Ode To The New Sex
Saint Teresa of Ávila, a 16th century Spanish nun, once encountered an angel. In her autobiography, she describes how he drove his long, gold spear into her heart again and again, creating a pain so intense that it wracked moans from her body. And yet, she wrote: “So surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it.”
This is the subject of Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, one of the most famous sculptures of the Roman Baroque era. Bernini passionately sculpted the latent eroticism of Teresa’s spiritual climax into material being: the nun’s body is collapsed with rapture, mouth caught on a gasp, chest offered to the smiling angel above her. A full-blooded lust pulses through her crumpled form, belying the coolness of the sculpture’s marble and the godliness of its devotion.
In David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future, we find another translation of Saint Teresa’s exaltation. A performance artist named Saul Tenser, played by Viggo Mortensen, lies on a capsule-like bed; his partner Caprice, a severely beautiful Léa Seydoux, stands above him. She does not hold a spear, but a strange, fleshy-electronic remote control which operates robotic scalpels attached to Saul’s bed. Her dark lips smiling, she slices into him – revealing his innards to a crowd of enraptured onlookers, and extracting something bulbous and tumour-like from his open torso. Saul’s tongue writhes between his lips, and his fingertips sensually graze the skin of his bare chest. Offering the very depths of his body to his angel, and his pain as sacrifice to their audience’s carnal hunger, he is possessed by the blinding, sweet ecstasy of submission. A cybernetic Saint Teresa, with rapture in his eyes.
This altar, upon which the desires for sex and bodily annihilation fuse into perfect singularity, is where our beloved prophet of the new flesh – Cronenberg, hallowed be thy sick name – once again welcomes us home. But like Bernini’s Ecstasy, Crimes of the Future’s tortured eroticism illuminates how authority always penetrates deep into the flesh: defining what shape pain and pleasure can take, and the very parameters of what a body is allowed to experience. Saul may not become a conduit for the divine, but his body, too, is subject to the controlling gaze and interference of a higher power.
In Crimes of the Future’s elegantly dilapidated universe, new organs arbitrarily spawn within our bodies, and government divisions like the ‘National Organ Registry’ and the ‘New Vice Unit’ administrate the most intimate forms of surveillance and control. It’s gradually revealed that the powers that be are attempting to stave off an imminent fork in the road of human evolution, as some bodies begin developing the capacity to eat and digest plastic. Political unease simmers, whispering in the shadowy enclaves of Saul and Caprice’s auditorium and the yellowing office rooms of the National Organ Registry: obscenely eager to examine Saul’s insides, Registry employee Timlin (a brilliantly horny and skittish Kristen Stewart) frenetically emphasises “the necessity of organ registration from a security standpoint”. Through tentacle-like cameras inserted into the flesh – visually reminiscent of The Matrix’s sentinels, and the squelchy ‘bioports’ of Cronenberg’s own eXistenZ – the state physically enters and manages the innermost parts of citizens’ bodies, making them an object of national security. Nothing, not even the dark cavern of one’s abdominal cavity, is sacred.
If this no longer sounds like science-fiction, it’s because these crimes are not of the ‘future’: legal, political, and capitalist technologies of control already inhabit our flesh. A steadily building wave of anti-trans legislation and abortion bans makes non-compliance with the cis-hetero-patriarchal gender regime increasingly fatal; climate politics continues to disproportionately claim lives in the global South; and embedded as we are in the bowels of capitalist wreckage, a credit card’s worth of microplastics enters our bloodstreams every week.
Crimes of the Future begins with a child named Brecken eating a plastic wastebasket that dissolves into pink froth in his mouth; in the very next scene, he is murdered. This plastic-eating child’s death becomes an allegory that reverberates across the film’s dystopian landscape, one so proximate to our own. Brecken’s evolution is described as “insurrectional”, as straying from “the human path” – a process of othering his body that echoes, perhaps too familiarly, the anti-trans rhetoric violently splashed across our own public discourse. The political narrativisation of his non-conforming flesh marks him as queer, as trans; as a body born into ecological disaster, killed by an ideological war over how to understand his existence. A death knell sounds. The future is not promised for deviant bodies.
The child’s murder looms over the rest of Crimes of the Future, even as the film pivots from its haunting prologue to the underground world of Saul and Caprice’s dizzyingly erotic surgery-as-performance-art gig. The political meaning of the boy’s death and the underground performance of choreographed open surgery are, after all, intimately entangled: both Saul’s and Brecken’s innards are the terrain upon which the state and individual wrestle for control. “We’re making art out of anarchy,” Caprice declares: her remote-controlled scalpels are a weapon of political revolution, and Saul’s abdomen the site of microcosmic coup d’états. Audience members like Timlin are invited to partake in the euphoria of reclaiming autonomy over one’s body, embracing the sexual and political potential of resisting, or encouraging, its mutation. ‘BODY IS REALITY’, a television screen boldly proclaims during their performance. The cheekily impenetrable statement is both a self-aware nod to Saul and Caprice’s artistic posturing, and a manifesto of infinite, liberating possibility – an invitation to cut through the narratives projected onto the body and forge one’s own reality, carve it into flesh.
“Surgery is the new sex,” Timlin whispers to Saul: a hushed revelation she reaches after seeing him and Caprice perform. “Does there have to be a new sex?” Saul asks, surprised. “Yes, it’s time,” she urges, syllables rushing forth. As ecological devastation blooms alongside processes of bodily mutation both natural and artificial, the era of the old sex might be fading away. Tensions between the police and the growing faction of plastic-eaters subsisting on neon purple ‘synth bars’, fatal to other humans, continue to seep into the atmosphere like biotoxins. Yet underneath this latent war on bodies, an orgiastically sprawling network of performing artists and their voyeurs throw themselves into finding new pathways to pleasure.
“When I saw her cutting into you,” Timlin continues uttering, urgent with lust, “I wanted you to be cutting into me. That’s when I knew.” Later on, Caprice witnesses another woman slicing gill-like lacerations into her cheeks and forehead. She reveals to her fellow artist that it filled her with the desire to cut her own face open. A spark of perfect understanding passes between their intense gazes, electric with the euphoria of being able to name exactly what you want done to your body, and by whom. In this underground space of communal experimentation – where even the most anarchist of desires can be articulated – pursuing the erotic and the transgressively hedonistic is the ultimate resistance to a regime of bodily invasion and control.
But for all its transgression, Crimes of the Future is beautifully uncertain about where the “future” takes us. While much expectation surrounding the film sought to focus on its gross-out potential, both Crimes and Cronenberg himself are done a disservice by a prescriptive understanding of body horror as gore-driven provocation. Less horror than biopolitical elegy, Crimes of the Future is a tender, often disarmingly romantic reflection on one man’s revelatory journey towards bodily and philosophical discovery – a deeply trans and deeply ecological text which culminates in a stunning, euphoric open-ending.
In his book Testo Junkie, trans writer and philosopher Paul B. Preciado wrote: “I’m not taking testosterone to change myself into a man; I take it to foil what society wanted to make of me, so I can write, fuck, feel a form of pleasure that is postpornographic; I do it to avenge your death.” In an almost perfect allegorical echo, the film’s final shot sees Saul begin to ingest a synth bar – and his body, flung ecstatically into an unpromised future, becomes an answer to Brecken’s murder. We once again bear witness to Saul, our trans Saint Teresa in the era of microplastics, succumbing to the throes of ecstasy. Gone is the old sex. His body’s been pierced again and again: by Caprice, by the state, by the war between flesh and meaning, and between agency and surrender. Rebellion, the sweet, excessive pain of it, now flows into his bloodstream. And in his eyes: rapture.
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