Starcast : Kristen Stewart, Lea Seydoux, Viggo Mortensen
If traffic accidents were the new sex in David Cronenberg's Crash, surgery is the new-er sex in his latest freak-fest Crimes of the Future.
When a horny, jittery and hysterical Kristen Stewart utters the catchphrase in the film, she is outlining the Canadian auteur's thesis statement. The core of the idea has been the same throughout Cronenberg's body of work: that the body is the only graspable truth of the human condition. The blood, fat and innards are what change from one film to the next. In Crimes of the Future, Cronenberg assimilates all his career-long preoccupations and motifs: the mechanics of fetishism (Crash), the organic-machine interface (eXistenZ), the shadowy bureaucrats (The Naked Lunch), and the opening of new sexual orifices (Videodrome). In fact, "Surgery is the new sex" echoes the catchphrase "Long live the new flesh" from Videodrome, in which a porn programmer hallucinates a television screen swelling to engulf his head, inserting a videotape into his abdomen, and a gun fusing into his hand. Given how we are attached to our devices on a day-to-day basis, the nightmares that Cronenberg imagines are nothing but a literal extension.
As he has done throughout his career, Cronenberg employs the human body as an artistic testing facility. Only this time, his vivisection edges towards an eco-parable: about pushing the body beyond its limits to adapt to the impending environmental and food crises. The setting is a distant future or perhaps not too distant. Look just underneath for signs of an old world foul with detritus. Most of humanity has evolved to a point where they no longer feel pain. If so much of the art that gives our own lives meaning and joy is rooted in pain, what will artists in an anaesthetised world use to fuel their creative impulses? How will they turn their trauma into triumphs?
Aldous Huxley's Brave New World imagined a dystopian future in which everyone is encouraged to take the drug soma to get rid of all negative feelings. "When the individual feels, society reels," suggests a character. In Cronenberg's brave new world, a dystopia one step beyond its own logic, pain has thus become an illicit pleasure. This rare resource is sublimated into art by some of the few with access to it.
This is where the performance artist couple, played by Viggo Mortensen and Léa Seydoux, come into play. Saul Tenser (Mortensen) has the ability to harvest vestigial organs in his body. The organs are first "tattooed" and then surgically removed by his partner Caprice (Seydoux) in front of a rapt audience. There is a sensuality to this procedure akin to a live sex show. Not everyone is a fan of course. A radical counter-movement led by Lang Dotrice (Scott Speedman) believes Saul is reducing the next stage in human evolution into a vulgar exhibition. A government ministry made up of bureaucrats Wippet (Don McKellar) and Timlin (Stewart) are keen to archive and register Saul's organs in an effort to monitor the pace of evolution. A detective (Welket Bungué) from the New Vice Unit enlists Saul in an investigation into the evolutionists. Seydoux is kind of the heart of the piece.
The strain of growing tumours deliberately reveals itself in the coughs, gags and guttural voice of Mortensen. In the presence of Saul, Stewart as Timlin brings a sense of comic relief, teetering awkwardly between fangirl adulation and neurotic shyness. Everyone here tends to speak in unfinished thoughts. These are deliberate flourishes, yet the cumulative effect keeps the viewers at a distance. Which in itself may be deliberate to sell us this unfeeling world.
The score by Howard Shore lends a sense of the macabre in tune with Cronenberg's ideas, enveloping us in droning synths that play up the synthetic atmosphere.
When it comes to the ideas in Cronenberg's films, their exhibition and exploration have always gone hand in hand. As Caprice does with Saul, the filmmaker too cuts open his own body of work and excises the parts he needs to Frankenstein a new beast. Each organ that grows inside Saul is like the germ of an idea that takes root inside an artist's mind before it matures and materialises for the world to see.
Body horror exercises are always a fun assignment for make-up and prosthetic artists. And Cronenberg gets them to fashion some wild grotesqueries. As befits the film, the production design turns its world into a more dead, decaying place than a living, breathing one. HR Giger seems like an obvious influence. Saul is fed by what looks like the most uncomfortable dental chair, sleeps on a beetle-shaped bed with appendages piercing into his body, and dissected upon in a mechanical sarcophagus. At one point, he catches the show of another artist, a man whose body is covered in ears, eyes and mouth sewn shut, as if to become a human surround sound system for his modern dance showcases.
In this dark closed-off world, we experience warm sunshine and blue skies only in its opening moments. A young boy plays with sand on a seashore. His mother calls out to him. What plays out next may be a lot more distressing than the more outrageous horrors to come. The young boy washes up in the bathroom, and proceeds to feast on a plastic trash can. The mother, believing her child to be inhuman, decides it is the last straw and smothers him to death with a pillow. The boy's father Lang comes home to find the body. This death acts as a catalyst for the ideological clash between Lang and Saul.
With food sources dwindling, Lang believes mankind gaining the ability to metabolise their waste is the only way they can survive. Given the amount of plastic that continues to accumulate in landfills and oceans, scientists estimate we are already consuming thousands of bits of plastic each year. Cronenberg gives us his own twisted logical extension of how the human body might need to subvert the biological status quo as a sustainable measure.
Ahead of the film's Cannes premiere, Cronenberg and his nifty marketing team warned us about potential fainting spells and anxiety attacks. There is no doubting his take-no-prisoners zest for the grotesque, but it is not quite as nauseating or deranged as we were promised. At least not for seasoned horror fans with a strong constitution. While the film does maintain a hypnotic grip on the senses, it falls short of getting under the skin.
Crimes of the Future releases on MUBI on 29 July.
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