Rob Pattinson Is Cronenberg's New Boy Toy

Cronenberg's Cosmopolis Winning the MTV Award 2012 Over Hunger Games

Rob Pattinson says Cronenberg says he doesn't make commercial films. He was ecstatic over this win. Does this pic look like a man who doesn't care?

The Young Beautiful Cronenberg As An Actor - Forget the film

He looks gender ambiguous to me. How about you? Shall we have a little vote on it?

Nolan has been criticized by a number of reviewers for the way he has portrayed Batman's sexual relations and the sexuality of the women in his Batman films. In The Dark Knight Rises they have said that this has been corrected somewhat. Anne Hathaway's Catwoman is confident sexually and Bruce Wayne is displaying seductive sexual interest for the first time in Nolan's Batman series. Interesting. 

So I began to think about Cronenberg. His recent Cosmopolis reviewers have reported that there is a lot of sex in it that is not sexy. eXistenZ? Naked Lunch? A History of Violence? Eastern Promises? Videodrome? Dead Ringers? All of them have sex in them that is not sexy with the exception of A History Of Violence between Viggo and Bello. There is no way Cronenberg is going to tamper with what Viggo wants to do in a scene. Viggo is the dominant one in this pairing of actor and director. 

Crash has lots and lots of sex in it that I do not find sexy but pornographic, but that is the way Ballard wrote it. Cronenberg decidedly has sexual issues. He imposes his arid sexuality on his characters or he chooses material that is already that way. The exception is  A History Of Violence. In Eastern Promises Cronenberg focuses his camera on the body of Viggo using the ploy for showing the viewer his gangster tattoos. It works. Definitely. Viggo is lovely.

Gender ambiguity - James Spader

James Spader was super hot in Soderbergh's Sex, Lies and Videotape, and playing opposite Susan Sarandon in White Palace in the early 90's. In 1996 Spader plays Ballard in Crash for Cronenberg. Again lots of hot sex that is not hot, but is very physical and pornographic. And the camera focusesing on Spader's body. From the reviews of Cosmopolis he is repeating his sexual problems with women yet one more time. 

Too many instances to brush off now. Once again Rob Pattinson is being castrated. For other times see HERE. His face and body once again used as pornography void of sex. In one trailer we see him asking for the stun gun, the camera on his naked upper body. Again the erotic male body.

Sexy Hot Spader - Cool Cronenberg Sex

Trailer For Crash  - Lots of Sex

And again we have lots of sex without sex. 

Seems to be a trademark of a Cronenberg film eh? 

A repetition compulsion maybe?

In Rob Pattinson he has found a malleable mind to mold and it seems Rob Pattinson, adoring him now instead of Stewart, is his latest Boy Toy.

DeLillo's novel Cosmopolis alternates between the limo (Order of Production) and the outside (Order of Seduction). It is Elise who seduces him on, away from the limo, to let the world will him. Eric Packer is following her all day without searching for her, just finding her as Destiny keeps their paths crossing. At the end is an ecstatic sexual encounter beginning in a naked body sequence being filmed. Cronenberg said in an interview that it was too over the top to be believed so not cinematic. He uses "not cinematic" whenever he wants to get rid of something. Since Spencer Tunick's naked body installations have been performed all over the world, it appears DeLillo has put them in his novel in the Hades scene as a movie set where naked Eric Packer lies down beside his naked wife Elise Shifrin without knowing it is she at first. (Cronenberg has said he cut it out because it was a fantasy.) Is that a fact.  (She is the "woman who keeps disappearing" as Zizek will describe these film women. these Gradivas.) As they leave the naked bodies to get their clothes in some seclusion she shimmies up his body in passion and kisses him in ecstasy and "he knew he loved her" and just at the moment he knows she slithers down his naked body and away like Gradiva. Or Eurydice. It is the woman here in the novel who has hystericized on the male body, Packer's, inverting the process. (Baudrillard The Perfect Crime; Fatal Strategies)

Sarah Gadon has given Cronenberg the rationalization he requires of the character of Elise as cold and asexual. Sarah has used post modern sound bite lingo to say in an interview, "She is not going to let her husband hystericize on her (Gadon's words), so she exits the marriage. She's out of it. Yet another misreading by Cronenberg. 

Alan Sheridan in his 1980 Foucault: The Will To Truth discusses this in the chapter Sexuality, Power and Knowledge. 

Foucault elicits four great strategies that have emerged in Western society since the late eighteenth century.The 'hystericization' of the female body is a process whereby the woman's body is seen as an organism saturated with sexuality.....(p. 187)

The result has been the femme fatale we all know from noir film. At the present time she has almost vanished. There are no men for her says Baudrillard. He proposes the 
solution of the female 


hystericization of the male and his body, and this seems to be going on with Rob Pattinson initiated by his role of Edward Cullen. Meyer has dreamed Edward into existence, and Rob Pattinson has fulfilled the dream. The new sexy male is a type portrayed by Pattinson with all his gender ambiguity David Bowie style refined beauty. So we have the male version of the femme fatale in Rob Pattinson, and Cronenberg appears smitten and willing to pimp his latest Boy Toy, his latest Ken doll. And Rob is complicit.

“I forget who said that films are desires visualized, but for me, at least, film is the visualization of the director’s desire. But the director’s desire doesn’t appear in the film directly. It appears in all kinds of convoluted forms. My fear that my desire will appear in my films has always caused me to be extremely wary of making films, hasn’t it? Haven’t I made films to hide my desires instead? Trying to hide them made them appear even more vividly.”

Nagisa Oshima
March 31, 1932 – January 15, 2013

(Source: strangewood)

Blyth

If Elise is out of it instead of DeLillo's drawing of her leading Eric Packer to transcendence, then the film falls apart and becomes just another "hard" Cronenberg film instead of "soft". Blyth has discussed the pairing of the relation fear/hatred in his book on Zen. We fear what we hate and we  hate what we fear.

In avoiding sensuous, ecstatic sex in his films is  out of Cronenberg's personal fear of the erotic sexuality of women, and displaces the erotic by focusing his camera on the body of the male. In this way he can satisfy his urges for the male body without acting out his desires. His Lack is assuaged for awhile until he finds a new Boy Toy to parade around and pimp to sell his movies, to get him financing that he is not able to get otherwise because his films are lacking in some way that he himself cannot see.

It is his denial of sensuous, erotic female sexuality that cripples him.

Reading Eric Packer Through Erik Satie

Erik Satie "Trois Gymnopédies"

How to Play Gymnopedie No1 by Erik Satie on 

Piano Lesson Pt1

If you listen to this music while you are reading this you will feel what Eric Packer says this music does for him. If you have access to a piano you can play it yourself with this fine tutorial. No previous music knowledge needed.

He rode to the marble lobby in the elevator that played Satie. (C 8)

I have two private elevators now. One is programmed to play Satie's piano pieces and to move at one-quarter normal speed. This is right for Satie and this is the elevator I take when I'm in a certain, let's say, unsettled mood. Calms me, makes me whole. (C  28-29)

In the Krasny youtube interviews DeLillo emphasizes that Eric Packer is not a normal Wall Street cyber financier. He reads poetry in different languages, he appreciates the art of Rothko, he listens to Satie and rap music. He has turned Satie into his very own musak musik elevator music. 

DeLillo's emphasis here is to project a character who is a  consumer of high avant garde culture. An aesthete perhaps. This contrasts with his Philip Dick sexual seduction dialogue with Elise. The paradox makes the dialogue very sexual indeed. 

I am equally sure that The Cronenberg did not include Eric Packer's ride down on his own elevator listening to Satie. 

Again we turn to Babette Babich, and a chain of signifiers floating all through Cosmopolis:

Nancy Babich, Nietzsche, excess, limits, implosion, aphoristic writing, musical writing, discontinuous, non linear, non- descriptive, non-explaining writing, writing that is all short, choppy dialogue even more so (Baudrillard) than the choppy, start and stop in quarter inches Foucauldian grid of New York City traffic and the power/knowledge/capital grid of our world where "there is no outside".

New York City Street Map

Agnes Martin

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.

Reading Eric Packer Through the Solitude of Prime Numbers

Eric Packer thinks about prime numbers.

So does Sasha and the Silverfish

#28 of 2011 ? The Solitude of Prime Numbers by Paolo Giordano.

Prime numbers are divisible only by one and by themselves. They hold their place in the infinite series of natural numbers, squashed, like all numbers, between two others, but one step further than the rest. They are suspicious, solitary numbers, which is why Mattia thought they were wonderful. 

Sometimes he thought they had ended up in that sequence by mistake, that they’d been trapped, like pearls strung on a necklace. Other ties he suspected that they too would have preferred to be like all the others, just ordinary numbers, but for some reason they couldn’t do it. This second thought struck him mostly at night, in the chaotic interweaving of images that comes before sleep, when the mind is too weak to tell itself lies.

In his first year at university, Mattia had learned that, among prime numbers, there are some that are even more special. Mathematicians call them twin primes: pairs of prime numbers that are close to each other, almost neighbors, but between them there is always an even number that prevents them from truly touching. Numbers like 11 and 13, like 17 and 19, 41 and 43. 

If you have the patience to go on counting, you discover that these pairs gradually became rarer. You encounter increasingly isolated primes, lost in that silence, measured space made only of ciphers, and you develop a distressing presentiment that the pairs encountered up until that point were accidental, that solitude is the true destiny.

 Then, just when you’re about to surrender, when you no longer have the desire to go on counting, you come across another pair of twins, clutching each other tightly. There is a common conviction among mathematicians that however far you go, there will always be another two, even if no on can say where exactly, until they are discovered.

Mattia thought he and Alice were like that, twin primes, alone and lost, close but not really close enough to touch each other. He had never told her that.

Gotham Book Mart In Memoriam - Eric Packer's Day in Cosmopolis

The Gotham Book Mart is the bookstore Eric goes into to look at poetry books and sees an apparition of a woman that he follows. He finally catches up with her and it is Elise sitting on the stairs reading a book of poetry. Just as Gradiva sits on the stairs in the antiquities shop that used to be the Pompeiian poet's residence. In both cases Gradiva/Elise are taken to lunch by Hansen and Packer -  rather lovely I think.

DeLillo has lovingly included the famous and excellent historical Gotham Book Mart in his story. It was forced to close in 2007. The real estate the store rented was obscenely expensive, and a bookstore that was cherished and obviously loved by DeLillo bit the dust to greed. It's huge inventory of priceless rare autographed books and photographs went up for auction and were donated to The University of Pennsylvania's Library. A happier ending than might have been.

NYTimes or paste in browser http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/02/gotham-book-mart-holdings-are-given-to-penn/ article

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2009/01/keeping-the-got.html lovely article reminiscing about GBM

The Gotham Book Mart was famous for its literary eminences. A December 1948 party for Osbert and Edith Sitwell (seated, center) drew a roomful of bright lights to the Gotham Book Mart: clockwise from W. H. Auden, on the ladder at top right, were Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, Charles Henri Ford (cross-legged, on the floor), William Rose Benét, Stephen Spender, Marya Zaturenska, Horace Gregory, Tennessee Williams, Richard Eberhart, Gore Vidal and José Garcia Villa. (Photo: Gotham Book Mart)

Andreas Brown, the last owner of the Gotham Book Mart, readied vintage photos of Arthur Miller and James Joyce in 2004 in preparation for a move to a new location. (Photo: Frances Roberts for The New York Times)

Updated, 4:50 p.m. | About 200,000 items from the Gotham Book Mart, which closed in 2007 after 87 years as a New York literary haven of international stature, have been donated to the University of Pennsylvania.

January 2, 2009, 12:51 pm

Gotham Book Mart Holdings Are Given to Penn

By SEWELL CHAN

Reading Eric Packer and Elise Shifrin Through Destiny

On The Continental Divide Trail

Against this assumption into generalized exchange, this movement of convergence towards the Single and the Universal: the duel form, irrevocable divergence. Against all that is striving to reconcile the antagonistic terms: maintain impossible exchange, lay on the very impossibility of that exchange, lay on that tension and that duel form, which nothing escapes, but everything opposes.

At all events, this duality governs us. Each individual life unfolds on two levels, in two dimensions - history and destiny - which coincide only exceptionally. Each life has its history, the history of its successive events, its twists and turns - but elsewhere, in another dimension, there is only one form, that of the absolute becoming of the same situation, which occurs for everyone in the form of the Eternal Return. The form of destiny, which Nietzsche also calls 'character, to distinguish it from any psychology of the ego and its successive changes. (79 IE)
Somewhere in Colorado there is a demarcation line where the waters part - the so-called Continental Divide - some running off to the Atlantic, the rest to the Pacific. It is a line almost as imaginary as the one separating the past from the future - that line we call the present. And the two dimensions of time themselves run off and vanish into oceanic depths of their own. The instant, that dividing line, is a line of destiny, past and future part there, never to meet again. And existence is merely this ever-greater divergence of past and future, until death reunites the two in an absolute present.

The line where the waters divide - the line where thoughts divide. No planispheric extension.  Waters and destinies always divide. (1 Cool Memories IV)

In man, it is thoughts which divide - the 'mental divide'. Like the continental waters, they run off unpredictably in opposite directions, and often those which were closest together will end up furthest apart.

Map of Eric Packer's Journey Through the Grid of NYC Traffic

There are always at least two occasions when two persons, unwittingly, almost meet. Each time destiny seems to have prepared this meeting with the greatest care, attending first to one possibility, then another, ordering the tiniest detail and leaving nothing to chance. But each time some tiny, unattended eventuality intervenes to prevent the coming together, and the two lines diverge once again at a greater rate... But destiny iis much too persistent to allow itself to be put off by a failure. It arrives at its ends, by such subtle machinations that not even a click is heard when at last the two persons are brought together. (Nabokov)(IE 81)

Agnes Martin Print

We can recall moments in the past when we had equal chances of living or dying - in a car crash, for example.... Every time someone finds himself at a crossroads of this kind, he has two worlds before him... It is the same with each decisive moment, both with birth and with death. Just as the virtual dead man that I am continues on his way on the other side, carries on with his existence which runs just beneath the surface of mine, birth is that dividing line where on the one side I exist as myself, but on the other I begin, at the same moment to exist as other Such is the form of alterity...(Impossible Exchange 82)

Continental Divide - Mark Tansey

That which has separated definitely  - for example, the I from the non-I at birth - continues none the less to run along another line. These lines, or these parallel lives, meet only in death. But at certain moments, you can jump from one to the other, cross one of these other lives. Destiny dooms us to a personal death, but something of this multiple predestination remains. Alterity  is a trace of these crossings, which provide one of the grids of becoming...(IE 82)

Thus each existence is the product of a double declension. It is in this sense that it is a dual, not an individual form.  We are not free to exist just on the side of our ego,, or just on that of the so-called real world. We are wholly the products of this relation of adversity, this twin complicity. Destiny is divided, like thought, which comes to us from the other. Each is the destiny of the other. There is no individual destiny. (IE 82-3)

Destiny has been arranging the day for Elise Shifrin and Eric Packer. Elise - The Symbolic Order of Seduction/destiny/surprise/challenge/duel -  is ahead of Eric all day, moving West into the sunset and the night. Eric has been following her. Each time they meet, their selves diverge and divide like the waters at the Continental Divide. They split and then split again. Until they end pure and lorn, naked under blinding light.

Reading Eric and Elise Through the Symbolic Order of Seduction/Challenge/Surprise and Destiny

Rob Pattinson as Eric Packer and  Sarah Gadon as Elise Shifrin in Cosmopolis

Destiny is stalking Eric and Elise. Destiny does not leave it to chance but repeats to make sure. Destiny is of the Symbolic Order of Seduction always paired with challenge, the duel and surprise. In each encounter with Destiny the self divides into a before and after. As time passes the two selves bifurcate and diverge away from each other, farther and farther away. They occupy parallel universes. As Eric and Elise meet and separate all day, each changes as a modified  and different self emerges from the previous encounter with each other. Elise is an apparition as she surprisingly appears and disappears. Apparition is always coupled with disappearance.

Following through (free download) Gradiva-Elise here and here. (earlier posts here)

Continuing through Baudrillard:

He took off his sunglasses , for effect. She gazed into his face. She looked steadily with fixed attention.
Your eyes are blue, she said.

Switching to Nietzsche On the Genealogy of Morals: He lifted her hand and held it to his face, smelling and licking. The Sikh at the wheel was missing a finger. Eric regarded the stub, impressive, a serious thing, a body ruin that carried history and pain.

Eat breakfast yet?

No, she said.

.... You never told me you were blue-eyed.

That face. Even in ten years time, I shall not know the colour of its eyes. But I see it in the street, in my dreams and just beneath the surface of a great number of other faces which suddenly start to resemble it. Baudrillard (Cool Memories, 1980-85b p. 54) :

Reading Eric Packer through Baudrillard and the Double-continued

Eric Packer

Eric Packer

Eric watched himself on the oval screen below the spycam, running his thumb along his chinline. The car stopped and moved and he realized queerly that he'd just placed his thumb along his chinline a second or two after he'd seen it on screen.

Then why am I seeing things that haven't happened yet? (C 22)



His own image caught his eye, live on the screen beneath the spycam. Some seconds passed. He saw himself recoil in shock. More time passed. He felt suspended, waiting. Then there was a detonation, loud and deep, near enough to consume all the information around him. He recoiled in shock. Everyone did. The phrase was part of the gesture, the familiar expression, embodied in the motion of the head and limbs. He recoiled in shock.The phrase reverberated in the body.(C 93-94)

Between these two scenes of his screen Double there is a lengthening of seconds between the first and second noticed occurrences. Destiny has been arranging things for Eric Packer. Each time Destiny intervenes the Double diverges in time.

Eric Packer is following his Double. Which one is the original? The one on the screen or the one following the one on the screen? The Double is present from birth leading a parallel life with the historical life. (Life is what happens to you as you are carrying out your plans.- John Lennon) They will meet again at Death.

                                          

Kendra wears a sinuous skin of body armor. It is stab resistant and Eric has her wear it during sex. This is what Elise means by indifference and that she can't master it.  Eric thinks that at some level she would never be naked. Kendra has a stun gun.

Eric: How many volts at your disposal?
Kendra: One hundred thousand. Jam your nervous system. Drop you to your knees.
Eric: Stun me. I mean it. Draw the gun and shoot. I want you to do it, Kendra. Show me what it feels like. I'm looking for more. Show me something I don't know. Stun me to my DNA. Come on, do it. Click the switch. Aim and fire. I want all the volts the weapon holds. Do it. Shoot it. Now. (C 114-115)

.... He sat in the car borrowing yen and watching his fund's numbers sink into  the mist on several screens.... The yen spree was releasing Eric from the influence of his neocortex. He felt even freer than usual.... The stun gun probably helped. The voltage had jellified his musculature for ten or fifteen minutes....But he could think well enough now, well enough to understand what was happening. There were currencies tumbling everywhere. Bank failures were spreading. .... Strategists could not explain the speed and depth of the fall. They opened their mouths and words came out. He knew it was the yen. His actions regarding the yen were causing storms of disorder. He was so leveraged, his firm's portfolio large and sprawling, linked crucially to the affairs of so many key institutions, all reciprocally vulnerable, that the whole system was in danger.... He smoked and watched, feeling strong, proud, stupid and superior. (C 115-116)

The stun gun. A near death experience divides the Doubles in time. They keep diverging. The one that maybe died from the one that is living. Growing farther and farther apart. Until the moment of death when they will merge.

the extermination of the real by its double in “the perfect crime” (1996, 1-7).

Reading Elise Through Gradiva In Hades: Orpheus and Eurydice

Spencer Tunick Installation in Montreal (Montreal 1)

I have changed the photo into black and white as that is the way Eric Packer sees it in his mind when he closes his eyes.  Like an old timey noir film.

Reading through Gradiva and the last meeting between Zoe-Gradiva and Norbert Hanold which takes place at the Villa of Diomede:


A real Hades:
....a very extensive building and concealed within itself a part of the history of the destruction of Pompeii not invented by imagination. A confusion of extensive ruins formed the upper part; below lay an unusually large sunken garden surrounded by a well preserved portico of pillars with scanty remnants of a fountain and a small temple i the middle; and farther along two stairways led down to a circular cellar-vault, lighted only dimly by gloomy twilight. The ashes of Vesuvius had penetrated into this also and the skeletons of eighteen women and children had been found here;...and the deceptive refuge had become the tomb of all.


.....the place of refuge best suited to his newest mental needs. These longed most insistently for gravelike loneliness, breathless silence, .....so he had been wandering around through the portico since his entrance; 

Still feeling mad and disoriented concerning Zoe-Gradiva he notices it is growing darker and darker around him. And sees high up on a stone ruin, Gradiva. About to run...he involuntarily gave up the attempt to get away, stood there, helpless, and looked at the two feet, which now, as if somewhat impatient, were swinging back and forth; 


Zoe-Gradiva then tells him it is she, his neighbor and former childhood playmate. she tells him she found him intolerable when he developed his passion for archeology and his indifference to her.

"...But that your head harbored an imagination so magnificent as here in Pompeii to consider me something excavated and restored to life__I had not surmised that of you...and, in spite of its madness, it was not entirely displeasing to me. For, as I said, I had not expected it of you."


He then goes into a long description of what she is wearing, the folds, the material, the cashmere scarf, her extraordinary appearance. And then says,

"Yes, now I recognize_no, you have not changed at all_it is you, Zoe_my good, happy, clever comrade_it is most strange_" 


"That a person must die to become alive again; but for archeologists that is of course necessary."


Then he discusses the etymology of her name which has the same meaning as Gradiva signifying the one splendid in walking.


And then she tells him how they are going to convince her father of their betrothal. so all ends in marriage, family and a normal life.
________________________________________________________________________
The last scene with Eric Packer and Elise begins in the dark among naked bodies piled up for a film shoot.

He felt the presence of the bodies, all of them, the body breath, the heat and running blood, people unlike each other who were now alike, amassed, heaped in a way, alive and dead together. .....but the experience was a strong one, so total and open he could barely think outside it...


"Hello," someone said.


It was the person nearest him, a woman lying facedown, an arm extended, palm turned up.


"Are we supposed to be dead?"

"I don't know," he said.


Nobody told us. I'm frustrated by that."


"Be dead then.".....


"I assumed an awkward pose intentionally. Whatever has happened to us, I thought, probably happened without warning and I wanted to reflect that by individualizing my character. One entire arm is twisted painfully. But I wouldn't feel right if I changed position. Someone said that the financing had collapsed. Happened in seconds apparently. Money all gone.  This is the last scene they're shootig before they suspend indefinitely. So there's no excuse for self-indulgence, is there?"

Didn't Elise have sorrel hair?.....If this was Elise, wouldn't she react to the sound of her husband's voice? But then why would she? It was not an interesting thing to do.


"But I suspect we're not actually dead. Unless we're a cult," she said, "involved in a mass suicide, which I truly hope is not the case."


They call for stillness and silence ......he saw the clustered bodies as the camera did, coldly. Were they pretending to be naked or were they naked? It was no longer clear to him. They were many shades of skin color but he saw them in black-and-white and he didn't know why. Maybe a scene such as this needed somber monochrome.

It tore his mind apart trying to see them here and real, independent of the image on a screen in Oslo or Caracas. ...But why ask these questions? Why see these things?  They isolated him. They set him apart and this is not what he wanted. He wanted to be here among them, all-body, the tattoed, the hairy-assed, those who stank. ...He wanted to look around but did not open his eyes until a long moment passed and a man's soft voice called, "Cut."


He took one step and extended an arm behind him. He felt her hand in his. She followed him into the boarded off section of sidewalk, where he turned in the dark and kissed her, saying her name. She climbed his body and wrapped her legs around him and they made love there...

And here we have the resonance with Orpheus and with Eurydice being led out from Hades. And like Orpheus, Eric Packer turns to her in the dark kissing her.


....The instant he knew he loved her, she slipped down his body and out of his arms. ....She was the lone stroke of motion.....and she was cool and silvery slim and walking head high with technical precision...she would find her clothes, dress quickly and disappear. Into the dark, like Eurydice. (C 178)

John and Yoko

Disappearing all Elise's money into the void: Let it all come down. Let them see each other pure and lorn....Let them see each other clean, in killing light.(C 124)




If the film and the daydream are in more direct competition than the film and the dream, if they ceaselessly encroach upon each other, it is because they occur at a point of adaptation to reality – or at a point of regression, to look at it from the other direction – which is nearly the same; it is because they occur at the same moment: the dream belongs to childhood and the night; the film and the daydream are more adult and belong to the day, but not midday – to the evening, rather.[3]

Continuing a deeper discussion of cinema and dream go to: http://cengizerdem.wordpress.com/2011/05/05/cinematic-apparatus-brain-and-the-psyche-as-fantasy-machines/

Reading Elise Through "Gradiva"

Gradiva from Pompeii

Jensen's Gradiva 1903 Google Books PDF

The Grid of Eric Packer's Journey April 2000

Had not Freud interpreted Gradiva it probably would have sunk into oblivion. It is didactic in style and yet a lovely fantasy. The bas-relief comes from the ruins of Pompeii on that day in 79 AD when the volcano Vesuvius erupted and buried the city and all its people.

Freud's Interpretation of Jensen's Gradiva-Summary of Gradiva at Wiki

Norbert Hanold is following Gradiva in Pompeii. He is convinced she is an apparition of his imagination  . She keeps disappearing before his eyes and he traces her to the House of Meleager, a Greek poet who lived 2000 years ago, where now antiquities are being sold. He keeps getting glimpses of her in the labyrinth of rooms and finds her sitting on the stairs with a papyrus in her lap. It is lunchtime. He is convinced she is a figment of his imagination, a hallucination. She "plays" with him telling him not to speak Latin that he must speak German. She promises to meet him the next day. He is obsessively consumed.

Eric follows Elise through the maze of rooms in The Gotham Book Mart where he goes to peruse poetry books. He catches glimpses of an unknown woman that he follows through the labyrinth of rooms. He finds Elise sitting on the stairs with a book in her lap. Eric talks to her and then takes her to lunch.

Eric Packer is paying attention to what Elise is wearing. Her shoes. A cashmere sweater. Gradiva wears a cashmere shawl. Gradiva - Zoe holds her head high and slightly forward on her slender neck. Elise is described in the same way. They both  walk lightly away, as they disappear.

Elise is Eric Packer's wife of 22 days. The moon is in the 22nd day of its cycle. Eric and Elise have had sex. Elise's seduction of Eric Packer begins after the consummation. Eric is seducing Elise with his constant talk of sex, with wanting her immediately, with suggesting they do it in the bathroom, in the alley indicating his lust for her, not a perfunctory conjugal embrace.

Gradiva (Zoe) is seducing Norbert with her elusiveness and he has been seducing her with his amazing fantasy that she is Gradiva, whom he has sought after a dream of her, when she is really the neighbor Zoe whom he never notices, but  has known since childhood when they were inseparable playmates. With the death of his parents the wealthy Norbert Hanold has been so completely consumed with his research (Eric with his nightly studies and fabulous financial empire) in classical archeology that Zoe stopped existing for him. He has displaced his affection for her with his obsession for Gradiva, which greatly intensified with his dream of her. They both have the same way of walking very lightly, the foot pointed toe down perpendicular to the ground.

Norbert Hanold and Eric Packer are shadowing Zoe and Elise. Norbert is convinced Gradiva-Zoe is not real and Eric is never sure that it is Elise until he catches up with her. They both have only glimpses to follow. And there are many similarities as DeLillo creates a dream scene in a dying metropolis doomed to ruin resonating with the excavated relic of the catastrophically destroyed Pompeii.

The resonances continue. To be continued.

Elise Shifrin: Reading Elise Through the Little Prince

The Little Prince-Katherine Woods Translation

Elise has been described by Rob Pattinson fans as cold, frigid, aloof, asexual, and, well, you get the idea. I am following The Little Prince in reading her. She appears out of nowhere it seems all day long. If you go to the blog that has the map on it you will see that she is always ahead of Eric Packer, her husband of 22 days. In other words, he is her shadow, he is following her all day long. She appears and disappears and this occurs in a sharp cut in continuity, connected with breakfast, lunch and dinner and then..... It is non-linear, non progressive, non historical. In other words, discontinuous.

The Little Prince also appears out of nowhere. The pilot has landed in the desert with engine trouble. His airplane will not start and if he can't fix it he will die in the desert.  The Little Prince begins to ask questions and make his demands. And he tells the pilot about the tiny planet he lives on. On sad days he can keep moving his chair and see the sunset over and over all day long.

"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."


Another always-to-be-remembered example of a passage from Woods' translation dealing with the interaction of the little prince and the fox. When the little prince has to say goodbye to the fox, the fox says, "Ah, I shall cry."

"It's your own fault," said the little prince. "I never wished you any sort of harm; but you wanted me to tame you..."
"Yes, that is so," said the fox.
"But now you are going to cry!" said the little prince.
"Yes, that is so," said the fox.
"Then it has done you no good at all!"
"It has done me good," said the fox, "because of the color of the wheat fields."

Before the little prince tamed the fox, the wheat field had "nothing to say to" the fox. "But," he had said to the little prince, "you have hair that is the color of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat..." 

Finding her in the bookstore Eric takes her to lunch.


Eric: You were one of those silent wistful children. Glued to the shadows.


Elise: And you?


Eric: I don't know. I don't think about it.


Elise: Think about one thing and tell me what it was.


Eric: All right. One thing. When I was four, I figured out how much I'd weigh on each of the planets in the solar system.


Elise: That's nice. Oh I like that. And she laughed lingeringly.


And then Eric Packer returns to matters of consequence: sex. The circulating rats come in here for the first time.

At dinner Eric talks about wanting sex and what she is wearing and noticing her mood.

Elise: I'll tell you what the problem is. I don't know how to be indifferent. I can't master this. And it makes me susceptible to pain. In other words, it hurts.

And, "Look. I married you for your beauty but you don't have to be beautiful................."

 I just have to be indifferent.

He smells of sex. And she cannot be indifferent.

And after they have had sex and he has told her he lost all her money,

Elise: What do poets know about money? Love the world and trace it in a line of verse. Nothing but this. And this. And she begins to kiss him passionately. And then he knows he loves her and at that instant she slides down his body and disappears.

And another time I will read Elise through Gradiva.

Gradiva

Map of Eric's Route for the Day Starting at 1st Ave Going West on 47th St

 Eric Packer on his Appointment in Samarra.

Follow Eric on his route starting at 47th St. and 1st Ave. right by the Japan Society (yen you know). You will see the green park where he starts going West on 47th St. His residential tower is imaginary at 89 stories, (WTC had 107 stories) and is De Lillo's judgement on the Twin Towers which Eric does not pass that day in April 2000. De Lillo finished the manuscript before 9-11 and left it unchanged. The description of Eric's residential tower:

It was nine hundred feet high, the tallest residential tower in the world, a commonplace oblong whose only statement was its size. It had the kind of banality that reveals itself over time as being truly brutal. He liked it for this reason. This is a referent to Hannah Arendt's definition of EVIL: "Evil is banal."

Dag Hammarskjold Plaza at 47th between 1st and 2nd Ave

Michael Chin is in the car, sitting in the jump seat that faces backward and there is gridlock at 3rd Avenue.

Jane jumps into the limo at 47th and Madison. She has been running in the nearby Bryant Park when she gets the call.

Bryant Park

The violent demonstration occurs just before 7th Avenue and North  of where Broadway intersects at 7th, right before the triangle. Vija is in the limo now. The description in the book and the map are a little off I think, as the book puts it at the intersection a few blocks south and closer to Times Square.

Then follow Eric West across town into Hell's Kitchen just before the shipyard. I often like to follow characters on maps. Sometimes some insight appears that you hadn't thought of. In this case we see that Eric is following Elise all day, who is always ahead of his route when he sees her all day long. I knew this but didn't really know this until I saw the map. But it fits with the way I am reading Elise  - through Gradiva (Hansen and Freud) and hoping the film will make this clear.

Scene in Hell'a Kitchen from Past

Old Barbershop in Hell's Kitchen

Gradiva