CRONENBERG

 

Cronenberg’s Dystopia

 

          The history of David Cronenberg’s films frequently demonstrates a fascination with the intersection of the organic and the mechanical, a perfect subject for science fiction and horror, both forms he has explored in the course of his career.  Though the details are hazy, in Crash (1977) people enjoyed a connection between automobile accidents and sex; in Videodrome (1983) as I recall, James Woods has a VHS cassette (remember them?) inserted into his abdomen, though I do not now know exactly why.  In his fine remake of The Fly (1986) he shows the unexpected consequences of the accidental incorporation of an insect into a device for teleportation; as the now famous lines from the movie tell us, “Be afraid, and be very afraid.”  And in the generally abysmal eXistenZ (1999) a character uses a gun made from a human jawbone—it may be some other bone—and shoots the teeth like bullets.  Think about that for a moment.

          His latest work, Crimes of the Future, continues the theme in a perhaps even more bizarre direction, signaled by the opening sequence of a young boy eating the plastic wastebasket in the family bathroom, not an especially auspicious omen.  The future of the title, to begin with, resembles a kind of random assemblage of junkyard material, with apparently foundered ships in some backgrounds, dark streets, shabby offices, and an overwhelming atmosphere of squalor.  The central figure in this dismal, depressing dystopia, Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen), demonstrates what might be the logical evolution of today’s organ harvesting, with his ability to grow new organs, which his colleague Caprice (Léa Seydoux) removes by means of some odd remote control instruments.

          A number of unclear events revolving around the harvest and a number of strange people participate in the whole process, including some odd folks from an organization called the National Organ Registry, whose offices look like something from an abandoned building, and a pair of female automobile mechanics who end up boring holes in a character’s skull with cordless electric drills, for no apparent reason.  Perhaps worst of all, the usually intense and excellent Viggo Mortensen walks around wrapped almost entirely in black, with only his eyes showing, looking rather like an obedient female in Saudi Arabia; he spends a good deal of the movie uttering horrible choking, coughing, gasping sounds, again for no particular reason.  Crimes of the Future may surpass eXistenZ in sheer awfulness, but it’s a close contest, with a winner that most of us wouldn’t care to crown.