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 Cosmopolis Through Joyce's Ulysses, Freud, Hamlet,Proust, Moby Dick etc

Don DeLillo reading in NYC

Cosmopolis has been interpreted as a modern day James Joyce Ulysses by reviewers. It seems that any novel that takes place in one day gets covered by the Ulysses template. The last one I remember was Ian McEwan's Saturday, a marvelous novel taking place in London during one day with some back story in the thoughts of the main character. Or maybe it was just plain backstory, I can't remember now. So it seems that the Dominating Literary Discourse for a novel that occurs in 24 hours is a self-referencing footnote to Ulysses. And yes it can
certainly be interpreted this way.

Eric Packer begins his journey to get a haircut, to get shorn, just after sunrise. His triplex faces the water on the east side by 1st Ave and 47th Street. He will go West through Hell's Kitchen all the way to the west side, sunset and then darkness and night, where he will meet Death waiting there for him. It is April - Easter.

Eric Packer has been married 22 days. The moon is in the 22nd day of its phase. Eric wants a haircut. To be shorn. Lorn. Delilah betrays Samson who loses his strength when his hair is cut. When it grows out he tears down the pillars of the temple. Eric gets an asymmetrical haircut.

Appointment In Samarkand

"The disciple of a Sufi of Baghdad was sitting in the corner of an inn
one day when he heard two figures talking. From what they said he
realized that one of them was the Angel of Death.
"I have several calls to make in this city during the next three
weeks," the Angel was saying to his companion.
Terrified, the disciple concealed himself until the two had left. Then
applying his intelligence to the problem of how to cheat a possible
call from death, he decided that if he kept away from Baghdad he
should not be touched. From this reasoning it was but a short step to
hiring the fastest horse available and spurring it night and day
towards the distant town of Samarkand.
Meanwhile Death met the Sufi teacher and they talked about various
people. "And where is your disciple so-and-so?" asked Death.
"He should be somewhere in this city, spending his time in
contemplation, perhaps in a caravanserai," said the teacher.
"surprising," said the Angel; "because he is on my list. Yes, here it
is: I have to collect him in four weeks' time at Samarkand, of all
places."

from: 'Tales of the Dervishes' by Idries Shah 
http://www.maths.qmw.ac.uk/~ade/sld/sld10.html

Spencer Tunick Installation Montreal

Again following Ulysses:


We have Hades with all the naked bodies, and Orpheus leading Eurydice back out to the world, only he can't look at her for her to return safely. Samson married only 22 days to his Delilah, his hair growing back, and Eric is shorn, but only half of his head, but he does pull the pillars of the temple down. On top of him. The bicyclist at the end with his arms spread wide, balanced, riding no handed, the winged messenger Mercury/Hermes signaling to him his message.

Mercury/Hermes

 

 The made up words spinctered, prousted. All Joycean signs, dissimulating. Enchanted cookie crumbs _ madeleine cookies? -  leading to the enchanted cottage in the forest where indentured servitude awaits or being roasted in the oven and eaten by the witch.

Remembrance of Things Past

It can be interpreted through Proust. Eric says his limo is prousted. He tells Elise that it is cork-lined. He is journeying all day to return to his childhood, the past. Elise smells sex on him. But it doesn't smell like a madeleine, that famous cookie whose smell brought back all Proust's memories  - involuntary memory  -  and started him on A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. So anyone in the know about Proust will pick up this reference of the quiet limo, and the return to an earlier time that moved very slowly, where there was time for intimacy and contemplation.

Proust’s Madeleine

By Kenneth Rexroth 1905–1982 Kenneth Rexroth

Somebody has given my

Baby daughter a box of

Old poker chips to play with.   

Today she hands me one while   

I am sitting with my tired   

Brain at my desk. It is red.   

On it is a picture of

An elk’s head and the letters   

B.P.O.E.—a chip from

A small town Elks’ Club. I flip   

It idly in the air and

Catch it and do a coin trick   

To amuse my little girl.

Suddenly everything slips aside.   

I see my father

Doing the very same thing,   

Whistling “Beautiful Dreamer,”   

His breath smelling richly

Of whiskey and cigars. I can   

Hear him coming home drunk   

From the Elks’ Club in Elkhart   

Indiana, bumping the

Chairs in the dark. I can see   

Him dying of cirrhosis

Of the liver and stomach

Ulcers and pneumonia,

Or, as he said on his deathbed, of   

Crooked cards and straight whiskey,   

Slow horses and fast women.

Freud

Many girlfans go for the Freudian. His relationship with his mother, watching films after his father had died so they could learn how to be together. The gangster ones where doors got kicked in and victims/victimees  got killed. Carry this thought to  Didi, the older woman perhaps a mother figure,  who gets out of bed when he talks about wanting the entire Rothko Chapel. Or the fact his wife doesn't have sex with him, and so on. Eric feels insecure etc etc etc in the psychological swamp of never ending interpretation.

Following Lacan and Monty Python how about Moby Dick and Ahab's search for the great White Whale Moby Dick. Eric rides in a huge white whale of a  limo and gets tail _ not whale _ all day. What a fluke!

Moby Dick

These are all fun games. Interpretation is accepted literary discourse, in fact it is the Dominating Discourse for lit crit. And it really makes you feel so with it and smart that you know how to decode it. And you can use all of them if you want in a glorious mishmash of erudition. And don't forget Deleuzian flux as Torval lies inert (no flux and flow anymore) and Eric's dead body inert and smelling foul. There's smelling again.

So DeLillo throws out all these signs that distract and send your well conditioned mind to its well traveled rut. These signs dissimulate, they act as masks, to both reveal and conceal DeLillo's secret.

Or we can read Cosmopolis  through Hamlet  by way of doubt. Hamlet's doubts and search for "truth" bring about disaster after disaster.  Didi tells him that he is doubting, an interpretation that Eric denies, (there is no such thing as doubt anymore)and then Vija denies Doubt to him (using the same rationalization) when talking about the yen going up but that it has to come down. With doubt comes ambivalence, and ambivalence is how Marc Schuster organizes his reading of Cosmopolis through Baudrilard.

Marc Schuster

Again that quote from The Foucault Reader: Knowledge is not for knowing;knowledge is for cutting.

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 Cosmopolis Through Spencer Tunick's Performance Art

Mexico City

Spencer Tunick's Performance Art Piece This is huge and spectacular. See all the rest of his performances with nude/naked bodies while you are there. Very beautiful.

A slideshow that is spectacular:

And another one:


Down on left perhaps London. I don't think it is New York so tell me if you know.


And of course the last one is from the Concentration Camps just after liberation and too late for many.  The image taken with film cries out in a way the posed bodies do not, (digital?) but then the context is deathly, the bodies starved.

London?

I am wandering within McLuhan's  thought about the medium is the message. What if these images were presented differently. Some large, some very small. Would the message be different? Say the Camp bodies huge, the performance bodies small or the reverse? What about the order? If I included or you imagined the bodies in Haiti, or Afghnistan, or Tsunami, or Bosnia victims piled up, would that affect your perception of these images. If you have read the scene these refer to in Cosmopolis, does that change your perception?

De Lillo of course is self-referencing White Noise when the students are preparing for a rehearsal for an imagined catastrophe, lying down fully dressed, some in official helping roles. During War II we used to have air raid drills, hiding under our desks. The same during A bomb cold war time children rehearsed along with their teachers. A kind of higher level fire drill.

Liberation of a Camp