We Are The Sprocket Holes vol. 558

 David Foster Wallace once wrote that “Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching someone’s ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.” Cronenberg (whose sensibility, like Lynch’s, is unmistakable enough to function as an adjective) has supplied his new film, “Crimes of the Future,” with a character who has ears growing all over his body and his eyes sewn shut. The warped extremity of Cronenbergian body horror has kept him at a distance from the mainstream, but it’s also earned him a respect and influence that few other cult directors can claim. His work has been the subject of film-studies courses, Ph.D. dissertations, and critical anthologies, driving up the intellectual value of genre cinema without ever gentrifying it. His peerless series of gross-out mindfucks and philosophical schlockfests have shaped art-making in the movies and beyond, from the corporeal jolts of Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan” to the experimental pop of Charli XCX, who named a recent album “Crash.” Jordan Peele, an ascendant master of art-house scary movies, told the Wall Street Journal, in 2020, that watching “The Fly” taught him “the power of horror.” The veteran film critic J. Hoberman has called Cronenberg “the most provocative and consistently original North American director of his generation.”

David Cronenberg’s Dreams and Nightmares 

“People will say, ‘Oh, he’s back to body horror,’ ” the director says. “But it’s never changed for me.”