hot 'Crimes' summer
Top Gun: Maverick fuckin' rules but c'mon man, Crimes of the Future is the real summer movie of 2022.
Hey hey, it’s your resident evil sexy hamlet back on his bullshit after all this time. Time keeps on slippin’ slippin’ slippin’ into the future eh? While I was away I dipped my toes into the TV world, recapping Tokyo Vice and Under the Banner of Heaven for Vulture. Also, if you missed it, check out the first episode of KOTHcast, a King of the Hill podcast, here in the ESH feed. Anyway, I’d originally planned a Best of the Year So Far roundup or whatever but I couldn’t get the new Cronenberg joint outta my bones you feel me so I followed that urge instead. This one’s a long boi so you’ll need to open it in your browser or from the substack app to read the whole thing. Enjoy…
We're no computers, Sebastian. We're physical.
-Roy Batty, Blade Runner (1982)
Damn, shaping up to be a real #fuckshitsummer in America amirite, what with the Uvalde shooting and Roe v. Wade being overturned (among other fucked up decisions from our maniacal right-wing SCOTUS) not to mention the seemingly boundless rise of inflation and fascism and anti-trans bigotry we got goin' on in this here shithole empire. And that ain't even the half of it, the end is the beginning is the end and all that… the vibe shift or great realignment or whatever you want to call it is here, folks, and it offers no rest for the weary.
But when the fall comes and you're watching it all go down in real-time, you're still just you, ya know? With all your faculties and maladies and insights and obsessions and imperfections and mutations. You. In your body. And maybe, somewhere in the inevitable post-burnout malaise of the new end times, there's a certain ecstasy to just being 'over it.' It's summer in America and them's the vibes you dig?
And them's the vibes of Crimes of the Future, a film that's stayed with me more than any other film this summer. Word on the latest David Cronenberg joint leading up to its Cannes premiere was something like, "alright sickos, our guy is back on his gnarly body-horror shit so get your barf bags ready!" And while Crimes of the Future certainly dishes out its own, uh, moderate blend of Cronenbergian grotesqueries, it plays less like The Fly or Videodrome (or whichever Cronenberg film grossed you out most) and more like Blade Runner (incidentally celebrating its 40th anniversary this summer) — a moody, hazy, contemplative sci-fi dream noir with a reluctant "detective" in metaphysical transit at its center.
Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) isn’t a literal detecive like Blade Runner’s Rick Deckard, but Crimes’s similarly-loose noir plot amounts to a portrait of the artist as detective, uncovering a mystery that, as Cronenberg put it for Vanity Fair, “suggest[s] the evolution of a new kind of human being” — “more human than human” type stuff.
In a post-climate-catastrophe future, the human population is experiencing significant biological changes, most commonly ceasing to feel physical pain. As a result, new social trends emerge, like open surgery as a recreational, even erotic form of engagement. Tenser is a performance artist with a burgeoning condition called “Accelerated Evolution Syndrome,” which includes the rapid growth of new vestigial organs. Aided by his partner, ex-trauma surgeon Caprice (Léa Seydoux), Tenser makes performance pieces out of surgically removing these new organs and tattooing them in front of a live audience.
A few weeks ago I went to a performance of Sweeney Todd where a significant portion of the cast had tested positive for COVID, so the remaining players and understudies performed a sort of “live reading” version of the show, all sitting in chairs on stage and periodically standing to perform and sing their parts in place. I was bummed to miss out on all the blood and gore and other production elements for which the show is known, but I was also moved by how well everything still translated and how much the actors were still able to convey under the circumstances. It got me thinking about the performance-art world depicted in Crimes of the Future, and how uncannily it speaks to the endurance of human creativity through seismic environmental and societal change — especially at a time when the internet has permanently altered our relationship to art and the very concept of mediums. Life during wartime baby, this ain't no party, this ain't no disco.
In the world of Crimes of the Future, technology has both advanced (in the form of various biotech machines that help stabilize bodily functions — all in that organic, exoskeletal design you only get in a Cronenberg joint) and slid back (no smartphones or even computer screens, really, just a plethora of revived camcorders, film cameras, and old box TVs). But the dominant artform remains as fixated on the human body as it is today via Instagram or TikTok. As Cronenberg put it in a recent New Yorker interview, “My interest in the body is because, for me, it’s an inexhaustible subject—and of the essence of understanding the human condition.” This ain't no Mudd Club, or C. B. G. B., I ain't got time for that now.
Through their performances, Tenser and Caprice are quite literally cutting to the core of the central issues facing their evolving post-collapse culture. Inevitably, the remaining vestiges of power, law, rebellion, and bureaucracy take note. They’re called in by the National Organ Registry, which catalogs new and evolving organs for the state as part of an effort to restrict and control these biological phenomena. Cronenberg finds himself in a pantheon of artists (J.G. Ballard, William Burroughs, Devo, George Carlin, etc.) whose sharp, satirical focus on language, decay, and systems of control amount to prophetic visions as ecstatic as they are morbid. Crimes of the Future’s screenplay was written in the late ‘90s. Highly synchronistic it should come out the same summer we lost the right to abortion in America and a new parasitic wave of anti-trans authoritarianism struck the populous. America, America is killin’ its youth… as Cronenberg put it himself:
[Crimes of the Future] of course, strangely and sadly, has huge political repercussions right now. When I wrote it 20 years ago I wasn’t thinking of it that specifically, but this is always a go-around about who controls the bodies of the citizens. Who controls womens’ bodies? Who controls the bodies of transgender people? Can the government tell you what to do with your body and not, even if it doesn’t affect anybody else?
Juan Barquin wrote at length about Crimes of the Future as a "bleak, beautiful trans masterpiece" for INTO, deftly mapping the realities of the trans experience over multiple character arcs in the film. "Even in an era where body modification has become the norm," Barquin writes, "those who drift 'too far' in order to embrace their identity, and those who allow their body and mind to dictate what needs to be done to it in order to live their lives, are persecuted and treated as outsiders." As they also note, Crimes of the Future begins with the murder of a child whose body has evolved to eat plastic as nutrient. The child's own mother is the culprit, "loathing the fact that her child is something she considers inhuman." It's an unnerving opener that not only "feels distinctly tied to the way trans kids are being persecuted by everyone around them, including, for many, their own families," but speaks to the uncanny images of high weirdness that seem to materialize more and more out of everyday life — both in the flesh and through increasingly unhinged social media platforms.
Not long after his visit to the National Organ Registry, Tenser is also recruited by an emerging reactionary police force called the New Vice Unit. His mission, should he choose to accept it: infiltrate a group of radical evolutionists trying to modify the digestive system to safely consume plastic. Led by Lang Dotrice (Scott Speedman), the father of the murdered child from the top of the film, the group manufactures their own plastic “candy bar” which they eat as proof that the body is evolving beyond the dictates of politics and power. “Nobody was talking about micro-plastics when I wrote the script,” Cronenberg said on q with Tom Power, “and now they’ve discovered that micro-plastics have been found in the bloodstream of many people […] and yet the body seems weirdly, at the moment, to tolerate it rather well.” The idea that, in the face of total destruction at our own hand, we would evolve to effectively absorb our own poison, is a bleak one — though, as Cronenberg put it, “it’s almost like a desperation move. It’s not great, but all the other alternatives are worse.’” Life in plastic, it’s fantastic.
But as Cronenberg also noted, the film isn’t so much a polemic about climate change as it is a spiritually despondent satire of social structures persisting under the weight of collapse. When it’s not showcasing body-horror effects with an almost reverent tonality, the film sticks largely to people waxing philosophically in decaying rooms, or from the shadows of dark alleyways, and the dialogue is pretty fuckin’ funny. One of the great things about placing characters of an “art scene” inside a loose espionage plot is you get a potent kaleidoscope of casual absurdity. The film’s most quoted line, “surgery is the new sex,” is a prime example, like a tongue-in-cheek version of Videodrome’s infamous mantra “long live the new flesh” (especially when uttered by Kristen Stewart, whose scenery-chewing performance as the twitchy, mysterious bureaucrat Timlin is like Lisa Simpson meets Michelle Pfeiffer’s Selina Kyle on benzos — king shit from our girl).
Whether discussing artistic conceits or avataring for heady philosophical ideas, Crimes of the Future’s characters embody the multitudes of pathos, beauty, avarice and foolishness that dominate the worlds of art and politics alike. Creative pursuits are simultaneously aspirational and ridiculous in the face of “real shit,” and the progenitors of culture inevitably find themselves in the service of regime change. When Saul Tenser is recruited by New Vice, he checks in with multiple contacts from the performance art space. Arguably the most visually striking of these scenes is a show in which an artist with extra ears all over his body performs an interpretive dance, and his “biomorphology coordinator” tells Tenser she thinks the whole concept is shotty ‘cause the extra ears don’t even work. For as bleak and punishing Cronenberg’s films can be, they’ve always carried a distinct air of morbid, biting humor. Crimes’s equal-parts loving and farcical tone is not unlike that of such recent films as Velvet Buzzsaw and Nia DaCosta’s Candyman, which also poked fun at the commercial art world through dialogue that reflects the tweetable slogans and intellectual virtue signals to which we’ve reduced all human conversation.
And though Crimes of the Future provides a physical explanation for the ‘case ‘o the blahs’ everyone in the film seems to have, the whole concept of a society literally numbed to physical pain is a visceral stand-in for the emotional paralysis that ails us in an era of American decline. And that you’ll find in just about every zeitgeisty neo-noir from Blade Runner to Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye. Incidentally, something I wrote last year about the latter could just as easily be said of Crimes:
Everyone […] in the movie seems to be operating at like 50%, dressing and behaving like half-assed cosplay versions of themselves, talking past each other and responding to things they heard wrong in a constant snowballing loop of misunderstanding. Nobody knows what to do as the world crumbles around us so we just keep living in these impotent personas, too tired to really care about any of it.
Saul Tenser is one of the few people in the film who does experience physical pain, which we eventually learn comes from denying the changes his body demands. This is Mortensen’s fourth collaboration with Cronenberg, but the first to require this type of physical performance. Between his surgical shows, Tenser lives in a palpable state of constant discomfort and depletion, reliant on machines to aid his sleep and support his slowly-failing digestive system (Adam Nayman noted on The Big Picture podcast that “the aging Johnny Knoxville in Jackass [Forever] and Mortensen in Crimes of the Future would have a lot to talk about. ‘What more can we do to ourselves? What more do you want from our flesh-pod bodies?’”). As brilliantly embodied by Mortensen, Tenser’s ailments become a big emotional piece of the puzzle in a story meant for the COVID era, where many are forced to ‘keep on truckin’ despite inhereting a chronic illness from the virus of our times.
Speaking of viral phenomena, these Jan. 6th hearings have been a trip, man. Quite an exercise in rebooting a reality stranger than fiction. Takes me back to where I was the night before it all went down, out for a quick walk and a toke under another hazy, Michael Mann-ass Long Beach sunset that sparks an ethereal flame over the skyline against the port. Her name is Rio and she dances on the sand. Nights like this you can’t help but realize how redundant the whole industrial beachwave Cyberpunk ‘77 aesthetic has become — the gray, sweltering coastal decay of Crimes of the Future (auspiciously shot in Athens) a more potent image of the “now” and not unlike the beach-side alleyways of pale stucco you’ll find me passing through at dusk.
Anyway there I was the night ‘o Jan. 5th nursing a joint with a song in my ears, just kinda sitting with the last four years of America in a half-fugue state, unaware of the psycho coup-attempt on the immediate horizon but feelin’ the early vibrations all the same. There's something going down that wasn't here before, keep your eyes so screwed to the floor…. en route back to my apartment I passed the Sublime wall mural next to the barbershop and the words on it seemed to pop like 3D graffiti — LONG BEACH … life is too short, so love the one you got. In a way I’ve been surviving on the image of those words on that wall ever since.
4th of July weekend 2022 — the beach is dead-alive with the muted energy of jokers and tokers as ‘over it’ as anyone’s ever been in America but we’re all still tryna have a good time ya know? I’m kicking back in my beach chair with a hard seltzer and my earbuds in, oscillating between the Crimes of the Future soundtrack and a Lord of the Rings audiobook. This is my first time really diggin’ into Tolkien and I’m thinkin’ a lot about this oft-haphazardly quoted line from The Fellowship of the Ring, when Gandalf gives Frodo the bad news of his unfortunate role they must play in the war to come.
“I wish the Ring had never come to me,” says Frodo. “I wish none of this had happened.”
“So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide,” Gandalf replies. “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.” All well and good as an inspirational platitude or whatever if you stop there (as folks tend to do) but the real shit comes next:
And already, Frodo, our time is beginning to look black. The Enemy is fast becoming very strong. His plans are far from ripe, I think, but they are ripening. We shall be hard put to it. We should be very hard put to it, even if it were not for this dreadful chance.
Life is too short, so love the one you got, sure man fuck it, we’re all doin’ the same slow, groovy dance into the void anyway yeah? Walking down to the tide and it’s hard to tell which is denser with plastic, the sand or the water, might as well take a quick dip. Waste deep with a mild afternoon fade goin’ I drift into an aimless stare, the ships lined up on the horizon about as far as the eye can see. A bizarre series of aerial advertising banners cross the sky — Watch THE TERMINAL LIST on Amazon Prime Video — covidisalie .com — Follow XXXX on OnlyFans — A minion in a speedo with a mustache just like mine posing seductively on a beach towel. No one's gonna save your life, there’s something going on that's not quite right…
Any way you swing it, Crimes of the Future is the summer movie of 2022, striking the main nerve of what it’s like to live now. The title alone (recycled from Cronenberg’s unrelated first film) is an endlessly provocative statement and a goddamned haiku in its own right. Crime is, afterall, a fluid word defined by time, circumstance, and the rule of law. Who decides what is criminal, and which criminals are worthy of condemnation? of punishment? of praise? One person’s crime is another’s exaltation.
Welcome to the future — surgery is the new sex, body is reality, and it’s a crime to be alive.
You can rent Crimes of the Future on VOD // Physical media release is August 9th //
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