Art has to be outrageous for it to be worth it. Literally.
In our contemporary era, in the struggle so dear to the director between man and machine, the center lies precisely in pain, in pain. In an indefinite time between past and future, inhabited by wrecks and derelicts, a time in which darkness, sunsets and decadence have taken over, men have lost every characteristic of their being human, losing the ability to feel pain. So become addicted to pleasure, to life and therefore to the pleasure of life. In an attempt to simulate it, the body becomes a fetish object of art in a synthesis between performative body art and still life. A still life that wants to live and tries to do so through a pain that it does not feel and which for this reason takes on the precious character of rare things and privileges. Bodies tortured by the 'new vice', by the new vice which is an evolutionary imbalance.
Surgery taken to the extreme that destroys, medicine that doesn't cure but sickens, both minds and bodies. An eroticism deviated from the fetishistic charm of decomposed and eviscerated bodies to seek out an inner beauty that can save them, having corrupted the outer one. As in an anatomy lesson by Rembrandt, the bystanders are obsessed with the gaze, with seeing with their own eyes: the autopsy as a collective enjoyment. A voyeurism shared in theaters in ruins where nothing is left of life. These bodies have labored breaths in which man and machine have merged in a natural process of involution. Mythological individuals who have learned to feed on their own scraps having exhausted all other sources of life and energy. The sentence to a perpetual death without ever living.
Art has to be outrageous for it to be worth it.
Cronenberg's cinema is because the images are, for this director more than for others, the brush with which he paints futuristic scenarios but not too much (Videodrome, by the same director had anticipated in the 1980s themes related to the dictatorship of the media and the degeneration of virtual technology) inhabited by a humanity adrift, outraged, in fact, offended by itself and by its inability to remain human, to the point of being subjugated by those technologies born of its own ingenuity. A humanity in free fall that self-destructs from within and while doing so it watches itself and enjoys a sick self-masturbative pleasure. Because pleasure is the counterpart of pain and if you get used to one you will inevitably lose the perception of the other.
Cronenberg has the ability to read social and cultural phenomena while they are still in being and in the making and simultaneously show them to us at the endgame when it is too late to fix or reset. His films are an open door between the past and the future, a past that is the present because the future, while it is prophesied, is realized and escapes. What is left is a feeling of helplessness. The inability to act without reaction and which leads to annihilation. Is that our final destination?