Guts of the Artist

In a world without pain or infection, artists have nowhere to go but in. David Cronenberg's 2022 film Crimes of the Future is good old fashioned Cronenberg. It's weird how I can find something so comforting and disturbing at the same time. But I admired how much this movie made my skin crawl in much the way I've always admired Cronenberg's work of the '80s and '90s.

Crimes of the Future, which, aside from the title, has no relation to Cronenberg's other movie of the same name, begins with a little boy on the beach. His mother, from a nearby balcony, warns him not to eat anything out there. He doesn't, but she's not pleased when he comes back and proceeds to eat the plastic wastebasket in the bathroom.

And so she murders him, disturbed by this inhuman behaviour which, we learn later, happens to resemble surgical modifications her ex-husband, and the boy's father, had made to himself which enabled him to eat plastic. So we start to get some idea of the social and political forces at play in the future imagined by Cronenberg.

But the protagonists of the film are a pair of performance artists played by Viggo Mortensen and Lea Seydoux. This may be one of Cronenberg's most personal films because in scenes where Mortensen's character, Saul Tenser, talks about his creative process and Lea Seydoux talks about surgery, we're reminded Cronenberg has a background in both the avante garde art scene and in surgical medicine. In this world, pain and infectious disease have been almost completely eradicated. Saul, an anomoly, does feel pain as part of a condition in which he regularly grows entirely new internal organs. In art performance pieces, Seydoux's character, Caprice, performs surgery on him and describes to an enraptured but small indie audience the nature of Saul's most recent creations. The way he talks about them fittingly mirrors the uncertain, yet personal and driven, perspective of an artist.

In some ways the story resembles other things I've read and seen, like some older issues of Caitlin R. Kiernan's Sirenia Digest as well as the story concept behind David Bowie's Outside album. In Cronenberg's own oeuvre, I was reminded of Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch, Crash, and, of course, Videodrome. But there's a good dose of The Brood and The Fly in here, too.

In one sense, I think Cronenberg's vision with this movie reflects trends in modern society as young people increasingly indulge in more extravagant self-modification. Wealthier transgender YouTubers like Contrapoints and Jessie Gender have undergone skull shaving procedures that drastically alter the shape of their heads to appear more feminine and, living in Japan, I see plenty of people who've had work done on their eyes. But Cronenberg presents a world enraptured by biomechanical technology and transfixed by strange internal organs. The trend these days seems to be to move away from acknowledging the physical body as more and more people prefer to psychologically inhabit the internet with more honesty than the corporeal world. We live in a world of Virtual Youtubers and people who use increasingly sophisticated digital filters to totally alter their appearance. In Asian countries, young people are increasingly presenting a fantasy reality in which they and their friends are more and more resembling anime characters. Cronenberg's vision underestimates, and is likely not interested in, the youthful compulsion to be pretty.

But taken on its own merits, Crimes of the Future is a fascinating portrait of a strange alternate universe of compulsions and sex. Cinematographer Douglas Koch, standing in for the sadly absent Peter Suschitzky, provides a nice imitation of the kind of sensual shadows Suschitzky created for many of Cronenberg's previous films. The stalwart Howard Shore returns once again to provide the score, this time choosing a soft electronic sound. Mortensen and Seydoux both give fearless and generously sensuous performances. Seydoux in particular comes off as more committed than I've seen her in any other role.

As is often the case with Cronenberg at his best, he blends repulsive and attractive stimuli so seamlessly that you start to believe he really has invented a new form of sexuality.

Twitter Sonnet #1617

An angry brain controls the neighbour's flat.
The wakeful birds disrupt the nightly row.
Across the street, a dinner fills the vat.
Nutrition doomed the crispy bacon sow.
A pitcher benched could yet accrue a score.
Observing bills could float about the pool.
The only threat's an absent wild boar.
A quiet mouse could trick a singing fool.
A proper tool was melted prey in Hell.
A purple sickness crouched in foil bricks.
A poison breakfast comes for master's bell.
A passion swelled like algae turning tricks.
Configured guts accepted sex and art.
The moistened play provides an actor's part.