David Cronenberg’s ‘Crimes of the Future’, Surgery, and Performance Art

Season 3, Episode 5

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Emma and Christy watch David Cronenberg’s 2022 film Crimes of the Future, exploring the themes of this work while also connecting to some of the director’s earlier movies. In this episode, we discuss the fears and the pleasures of the human body and cutting into it; surgery as sex; Cronenbergian body horror; the monstrous as art; being and becoming cyborgs; evolution and pain; technology as prosthesis; the posthuman; contemporary performance art (good and bad); the cosmetic gaze; the body as text; and meaning making.

MEDIA DISCUSSED
David Cronenberg, dir., Crimes of the Future (2022)
First scene with boy playing on beach, cruise ship overturned in water
Saul Tenser in the Orchid Bed
TVs showing ‘BODY IS REALITY’ during Saul and Caprice’s performance
Scuttling, insect-like bureaucrats of the National Organ Registry
Bureaucrat of the National Organ Registry telling Saul that ‘surgery is new sex’
David Cronenberg, dir., Crash (1996)
Saul Tenser in the BreakFaster Chair
Saul Tenser’s facial expression at the end of the film
Gian Lorenzo Bernini, The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa (1652)
David Cronenberg, dir., Videodrome (1983)
The hand-gun in Videodrome
David Cronenberg, dir., The Fly (1986)
Odile (decorative surgery) performance art
Klinek (ear man) performance art
ORLAN, The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan (1990-1993)
Stelarc, Ear on Arm (2007 – )
The Swan reality show (2004)
The autopsy scene

REFERENCES
Anne Billson, ‘Cronenberg on Cronenberg: a career in stereo’, Monthly Film Bulletin 56, no. 660 (January 1989)
Alan Stanbrook, ‘Cronenberg’s Creative Cancers’, Sight and Sound 58, no. 1 (Winter 1988/89)
Allen White, ‘The Mixing of Blood: An Interview with David Cronenberg’, Filmthreat.com (September 11, 2002)
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London and New York: Continuum, 2004)
Donna Haraway, ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s’, Australian Feminist Studies 2.4 (1987): 1–42
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw Hill 1964)
Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (New York: Schocken Books, 1974)
Peter Ludlow, ‘Cronenberg as Scientist: Antiessentialism, Sex as Remixing, and the View from Nowhere’, in Simon Riches, ed., The Philosophy of David Cronenberg (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2012), 36-52
M. Keith Booker, ‘The Imagination of Deterioration: Human Exceptionalism, Climate Change, and the Weird Eco-Horror of David Cronengerg’s Crimes of the Future,’ Monstrum 6, no. 1 (June 2023): 28-45
Rachel Ablow, Victorian Pain (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017)
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987)
Stelarc, ‘Ear on Arm’, http://stelarc.org/_activity-20242.php
Bernadette Wegenstein, The Cosmetic Gaze: Body Modification and the Construction of Beauty (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2012)
Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image, Music, Text (London: Fontana, 1977), 142–48

FURTHER READING
Philip Brophy, ‘The Body Horrible’, Philip Brophy (1990)
Zoe Bursztajn-Illingworth, ‘Poetic Voice and Materiality: Material Evidence for Poetic Crimes of the Future‘, ASAP Journal (2023): n.p.
David Christopher, ‘Early Cronenberg and the Anarchist-Apocalypse’, Anarchist Studies 31, no. 1 (February 2024): 12-42
Ashley Crawford, ‘Stelarc’, Art Monthly Australia, no. 248 (April 2012): 10-11
Sara Eddleman, ‘The Postmodern Turn in Cronenberg’s Cinema: Possibility in Bodies’, in Shift: Queen’s Journal of Visual & Material Culture 2 (2009): 1–20
Michael Grant, ed., The Modern Fantastic: The Films of David Cronenberg (Westport: Praeger Publishers, 2000)
Matthew Hays, ‘Future Shock: An Interview with David Cronenberg’, Cinéaste 47, no. 4 (Fall 2022): 40-42
Kate Ince, Orlan: Millennial Female (London: Bloomsbury, 2000)
Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian, eds., #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014)
Simon Riches, ed., The Philosophy of David Cronenberg (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2012)
Sam See, Queer Natures, Queer Mythologies (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020)

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‘Drawing Blood’ cover art © Emma Merkling, image courtesy of the British Association of Plastic, Reconstructive, and Aesthetic Surgeons
All audio content © Emma Merkling and Christy Slobogin
Intro music: ‘There Will Be Blood’ by Kim Petras, © BunHead Records 2019. We’re still trying to get hold of permissions for this song – Kim Petras text us back!!