In the Flesh: Crimes of the Future

“Surgery is the new sex,” stammers the gauntly attractive bureaucrat Timlin (Kristin Stewart). “Is it?” deadpans performance artist Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen), a man whose partner surgically removes the pseudo-cancerous novel organs his body produces in front of adoring crowds. “You know it is,” she snaps. Crimes of the Future has no time for subtext. It has no interest in playing coy about Cronenberg’s preoccupation with neo-phallic violence and the creation of new orifices not as a replacement for sex but as an expansion of its physical language, a remaking of human physical connections. In the world of the film pain has largely disappeared from the general population, as has infection, but is the result our desensitization to extremity or the opening up of new frontiers of intimacy? There is, in Cronenberg’s vision, no distinction. Tonguing the zipper in your partner’s stomach is the new eating pussy, but of course it’s more than that, too, as well as fundamentally different. Technology and human evolution push us ever further into the unknown territory of our flesh, and we must continually reinvent our ways of knowing our own bodies and the bodies of the beloved.

Half-joking throwaway lines from Cronenberg’s earlier films (the inner beauty pageant from Dead Ringers, for instance) recur in Crimes of the Future as definite, if novel, facts of life. The fictional world is as preoccupied here with the maintenance of traditional human physiology as it is with the human mind in Scanners or our ability to perceive reality in eXistenZ. The “new flesh” which in Videodrome stood for acceptance of bodily death in service to technological ascension or recreation is here viewed first as an out of control cancer, then as the next natural step in human evolution. In the midst of these tensions Saul Tenser hangs in a void of ambivalent lack of commitment, informing on his fellow surgical deviants even as he begins to awaken to the possibility that his body’s constant production of novel organs is in fact in preparation for a radical change in humanity’s role in the world. Mortensen plays Tenser with a faltering, gravelly earthiness, constantly hacking and choking. The film externalizes his bodily processes — a special biomechanical bed like a seedpod connected to thick, fleshy tendrils helps him sleep. A chair made of waxy protrusions of bone and flesh aids him with chewing and digestion. He lives amid the deconstructed wreckage of his own failing body.

This wreckage, ultimately, is where the film turns its attention. Saul and his partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux) live in a nameless, rotting Canadian city left largely empty by climate change. Garbage is everywhere, decay omnipresent. Hidden in this waste-scape are Lang Dotrice (Scott Speedman) and his cell of plastic eaters, people who have undergone radical surgery in order to render their bodies able to survive on a diet of recycled garbage. “We have to learn to live on our own industrial waste,” Dotrice explains.He hardly needs to elaborate. In a world choking on its own byproducts as those in power struggle to brutalize their subjects into acting as though nothing has changed, the admission that humanity must emulate the rat, the roach, the pigeon if it wishes to survive is a cathartic thing to hear. At the film’s climax a tear of blissful relief rolls down Saul’s cheek as he effortlessly swallows a mouthful of toxic plastic. Subtext is for suckers. long live the New Flesh.