Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future is a synthesis of his body of work on bodies
New film addresses environmental crisis and the role of art in a dystopian near future
After almost a decade of silence, David Cronenberg is back to the movie theaters with the release of Crimes of the future. The title is not only curious for its literal meaning, but the Canadian director has actually released a short film with the same name back in 1970. However, this has nothing to do with the movie now starring Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux and Kristen Stewart.
The nods to the past don’t stop here. In fact, it’s possible to assume that the movie is some sort of “meta-collage” as it features something like a “moodboard” of ideas and concepts that connect the audience to Cronenberg’s body of work, as well as what’s happening in the world (especially in the art world).
In this new movie, Cronenberg beautifully makes justice to his title “master of body horror”, an achievement that he got with past works such as The Fly, Videodrome, ExistenZ and even the adaptation of Naked Lunch. As his son Brandon follows the steps of the father with movies such as Antiviral and Possessor, the oldest is braver for sticking his finger right inside a very specific, sensible and emergent hornet’s nest such as it is the case of body art and biohacking.
In fact, body art itself is no news. It’s a specific movement in performance art that uses the body as a platform not only in the sense of giving movement and incorporating meanings, but it proposes the use of the body as a “canvas” both in physically and biologically ways. For this very reason, there are clear connections established between body art and body modification. These include tattoos and piercings, for example.
While body modification is an ancient cultural and artistic practice, body art started in the 1960s with the Viennese Actionists. Artists such as Hermann Nitsch, Otto Mühl, Günter Brus and Rudolf Schwarzkogler used their own body or animal corpses as part of their installations and performances that addressed controversial and violent topics. These are some of the subjects common to the body art’s agenda, besides other reflections on gender, identity, and the exchanges between body and mind.
With time, body art also arrived in Italy and France, where it became known as art corporel. Then, in the 1970s, the world was presented to Marina Abramovic’s work Rhythm 0, a piece that is still popular till these days. In it, the artist offered different objects that the public could use on her. After six hours of performance, Marina not only was fully undressed by the audience, but her naked body was also marked with lipstick and a person pointed a gun against her head. This has triggered a fight which ended the performance.
While Marina’s work is indeed shocking to some, there are other performance artists in the body art movement that go even further when it comes to startling the audience with violence which can be directed to their own bodies. For this very reason, it is also common to see connections with niches such as BDSM (bondage and sadomasochism). Back in the time of the Viennese Actionists, the artist Heinz Cibuka did a performance in which he simulated the mutilation of his own genitals. More recently, the American artist Ron Athey has made that link between body art, BDSM and body modification much clearer with his work.
So it’s not exactly surprising to see that one of the taglines of Cronenberg’s new movie is “surgery is the new sex”. The director has actually tackled this notion in past films when it comes to the idea of mutation and mutilation of the human body as a source to eroticism — that is the case of Videodrome and Crash, to say a few examples.
On Crimes of the future, we are invited to see a future when humans no longer feel pain or face the risk of infections. This is why we can see surgeries and mutilation being performed in the middle of the streets, with no aseptic preoccupation and an erotic approach to it. Just like in BDSM, the pursuit for pleasure blends with pain; but in a scenario where pain doesn’t exist anymore, feeling it is as much of an enterprise as reaching an orgasm.
However, this orgasm does not happen solely on an erotic or even pornographic level. Here we are transported to religious art, in the ecstasy of saints where these subjects reach both the peak of pleasure and enlightenment. It is no wonder that suspension performances have exactly this meditative mood, because it is not about the blood that drips from the wound or the pain that the performer is feeling: it is about how this very pain allows them to reach another level of consciousness and sense-making.
On Crimes of the future, Viggo Mortensen is Saul Tenser, an artist that cultivates new organs inside his own body as part of his performance. If, on one hand, this future is absent of physical pain, this is practically irrelevant when we see Mortensen on screen, for his character is always in suffering and debilitation. But it’s precisely in this martyrdom that his geniality is achieved, to the point that he is invited to run for an inner beauty pageant prize — a literal reference to a conversation featured on Dead Ringers, another Cronenberg movie.
By the way, there are more nods given to this movie, for instance with the instruments used to check Tenser’s organs or even, I would risk, the puns hidden in the name of the characters. On Dead Ringers, Jeremy Irons plays the Mantle brothers (a surname that sounds like “mental” when said out loud); on Crimes of the future, Mortensen is Saul Tenser, a name that as much as Saul Goodman (it’s all good man) raises the possibility of pronunciation as “soul tensor” or a tensioner of the soul — an idea that fits quite well to Cronenberg’s exploration of the body and the soul in both movies.
But not everyone buys the narrative that Tenser is really a genius. In post-viral times when teenagers eat soap pods and people die taking selfies in touristic spots, inflicting pain to yourself and doing irrational things for performance (both in a sense of performing an act and performing in numbers) is not revolutionary. In this case, the detective played by Welket Bungue who is investigating Tenser questions whether the artist’s work is really that great, because then the bump growing on his belly is a masterpiece crafted by his own body.
This becomes even more evident in a scene where we see a man with his body covered by implanted ears. His eyes and mouth are seamed during a performance in which a narrator describes the act as a reminder for us to hear more and pay more attention to other senses than vision. With the poetic impact of a haikai bot on Twitter, the performance goes on with a dance. For an art critic in the audience, it seemed that the performer was a better dancer than a conceptual artist though.
Despite Cronenberg saying in an interview that he didn’t know Stelarc’s work, the artist is precisely known for his extreme experimentations with his own body — to the point that he literally implanted an ear on his forearm. At first, Crimes of the future may look like it could be called “Stelarc, the movie”, but instead of stanning the artist and his body of work, Cronenberg stresses how shallow the art and performance world can get.
This specific scene made me think of something that happened to me. Years ago, before I started my PhD, I presented a draft of my research project to some professors that, at that time, I thought they would understand and even be my mentors. However, when I spoke of transhumanism and people like Martine Rothblatt doing experiments with robotics and mind uploading, they said this didn’t exist, it was just science fiction.
For them, transhumanism and cyborgism were two concepts from the performance world. They believed that the ideas spread by people like Ray Kurzweil or Max Moore, for example, were more of an artistic manifesto just like in the case of Stelarc or Orlan (who is clearly mentioned in the movie when Seydoux’s character gets implants on her forehead). This is why at that same opportunity I was presented to someone who they judged to be very interesting and a true cyborg for the fact that they have danced with an outfit made out of motherboards.
The conflict in Crimes of the future is actually very similar to mine on that occasion. Tenser was being investigated by the detective because his performance, which consists of the creation of new organs, was similar to the agenda of a subversive group that was genetically manipulating humans to be able to feed on plastic, thus “solving” the problem of pollution.
In the past, I also had the opportunity to watch the performance of the artists Neil Harbisson and Moon Ribas in Sao Paulo. In one week, together with a set of specialists, the founders of the Cyborg Foundation developed a dental implant through which they could communicate remotely by using Morse code. Even though his body of work might have connection with the precepts of transhumanism and science fiction, the duo don’t share the same opinion as I found out during a later interview.
On that opportunity, I had the chance to understand that the artists were actually developing their own definition of cyborgism through the pursuit for technologies that could actually strengthen our connection to the natural world. This became evident when the duo suggested the following scenario: if we could see in the dark, like some animals do, we might not need as much electricity as we do today and, therefore, we wouldn’t be damaging the environment so much as we are. For this reason, both Harbisson’s implant (which translates colors into sounds) and Moon’s (which translates the seismic activity on Earth and the moon into vibrations in her ankles) are emulations of abilities that other animals have (bats and elephants, for instance).
Cyborg Foundation’s goal is therefore to achieve a new form of humanity, but in a sense that sticks to the original meaning of the word cyborg. The term was proposed in the 1960s by Maines and Maynes, and it suggests the development of a cybernetic organism that is adapted to live in inhospitable environments found in space exploration. On Crimes of the future, the group that is being investigated creates not only a means to modify the human body, so that our digestive system can process plastic, but this same ability would be passed on through generations.
It is precisely here where we found the intersection between the cyborg performer and the biohacker activist: both use technology to modify their body, but for reasons and goals that have subtle differences. In the movie, Tenser grows organs that are not functional, but symbolic as they are part of his artistic performance. In the case of the subversive group, modifying human biology is a means (although controversial or even scary) to tackle environmental issues.
Here, once again, I see myself in Cronenberg’s movie. In 2015, I implanted an NFC chip in my hand. It has a cryptographic key that could be used as a “password” to unlock any devices that have the same technology. So, in theory, I wouldn’t need keys to unlock a door that has an electronic lock, I would just need to lay my hand on it. But I never really used the implant for such means. I basically just remembered it when I was giving talks about cyborgism and transhumanism. On such occasions, many people asked me why I put something in my body if I could simply use a card, a regular key or my phone?
NFC implants are very discrete, but other implants like Harbisson’s antenna are much more visible — to the point that he often wears a cap to hide it in public. With the Eyeborg app, anyone can run the same process that his implant does, which raises the same question: why would you implant something in your own skull, when you could be using a mobile phone instead?
For many, it makes more sense to find more sustainable ways to produce energy than to inject something to your eye, giving you temporary night vision. However, in the agenda of cyborgs and biohackers, the body is a means, not an end. While some procedures are more conceptual or even aesthetic, such as it is the case of Stelarc and Orlan’s work, there are biohackers who are fabricating insulin for diabetics and sexual hormones for transgender folk.
Crimes of the future has an open end as Tenser decides to go under the same modification tried by the group being investigated. Therefore, the artistic and aesthetic approach gets closer to the political and practical perspective of body modification. Cronenberg is not necessarily saying that art is useless if there’s no purpose for it, also because art is originally not supposed to be useful — that would be design. However, there is the suggestion for more politicization and action. So it’s up to you to choose if it’s more appealing to dance with an outfit made out of motherboards to address the issue with electronic disposal or hack your own body to process the microplastics that we are invariable already eating.
Disclaimer: This is the translation of an article originally published at Tilt UOL.
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