I Keep Accidentally Calling It "Crimes of the Heart"
which makes it sound like David Cronenberg is at a mid-90s high school forensics tournament
Just saw the new Cronenberg, Crimes of the Future. I’m drawn to the way that many films’ plots and themes mimic the conditions of their reception, the discourse that will encrust around them. When news leaked that David Cronenberg had made a new film, that it was of the body-horror genre that made him famous, and that it had apparently elicited some amount of expensive vomit from the tummies of Cannes festival attendees — oh my God, people were excited. I was excited. We talked about this movie in a way that mimicked the old “Saturday Night Live” sketch where everybody has to sniff the spoiled milk. After all, when Cronenberg decides to make you sick, he can really do it. Scanners (1981), a comparatively innocent Cronenberg film in that it’s violent and suspenseful and gory rather than psychologically twisted, features one of the better-done exploding heads I’ve ever seen. Everybody talks about the moment in Videodrome (1983) when James Wood’s guts turn into a VCR that you can put tapes in, so as to “program” him CIA-style, although what makes Videodrome most upsetting for me is the moment when Debbie Harry seems to be getting (willingly?) ritually murdered as part of a pornographic TV broadcast: a moral horror that makes your stomach drop as you realize that this is something people would absolutely pay for if they could get away with. And in The Fly (1986) you can watch Jeff Goldblum throw upon his food so as to suck it back up — what did you expect, he’s a fly. Cronenberg is a filmmaker who haunts your nightmares if you see him at any age before thirty. If he has turned from the more respectable psychological-drama and crime-drama territory he has trod for most of this century for the visceral horror that made him famous, if Cronenberg was going to make us feel terrible, this meant that movies were back, somehow.
So. Crimes of the Future is floridly disgusting, and in that way it fulfills one’s expectations. It