Crimes of the Future (2022)

  David Cronenberg’s striking explorations of the flesh work in three ways. Obviously, the spectacle of the various operations is unnerving, even revolting. This is the shock cinema we expect of Cronenberg.

But they also represent a celebration of our fleshly existence. Our insides are logically as beautiful as our outside. Especially during the years of covid the film luxuriates in the body corporeal. Even as it assumes a future from which pain has been banished it asserts our fascination with our flesh and fleshly experience.

Third, the sprit of this film is essentially comic. The spectacle wittily materializes the most common expressions of artistic inspiration. Repeatedly the dialogue cites inner beauty, the artist opening himself up, the power of internal experience and connection. This theme makes the script one of the year’s wittiest. However personal Cronenberg’s visual vocabulary, he is dealing with — and refreshing — the most traditional metaphors both for artistic creation and for human connection. 

This revived commitment to the flesh, to the organic in man and in nature, is a pointed response to the loss of the natural in our current lives. This is represented in extremis by the young boy who has grown dependent upon eating plastic — and is naturally (?) murdered by his mother. He literally eats a garbage pail, a metaphor as pertinent to our debased cultural lives as to our diet. An abandoned sea-hulk amplifies the definition of the manmade world as garbage.

So, too, the performance artist’s story plays against the background of a world whose loss of the natural extends beyond pain.  As his name suggests, Saul Tenser is the patriarchal soul of a future tense, drawn taut in resistance to the decay around him. Tenser looks like the resurrection of Bergman's Death. In shaping internal organs out of his creative ideas he revives the New Testament ideal of the Word Made Flesh. He is about a business far more serious, probing and profound than his aide’s name, Caprice, suggests. Of course artists always hide their seriousness. That’s how they penetrate us.