Crimes of the Future, Body is Reality, Reflections on the Past
Here is a little essay I wrote a few months back about Crimes of the Future, which in my opinion is one of the greatest and artistically significant films of all time. Spoilers ahead. Thank you!
Crimes of the Future concerns Saul Tenser, a performance artist working in a future where the body is evolving past contemporary physical ability. Tenser possesses a specially evolved condition which causes him immense pain and discomfort; his body can grow new organs at random, a phenomenon considered to be dangerous because of the intrinsic implications on the direction humanity is headed, a non-human state. The state, in the governmental sense, in the form of an alphabet-agency called the National Organ Registry (NOR), detects Tenser’s performances, in which his art partner with whom he is romantically involved tattoos his grown organs, and surgically removes them in front of an audience. Through this, it is understood that in this future, many people no longer experience pain, and subsequently, on a cultural-sexual level, the new popular form of intercourse involves cutting and surgery. While the NOR acts extrajudicially and in the periphery of the narrative, another organization dichotomizes the Registry, a group of radical evolutionists who seek to drill through the government’s anti-evolution stances. On his own, Tenser navigates the underworld between the two adversarial groups, operating as an informant for the NOR, suddenly finding himself in too deep when he becomes instrumental in the martyrdom of the leader of the evolutionists. In the crucial final scene, Tenser fully realizes his wrongdoings and his reality, as the invention of the evolutionists proves to be the key to stopping his pain.
With Crimes of the Future, David Cronenberg creates a metatextual film obsessed with the body horror genre and the evolution of the genre within his own filmography through both content and form. The end result is a profoundly mature and artistic late-career genre film where Cronenberg picks and chooses what tropes to surgically remove and which can stay in a genre he pioneered. Approaching the film through lenses of semantics and syntactics makes it easy to categorically understand how the film marks Cronenberg’s maturity. The focus on evolution turns all the concerns of the film temporal; the environmental and societal decay in the future, as well as the reality of trans existence in current times, are semantic reminders of the politics of the genre, which Cronenberg seeks to keep. The primary maturation comes from the ending, though, where Cronenberg points the camera at himself and accepts the evolution of his genre.
Applying Rick Altman’s seminal semantic/ syntactic theory on genre film to Crimes of the Future allows for a categorized understanding of the tropes Cronenberg addresses in the film. In his essay, Altman categorizes genre into semantics and syntactics. Semantics are the building blocks of a genre, the materials on the surface level and the iconography. The syntactic content is the structures into which the semantics are organized. Specific genres, like the western, are easier to categorize into semantics and syntactics than others. The specificity of the body horror film allows for less semantics; the setting is not the American west but the body itself; the iconography is not the guns and horses but the parts and organs. Working backwards, the syntactical horror of the body horror film stems from a body changing into something else frightening. What causes the change-of-body will then also be semantic. In Crimes of the Future, evolution causes the change-of-body and is the change itself, meaning that evolution is the subject of both semantics and syntactics.
David Cronenberg undeniably pioneered body horror, and Rick Altman’s essay helps us to understand why it is permissible to focus on a singular artist in relation to an entire genre. The fact is, Cronenberg is synonymous with the body horror genre. From the beginning of his career, making short films at the University of Toronto, Cronenberg has dominated the genre, focusing his entire body of work almost exclusively on it. His films, notably The Fly and Videodrome, are highly influential and massively popular canon works of body horror. In Altman’s essay, he urges the importance of the history of genre film, and how it is crucial to understanding genre as an ever-changing mode of categorization. Audience expectations about semantics and syntactics are influenced by previous works within popular culture and the genre.
While The Fly and Videodrome both feature horrific things happening to the main protagonists, a great deal of their horror, and what ultimately makes David Cronenberg’s perspective so crucial within the genre, is their real-life political application and the horror that comes with it. These political applications are the syntactic building blocks and structures into which the semantic horror elements are arranged. In The Fly, a character the greatest act of evil committed by the villain is an attempt to force a pregnancy and prevent an abortion. In Videodrome, the horrific threat is the idea that anyone out there could be watching and sustaining moral injuries from snuff films. Both threats are contemporarily applicable to real life, making the unbelievable body transformations legitimate and threatening. In Crimes of the Future, David Cronenberg chooses to keep the intrinsic politics of the body horror genre. Many people read Crimes of the Future as a commentary on the movement for the rights of transgender people. There are many parallels: government agencies wanting to control the bodies of people, as well as the emphasis on surgery and expression. M. Keith Booker writes about the film’s climate awareness: “It is marked by a general sense that most of our social and political systems are in a state of slow, inevitable decline. However, it is perhaps most centrally driven by an awareness of climate change, which thus wreaks havoc on the people of this future world both physically and emotionally.” And so, with Crimes of the Future maintaining the same progressive themes that his other films contain, Cronenberg regards them as essential to the genre and his body of work.
The final scene of Crimes of the Future is the most important, and where most of Cronenberg’s mature career retrospective comes from, a close read is necessary. In the final scene, Saul Tenser, ridden with guilt because his collaborations with the National Organ Registry have caused the death of the leader of the radical evolutionists, takes a leap of fate. Tenser consumes the invention of the evolutionists, recycled toxic waste, which is processed into the form of a candy bar and is highly toxic to anyone without a modified digestive system. Tenser has no idea whether or not this bar will kill him because he never had his digestive system modified by the radicals and is not sure if his hyper-evolutionary ability has evolved his digestive system in a way that could process the candy bar. Tenser sits in his feeding chair, which turns his body in specific ways to allow his organ-overgrown internals to function correctly and not cause him pain while eating. Tenser’s partner turns on a camera, which later becomes the profilmic, and records him eating the candy bar. In a moment of relief, Saul’s chair quiets, and through the view of the camera, he lets out a tear of happiness. The final shot is a reference to the Passion of Joan of Arc.
It is in this final scene that Cronenberg decides what can not stay in the body horror genre. In The Fly and Videodrome, the men whose bodies are changed both die alongside what is causing their bodies to change. Videodrome ends explicitly in a suicide, which does not even stop Videodrome from potentially taking over the world. The main characters of The Fly and Videodrome become the ultimate victims of the semantic horror. In Crimes of the Future, Saul Tenser willingly attempts suicide to pursue the ultimate truth, the legitimacy of the National Organ Registry and their fear of evolution, or the legitimacy of the radical evolutionists and their attempts to manually evolve the human body to recycle toxic waste humans created. The martyrical reference to Joan of Arc exemplifies the gravity of the situation. Tenser being recorded by a profilmic camera in the final scene is the key to understanding that Tenser is meant to represent Cronenberg himself. Thus, because evolution is proved to be the solution to the problems humanity is facing in Crimes of the Future, David Cronenberg makes, for the first time in his career, the stance that what semantically causes the syntactical horror of his films to be a good thing, something that is not scary and should be celebrated. It is a hopeful ending that suggests that the world will be okay if we continue to let it evolve and that evolution is not scary.