Crimes of the Future: Resisting the ka-chunk of categorization (a review/ anecdote)

"Have you seen the new Cronenberg?"

"Yes, I have."

"What's it about?"

"I don't know." 

Finally got out to see Crimes of the Future on Sunday afternoon at International Village, ten days into its run. I *think* there were other people in the theatre - thought I heard a couple of voices - but I didn't look around to confirm this; certainly, when I bought tickets, choosing my seat from the seating chart on a laptop, there was no one else on the display... 

...So whether it was just me or not, it wasn't exactly packed, which mirrors my experience of seeing Cosmopolis and Maps to the Stars. We may, as a nation, have respect for Cronenberg, by and large, but we don't turn out in droves for his movies. Weirdly, there wasn't even a poster for the film, not in the lobby, not next to the theatre door ("maybe we weren't sent one?" the girl at the front said when I inquired).

I'll get to the film in a second, because there was a memorable moment prior to the movie that I want to write about. It eventually will relate, as it pertains to the satisfactions of categorizing things, and the awkwardness that sometimes ensues when things resist categorization... Seeing that Bali Thai, my favourite place in the food fair - serving yummy Indonesian dishes - was closed on a Sunday, I'd gone downstairs to get a milkshake at the McDonalds, since it was the cheapest possible lunch I could have. Getting in line, I heard from behind me, "Excuse me, sir, would you buy me a meal?"

A very civil way of asking, and - how does Hannibal Lecter phrase it? I am "receptive to courtesy." There had been a rather less civil panhandler working the Skytrain on the ride in, a dark-haired day drunk (it seemed). I had been sitting there listening to music when he came up to stand in front of me, ignoring my headphones, speaking at me. I took the headphones off, already irritated to have a song interrupted, and asked him, "What?" 

Gruff, growling, demanding: "Got fifty cents?" Eyes rheumy and hostile, staring and direct. 

I was direct back: "No." He continued up the car, being no more civil with anyone else that I could see. No one give him money. Some people seemed to flinch from him. I kept one eye on him just in case, should things turn for the ugly, but they didn't.  

By contrast, this fellow behind me was very polite, and, turning, I quickly saw that he had a Mohawk. So, sure, okay. Even though I had already decided that eating a meal would be too expensive for me, now I had committed to buying a meal for a total stranger. I had second thoughts, realizing this, but some things you can't backpedal from; he had already stepped ahead of me and was ordering a Big Mac meal "with hotcakes." (You can get a side-order of hotcakes at four in the afternoon? Apparently so). 

Making conversation, I observed, with my mushy post-surgical voice, that he was "Carbing up, eh?" 

Could have been the hotcakes were for a kid, of course, or for a friend waiting elsewhere. I don't recall his answer, but I do recall what he did afterwards: he looked at me quite directly and said something I thought was kind of remarkable: "Are you all right?"

Because slurred speech can be a sign of a stroke or some other neural event. It's actually a totally reasonable question. But understand that nobody does this, in the course of my daily life, and it's not because people don't notice my atypical speech; they just have no frame of reference for what might be going on, and in the absence of that knowledge, most folks - shop clerks, what have you - opt to err on the side of caution and just fake not noticing. Occasionally I notice them adopting a little heightened degree of attentiveness, which they then try to hide, but for me, it's like I can read the thought bubble over their head, the one that says, "Something unusual going on here, best be a bit cautious."  I can see that they are opting to "wait and see." Do I have a problem that will impact them? Do I have a problem they will need to do something about? What's with the funny voice, man? They don't want to ask, so they just adopt a slightly more vigilant awareness until I am on my way. 

...which is all actually fine, because that's kind of what I do, too, even before I got operated on: when I myself hear atypical voices in my environment, I sort of make a note of it, maybe keep an eye out to see what folder to put the person in, internally: "File under day drunk."  "File under mentally challenged."  "File under someone having a neural episode." (There is no "recent tongue surgery recipient" folder, yet, because to date I am the only person I know who inhabits that file, but should I run into someone who seems to have the same issue, I'll probably run over and introduce myself and ask if we can compare notes). If someone resists quick categorization, I too just wait and see, in case whatever it is I've noticed develops into something more. 

And while it may seem a bit coldly prejudicial and assholish to categorize people so cavalierly ("aha, it's a person with Down syndrome" - ka-chunk, they're dropped in the folder and forgotten), it's not, really. It's just an aspect of basic attentiveness to ones surroundings, a tool to be used as part of a general habit of vigilance out there in the world; you're quickly and constantly categorizing everything you see or hear, in the broadest folders available to you, which habit contains a quite positive and moral element, because one possibility when you hear that atypical voice is also, "This is someone having a problem that I may need to do something about."  

It's the same basic logic as when you hear a scream and look around in case someone is being attacked or has been hit by a car or if they are just having a loud moment. You hear a scream and look around, and if you see laughing teenagers tickling each other, you file them into the "no further action required" folder and ignore further sounds from that direction. On the other hand, if you see someone being hit or threatened or in crisis, maybe you have to wade in. Categorization may be cold, but it's helpful, a fast way of sorting out the shit that is your problem (or might become your problem) from the shit that isn't. 

But unlike the people in my social milieu, this guy went straight to the "Is this something I need to do something about" file and confronted it quite directly. No concern about covering his ass or giving offense or what-have-you. I presume, besides his being a decent human being, that this is because he lives an environment, the DTES, where the answer to the question, "Do you need my help?" is more frequently, "Yes," where maybe he gets involved in people's problems quite routinely, and where maybe people aren't so quick to take offense if you offer them help that they don't need. 

I kinda loved the guy for asking it, really. I sure didn't take offense, but I answered, chuckling, "Nah, I'm all fucked up. Had tongue cancer, they cut out most of my tongue" (I show him my tongue) "and replaced it with grafts." (I show him my right wrist - didn't have my leather cuffs on, since the day was cool, so all I had to do was pull up my sleeve). "This one failed so they did another." (Pull up my other sleeve and show him my left wrist.) "So now I talk like this." 

Last six months of my life summed up in less than fifteen seconds. I don't think I've ever been so brief about it. 

I see that he's taken a step back from me. "Holy fuck dude! Are you going to be okay?"

"Well, my voice isn't - this is how I talk now. But, I mean, I'm fine. Drinking a lot more milkshakes these days," I say with a "That's Life" shrug.

There are a few other minor exchanges - I tell him that I'm an old punk and that his Mohawk was what swayed me - but soon enough, he gets his food, I get my milkshake, we say our good-days, and I go up to the movie. 

You'd think that, given my recent life experiences, I'd be well-attuned to a movie about the fetishization of surgery. I have certainly inwardly thanked Cronenberg, and body-horror cinema in general, for having psychically prepared me for what I've experienced. And indeed, the most potent moment in the film for me did, in fact, relate to my tongue. There is a scene where Kristen Stewart, in "horny neurotic" mode, advances on Viggo Mortensen (playing a performance artist given to growing new organs, which he gets surgically removed in onstage performances). She eventually goes to kiss him (with Viggo backing away, explaining his isn't much good at "the old sex."); but before doing so she reaches into his mouth and inspects his tongue. Just briefly. It's a very striking, very eccentric gesture.

And something stirred in me at that moment - something kind of unquantifiable. Hope? Hope for what? Hope that Cronenberg was going to get into some "tongue stuff," that the movie would somehow connect deeply with my recent experiences of surgery? There is some tongue stuff in the 1970 film of the same title that Cronenberg made, the "kinky foot fetish" one, though I forget exactly what happens. It involves Ron Mlodzik, pictured below. But is a film I haven't seen in years, and Cronenberg has said that his new film really doesn't have a bearing on the old one; it's not a remake, just the pilfering of a title. 

And that was it where tongues were concerned. There's a lot of grossout surgical stuff, a lot of organs in the film, but Cronenberg is kind of gut-fixated. A few scalpels cut into bodies at other places - and there's even a bit of "foot stuff," for fans of the earlier movie, whereby two women seem to be having a new form of sex by having one of them slide a scalpel in and out of a hole she's cutting in the other's foot. And there a few other odd body mods - most famously the dancer (who looks like Jeremy Irons, but no idea if it's him; it's an uncredited appearance, if so) with the extra ears. But the main scenes of surgery involve intestines and stomachs and spleens and such, not tongues. 

I didn't, ultimately, know what I made of any of what transpired - a condition not aided by the few naps that visited during the course of the film. I did not, on leaving, understand basic things about the plot. Like, "Why did the female assassins kill Scott Speedman?" (let alone, "Why did they use power drills?"). Was Viggo being an undercover agent a good thing or a bad thing? And what exactly is it that happens to Don McKellar? He enjoyably plays a government (?) bureaucrat and would-be acolyte to Viggo and Lea's "art," but he runs away from a final performance. when he sees that the organs of the dead boy being autopsied have been tattooed. Was it too gross for him, or - since the office he works for, a new organ registry of some sort, has something to do with the tattooing of new organs, did he feel somehow threatened, like the tattoos somehow implicated him or his office? I don't think he appears after that scene in the film, and don't recall any mention of his flight, so... what exactly happened there? And, um, just what was the significance of the tattooing again? The practice is explained in the film before you really see the results, so you are left casting your mind back into the earlier passages of the narrative, trying to remember what got said. Is it a metaphor for something? If so, what? What is the real-world analogue to bureaucrats tattooing new organs while they are still inside the body? There are - shades of Videodrome or Naked Lunch - suggestions of warring factions in society, that the artist is torn between, but was one side better than the other? What were the real world analogues for them? (Control vs. Chaos, Spectacular Optical vs. Brian O'Blivion, but... what about reality? How does it relate, here?) 

Maybe they were passing out magic decoder rings in the lobby, and I missed them?

And some questions just raised other questions. Like, Viggo dresses like a ninja through most of the film, whenever he's in public. Not finding specific stills that show him with only his eyes peeking through, but there's more than one moment where he successfully merges with the shadows. So what's up with that? Could it be a clue that, in fact, the film is some sort of very dry comedy? Because it's kind of ridiculous, isn't it, even if (or should that be "especially because?") the film plays these moments with such a straight face...?

Hell, I don't know. The one tongue-grab aside, everything that happened in the movie reminded me not of things in the real world, but things that happen in other David Cronenberg films. Lea and Viggo having conversations about their kinky explorations, sometimes involving another couple or a small cult with related kinks: Crash, Naked Lunch, Videodrome. Weird rubbery technology that you finger and prod, or sometimes get inserted into you or attached to you: eXistenZ, Naked Lunch, Videodrome. Artists growing new things inside their bodies that may soon prove problematic: The Brood, The Fly, Videodrome. Strange surgical instruments, weird chairs, new tools for new bodies: Dead Ringers, Videodrome, eXistenZ. Grieving normal father trying to figure out why his spouse killed his son: The Brood. Going "undercover" as a pretext for criminal/ transgressive behaviours: Naked Lunch, Eastern Promises. Some of the surgeries even put me in mind of the Soska twins, whose American Mary Cronenberg has presumably seen (and who, of course, remade Rabid, though I didn't much care for their version). 

About the only glimmers of a connection to the real world that I felt were in wondering if the film was some kind of satire of the arts scene and wondering if there was somehow somewhere a very veiled, sub-textual commentary on gender reassignment surgery. I also wondered if Cronenberg knew the work of Fakir Musafar. But nothing really fruitful came from asking these questions; mostly all roads just kept leading back to Cronenberg, like the film was more about Cronenberg's other films than it was about anything else. People who found eXistenZ too self-conscious and self-referential ("Cronenberg's greatest hits," is how a friend once described it) haven't seen nothin' yet. Even eXistenZ, self-referential as a lot of its elements seem, is clearly "about" virtual reality and gaming and technology that could threaten to undermine our relationship to the real. It connects with actual issues in the world, is easy to reduce to a take-away you can understand, if that's what you're going for. 

Crimes of the Future does not reduce easily. The self-referentiality runs so deep it overshadows anything else. Which is not itself a bad thing, necessarily - if there is a filmmaker who is uniquely qualified to disappear up his own asshole, who can still make an interesting movie of it, it's David Cronenberg. But it requires more than one viewing to write coherently about, I suspect. 

Remember when Vincent Gallo had had a disastrous screening of a rough cut of The Brown Bunny at Cannes, and Roger Ebert compared it to his colonoscopy, saying that his colonoscopy was more entertaining? I since then have had a colonoscopy of my own, and lemme tell you: Crimes of the Future was the vastly more entertaining experience. So if it's ultimately "Cronenberg showing us his polyps," if that's the best I can reduce it to on one viewing, he does so with control, restraint, artistry, and a sense of conviction that his polyps will be of interest. And polyps ARE interesting to look at, to say nothing of polyps with tattoos.  Whatever Crimes of the Future was "about," it was clear that the film had an inner coherence, that it had been carefully crafted to have an effect. I'm just not sure what the desired effect was. That other satisfying categorizing "ka-thunk" that you feel when you file a movie into the right category, that lets you know how to work with it, what to compare it to, what to apply its point to... that leaves you with the feeling that you have understood it well enough to actually have the right to comment on it,  it never really happened, for me, watching the film the first time through, yesterday. Which is, really, not all that unfamiliar a feeling, when it comes to Cronenberg. I mean, who really can give a final, simple answer as to what Videodrome or Scanners are about? 

The question really, now, is whether I care enough to revisit the film, to give it another shot some day in the future. I might, but then, I still haven't figured out how I feel about Maps to the Stars or Cosmopolis yet, either, so it's going to have to wait in line. 

Actually, I'd be more inclined to revisit Crimes than either of those films. But, uh, I don't know. Is further action required? 

I guess we'll have to wait and see.