Für Elise - a non-review

“It came to me…that I didn’t want to be anywhere else in the world at that moment, that what I was feeling at that moment justified all I had been through, because all I had been through was my being there. I was experiencing…a new self-acceptance, a sense that I had to be this mind and this body, its vices and its virtues, and that I had no other chance or choice.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

"Without everything just as it was, with nothing altered and holding nothing alterable, nothing at all - not even the most transient, ecstatic moment of happiness or joy - can have been. Causality works forwards in this kind of passionate affirmation only by working backward like the ray of sunlight Nietzsche sees shining on his life: “I looked backwards, I looked forwards, never did I see so many and such good things at once.” Nietzsche’s account, telling his life to himself, thus works upon his life as a benediction. And it is this benediction which transfigures the glance, transfiguring
what was into what was willed as such, which is the meaning of what it is to will backwards, declaring: “how could I fail to be thankful to my life?” (EH Epigraph,KSA 6, p. 263)"
- in Babich, Nietzsche's Imperative as a Friend's Encomium: On Becoming the One You Are, Ethics, and Blessing

"Everything in our lives has brought us to this moment".
Benno to Eric in Cosmopolis (the book and the movie!)

Without Elise, there's no all of Eric in the movie. Without Elise, this everything Benno talks about is NOT everything, it's just what's in Eric's world. Elise is not in Eric's world, she is Gradiva, Euridice taking him out of the limo, seducing him who has it all and wants nothing but a haircut into having no choice in the end. Having no choice but to accept the irreversibility of his Destiny and not look back on destroying the circulating capital, his money, her money because of a yen. And not just to accept it, but to love it seeing it for what it is.

What is money to a poet, she says, love the world and trace it in a line of verse. Without Elise there's no love of the world. No Elise makes the movie as detached as Eric is in it. Cosmopolis the book is a verse. Cosmopolis the movie is not, it's a movie.

Instead of words from the book, Cronenberg says he gives an actor's face.
This post is for Elise's face missing in the movie when Eric realizes he loves her and she slips away.
For Elise, the face of love. The kind of love which sprungs out mysteriously in unexpected places; which enables, is not selfish, makes one do foolish things and wear turbans, which supports and understands without asking, which gives and makes one free to be a gull at dawn, anything and everything one can be. Which makes one an overman. Even if everything and anything one is, is dead in the end. Precisely because that which one ultimately is in the end is dead .

Amor fati, nothing altered, nothing alterable.