Highly successful, but only really enjoyable if you’re into it—and I hope you aren’t! The body stuff is quite unpleasant to watch, and is very familiar to us all at this point. I was unpleasantly pleased that he introduced “eating” as another fucked up thing that he could bring into the duology of pain and eroticism. I found myself confounded most of all by the schmaltzy dialogue. Every scene is an exposition dump, every line might as well begin with “As you know….” But it’s all part of that Cronenberg style; funny to think of how people put Shyamalan’s “Old” on blast for its artificial dialogue, but my countryman manages to dodge the same charge.
There was a point early on, when the psychoanalytic themes were really piling up, that I thought it might be part of his critique of the type of people/culture he is representing; but it’s a style of performance and dialogue that is present throughout all of his films. Crimes of the Future is in direct stylistic continuity with films like Videodrome and Naked Lunch: peak Cronenberg, where he has recognized what his niche is, what people expect from him, and is no longer bothering branching out with outliers like A History of Violence, A Dangerous Method, or Eastern Promises. The movie is highly successful in that its production design, pacing, atmosphere, performance, script, narrative, are all quite well unified and are all obviously the culmination of a long-running sensibility. I feel like I’ve seen a lot of the props before: it’s really in the narrative that this film becomes something new. It’s pure sci-fi, with just enough tantalizing hints at an expansive world beyond the plot (references to politics, etc). Not to mention all the plot threads that don’t get tied up: I was genuinely surprised when the credits rolled.
Thematically I was reminded a lot of Nordau’s “Degeneration,” and similar conservative reactionary thought around the onset of modernity. I’m quite sure that Nordau in particular was explicitly evoked early on as the foundation against which the film was responding. It was remarkable (problematic?) that the one black actor in the film is the one who is critical of the evolutionary “degeneration” that all the rest of the characters seem to embrace, to varying degrees. Because of course that is the position of the film, and of Cronenberg’s entire, half-a-century long exploration of the body horror theme: of course he is critical of a culture where surgery is the new sex; where pain has become a commonplace reaction to alienation from our bodies and souls. But he’s in a complicated position, where if he is unequivocally critical of his characters’ “neo-evolution,” then he is basically a Nordauian (i.e. deeply racist) reactionary thinker. Thus, you have a black man cast judgement on everything we are watching. The problem is, that I always have the impression that this entire realm of discourse is a distinctly 20th century phenomenon, and that it does not have the same relevance today that it did when Cronenberg started making his films. He is developing a style and a theme that had greater relevance in the 70s/80s, but which no longer seems to bear entirely on the present. There are certain stylistic innovations, most notably Viggo’s outfit, but the core of Cronenberg’s whole oeuvre as an artist seems to me to be dated. Still successful despite that.