In Which Don DeLillo And Robert Pattinson Are Together At Last

More Erotic When It's Wasted

by RACHEL SYKES

Cosmopolis
dir. David Cronenberg
108 minutes

In the opening shot of David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis, Robert Pattinson stands downcast outside a Manhattan office block. Dressed in black, or so the old joke goes, the most famous vampire in the hemisphere slouches beside a skyscraper, innocuous, glum and keeping to the shadows.

Sunglasses cover his eyes. “I need a haircut,” he says.

Cronenberg’s film, adapted from Don DeLillo’s 2003 novel, follows a day in the life of Eric Packer (Pattinson), a billionaire who at the age of 27 wants nothing more than to have his hair done. Though he might click his fingers and have a solution provided, Packer is looking for something. On this particular day, he demands a barber shop with mirrors and a swivel chair, a place where he can sit and look at the reflection which he has stopped seeing amongst the glaze of his skyscraper and the sheen of his limousine.

“Where is your office? What do you do exactly?” Packer’s wife asks.

But as he rides around Manhattan in a car proofed against nuclear war, it becomes clear that Packer exists in the ultimate hyper-real. Computers have replaced the walls around him, providing constant code without information. And on these computers Packer can watch as his net worth decreases, second by second, and he gradually sabotages his personal wealth. His financial decline neatly parallels the protests visible through the blacked out windows of the limo. These are marches against globalisation, against the future, protesters who damage the protagonist’s vehicle but never pass through the glass. As it becomes increasing clear, the 1% which Packer, which Pattinson, embodies can only be destroyed by itself.

Any satisfaction garnered from watching Cosmopolis will depend on your ease with Pattinson’s automaton billionaire. An early poster released before its premiere at Cannes showed a glittering overview of the New York skyline fading to black under the tagline: “How far can he go before he goes too far?” But by the time the poster was released to cinemas, ambiguity had been sacrificed for the solemn face of its star, a face which for this moment is potentially as global as the New York skyline itself, sitting alone in a dilapidated version of his limousine. A yellow cab is still visible through the window over his right shoulder, the protests just apparent over his left. But directing attention consistently to the centre of the poster are the names, in capital letters, of the Trinity: PATTINSON, CRONENBERG, DELILLO.

A hyper-awareness of name and stature, the star, the director, the author, seems fitting for a film obsessed with transience, youth, and power. Over the course of 100 minutes a string of associates and/or lovers pass around or through Packer’s car, all emitting a specific, loaded language which stings with its twin obtuseness and directness.

“You smell of sex,” Packer’s wife says to him, when he discovers her hiding in a book store.

“It’s not the sex you think I’ve had,” he replies. “It’s the sex I want. That’s what you smell on me.”

A wearying sense runs through Cosmopolis that sexuality has festered, that intimacy is a fallacy. These supporting characters prove to be only cameos in the death throes of the protagonist, each with neat taglines which seem to be rejected from their mouths. “Destroy the past,” one adviser says, “make the future.” And as Packer sabotages his own life, we witness each character fade to irrelevance, their speech becoming ever more obscure and verging wildly between the bizarre and the ridiculous.

It is this language, directly lifted from DeLillo’s text, which fills the film and moulds its silences. The most palpable reaction in the cinema in which I sat was that of suppressed laughter. Several people scoffed as one protestor ranted about shoving custard pies in the faces of the famous. But full belly laughs emerged as Paul Giamatti, a beige dressing gown obscuring his face, announced that the fungus between his toes has begun to speak to him. In this climactic scene, shot in one take, and intended as two-handed theatre, the problem of Cosmopolis’ dysfunctional language crystallises. This is not the dialogue of Harold Pinter; this was not written to be said out loud.

And there the ultimate futility reverberates, not in the story, not in the characters, but in language itself. To DeLillo, sex dominates with equal ineffectuality, the creator and the destructor of everything in the individual. It permeates the dialogue – it is powerful, omniscient, it appears in the life of Packer both as therapist and stalker.

“Sex finds us,” Packer says, “Sex sees through us. That's why it's so shattering. It strips us of appearances.”

His virility, his mortality, is tested in one scene which details Packer’s daily health check. Bent over in the middle of his limousine for his prostate examination, the doctor announces that his prostate is asymmetrical. From this position, bent double, with it not immediately clear what is happening to him behind, he yells in the face of an adviser: “I want to bottle-fuck you slowly with my sunglasses on.”

More giggles ripple around the theatre. Because faced onscreen with the full absurdity of postmodernism, this much we are forced to understand: sex is disconnected - sex is irrelevant – sex is death. In the face of this, we laugh. Depictions of the sex acts themselves focus on the female form as it writhes on top of the young billionaire. His most intimate moments are with strangers or professionals. The woman, on top, obscures the form of the man below, who seems ultimately powerless to react or resist, and equally powerless to enjoy. And in the face of this, we laugh.

Of course, this is also like the experience of reading Don DeLillo. Especially in his most recent novels, DeLillo can be supremely frustrating when his portrayal of privilege relies too frequently on the obvious to imply its disjointed undertones. “Sex was everywhere,” he wrote in Falling Man, “This was sex. They’d walk down a street together and see themselves in a dusty window. A flight of stairs was sex.” Particularly when a world is in turmoil, DeLillo seeps sexuality into every aspect of the present and beats the reader over the head with its permeation. As a reader, I laughed, again, at this description which bludgeoned a frenetic moment with predictable overstatement. But I thought of Falling Man again, as Pattinson left the barbershop with only half a haircut, and as the few viewers in the cinema around me laughed without sympathy at an asymmetrical prostate.

A cardboard cut-out of Pattinson stood in the foyer of a small, independent theatre which I walked through one Wednesday night in June. His downcast face stared aggressively at the floor, whilst words sprawled over the cardboard boasted Cosmopolis to be “The first adaptation of a DeLillo novel.”

I sent a message to a friend: “This is the First. And soon there’ll be Falling Man. Russell Crowe will star.”

The reply quickly came: “Sex was everywhere. This was sex. The porch seat was sex. Sex will be everywhere… for Russell Crowe.”

Rachel Sykes is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Nottingham. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about the longest bunting. She tumbls here.

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In Which We Portray A Psychoanalyst With Our Usual Aplomb

Jung at Attention

by ALEX CARNEVALE

A Dangerous Method
dir. David Cronenberg
94 minutes

The appeal of a fine Jewish woman, the unshiksa, is well known throughout the centuries. Somehow Jesus avoided the temptation, but basically no one else did. Perseus, as he crossed the Grecian plain, had on his mind only a trick named Sheila Wasserstein, who he planned to maybe hang out with and see a movie at some point down the road. When he visited the cinema with his gentile girlfriend, all she did was hold his hand.

In ensuing years, we can only guess how many gentile lives unshiksas like Scarlett Johannssen and Lizzy Caplan have ruined. Ryan Reynolds wakes up every night in a damp sweat, and he doesn't have the knowledge that he is a prominent psychologist in turn of the century Zurich to quell his innate fears. Instead he's just a fucking actor.

In David Cronenberg's new film A Dangerous Method this Jewish ingenue, Sabina Spielrein, is portrayed by Keira Knightley. To make you forget this is the Keira Knightley who has had an agent since she was six years old, she adopts a slight Yiddish accent. She tells her psychiatrist Carl Jung (a childlike Michael Fassbender) that she enjoys adopting a pose in which she kneels and simultaneously attempts to defecate and stop herself from defecating. I tried this after the movie was over and it didn't end as well for me as it did for Keira.

Watching Keira Knightley try to play the part of psychotic Jewish mistress/patient, who, after she is cured, attempts to become a psychiatrist herself, is just as anguishing as it must have been for her to try to play the role. She is working so hard to be a serious actress, to live up to the potential of her part, that she eventually wins us over through sheer force of effort. Her accent is pure shit, and her manic facial expressions are something of a disaster, but who cares? Verisimilitude has never drawn at the box office.

Keira comes into Jung's life, frothing at the mouth, bursting out of her restraints because of the humiliation she suffered at the hands of her father. Jung is in contrast the nicest man she has ever met, played by the magnetic Fassbender as a naive-do gooder turned hypocrite. Jung initially struggles as he tries to cure her madness, almost crying when she refuses his jacket on a cold day.

After he makes a mentor/protege visit to the father of his field, Sigmund Freud, it takes Keira about ten minutes of screen time to not only cease her illness, but take up the task of psychoanalysis herself. It's only the tendency of Knightley to slightly jut her jaw out that lets us know she's still a crazy nutbag. Naturally, the married Jung finds his gorgeous Jewish patient irresistible, either as a consequence of Freud's method or in spite of it. Her bushy eyebrows — Cronenberg's idea of a Semitic affectation — do nothing to dim her appeal to the entranced analyst.

the tweezer was invented in 1994

Viggo Mortensen was Cronenberg's second choice for Freud (after Christoph Waltz), and his laconic portrayal is more along the lines of what we expect in a period film. The action is set in a Swiss hospital around the turn of the century, and we meet Freud when Jung appears in Vienna for a visit. The two bray and honk at each other for 13 straight hours, detailing their hopes and dreams for the future of their profession. Their discussions come across more as impassioned exclamations of pop psychology than serious discourse. Either that, or there is no such thing as psychology, only pop psychology.

It doesn't take long for the younger doctor to be uncomfortable in Freud's shadow. Freud sends him a lecherous patient (a scene stealing Vincent Cassel) and Jung manages to not only worsen his condition, but allows him to escape the sanitarium. Jung speculates that Freud is so obsessed with sex because he doesn't get any, and almost immediately begins to disregard his mentor's advice in favor of a spiritual understanding that will allow his patients — and himself — to escape the roles life has written for them.

around 1902 a public HJ from your pregnant wife was de rigeur

Jung is married to a rather boring gentile woman who has a lot of money. She buys him a lovely estate, and also a cute sailboat. They take naps in the cabin together like chaste siblings. It is never mentioned that she herself also became an analyst. Even after ten years have passed, they don't age her with makeup one bit, so as not to give Jung any excuse whatsoever for cheating on her so flagrantly, for not exhibiting the slightest bit of guilt. She is simply an unwanted beautiful thing.

Carl takes out his frustrations on his Jewish friends. Henry Kissinger is not available and The Prince of Tides hasn't yet hit local theaters, so Freud himself bears the brunt of his anguish. (I'm not sure what I was doing, probably practicing my jiu-jitsu.) There is never a shouting match between Freud and Jung. The most evocative moments of conflict occur in monotone readings of their letters to each another, which is great fodder for blog posts, but somewhat inadequate for a visual medium.

Freud's wife bought him a toy sailboat

When the two eventually reunite for a trip to America, Freud believes the closeness between him and Jung will not ebb, and is shocked that Jung's wealthy wife has booked him a first class cabin while he labors away on a manuscript in the middle decks. Celine Dion refused to score the soundtrack unless Cronenberg apologized for making his 1999 film eXistenZ, so no music outside of a random note here or there adorns the ship's arrival in Manhattan.

near, far, wherever you are

Instead of watching the two psychoanalysts stroll the streets of SoHo, it's back to Europe again. Cronenberg's disgust for the period makes A Dangerous Method more amusing than the staid stage play it is based on. He doesn't bring the past to life, quite the contrary: he murders it again and again. Europe holds no glory for him; even a magnificent Swiss vista absorbed by Jung in his waning years symbolically represents only another personal tragedy. The fact that Europe is so much older than his own country is a point of regret, not an enticing feature of its history. In this landscape, we are forced to be continually reminded of that continent's many disappointments, foretelling the genocide to come. (Sabina Spielrein herself was ended by a SS death squad.)

Strangely, Freud comes across as the only sympathetic figure in the film. This is half due to Viggo's dreamy, sad eyes, and half a consequence of the fact that he is the only person in the film not to behave abominably. In fact, he doesn't behave at all — he smokes over 82 cigars in the movie, one for every scene he is in (I counted out of boredom) and the only time he moves more than an inch is when he collapses after a panic attack. The idea is to subtly associate the staidness of his psychoanalytic viewpoint with his literal motion, but the end result is so dull you can't properly appreciate the meme.

a relationship that spans space and time

I don't know why Cronenberg, usually the purveyor of such cinematic excitement, tension and pain, chose this project. Perhaps he wanted to zig instead of zag. A sanitarium would seem to be the perfect setting for scares and frights, and none are in evidence here. There is nothing to suggest that the same man who directed A Dangerous Method also wrote and directed a horror film about the psychosomatic offspring of a mutant woman, or one about sex after car crashes. The underlying message here is that none of us can afford to live in the past; as Jung himself puts it in the film's final scene, "Sometimes you have to do something unforgivable just to be able to go on living."

Until the very end of A Dangerous Method, Cronenberg resists nearly all the trappings of period films: the maudlin crossfades, the montages connoting the passage of time, the dreamy/sweeping score, the Mad Men trope of exposing the outrageous conventions of the time to modern eyes. Cronenberg prefers instead to focus on the psychic unraveling of deeply misguided individuals. It's true that this has been his subject before, but the analysis never came to such a hopeless conclusion.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He is a writer living in Manhattan. He tumbls here and twitters here. He last wrote in these pages about Lars Von Trier's Melancholia. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

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