David Cronenberg, Tattoos, and Wilhelm Reich: Crimes of the Future, Part II
Vol. 1, Issue 13, Sept. 16, 2022
This week’s column continues from the previous with thoughts on David Cronenberg’s most recent film Crimes of the Future (2022). There is a scene that struck me as profound in its attitude, but that did not make it into the initial analysis. In the scene, roughly twenty minutes in, Saul Tenser is making adjustments to the rubber cartilage of one of the articulated skeletal instruments of the Sark (sarcophagus) Unit that he and Caprice will use in their performance. Caprice has added the requisite “uniquely self-referential” tattoo to the novel organ growing inside Tenser’s body. Tenser is pensive.
Tenser: “I’m a little upset about the tattoo.”
Caprice: “Oh?”
Tenser: “Rambunctious. That’s what I’d call it.”
Caprice: “That’s a technical term?”
Tenser: “It takes over the form, the shape of the organ itself. It really, in a sense, dominates it, reshapes it. It’s not just parasitic, although, in a sense, it is that too. It seems to take meaning away from the organ. Takes the process of meaning for itself, so to speak.”
This being Cronenberg, Tenser’s line of critique is a provocation, one of those existential or ontological monologues that are written, in a sense, into the skin of Cronenberg’s corpus of work, so to speak. How deeply Cronenberg feels this line, or whether he gives it to Tenser with complete ambivalence, I do not know. But it is worth taking seriously, either way. The provocation is very simple: does ‘the tattoo’ —not the one Caprice inks upon Tenser’s organ, but the tattoo as a concept, as a species of art— tend to take over the form? Does the tattoo take meaning away from the organ (the largest of the human body), the skin on which it is written? At what point do we stop seeing, say, the arm upon which that tattoo appears and see only the meaning generated by the tattoo?
Cronenberg’s ontology “body is reality” is reminiscent of Wilhelm Reich’s functionalism, and rejects mind-body duality, disembodied consciousness, and spirituality. Necessarily, it critiques those beliefs as among the ontologies that have led to the loss of bodily meaning. The Cronenbergian, or Reichian position is anti-Cartesian, anti-Platonic, and of course, against the Christian (and insert spiritualities as required) negation of the physical present that is informed and/or reinforced by Platonism. Anecdotally, my experience is that many ecopsychologists have ethical oppositions to Descartes’ particular dualism and denial of animal sentience, but many retain some version of dualism in their conception of what has been called the mind-body problem; one sees the ecological insistence that this is our one and only planet, simultaneous with beliefs in the persistence of disembodied consciousness or a spiritual afterlife, thus splitting the difference. There is a tendency toward a dialectic of embodiment and disembodiment in the field, where I take a different position. Many regard ecopsychology as an inherently ‘spiritual’ practice. I do not. So, one can see why David Cronenberg’s or Wilhelm Reich’s ontology, or indeed the Freudian view presents a challenge. Yet, these also offer a solution in their insistence on the singular meaning of the body, and by extension, the ecosystems of existence.
To return to the tattoo. It takes meaning away from the organ only in a world where the organ retains meaning of its own; and Cronenberg’s point, I believe, is that we have ceased to inscribe the body with meaning in and of itself, that postmodern notions of performance, or ‘performativity’ (ugh…) have been as responsible in their ways of stripping the innate and implicit reality of the body as Platonism, Christianity, and New Age fantasies. That is why Tenser and Caprice are, provocatively and ironically, performance artists: their novelty is in taking the body absolutely seriously as ontology, not as an abstract ‘site’ for the ‘play’ of ‘signifiers.’ Body is reality.
But, there is a difference between Caprice’s tattooing of Tenser’s novel organs and tattooing in some other contexts. Tenser does not direct Caprice’s art. Caprice chooses what she tattoos upon Tenser. Tenser’s point, that the tattoo can overwrite the innate meaning of the organ, remains true—surely, that happens. Yet, I found myself provoked in an interesting way. I have only two tattoos, and/but yes, it is true that their meaning, their being-there in my being-there invites interpretation or questions. There’s a good chance that you’ve had similar experience with your own.
Tenser’s critique reminded me of the difference between my experience and his: the tattoos I have are—as much as I can insist on this—expressions of my inner realty, things that I have wanted to surface, ambient presences and indicators of my existential position. They are there to explain, to preempt other explanations even. So, do they ‘take’ meaning from the organ? So to speak, yes, in a sense, as Tenser might say. But if you believe body is reality, then they are of the body and the consciousness with which the body is functionally identical—the Reichian view—and then they can do nothing but express the interior of the same body closer to its exterior. Perhaps, in that case, there is no question of the tattoo overwriting the meaning of the organ with its own. Of course, this inevitably returns us to the question I asked in the previous column: to what extent can we say that any modification of the body is voluntary? Was it, indeed, caprice (lower case) that led me to the tattoo parlor? Is the archetypal Caprice always the one doing the work?
I received a question following the last column about why Tenser and Caprice experience pain in sleep. I don’t think it so much in sleep, as it is in dreams that their pain is experienced. It strikes me that it is consciousness of pain that has been lost, but that it remains in the unconscious. Pain cannot be incorporated out of existence in the unconscious. At last, particularly for Caprice, it is empathy toward the imagined pain of others that returns. Indeed, we understand this from watching Cronenberg films in general: those moments of shock, disgust, or horror are always thus. Even if the protagonists insist on the death of affect, on the sublimation of pain, or its incorporation, the audience—absent psychopathology—feels the pain by proxy. Cronenberg proves this repeatedly in Crimes of the Future and elsewhere.
The flattening of affect, then, is a removal of bodily meaning, of reality. This, I think, must be why I recoil from flat affect whenever I encounter it, and why my reaction to it is what I would call visceral. Pain is transpersonal, in that sense, but also, it cannot be removed. Caprice’s glorious soliloquy during the autopsy of the child Brecken is evidence of the inseparability of agony, as is Tenser’s ambivalent ecstasy in the final shot, again absent psychopathology. Tenser and Caprice are absolutely not psychopaths. Those who insist that the body is merely a ‘site’ for the ‘play’ of ‘signifiers’ might be. To treat the body in such terms, or as a temporary and lesser vessel for an eternal and greater spirit invites disdain for the world, however unconscious that may be. There is, as Sartre put it, no exit.
I hope this has given you some ideas.
Regards from Santa Fe,
—James Reich