Crimes of the Future (David Cronenberg, 2022) (Patreon)

In terms of my response to Crimes of the Future, I owe a significant debt to my friend Steve Carlson, whose comment on Twitter helped orient my viewing. Steve (who loves the film) suggested that it's a comedy, and that its portentous tone is primarily a misdirection. I will concede that Crimes is a dark comedy, one that maps a possible future of increasing depersonalization and mismanaged science. But above all it's a consideration of our own world on a precipice, about to hurtle headlong into biological ridiculousness. 

If "surgery is the new sex," as Timlin (Kristen Stewart) faux-sagely whispers into the ear of performance artist Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen), then we have to look at our present moment to understand our bio-political foreplay. For instance, if plastic surgery is in most cases an attempt to purchase a body that conforms to socially constructed notions of attractiveness, is it possible that eventually, the surgery itself might be eroticized? (In the Renaissance, women we now call Rubenesque were desirable because their zaftig form conveyed wealth and abundance. Since elective surgery is similarly restricted to the rich, the act itself might become a fetish, titillating because of the sexual promise it offers the patient.)

In a much more disturbing register, Crimes of the Future asks us to consider the prevalence of cutting, especially among young people. Cutters frequently claim that externalizing emotional pain provides them with a sense of control, since the body's surface is infinitely accessible compared with the dark continent of the mind. As Cronenberg shows, this kind of self-directed "surgery" may have a future as body art. At first I worried that the film was glamorizing, or at least making light, of a self-destructive impulse. But we know that depiction does not equal endorsement, and when the society Cronenberg depicts embraces self-mutilation, it is arguably a point along the curve of Romanticist ideology, the equation of suffering with genuine expression. (Imagine the Immersive Saul Tenser experience!)

Cronenberg is a shrewd satirist, and it's notable that within his hypothetical universe, Tenser is a bit of a conservative. Unlike the neo-evolutionists and their commitment to a radical doctrine of bodily reorganization, Tenser perceives his strange new organs as cancers, unwanted (or unneeded) revisions of the body-politic. Between Tenser's auto-corrective excisions and the new flesh of the plastic-eaters, there is a conceptual gap, a moment of Deleuzian uncertainty. Beyond this interval, the long-promised Body Without Organs, is yet another corporeal regime, another mapping, the next phase of bio-control.

Seen in this way, it makes sense that Tenser is a narc. His willing cooperation with Agent Cope (Welket Bungué), and his intimate institutional connection with the New Organ Registry, mark him as the last stand of a body-ideology that we might recognize as our own. Despite all scientific evidence to the contrary, the conservative worldview regards the body as immutable ("God's creation," ever perfect), and uses that faux-eternalism as the ground on which to build other, more fragile ideologies. Cronenberg commented at Cannes that his film wasn't strictly about the kinds of cultural body-wars we're witnessing in the U.S., but that it is certainly relevant to them.

Why don't evangelicals object to plastic surgery? Or for that matter, medical interventions into the human body of any kind? At what point does science cross their imaginary line into abomination? Women's sovereignty over their own reproductive systems is a cornerstone of women's full participation not just as citizens but as human subjects. (Post Roe v. Wade panic is not alarmist. Go to any alt-right or white supremacist website and the coming attack on contraception is well within the radical right's Overton window.) They aren't just coming for bodies they perceive as errant or wayward; they are using them as a fulcrum for reversing Enlightenment principles of selfhood.

Not very funny, I know. But Crimes of the Future's conclusion should give us a glimmer of hope. Tenser's auto-conservative regime proves futile. He must eventually accept the new flesh, in part because he is the biological product of global capital. He is a post-human garbage disposal because we as a species have reduced both our bodies and our planet to a multi-century regimen of accelerated mutation. We breathe benzine, we swallow micro-polymers, we ingest chemicals to sleep and move and think. We have met the Lamarckians, and they are us.

Crimes of the Future is not anti-science by any means. In fact, it suggests that only science can save us, that we have to travel to the heart of the very wormhole we've created. The body is always changing.  Only by taking charge of those changes, and linking them to human desire and happiness, to survival itself, can we overcome the ruling regime of capitalist / fascist bio-power. Or, as Barbara Kruger put it over thirty years ago,