David Cronenberg
Crimes of the Future

The scalpel that cuts through flesh, probes among the internal organs, severs. An ostentatious, obscene pain, with a sweet metallic taste of blood, a forbidden pleasure and therefore irresistible. In the future, man no longer knows how to feel pain; he is paralyzed in his frantic search for pleasure, which is equally faded, almost unattainable. The new sex is in surgery, the desecration of bodies, which meanwhile - perhaps as a reaction to this sensory stasis - have begun to gallop on the path of evolution.

Inexplicable mutations, not yet fully understood in their supposed physiological functions. New organs as works of art. The government investigates weakly, but man is a playful and deviant animal, which does not settle for just accepting transformations: it turns them into a reason for exhibitionism, those tumultuous bodies thus become conceptual art. Pleasure, pain, sex, art. Everything interpenetrates in a dazzling experience, of which we are participants as voyeuristic spectators who watch the scenes, astonished and seduced by the pain that oozes from the limbs.

It feels like sensing the stimulus of the blade that opens the muscles and etches into the bones. An absolute perversion, the ultimate frontier in the barter of the body. Art and sex through mutilations, deep penetrations, because lips and genitals are no longer sufficient, there is a need for a spur that touches us more intimately to awaken the now dormant nervous stimuli of the human race.

A humanity that has lost with pain its morality, sense of limits, dignity. Without using futuristic scenarios or stunning special effects, Cronenberg constructs his dystopia primarily in the words of his characters. It feels like being at a perverse vernissage, where the words seem those of depraved art critics who are willing to do anything for a thrill. Death is denied, withdrawn, judicial authorities no longer believe in the possibility of doing harm, which therefore slithers freely, a form of aesthetics like any other.

The machines of the future open tissues and dissect bodies without leaving traces, without consequences. These infernal machines are the erotic trinkets and the instruments of the artist who offers his performance art to an audience of maniacs. Caprice (Léa Seydoux) cuts the new organ of her partner Saul (Viggo Mortensen). A brilliant dystopian hyperbole that draws inspiration from examples very close to us, like Abramovic, but actually delves into a psychological trend that is still underrated today. The persistent exhibition of bodies, the prevailing pornography, nudity always, sex without more rules: all this does not lead people to enjoy more, to embrace eros with enthusiasm. If anything, it diminishes pleasure, because it frees it from pain, from lack, from prohibition. Without transgression, there is no thrill and no orgasm.

The worn-out bodies, like empty shells, feel nothing anymore, they are wrecks. A theme that was already posed by Lars Von Trier in his Nymphomaniac. Here it goes further, in search of new pleasure and new pain.

It is not over. It pushes even further, with the autopsy of a child killed by the mother. The little one ate plastic, hypotheses are made about his astonishing internal organs. The father "sells" the body for an artistic performance that can highlight his secret organization. A perverse perfection of the human race, another degeneration or a true evolution? Why do they eat plastic?

With a minimal budget, the director essentially puts everyone in line and explains how to make a film that cuts into our flesh, as well as assaulting our synapses. Then the plot may not be perfect, but it matters little. The ideas and images are so powerful and disturbing that it could have ended halfway and I would still have cried out to the miracle.