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.

"Heart of Stone" - The Novel Ideas (mp3)

"Not Enough" - The Novel Ideas (mp3)

The latest album from The Novel Ideas is entitled Home, and you can find their website here.

In Which We Witness The Return Of Pomp In Austerity

The Longest Bunting in the Land

by RACHEL SYKES

The windows in the houses opposite were opening onto the street. Sound bubbled out of them, up and over the windowsills, spilling down the road. Church bells were rumbling and the sounds of the day already seemed to cluster round my ears. Nothing was loud, exactly, but it mumbled — a dull and incipient mutter of radios, the slight buzz of background TV. It was not loud, exactly, but it was building. The road itself had fallen uncharacteristically silent. As we turned on our own radio, the noise rose up to meet us. Dresses, we heard; all normal programming has been removed. Dresses were in its place.

On the day of the Royal Wedding, we got up for free champagne. Free champagne that would be plucked from the hands of less miserly friends, to momentarily halt a barrage of dirty jokes about Prince Phillip and the bridesmaids. We reached the party just before the near-princess emerged from her carriage. We now sat, tipsy, self-censoring, amongst a table of pancakes, strawberries and creams, beside a republican, an agnostic, an indifferent, and a monarchist.

The lonely monarchist had come with her own bunting. From several patchworks of pastel fabrics, she was now waving five triangles around her head. Each piece bore a large and pronounced "W 4 K" which she had reverse appliqued with the greatest of care. As the alcohol kicked in, this bunting trailed lower and lower, until her limp wrist dragged it dolefully along the carpet.

This is not a story worth remembering. But I hate that I won’t forget it. And I know, in every way possible, that I am uneducatedly unpatriotic. Many intelligent people have written many clever books about the downsides of monarchy, and I haven’t read any of them. Yet I still suffer from the type of discomfort which comes from knowing that you can’t support a hereditary power, yet you have never learnt more than what was taught to you in history class.

For most of my life, everyone has seemed content in their apathy toward kings and queens. But then one of them got engaged, and we have fallen through the ensuing two years consumed in repatriation. Bunting was the first hint of acceptance when a wave of posters bumbled: “Keep Calm and Carry On.” And so, the avalanche: memorabilia from World War II, commemorative plates of the wedding, and now the Diamond Jubilee with stationary, tea towels, covers for games consoles, and, no exaggeration, Union Jack sex toys. We are being assured of the return of pomp in austerity by a rush of confused products which claim that it is OK to be British because it was once unquestioned. And the Queen has certainly been alive for a long time. She is so old that her heirs are themselves too old, but as luck would have it her grandchildren are young. And if they’re not young, they are assuredly media savvy.

Six months ago, I poured a glass of water over my camera. But with a little money scraped together I found an awful replacement just before the four day Jubilee. Eyes inevitably on the pavement, I started taking pictures of bunting in puddles.

My housemate noticed the attention I’d been paying to patriotic litter on the Saturday morning of the long weekend. As we walked to our exercise class, she told me about the village where her parents lived: it boasted the longest piece of bunting in the country. Both my housemates wanted to watch a beacon being lit outside the Elizabethan mansion which stands a half mile from our house. 4,200 beacons would be set alight across the Commonwealth, in countries so disparate that the only thing linking them were picture postcards of an 86 year old woman.

Trying to think of this, I fell short. I rang my mum. “It’s raining,” she said. “I’m baking cakes for the street party. People are bringing umbrellas.”

There it was, the sinking feeling at the thought of my neighbours sitting outside for the Queen, eating cake under fifty brollies. Street parties were now happening everywhere. If one street didn’t have one, someone would arrange it immediately like a nostalgic flash mob. Bunting had snuck along the shops, and down the road that my housemate and I lolloped back across after our class. Two ladies turned up in Union Jack leggings, topped with Union Jack t-shirts, to a round of applause. In some places, the rain had caused the flags to sink so low that they seemed in danger of cutting off our heads.

At home, the internet told me that my friends and acquaintances had engaged in monarchism in increasingly impressive ways, from non-ironic proclamations of “God Save The Queen!” to painting members of the Royal family onto their fingernails.

On Saturday night, my friends went to a small bar, tucked away from the flags above a card shop on the town square. The bar is part gallery, part venue, part living room, but is dedicated to local bands. From where we sat by the window, we were almost eye level with the bunting that draped the outside world. From corner to corner, shop to shop, we could see it darting round the town hall which looms over the pure white of the city center. Below us, people streamed around, covered in more Union Jacks, installed with tiny flags in hand. Directly opposite, an Irish bar was emitting an odd purple light over its bunting. To the right of the purple, we could see one of several pubs in Nottingham claiming to be the oldest in Britain. In its top window, a blow up doll, naked, Union Jack in hand, was gyrating with a stag party.

Inside, however, we were flanked by a variety of fairy lights which largely excluded the scene below. The bar was lined with the owner’s personal art work — this month, a series of graphic portraits of a former lover’s genitalia. Spurned by this lover, the bar’s owner had publicised his art show with the woman’s name and “NUDE” as its title.

“I’m looking for new models,” he said. “We’ve fallen out."

The bar is two stories high: a low-ceilinged room for drinks downstairs, a cavernous performance area above and studio space all around. The back of the lower floor is cluttered with junk and memorabilia: a broken till, an inflatable globe, a shopping trolley, a plastic Viking helmet. We drank ales named after badgers and hopping hares, or cider out of a barrel marked “raspberry + pear” (although “pear” had been dubiously taped over something else). They carry the best samosas in Nottingham, half the size of your head. Behind the bar, a sign read large in capitals: “Water will only be served to ugly customers (and it tastes like piss anyway).” For this weekend, a merchandise stand sold posters and CDs, some of which had been encased entirely in wax.

the other rachel

One friend and I sat by the window, taking pictures of faux-surprise next to the nearest intimate portrait. We share our first two names, both Rachel and Elizabeth, plus a poor level of eyesight, which makes some people think that we’re either strange sisters or lovers. Sitting alone, we could talk about nothing in particular which we enjoy very much. But we could both still see the flags out of the corners of our eyes. We did not like the flags, though neither of us could say quite why.

As the music started, it dismissed our problem. A man in a long coat got up to sing, setting off an endless drumbeat and swaying back and forth. His most popular song peaked about his time on minimum wage: “£5.60? Fuck off!” He stood at the front of the crowd with his coat buttoned up to the neck, directing his anger towards everything from penny farthings to the microphone in front of him.

“McFlurrrrrrry,” he yelled as the mic stand quivered. “I’m a nasty bastard in stage tights.”

The band who followed him were covered in the grand tradition of safety pins, mohawks, and t-shirts which, again, said “Fuck off” in blood red letters. We were warned by several people not to go too close to them as they tended to slide across the dance floor and stare intently at the crotch of anyone who they ended up underneath.

Three hours later, we left with the inflatable globe and Viking helmet gifted to us. Our friend bought one of the CDs encased in wax, though she didn’t know whether she would ever get it open. And we sat at the bus stop looking up at the bunting which fluttered noisily in the dark. A week later, it still hangs there.

The music coming from above was still noisy and varied and messy. It had been awkward, and funny, and bold. Surrounded by the portraits of a doomed affair, the bands were creating something out of pomp. If it was not perfect, exactly, it was something.

With my new camera, I tried to take a photo of the bunting fluttering overhead. But it wasn’t bright enough, and the flags were eventually lost against the neon of the supermarket and the blackness of the city in the evening.

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 life in Russia. She tumbls here.

Photographs by the author.

"Brighter Than The Sun" - Colbie Caillat (mp3)

"Bubbly" - Colbie Caillat (mp3)

In Which We Are The Last Of Our Kind

Home From Home

by RACHEL SYKES

There is a small tavern in the city of Veliky Novgorod known as “Sinbad’s Cave.” The sign above the front door swings low from two brass hooks, spelling its name in faded, gold Cyrillic. Its doorway opens onto a pitch-black staircase, warm with the smell of cucumbers and damp - inside the walls are crowded with fishing nets, plastic crabs, murky portholes and an orange tree. Although the walls are unmistakably cave-like and drip in the manner of their namesake, they are made only of the dankest plastic.

Sinbad’s is neither a cave, nor even partially underground. It sells discount perogis and high percentage beer by ambiantly manufactured cave-light. Locally, it’s infamous for providing its clientele with lighting so low that you can’t tell the colour or form of the bar food. As a drinking experience, this means that it probably rates lower than consuming a can of gin and tonic in a snow drift. But for seven months, Sinbad’s was the high point of many of my days. From work, it was a last point of contact before I picked up a kilo of dates from the elderly woman on the corner of Main Street and returned to my tiny bed, two streets further, to listen to my host brother sing “Material Girl” through the walls.

Seven years after the fact, I get told off for talking about Russia. This must be to do with what I returned as. A mass of hair grown to two feet in length, wooden beads around my wrist and neck, a Discman full of ripped CDs of Russian ska, I had Novgorod written across my body and was not afraid to force it into the eye line of others. In the months after I left, all my thoughts turned towards it, my entire body feeling like its reboot might need several years to take hold. For my even more luckless friends, it was the break-up I never got over. I would lie on student futons and talk obliquely about my “soul” and the “Russian winter” spent in Sinbad’s Cave, until the memories of this place, which I had seized in a moment but crafted only in retrospect, were formed out of the desire to make myself an other.

I remained in daily contact with a friend I had met there. It became strange how, more often than not, we did not recall the excitement of our time together. We didn’t mention the adventures around a city where everyone noted our privilege, the drug dealers who wanted to date us, the strange trips to the middle of Russian nowhere. It was the mundanity that we wanted back. The elaborate and immensely boring routine which we had carved for ourselves in what had seemed like a parody of the western world. This, to us, was what became remarkable.

My friend was a seventeen year-old Australian girl, shipped with me to Novgorod by a ramshackle teaching organisation and instructed to teach the English we quite obviously misunderstood. We met on our first day as teachers and fell quickly into friendship, the two of us very much in love with our dissimilarities. As teenagers, we were still shaping ourselves out of the shadows of others. We loved each other, for the cold winter in which we both turned eighteen, because being so very different made us ambitious for ourselves. We were friends because we were obsessed with our hormones.

“It’s spring,” she would say, scanning the men as we crossed the melting snow towards Sinbad’s. “All the animals are mating.”

I looked at her and would often nod very sagely, pretending to be neither British nor sexually awkward. I wasn’t quite sure that what she was saying applied to me, but I did know that I wanted her to think it did.

The city wall in Veliky Novgorod

So for seven months we sat together in Sinbad’s, or in a better lit café called only “GRILL” that sold chicken covered in cat hair. On bad days, we ate the chicken. But on good days, we drank vodka with a glass of peach juice, listing one hundred Australian terms for vomit and conjugating Russian on the side. On one of these good days, whilst constructing a manifesto on oral sex, my friend began a list of what she was seeking in The One. Bullet by bullet, we wrote each point painstakingly in English then translated into Russian, in the back of my teaching book, a bright notepad whose cover dramatically recreated the bedtime routine of a family of Russian mice.

“A former drug addict,” she said with the pen poised at her mouth. “That’s obvious. Also, a drug dealer swagger, a B.O. problem, and a disgusting amount of back hair. And I mean, disgusting.”

The only thing I knew with that degree of certainty was that I wanted to go at least twenty-four hours without falling over on the ice. As it was, I couldn’t imagine myself an ideal. I could barely conceive of anything to settle for.

As a reality that I was more comfortable with, we described our friends at home in exquisite detail. Eventually, there were no parts of our lives that the other did not understand. We could give a full description of every best friend we’d claimed since kindergarten, every boy we’d brushed the hand of, every pop song that made us feel mind-numbingly understood, as only good pop songs could do. We might never have left home; we made sure every part of it followed us to that cat-lined café.

Slowly, together, we wrote intricate profiles of our fellow teaching assistants. Pages and pages in length, it seemed as though missing any detail of their fledgling personalities would mean that their memory escaped us forever. We denied them the privilege in which we luxuriated, defining their personalities with damning solidity. Tearing off every sticker from every bottle of beer we drank, making blood brother promises to spend our lives meeting in countries halfway between our antipodean homes until the ultimate goal might be achieved: a tour of the Eastern bloc in our twilight years.

There was no doubt that this was the point to which our future would always return. And we had to remember every part of it for when we eventually came back, together, fifty years in the future.

Church of the Saviour on Blood, St. Petersburg

One of our Russian friends, Yulia, wanted to follow us back home. Yulia was infamous amongst our friends for her love of aerobics. Her infamy spread for one simple reason; when she introduced herself to strangers she began by saying: “I love to shape my body.” Repeated explanations of her body’s morphic qualities meant that we referred to her only as “Shaping” for six months. She claimed not to care. When we suggested she should visit us in either Anglo pole of the world, she would respond with a sigh: “Quite frankly, girls, this is the only reason I am being friends with you.”

Shaping had a game she liked to play. In the middle of crowded bars, she would tear us each a square of her plain white notepad and distribute pieces between us. “Close your eyes,” she would say, “close them tightly.” Then, placing a pen in our hands, she would ask us to draw a room with no windows or doors, the colour of a brilliant white. “This,” she would whisper in our ears, “this is what heaven will be like.”

As a party trick, it wasn’t a lot of fun. But if we didn’t play along, she would go off to her shaping class in a puff of anger, upsetting chairs and beer cans as she left. The game would last for about fifteen minutes and by the time we surfaced out of our trance, all we could see were white lights and phobias of death. Shaping told us that the aim was to find the most important thing in our lives, to focus our energies on what we cared for the most. She claimed her white room had to be some form of gymnasium.

In the back of one of our notebooks, my Australian friend wrote to me: “Here’s to a lifetime of meeting half-way between us, until the time we enter a white room with no windows and no doors.”

Months after we left Russia for the final time, we struggled to see ourselves in our notebooks. By the end of our short time there, I had fallen in and out of love enough times to feel, firstly, less British, and secondly, changed in a deeply fundamental but ultimately inexplicable sense that no-one at home would ever be able to understand. Outwardly I might look the same: same skirts, same woolly hats, same discount t-shirts with “MAKE TEA. NOT WAR” written across them in inoffensive pastels. But still, my world had expanded, unfathomably. If I was sure of anything, I was 99% sure of this.

The full terror of that remaining 1% was enough to ensure that my friend and I wrote to each other every day. Back in Australia, she felt like she was waking up from a seven-month hangover. I had half-heartedly started at university. Bulbous packages, some actually shaped like kangaroos, turned up at my halls of residence, spilling coasters of every Australian city over my textbooks. I sent back ill-formed letters, attempting to delicately balance first-year philosophy with explicit sexual content. I interpreted, revisited, cut and paste sacred parts of my diaries and scrap books, adding photos, CDs, and, unbeatably, excerpts from the five tapes of the dictaphone I had religiously carried. I had recorded impulsively and without discrimination, leaving me with tape upon tape of appalling in-jokes, accordion music, and depressing speeches from our superiors, whose job of teaching English expanded far beyond our seven month holiday in Veliky Novgorod.

In October, the month I started university, I got an email with the following writ large in the subject box. “ELENA SERGEIVNA,” it read, “IS NOT HAVING AN ASSISTANT THIS YEAR.”

St. Sofia's cathedral, Novgorod

Starting universities on opposite ends of the planet, we were running at everyday life with all the gravitas of an astronaut returning from space. About my year abroad I was casual and always cool in conversation. We had lived through a Russian winter, I would say, what can the north of England do to me? I was in danger of becoming one of the people that university guides warn you about. Empty bottles of vodka lined my tiny room, Soviet matchbooks lit the cigarettes of strangers, and a miniature accordion sat on my kitchen table. Sometimes, as if struggling for affectation, I still carried the Dictaphone.

In October, two months out of our English teacher guise, my friend told me that our role as teaching assistant no longer existed.

Elena Sergeivna was an English teacher who had married young to a man in the Russian militia. She taught the humanities pathway in our school in Novgorod, where the high achievers of the top year, we were told, would develop a fine grasp of English in order to become an economist in either New York, or Leicester.

“We expected poets,” we complained, “We get economists.”

As Elena Sergeivna repeatedly told us, teachers in Russia earnt as much as doctors. But doctors earned the least in the country. The teachers who did the most work still needed second jobs and would frequently ask us if we knew of anyone who needed a cleaner. Elena had finally decided to get pregnant. Now in her early thirties she would loop the following phrase: “I am only here until pregnancy.” We mourned the fact that a woman both so young and so unmotherly could soon be with child. She had assumed that two fully grown women would not need looking after; we, in turn, gave her no pity.

After we left Novgorod, we never heard from Elena again. But three months later, word somehow reached Australia that our former jobs had been done away with.

“We’re obviously not good enough,” my friend suggested, before rattling off an anecdote about the time we ate two litres of soup, ordered in a Chinese restaurant because we knew neither the relevant Chinese, nor the relevant Russian.

In England, I continued to tease and provoke relationships with my ex-teachers in ways that extended their every relevance to my world. I made sure if I had to leave Russia that most of the Russia I knew would come with me. It was inconceivable that I could be anything but the weirdest personality that my closest Australian friend had helped to cultivate through seven months in Sinbad’s Cave.

When I went on dates, I would say I was passionate about dried fruit and pickled cabbage. “As long as the dried fruit has been stored in two metres of snow,” I would add glibly. “I like ska-punk. And I like to pluck my eyebrows.”

I was nineteen years old. And Elena Sergeivna never had an assistant again.

Rachel Sykes is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Nottingham. This is her first appearance in these pages. She tumbls here.

"Too Tough (Saint Etienne remix)" - The Pains of Being Pure At Heart (mp3)

"Strange (Totally Sincere remix)" - The Pains of Being Pure At Heart (mp3)