FAREWELL TO THE FLESH
“Long live the new flesh.” Words that, as any David Cronenberg fan will know, were spoken at the very end of Videodrome, his 1983 cult hit about the mind-and-body altering power of television. Words, also, that could apply to his latest film, Crimes Of The Future, which sees the Canadian back behind the camera after an all-too-long eight-year hiatus. The “new flesh” – the metamorphosis of our bodies into something more advanced, more poisonous perhaps – is embedded in his entire work. Or as the 79-year-old director now puts it: “The human condition is the human body.”
After his last film, the satire , Cronenberg sidestepped into novel-writing with 2014’s , a story that saw him tackle strange sexual fetishes and technology run amok. continues this re-embracing of such perennial topics. Even the title takes him back to his 1970 underground short of the same name, about cosmetics causing a deadly plague – a phrase about a starving poet who, at one point, scribbles ‘Crimes of the Future’ on a notepad. The script for was written around 1998-99, just as he prepared to release . Then under a different title, , Cronenberg compared it to his 1996 J.G. Ballard adaptation . “To the extent that is not very Hollywood, I’d say that will not be very Hollywood either,” he told many years ago. “Although I’d say that technically you could call a sci-fi movie.” Nicolas Cage was attached, then dropped out. Ralph Fiennes, who worked with Cronenberg on 2002’s , later stepped in – but, again, the project stalled.
