A Dual Review

Crimes of the Future is the latest film from master of body horror David Cronenberg, although the title is reused from a movie he made in 1970. Which, fair, it’s a good title and worthy of reuse. Xenoerotics is a short, loose, collection of vignettes and essays whose closest relation to the mainstream is the works of David Cronenberg. I wouldn’t really recommend either to most people, even though I quite liked both.

Crimes takes place at somepoint in a future, where most people have stopped feeling pain, infection has ceased to be a problem, and some people are undergoing rapid evolution and are growing novel organs. The protagonists are a pair of performance artists, one afflicted with the problem of growing new organs and the other who surgically removes them on stage (after endoscopically tattoing them in private) as their performance art. They are played by Viggo Mortensen and Lea Seydoux.

The film feels like a phillip k dick short story, filled with weird scifi flourishes that build out the world in strange and unexpected ways (this is a compliment btw). It is also the kind of film where after the surgical art, characters sit around in the performance space and discuss it’s merits and meanings. Later a skepical character directly asks Viggo, the one who is producing new organs for the performance art, if he is really an artist because he is not in control of the organs growing in him. David Cronenberg knows filmmakers who use subtley and he thinks they’re cowards.

The sets are bare and stripped back, but also evoking the feel and style of Cronenburgs earlier film, Naked Lunch (an adaptation of William Burroughs life and book of the same name). The cast is similiarly stripped down. We meet a pair of goverment beaucrats, tasked with catalouging new organs working for the National Organ Registry. They appear to be the only two employees in the building. It’s unclear if they are the National Registry, or a branch office. There is an unsettling feeling of aloneness.

The film, like a lot of Cronenbergs filmmography is also obbessed with the intersection between eroticism and violence.

Which leads into Xenoerotics by David Roden. Where Crimes of the Future wants to bleed together these two subjects of surgical violence and sexuality, Xenoerotics opens in a universe where any trace of difference between the two has been long ago erased (true to the title, one would actually have to be an alien, or something inhuman, to find any part of it erotic). It’s vulgar book, with the previously mentioned Naked Lunch being the best known work to compare it to. You will probably not be much interested in it. But it does have a few tricks up it sleeve that made it worth reading.

It is told in short vinettes, which are separated into short paragraphs, consisting of sentances that are rarely any longer than they need to be. I have read a few other Vulgar books, like naked lunch, and their biggest failure is that at somepoint they become boring. The vulgar spectacles they engage in are over described again and again. At somepoint the author exhausts the disgust in the reader because the scenes have fallen into the groove of vugarities that the author likes and everything begins to feel the same. Xenoerotics nearly escapes this trap by it’s terseness, it doesn’t linger too long in description of whatever new atrocity is happening before moving on to the next. Allowing the gaps in description to terrify the reader.

It is also told in reverse, with each successive chapter happening before the previous one. There is little to no overlap in characters between chapters, only the slow, strange apocalypse that is happening in reverse. Beginning in a world (the future) that is slowly and counter-causuly brought back to the normal world as the pages flow past.

There is also an interesting gambit happening in the narrative voice. Things flow between first and second person, the way I would write to you if I was writing a letter describing events from yesterday in case you had forgotten them. It brings an intimacy and a strangeness that will probably linger with me longer than any of the descriptions of profoundly awful things carried in the narration.