Secure
within the shell of the high-rise like passengers on board an automatically
piloted airliner, they were free to behave in any way they wished, explore the
darkest corners they could find. In many
ways, the high-rise was a model of all that technology had done to make
possible the expression of a truly free psychopathology.
JG
Ballard, High-Rise (1975.)
2012
was the year of the existential stretch limo film, or so say Cashier du Cinema,
having voted Leos Carax’s Holy Motors
and David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis
their top two films of the year. There
are certain intriguing, if superficial, similarities between the two
movies. Both are set during the course
of a single day, and both their protagonists experience episodic adventures
while being ferried around in stretch limos.
The limousine has lost much of its mystique as a symbol of wealth,
power, and conspicuous consumption in recent years; in Holly Motors and Cosmopolis it
becomes symbolic of how technology tends to insulate and isolate modern
individuals from the world, operating as a womb, a shell, and a prison. Both films remind me vaguely of the John
Cheever short story and subsequent Burt Lancaster movie The Swimmer, in that they are long day’s journeys into night, or stories
of men who are gradually exhausted and disillusioned by the close of their
compressed odysseys. A more comprehensive comparison between the
two films might make for an interesting essay, but since I’ve only seen Holy Motors once, and wasn’t overawed by
it, I’m going to concentrate on Cosmopolis,
which strikes me as the first real Cronenberg
film since 1999’s eXistenz, and the
first really good Cronenberg since his adaptation of Ballard’s feverish prose
poem Crash in ’96. In fact, Cosmopolis
feels like a mature companion piece to
Crash, and a long awaited return to the weird and coldly fascinating shared
universe in which the director’s best work takes place.
The
quintessential theme of early Cronenberg was the transformation of the body
through its marriage with technology. In
Videodrome, James Woods’ flesh was
subject to a literal transformation; in Crash,
with the exception of copious flesh woods, the body preserved its integrity,
but the mind underneath was transformed.
James Ballard and his wife Catherine (played by James Spader and Deborah
Kara Unger) have a cold, oddly affectless quality; they appear to have moved
past emotion as it is conventionally expressed, and regard their bodies and
sexual compulsions with the rapt but clinical interest of physiologists
examining a cadaver. It could be argued
that Cronenberg was always primarily concerned with the mental rather than
physical transformations engendered by technology, and in this sense both he
and Ballard were pioneering theorists of an idea which only acquired a name
much later on: the idea of the posthuman,
or the radically transformed new species that emerges from our increasing
symbiosis with technology. Ballard’s
fictions constantly present aspects of the topography of modern life as
potential incubators for new types of human behaviour and new species of human
being: automobiles, motorways, high-rise apartment towers, and luxury gated
communities become the behavioural laboratories of emergent social orders and
pathologies:
“A new social type was
being created by the apartment building, a cool, unemotional personality
impervious to the psychological pressures of high-rise life, with minimal needs
for privacy, who thrived like and advanced species of machine in the neutral atmosphere.” (Ballard, High-Rise.)
Cosmopolis finds Cronenberg exploring a
similar kind of detached, posthuman ennui
to that which characterised the fusion of his vision with Ballard’s in Crash.
In Crash, however, the
technologies which transform the psychologies of its characters are primarily
those of the first Machine Age – the mass produced automobiles and crowded
motorways which also formed the centrepiece of Godard’s 1967 consumerist
apocalypse Weekend.
In the 21 century Information Age vision of Cosmopolis, both people and technologies
have become subservient to the transfer of information which they facilitate –
the idea of clock-time which facilitated the physical, labour-based capitalism
of the Industrial Revolution has given way to a permanently encroaching present
or future-present of instantaneous information, and a wholly abstract economic
system where “money talks to itself”:
“You don’t believe in
doubt. You’ve told me this. Computer power eliminates doubt. All doubt arises from past experience. We used to know the past but not the
future. This is changing,” she
said. “We need a new theory of time.” (DeLillo, Cosmopolis.)
With Burroughs
and Ballard in his earlier movies, Cronenberg proved adept at finding literary
sensibilities which could be merged with his own thematic and stylistic
concerns to the point where it was difficult to pinpoint exactly where one
begins and the other ends (influence as a perfect viral infection or
parasite.) In Don DeLillo’s source novel
he has found that perfect symbiosis again, and the result is one the year’s
most exciting and original films.
Just as the
Greeks saw fire, atoms or water as the ultimate constituents of matter, so we
now see information flowing through all things.
Brian
Appleyard, The Brain is Wider than the
Sky.
Published in
2003 and ostensibly covering the period of the dot com collapse in 2000, Don
DeLillo’s Cosmopolis feels remarkably
prescient in 2012. It tells the story of
Eric Packer, a 28 year-old billionaire asset manager who decides on a whim to
get his hair cut in a barber shop across midtown New York. In order to do so, his limousine must travel
through an urban landscape which has become as complex and fraught with
variables and vectors as the financial system itself: a presidential visit is
in progress, a Sufi-influenced rap star is publically being laid to rest, and
an anarchist/anti-capitalist protest, operating under the symbolic banner of
the rat, has exploded into a riot of graffiti and self-immolations. While the limousine is attacked by
protesters, Packer’s “theoretical” advisor insists that the riot is “a protest
against the future”, or against the reformulation of temporality into the
perpetually unstable now of cyber-capitalism.
(In 2010, protestors attacked the
Royal Roll Royce; the expression on the faces of the Prince of Wales and the Duchess
of Cornwall was less of everyday fear and more of a kind of shock that the
symbolic order of the world had been breached and shattered.)
Packer is
himself making an unconscious protest against the future, however. His desire for a haircut in a traditional
barber shop, and in an establishment which he used to visit as child with his
father, represents a nostalgia both for his own childhood, and for the
vanishing world of traditional, tangible commerce. He seems, in various inchoate ways, to be
trying to remember what it means to be an authentic human being:
He felt these
things. He felt the pain. It travelled the pathways. It informed the ganglion and spinal
cord. He was here in his body, the
structure he wanted to dismiss in theory even when he was shaping it under the
measured effect of barbells and weights.
He wanted to judge it redundant and transferable. It was convertible to wave arrays of
information. It was the thing he watched
on the oval screen when he wasn’t watching Jane. (Cosmopolis.)
He encounters
his new wife, a young heiress and would-be poet, and attempts throughout the
day to have sex with her, an act which he believes will be cleansing and
cathartic. Failing this, he has
intercourse with a female bodyguard in a hotel room, and tries to persuade her
to stun him with her Taser gun. All the
while, however, his world is crumbling around him. He is haunted by the fact that he has an asymmetrical
prostate. Somebody is trying to kill
him. Most catastrophically, he has
gambled hundreds of millions against the rise of the yen (the yuan in
Cronenberg’s adaptation) and his fortune is ebbing away. In his book The Quants: How Math Whizzes
Helped Sink the Economy, Scott Patterson describes how Wall Street quantitive
analysts dreamed of finding hidden patterns amid
the chaos and complexity of the global financial system which would make it
possible to gamble the markets with the predictive accuracy of a hard science:
Regardless of which
signature trade each man favored, they had something far more powerful in
common: an epic quest for an elusive, ethereal quality the quants sometimes
referred to in hushed, reverent tones as the Truth. The Truth was a universal secret about the
way the market worked that could only be discovered through mathematics.
Revealed through the study of obscure patterns in the market, the Truth was the
key to unlocking billions in profits. The quants built giant machines—
turbocharged computers linked to financial markets around the globe—to search
for the Truth, and to deploy it in their quest to make untold fortunes. The quants created a name for the Truth, a
name that smacked of cabalistic studies of magical formulas: alpha.
According to Brian
Appleyard in The Brian is Wider than the
Sky, “the quants’ superstition
that infected the financial markets is the most vivid example of a superstition
that infected the entire world in the post-war period – the fantasy that maths
could be applied to the human realm and, with the ever-increasing power of
computers, arrive at truths that were as hard and testable as those of physics.” In Cosmopolis,
Eric Packer embodies this mixture of venal hubris and Platonic mysticism:
He knew there was
something no one had detected, a pattern latent in nature itself, a leap of
pictorial language that went beyond the standard models of technical analysis
and out-predicted even the arcane charting of his own followers in the field. There had to be a way to explain the yen.
The absolute
fallacy of these notions is revealed to Packer in the course of Cosmopolis, as it was revealed to the
world in the aftermath of the crash of 2008: the application of computerized
mathematical models to the global financial markets didn’t make them more
stable and predictable, it did the opposite.
It created a volatile, perilously interconnected abstract monster that
nobody could predict because nobody could really understand it. Cosmopolis was not warmly received when
it was released in 2003, but it strikes me as a very prescient and original
thing: a strange lovechild of David Mamet, Harold Pinter, Bret Easton Elis, and
JG Ballard. It is a bone-dry black
comedy and an intricately constructed prose poem where every recurring image
and theme is very carefully interwoven.
Cronenberg’s
adaptation has been similarly underappreciated on its first critical airing. It’s the type of film that makes you wonder
what exactly you’re watching at first; it feels a little like movies do when
you watch them in a sleepy, hypnogogic state of mind, and everything feels a
little weird and austere and lifeless and hypnotic because your mind can’t
quite follow what’s happening. The
interior of Packer’s limousine is a striking creation, like a HR Giger
sculpture without the explicit references to human biology. Cronenberg stresses its artificially, using
green-screens that echo the unconvincing back-projection of film antiquity;
when Packer eventually steps out into the world it startles us, because we hadn’t
believed there was any world outside its artifice up to that point. The director and his cast – including the Vampire
Valentino of the Young Set – do a remarkable job of performing the novel’s ultra-mannered,
Mamet-like dialogue. Cronenberg himself
responds to the challenge of the novel’s dialogue-heavy theatricality by
producing a master-class in careful, arresting composition. “I feel located absolutely nowhere” one of
the characters says, and Cronenberg’s compositions constantly wrap space around
the protagonists, shrinking the world while it expands the constrictive bubble of
the limousine. Most of all, it’s a joy
to see the director firmly back in the very particular world he made his own in
the 80s and 90s – a chilly, Ballardian world where oddly lifeless characters
are absorbed and coolly obsessed by dreams of putting on a new flesh in a world
of high technology. Ballard and
Cronenberg and DeLillo’s posthuman fantasies may seem exotic and affected to
many audiences, but as a recent New York
Times article How to live without
Irony suggests, we are a culture moving to some extent towards a kind of
detached and distanced relationship with the world. What Brian Appleyard calls the superstition
of the post-war world still presides over our lives today, despite the crash of
’08. The internet was once envisioned as
the ultimate interaction with a vast environment whose positive virtues were
its randomness and unpredictability; increasingly, however, it is being
designed to reflect ourselves back at us – but not ourselves precisely, rather a version of ourselves and our interests
which has been reverse engineered from our footprints by algorithms. Travelling, again, in a bubble. Cosmopolis
articulates a pervasive underlying anxiety of our time: that in our intimate
relationships with technology, we are willingly and even enthusiastically participating
in our own obsolescence.
“He was thinking about
automated teller machines. The term was
aged and burdened by its own historical memory.
It worked at cross-purposes, unable to escape the inference of muddled
human personnel and jerky moving parts.
The term was part of the process the device was meant to replace. It was anti-futuristic, so cumbrous and
mechanical that even the acronym seemed dated."
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