A man loses his skin and limbs and becomes a giant fly. Another character’s hand evolves into a precise biomechanical weapon. A woman licks the blood of her newborn. A young man copes with a half-mated existence through a wound shaped like a vulva. Someone rips a gun from his own stomach. A human head is disassembled into a thousand fragments in a tightly focused close-up. A filmography crowded with such scenes has propelled David Cronenberg into one of cinema’s most extreme and unsettling voices. “The civilizational process has allowed us to suppress our most immoral impulses, and that’s why we can meet without killing each other, but as an artist, I try to explore the destructive side of man, and it fascinates me,” the Canadian filmmaker explained during a San Sebastián honor, as the Donostia Award recognized his career that Wednesday. (San Sebastián Festival attribution)
Cronenberg has spent most of his fifty-year career crafting horror that avoids haunted houses, vampires, zombies, ghosts, or demons. The monsters in his films are always unmistakably human. He sits at the center of a subgenre often labeled bodily horror or body terror, where transformation or disintegration of the body dialogue with sexuality becomes the central engine. “They came from within…” began one early work in which a doctor introduces a parasite into a group of people, awakening insatiable sexual and murderous impulses. In Angry (1977), a dying woman undergoes experimental surgery that turns her into a vampire with phallic appendages under her armpits, making her victims into new threats. In Inseparable (1988), a gynecologist devises and attempts to employ abnormal surgical instruments on women who he believes harbor mutated reproductive systems. Building on premises like these, Cronenberg has repeatedly asked existential questions that many other artists would avoid. “I’m not trying to provoke the audience,” he stated at the San Sebastián event, “I’m trying to push myself to the limits and invite the public to join me. I’m not like Hitchcock, who saw the audience as puppets to be manipulated. I seek a truth about myself through my cinema.”
‘Future crimes’
Premiering at the Cannes Festival in May and shown again in San Sebastián, Cronenberg’s new feature arrives in Spanish cinemas the following Friday. Crimes of the Future imagines a tomorrow in which infections and physical pain are banished, even as some bodies sprout new organs that some critics regard as art. The work threads together recurring themes and visual motifs from Cronenberg’s career. Early in the film, a pair of cartilaginous mechanical arms carve across a woman’s chest. Viggo Mortensen lies in a sarcophagus whose texture recalls the monster from Alien and begins to probe his own insides while licking his lips with a peculiar pleasure; elsewhere a dancer’s mouth is stitched shut. A voice notes, “Surgery is the new sex.”
The film places Cronenberg’s preoccupations within a world where large corporations and climate concerns collide with the sustainability of life itself. He has expressed concern about unwinding the damage humanity has inflicted on the planet, and he nonchalantly acknowledges that the public can expect more films from him. “I thought they wanted you to stop making movies when they gave you the honor,” he observed in San Sebastián. “Now I understand that, on the contrary, they are encouraging you to keep making them.”