Most of humanity has evolved to a point where they no longer feel pain. Look just underneath for signs of an old world foul with detritus. The setting is a distant future or perhaps not too distant.

Only this time, his vivisection edges towards an eco-parable: about pushing the body beyond its limits to adapt to the impending environmental and food crises. Given how we are attached to our devices on a day-to-day basis, the nightmares that Cronenberg imagines are nothing but a literal extension.Īs he has done throughout his career, Cronenberg employs the human body as an artistic testing facility. In fact, “Surgery is the new sex” echoes the catchphrase “Long live the new flesh” from Videodrome, in which a porn programmer hallucinates a television screen swelling to engulf his head, inserting a videotape into his abdomen, and a gun fusing into his hand. In Crimes of the Future, Cronenberg assimilates all his career-long preoccupations and motifs: the mechanics of fetishism ( Crash), the organic-machine interface ( eXistenZ), the shadowy bureaucrats ( The Naked Lunch), and the opening of new sexual orifices ( Videodrome). The blood, fat and innards are what change from one film to the next.

The core of the idea has been the same throughout Cronenberg’s body of work: that the body is the only graspable truth of the human condition. When a horny, jittery and hysterical Kristen Stewart utters the catchphrase in the film, she is outlining its thesis statement.

If traffic accidents were the new sex in David Cronenberg’s Crash, surgery is the new-er sex in his latest freak-fest Crimes of the Future.

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