Flesh is dead, long live the new flesh: a review of "Crimes of the Future"
David Cronenberg's testament summarizing his work over the past 40 years.
"Crimes of the Future" especially tickled the nerve endings of Cronenberg fans, promising that the director would return to his roots, otherwise in recent years the author has been frequent with psychological thrillers, when all the suffering wanted a good old-fashioned body-horror. We got, in fact, a collection of greatest hits, which repeated the program for the past decade: technological progress is inevitable, we are part of it, long live the new flesh, Viggo Mortensen - the best man in the world.
Cronenberg sees a bleak future, people have lost contact with themselves and the ability to feel pain, the earth around them has become dried up and lifeless. It nevertheless hosts quite lively hangouts, such as art performances exploring the limits of the body. The protagonist Saul Tenser (male depression ambassador Viggo Mortensen) is a performance artist who works in tandem with Caprice (Leia Seydoux): he grows new organs inside himself, she performs a public autopsy to admire them. Saul is clearly uncomfortable in his body, so he keeps cutting flesh, roughly speaking, in search of meaning. Everyone else is cutting bodies, too, not only in search of meaning, but also in search of pleasure. Timlin (Kristen Stewart), a worker at the Public Services department for new organ registration, is blunt: Surgery is the new sex.
While everyone collectively struggles with their own physiology, which is changing faster than consciousness, a frightened mother kills her plastic-eating child. The woman thought he was a monster, but the child's father, on the contrary, was convinced that the boy was a model of the "new" man. Thus sets up a confrontation between the plastic-eaters and the rest, ready to do anything to avoid turning into "monsters.
The only thing David Cronenberg was wrong about was that in the first 20 minutes of the show the shocked audience would leave the theater: as they say, anyone who hasn't been killed by Existence has been made stronger by Existence. In fact, the performative autopsy is not as frightening as it's portrayed, the movie didn't repel at all, it was more of a stupefying, because in the first act it's hard to understand where we are, what year it is and if this is the future, then where have the iPhones gone. But there are new gadgets - chairs to help you digest food, "smart" beds to help you sleep, and sarcophagi for surgeries. All adapted to the body's new needs.
The cinematic language of body horror is tied to bodily sensations, but since physical pain has been taken off the agenda, all that remains is a one-on-one struggle with the body. The new flesh adapts poorly to familiar processes, and instead of letting the body lead where it wants to go, the characters begin torturing it. The internal resistance to natural evolution is shown through self-injury and the characters' general discomfort with the environment. Saul's body is in constant conflict with his own consciousness, and no new organs help the hero find any semblance of harmony and tranquility. As in "Existence," people are divided into two warring camps: some furiously trying to accelerate progress, the others trying to do everything they can to keep life the same. As history shows, the latter usually lose, but take more people with them to the grave than necessary.
All in all, it's pretty simple with Crimes of the Future, Cronenberg encourages us to surrender to the natural process of evolution to which we have brought ourselves by technological progress, instead of resisting it. Whether it's microplastics in our blood or growing new organs in laboratories, well, it is, so why bother? The final scene, where an exhausted Saul Tenser surrenders to progress and finally finds peace, seems to take the pressure off the viewer, inviting him to relax and accept the scary and unfamiliar world as it is.
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