Cronenberg's Cosmopolis Wins MTV Movie Brawl: Robsessed Fangirls Packer An Implosion Voting

A victory in Eric Packer style. MTV voting allows multiple voting with no limits. This ensures multiple hits, increased revenues from advertisers,eh.

Certainly Dark Knight and Hunger Games have funneled multi $$$$$$ into MTV: trailers, movie stills, all that hoopla stuff. Already these franchises have spent a fortune and the movies are not even in the theatres yet.

Cronenberg's Cosmopolis has no trailer yet, and no movie stills with the exception of Caitlin Cronenberg's photo. What is the meaning of this win by the underdog, the Seabiscuit of a movie race?

A Baudrillardian/Nietzschean example of an excess of voting carried beyond limits, over the edge in an excess so tumultuous that the voting machinery was turned on its head, defeating its purpose, which was to garner votes for their advertising giants, create an award for them, and promote their franchises.

They got fooled big time by ladies at robsessed who voted day and night all weekend long for Rob Pattinson and brought Cosmopolis to victory.

This is what Eric Packer does to the yen in Cosmopolis. He buys vast amounts of yen, creating a vast demand for yen by everyone who follows him. The higher the yen goes, the lower the dollar falls.

Like gas prices. Gas doesn't go up. The dollar goes down. 

The yen goes so high that all other currencies in the speculative global circulating currency market crash to nothing.

Baudrillard through Nietzsche calls this IMPLOSION. The destruction of the mass marketing tool which is MTV for its advertisers to give the win to The LIttle Engine That Could - Cronenberg's Cosmopolis.

And who imploded MTV? Women from robsessed who love Rob Pattinson. And who also hold a deep grudge against Scummit Summit/now Lionsgate for messing up Twilight, thus beating their next hopeful multi-billion enterprise franchise The Hunger Games.

A pity says Jane.

The fangirls showed how you can beat the big machine. They voted all day and all night all weekend. Nothing but love as motivation.

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!

Graph of Yen To Buy 1 US Dollar: Money Changers In The Temples of the World

Japanese Yens to 1 US Dollar

This graph is in linear, read historical, time. The dialectic is in play. As the Yen goes up, the dollar goes down. Eric Packer is not observing the Yen in this format. He is watching numbers scroll across a screen, a flat screen, but never flat enough. He watches for patterns that mime the patterns of different processes in nature: cicadas, grasshoppers, perhaps wave theory or other mathematical formulations. But still the natural processes occur in linear time. In linear time what goes up must come down.

Throughout the day Eric Packer will become aware that he is in virtual reality, real time. The numbers are circulating globally. They are not necessarily moving up and down. In fact the Yen keeps going up. It is going beyond its resistance levels. If you look at the graph you can draw a line crossing the highest peak and the lowest peak. In a given amount of time this is a resistance level. The Yen moves but does not break the resistance line. Except when it does. And then there is a break out or a break down. But on this day in April, Eric Packer, the currency trader, the money changer, watches the Yen go up, then continue up and continue up.

This graph is current as of May 15 2011. About 3/4 of the way from February 25 to March 28 the Yen dropped to 79 Yen to buy 1 dollar. Between March 28 and April 26 it took around 85 Yen to buy one dollar. So if you bought Yen at 79 to 1 dollar and sold the same Yen between March 28 and April 26 you would have made 6+ Yen on each dollar. 1 thousand dollars would have bought 79,000 Yen and then when you sold you would have made 6,000 Yen gross minus expenses of trading.

It charts, he says. Over and over. It charts.  Only it doesn't. The more he borrows the higher it goes. Surely traders are watching Packer Capital and following him, copying his trades. If Packer Capital is borrowing, he must know something. The more people copy him and borrow Yen, the higher it goes. So the more money changers are going to be driven from the temple of Wall Street and the exchange temples all over the world. Untold numbers of them will go broke.

Eric Is Shorting the Yen

Eric Packer's Residential Tower

Eric is doing what's known as shorting the yen. He is borrowing yen in huge amounts with his multi-billion hedge fund. A hedge fund hedges. It hedges its bets. It plays both sides. It protects equity capital. But Eric of Packer Capital isn't. He is gambling in the world of cyber-capital. If he borrows huge amounts of yen, then when it drops he pays back the yen at a much lower rate relative to the dollar (or whatever currency) and the difference is his huge profit. The speculative cyber-capital profit.


Say I agree to buy your house for market value in six months and pay you for it in six months when I expect the bottom to drop out of the real estate market. But I take possession and control of it now. By written agreement. You say yes for the option money I pay.  I get your house and sell it at today's high market price say $1,000,000. In six months I pay you for your house which is now worth $300,000. I have made 700,000 minus the option price I paid you, in profit. And not only that, I have borrowed the $300,000 that I used to buy your house. This is what Eric is doing with the yen.  He is within a world where he knows numbers signifying yen, chart. A world of linear time, historical time. It charts. Even if it charts according to patterns of nature so complex they cannot be seen as the numbers run across the screen. Eric sees these patterns. He is performing within dialectical, linear, historical time. A world where if the yen goes up, then it must come down. A world of polar opposites, of good/evil, up/down, origins and utopian horizons of cyber-capital progress continuing into a future of expanding opportunity and visionary innovation.

But he is in a simulated reality. Like the actors on the simulated set of Water For Elephants. Only the actors know they are but Eric Packer does not.

This is where Vija comes in, the voice of Foucault. Vija, VJ(ay) Day, a pun bringing the Bomb to mind? A kind of playful puzzle that DeLillo likes to toss out for our and his amusement (as Nabokov says he does). An inversion opposing the strength of the Yen opposed to the Dollar? For chuckles?

Since DeLillo has the reputation of predicting the future, and the critiques of Cosmopolis were using the stock market crash under Bush II as confirmation of his genius, were they not a bit ahead of themselves? The derivative market crash was still to come in five years following publication.

Now I am wondering if an Eric Packer was pulling the strings behind that meltdown only stopped by vast outpourings of treasury money into the pockets of the gambling bandits, which we are witnessing in $4.00 a gallon oil at the pump. But separated in time so the connecting dots are not drawn. Just a tidbit for my paranoid imagination to play with.

I think it may have been Baudrillard that discusses that an author might consider taking responsibility for his characters and their actions. The example given was in Graham Greene's novel  The Quiet American set in 1950's Viet Nam. A terrorist hides a bomb in the bicycle frame outside a coffee shop where it blows up, projects metal pieces, killing and wounding people. I think it is Ballard who reports that a similar incident occurred outside the coffee shop he had always frequented. He immediately connected it to the fictional account in Greene's novel and reflected on a writer's responsibility for the actions of his characters.

Did someone copy Eric Packer in 2008? We will never know, will we?