David Cronenberg's COSMOPOLIS

COSMOPOLIS = Death.   But in a good way.

COSMOPOLIS may be something of a masterpiece – but it is also a frustratingly hard to recommend, abstruse fucknugget of a film.  I’m not sure who I confidently tell to go see this film—and I can’t begrudge the opinion of someone who sees it and thinks its essentially the worst piece of trash they’ve ever encountered.  But I mean it when I say I loved it, and think it’s the most important Cronenberg piece since DEAD RINGERS.

This isn’t the commercial Cronenberg who served up Viggo Mortenson first as a small town angry-dad in A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE and then as a naked, showering Russian gangster in EASTERN PROMISES.   This isn’t even the body horror David Cronenberg who obsessively traced the intersection between the human body and technology in genre defining cult-classics like THE FLY, eXistenZ, and VIDEODORME.  This is closer to something David Lynch would create, although COSMOPOLIS’ brand of perversity is more the societal and less the individual and psychoanalytic.  But I mean that in so far as the stilted, stuffy, uncanny atmosphere that permeates the film – something’s rotten indeed in a very Lynchian kind of way.

And more to the point—it’s pure Delillo.  The match here between source material and director is—simply put—crazy good.  I’ve now read a lot of Delillo and COSMOPOLIS is pretty much like the rest; it’s your thing or it’s not.  If you like postmodern malaise and evocative acausality you’ve come to the right place.  If you like realism, explosions, or pat character arches you have not.

Very quickly – the plot of COSMOPOLIS is this (no real spoilers) – a rich young guy (Robert Pattinson) takes a cross town limo trip in New York City in order to get a haircut.  He’s waylaid on this journey several times—chance meetings with his new wife, rendezvous with various fuckbuddies, meetings with business associates, angry mobs of proletariat storming the streets, and finally the advances of two stalkers, seemingly out to take his life.  He finally makes it across town to get the haircut—well half the haircut.  That is, with some limited other surprises I won’t get into here, essentially it.  It’s not A TALE OF TWO CITIES.  It is, in fact, a tale of  just one – not New York, per se, but the Global Cosmopolis that has risen with increasingly-convoluted tenets of international commerce.  Banking on iPhones is only the beginning.

Ahh yes, so that’s the other thing COSMOPOLIS is about – finance.  I am hardly a finance geek and honestly neither is Cronenberg, you aren’t going to learn anything about the buying and selling of money.  See MARGIN CALL if you want a sharper indictment and/or critique of pecuniary matters.  MONEY here is a metaphor – COSMOPOLIS is more precisely about the depersonalization of wealth, the chasm between possession and satisfaction, and the problems that come out of satisfaction not met.  It’s also about DEATH—even with some intense sex scenes this is far more THANATOS than EROS—and that’s where Cronenberg beautifully comes into his own.

“Money has lost it’s narrative”  is a comment made by Pattinson’s character’s “chief of theory” during a business meeting in his limo (80% of the film takes place in the limo in fact, a directorial challenge that Cronenberg quite frankly knocks out of the park.  He puts on a clinic for interior work that maybe all filmmaking students should bear witness to).   It’s a deceptively simple statement.  And, as others have pointed out, it maybe even a little of a banal one.  But insofar that COSMOPOLIS is about this evolution of wealth it is also about losing one’s narrative in all ways, and the inchoate, spastic, violent atmosphere that results when we are left narrative-less (which is, in a purely theoretical mode, the very essence of the postmodern).  VIOLENCE NEEDS A MOTIVE, Pattinson reminds when confronting his would-be assassin—egging him on while intimating he won’t kill him because he doesn’t have “reason.”  

Cronenberg has already explored the history of violence, but here we get something infinitely more interesting—violence without history.  In fact, we get History without history.   The world and the city of Cosmopolis, are places where meaning and narrative have completely evaporated.  The edicts of  some ominous central organization (“The Complex”) tell our protagonist what to do, or warn him when he’s in danger (and the danger is vague -- is it a pie in the face, a rat thrown in protest, a bullet in the brain?).  He stumbles between encounters, acausally.  Sex is pleasureless, and money—whether he’s making or losing it—seems to matter little.  In a world where anything can happen, nothing really does – for although there are guns brandished and shots fired and affairs arranged and haircuts (half) received, little of it can be called story.  There is no history here, a state akin to death.  Watching COSMOPOLIS is experiencing death.

It’s exciting, weird, challenging, and—yes, indeed, highly academic.  COSMOPOLIS is certainly anti-entertainment—so meticulously unwatchable that it somehow goes back around to be highly engrossing.  If you’re looking for summer pop entertainment, see TOTAL RECALL.  This isn’t to say—you’re not smart enough for this shit—it is to suggest that you’re probably a much saner and happier person than I for wanting to be entertained at the movies.  No promises for that here.

But challenged, definitely.  Delillo by way of Cronenberg asks you to look into the monolith of global finance and experience the human alienation that the digitization and commoditization of wealth entails.   It can be seen as a psychological portrait of Occupy Wallstreet dissent.  It is my favorite movie of 2012 (so far).