Crimes of Our Presently Revolting Bodies
Cronenberg's Fascination and My Adaptations
This post contains descriptions of medical procedures, and images from Crimes of the Future and Titane which involve both realistic and over-the-top medical equipment. Though not overly graphic or gory, readers may want to proceed with caution.
Last Halloween my ‘treat’ was two ultrasounds; one exterior, one very much not.
Preparation involves drinking litres of water, wearing a gown, and filling out detailed forms. You can even pick one (of two) preferred technician genders – though the ‘trick’ is, specifying will likely extend your wait time.
When the appointment ended I hit the nearest cinema and bought the first available ticket, a way of rewarding myself for enduring.
Which is how twenty minutes after being squirted with warm gel and probed literally and metaphorically, I was comfort-eating a bucket of popcorn to Crimes of the Future.
Cronenberg’s philosophical futuristic body horror opens on a child named Brecken, who within three scenes eats an entire plastic trashcan, is scolded for his ‘abnormalities,’ and gets murdered by his mother. In an extended shot, Brecken’s supposed protector holds a pillow over his face and lies atop his tiny body until he stops moving, looking pained but determined at what she ‘must’ do.
So much for comfort.
Yet by the time credits rolled, I’d found strange solace.
Between age two and four, when I was unable to walk or see or eat how and when doctors thought I should, I was poked and tested and given glasses and a diagnosis ‘autoimmune disorder.’
One of those many prodding tests is hilariously (now. kind of.) one of my first memories, also around an October 31. I know the date because techs wearing decorative masks marched me into a cotton-cobweb-and-fuzzy-spider-covered office, where they laid out a large gleaming needle and so many colourcoded tubes I could barely count them all. Sure I needed all my blood to survive, I did the reasonable thing and freaked the everloving fuck out.
After fighting off the phlebotomist with panic-induced strength, I was handed back to my mother who was told to bring me back when I would behave. At home I was given a whooping and a stick of gum — “chew and it’ll be over soon”.
I returned the next day filled with rage and determination to heroic stoicism. Not trusting my innocent face, the nurse called four reinforcements: a total of five adults against one tiny me. Perhaps frustrated at the many kids who just didn’t understand bodily autonomy ‘must’ be traded for potential answers, these giants grabbed all my scrawny limbs and the nearest prop: a stuffed bat which they waved in my face while making squeaky sonar noises.
Time is infinity to any four year old, let alone one with a thumb-sized needle deep in their tightly restrained arm. During those interminable seconds, pinned down and not allowed to see the procedure I could sure feel, I developed two things which persist to this day: a need to watch when techs stick anything in me, and paralysing fear of anything from bats to butterflies flapping in my face.
Brecken’s corpse returns to Crimes narrative as a blue-tinged form to be observed and probed and opened. These violations are perpetrated by his father and other adults who convince themselves they’re doing a right or at least good thing – if not for Brecken, then for other ‘abnormals’ and society at large. It jus so happens to benefit them through money, notoriety, and hope for answers.
Answers for what? In the Crimes future, many people feel their bodies revolting. Some modify themselves through surgery or seeming force of will, some are repulsed by bodily functions which feel wrong or inhuman. As society predictably decays and freakishly evolves, peoples’ responses spring from understandable wishes to assert control, while methods straining for such control often cross ever-shifting boundaries.
Brecken’s autopsy shocks movie-viewers and in-world observers: we gasp, squirm, look away, look again. In the present and Cronenberg’s prophesied future exists something instinctively special about a child’s innocence, even as corporations rack up incomprehensible, unsurmountable debt: contaminates in our vegetables, oil in our oceans, poison in our air.
Future children are far less likely to live a safe, healthy life than we are: we know it, we’re causing it, we can hardly bear to face it, we can’t look away.
I developed with a few physical abnormalities along my normal bumps and broken bones. When joint pain seized my neck and locked my hips I saw physical therapists and sat in baths of epsom salts and ice and steam. I followed stretching and exercise and food regimens. When the pain was unbearable enough I would try anything for a chance at tangible or psychosomatic relief. I even overcame my fear of needles to try acupuncture.
In the end, or rather for now, I could walk straight, play sport, and get a script for pain when the episodes are most unbearable.
As my body grew and morphed, I adapted.
Crimes introduces Caprice and Saul (Léa Seydoux and Viggo Mortenson) performing an unusual wakeup ritual followed by juxtaposed scenes of them eating breakfast: Caprice casually enjoys a plate of food while sitting on a wooden bench, sunlight streaming over her dangling legs; meanwhile, Saul is in the basement, strapped into an undulating chair which feeds him baby food puree from a metal tray.
Saul’s bed and chair are supposed to accomodate his body’s needs, but as the movie elapses, Saul is less able to sleep or eat, gagging and choking as his throat closes against his will. Other characters display changing sleep patterns and eat foil-wrapped bars reminiscent of modern meal replacements, Snowpiercer’s black protein blocks, or Soylent Green. Food and rest are becoming only means to an end. As joys such as communal meals and co-sleeping disappear, people search for pleasure in anything, everything else.
Survival over succulence.
All the while, their bodies rebel.
At 20 I was quite sick again, going from doctor to doctor hoping for a cure or at least answers in scans and tests and invasive procedures. As I give – or rather grudging let them take – tubes of blood and urine and saliva, most techs range from professional and matter-of-fact to delightful and comforting. But the fact remains: either consent, or get instantly dismissed.
After years and gallons of my body given, I know more what is happening in my body, but not why or how, or whether it’s good or bad or neutral. Can something this ‘abnormal’ even be neutral or good?
One doctor shrugged “you’re just not an eighteen year old athlete anymore” had caused me to gain 50 pounds in a few months. A few years later another said I should be happy when I suddenly lost the same amount without trying.
A man with four framed degrees hung high on his wall said not to worry about my sex drive because you don’t need those urges to consummate a relationship or have a baby. A few years later I was happy to be assigned a woman specialist because maybe she’d see me as more than a reproductive vessel; she said even worse things, to the point I filed a formal complaint.
Not one asked how my body felt or what I wanted to feel.
I was rubbed raw emotionally as well as physically. Lying awake at night with pain, insomnia, and curiosity verging on terror, I wondered what I’d done wrong? Could using different terms crack the case, shatter their indifference? What message was my body sending that I couldn’t decipher?
No wonder movies about strange-illness-as-evolution begin to feel comforting.
Crimes depicts few moments of pure pain or pleasure. Most occasions — sex parties, dinner rituals, surgical modifications — are stews of emotions and internal conflict, especially when characters’ physical responses are labelled abnormal and their feelings about that don’t match what society declares they SHOULD feel.
Some characters postulate their physical and social evolutions are necessary; others declare humans have gone too far chasing extreme emotions and thus ruined everyday sensations; all seem to agree change is progressing more rapidly than their ability to comprehend the how and why and what it means.
Most of the doctors I’ve seen in the last dozen years seem to agree — It’s more an art than a science. I’m not sure how this diagnosis relates to yours symptoms. We don’t know why this particular medication works, but try it.
In seven years, I bled four times.
When you meditate on it, it’s actually oddly horrifying many bodies do bleed so often. But after the first several times, once society (somehow!) simultaneously normalises and stigmatises monthly bleeding, it’s even more terrifying for your body to stop cold turkey.
Doctors checked for blockages, tears, illness, cancer. I took medication to jump-start it twice; my body ignored it twice. Then from nowhere would come 16 cycles crammed into three weeks: cramps which left me bedridden, bone-crunching exhaustion, rock-hard breast tissue, Carrie red torrents.
Medical professionals can be helpful and knowledgable, hostile or disinterested. One doctor blithely chirped “I’m sure you want to get back to regular periods” – I just stared. Why would I WANT regular intervals of pain, inconvenience, weird surreal bleeding? All I wanted was to be sure this aberration wasn’t a sign of something killing me.
Actually, what I really wanted, after months of consideration, was for my transmogrification to be something from Titane, a sign of getting stronger and more impervious.
Despite my own ephemeral gender, not for nothing is the horror I’ve found as a closest point of reference through this process directed by a woman. (And heavily involved in interrogating gender, at that.)
In a hard reverse of the doctor who discounted my libido, another dismissed me upon discovering I had no interest in pregnancy. When I dragged myself three blocks between back spasms, a pharmacist refused me stronger OTC painkillers because “it’s just a period” and “you might get addicted.” In order to function, for three or so days I swallowed a tiny conveyor belts of ibuprofen and stronger meds bummed from friends in the right low places.
Sometimes the only untried answers are things you know may harm you, lead to alienation or prosecution. Cronenberg’s understanding of this is in the title: off-script drugs, back alley procedures, desperate means to hopeful relief, are technically Crimes.
(You also begin to fear what happens in late capitalism when the system decides your pain costs too much, and attempting to heal you outweighs what they determine your worth to society is. But that’s another essay / movie)
Eventually or sooner, desperation takes you beyond caring what people think, especially if your pain matters as little to them as your lack of pleasure.
In a much-improvised exchange where Kristin Stewart and Viggo Mortensen explore each other, I was riveted seeing / projecting my recent emotions play out between two future fictional people: desperate, curious, searching, awkward, intense, recognising something they can’t quite name, exposed, fascinated, repulsed.
Nothing to lose. May as well.
People wonder why those suffering physical agony and excruciating unknown turn to untested treatments, unlearned friends, and internet-rabbit-hole strangers. Simple: when experts and known science fail us, compassion and lived experience aren’t nothing. We’ll try to figure it out together as we wait for blood test results or yet another specialist appointment.
As I cycled through symptoms and hospital visits, my diagnoses were erased, rewritten, shifted. I asked a specialist if lupus could change my period: he shrugged, maybe. I asked my gynaecologist if my period could affect how other symptoms progressed: she shrugged, likely. Were some or all related or not? Only about twenty ways to find out, almost all involving more tubes and blood, prods and discomfort.
Unlike doctors, internet black holes are there at 3AM when pain and fear fend off sleep. Like doctors, they are only making best guesses.
All bodies are different.
It’s more art than exact science.
It’s all connected, or maybe it’s three different things.
Which domino fell first?
If pain is an aberration, maybe it can be excised.
Maybe it’s a bad miracle.
Maybe it’s adaptation.
Whether evolutionary urges are burning themselves out as the world does, or because people are exposed to more and more extreme elements, desires have shifted in Crimes’s future. Sex is surgical; surgery is artistic; sleep cycles, eating methods, breathing patterns, affects of ingested chemicals, all changed.
Perhaps the changes seem drastic, but literally and artistically, they’re possible accelerations of the steps we’re taking now.
In our reality, food contains increasing amounts of carcinogens and plastics. Crimes suggests when toxic material reaches crucial mass, the body either dies or evolves ability to digest it, then some bodies will digest only it.
In our reality, the planet is rapidly turning inhospitable, so Crimes posits bodies will become less conducive to incubating children.
And so on.
This is necessary and survivable.
When I sign waivers and grit teeth and bear down, I now understand more fully what I’m doing. But I’m not any happier about it than four-year-old me.
Trauma can manifest in days or decades. Horrific events, constant stress, abuse, and more, can cause or exacerbate physical or mental illness, PTSD or OCD, eating disorders or disassociation, vomiting or ulcers, cancer or . . . nothing.
Outcomes aren’t directly related to how bad or chronic trauma is, whether caused by environment or accident, stranger or someone you trusted. Coping mechanisms become ingredients of a recipe which permanently reshapes body and brain, chemistry and synapses.
Our bodies may manifest cumulative changes as adaptations, dealing with our near-future-untenable situation in ways we can’t fully comprehend. Perhaps digesting new chemicals en mass tips over to a tangible effect, a collective WHAM! of a door slamming shut. Children of Men’s society noticed when babies collectively stopped being born, but some bodies had to be the unnoticed canaries in the coal mine. If we’re always distressed, or incapacitated by other maladies, maybe bodies will decide to take abnormal action, for our own good.
Maybe something this ‘abnormal’ is my body keeping score ahead of its time.
Intertwined physiological and mental trauma responses are often maladaptive, but the body doesn’t always know when or how to quit them. Having learned for so long to survive in unusual ways, perhaps my body simply never couldn’t stop.
Am I evolving? Must evolving involve so much pain?
Maybe doctors or amateurs who poke and prod to satiate their weird, twisted curiosity are on the right path, the body demonstrating how mystical arts and science are changing, growing, expanding the future.
Crimes depicts agony etched on faces, in groans, in the way people hold their bodies. Saul actively struggles to consume calories and sleep in his cocoon-bed. His constant adjustments are all familiar to anyone who has chronic pain and developed mechanisms to feel slightly less excruciating while functioning even somewhat ‘normally.’
While pleasure and survival may not look like we expect, characters still find it. The central question becomes whether it is or should be a crime to do whatever we can to endure? If to alleviate suffering we must modify, if we hurt no-one else, if we enjoy or need something others may or may not understand, is that wrong? If there’s suffering in being unable to do certain things, is there relief in embracing their impossibility as personal growth? At some point if we lose the ability to get pleasure ‘the old ways,’ is that a bug or a feature of evolution?
What if pain is a gift, sickness the price of progress, certain symptoms a sign of evolving beyond what society has thus far called ‘necessary’ for bodies to survive a hostile environment?
We judge and gawk and are afraid of anything which seems gross or different or incomprehensible, but maybe we should embrace it, as Cronenberg has. Change can be bad, or good, or neutral. Growth can be malignant, or benign, or positive. But we can — can we? — work to make sure the outcome is better than not.
Vesper – another futuristic dystopian body horror which came out around the same time as Crimes of the Future – has Crimes’s curiosity and anger at the current destruction of a liveable planet, but centres a living child instead of a corpse.
I watched it with the two kids who mean the most in the world to me, and we were in awe at the strange biological morphing; just as horrifying to experience as Crimes, but Vesper’s journey ends on a clear grace note.
If Vesper is hopeful, Crimes is a Rorschach test.
I sat spiritually depleted and physically full of popcorn in a nearly empty theater, watching Saul finally accept he will never process, taste, engage in, enjoy, the types of food and sleep and sensations he once did and Caprice still does. Saul’s acceptance he must live with this Other sustenance and cycles gives him a different type of pain; nostalgic, complex, grief mingled with a sort of progress. But with his acknowledgement comes, if not relief, release.
If I can’t change the abnormal, my environment, the progress of a wholly new physicality, can I accept and work to make the best of it? What if I treat myself as the next evolution of humanity? Whether I actually am or not, only the future will tell.
Horror films are part of how we can, together, process and face our bodies, their crimes, and that future.