Let Them Eat Plastic: David Cronenberg's 'Crimes of the Future'
Vol. 1, Issue 12, Sept. 3, 2022
Professor Dick Vethaak is an ecotoxicologist, member of the UN Joint Group of Experts on the Scientific Aspects of Marine Environmental Protection (GESAMP), and a senior researcher at the Deltares institute in the Netherlands where he specializes in microplastic and nanoplastic pollution. In March, he was one of six scientists involved in preparing a paper titled “Discovery and quantification of plastic particle pollution in human blood,” published by Environment International in May. In their study, Vethaak and his colleagues discovered plastics in 77% of participants.
Interviewed for The Guardian, he explained, “Our study is the first indication that we have polymer particles in our blood – it’s a breakthrough result.” The most common microplastics discovered in the blood samples were polyethylene terephthalate (PET) used in polyester cloth fibre, plastic bottles, and packaging (also sometimes in modified form as Mylar), polystyrene, and polyethylene. As Vethaak put it, “We also know in general that babies and young children are more vulnerable to chemical and particle exposure. That worries me a lot.” Vethaak continued:
The big question is what is happening in our body? Are the particles retained in the body? Are they transported to certain organs, such as getting past the blood-brain barrier?” And are these levels sufficiently high to trigger disease? We urgently need to fund further research so we can find out.
This brings us to Crimes of the Future (2022), the fantastic new film by David Cronenberg which premiered at Cannes in May, just as the new study that confirmed the presence of microplastics in human blood was hitting the journals. It’s a testament to Cronenberg’s predictive powers as a filmmaker, and his own interest in the ingestion of microplastics by humans, that this synchronicity was generated. The concern for children that Vethaak expresses is precisely Cronenberg’s.
Note: There are significant ‘spoilers’ in the following.
In the opening scenes of Crimes of the Future, an eight-year-old boy eats the rim of a pink plastic trash basket in a dirty bathroom. The boy, Brecken, is the son of Lang Dotrice (Scott Speedman), leader of a cult of plastic eaters whose altered bodies have a tolerance for consuming plastic and toxic waste products. Brecken’s is the first case of a child genetically inheriting this ability. Regarding her child as an inhuman creature, Djuna Doctrice (Lihi Kornowski) euthanizes/murders Brecken. It is towards a public performance art autopsy of Brecken that Crimes of the Future moves, and that provides its tragic environmental statement. Conducting the autopsy, Caprice (Léa Seydoux) delivers a soliloquy, in part:
So, we see that the crudeness and the desperation and the ugliness of the world has seeped inside even our youngest and most beautiful. And we see that the world is killing our children from the inside out. Here we have the anatomy of today’s pathology.
The “crudeness” that Caprice condemns is a pun on plastic’s petrochemical origins. Yet, it is not merely plastic in the crude material sense that Crimes of the Future investigates. It is, of course, the plasticity of the body. Caprice is the performance partner of Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) and this collaboration is the center of the film (all of the names are archetypal and Ballardian). Tenser’s body has a syndrome that spontaneously develops novel organs. Tenser and Caprice’s performance involves the public removal of these organs that Caprice has tattooed through keyhole surgery. Their star power has an irresistible gravity. Their creative surgeries are the center of an underground culture. This, we recognize in our media landscapes, and in our zeitgeist. It was ever thus. And this tension between involuntary mutilation and voluntary modification of the body reaches back, to borrow a phrase from Christopher Hitchens, to the infancy of our species.
We can never know which of our ancestors was first to cut into his or her flesh for a ritual, aesthetic, or cathartic purpose. We can never know which of our ancestors was the first to believe that his own mutilation should be inflicted on others in kinship and should be passed on to his children and what kind of psychic and physical charisma/tyranny was required to establish, say, circumcision and later subincision to create a false vagina in the shaft of the penis as an accepted, dysmorphic rite. We do know that the involuntary, forced mutilations of the genitals of infants or youths are part of the deep tribal pathology of human being.
So, it’s always curious that more conservative critics of Cronenberg find offense in what is somewhat reductively referred to as body horror. The difference in Cronenberg is that he is an atheist, with no belief in disembodied consciousness or spirit. The body, for Cronenberg, is it. Or, as one of the analog televisions that flank the performances of Tenser and Caprice says on its screen, Body is Reality. Without the escape clause of disembodiment, what happens to the body in a Cronenberg film has a finality that demands we take it seriously as experience. What we should find pathological is the use of disembodiment as an excuse for insisting on the mutilation of others, or ourselves.
“It’s—in our line of work—very easy,” the neurotic Timlin (Kristen Stewart) says to Tenser, “to be dazzled by the glamor of the performance world, the charismatic people we meet, like you.” Saul Tenser is a quasi-religious figure, approaching conversion in his black Middle Eastern clothing (the film is set in Greece, whence much of our cult of the body and Platonic-Christian disembodiment). The eight-year-old Brecken did not choose his posthuman anatomy. Timlin is not making a choice either. Timlin demonstrates the nature of psychic compulsion toward Tenser and his kind. In Timlin, and others, Cronenberg explores the ambivalence in the ‘voluntary.’ Is any modification of the body ‘voluntary’ in the conventional sense, or are they all responses to forms of pathology, cultural and/or personal? Timlin struggles to articulate Tenser’s irrational charisma, his influence, though she cannot reconcile with the posthuman remoteness he represents. It is alien and cannot be seduced by the methods of ‘old sex.’
Cronenberg has always been an intensely oral filmmaker, and his work makes much of the deadly pun in Hamlet’s “consummation devoutly to be wished.” Cronenberg’s 2014 novel is called Consumed for obvious reasons. Saul Tenser struggles to eat. His access to what he describes to Timlin as “the old sex” has been choked off. Even as he investigates Brecken’s death, preparing for the autopsy, Tenser might be developing the same kind of novel digestive tract that permits the consuming of post-consumer plastic waste in the pink plastic candy bars made by Lang Dotrice’s underground cell.
We are forever committing Crimes of the Future. The damage done to future generations is one of the moral imperatives of environmentalism. Cronenberg’s archetypal Brecken is one such casualty of a crime committed in the present that emerges in its full tragedy only in the future of children. He has both the ability and the compulsion to eat plastic, to eat the shit generated by adults. It is not choice, but inheritance. Crimes of the Future, for me, is a deeply moral film. It may even be ‘conservative’ in a libidinal sense, perhaps even morally so. However, Tenser’s first taste of the toxic post-consumer candy represents—with such perfect ambivalence—Tenser’s conversion, his consumption of/consummation with the posthuman. Whether his expression is ecstatic in transition to a new existence, or in release from existence, or both, is left to the audience. Cronenberg relates to the disaster scenario in Crimes of the Future in Ballardian terms of adaptation, in turning toward the horror. The irony is that concurrent with the discovery of microplastics within the human bloodstream today (not to mention jet fuel and other so-called ‘forever chemicals’ in breast milk), and the intimations of a certain tolerance—albeit sinister, and likely to promote tumors, birth defects, etc.—Cronenberg has struck upon a posthuman allegory in which we are destined to re-consume our plastic waste as mitigation, the plastic-tolerant bodies of the future eating the disaster. Crimes of the Future is a masterpiece. If you’ve seen it, watch it again.
Thank you, as ever, for reading. I hope this gives you some ideas.
Best regards from New Mexico,
James Reich
www.jamesreichbooks.com
Cronenberg wrecks me. ever since watching 1983 Videodrome after smoking some blond hashish along with 2 somewhat unnerving friends. I am going to watch this movie as soon as I get my courage up. amazing filmmaker and loved your review
Brilliant. I would also like to discuss the other major body trope I saw in the movie, the evolution of pain, the relation of it to sleep and art. I never quite figured out if it weren't saying that everyone experiences pain in sleep and not waking, or if this were a more limited, or evolving phenomenon