That generalized fear of contamination comes back with the new Crimes of the Future, opening on the image of an abandoned commercial ship turned on its side off the coast of some desolate beach, a young boy (Sozos Sotiris) dejectedly playing in a contaminated tide pool nearby. His mother (Lihi Kornowski) obscurely warns him to not eat anything he finds, but she later discovers him huddled under the sink of their bathroom, solitarily munching away at a plastic waste bin. We later learn that, not unlike the monster from Cronenberg's 1986 film The Fly, her child was a mutant of sorts, able to secrete an oral acid to help corrode synthetics for food. She ends up smothering the child in his sleep. She has no remorse for killing him, rationalizing that the creature she destroyed was not, in a certain sense, really human, or any longer human.

As with the 1970 original, to say nothing of the major body of his early genre work, Crimes of the Future takes place in a world at the precipice of a biological singularity, where mutations are widespread and rapidly changing what it very well means to be human. This, in turn, also seems to have accelerated its own kind of psychological crisis. Shooting on location in Athens, Greece, the future that Cronenberg describes in his latest film is one where every facade seems to be crumbling, and where conventional institutions struggle to adapt to the psychotropic demands of an incessantly mutating human landscape. At the heart of it all is Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen), a performance artist who, like the patient of Cronenberg's prototypical arthouse film, suffers from a condition that causes the accelerated growth of novel internal organs that have seemingly no purpose. With the help of his live-in creative partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux), Saul takes his debilitating disease - which causes him chronic pain that even the most advanced "bio-ware" technology can't alleviate - and turns it into art, performing live surgeries for conceptual art installations that take place in a seemingly never-ending montage of virtually identical underground grottos and artists lofts. Each of these organs is then tattooed and submitted to the National Organ Registry, a bureaucratic institution that seeks to catalogue but, ultimately, repress and contain these mutations.

Saul's "inner beauty" proves to be a source of universal fascination. Even the investigators to whom he submits his "creations" (Don McKellar and Kristen Stewart) find themselves drawn into his world, developing a sexual obsession with it and practically begging to be made art subjects themselves. The influencer intelligentsia of the future flocks to Saul's shows, well-armed with cameras of both the state-of-the-art and analog type. These venues are also breeding grounds for criminals engaging in what is dubbed "new vice" by the authorities. This includes the proliferation of extreme sado-masochism and acts of mutual mutilation, as well as de facto revolutionaries who think that mutants, especially Saul, should embrace what humanity is changing into, not cut it out and deny it. As such, these occult spaces are also profligate with informants for an inscrutable government, Saul himself among them.

Under no circumstances expect any of these strands of the plot to be thoroughly or even cursorily exposited to you. Cronenberg has not always been the primary writer of his films, but when he does write his dialogue is often laden with a kind of bourgeois sophistry. At rare times truly poetic, his style of writing is more often intended to be neurotic and obscure, placing the spectator at a conceptual distance from the psychological world of the characters. With Crimes of the Future, he relies totally, and to his detriment, on the ability of his principal cast to affect the attitudes and dispositions of people who live in a universe where pain has been eliminated to the point that its experience takes on profound sensual and even spiritual significance. Otherwise, the film leans upon its audience to invest critically in the construction of the imaginative scheme of the film in a way that they are simply not often expected to do with conventional genre cinema. They are more or less invited to understand that this future they are beholding is one in which these characters have already, so to speak, "evolved" in such a way as to be completely dissociated from what we think of as being human.

This more conceptual approach to science-fiction is not exactly unique to Cronenberg, nor is Cronenberg, especially in the instance of this latest film, necessarily the best achiever of it. But where Crimes of the Future really confounds that thin line between a frustrating and pretentious art and the truly provocative and stimulating kind is its overall technical presentation. Cronenberg has never been a formalistic filmmaker, per se. Despite his penchant for grotesque visuals and a writing so detached from conventional realism, the deeply uncanny aspect of his films is the ironic functionalism with which he presents these motifs. It is this strangely placid objectivity by which he views these phantoms of his imagination that renders them much more surreal than the legion of genre stylists he inspired. And with Crimes of the Future, his first feature film since Maps to the Stars in 2014, this almost anti-picturesque functionality reaches new lows of subliminal provocation. The editing of the film is especially ascetic, with Mortensen crawling from dialog-driven scenario to dialog-driven scenario, in an investigation that obscures just as much as it illuminates. There is no contrived elegance in transitions between scenes, so that from moment to moment the character of any particular space is muted, to an extent that there is no substantive delineation.

Cronenberg's insistence upon a queer, stultifying sense of normality is more aggressive here than it has been in his cinema since, appropriately, the original Crimes of the Future. And despite the challenge it poses to ever really get into the film, it must be said that the arc of Cronenberg's surreal story manages to justify itself, drawing the viewer into this world of vague, unbounded spaces, peopled by characters who all, in their own way, play two different angles in what boils down to a melancholy neo-noir. Despite its dry insistence, Crimes of the Future only feels too long at the exact moment it abruptly ends, and one realizes they've truly lost track of time. The film, despite it all, feels so much shorter than it really is. Cronenberg's surrealism thus captures the temporal enigma of a dream, stretching out with a feeling of fluid infinity before it's all snatched away in a second of waking.

I have my reservations about the overall effect of Crimes of the Future, but I must admit that I found the finale of the film far more sensitive and impactful than I ever could have intimated. Cronenberg having once identified himself as "a complete Darwinian," his science-fiction, whether of the pulpier or the conceptual variety, has always been tinged with a certain degree of ambivalence about the horrific mutation that its characters, more often than not, strive desperately to turn back. There is always, through the horror that he provokes, a sense of relief in the inevitable replacement of humanity by something adaptable to the very conditions by which humanity dooms itself. For all its zombified morbidity, Crimes of the Future proves to be a shockingly poignant and tender film, one that turns out to be more about its artist protagonist's self-persecution in the name of values he doesn't really understand than it is about the superficial super-masochism of the sex-numbed future bourgeois.

Even still, I must admit that the charitableness of my feelings toward the film may be unduly colored by my overall affinity for Cronenberg's work. Crimes of the Future confirms his commitment to a largely conceptual cinema that, considered in the light of his greater filmography, I might indeed be less inclined to tolerate if a different name was attached to it. And though prototypical and half-formed in its own way, I can't help but consider the original Crimes of the Future in enviable contrast to the now institutionalized auteur's present comfort with his vision. I think especially of the younger Cronenberg's fascination not just with the speculative ways in which technology effects what it means to be human, but also his innocent consideration of contemporary architecture and interior design. Compelled to actualize his visions of the future with a shoestring budget, he managed to charmingly present the modernist trappings of the university buildings, office and apartment complexes in which he shot in such a way that brought to life their own intended anticipation of future forms and styles. Though never immersive, his unpretentious mapping of the present as a vision of what is to come projected so much more of an endearing confidence and vitality. Even his more grounded, early genre films, especially Rabid and Scanners, reflect his apprehension of the ways in which humanity's utopian aspirations are embedded in found settings, as everyday as a medical school common area or atrium. His films, in turn, projected the horror of time collapsing as technology and environmental conditions accelerate. The motifs of the utopian in public life are rendered bleak totems of our undoing.

Both Maps to the Stars and 2011's Cosmopolis managed to adapt and show a progression in Cronenberg's mapping of man-made spaces and forms. Sadly, the same can not be said for Crimes of the Future. Its exploration of facades is so much less original, and so much less suggestive of the strange continuity between the present and visions of the future. This lack of edge keeps the experience of the film just a little too intangible for its own good, just a little too vague, rather than earnestly open for teasing out and toying with by the spectator.