Stereo/Crimes of the Future (review)

I would imagine a double billing of those two would take a lot of sitting through.

David Cronenberg (cited in Sammon 30)

Usually discussed as noteworthy (if rarely seen) early forays into horror and sf, David Cronenberg's Stereo (1969) and Crimes of the Future (1970) – his first 35mm films made after graduating from the University of Toronto – are now available together on DVD. Distinct examples of a form of avant-garde sf, they offer a unique perspective from which to consider Cronenberg's extensive oeuvre. These films are quite unlike the feature films upon which he built his reputation as a master of horror, such as Shivers (Canada 1975), Rabid (Canada 1977), The Brood (Canada 1979), Scanners (Canada 1981) and Videodrome (Canada 1983), which used the more visceral conventions of the horror genre alongside sf to explore the director's preoccupation with a Cartesian split between mind and body.¹ Instead, Stereo and Crimes of the Future represent a concerted effort to engage cerebrally with sf and dystopian narratives, through the lens of the avant-garde rather than horror. While acknowledging their seminal position within Cronenberg's early career, the sf and fantasy film magazine Cinefantastique memorably described these films as 'arty, overly pretentious, and statically boring' (Sammon 22).

While such comments are unnecessarily dismissive, these films are challenging experiments in film form and narrative construction which grew out of Cronenberg's engagement with underground cinema while in university, but at the same time their plots are, on the surface, straightforward and quite familiar. Stereo takes place in a scientific institution which experiments on people to develop their telepathic communication, while Crimes of the Future presents a dystopian future in which millions of women have died as a result of a recently discovered disease spread through cosmetics, provoking a search for alternative forms of reproduction and evolution. As Cronenberg himself suggests in the above quotation, Stereo and Crimes of the Future make for a taxing double bill for they are slow, ponderous and at times almost abstract because the causal connections between various plot events are unclear. Meaning is not conveyed through cause and effect but rather through the juxtaposition of images, voiceover and sound effects, in the tradition of the avant-garde or art film, demanding that the audience work out each film's various meanings for themselves. These are films that invite the audience to think rather then tell them what to think.

But what are we being invited to think about? In subject matter, both films demonstrate nascent themes and preoccupations that have come to dominate our understanding of Cronenberg's work: the exploration of the relationship between sexuality, the body and the mind; the implications of scientific intervention into the body; and the body undergoing processes of evolution. They also feature moments of social and sexual taboo, such as when the test subjects are made to take drugs and aphrodisiacs in order to develop a form of 'polymorphous perversity' which results in an orgiastic ménage à trois in Stereo. Another example is in Crimes of the Future when the scientist Adrian Tripod (Ronald Mlodzik) admits that the bodily secretions of those suffering from Rouge's Malady are strangely sensually attractive and induce those not infected with the disease to imbibe them – a truly Cronenbergian body horror moment that fuses abjection and death with erotica.

Additionally, the scientific institutions depicted in these films, such as The Canadian Academy for Erotic Enquiry in Stereo, and The House of Skin, the Institute of Neo-Venereal Disease and the Oceanic Podiatry Group in Crimes of the Future, are clear precursors to the host of corporations and foundations that reappear through Cronenberg's filmography, such as the Somafree Institute of Psychoplasmics in The Brood, Con-Sec in Scanners and Spectacular Optical in Videodrome. Each of these films questions the impact of institutional science on the individual and the body. Finally, these early films are haunted by Cronenberg's 'mad scientists' – the parapsychologist...