Near future. Pollution, climate change, and biotechnology.

A child is suffocated by his mother, a couple of artists exhibit surgical performances, a man proposes an autopsy.

Tomorrow's Medea kills her son as a divorce gift; her son Brecken is born to torment her, eats plastic and perhaps his body will be devoured by his father Lang's cannibalistic friends who head a group of radical evolutionists.

Saul has a condition called Accelerated Evolution Syndrome, meaning he produces unknown organs and Caprice his partner/surgeon extracts them in public and tattoos them.

They are to be cataloged at the National Organ Register, a bureaucratic state body where Wipped and Timlin must oversee to uphold the state's restrictions on human evolution by cataloging and storing newly produced organs.

Timlin attracted to the figure of Saul declares that "surgery is the new sex," considers newly produced organs art, new Picassos.

But how is it possible to consider Art new formations

neoplastic? Can I consider new Bacon or Duchamp mere subcutaneous protuberances?

Caprice responds to the rebellion of the body, takes control of it, shapes it, tattoos it and disposes of it.

The first way to fertilize the male body; the two performers have tremendous power, they are stars, and the government submits to these figures, needs them and instrumentalizes them.

However, pain torments Tenser; he has remained the only one to experience this physical symptom, while the psychic one still affects everyone.

This will be the reason why he produces endless more or less mysterious pseudo "artistic" formations: the physical pain joins the psychic one doubling itself and the nocebo effect affects the birth of new organic species, the subconscious is the basis for the birth of new life forms.

Cronenberg's Future World features other performances, such as that of a man whose eyes and mouth are sewn shut and auditory organs are reproduced all over his body, who wiggles to the beat of music while celebrating a kind of mantra:

"it is time to stop seeing, it is time to stop talking, it is time to listen."

It is conceptual art and " the creation of inner beauty cannot be an accident," there are specialists who deal with this.

The autopsy of the body of the child killed by the mother, proposed by the father to Saul is meant to be a counterrevolutionary message to the system of control the state exerts over the evolution of organs: "one must be outrageous to be useful."

An interesting further performance captivates Caprice: Odelie undergoes surgery that opens cuts on her face, "the desire to be open is the beginning of something exciting."

A metaphorical, emotional, artistic desire, the surgeon emphasizes to Saul.

Wipped, he tries to get Tenser on his side, that is, on the side of those who register inner beauty, passing it off as knowledge, as aesthetics in power, as anger, rebellion, rejection through the scalpel.

The boy's autopsy examination represents "the anatomy of today's pathology, the inner chaos, the map to enter the heart of darkness."

A conceptual psycho/organic film, evolutionism to the nth degree, a materialistic-Darwinian horror film.

What is natural and what is not...

What is the cause of everything, the psyche?

Does the end justify the means?

Is survival political or biological?

Is inner beauty flesh?

Is evolution perversion?

Why all this therapeutic doggedness for the survival of the species?

Correcting the Marxist definition of historical materialism Cronenberg argues that the driving forces of humanity are organic/evolutionary material in nature ... on which aesthetic conceptuality can act decoratively and over which instrumentalization and public control dominate.

The body is the stage on which everything takes place, and the representation of internal exteriority makes it highly political.

Although the witnessing of perceptual experience transcends any scientific approach, the aesthetic leap is an anesthetic artifice: a meta-rational, pseudo-logical approach in a possible near future world where only the selection of the species will decide what to become among flesh, plastic, hemorrhage of being of a body sprinkled with orifices.

An aesthetic justification of existence where nihilism advances mercilessly.

The representation of a fragmentary and labyrinthine posthuman transhumanism, where the mutant, moribund and lifeless repetition of the human species confirms the irredeemable and composed inevitability of death.

20-Aug-2023 by Beatrice