Synthetic Surrender: David Cronenberg's 'Crimes of the Future' (2022)

The king of body horror takes us to a hellish future where mutated excess organs are removed as performance art and bodies try to adapt to the pollution of the natural world

To make a record of something is a deliberate act of preservation, but it also doubles as one of erasure. A person, thing, or event is documented for eternity, while the one responsible for the recording is occluded, the anonymous other to the information captured or idol depicted. This erasure, however, is anything but grim annihilation — on the contrary, it is vibrant, even sensual. This is because the artist, scientist, journalist, government bureaucrat, detective, whoever it may be, creates the recording twice. First, there is the strange immediacy of the moment, where it is simultaneously experienced and inscribed into the future. There is then the posterity of the same moment when the public encounters it at a later date — as art, knowledge, truth, legal documentation, etc. There is, in other words, an exhilarating character to the recorder’s anonymity — insofar as the immediacy of the moment cannot be entirely represented to the public, it remains intimate for the recorder, even as the traces of the experience remain for the public. There’s a lasciviousness to the very act of sharing a documented moment while clinging to its intimate reality, wondering — daring — others to inhabit your perspective, why you “actually” preserved it in the first place. Even when it comes to the most mundane circumstances, every instance of recording carries with it the thrill of getting caught. This contradictory pleasure, both exhibitionist and secretive, is what moves David Cronenberg’s brilliant science-fiction/horror hybrid Crimes of the Future (2022).

The future in question is a hellish one, but not so unfamiliar to us in the present. In it, humanity has been outpaced by its technological creations, and the detritus produced by excessive levels of production and consumption seems to have permanently transformed the Earth’s ecology. Humans are beginning to breach extinction as their bodies try to adapt to the pollution of the natural world. People have begun to sporadically grow new organs, though no one seems to know exactly what function they serve, except that they may enable the human digestive system to process synthetic material instead of nutrient-rich food. It seems all but impossible for humans to carry out basic biological functions like eating and sleeping without the assistance of monstrous machines that latch onto the body, read its biological data, and administer to it a series of sclerotic shakes and jerks. While it is not made obvious, it seems undeniable that the mutation of the human body is correlated to its interactions with these avatars of biotech corruption and control.

In this zombified future, Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) and Caprice (Léa Seydoux) carry on as underground performance artists with a unique act titled “Body is Reality.” Saul’s body is able to grow new organs regularly, and Caprice, a former surgeon, removes them before a small, captivated audience. The appeal of the performance, it seems, comes from the belief that Saul exerts some control over the unnatural process, though it seems an open question as to how much agency he actually has to make the organs develop particular physical characteristics, like size, shape, or color. But Caprice’s role in the performance nullifies the need for any definitive answers to the question — it is her theatricality that obviously communicates artistic intention and purpose. For Caprice, at least, their work together makes spectacle out of the slow degradation of the human body, and by extension, the social body that has adapted to an utterly inhuman, almost lifeless world. Saul is far more recondite, tormented as he is by physical agony and discomfort of his body mutating at an accelerated rate, therein necessitating the question: At what point does he stop being “Saul Tenser” and become something else entirely?

The government — there is no indication of who or what country it represents, if any — is concerned with the warped state of human evolution, and a new bureaucracy has been established to register and catalog these organs in order to study and better counteract this process. Motivated far more by curiosity than civic responsibility, Saul and Caprice visit the New Organ Registry (NOR) where they meet its only officials, Wippet (Don McKellar) and Timlin (Kristen Stewart), both adoring fans of the performance artists. Seemingly to get them on their side, Saul invites the bureaucrats to their next performance, frustrating Caprice who is suspicious of the mousy Timlin, who seems infatuated with Saul. After the performance, Timlin approaches a post-surgery Saul, utterly spent and recovering, and tells him that surgery is the new sex, which amuses him and irritates Caprice.

Caprice is not entirely wrong to feel something is amiss, though the feeling is misdirected. Saul has not been honest with his partner and for some time he has been collaborating with a special police unit, and Detective Cope (Welket Bungué), to track down a radical group that is aiming to accelerate humanity’s synthetic evolution into plastic eaters. Lang Dotrice (Scott Speedman), one of the leaders of this group, approaches Saul and Caprice with an idea for their next show. Even for them, it is an unusual one: A live autopsy of Lang’s son Brecken, who was murdered by his mother. The performance would, in effect, serve as a radical political statement insofar as Lang believes Brecken was the next stage in humanity’s evolution, born with a digestive system that is fully capable of metabolizing plastic instead of requiring real food. This, for Lang and the others in his orbit, is a portent of humanity’s future in which there is no possibility of turning the tide on ecological catastrophe.

Crimes of the Future is a strange, horrifyingly bleak, and surprisingly touching film; it is one of Cronenberg’s best. In what amounts to a moral as much as an artistic condemnation of the overindulgence inherent to the science-fiction blockbuster, Crimes of the Future offers almost nothing in the form of exposition. Whatever context is provided — of the environment, of the motivations of the characters, the consequences of their actions — is only suggested, but never fully explained. For instance, it is not clear why Saul became involved with the police. Was he compelled to? Or, as the film seems to hint, is his life with Caprice an elaborate cover and he really is a cop? Either way, Cronenberg is not interested in the question of why so much as he is concerned with what: what Saul is doing, and more concerningly, what is happening to Saul as a result of his actions? Likewise, there is no contrived answer for what happened to this fallen world. It seems that the conditions that we are currently living through — a crisis of socioeconomic inequality, the precarious position of labor, the proliferation of the tech industry and its exploitation of its own customers, the indifference of the political and economic elite to human life and the destruction of the natural world — have only intensified.

In this mise-en-scène, it is ludicrous to imagine that there would be anything close to a functioning government. The tone of the scenes involving the NOR bureaucrats makes this point clear. Intellectually, the prospect of the government recording and monitoring biological information ought to give one pause, especially when it is never really clear in Crimes of the Future who that information is being shared with or if it is even possible to learn something from studying these novel organs. As such, it is plausible to expect that the NOR would be depicted as overtly nefarious and its agents evil, duplicitous, and dangerous; however, Cronenberg quite brilliantly makes no such move — Wippet and Timlin are such strange figures, and so strangely infatuated with Saul, that the NOR feels like a farce concocted by just these two people, for who knows what reason. They act more like hobbyists or obsessives, more childish than official. To put it differently, the NOR does not feel like it is meaningfully connected to the government, nor do we see these bureaucrats communicate any sort of findings to their higher-ups. The NOR is, effectively, nothing more than a new organ that does not have a purpose in whatever remains of the State. Wippet and Timlin are just so hyper-fixated on Saul that it raises our (and Caprice’s) suspicions. That said, Timlin’s darting eyes, fidgety movements, and anxious, self-conscious speaking pattern — truly exceptional work from Stewart — make it difficult to hold onto those suspicions with much certitude. Crucially, this farcical depiction does not cast doubt on such apprehensions, whereby fears of such surveillance are ameliorated by the buffoonish or incompetent officials who carry it out. Quite the opposite, it is precisely because the NOR and its lone investigators are singularly odd, inept, and seemingly devoid of purpose that they are symptomatic of more than just institutional decay. They represent how state power re-establishes itself through a sort of mutation, adapting to historical circumstances. In this sense, it is not so much that the new bureaucracy is strange, or even that the power it has is uniquely dangerous. Rather, it would seem that there is simply no future from which we are free from such surveillance or control — even as “we” transition into the post-human condition, state and economic institutions morph without fundamental transformation.

And yet, even with this existentially morose backdrop, Cronenberg has evacuated his film of any sense of urgency. In the hands of a different filmmaker, this story would involve a protagonist far more motivated than Saul. He would race against time to learn what exactly has been happening to his body, and he would confront the malefactors responsible. This alternate protagonist might even be successful in stopping these forces. But in Crimes of the Future, there are no such moments — they are hinted at, the narrative pieces are all there, but Cronenberg denies us any satisfying progression. Seeing Saul amble around, agonized by each breath, it is obvious not just that the man is incapable of action, but there is nothing left to be done. All possibilities have been foreclosed, at least at the level of conscious action. What remains is passivity, waiting, and the slow and painful process of transformation. It is as if Cronenberg brought himself to the edge of this very position, simultaneously receiving and recording the corpus, the sensations, of this non-future.¹ Saul and Caprice surrender themselves to such a moment that is as horrifying as it is blissful — an act of recording that is also one of erasure — a memory for no one.

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There is a vague correspondence between this film and one of Cronenberg’s first films, also titled Crimes of the Future (1970). The two films are similarly nightmarish in their lethargic protagonists and narrative structure. The earlier film concerns a world in which cancer caused by cosmetics products has eliminated the world’s population of women, leaving men in a state of psychic disarray as they struggle to adapt to this environment. Despite the spiritual and tonal similarities between them, the latter film is not a remake of the former. ↩︎