As a long-term Cronenberg freak, it took me far too long to get around to Crimes of the Future, and I only got to see it last week. But it was worth the wait, because it was so uncomfortable I still feel like it's needling me somewhere in the neck, and it feels good, man..
It was so completely and unapologetically discomforting, in multiple ways. It's not that the eating chair Viggo has to use is made out of plastic bone, it's that it's twitching and spasming in the most awkward way. It's not just dealing with dead kids who might not be human because they eat too much plastic, it's cutting them open and letting you see inside. It's those fucking beds.
The wholesale display of terrible new organs in the human body is bad enough, but it's also the way Viggo Mortensen's Saul Tenser can't even speak without choking and gagging and coughing, as his body mutates in unforeseen ways.
My lovely wife understands me better than anybody else in this world, but she still doesn't understand why you'd even bother watching that would make you feel mentally uncomfortable, or physically queasy. Why would you put yourself through that?
But even beyond the ubiquitous intellectual vigour of a Cronenberg screenplay, even beyond the strange compassions he finds at the edge of human experience, even beyond the pitch-dark humour of his films, there is always something invigorating about a movie that can get any kind of genuine reaction out of you. Even the grossest of reactions is preferable to the apathy generated by so many other films.
This spirit of safe transgression has to be worth celebrating, and always worth seeking out. What makes us uncomfortable can only make us stronger, if we make even the smallest effort to understand and empathise with it..
Just don't ever ask me to sit in that fucking chair. Jesus fucking Christ, what an ergonomic nightmare.
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