Crimes of the Future | Transhumanism in a painless world | Plastic as a famine solution

Read here the Spanish version of this article.

Watch the movie here if you are a Mubi subscriber. If you are not but want to watch the movie, leave your email in the comments, and I will send it to you as a gift.

Cronenberg has the cinema tattooed all inside his organs.

‘Crimes of the Future’ by David Cronenberg is a direct reference to transhumanism, understood as the awkward obsession of several megarich people to ensure a more extended living on Earth, a contemporary eugenics version. Lastly, an antinatural, aberrant, and not-Lindy behavior.

Saul Tenser, the protagonist, is a performance artist who develops the rare sickness to grow new organs inside him whose function is unknown, which is simultaneously an ode to the pain implicit in the creative process.

Art out of anarchy

‘I don’t really know if I am creating something

the creation of inner beauty cannot be an accident

I don’t like what’s happening with my body

thinking of that slimy worm growing inside me

makes me sick’

Saul Tenser and Djuna

Two disturbing facts confirm the dystopia of this transhumanist world: first, a new specimen of the human race, able to eat plastic, surges; two: “the world is a much more dangerous place now that pain has disappeared”, claims Caprice, the art partner that performs atrocity exhibitions alongside Saul. Their performances include real-time surgeries at the gaze of a painless and morbid public that has almost lost the capacity for astonishment.

‘How can a tumorous growth be considered art?’, asks someone about the internal process occurring inside the protagonist Saul Tenser. ‘Creation of art is related with pain. A good night of sleep is hard to define when you are an artist’, answers Tenser, our glorified organ donor.

During another exhibition of a freak show full of ears, apparently taken from a Guillermo del Toro movie, the audience listens to these lines:

it is time to stop speaking

it is time to stop seeing

it is time to listen.

Is it a direct reference to this quote from Epictetus, one of the most outstanding referents of Stoicism?: ‘We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.’ This phrase might be a calling for sanity in this sick dystopia because stoics were very aware of the expiration date of human nature. Cronenberg confesses that his whole art embodies death and aging during the movie’s press conference at Cannes.

“Death and aging, it’s always in every film, not just my film, it’s in every film. When you take a photograph, the photograph is aging immediately, and after aging death, so, you know it’s everywhere”.

When you take a photograph, the photograph is aging immediately.

At the very end, a sick autopsy of a specimen of this new breed of the human race is part of the last performance of Saul and Caprice. A father lends his dead kid’s body to this sick endeavor. The kid, assassinated by his mother, Djuna, can digest plastic. To his father, his body is a promise of the future, as the time for human evolution to sync up with technology.

Plastic as a famine solution?

Speaking of the new human breed able to consume and digest plastic in the movie, here’s Cronenberg’s approach. He doesn’t pretend to change it or fix it but to embrace it, as one must do in our lives when some tragedies come.

“20 years ago, nobody was talking about microplastics. Now, every five days, you have another microplastic revelation (…) we have microplastics found in the blood bloodstream of many people, and the awareness that about 80 % of the people on Earth have microplastics as part of their flesh”. So the is posing perhaps it’s a satirical suggestion which is instead of thinking that to save the Earth, we have to stop the production of plastics, clean the plastics out of the ocean, clean the microplastics out of the bodies of billions of people because that doesn’t seem very possible. The alternative is that we embrace plastic (…) we enjoy it, we eat it, we find a way to use it as food. It would solve the problems of famine all around the world”.

This movie is another 3 out of 5. Do I recommend it? Again, it depends. In my first review, I spoke about the parallel between oneiric movies and those movies that can be understood more easily. This picture evokes a similar discussion: would you rather the fleshy ones, where makeup and perturbing images prevail, or would you instead choose the movies of the normies to say so?

You can read the other reviews here.