If you can’t feel pain, you lose your capacity for pleasure. If porn is hotter than sex, you’re screwed. If you’re in a hurry, it’s already too late. You’re going to lose your mind if you can’t learn how to get back into your body.

David Cronenberg is the Canadian film director widely considered the preeminent master of “body horror,” a genre he’s helped define throughout a career spanning five decades. He moved from outre b-movies through foundational cult classics such as The Fly and Videodrome into a controversial mid-period that included the much-hated Crash (which had the misfortune to predate the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, by a year) to emerge with more art-house-serious fare such as Maps to the Stars and A History of Violence. 

His new one, with the offensively generic title Crimes of the Future, brings together much of what Cronenberg does best, mixing the erotic doomer McLuhanisms of Videodrome with the arch self-awareness of Eastern Promises and reintroducing go-to actor Viggo Mortensen. Mortensen plays Saul Tensor, a jaded performance artist who’s the biggest star in a waterlogged near-future hellworld mangled by climate change, where people’s bodies are mutating to keep up with the escalating trauma. Tensor’s own body is constantly generating new organs, which he and his partner Caprice (Lea Seydoux) remove in a wildly popular, critically acclaimed surgery-based carnival act.

In one sense, Crimes of the Future is a canvas on which the 79-year-old Cronenberg takes stock of his own life and work, asking if art can save us from suffering and, if so, whether or not it’s worth it. It’s also a definitive statement on body horror for a time in which a lot of Videodrome’s predictions have long since come to pass, for an audience desperate to reconnect with corporeal reality, wondering if the damage is already done, and still planning to finish reading The Body Keeps the Score at some point.

There was a study a few years ago that claimed to show conservatives as having a higher capacity for disgust than liberals. It’s been used to support a lot of dumb ideological straw-men, but it’s useful when considering the purpose of horror as a specific genre of art and entertainment.

Among its other purposes, horror interrogates the conservative parts of our brains. What are we hanging onto and why? Whom do we hate, why do we hate them, and why is it really ourselves we hate? It’s a conservative genre insofar as it cleanses our more old-fashioned instincts through shocking and purging them. When done well, it also has the potential to help us reconnect with our bodies as it shows us how simultaneously silly and serious and comic and tragic it is that we’ve become so grossed out by ourselves.

Key lines of dialogue from David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future

• “No crime like the present.”
• “Zippers have their own sex appeal.”
• “What we’re doing is going to be very public, and it’s going to resonate.”
• “I enjoy trauma. What I do to myself is very traumatic.”
• “Surgery is the new sex.”
• “Does there have to be new sex?”
• “Yes. It’s time.”
• “I’m not very good at the old sex.”

While Tensor can be read as a self-insert, Cronenberg makes it clear that his creative practice, while sexy and remunerative, is not adequate to liberate him. He’s using his work to escape a fear of death that nonetheless rapidly closes in. He’s torn between the soulful seductions of Caprice and the adoration of an ambitious superfan played to comic perfection by Kristen Stewart, both of whom burn with desire he lacks. He’s being dragged one way by a grieving father and another by the organizers of something called The Inner Beauty Pageant as his cognizance and vitality drain by the second. Oh, he’s also a rat for the government, which, yeah, of course “the world’s most successful performance artist” is a fed. Using our fractal trauma as an engine for generating content, the film suggests, only propels us deeper into the maze.

The larger point, about the urgency of embodiment, may seem obvious, at least until you actually try it.

As usual, despite his more seasoned late-career philosophical outlook, Cronenberg ain’t subtle. While other directors would hit you over the head with an idea, Cronenberg will cut a hole in your belly and fuck you with it. And he knows that may not be enough. In contrast to the anarchist BDSM chaos energy of Videodrome, Crimes of the Future has a mournful tinge, as though Cronenberg recognizes that his work is nearly done and he hasn’t fixed anything.

But the film did help me get back into my body. I watched it in a chilly theater and, although I have a strong stomach for gore (thanks, journalism school), I occasionally couldn’t stop shivering. I’m not eating well lately – some people “stress-eat,” while I do quite the opposite – and I’m acutely aware of the bones under my skin. As I picked at my own sense of self-disgust, I noticed that, much as my brain was thinking thoughts, my lungs were breathing, my heart was beating, my gut was digesting queso fries, and I was alive.

I don’t have a body. I am one, in relation and connection to others, and that’s my salvation I struggle the hardest to accept.

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