Sam Miller reviews director David Cronenberg’s new film Crimes of the Future, arguing that it successfully critiques ‘end of history’ liberalism.
Introduction
Saul Tenser: A consultation about a medical problem?
Adrienne Berceau: A consultation about a political problem.1
David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future is a film where people talk. Art, anatomy, evolution, revolution, consent, death, pain, beauty, politics, and more are hashed out in dialogues set against dilapidated dystopian backdrops. It is a truly dialectical film, in the classical Greek sense of the word: like the ancient Socratic dialogues, opposing views are made to clash head to head, refutation and investigation, employed to come to a more specific understanding out of the vague mess of ideas constantly swimming around the characters and their world.
But it is also a film about surgery and mutation. In between the scenes of high minded debates are shots of bodies cut into and organs removed, unusual looking devices slid into human flesh to get a better look at the innards developing inside. Through these two aspects, dialogue and body modification, Crimes of the Future presents a compelling, if perhaps imperfect, critique of contemporary liberalism. Its science fiction setting and body horror elements may be fantastical, but the surreal world depicted therein is all too familiar even in its unfamiliarity, and it is unique among Cronenberg’s films for its transcendent revolutionary path out of the horror.
Crimes of the Future presents a nihilistic near future where humanity is changing. The vast majority of people no longer experience pain, and only a small minority feel the sensation in their sleep. Infectious disease is a thing of the past, and so handwashing has fallen to the wayside. As a result of the loss of pain and disease, amateur surgery has sprung up as a bloody pastime; while few have medical licenses, anyone can be a “desktop surgeon.” And into this strange new world enters Accelerated Evolution Syndrome (AES), a fictional condition that prompts the development of novel new organs with unknown functions. The film’s protagonist, Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen), experiences AES and has even turned this mutational process into an artform. He and his performance partner, Caprice (Lea Seydoux), give performances in which they remove Tenser’s newly developed organs using a biomechanical autopsy table.2 There is an extensive discussion of what it means to be an artist and whether novel organs produced by mutation should be considered art in the film, but this is not an aspect of the work that can be delved into in much detail here; suffice to say, while this article focuses on the political content of the film, it endeavors to discuss much more than solely politics.
Tenser and Caprice’s role as a performance art duo in the eminently competitive world of body modification art is only one aspect of the film’s many sided dialogue. Tenser also must register his organs with the National Organ Registry, a bureaucratic department of the New Vice Unit, a police organization tasked with controlling human genetics and human evolution. The governments of the world have a keen interest in curbing AES and keeping the world “on the human path.” In opposition, then, are the plastic eaters, a secretive organization of body modified radicals who have undergone extensive amateur surgeries to allow themselves to be able to digest plastic, to eat the industrial waste of human society. And then, in strangely precarious positions relative to the controlling Unit and the radical plastic eaters are the LifeFormWare company and the Inner Beauty Pageant. The former are the creators of the half alive, half electronic furniture that peppers Cronenberg’s world, two of their sardonic mechanics establishing a strange relationship with Tenser and Caprice. The latter, meanwhile, are a secret group that encourages those experiencing Accelerated Evolution to embrace their mutations and practice positivity.3 None of these groups or perspectives have clean allegories with real political divisions; however, in simply being a world depicted in many layers of its own complexity, the fictional politics of Crimes of the Future can be read in light of our real world politics.
The Ruinous End of History
The backdrop against which these rival political-philosophical factions debate is just as important a part of the film’s message as any moment of body horror or strange dialogue. The world depicted in Crimes of the Future is the ruined, abandoned, nihilistic, hedonistic end of history. Every scene is set in buildings in various states of decay, with paint peeling off of walls and dust steadily accumulating. This visually confirms what Wippet (Don McKellar), a bureaucrat with the National Organ Registry, mentions about the elimination of disease, that “nobody washes their hands anymore.”4 The people of the future have simply given up. Handwashing is a thing of the past, cleaning up and taking care of buildings has fallen to the wayside. The only objects shown to be actively maintained are the biomechanical products of LifeFormWare, which are privately licensed and have to be worked on by technicians from the company, similarly to how electronics companies from Apple to John Deere restrict their customers from working on their devices.5 Crimes of the Future is a world where nobody cares about cleanliness or maintaining living spaces, but where companies invest in maintaining their precariously half alive product.
What people do still seem to care about is spectacle and symbolism. As has already been mentioned, desktop surgeries are a fashionable fad, and medical performance art is all the rage. At the shows of Tenser, Caprice, and their fellow artists, there are ever present cameras staring at the performers, and often televisions displaying artistic messages. What is notable, however, is that most of the cameras are old, the most recent models being from the late 1990s or early 2000s; film cameras from the early to mid twentieth century are much more commonly seen. The television sets are universally CRT TVs, their images displayed in blurry scanlines. People in the world of Crimes of the Future have given up on the world around them, and turned instead to the bloody spectacle they can draw out of others, or to the imagery of the long gone past. Incredibly advanced biotechnology obviously exists, and yet people are more interested in using analog antiques to record their public surgeries and surreal dances; and, at least from the way the world is depicted in the film, it would appear that going to such performances and recording them is the height of anyone’s day.
Socially, people have simply given up on the world. A kind of liberal, or perhaps post liberal, nihilism suffuses everything. Politically, however, the other side of the end of history is more apparent. The authorities, in the film embodied in the National Organ Registry and, above it, the New Vice Unit, are deeply involved in controlling the state of affairs. While the rest of the world has given up on everything and passively retreated into surgery, spectacle, and nostalgia, New Vice insistently asserts the status quo. It is a fantastical reinterpretation of Fukuyama’s narrative, where instead of liberalism’s victory over Soviet socialism revealing that western liberalism is the only viable system, it is that the human body has achieved its greatest possible heights and any change beyond where it stands right now is unacceptable, inhuman, impossible. In the end of history, there is no alternative; there is no evolution. Or so says the New Vice Unit.
This is where Crimes of the Future begins to ever more clearly reflect our contemporary reality. In the contemporary liberal imperial core, the general population is often disinterested in political change, or perhaps more accurately, many people are interested in change but feel powerless to affect that change. Most people are not like the sensuous performance artists of Crimes of the Future, but the retreat into media and marketable patterns of nostalgia are ever present. And, just like the New Vice Unit, the governments, political parties, and NGOs of the world seek to control the acceptable avenues of political action. New Vice seeks to control both humanity’s bodies, an aspect of the film relevant to today’s struggles over reproductive rights, as well as humanity’s body politic. History has ended, we just have to figure out how best to distribute the pieces to everyone. That worldview is increasingly challenged, thankfully, but is still present in the ideological background of Western liberal society; and those who challenge it, who assert that history has not ended yet, come in more than one form. Reactionaries and revolutionaries both seek to change the liberal order, and Crimes of the Future thrusts our characters into that conflict before we even meet them, with an opening scene that shows an all too common tragedy that puts the plot into motion.
The Death of an Unloved Child
The opening scenes of Crimes of the Future depict a mother aghast at her own son. Her son, Brecken (Sozos Sotiris), has the ability to digest plastic, a trait which inspires disgust and hate in the woman, ultimately prompting her to suffocate him with a pillow while he sleeps. She leaves the body for Brecken’s father Dotrice (Scott Speedman) to pick up in the night, before turning herself over to the police. This whole experience, from the initial introduction to the boy as he fishes for plastic trash on the beach to the father tearfully coming to pick up his son’s lifeless body, is a slow and sorrowful experience, but one presented rather frankly. The mother does not show any outward anger toward her child during the act of murder, but after refers to Brecken only as “that thing” and “that creature he [referring to her husband] calls his son.”6 She is so consumed by hate and disgust that she cannot even feel anger towards her child; to be angry with him would be to recognize his humanity.
This singular tragedy is what truly sets the events of the film into motion. While Tenser and Caprice are not initially even aware of the murder, the father goes to them with the idea of doing a public autopsy on Brecken, roping them into another dimension of the political conflicts they are steadily more mired in. Caprice is reluctant to do it, emphasizing that their art is always fundamentally consensual, but the father is insistent. His goal here becomes apparent: he wants to use Brecken’s public autopsy as a shocking instance of propaganda, because Brecken was the first person to be naturally born with the ability to digest plastic. The man and his whole group of co-conspirators, as was mentioned above, are revolutionary plastic eaters who underwent surgeries to gain plastic processing digestive systems because, in their own words, “…our bodies were telling us to change, yes? Time for human evolution to sync up with human technology. We’ve got to start feeding on our industrial waste.”7 Revealing Brecken’s naturally plastic digesting internal organs would, ideally, be a propaganda victory for the plastic eaters against the governments of the world who seek to tightly control human evolution.
The tensions and ideologies here reflect moments in our real world, although transformed by the science fiction context. Brecken’s mother’s intense disgust toward her son, ultimately resulting in his murder, is very reminiscent of the disgust that many reactionary parents feel toward their children for being different from what they want them to be, the feeling of lost control over their children. For instance, children with disabilities are three times as likely to be abused or neglected than non disabled children, and the rhetoric of disgust, disappointment, and loss of control that some parents of autistic children express, the desperate search for a “cure” or the blaming of a child’s autism on vaccines, parallels how Brecken’s mother talks about him after his death.8 Some parents of transgender daughters and sons similarly dehumanize their children, force them out of their homes, or act violently toward them simply because of their gender experience. The organization Moms for Liberty is engaged in widespread censorship campaigns and book bannings in a desperate attempt to maintain control over children and to force transgender people out of public life.9 The violent attempt to assert control over Brecken on the part of his mother is not directly analogous to the repressive control of disabled, autistic, or transgender children; rather, I am making the comparisons to show how Brecken’s mother feels about her son’s plastic eating adaptations the same way that many reactionary and abusive parents feel about their children’s disability or gender experience. The same patterns of disgust, feeling a loss of control and desperately, violently attempting to wrench back that control, color both fiction and reality.10
Inversely, Dotrice and the rest of the plastic eaters see Brecken as both a revolutionary inspiration and a propaganda opportunity. They refer to him as “the firstborn,” the first plastic eater to be born with synthetic digesting anatomy. The Brecken autopsy show is intended to use Tenser and Caprice’s fame as performance artists to reveal the plastic eater movement to the public, showing that there is hope in human evolution. Even this attempt at propaganda is colored by the social condition that everyone in the world of Crimes of the Future is living under, however. Turning Brecken’s body into a spectacle through autopsy as performance art makes sense in the context of the post-historical world where most everyone has retreated into individualistic art and nostalgia, but only if you accept those premises. And it is ultimately this individualistic agitprop performance art that allows the whole spectacle to be taken advantage of by the New Vice Unit to undermine the plastic eaters.
When Caprice and Tenser begin the autopsy, it quickly becomes apparent that something is wrong with Brecken’s body. The organ systems that are removed are sickly, and covered with the tattooed markings of the National Organ Registry despite the claims that Brecken’s organs were naturally grown and never removed. Dotrice flees the scene and breaks down into tears when his boy’s insides are revealed, as the crowd gasps in shock. It is revealed later that it was Timlin (Kristen Stewart) who surreptitiously performed surgery on Brecken to make it appear as though his organs were artificial and inserted into him. Brecken truly was a boy born with the ability to digest plastic, but the government covertly made him appear to be a fraud. And, on top of this, when Dotrice is sitting outside lamenting his boy’s condition, the technicians from LifeFormWare come out and murder him with a pair of power drills. Whether the company LifeFormWare and the government through the New Vice Unit are collaborating is never explicitly stated, but they appear to have converged on the same goal: eliminating the plastic eaters. This type of covert counteroffensive and counterrevolutionary assassination should be familiar to anyone who knows the history of the socialist movement of the twentieth century, albeit here it appears on a smaller scale.
Revolutionary Transcendance
Saul Tenser serves as the uncertain protagonist through all of these political conflicts, taking in opposing perspectives and attempting to reconcile them with his own. He does not refuse to engage with anyone; he and Caprice agree to perform the Brecken autopsy, while at the same time he meets with an agent of the New Vice Unit, and takes part in the less revolutionary but still taboo Inner Beauties Pageant. However, in the end he comes to increasingly side with the plastic eaters; at his final meeting with the New Vice Unit agent, he refers to Brecken’s father as a martyr:
TENSER: And Dotrice’s assassination?
DETECTIVE COPE: Assassination? Fancy word for murder.
TENSER: He was a leader. He had a cause.
COPE: Whatever it was, it was a surprise to me too.
TENSER: You have a bad habit of not telling me things. It makes it difficult to function!
COPE: I’m telling you, we didn’t know about it. Maybe… maybe his crazy wife got to him somehow, I don’t know.
TENSER: No, no, no. Well, it doesn’t matter who killed him. It’s going to make him a martyr. Just what the cause needs.
COPE: The cause? Sounds like you are becoming a believer.
TENSER: If you’re going to be good at living undercover, a part of you has to believe.11
At this point, he is not fully convinced. But although he is skeptical of his New Vice contact, believing him to be dishonest, he has still not become an explicit advocate of plastic eating. But this point is the final straw that breaks the camel’s back for him, the final chink in his armor that leads him to question not just the singular New Vice agent, but the whole goal of the government’s controlling human evolution in the first place. In the end, he realizes his role in the conflict and transcends his condition with a new answer for himself.
Throughout the film, it is shown that Tenser has difficulty eating. He often mentions his throat feeling tight, or difficulty swallowing. On top of this, he uses a LifeFormWare Breakfaster Chair, a biomechanical device that the user sits in and supposedly aids chewing and digestion by shifting the body around, moving the user up and down, side to side. It doesn’t seem to help Tenser, however, and he only properly realizes why he cannot eat at the end of the film. While he is sitting in his Breakfaster Chair, groaning in pain from the difficulty of swallowing his food, Caprice takes a wrapped plastic bar, a kind of synthetic food produced by the plastic eaters, and brings it to him. Tenser takes a bite out of the plastic synthbar, chews it up, and swallows it with ease, while Caprice films him with a black and white camera. A singular tear falls down his cheek as he realizes not only that he is a plastic eater himself, and a natural born one at that, but that through this realization his suffering and struggle is able to end, to transcend. The film ends on the black and white shot of this tear falling down his cheek, a shot that Adam Egypt Mortimer, writing for Inverse, compares to a similar shot from Theodor Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc.12
Tenser’s realization is an acceptance of the form of revolutionary politics presented in the film, embracing the revolutionary potential of human evolution and his role in it. If Crimes of the Future is a dialectic, then Tenser’s tearful realization is the synthesis, the uncertain open ended conclusion that integrates aspects of the many disparate worldviews presented to him throughout the film. It is also a moment that is unique among Cronenberg’s filmography, as explored in Mortimer’s article on the film. Cronenberg is an avowed atheist and materialist, and while his films often incorporate things that are unnatural, alien, or beyond what is normal, they are as a rule never supernatural. Cronenberg does not believe in a life after death, and so he does not depict it in his films. Instead, in the event that his main character dies, that is where the film ends:
Videodrome, The Fly, The Dead Zone — these movies all end at the exact second the main character takes a bullet, his point of view snuffed out. eXistenZ mocked the idea of transcendence, ending in the reveal of a game called transCendenZ from which we may never escape. A false transcendence. An impossibility.13
Mortimer concludes that in depicting transcendence in Crimes of the Future, Cronenberg commits the titular crime, against both the future and his own filmography. Through Tenser’s single tear of realization, he envisions a future beyond the body:
Seeing Saul in this perfect reproduction of Joan [of Arc], we have to imagine what she imagined: that her body’s death and destruction would not be the end of her. This is the crime Cronenberg commits, the sin of suggesting transcendence. Maybe not going so far as to claim a literal belief in an afterlife — but maybe through ideas, through evolution, through the single tear of a transforming artist, there is some future beyond the body.14
This is, however, an imperfect view of the film’s conclusion. Rather than a transcendence of the body into something else, a future beyond the body, it is Tenser embracing the revolutionary potential of his body. Rather than removing his organs for spectacle and show as he has done before, he is realizing that his body is itself developing in a manner that will be beneficial to him if he does not fight it. His suffering and discomfort was caused not by his body and its mutations, but by his consistent refusal to accommodate it. The transcendence depicted in the film is not an abandonment of the body, but rather an abandonment of the division between body and society. Tenser’s tear is not a realization that he is more than his body, but a realization that he is his body and that he shouldn’t fight it! So much of the film’s conflict is over control of the body, over the governments of the world wanting to fight human evolution, to course correct “the human path.” Tenser realizes, in the final moments of the film, that it doesn’t have to be that way. The crime of the future is controlling and restricting the body; the body is political.
Critiquing Cronenberg
But, for all of the nuance, dialogue, and complex verisimilitude of the film, Crimes of the Future’s politics remain imperfect and incomplete. Despite its criticisms of ‘end of history’ liberalism, with its fascination with spectacle, nostalgia, and tight control of the body, the film does not offer a convincing alternative. Rather than a purposeful political process, the revolution in Crimes of the Future is already under way. It is the natural process of Accelerated Evolution Syndrome, and it is reaction and counterrevolution that is actively working to curtail it. This, along with the general individual focus of the film hamper its ability to offer solutions to the problems that it presents. Perhaps, even after seeing the film, we still need a consultation about our political problem.
Plastic eating as a revolutionary process is also somewhat problematic when taken literally. Throughout this article, it has primarily been interpreted as a metaphor for revolutionary action against ‘end of history’ liberalism, but from interviews it would appear that Cronenberg, at least in part, meant it to be taken literally as a potential solution to the problems of modernity. Cronenberg has an interest in the ubiquity of microplastics, and in interviews he discusses the possibility of human plastic eating as a likely adaptation to the changing environment:
There is… a kind of weird possibility being presented, a proposal, which is that maybe the solution to the fact that we’re kind of destroying the earth—and in terms of plastics, we are—how do we deal with it? Well, the obvious way would be no more production of plastics, and clean the entire oceans of the earth, the bodies of every human being on Earth, of plastic, somehow. How probable is that? Not very, given that we can barely deal with oil and fossil fuels and stuff. How about a strange proposal? Which is the movie’s proposal. How about, if bodies actually can evolve to use plastic, to absorb plastic, to use that as nutrient material, could we feed off plastic? After all, there are bacteria, single-celled animals, that can eat plastic and can use it as food. We are made up of single cells, basically, almost like little animals all clustering together. Why not? Maybe humans can do that, too. It’s absurd, but also, it’s possible. I’m reading about corporations that are employing scientists who are using plastic to create food. There seems to be some positive movement on that score, that some kinds of plastic can be converted into a kind of protein that is usable by the body. Obviously, if that could really happen, then you could solve a lot of the problems of famine, and so, yeah, it’s ridiculous, but maybe not totally ridiculous. We live in hope, we need hope. And so, even when it’s a little suspect, we go for it.15
While this kind of science fiction speculation is fun to engage in, it should be apparent the shortcomings of such a potential strategy for resolving the pollution crisis. It is tantamount to abandoning the natural world for the sake of the human body and human society; in this it appears to accept some of the premises of the kind of ‘end of history’ liberalism that other aspects of the film seem to critique. Perhaps it’s a good thing that Cronenberg is making very beautiful and grotesque films instead of engaging in ecological planning!
Conclusion
Crimes of the Future is a many layered, complex, nuanced film; it is a grotesque, beautiful, disgusting, empowering film. In its complex dialogues it puts up a monstrous mirror to our own world, heightening the contradictions of ‘end of history’ liberalism into a fantastical biomechanical half abandoned world of artists and surgeons. While its solutions are imperfect, incomplete, and individual, it presents a powerful and suitably strange critique of the strange world that we live in. We leave the film with the future of the world depicted therein, or even of Saul Tenser and his partner Caprice, uncertain; but through this snapshot into a world of desktop surgeries and plastic eaters, we can come to understand our own world and our own struggles. We are always living through crimes against the future: crimes against our bodies and their autonomy, crimes against future generations, against the natural world. Through embracing our revolutionary aspirations and potential, perhaps we can end them.
- Crimes of the Future, directed by David Cronenberg (Argonauts Productions S.A. et. al., 2022).
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Alex Gray, “The debate over right to repair in 2022,” Successful Farming, March 9, 2022, https://www.agriculture.com/machinery/repair-maintenance/the-debate-for-right-to-repair-in-2022-joe-biden-jon-tester-john-deere.
- Crimes of the Future.
- Ibid.
- “The Risk and Prevention of Maltreatment of Children with Disabilities,” Child Welfare Information Gateway, January, 2018, https://www.childwelfare.gov/pubpdfs/focus.pdf.
- Tim Craig, “Moms for liberty has turned ‘parental rights’ into a rallying cry for conservative parents,” Washington Post, October 15, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/moms-for-liberty-parents-rights/2021/10/14/bf3d9ccc-286a-11ec-8831-a31e7b3de188_story.html.
- Christopher Rhodes, “The next threat to democracy in the US: Moms for Liberty?” Al Jazeera, April 27, 2022, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/4/27/the-next-threat-to-democracy-in-the-us-moms-for-liberty.
- Crimes of the Future.
- Adam Egypt Mortimer, “‘Crimes of the Future’ is David Cronenberg’s Most Transcendent Movie Yet,” Inverse, June 13, 2022, https://www.inverse.com/entertainment/crimes-of-the-future-review-david-cronenberg.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Emma Stefansky, “David Cronenberg’s Strange Proposal,” Thrillist, June 6, 2022, https://www.thrillist.com/entertainment/nation/david-cronenberg-crimes-of-the-future-interview.