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.

They Lost Their Lives In Backyards

Dogtooth(2010)

Directed By Giorgos Lanthimos

Dogtooth is a film about a family who has never let their children of out of the house.

I say “children” but by the time we see them they are well into their 20’s, the eldest perhaps even her early thirties.

So that they do not become confused when reading one of the very limited, and in all probability, heavily redacted books, in their home the parents have taken the time to replace certain unknown words with more tangible ones.

The “sea” they are told is the word for the armchair in the living room, a “zombie” is a small yellow flower, and a “pussy” is a large bright lamp. “For example “If you turn out the ‘pussy’ the room will plunge into darkness”, the mother tells her inquisitive daughter.

I am perhaps giving you too much information up front, the film is largely silent in passages, preferring to tell its story visually and subtly.

It’s not until a substantial way into the film that are we are told what “Dogtooth” means. What we do see and quite early on is that the father brings a blindfolded woman to his home regularly to have sex with the son, who has become increasingly aggressive toward the fence which separates him from the outside world.

Lacking any understanding about why he hates the fence he can only taunt it and hurl objects at it, while suggesting that he can do a better job of cleaning the carpet than it ever could.

A haze of cognitive dissonance pervades everything.

This is all deeply disturbing, and things only get worse as they continue on. Some of you who have seen the 1968 horror film “Spider Baby” also about three adults living and functioning as children and living out a macabre combination of extreme innocence and violence, may experience a sense of deja vu.

“Dogtooth” like “Spider Baby” is also full of pitch black and bleak comedy, but in Dogtooth the comedy is more brutal, surreal, incisive, and believable.

When I first really started this blog a few summers ago, I remember a story that was big on the local news, around the time of the election riots in Iran, about a man in California who had kidnapped a girl, and kept her in his basement for years.

He fathered several children with her, and eventually (with his wife who was aware of all this) moved this second family into the backyard, where they had small shacks concealed from view with a tarp.

There is the Fritzl case, years before that where an Austrian man imprisoned his daughter for 24 years in a basement and abused her, resulting in several children.

I remember then thinking (ignoring for the moment the horrors of the kidnap, perpetual rape, and other likely tortures) about what it would be like to be raised completely cut off from the world. Not just Amish-style culturally cut off, but with no real concept of the outside at all.

The three children of "Dogtooth" having grown up with all things equal begin to become aggressive as the new visitor (the woman brought to have sex with the son) becomes something they cannot share, and begins herself to exert her new found celebrity over other members of the house.

We don’t get any background as to how this family began or why. We can’t understand the parents motives any more than the children could. When silent the family resembles a scene of domestic perfection (the children clad in white), but when the parents speak they sound mysterious and absolute as Gods on a distant mountain.

If you were or have ever met someone who was had a prolonged and sheltered upbringing you might note a familiar childishness in the small gestures of the actors. It’s not just that they are pretending to be children, they are intelligent enough to realize something is wrong with the world, but lack any background knowledge that would tell them what it is.

In a scene which recalls Luis Buneul’s "The Exterminating Angel" (about a party where the guests find themselves unable to leave for reasons that never get explained) the children watch their father leave for work at the edge of the open gate, peering out, but not daring to cross the threshold, like an invisible forcefield had been thrown up at the edge of the driveway. They are told the only possible way to leave the house is in the car. The floor is hot lava.

“Dogtooth” is a satire, of the perfection of the nuclear family, the idea that children can be raised without being contaminated by the rest of the world, but its execution is so ruthless and comical that its easy to forget that its about anything else than a family living in their own private universe. What does freedom mean when the word for freedom might translate to “wood shed”?

From this train of thought, outside of the obvious hypocrisies of the parents and the deeply uncomfortable sexual episodes (akin to the thematically similar “Splice”), we can see a variety of questions emerge about the role language plays in shaping reality (never have Orwell’s notions of a limited language creating limited human beings been better expressed), and the reactionary feelings many people have to modern technology (which revolves for better and worse around communication).

We don’t know exactly why the parents have done this terrible thing to their children but we almost understand their need to create their own perfect world, as instinctively as the son understands that the fence is his natural enemy.

Dogtooth is a very cerebral horror film and if you have dark sense of humor, also an exceptional domestic comedy. It’s rare that I am shocked in a movie, but there were many moments in “Dogtooth” were my jaw was on the floor, or my hands defensively covering my face to keep the images away.

Everyone may see something different in “Dogtooth” “it’s about the homogenizing effects of capitalism”, “the horrors of traditional patriarchy”, “a critique of modern Greek politics”, and they may all be right, when a movie has an ending as devastating and tension filled as the ending here, such considerations take a back seat.

“Dogtooth” takes us into this world of inverted logic, wicked parents, and disastrous siblings rivalries, a place where you might sit on the sea under the gentle light of the pussy with a zombie in your hair and reflect on all that you’ve seen and done and then on the much larger region of all that you don’t know, haven't done, and can only vaguely imagine if at all.