A Sentimental Haircut

Cosmpolis(2012)

 Directed By David Cronenberg

Cosmopolis is David Cronenberg's adaptation of Don Delillo's novel of the same name.

The film follows a day in the life of a 20 something billionaire asset manager named Eric (played by Robert Pattinson), taking his limo through grinding New York traffic on a cross town odyssey to get a sentimental haircut.

There is a Samuel Beckett like absurdity to an obscenely wealthy man insisting himself into self destruction.

He insists going cross town against the flow of traffic.

He insists the Yen cannot rise any higher, as reports flow in that it continues to do so.

He insists on ignoring his security advisers and the possible threat against his life.

Over the course of a few hours we watch a man insist himself into ruin.

Eric's day is filled with episodic meetings from his various business partners, assistants, lovers, and his equally rich and emotionally detached, equally independently, absurdly, wealthy wife.

The first half of the film is structured around philosophical discussions of cyber-captialism, wealth, class, ego, equality, predetermination, rebellion, and commodification, the second half follows Eric outside of his limo his desperate, disastrous and malicious attempts at connecting with the real world. 

Many viewers have noted that the second half of the film is more dramatic, dynamic, exciting, and unpredictable than the first, but this tonal shift is Cronenberg's intention, and an asset to the film, not a defect. 

To show the limits and repetitions of Eric's life, even with the boundless possibilities his wealth offers.

Director David Cronenberg creates a claustrophobia through the soundless world of Eric's interior highlighted each time he opens the door and a rush of street noise sweeps in.

 "A specter is haunting America, the specter of capitalism" reads a building ticker, during a nameless, "easily forgotten", mass global protest in Times Square.

This reversal of the famous lines of Karl Marx, capture not only an anti-globalization maxim and sentiment of the film, but comment directly on Eric's spectral disconnection from the world around him.

His wealth, his stature, status, and connections; his very place in the circuitry of capitalism itself, have made him a ghost in his own life.

 Being able to own anything has made desires empty of value.

 The lack of desire is central to clinical depression and cultural ennui as well.

For Eric the only thing to desire is risk.

 The knowledge that the Yen can be beaten, the laws of economics made to bend to the rational laws that govern everything.

Only as Eric slowly learns rational laws do not govern the world, and predetermined facts and predictable systems can still, nay must eventually, produce unpredictable results.

 Enter Paul Giammotti's depressed, embittered, homicidal, towel wearing, hobo agent of chaos (that is chaos theory) itself, as Eric asymmetrical twin.

Giamotti's exchange with Eric at the end of the film is the most intelligent discussion since "Police, Adjective's" dictionary lesson.

Even among those who didn't like the film, I've heard and read nothing but respect for the skill of this scene and the acting involved (Pattinson included, whose vampiric blankness finds a synonymous character).

Cosmopolis has Eric hitting on his assistant while his doctor gives him his daily prostrate exam. 

This will doubtless not be a film to appeal to those interested in a light diversion.

David Cronenberg has if anything, made the novel harsher, colder, and sharper.

The sex is mechanical, the texture is glossy, the violence unpredictable, and the sense of humor and self-mockery honest as a pie to the face. 

This novel was written before the 2008 financial collapse or the Occupy Wall Street protests, and though Cronenberg is doubtless aware of these events and their similarities to the plot (Eric's genuine shock at the imperfections of his system are not far off from Alan Greenspan's similar surprise at the limits of his free market dream) he doesn't exploit them, staying ruthlessly close to the novel's original text, and letting the eeriness of the connections sink in for themselves. 

Even if every bit of jargon, philosophical musing, or witty banter falls on deaf ears, the film still succeeds as a story of a wealthy young man searching for something, anything, real.

Whether its freedom he finds or just "freedom to be poor and die", as his wife corrects, is something the film leaves open to viewers to decide. 

Like the possibility of the fungus between Giamotti's toes ordering him to do things, some answers are ultimately irrelevant, and some absurdities more real than any truths.

I Will Be Your Ambulance, If You Will Be My Accident

Crash(1996)

Directed By David Cronenberg

Vaughan: "It's too clean."Tatooist: "Medical tattoos are supposed to be clean."Vaughan: "But this is not a medical tattoo. It's a prophetic tattoo. Prophecy is ragged and dirty... so make it ragged and dirty."The reason I added a content warning to this blog was so that when I wanted to I could review film's like David Cronenberg's "Crash" , having at least given fair warning. That being said, "Crash" is basically Cronenberg, who had been up to this point made primarily body-horror movies, directing soft core porn for car crash fetishists(This is your last chance to stop reading).When I read the words erotic printed on a DVD/VHS case, I usually take it with a grain of salt as virtually any euro or artsy film with more than one close up of a set of lips, hips, or...will get the brand "erotica", but this was pretty genuine smut (a nice sounding word I too rarely get to use), and that kind of sincerity I appreciated right off the bat.

James Spader does things in this film, some porn actors won’t do.

James Ballard: "After being bombarded endlessly by road safety propaganda, it was almost a relief to have found myself in an actual accident."From the first few minutes onward we get fairly straightforward sexual escapades in virtually every scene, involving a bored, zombie like husband named Ballard (after the novel's author) and his wife, stiff and only excited by each others infidelities. They say things to each other like...James Ballard: "You should've gone to the funeral."Catherine Ballard: "I wish I had. They bury the dead so quickly. They should leave them lying around for months."

Until one day the couple have a head on collision with another car, killing the husband in the oncoming car. The wife in the same car while pinned in her seat, (accidentally or on purpose) exposes her breast to Ballard, who hitherto becomes obsessed with car crashes and sex and all the combinations between the two.

More sex is had, and Ballard’s wife, and several other people come into the general swinging mix of things. Ballard begins a sexual affair with the wife he crashed into as well as a man who is obsessed with re-creating celebrity car crashes named Vaughan. Vaughan is a charismatic leader of this fringe group and makes up multiple explanations for his fetish which all sound vaugely reasonable, but like "The Dark Knight’s" Joker, all of them are flimsy names for what is basically unexplainable chaotic impulse. Whether he is explaining Crashing as a "fertilizing rather than a destructive event, mediating the sexuality of those who have died with an intensity that's impossible in any other form.", or discussing the time honored back-seat boogie as "reshaping of the human body by modern technology," its all just ego making excuses for Id.

Author J.G. Ballard, survived WW2, as documented in Stephen Spielberg’s “Empire Of The Sun”, an autobiography of the authors youth, but considers this his most personal work; both protagonists share his name, "Empire Of The Sun" the youthful usually referred to as "James" while "Crash" the adult "Ballard". He says of the his own story, for those of you in a contemplative "what does it all mean" mood the following...
"The car crash is the most dramatic event in most people’s lives, apart from their own deaths, and in many cases the two will coincide. Are we just victims in a totally meaningless tragedy, or does it in fact take place with our unconscious, and even conscious, connivance? Are these arranged deaths arranged by the colliding forces of the technological landscape, by our own unconscious fantasies about power and aggression, our obsessions with consumer goods and desires, the overlaying fictions that are more and more taking the place of reality?....I remember seeing some films on television of test crashes a few years ago. They were using American cars of the late 50s, a period I suppose when the American dream, and American confidence, were at their highest point.” It's may be helpful to understand the Ballard of "Crash" by understanding the Ballard of "Empire Of The Sun". After living through the trauma of a sheltered well to do little boy suddenly thrown into an internment camp during the largest global war in history, it's not un-reasonable to imagine the same "character" growing up to view the universe and the varieties of contacts and connections in it, as either a disaster or an accident.

James Ballard: Do you see Kennedy's assassination as a special kind of car crash?
Vaughan: "The case could be made."

The performances are emotionally stale even during sex, eternally alienated, every one's looking for greater and greater kicks, and the story moves like any porn should with escalating extremities building toward climax. If there is a climax, and I’m not totally sure there is one, it comes a little too late, and doesn't leave us with enough intellectual or emotional denouement.In the end everyone is as automatic and mechanistic as the cars they operate, and are forced to collide in order to create spontaneous human contact, but we get that within the first 30 minutes, so why the additional hour of sex? "A beautiful body is it’s own reward", "sex has become meaningless", or "Who cares?/Why not?", are all decent enough answers, so you can pick whichever sounds best to you.

James Ballard: You had sex with all those men in cars? Only in cars? Helen Remington Yes. I didn't plan it that way.

James Ballard: Did you fantasize that Vaughan was photographing all these sex acts as though they were traffic accidents?

Helen Remingon: Yes. They felt like traffic accidents.

Lacking a denouement is not lacking emotion, the film draws our attention to the absence of feeling in a way, though be it with very different aims, that Robert Bresson would through his use of toneless, expressionless performances. Like Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut" or Pier Pasolini's "Salo" the depictions of intercourse are dehumanized and passionless, and not intended to be enjoyed as erotic. The characters fuck constantly, never ceasingly, but hardly ever touch, rarely otherwise smile or blink, and grow to naturally rely more and more on the cars to add what Vaughn called "an intensity that's impossible in any other form" , having themselves become mechanical props in their own growing ever more extreme fantasies, little more than piston rods and fuel injectors made of flesh.

That being said Cronenberg is as much a masterful director of the body and the human form, here as he was ever, veering between unease, violence, the grotesque, and the arousing eventually into a wreck, but a flaming wreck of a film, that fails, but does so in manner that can generate an amarous discord of arguments and interesting thoughts. "Crash" is not a film for everyone, but for the minority interested in literate cinematic porn, there may be something amongst the debris.