Review: Cronenberg's Cosmopolis: Decaffeinated and Defanged DeLillo

Eric Packer

Difficult as it is to review a film you haven't even seen I am not to be stopped. Cronenberg has told us what is NOT in the film.And so has blackbeanie who saw it in Cannes. Is that so we won't be disappointed?

OK.  I.  Am. Not.  Disappointed.

I. Am. Furious!

A terrible reading of DeLillo's savage with teeth novel.

A fantastic one time chance from the universe

To throttle cyber-capital

Wrestle it to the ground

And finish it

And he fucking blows it

Jean Baudrillard: THE SPIRIT OF TERRORISM

Requiem For the Twin Towers; Hypotheses on Terrorism; The Violence of the Global

2002 - Verso

Baudrillard following Nietzsche:

Capital stripped bare by Speculation itself, like the bride by her bachelors. What becomes of Capital once the veil of Profit is lifted? What becomes of Labour once the veil of Capital is lifted?(Baudrillard - Cool Memories II 38)

Contrary to the historical slogan which says that the 'emancipation of the workers will be achieved by the workers themselves', we have to accept that Capital will be put to death by Capital itself or (not at all). (CM II 38)

But it will be Baudrillard who will go all the way with Nietzsche. Baudrillard will tell us how to end the evil of anything. Push it to the limit and beyond, worse than worse, and then it will suicide. This is what DeLillo has Eric Packer do by imploding the speculative currency market.  Eric Packer wants all the yen there is.

Yen is the important currency here in a Lacanian sense of yen/want/desire-lack/need-satisfaction, but Cronenberg prefers the literal up to the day yuan because he misreads the text of the novel. 

Please excuse him tho as he read it in one sitting and did the screenplay in 6 days. Ah Evelyn Wood, are you happy now?

Someone tell him about Lacan, please.

Slavoj Zizek: LESS THAN NOTHING
HEGEL And The Shadow of Dialectical Materialism
2012  - Verso

....why cyber-capitalists appear as the paradigmatic capitalists today _....What we have here is an ideological short-circuit between two versions of the gap between reality and virtuality: the gap between real production and the virtual or spectral domain of Capital, and the gap between experiential reality and the virtual reality of cyberspace. ....haunted by the notion of a global catastrophe lurking just around the corner, threatening to explode at any moment. 

It seems as if the gap between my fascinating cyberspace persona and the miserable flesh which is "me" off-screen translates into the immediate experience of the gap between the Real of the speculative circulation of capital and the drab reality of the impoverished masses.( LTN p.245-246)

eXistenZ anyone? How about The Hunger Games?

BTW this by no means has anything pejorative to do with Rob Pattinson's performance as he has been directed to perform, controlled by the script written in 6 days BTW. Cronenberg is so proud of this fact. I bet he can read Zizek's Less Than Nothing and its 1000 pages really fast too. Not to mention Lacan's Ecrits.

_______________________________________________________________________

Postscript Monday June 25 2012

From: http://notcoming.com/reviews/trishna/

Trishna, Winterbottom’s third adaptation of a Thomas Hardy novel, is a take on Tess of the d’Urbervilles that’s loaded with risks, big changes that nevertheless amount to a worthy attempt to capture what film theorist André Bazin would call the “spirit” – rather than the exact letter – of the novel on which it is based.

.....But to go back to Bazin, the elusive “spirit” of the novel, particularly its strong element of social critique, is transformed but still vitally present in this film. 

...Most festival screenings are met with a round of applause when a film’s credits begin to roll, but the theater was silent after Trishna’s brutal denouement. I took this less as an indictment of the film’s quality than an indication that what had just unspooled required some serious thought and digestion, and to my mind, that’s a wonderful mood for any work of art to inspire. Winterbottom is not always an easy director to handle, and that’s one of the things that recommends him most.
_________________________________________________________
Another postscript June 30 2012

abbeysbooks MOD • 2 minutes ago

• −

An excerpt from an excerpt of Roberto Bolano's The Soldier Who Sold His Soul To God:

http://biblioklept.org/2012/06...

Then the soldier awoke and looked at God and asked where he had to sign. Here, said God, pulling a paper out of the air. The soldier tried to read the contract, but it was written in some other language, not German or English or French, of that he was certain. What do I sign with? asked the soldier. With your blood, as is only proper, God answered. Immediately the soldier took out a penknife and made a cut in the palm of his left hand, then he dipped the tip of his index finger in the blood and signed.

DeLillo and Bolano got it right. Cronenberg fucked it up.

____________________________________________________________

Postscript on August 13 2012

I am sick at heart that Rob Pattinson is going with Cronenberg to ring in the NYSE tomorrow morning. 

This is a knife in the heart of Don DeLillo. 

This is DETERRENCE for the image of the NYSE and DETERRENCE for the image of Rob Pattinson in the wake of his Break-Up Porn with Kristen Stewart.

I can understand Cronenberg doing this for publicity, but I cannot understand Rob Pattinson's misreading of DeLillo's Cosmopolis, to allow him to defile its message, to corrupt its meaning, just to bolster his image and his film in this difficult time for him. 

How could they betray DeLillo like this? Now Rob, this is REAL betrayal.

Reading Eric Packer Through Surfaces - Interfacing

By Marina at cosmopolisfilm.com

The tower gave him strength and depth. He knew what he wanted, a haircut, but stood a while longer in the soaring noise of the street and studied the mass and scale of the tower. The one virtue of its surface was to skim and bend the river light and mime the tides of open sky. There was an aura of texture and reflection. He scanned its length and felt connected to it, sharing the surface and the environment that came into contact with the surface, from both sides. A surface separates inside from out and belongs no less to one than the other. He’d thought about surfaces in the shower once.

Excellent image. The surface of the buildings like an IBM punch card as Baudrillard says in his comments pre - 9/11 about the  Twin Towers. This is DeLillo's or one of DeLillo's descriptive pieces of writing about the Towers via an imaginary residential tower that Packer lives in. His adjective "brutal" is another one. The manuscript of Cosmopolis was finished before 9-11, DeLillo was profoundly moved by that event as he was about the assassination of JFK, and in December or November wrote a piece in Harper's 12-01 called In The Ruins of the Future: Reflections on terror and loss in the shadow of September  about terrorism as an ongoing part of our future world.

Graph Function in Linear Time NOT Realtime

Considering surfaces, insides and outsides, and the shower (sex) resonates with the interfacing of Eric Packer's whole being with the screen, the market, the numbers twinkling by indicating the rise and fall of the yen, -  yen, yearning,  - wanting? - yes, by god  - a haircut, that most trivial of things to decide to want since you don't know what of value you might want, because you are in such a consumer conundrum you don't know what you want. So let's want a haircut! That's an easy thing to want. No problema.

But what that wanting - and its journey -  is going to lead to!

Reading Eric Packer Through Ayn Rand

Rob Pattinson as Eric Packer

He tried to read his way into sleep but only grew more wakeful. He read science and poetry. He liked spare poems sited minutely in white space, ranks of alphabetic strokes burnt into paper. Poems made him conscious of his breathing. A poem bared the moment to things he was not normally prepared to notice. This was the nuance of every poem, at least for him, at night, these long weeks, one breath after another, in the rotating room at the top of the triplex. (C p. 5 the first page)

Raymond Massey

Gail Wynand in The Fountainhead has his bedroom at the top of his penthouse where it is glassed all around. The world can watch him fuck women. A little bit of trivia that DeLillo throws in for Ayn Rand intelligentsia. A "floating sign"? 
"When she entered his bedroom, she found it was not the place she had seen photographed in countless magazines. The glass cage had been demolished. The room built in its place was a solid vault without a single window. It was lighted and air-conditioned, but neither light nor air came from the outside."When Dominique enters his penthouse after their marriage.

Patricia Neal and Gary Cooper - Fountainhead

Alert cue, alert cue!

He bypassed sleep and rounded into counterpoise, a moonless calm in which every force is balanced by another. This was the briefest of easings, a small pause in the stir of restless identities. (C p.5-6)

The dialectic is stilled, balanced, the see-saw is even, straight across. It's not charting. The line is flat. Like a brain-dead flatline on the oscilloscope. 

Every act he performed was self-haunted and synthetic. The palest thought carried an anxious shadow. (c p.6)

The appearance of the Double, just barely sensed, like a shadow. Restless identities stirring. Death enters the novel quietly, on the first two pages, like a shadow, with the appearance of the Double.

DeLillo writes in this way: He types a paragraph on one sheet of white paper, edits it, retypes it again on another white sheet of paper, re-edits it, etc until it reads the way he wants it to read. There is always plenty of white around the paragraph. If you have ever seen a shot of an Ayn Rand manuscript, not like DeLillo at all.

Eric Packer:

When he died he would not end. The world would end. (C p.6)

Freud is finished. (dead). Einstein is next. (to die) Their worlds are dead.(C p.6)

On reading Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne Heller:

On the last page:

"It is not I who will die, it is the world that will end," Ayn Rand liked to say. It is a favorite quote of hers her fans like so much.

DeLillo is challenging Baudrillard on ending global capitalism through narrative transcendence, and he is also challenging Rand and  her moral defense of capital. 

Anne Heller

Although Heller's book was published after Cosmopolis, it seems prescient that this quote is on the first page of Cosmopolis and the identical quote is on the last page of Heller's biography of Rand. DeLillo's self chosen book cover for Underworld seems also prescient in its erie image of the coming 9-11. And Cosmopolis is clairvoyant about the 2008 meltdown.

                                                                                                                                       

Nietzsche - Genealogy of Morals

Now I feel that DeLillo's ghost is following me as I am reading Cosmopolis through Atlas Shrugged but even more through Rand herself. I am coming to believe that she is the great unacknowledged post modern philosopher her rather poorly educated disciples have always thought her to be, but not for the same reasons as they. I believe she is Nietzsche's heir, more than Foucault and Baudrillard, and taking in the consideration that she disavowed Nietzsche early on, stopped writing in her journals about him so much, all his thought embedded in her mind went underground. Until Baudrillard came along and blasted it up in my face without even knowing about her.

Does DeLillo intend to just blast her for her defense of capital? Or is DeLillo somehow divining her   unconscious catastrophic collision with capital via Greenspan in the 2008 meltdown. As a defender of capital on a moral foundation of self-interest,  this is the flaw Greenspan told Congress he had found in his thinking.

From Digby at Hullabaloo who blames Rand for the 2008 meltdown.

Digby

Under questioning from Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), the committee chairman, Greenspan acknowledged that the failure of that expected self-regulation represented "a flaw in the model" he used to analyze economics. "I was going for 40 years or more on the perception that it was working well."

This is the fundamental problem with Randian thinking. They really do believe that capitalism is a moral system in which the people become wealthy because they are morally and intellectually superior to those who don't. Why, it would be wrong for them to not self-regulate and endanger the whole economy, right? It wouldn't make any sense. - Digby

No Digby, that's not the reason they believe it is a moral system. They believe it is a moral system because it is based on man's reason and self-interest. The flaw is rational self-interest. Why would these financiers destroy their financial empires? Well, Mr. Greenspan, you should have known in 1968. Rand destroyed her lucratively financial, philosophical empire of Objectivism that Nathaniel Branden had built for her, his lover, because he didn't want to fuck her anymore. She wanted to punish him, destroy him, kill him for choosing a beautiful young woman instead of an old brilliant frumpet.

And OMG I believe she was following Nietzsche all this time. Taking every single premise she had and carrying it to the extreme. And every goddamn one of them from sex, to friendship, to love, to her writing,  all of it, to the extreme, to excess. What is Atlas Shrugged as a novel, but a novel that is more a novel than a novel, a hyper-novel, an excessive novel, a novel that is "worse" as Nietzsche would say. All the way to Death as Canetti would say. Being more a capitalist than a capitalist. More so. Worse as Nietzsche advocates to bring something down. To destroy it. This is where Baudrillard kills Foucault in Forget Foucault. This is where Rand does it in reality through Greenspan instead of advocating or writing about it. She is a major philosopher by default. She didn't know she knew.

Does DeLillo know that he knows. I dunno.

To defy the system with a gift to which it cannot respond save by its own collapse and death. Nothing, not even the system, can avoid the symbolic obligation, and it is in this trap that the only chance of a catastrophe for capital remains. ...For it is summoned to answer, if it is not to lose face, to what can only be death. The system must itself commit suicide in response to the multiplied challenge of death and suicide. (Jean Baudrillard - Symbolic Exchange and Death 37)