Ecology, Materialism, and Transfiguration

Introduction An ecologically responsive parable about biological mutation in a post-apocalyptic environment, David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future (2022) was hailed on release as a “dream-noir” (Ehrlich), a “sci-fi noir” (Oller), and a “body-noir” (“Crimes”). The use of the term ‘noir’ here is enigmatic. As is often the case, the term is deployed to address a quality that otherwise resists easy identification. Noir has, of course, acquired a multitude of connotations and aesthetic legacies over the years. As I have observed elsewhere, one of those legacies is a concern with the physicality of the human body, and, somewhat gnomically, with the body in states of passivity and suspension that are, deceptively, also vivid states of transition and potency (Killeen 10). Cronenberg’s examination of such passivity in Crimes of the Future is at the heart of the film’s deft concoction of post-humanist paranoia, ecological horror, and noir aesthetics. As such, my study will observe the ways Cronenberg elegantly steeps his narrative of transhumanist and evolutionary mutation in a distinctive noir iconography of the human body in states of stillness and ‘taking place’. Significantly, this body is framed, too, in a familiar noir environment: liminal spaces of ruin, dereliction, and terrain vague. In addition, I will also discuss the film’s distrust of the hermeneutical violence often performed by depth models of metaphysical ‘meaning’, and its celebration of the redemptive force of the body via its material capacities for transformation. 1 Noir is an aesthetic category that long ago transcended cinema. Its chiaroscuro visuals, rich and versatile iconographies, weird psychologies, eroticised metaphysics, and fugal, oneiric atmospheres have migrated to everything from cosmetics to video games, becoming a “noir mediascape” that circulates through “all the information technologies” (Naremore 255). This is appropriate. From the outset, the classic cycle of film noir (1939-1955) proved itself a narrative and stylistic category which fundamentally relied on principles of formal hybridisation. Many scholars, among them Slavoj Žižek, have identified the sense in which film noir itself was never a genre per se but rather an “anamorphic distortion affecting different genres” (Žižek 9), a mutative aesthetic transforming any genre it encountered. As a filmmaker fascinated by mutative operations, it is hardly surprising that David Cronenberg has recurrently invoked noir aesthetics and their concomitant affects, whether very directly (A History of Violence), more adroitly (Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch, Crash), or as a supplement to the ‘body-horror’ stylings for which he is renowned (Scanners, Videodrome, eXistenZ). In Cronenberg’s work noir provides the dark, intricate, and webbed textures within which human beings are beset, stimulated, or transformed by biological agents (viruses, insects, anatomical anomalies), technological agents (machines, instruments, media), or disciplinary agents of capitalist or statist corruption (corporations, governments, organised crime). In Crimes of the Future, Cronenberg brings this textural invocation of noir to a crescendo by linking noir specifically to the topic of ecology and materiality. In doing so, he reinforces a very contemporary articulation of so-called ‘eco-noir’. 2 In recent years a number of scholars have turned to noir aesthetics to develop provocative new theories of ecology. These include works such as Michael Uhall’s Noir Materialism (2024) and Katrina Younes’s The Ecology of American Noir (2025). Significantly, both of the latter acknowledge the influence of Timothy Morton’s concept of ‘dark ecology’, wherein Morton identifies the noir protagonist as a productive metaphor for the human being’s inextricable relation to its environment: in short, a figure who discovers that their very “personhood ironically contaminates the scene” of the mystery they are probing (111). This is the ecological fate of the human: to be a live trait, a relational entity with-in an eclectic ecology in which they are ‘implicated’; not to be its romanticist observer, and certainly not its master. Morton’s dark ecology, moreover, accounts not just for so-called ‘natural’ entities within our environment, but also technological entities. Indeed, Morton’s example of the quintessential implicated noir protagonist is Harrison Ford’s Deckard in Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) who discovers himself to be one of the androids he has been tasked with eliminating. Morton’s conception of a ‘dark ecology’ is broadly consistent with the articulation of a ‘posthuman’, fundamentally immanent, materialist, and emergent model of (anti)metaphysics that continues to spawn wildly in the wake of Gilles Deleuze’s influential philosophy of becoming. In these conceptual worlds of vibrant matter and diverse networks of human and nonhuman actors, the human is necessarily decentred. What emerges in its place is the “vital materiality” of a human body that “is not fully or exclusively human”; one in which, for instance, the bacteria living in our epidermis, or the “swarm” of bacteria living in the human gut, necessarily constitute each one of us as a living multitude, “an array of bodies” (Bennett 112). This is a distinctly Cronenbergian image, of course: the human as multitude, the human as hybridised by and with its ecological cohabitants, or – to use one of Uhall’s terms – the human subject as a morphogenetic entity, a “chimerical site” (115). In Crimes of the Future Cronenberg addresses precisely these facets of human existence – the morphogenetic and the chimerical. 3 Set in a near future where civilisation verges on collapse, the film centres on a small outpost of survivors whose world is poised between the decaying vestiges of modernity and a retreat into markers of earlier historical epochs (late medievalism, vague Hellenism, twentieth century glamour aesthetics). This is a kind of ‘1984 Revisited’: by way of 1948, but also 1448 and 484 BCE. Electricity seems in short supply, but sufficient to power vintage ‘brick’ cell phones, old TV sets, and the exotic, fleshly SARK surgical devices prized by the film’s chief protagonists, Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) and Caprice (Lea Seydoux). The latter are prestigious body-modification artists, whose practice involves the live removal of ‘novel’ organs that routinely grow in Tenser’s abdomen. These anatomical anomalies are excised in vivid open surgeries which – in a society where humans’ capacity to experience pain and pleasure has faded – are regarded by their fans as not just revolutionary artworks but as a transgressive form of “new sex”. Performance art of this ilk is this society’s dominant form of entertainment. A vaguely illicit spectacle, it fuses together rival conceptions of theatre: as space of performance, and as space of medical demonstration. (That both of these conceptions of theatre stem from the culture of Ancient Greece is apt, as the film was shot on location in Athens.) But such mortifications of the body are not confined to the rituals of somewhat pretentious high art gatherings. They have spilled out into every corner of society where – in the nocturnal shadows – people moan in delightful agony as backstreet ‘desktop surgeons’ hack into their nerve centres. Monitoring the threat of these subversive activities are the agents of diminished state institutions that themselves lurk in the shadows. These include New Vice, a police branch focussed specifically on the “accelerated evolution syndrome” that is wrenching the species away from “the human path”, and the National Organ Registry presided over by two Kafkaesque figures (Kristen Stewart and Don McKellar). The latter duo maintain archival records of novel organs, and each seems torn between discharging their bureaucratic, biopolitical labour and the beguiling allure of the bodily mutations (and mutilations) they encounter. Insurrection, finally, is very much the threat in this world. In addition to the phenomenon of ‘naturally’ occurring bodily mutations, which in many cases have made the digestion of food almost impossible, an underground movement of eco-conscious transhumanist bio-engineers have been tinkering with the human organism so that it can survive by consuming its own industrial waste (in the form of ‘synth’ bars made of plastic). It will transpire that Mortensen’s noir antihero, who himself suffers from a rogue digestive system, is actually an undercover agent reporting to New Vice on both threats: that of the body-art circuit within which he works and the transhumanist underground with whom he comes into contact. 4 It is important to note that the sensuous and liminal atmosphere of Crimes of the Future, which is perhaps even more compelling than the narrative on which the film hangs, is explicitly the result of an evocative “rubble noir” aesthetic: its integration of “fragile” and “impermanent” metropolitan spaces “on the cusp of complete demolition” (Fay 126). The film’s dilapidated, crepuscular environment, with its serpentine streetscapes and exorbitant textures of decaying mortar, suggests a sense of civil and ecological cataclysm in virtually every frame. In this, it adheres to noir’s long-established “proclivity … for urban topoi on the verge of destruction” (Dimendberg 64). In reflecting on the liminality of such noir spaces, Edward Dimendberg invokes Ignasi de Sola-Morales Rubio’s analysis of visuals of “terrain vague” in urban photography: strange, void spaces that solicit alienation and wonder. As de Sola-Morales Rubio observes, for all their unsettling qualities, such terrains vagues are not necessarily ‘negative’ or hopeless spaces, but are primed also with a sense of potential: the relationship [in these spaces] between the absence of use, of activity, and the sense of freedom, of expectancy, is fundamental to understanding the evocative potential of the city’s terrains vagues. Void