Crimes of the Future: the monstrosity of scientific intervention

Crimes of the Future (dir. David Cronenberg, 2022) is a contemporary representation of a dystopian future, contending interpersonally and politically with biological responses to environmental pollution. The film explores a devastated future humanity with stoic, languid inhabitants. These humans no longer feel physical pain, occupying a brutalist grey world. They search out new ways to experience and showcase extreme representations of bodily abjection aided by invasive, probing technology. The film contributes to the eco-horror genre through portrayals of physical and genetic mutations, best realized on screen through visceral disgust, discomfort, and interrogation of humanity’s relationship to technology. Unlike many eco-horror movies, Crimes of the Future does not depict a monster that is physically deformed, mutilated, and out for revenge against the actors or bystanders of environmental degradation. Crimes of the Future portrays a child whose disability is invisible and who has no malicious agenda. The horror comes from his behaviour, eating plastic, and consequently, the underlying inherited genetic alteration that allowed the digestion of what would be inedible and inconceivable to humans. This unknown, permanent genomic change is repulsive to his mother – so much so that the mother deems him inhuman, a creature. The film, therefore, positions this nuclear family in opposition to each other and begs the audience to question who is monstrous – a father who genetically altered his child, a mother who rejects her child, or the “inhuman” child. This essay critically analyzes Crimes of the Future and explores the tension between scientific intervention and genomic evolution through the context of disability. Crimes of the Future communicates the violent, ableist power structures upheld and enacted by medical capitalist corporations, specifically by depicting technological interventions on a child with a disability. This is accomplished by depicting tension within a nuclear family structure as they grapple with demarcating monstrosity in combination with syntactic elements that portray abject aspects of disordered consumption. Ultimately, this results in exploring representations of responses to conflict met in societal norms as both scientific advancements and environmental pollution threaten to change our ongoing definition of humanity in the modern age. 

The monstrosity of disability in Crimes of the Future is constructed through the abjection of bodily abnormality, eliciting disgust in the characters' reactions and the audience’s reactions alike. Abjection, as redefined by Barbara Creed in her research on the horror genre’s portrayal of the monstrous feminine, is described as that which defines and threatens the border of human identity. Here, I alter Creed’s definition of abjection to include revulsive acts of eating as it disrupts a biological definition of able-bodied humanity. Creed builds on Julia Kristeva’s concept of rituals of defilement, examining how rituals threaten identity as an internal biological process, stating ritual creates “demarcation lines between human and non-human, drawn upon anew and presumably made all the stronger for that process.”. In Crimes of the Future, abject is presented in Brecken’s disruption to the ritual of eating and his mother’s evaluation of her son as non-human for his ability to consume plastic. In the opening scene, sparse lighting from old fixtures illuminates the silhouette of Djuna (Lihi Kornowski), her back to the camera but head turned, anticipating her son’s arrival. In the following shot, the camera is initially set high above the child, showing his small stature as he brushes his teeth and prepares for bed. The next cut is angled at eye level as he succumbs to eating a trash bin, his mouth foams with an unknown white liquid as he chews. Throughout the scene, the child is shirtless, emphasizing that his exterior body has no noticeable deformation while suggesting his interior organs are uncanny, an unknown abject lingering within. This difference in clothing also sets the child as innocent, bare, and unable to protect himself. The child remains completely mute and emotionless before his death. The only sound he emits is the crunch of his plastic consumption, then the muffled screams of confused retaliation as his mother smothers him. This inciting incident sets the explicit meaning throughout the film, the contentious boundary of permitting differences that arise within the human condition. 

Saul Tensor (Viggo Mortensen) is a character that despite sharing the same disability, contrasts Brecken’s exposed vulnerability and is not positioned as monstrous. Unlike the exposed child who could not recognize the stigma of his disability, Saul is aware of his abnormality, going to lengths to hide his bodily identity in clocked black robes, only revealing his biological deformities when he capitalizes off an audience willing to pay for the spectacle of disgust. The stigmatization of disability is present in both characters, however, only the character that accepts and aligns himself with his status of abjection survives. Saul frequently engages with biotechnology purchased from a medical corporation which provides accommodation for activities that are otherwise inaccessible or extremely discomforting. The abjection of consumption continues with this biotechnology. A living spine, shaped into a sensorial chair adapts to and feeds Saul as he coughs and winces in pain. The diegetic sounds of Saul’s discomfort solidify that abnormal eating rituals are integral to the depiction of abject disability. Kimberly Jackson, in her book on the intersection of technology and monstrosity in modern science fiction films, creates a strong argument for the ethical complexity of scientific intervention under capitalism, arguing “Technology is alienating and dehumanizing and the paths it offers for fuller engagement with and experience of the world.” Though Saul benefits from this technology, his need visually emphasizes that he is straying from the border of humanity through this symbolic act. The monstrosity of disability depicted here is thereby upheld in both the need for and the use of scientific intervention. 

Brecken’s father, Scott Speedman (Lang Daughtery), is an ecoanarchist responsible for leading a group of radicals who consent to undergo genetic engineering to create the mutation that allows for the digestion of plastic, and consequently, Brecken’s inherited condition. Kimberly Jackson describes the use of biological reproduction as a means to represent nuclear family structures under patriarchal capitalism, in contrast to her concept of the “technological womb” where technology replaces birth to create a semi-human progeny. This progeny threatens the definition of humanity and the vulnerability of human biology, further illuminating the potential for rapid technological advancements to disrupt normative power structures. Jackson argues these films are hopeful narratives because they reduce the agency of traditional norms as a new, non-human child monster embodies a symbolic future despite evolving through corporate influence. Brecken represents a new humanity their fathers have chosen in a future where humans can consume pollutants and individuals like Saul have alternatives to purchasing products from corporations to accommodate to the lifestyle of able-bodied individuals. 

Scott attempts to gain public acceptance of Brecken’s condition by conducting a live autopsy of his son’s body in front of an audience. The establishing shot of the scene opens with an extremely wide shot, set on the exhibition building, angled low to the ground from the eyeline perspective of a child. A wide shot showcases Saul and Scott as they first react to Breken on the autopsy table. This shot is framed with a strong depth of field, casting the audience in a dark obscured vignette, hiding behind their cameras, further framed by crumbling concrete pillars and banister, leaving only their upper torso and faces visible. The shot positions the men responsible for the public autopsy in a physically removed and isolated section of the exhibition. In contrast, the scene cuts to an extreme close-up of Brecken's upper torso as he lay on the ribbed dissecting table. The surgical top lighting illuminates his ghostly pale face as Caprice (Lea Seyoux) caresses his cheek and hair. A medium-wide shot reveals the prior diegesis, Caprice circles the womb-like table that holds Breken's naked body as she begins to narrate Saul’s surgery with the audience looming over balconies, anxiously awaiting to record the anomaly. The concept of a technological womb is striking in this scene, present in the biological and vaginal form of the autopsy table, several CRT TVs resembling ultrasound monitors, and surgical arms resembling a mother's ribs. The background murmur of the crowd silences in a close-up from Caprice's point of view of Brecken's body as the first incision is made. Another extreme close-up pans down Brecken's torso as surgical arms peel back to reveal the novel organs. The lens switches to a surgical camera, revealing the mutated organs his bare flesh concealed. As a function of suppressive capitalism, corporate self-interest is represented in the actions of their employees who sabotage the autopsy and murder Scott. The ending sequence of the scene reverses from a close-up of the father's distressed face as he sits at the top of the steps of the exhibition building, to a medium shot of his murder, and ending with a wide shot of his body rolling down the staircase. The implicit meaning gives way to the symptomatic meaning, Scott’s murder signifies that profit incentive outweighs respecting the autonomy of clients and corporation has a disdain for their products associated with socially abject subjects. Scott’s death is received where his power originated from, by drills entering both his temples, in his ideas of post-humanist bodily anarchism threatened to oppose corporate financial gain from those living with disabilities. Jackson best describes how Crimes of the Future establishes a concept of monstrosity to then ask how dismantling that stigma could be revelatory for several causes: “The essence of humanity is transposed onto these nonhuman creatures; they are the ones who rebel against the dehumanizing corporation and sustain through their struggles certain notions of the uniquely human capacity for freedom, rationality, higher emotions, and morality“. Radical acceptance of disability threatens to disengage with corporate profit of scientific advancements and bring reformist change to what society considers abjectness.

 1. Creed, Barbara. “Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection.” Screen (London) 27, no. 1 (1986): 45

2. Disability is defined as an inability to access social structures as expected or designed. I write from the perspective of an individual with chronic disability and recognize that differences in this definition exist, however, generally I believe this description aligns with disability studies from an intersectional feminist lens.

 3. Jackson, “The End of Patriarchy,” 113.

 4. Kimberly Jackson, “The End of Patriarchy – Defining the Postmodern Prometheus in Splice and Prometheus” in Technology, Monstrosity, and Reproduction in Twenty-First Century Horror. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 121.

5. Jackson, “The End of Patriarchy”, 113.

Bibliography

Creed, Barbara. “Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection.” Screen (London) 27, no. 1 (1986): 44–71.

Crimes of the Future (dir. David Cronenberg, 2022)Kimberly Jackson, “The End of Patriarchy – Defining the Postmodern Prometheus in Splice and Prometheus” in Technology, Monstrosity, and Reproduction in Twenty-First Century Horror. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 112–142.