As women in the United States are seeing their rights to safe abortions, access to reproductive health services, and contraceptives slowly being stripped away by red state governors, a recent leak revealed the conservative majority Supreme Court may strike down Roe vs. Wade, ending legal abortion. It is perhaps timely, then, that David Cronenberg‘s new film “Crimes of The Future” explores bodies and how we perceive ownership, which has been seen as a political comment on modern topics.
However, while speaking with Deadline, the Canadian filmmaker was quick to point out he wrote the film decades ago and well before the era of Trump. Cronenberg also stated that all art is political regardless of its intention or when it was created.
“I did write [‘Crimes of The Future’] 20 years ago, but you can feel that this was coming, this kind of oppressive ownership and control,” said the filmmaker about how issues of rights over one’s body against ruling governments hasn’t gone away. “It’s a constant in history: There’s some sort of government that wants to control its population and means once again, body is reality.”
“The movie is not overtly political,” Cronenberg continued, “But to me, all art is political or innately political. It is an expression of culture, context, and intellect, of a very specific language, so in that sense, it’s political, whether the creator of the work is conscious of it or not.”
The topic of politics and abortion rights led Cronenberg to remark about the current environment in the United States alluding to it mirroring some authoritarian elements of Putin’s Russia.
“In Canada, and I have said this recently, we think everyone in the U.S. is completely insane, I think the U.S. has gone completely bananas, and I can’t believe what the elected officials are saying, not just about Roe vs. Wade, so it is strange times…We talk about Putin and the invasion of Ukraine, but then south of the border in Canada we feel the vibrations that are weirdly similar,” the filmmaker said.
It’s worth noting that while Cronenberg resides in the cosmopolitan Toronto area, his very level-headed mentality doesn’t represent the entity of Canada. The country has its own wacky group of conservative and nationalist Canadians that very much do agree with similar Trump/MAGA talking points. Even a major party, the Conservative Party of Canada, had various members of parliament initially supporting the Ottawa and Alberta border trucker convoy blockades over the winter until the federal government stepped in to remove them. That group was mostly run by anti-government agitators that were bankrolled by millions of American dollars sent using crowdsourcing apps.
“Crimes of The Future” did very well at the Cannes Film Festival, earning a solid standing ovation. The film will be released by NEON domestically on June 8.