Our Future Horror
I recently read about the premier of the body horror movie Crimes of the Future, directed by David Cronenberg. The premise is summed up by one of the catch-lines in the movie that was used in the trailer: surgery is the new sex. In a post-apocalyptic future where most of humanity has become injured and mutated, surgery has become an art-form.
Viggo Mortensen plays a character who can grow body parts, and Lea Seydoux plays someone who extracts them in front of gawking crowds. The movie premiere at Cannes so horrified viewers that a number walked out on it on its opening night.
While Cronenberg’s new movie could be seen as the latest installation of a genre of body horror films, what I found fascinating is this interplay between future forecasting and the frightening fruits of that task. Whilst the twentieth century forecasting was marked with hope and optimism, the same cannot be said as we move into the twenty-first. The fruits of future forecasting are simply dystopian, but horrific.
The question to be asked is, why this overlap? I ventured a partial answer in Redeeming Flesh.
In that book, I argued that zombies are not something disconnected from us, but articulate something about the postmodern condition. I argued that modernity, and later postmodernity, was marked by a striving for and reaching a future utopia, a kind of realised, secular heaven. These postmodern heavens are undergirded by a metaphysics that prioritises potency (what could be) over act (what actually is). Readers might be interested in my thumbnail explanation of this metaphysics of potency over act in my interview with Justine Toh at the Centre for Public Christianity. Thus, our heavens are seen not with a vertical perspective but a horizontal, whereby we equate heaven with a temporal future.
Moreover, we are driven to mark our bodies with signs of that heaven, trying to transcend the limits of our biology through technical means. We strive to become embodiments of a postmodern heaven, what Graham Ward described as a “postmodern angel”, bearing on our very selves the most glistening heaven money can buy. In the words of Herve Juvin in his The Coming of the Body, we try through our money and technology to “extract time itself from the human body and give it immortality”.
The trouble is that, as I argue in the book, our bodies are incapable of bearing this weight of heaven. Indeed, I said in Redeeming Flesh that “the more we try to make our bodies angelic, the more our bodies die”. We try to prise death from life and protect life by being on the constant lookout for death which, ironically, creates a scope of vision that has nothing other than death within it, and allows for a culture of necrophilia to set in. Ironically, the more we try to create become immortal on our own terms, the more we advance on a track that leads to death. Little surprise then that, when we forecast on what is to come in the future, our horizons are marked with death and horror.
We see a biblical embodiment of this type of outlook when we read the Book of Job. Under the yoke of Satan, Job makes a lament that makes a tantalising hint at future forecasting, labeling them as visions from God. These visions do not bring comfort to Job. Instead, Job laments that these visions terrify him, and drams frighten him, so much so that he prefers “strangling and death over life in this body” (Job 7:14).
This might be an exercise of overreading, but it seems to me that the author of the Book of Job could foresee what would happen if, we looked at the future purely through the eyes of man (with its purely immanent, horizontal perspective), and not with the transcendent perspective that come from the eyes of God.
Support Awkward Asian Theologian on Patreon, and help make a change to the theological web.
