Body Words: Cronenberg, Kavan, Delany, Dick
On Crimes of the Future and the rich sci-fi tradition it participates in
It is a rarified echelon to belong to, that of the repeat lead players in the films of David Cronenberg. Unless you count Robert A. Silverman’s auxiliary appearances, or Robert Pattinson’s modest screentime in Maps to the Stars, it’s a club reserved solely for Jeremy Irons (1988’s Dead Ringers, 1993’s M. Butterfly) and Viggo Mortensen (2005’s A History of Violence, 2007’s Eastern Promises, a considerable supporting turn in 2011’s A Dangerous Method), the latter now a fourtime member, with Crimes of the Future. If there’s a detectable throughline connecting these variegated performances, it’s how they participate in and are influenced by a relatively recognizable milieu, which can fulfill a viewer’s more foundational notions of narrative filmmaking: the impressionistic histories of M. Butterfly and A Dangerous Method, the upper-class intersection of medicine and celebrity in Dead Ringers, the overwhelming criminal world of Eastern Promises, one of which also invades the Small Town, USA of A History of Violence. Cronenberg’s judicious abstraction maintains itself, flourishes, even, although none of these films unmoor themselves from reality as much as something like, say, Naked Lunch (1991) or eXistenZ (1999).
Those two above mentioned films, in their closed-off environments, are what resemble Crimes of the Future the most amongst the Cronenberg corpus, Mortensen abandoning the capital-A Actorly tendencies of past collaborations to channel the self-effacing demeanor of Peter Weller or Jude Law, all the more impressive considering he is the should-be ostentatious performance artist Saul Tenser, who has his spontaneously grown vestigial organs removed for show. The obvious intensity of such a conceit runs contrary to how Mortensen portrays Saul, who moves through a disintegrated world as half a cipher, half an oblivious messiah. Those in his orbit prescribe various lofty ideas of what Saul’s documented Accelerated Evolution Syndrome (as the film explicitly defines it) means; his responses are mostly self-deprecating, if not outright baffled, and thus, Mortensen renders Saul a Cronenberg proxy, one who weathers innumerable interpretations of a working method that is more inexplicably organic––bodily––than it is cerebral.
Accelerated Evolution Syndrome is in the extended process of dampening humankind’s reaction to pain, with the predicted endpoint of the total eradication of the sensation, so it’s reasonable that Saul’s audience hails him as a paragon of progress, even if he can’t get their pithy encapsulations of his art right: “surgery is the new sex,” is the film’s tagline, though he fumbles the wording’s order, only to be corrected. Cronenberg’s films are often populated by what could politely be called half-assed subversives, whose relationship with a chosen medium––smut and snuff in Videodrome (1983), literature in Naked Lunch––never transcends the casually inflammatory, until they are ingested by a larger, perhaps more veritably insidious conspiratorial network. Saul and his live-in performance partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux) find themselves ensnared in one of these elusive systems after their first meeting with the National Organ Registry, staffed by the evocatively dubbed Wippet (Don McKellar) and Timlin (Kristen Stewart, in a cumulative exhibition of her innate, overly-enunciated nerviness). This paltry bureaucratic office nevertheless shoulders the task of cataloging these new human advancements, and upholding whatever restrictions they may necessitate.
Both National Organ Registry employees are besotted with Saul’s autogenerative body, and choose to forgo the formal strictures of their positions to attend one of his tabletop surgery shows, which only deepens the fascination. Saul isn’t the only artist of this corporeal medium, though he may be the most well-respected: Crimes of the Future’s promotion often props up the Frankensteinesque Ear Man (dancer Tassos Karahalios) as the most extreme member of these artistic circles, although in the world of the film, he’s mostly a hack (“the ears don’t even work,” a critic scoffs). The film’s moral crux also pertains to performance, in that an evolutionary “radical”, Lang Dotrice (Scott Speedman), approaches Saul and Caprice with the body of his dead child in tow, ready to offer up his son’s unique digestive system––he can swallow plastic, spewing up a Brundlefly reminiscent fluid to makes it chewable, as is made clear when he easily munches on a plastic wastebasket––as their next showstopper. Lang leads a group that have all undergone the same surgical operation that allows them to eat and derive sustenance from synthetic material––which they condense into purple “candy” bars––a trait that seems to have been naturally passed down to his son, Brecken; the boy’s mother, Djuna (Lihi Kornowski) smothers him with a pillow in the opening minutes. To her, he’s an inhuman abomination, one that must be snuffed out.
Less an actual character, Brecken’s name is an incantation that haunts conversations, and his body little more than a material presence, stowed in a freezer. Similar to Saul, his organic makeup is of messianic import for others, even if he is quite literally unable to participate. Saul himself strikes out as a pragmatist, playing the uncommitted informant for the police’s Future Vice department that, like the National Organ Registry, has an absolutely barebones staff, the lone Detective Cope (Welket Bungué) acting as the contact for a governmental institution that is otherwise referenced in name only. It’s as if the only way to mitigate the penetrating obsession that swirls around Saul is to compartmentalize it between what’s criminal and what’s permissible. When paired with the indeterminateness of Crimes of the Future’s temporal setting (abandoned ocean liners are a succinct visualization of climate disaster, though there’s nothing in the way of “world-building”, the aggressively expository script positioning itself strictly in the present), this disorienting web of allegiances foments a constantly destabilizing aura, every scene reinventing itself from its predecessor to account for new information, new secrets.
The richly rendered––though nevertheless omissive––environment of Crimes of the Future is indebted to a larger literary tradition, and thus, perhaps one of the only worthy science-fiction films in recent memory to modulate tenets of the genre as established by Philip K. Dick or Ursula K. Le Guin to account for its expressive nebulousness, which skirts the overbearing and didactic, but always pulls back at the precise moment so that said destabilization lingers, and metastasizes.
Although not as obviously peripatetic, Crimes of the Future shares a post-apocalyptic palette with Anna Kavan’s Ice, first published in 1967. Driven by possessive, masculine paranoia, Ice’s unnamed protagonist moves across a dystopic steppe of encroaching permafrost and dilapidated towns and villages, navigating treacherous waters which can freeze over at any given moment: “The devastation was even greater than it had seemed from the boat. Not a building intact. Wreckage heaped in blank spaces where houses had been…Only the main streets were clear of rubble, the rest obliterated. Faint tracks, like the tracks of animals, but made by human beings, twisted among the debris.” Somehow, in Kavan’s unnervingly inscrutable future, humanity has superseded animal life, unlocking the primal behaviors that Cronenberg wields in Crimes of the Future. The film, shot largely in Greece, yields spartan, slightly dilapidated locations that, just like Kavan’s prose, couch unspeakable, destructive history in overwhelming, peeling dryness, a striking counterpoint to the potency of both texts. Like the world of Ice, or the Marseilles of Christian Petzold’s Transit (2018), time has either paused or jumped forward (or has it decayed?), abandoning the viewer in Crimes of the Future’s domain of rigorous withholding.
That past something, those defining events that furnish these reliably dystopian landscapes, adheres wonderfully to Cronenberg’s attraction to the viscerally oneiric. That tangible something did occur, and its aftermath is generously discernible, but like the city Bellona of Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren (1974), the apocalypse of the post-apocalyptic is never elucidated. Delany prefers spiraling paragraphs flecked with straightforward, pulpy dialogue, a method which works at a distance from Cronenber’s termitic consistency, though both have hit upon the status of the individual artist in a world that’s all but evaporated. The streets of Ice, Dhalgren and Crimes of the Future are mostly empty, save for the most merciless denizens, but performance spaces are well attended, probably the only common meeting place available. The performer inherits a new notoriety, the willingness to create, or merely disrupt, relatively nullifying the actual results. In Dhalgren, the protagonist, the Kid, goes on poetry benders, which a local “entrepreneur” instantly snatches up to print; an astronaut is hailed as a visiting celebrity; a perpetrator of sexual violence develops a discomfiting cult following.
As in this latter point, fandom in Cronenberg’s film is distorted as well, made clear by Saul’s acolytes, Berst (Tanaya Beatty) and Dani (Nadia Litz), mechanics who work for the company that produce the anthropomorphic furniture that assists the artist in sleeping (OrchidBed) and digesting (BreakfasterChair), leftovers from Naked Lunch’s semi-sentient artifice that seamlessly inhabit Crimes of the Future regardless. The two project desire upon Saul’s antique biomechanical Sarc-module, which is the autopsy machinery that Caprice controls in their performances; they’re also handy with drills applied to the back of the skull. To them, Saul’s ceremonial removal of his organs is the required quelling of the evolutionary whirlwind, and their murky alignment makes them comparable to any of the double-agents that sneak around the novels of Philip K. Dick.
The reality slippages of Dick are too akin to those of Cronenberg to wring any sort of new observation out of comparing the two, but within those slippages is a latent artificiality, which often offers itself to assimilation, lest one be unwillingly consumed by it. The conclusion of Ubik (1962) finds telepath-adjacent technician Joe Chip resigning himself to an internal universe where survival is dependent on the aerosol spray of the title, which prevents the body from dissolving entirely into this otherwise incompatible biosystem. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964) is a signature Dick work where drug-use intercourses with pure faith, his writing an evocative and maybe even intentional failure to encapsulate the enormity of what it’s introduced. “That thing, which we know only in its Terran body, wanted to substitute me at the instant of its destruction; instead of God dying for man, as we once had, we faced––for a moment––a superior––the superior power asking us to perish for it,” writes Dick; this perishment is the governing paradox of Crimes of the Future: is the body rebelling, or is it saving its owner? Caprice can still easily eat bacon and eggs, but even Saul’s BreakfasterChair can’t breach the tumorous blockage spawning in his throat, which Mortensen telegraphs via a series of glottal tics. Timlin can enact both the “new” and “old sex,” but Saul is exiled to the purgatory between the two, somewhat unconvinced of his body’s autonomous significance, but conscious of it enough to perceive it as a preventative entity.
If Saul is saddled with the portent of a religious figure, it’s one who’s a reincarnation, an embodiment of the purity of a chosen faith, or at least the vector for a voice of omniscience. The film ends with an image of unfettered transcendence that’s practically a rugpull after the botched autopsy of Brecken’s body, which reveals a hasty organ-tattoo job that’s eradicated the uniqueness of his digestive system, a revelation that knocks Lang sideways; the cause has lost its linchpin, a father his dearest creation. Crimes of the Future opens by cutting from Brecken’s murder to Saul waking up, a kinship between the two––one’s eyes open when the other’s close–– formatted and set in motion, if not yet specified. Saul’s body has adopted what hitherto belonged to Brecken, like when the interplanetary draftee Barney finds his spiritual person invaded by the eponymous false idol Palmer Eldritch, whose three stigmata––artificial limbs and prosthetics––mutate into spectral accouterments that save him from one of the carnivorous lifeforms that stalks his new colony planet. “You’re an unclean thing,” says the alien. “I can’t eat you. I’d be sick.” Cronenberg inverts Dick’s motif of consumption so that the aforementioned “uncleanliness” finally liberates Saul, which is arguably not possible without merely surviving first, which Barney does in a situation that should have spelled his death. The cagey “superior power” that Dick writes of manifests in Crimes of the Future, omnipresent but invisible, traceable in humans, and not their surrounding, crumbling world. The internet has reasonably latched onto the parallel imagery of Mortensen and Maria Falconetti in Carl Th. Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), but I found the closing words of Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (1951) echoing in my head when faced with Saul’s transference: “What does it matter? All is grace.”