When David Cronenberg took the stage at the Walter Reade Theater last night, he was introduced—to a smattering of dry laughter—as the Prophet of the New Flesh.
“Maybe the Prophet of the Slowly-Aging Flesh is more like it,” the great director humbly rejoined, his shock of white hair standing at attention.
Since Torrey had plans, she generously donated her tickets to the New York premiere of Cronenberg’s newest film, Crimes of the Future, to me and Jade. Starring Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, and Kristen Stewart, Crimes is a revival of OG body horror Croney, a return to his old stomping grounds of rent flesh and razor’s edging after a couple decades of less viscerally grotesque, if not less brutal, fare1.
Crimes drops us in a near-future—more ravaged by climate crisis than now—where famous performance artists Saul Tenser and Caprice (Mortensen and Seydoux) titillate audiences with waking surgery in darkened drawing rooms. As Saul and Caprice’s star rises, a body known as the National Organ Registry begins investigating the disease, known as Accelerated Evolution Syndrome, that causes Saul to proliferate with new organs and novel hormones; if it wasn’t for Caprice’s surgical interventions, he would swiftly become something else other, or more, than human. And he’s not the only one.
Without getting too much into it—I may actually write something like a review, at some point—Crimes’s themes of public intimacy/sex, S/M, bureaucratic quagmire, and apocalypse merge into a distinctly transsexual valence that feels blissfully depoliticized, or at least politicized differently than what we’re used to. Maybe that’s what has drawn me to Cronenberg since I first saw Videodrome (1983): his work with the textures, torments, and sensations so often relegated or even confined to us, as trans people, without limiting himself to mere gender play. Jade has an, I think, very credible theory about the chaser gaze in Crimes, but neither of us think the director emits it himself2.
As livid, shocking, and strange as it is, and as clickable a tagline as Surgery is the new sex, Crimes is most preoccupied, I think, with the creative process—a fitting theme for a highly successful artist who is, frankly, nearing the end of his life. I might even suggest that Crimes is an attempt to interrogate the limits of body horror as a metaphor by the director with whom it’s mostly closely associated. Does Cronenberg denaturalize body horror with more of the same? If he is successful—and I’m not sure that he is, still chewing on it—it proves that, even now, decades since he started this beat, it remains, as Saul says, with sensual satisfaction, “juicy with meaning.”
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For more context, I recommend my friend Chris Randle’s Letterboxd review.
If anyone can direct me to reviews that take into account disability, please do! A rich text, indeed!
David Davis