In the future, I dream of poured concrete over industrial wastelands, edging the shoreline into orgasmic destruction with condo development. I dream of e-waste barrows, waiting to be excavated by digital archaeologists in thousands of years. I dream of a simulated omniverse, in which the burn of nostalgia is as real as the ease of forgetting. In the future, I dream of now. 

Surgery is sex, and sex is public performance. This is the main conceit of Crimes of the Future (2022, dir. David Cronenberg), where we follow the performance artists Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) and Caprice (Léa Seydoux). The former is an artist with “accelerated evolution syndrome” needing constant surgeries to excise organs rapidly developing in his body, and the latter is a retired trauma surgeon willing (even desiring) to perform the surgeries for an audience. In this world, humans have evolved to be without pain, except for a select few who exclusively feel it in their sleep; Saul Tenser is one of them. He must make use of a number of “LifeFormWare” technologies, machines that look like organisms, in order to eat and sleep. Caprice makes use of one such machine to perform surgeries on Saul, sensually touching a giant beetle strapped to her chest to control its slicing and sucking maneuvers. 

While watching this movie, I was jolted back into the world of the postmodern authors I had come to love. The Atrocity Exhibition by J.G. Ballard follows a man with an ever-changing name—always starting with T, such as Travis, Talbot, Travers, Tallis—as he interacts with the things that dominate his cultural landscape: Marilyn Monroe, the Vietnam War, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. 

“Love & Napalm: Export USA,” the 11th chapter of The Atrocity Exhibition, reads like a bizarre report of several psychological experiments performed on the American public. Ballard describes a perverse society, where psychosexual arousal is stimulated by watching “newsreel atrocity films” that depict racist and misogynistic torture. Atrocity films are used in conjunction with “combat films,” the former used to stimulate the mind and the latter used to sedate it. 

His criticism here is most immediately of America’s involvement in the Vietnam war and the American public’s complicity, but this also plays into his broader commentary about the flattening of sex, violence, and consumerism into one. In his notes on the chapter, he says that although the chapter is taken to be specifically anti-American, “the hidden logic at work within the mass media—above all, the inadvertent packaging of violence and cruelty like attractive commercial products—had already spread throughout the world.” 

In The Atrocity Exhibition, bodies are on display, this time instrumentalized—packaged—to manipulate the emotions of their consumers. This happens all at once through a barrage of billboards and mass media. The women start to look like Marilyn Monroe, and Marilyn Monroe’s body seems as abstract and expansive as dunes in the desert. Karen Novotny, Tallis’ lover, stands in the corner of a room. The white walls of the room are sand dunes, and so when she interrupts the corner with her body, Tallis must kill her. In Crimes of the Future, the “inner beauty” of bodies (i.e. organs) is made both public and sensual. Caprice is notably a former trauma surgeon, and so the sexual pleasure that she gains from performing surgery on Saul and herself has inescapably violent undertones. Abstractions upon abstractions are what make the body open to the erotic and violent for Tallis, whereas for Caprice and Saul it is desire that drives them.

The metaphorical implications of Cronenberg’s surgical body horror does not stop sex. At the beginning, we see a boy eating a plastic trash can, and as a result, his mother suffocates him thinking that he is a monster. We learn over the course of the movie that the boy’s father had surgically altered himself so that his digestive system could process plastic, and only plastic. He then passed this trait on to his son; the bizarreness of a surgical change corresponding to a genetic change is not overlooked. 
This, paired with the fact that humans in this world cannot feel pain, provokes a question: why would humans evolve to have traits that could kill them? By the end of the movie, I realized that the evolution that Crimes of the Future refers to isn’t toward development, but destruction. If the environment humans destroyed couldn’t kill them, then the body would do it itself. Organic beings and industrial waste merge, creating an impossible future—or, a prescient diagnosis of our present trajectory.