The (Bad) Taste Test: In Crimes of the Future, David Cronenberg Says Trans Rights
There’s a tendency to assume that all trans artists make work about their bodies. And a trans person making work about their body often becomes a shorthand for making work about gender, making work about Being Trans. Sometimes this is explicit or obvious; the work of performance artist Nina Arsenault, as she documents the procedures that have led to her body looking the way it does, is clearly a commentary on gender - on creating it, performing it. Sometimes, the work might not be too explicit; might only make itself clear after you understand yourself a little more, like The Matrix series.
Crimes of the Future, David Cronenberg’s return to bodies - if not to body horror - lies somewhere in-between the two. While Cronenberg seems to present the film as being obliquely about trans-ness - there are plenty of other ways to read it: on the role of the state; the precarious relationship between humanity and the environment; as a treatise on the history of performance art - the performance art couple at the centre of the film are exploring gender, in their work and lives, in a way that’s more explicit.
Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) is making art about his body. He’s one of a new kind of person, one who evolves rapidly, almost endlessly. This rapid evolution, the relationship he has with a body that he often feels out-of-step with, is central to both his art and identity. One of the first things that his partner and artistic collaborator Caprice (Lea Seydoux) says to him is “there’s a new hormone in your bloodstream” - a sentence that carries with it all kinds of trans implications. About hormones themselves; about the ways in which our bodies change, and what we do with that change.
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In response, grimacing - Saul’s body is almost always in pain; he needs complicated chairs and beds that keep moving him around, aiding him in simple acts like eating or sleeping - he says “It’s about time. I thought I was all dried up.” Saul’s cropped white hair feels almost like a kind of trans coding; he’s got a certain kind of transmasc hairstyle that you’ll see a lot if you follow queer artists and writers on Instagram.
The relationship between Saul and Caprice is the film’s heart; the way that they explore ideas of gender and bodily transformation through their art. When she talks about the beginning of her relationship with Saul, she mentions the idea of “what [they] unleashed in each other,” before saying “now, we are what we are.” But while the relationship between Saul and Caprice is understanding, empathetic, and deeply loving - they’re almost always making some kind of contact with each other; laughing, touching, holding hands - Crimes of the Future takes place in a world that isn’t quite as understanding. Even as bodies keep changing, becoming more fluid, the question of what to do with these bodies - how to respond to them, what the government should do - looms large.
As Crimes of the Future opens, a young boy eats plastic that’s washed up on the shore; another new stage in human evolution. After he’s smothered to death, there are whispers about “the corpse of that creature” coming from the woman that killed him: his mother. Cronenberg, always looking to the future, still grapples with the darker side of what happens in the wake of progress, and if some people are being left behind. The government arm associated with these ever-changing, newly-evolved humans, argue that new organs need to be registered “from a security standpoint,” according to Timlin (aka Kristen Stewart in a fascinating, almost mousy performance that shifts as she gets closer to the things that she ought to be regulating).
This tension: between the drive towards registering a new organ, compared to the feeling of trying to understand a body that’s continually changing, is an axis of trans politics. What it means to self-define - in terms of body and gender, but also how people define their own liberation - placed at odds with institutions that insist on forcing people to define themselves a certain way. It might be tempting to see this as a film driven by fear from Cronenberg, trying to grapple with issues that he doesn’t understand; but the more that it goes on, the clearer it becomes that for Cronenberg, the question of the heart of this is, as it’s been throughout his films, one of liberation.
In the past, the body horror of Cronenberg’s filmography - the parasites in films like Shivers and Rabid, the New Flesh of Videodrome - is a monstrous influence, something that almost corrupts. But even through this, characters have always found liberation; a new language, as much as a new flesh. This is what Crimes of the Future offers. As much as its headline assertion - that “surgery is the new sex” something that feels like a knowing riff on Videodrome - implies something lascivious and explicit, it never goes fully in that direction. It’s inaccurate to even call Crimes a body horror film, since Cronenberg doesn’t see these bodies as horrifying, but instead, as vehicles for liberation. Whether it's Saul and Caprice trying to make sense of the chaos of his body through their performative collaborations, to a dancer who’s sprouted ears all over his body playing in voiceover that “now it’s time to listen” as his eyes and lips are sewn shut.
“The two of them are constantly embracing, as each of them transforms, refusing the narrow confines of oversight and demonisation - this is Cronenberg’s most political film and possibly his most romantic one as well; offering a study in the empathy, power, and politics, of being able to feel at home as your body, your reality, changes.”
During one of Saul and Caprice’s performances, the elaborate surgery table that he’s splayed out on while she operates on him - she sees the operating table as an “extension” of her, a kind of canvas. They’re surrounded by screens, with the Barbara Krueger-esque declaration “THE BODY IS REALITY.” In a way, this is what animates the politics of Crimes, the fact that the body is reality.
But where the film succeeds is in approaching this from a way that feels almost radical in its empathy; so willing to show the ways in which different bodies make reality itself different for so many people. Caprice herself even undergoes cosmetic surgery the more time she spends networking with performance artists. In the film’s most sexually explicit scene, she eats out one of Saul’s surgical wounds. Like so much of Crimes, this scene is a strange combination of things: clinical distance; eroticism; deep intimacy. The two of them are constantly embracing, as each of them transforms, refusing the narrow confines of oversight and demonisation - this is Cronenberg’s most political film and possibly his most romantic one as well; offering a study in the empathy, power, and politics, of being able to feel at home as your body, your reality, changes.
Words: Sam Moore
