'The Crimes of the Future' Are Under Your Skin
This review contains spoilers for Crimes of the Future.
David Cronenberg is a filmmaker primarily lauded for his contribution to the body horror genre. With a career spanning decades from Shivers (1975), Videodrome (1983) to eXistenZ (1999), his artistic voice has become one of the most authoritative ones in the industry. Endowed with age and experience, Cronenberg shares his most refined vision of the future in his 2022 film Crimes of the Future.
The world is a dystopian one. In the film’s first five minutes, a mother kills her son, whom she refers to as nothing but a creature — the first of his kind — who can eat plastic. In this world, several people, including the murdered boy’s father, have modified their bodies to digest plastic and other toxic waste in the form of purple “synth bars.” The group believes the human body is meant to evolve in that direction. However, these ideas and actions are considered radical; as it’s frowned upon by the government, it forces the group to work clandestinely.
We’re forced to ask ourselves two main questions. First, “Why is the government so opposed to the evolutionists?” And second, “Why have the evolutionists chosen such severe measures: to be able to digest the synth bars?”
The answer to the second question is simple. This is a world in which “pain has all but disappeared” — so much that “desktop surgery,” a type of surgery that casually happens in public, has become popularized. The few people who can still experience pain are considered spectacles. The first question is best answered by a government worker Wippet (Don McKellar), who asserts that human evolution is going in the wrong direction. He cites the disappearance of pain as an example; it served as an important “warning system,” which has since been lost.
Amid the battle between the government and evolutionists is Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen), an aging man with a condition known as “accelerated evolution syndrome,” which gives him the ability to generate new organs. As half of a performance art duo, his partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux) dissects them out of his body during a show. Additionally, Saul is extremely sensitive to stimuli and is heavily aided by machinery and appliances from a corporation known as LifeFormWare. The corporation has a monopoly on daily life, from beds that adjust and turn the user according to their whims, to chairs that spoon-feed and change the user’s position to make the process of eating easier.
Saul is first sought out by government officials to infiltrate the evolutionists, and then by a prominent evolutionist to help expose what the government is covering up. Because of this, Saul begins to rethink the state of the world; naturally, so does the viewer. At the core of Crimes of the Future is the conflict between man and nature. Large corporations like LifeFormWare have heavily contributed to the generation of toxic waste, which does not happen without any environmental consequences. The human body responds and adapts to environmental changes. Still, groups like the evolutionists are forced to speed up this adaptation through radical procedures because, as we have observed in our world, the rate at which pollution and environmental damage occur is infinitely faster than the human body can evolve to live in such a world comfortably.
The film acknowledges that eating has become uncomfortable for many people — likely due to their changing bodies — and that is what brought on the universalization of the “BreakFaster” chair. LifeFormWare, like certain tech corporations of today, created a problem, made a mockery of a solution, and will continue to exploit the same problem for profit. The evolutionist solution to the eating problem are the synth bars, which as a food source would decrease the amount of waste going into landfills and oceans. Still, the group is heavily controlled by those with power, because that would affect their profit margins. Even in our world, governments and corporations share many overlapping interests.
The same boy who could eat plastic at the beginning of the film was murdered by his mother, who smothered him. It’s a jarring yet highly effective scene, especially in considering the boy as a representative of regular civilians, and his mother as the super body created by corporations and governments. By virtue of having people behind them, you expect the government to care for you and for corporations to have your best interests at heart. But every day it becomes increasingly clear: they do not. There’s always a farce of caring, but nobody is safe in a world where these two artificial bodies control everything about your own. This ruling of bodies and theft of autonomy are the crimes of the future. ♦