“Let nothing be called natural in an age of bloody confusion,” said Brecht; after this film, things look bloodier and more confused than ever. David Cronenberg’s new movie in the Cannes competition, Crimes of the Future, is a body-horror atrocity exhibition in the Ballardian style that he gave us in Crash (1996), which was about the secret cult of connoisseurs devoted to the erotic dimension of car crashes. As for this film, one of the macabre things to be witnessed here has one character purring passionately: “It’s juicy with meaning!” Or … well … maybe just juicy. But very, very juicy indeed.
This is set in an eerie future world in which people’s bodies are changing and everyone is beginning to divine that they are on the brink of a post-human evolutionary stage. Developments in medicine and analgesia have diminished physical sensation to the extent that pain is a thing of the past, so much so that it is sought after by a bizarre new breed of sicko sybarites, but conventional sensual pleasure is withering away also, along with the disgust and fear that has always moderated human behaviour. And along with this, bodies themselves have also shown that they are capable of growing new organs, whose function is not yet clear.
