Cosmopolis reflects the experience of a cancer patient, housed within a corporatized institution, dependent on the biases and whims of authorities, machines, and data. The book and film, poorly reviewed on their initial releases and having gained substantially in reputation since, investigate the individual and the urbane in a time of hyperconnectivity and the fiscal marketization of the human – the now widely known concept that if you’re getting something “for free,” you’re the product.
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Representations of technology present as a slowly metastasizing cancer coursing through the Don DeLillo novel Cosmopolis (2003) and post-internet realities commodify, colonize, and corrode space and place as a central feature of the filmography of Cosmopolis’s (2012) adapter David Cronenberg, who has opined in both images and words that: “Technology is us. There is no separation.” Videodrome (1983) marks the apotheosis, and the colonization of human flesh transfuses his adaptations of other transgressive-canon novelists William Burroughs, in 1991’s Naked Lunch, and J. G. Ballard, in 1996’s Crash, while the profluence of discomfiting hybridity is as defining an aspect of Cronenberg’s oeuvre as the term “body horror.”
The imperialistic and colonizing force of a scourge invading a sovereign region, in the case of Cosmopolis, proliferates through a single day in NYC, aka: “the capital of the world” (or the world of capital), serving as an imbricated avatar for postmodernity. Other sovereign regions breached are the human body, mind, and soul, wherein the cancerous invader is post-internet “smart” tech.
DeLillo sets his novel in April 2000, a pre-9/11 NYC, and together these two auteurs constitute a significant position in the discourse charting cultural production as we move into the mid-2020s, two decades hence from Don’s book and a decade since Dave’s art film (in juxtaposition to both mainstream Hollywood “movie” and post-theatrical “content,” but also not quite “avant-garde” or “experimental”). Cosmopolis’s critique of corporatism and gentrification points toward the slow spread, the crawl, the slouch of “cancerousness” that ends in negation. In DeLillo’s proverbial backyard and the most globalist American city/conurbation, within a minimalist novel that all but nullifies emotion, the far-from-everyman protagonist Eric Packer perceives NYC (and the whole world) through windows both literal and figurative: tinted shatterproof windows and digital screens.
These screens multiply and portend in the Cronenberg adaptation, surrounding its protagonist, a narcissus dry-played by Robert Pattinson. Eric Heyne in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction calls Packer a supervillain, and Cristina Garrigós, also in that journal, perpends the character’s unconscious Freudian death drive. I don’t see Packer as antihero, neither in the sense of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man nor Breaking Bad’s Walter White. He’s not root-for-able or oppressed, marginalized or suicidal. In Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Martina Sciolino labels him a “neoliberal antihero” and links his white limousine to both White Noise and whitewashing, but DeLillo and Cronenberg are up to something more perverse – Cosmopolis presents a self-absorbed “unlikable character” billionaire’s complete loss of wealth as a victim narrative, an “American tragedy,” one intuited by Walter Kirn in his April 13, 2003 review in The New York Times that compares it to the most canonical of American literary tragedies; the title of Kirn’s essay: “Long Day’s Journey Into Haircut.”
What interests me is not so much what Kirn calls “the barely corporeal cerebral entities that populate the pages of ‘Cosmopolis,’ a novel about the alleged insanity of Nasdaq-era hypercapitalism,” but how these patterns, mimeses, and reifications read in a post-pandemic era of urban PTSD (the more rural regions of America having barely participated in Covid lockdowns and educational interruptus) to highlight society’s growing amount of time spent perceiving (or failing to perceive) the world through devices – computers, tablets, smartphones, and smartwatches, and soon perhaps VR helmets or goggles.
Cosmopolis reflects the experience of a cancer patient, housed within a corporatized institution, dependent on the biases and whims of authorities, machines, and data. The book and film, poorly reviewed on their initial releases and having gained substantially in reputation since, investigate the individual and the urbane in a time of hyperconnectivity and the fiscal marketization of the human – the now widely known concept that if you’re getting something “for free,” you’re the product.
The minimal plot of Cosmopolis concerns the 27-year-old billionaire’s long limo ride through NYC on an incredibly busy day (navigating thick traffic inside a military-grade armored vehicle as he traffics in international commerce and mercantilism). His putative goal is getting a haircut from the barber he’s been going to since his first shearing – as universal and pre-tech an activity as there is, someone who’s known you since you were a child, regularly and reliably scissoring your hair, the hair that famously “grows even after you’re dead.” By journey’s end, Eric Packer’s on-paper wealth will be erased. The “e-rich” protagonist will have been “unpacked” due to a fatal flaw, a black swan event revolving around the Japanese yen in the book, the Chinese yuan in the film.
The floor of Packer’s limousine, where the majority of the story transpires, is made of “Carrara marble, from the quarries where Michelangelo stood half a millennium ago, touching the tip of his finger to the white stone,” thematizing stasis in a sludgily moving automobile outfitted like both a sleek-shiny tank and a glittering cocoon. At one point, Packer tries to buy the Rothko Chapel, the perfect icon for the collision of modern and premodern institutions. Demolition, rubble, and collapse are thematized as the story maps the confluence of the cybernetic, the terroristic, and the flow (and cessation) of cyber-capital within the “non-place of empire,” as Marie-Christine Leps terms it in Textual Practice, and all this years before the first Bitcoin transaction, Don and Dave (as usual) early to the party.
Cosmopolis takes place almost entirely within Packer’s limousine, an oasis, and like many oases, it’s a mirage. A cancer-free life is also a mirage. This is the root of the round-trip fallacy: inferring from the absence of evidence of an event the conclusion that there’s evidence for the absence of this event. Or: there can be “no evidence of cancer,” but there can never be “evidence of no cancer,” as oncology lacks the ability to scan every single cell in the body. Medical terminology uses the acronym NED (no evidence of disease), but there’s no such thing as END (evidence of no disease). There being “no end” rhymes quite well with the “non-ending” of both the novel and the film.
Fredric Jameson’s dictum that “it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism” is coupled by the designations of a text like Siddhartha Mukherjee’s Pulitzer-capturing The Emperor of All Maladies (2010), with its thesis that cancer is simply better at adapting and surviving than is the human animal. DeLillo has been diagnosing the sickness of capitalism since his 1971 debut, Americana (where he offered a path of flight: the way to survive the suffering that is existence and avoid the “collapse” or “ruin” that Packer endures is to do nothing – “Sit still for years on end and eventually things will begin to revolve around you, ideas and people and wars, depending for their folly and brilliance on that source of light which is human inertia”), but Cosmopolis is unlike many earlier DeLillo texts in that it’s not a dense book full of veering clinamen. It’s part of a cadre of later-period books that depart from the signature mid-period DeLillo style and lean into his earlier, slimmer-volumed, satirical side, as in End Zone (1972) and Great Jones Street (1973).
The narrative of Cosmopolis – understood by Cronenberg and his actors as a minimalist, understated work (especially by Cronenberg’s standards, with gore mostly absent, and when body horror does appear it’s muted, self-imposed, the disfigurement underplayed when, for example, Packer shoots a hole in his own hand) – is steady, predictable, inexorable. Trance-inducing corporate-style capitalism has contributed to our current-day “fatigue society” (to paraphrase another Canadian of note, philosopher Byung-Chul Han), and this has been augmented by narcotizing elements like drugs promoted by Big Pharma, the gamification of romantic relationships (made more disposable by dating apps and social media), parasocial celebrity worship, hyper-self-consciousness and hours spent cultivating the superficial coupled with a lack of internal self, and myriad forms of infinite distraction from the internet. Packer is essentially a bleeding edger (DeLillo’s dystopian antecedent, Thomas Pynchon, his novel of that title pairs proficiently with Cosmopolis) who ends up hoisted on his own cyber-capital petard. Ironic, too, that Cronenberg’s effort here is in the art film genre, despite its A-list stars, and like much of his filmography financed by Library and Archives Canada, an institution within the federal government tasked with acquiring, preserving, and providing accessibility to the documentary heritage of Canada, as well as by an accumulation of non-American producers like France 2 Cinéma, Prospero Pictures (Canada), Alfama Films (France), and distributed by Entertainment One (Canada) and Stone Angels (France).
Screens, then. Screens are radiant and seductive, not to mention infantilizing and addictive. Eric Packer floats through the world – chauffeured in his womb-like limousine, surrounded by casino-like, slot-machine-evoking graphs, charts, videos, and numbers on screens, with his come-and-go underlings as his orchestra – conducting the life and death of capital, thinking wealth has made him immortal. He observes, on screens: streams of financial information, the dead body of a murdered Russian rival, the U.S. president and his motorcade, an environmental catastrophe overseas, his workout-obsessed single-mom chief financial officer Jane Melman and himself having a form of sex (while having his prostate examined by an on-call doctor, he speaks of his yearning to penetrate her with a plastic water bottle while wearing sunglasses; this triggers her orgasm without him touching her, they “reached completion more or less together, touching neither each other nor themselves”) while recording “his face on the screen, eyes closed, mouth framed in a soundless little simian howl,” an image of his heart inside his body, and “his own image” writ large, as well as the eventual plummeting to nothing of his wealth and the fully and literally capitalized message: “A SPECTER IS HAUNTING THE WORLD – THE SPECTER OF CAPITALISM.” The novel’s last line refers to the screen of Packer’s smartwatch as he awaits his last breath, inside an ambulance, assassinated by Benno Levin/Richard Sheets: “He is dead inside the crystal of his watch but still alive in original space, waiting for the shot to sound.”Wealth’s capacity to purchase immortality is a widespread misprision, the alchemist’s and the Silicon Valley baron’s shared dream. The FOMO/YOLO attitude of the hyper-aware and their dubiety regarding scientific facts (the Earth is neither flat nor hollow, the birds are not robots working for the bourgeoise) is everyday proof of this, confirmed by the propagation of artificial intelligence and the term “post-truth.” The machines DeLillo and Cronenberg show Eric Packer literally connected to report financial data while, tellingly, medical machinery affirms the persistence of heartbeats and brain waves, and as Packer’s daily visits from a human physician detect his asymmetrical prostate only when his regular doctor is replaced by a substitute. Packer’s advisors enter and exit his bubble, in which a male human animal is ensconced, encased, and cosseted in a feminine sheath while his security team hovers outside the silo like armed-guard nurses. Via these tenders, Packer engages with the primal forces of life and death – having sex with one of his bodyguards and murdering another.
Cancer, of course, matches this life–death pattern. Cancer proliferates, and cancer kills. It’s better at mastering the balance of the reproductive and the violent than the humans it inhabits. Parasite and the feted films of Bong Joon-ho, a Cronenberg descendent, understand this well.
The form of Cosmopolis is also cancrine. It’s compact, efficient, incredibly adaptable (Cronenberg and cast commit to an anti-realism that is Kubrick-derived and updated for a post-millennial tech-subsumed landscape), but its progress is slow and sinuous, meandering. The book takes its time turning the narrative, like a limousine, or, as President Obama famously stated re: America’s federal government and democracy, it’s “a big oceanliner, it’s not a speedboat.” Cancer weaves its way through blood vessels and lymph nodes, through ventricles and brachia, slithering and slaloming through systems’ deaths before killing its host. Packer’s fate mirrors this, as both book and film navigate fugue states (reminiscent of influences like Burroughs and Ballard and inheritors like Denis Johnson and Jeff VanderMeer), but the plot remains terminal, as death-obsessed as two even more curious predecessors from widely read, NYC-based, era-defining novels.
As Packer’s arrested-development teenager-like tech-finance wunderkind protagonist wonders where the limos go at night, another forlorn New Yorker on a quest, Holden Caulfield, wondered where the ducks go in winter. And as someone whose self-awareness is hyper-focused on surfaces while never developing an interior self, Packer is the evolutionary son of an investment banker/murderer named Patrick Bateman.
Harbingers and arbiters of Cosmopolis’s pro/antagonist portend a figure very much like the confused “is it real, did I actually kill anyone in this book” mindset of Bateman at the end of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991) and the story-ending aspect of the institutionalized, and also confused, Holden Caulfield at the conclusion of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951). At the end of Cosmopolis, knowing he is about to be killed, Packer starts “missing everybody,” like Holden at the end of The Catcher in the Rye, and Cosmopolis’s penultimate line, “This is not the end,” echoes the conclusion of American Psycho: “THIS IS NOT AN EXIT.”
Paul Giamatti and Robert Pattinson
DeLillo’s novel and Cronenberg’s film arrive at the terminus of death in the apartment of Benno Levin. This is stage four, the point at which the patient is sent “home.” Benno is the deathbringer in the killer/dier binary that DeLillo famously explored in Murray Siskind’s remarks to Jack Gladney in White Noise (1985):
I believe, Jack, there are two kinds of people in the world. Killers and diers. Most of us are diers. We don’t have the disposition, the rage or whatever it takes to be a killer. We let death happen. We lie down and die. But think what it’s like to be a killer. Think how exciting it is, in theory, to kill a person in direct confrontation. If he dies, you cannot. To kill him is to gain life-credit. The more people you kill, the more credit you store up. It explains any number of massacres, wars, executions. . . . I’m talking theory. In theory, violence is a form of rebirth. The dier passively succumbs. The killer lives on. What a marvelous equation.
Massive change can happen quickly, but usually it metastasizes. The fatal flaw in both liberal utopianism and conservative free market worship is that mechanization and technology are more fit, more Darwinianly advanced, better built than either political carapace. Armor cannot protect you from cancer because it kills from the inside out.
There’s also no amity that protects you. The corporation is a psychopathology, so it does its killing from the outside in, because money is imaginary, an agreed-upon reality, like the presence or absence of cancer, like what makes someone wealthy “on paper” (though now almost always on screens; Packer signs away his fortune not with a pen but with a touchscreen) but never END, never 100% insulated from a fall, a collapse, from being worth, literally and fiscally, nothing. Benno Levin even compares Packer to Icarus. And how does one destabilize a titan, according to (Cronenberg devotees) Rick and Morty? Do you set all their nukes to target one another? Do you rejigger their space portals to disintegrate their entire space fleet? No, kids, good pitches, but “watch closely as Grandpa topples an empire by changing a one to a zero.”
Cosmopolis reveals not the triumph of the unreal but that the unreal is ever-present and inexhaustible. Packer’s killer’s name is an imagined self, a transformation from olde world to new, from tangible thing to tech, from document to screen (“Benno Levin” etymologizes as “good brightness/shining,” whereas his birth name, “Richard Sheets,” is, effectively, “king paper”), and Eric Michael Packer’s affectless neo-master of the universe acronyms as EMP/ “electromagnetic pulse” (the destructor of telecom) while the supporting characters play their video-game-character-like roles. Why video games? What did Benno love? What made him the madman antagonist? His inability to fully wrap his mind around the fluctuations of a particular currency, the baht (the bot).
A man with a “gentle intelligence,” Benno “loved the baht” and tells Packer, “but your system is so microtimed that I couldn’t keep up with it. I couldn’t find it. It’s so infinitesimal. I began to hate my work, and you, and all the numbers on my screen, and every minute of my life.” You can’t control technology or master cancer, and you can’t alter your cellular construction by changing your name: the “current”(-cy) is irreconcilable with the “infinite”(ssimal).
Like cancer’s uncontrollable reign, technology’s simply better than we are at adapting, so we surround ourselves with people-as-objects, much like Packer does in the novel/film. It’s partly this use of archetypes that frustrated initial reviewers of the novel, like the aforementioned Kirn (“Though Don DeLillo gives his characters names, he might as well just assign them serial numbers . . . on they drone, like Palm Pilots with lips”), though the film makes of DeLillo’s techniques a fully realized rostrum for thespians, and Cronenberg speaks in the DVD featurette “Citizens of Cosmopolis” about how in writing the screenplay he “built” the film “out of the book.” Elise Shifrin, played by Sarah Gadon, is an intelligent heiress who Packer sees as his trophy wife; Didi Fancher, played by Juliette Binoche, is his art consultant and paramour; Ibrahim Hamadou, played by Abdul Ayoola, is the limo’s disfigured-by-torture Sikh driver who lives in New Jersey; André Petrescu, played by Mathieu Amalric, is an avant-garde artist; Richard Sheets/Benno Levin, played by Paul Giamatti, is the former employee who snaps and enacts revenge. Jay Baruchel and Philip Nozuka play a cybersecurity expert and a systems analyst; K’naan plays Packer’s favorite rapper (here Cosmopolis forecasts hip-hop-worshipping Kendall Roy from HBO’s Succession); and Samantha Morton gives the film’s most indelible (and germane) performance as perfectly named Vija Kinsky, Packer’s Slavoj Žižek-esque “chief of Theory.”
Samantha Morton (Vija Kinsky)
Her surrogate mother role is a short film in itself (which patterns a systemic “the future is female” paradigm where masculinity’s dying and femininity’s ascendent) and Cronenberg’s motion picture a monologic adaptation, not just affectless/staccato/cold; invested in stasis, yes, but more a series of intellectual riffs, embodied philosophical and metaphysical eddies. Morton’s iterations come verbatim from the novel and amidst the chilliness of DeLillo’s prose and the logicality and unnaturalness of Cronenberg’s mise-en-scène, her monologue is the apogee. From inside the gridlocked and defaced formerly-snow-white limo she sees a protester outside set himself on fire. “It’s not original,” she deadpans. The self-immolator has meme-ified himself. Meanwhile, the anarchist protesters (the film directly references, as Cronenberg testifies in the director’s commentary, the 2008 economic crisis and 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement that occurred after DeLillo’s book) vandalize Packer’s limo without knowing who’s inside. They’ve crafted an insurgent meme of their own by hijacking the scroll of Manhattan’s building-side tickers to read “A SPECTER IS HAUNTING THE WORLD – THE SPECTER OF CAPITALISM,” an appropriation, and quite an “unoriginal” one, of the opening line of Marx and Engels’s The Communist Manifesto (1848).
Again, Cosmopolis wasn’t initially well-reviewed. Besides Kirn’s pan, Updike in The New Yorker thought that not enough happened, that Packer was too “unsympathetic and bizarre” to be a protagonist, the plot “far-fetched and random,” and the novel lacking the empathy of DeLillo’s earlier books. Film critiques shilled a similar line; Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle: “There’s not really a movie there, nothing that sustains itself from scene to scene and nothing that’s worth watching from beginning to end . . . no build or narrative drive.” To me, this was a classic case of not spinning the hits for one’s readership/cine-fanbase.
Gone were the maximalist “systems novel” prose blocks that made up The Names, White Noise, Libra, Mao II, and Underworld. That five-novel 1982-1991 period is considered vintage DeLillo, but as we emerged from the PTSD-incepting event of the moment, 9/11, the critical consensus was that DeLillo was for once behind the times, no longer the prescient saint of post-history, retreating into more aphoristic forms, the master of the literary exchange and the film-like sequence having just published, in 2001, a tiny novella called The Body Artist (more reminiscent of his frustratingly Beckettian plays than his uniquely immersive, crowd-pleasing, award-winning novels), and right after that Cosmopolis. Reviews of both the book and the film are littered with dismissive references to “minor DeLillo” and “minor Cronenberg.”
Interviewed in Austin American Statesman, Cronenberg spoke to how he was enraptured by Cosmopolis precisely because it reminded him of Beckett, austere and ascetic (not words one would use to describe the five big mid-career DeLillo novels or the Grand Guignol of viscera-drenched horror-genre Cronenberg), not minor but minor key, and his adaptation “an art film that is very demanding.” Both Cosmopolis the film and DeLillo’s later works are about Americans regressing into infantilism, paralyzed by commodification and materialism, thoroughly dehumanized.
Cronenberg’s following feature makes a mirroring point about the opposite coast with his Hollywood-lambasting Maps to the Stars (2014), and critic Mark Kermode has stated that Cosmopolis is a “transitional film” wherein Cronenberg’s fascination turns from body to brain, a fully intellectualized audiovisual text that intentionally nullifies emotion via a sense of glaciation, of looking at everything through a car window. It’s a film of ideas based on a novel of ideas, and in that way DeLillo is consistent across his bibliography. He remains the “ideas man” of American letters, although I’ll argue that Helen DeWitt has made significant incursions as his femme analogue since the publication of her neo-classic The Last Samurai (2000), while Cronenberg’s most viable inheritor may be his literal one, son Brandon, director of Antiviral (2012), Possessor (2020), and Infinity Pool (2023), and his feminist successor may be Palme d’Or-winner for Titane (2021), provocateur Julia Ducournau.
Don DeLillo, 1988. Public domain photo by Bernard Gotfryd, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
The beloved mid-period DeLillo novels are long, dense, sprawling. The later novels are sharper, more focused, more trance-inducing, like late capitalism augmented by the narcotization of Big Pharma, everything from Covid vaccinations misrepresented as miracles to the ongoing opioid epidemic, and also the proliferation of online and IRL “games” that contribute to infinite distraction in the sense of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) or some of David Foster Wallace’s (a DeLillo devotee) better refrains, in both his fiction and essays, about the dangers of the entertainment complex. Cosmopolis is not remotely treatise-like, though. The late DeLillo works – brevities Point Omega (2010) and The Silence (2020), but also longer books Falling Man (2007) and Zero K (2016) – are more poem-like. Fewer words turn the narrative. Amid the negative and middling reviews that accompanied Cosmopolis’s publication in 2003, Blake Morrison is one of the few who got it right, calling it in The Guardian, “More of a prose poem than a novel.” More recently, with his 2020 piece “Full Orchestration” in Music & Literature, Greg Gerke compares the post-Underworld DeLillo novels to the works of painter Gerhardt Richter – narrowing the scope and lessening the detail, “the prose bespeaks doing more with less” – while focusing on unrelatable characters who are more like “a series of moods and morose anthems typifying our rampant egomania.”
Many ultramodern plagues take the form of the cancerous, from the rise of the carceral state to the omnipresence of global surveillance, with a hardcore enviro-anthropocentric view espousing the stance that to our larger ecosystems and geologies, the protogenesis of the genocidal is found in human overpopulation – Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land (2021) is a recent DeLillo-esque meta-novel invested in these environmentalist topics, as is Richard Powers’s The Overstory (2018) – the cancerous domination of a planet by a species unable to curb overharvesting, excavation, clear-cutting, and climate abuse.
In a destabilized political realm, the regular parroting of postmodern tropes takes as given our incapability of objectivity, with things far more likely to stay broken than to mend. A most mainstream manifestation of this was Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century (2005), and an ideation taken to a more extremist fringe was Nic Pizzolatto and Cary Joji Fukunaga’s True Detective, Season One (2014), as fully instantiated a treatise on anti-natalism as we have in the American canons, importing philosophs from Ligotti and Schopenhauer to Deleuze and Cioran, culminating in McConaughey’s brilliant and gif-able embodiment of Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence in Rust Cohle’s notorious “Time is a flat circle” monologues. At multiple points in Cosmopolis, Packer waxes philosophically, even romantically, about the flatness of the screens on which he and his minions manipulate the workings of the world.
Academia largely miscategorized Cosmopolis as well. The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo, in 2008, still grappled with the book as a responder text instead of a premonitory one, though DeLillo would soon become even more prophetic in Zero K where he limns the desire to live forever: cryonics, technoviruses, singularities, virtual immortality, and mass delusions on the menu in that novel. The best example of sharp academic crit I found was published in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, wherein Randy Laist nimbly argues that yes, Cosmopolis is DeLillo’s first post-9/11 novel, but it’s more notable in unveiling Packer as “a monolithic symbol of global economic hegemony.” Laist brings in commentaries on 9/11 by Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio not to muse about fundamentalist terrorist attacks targeting Western Civilization but to “suggest a theoretical context for understanding the manner in which DeLillo portrays Eric’s psychological collapse and the collapse of the World Trade Center as eerie analogues of one another, both indicating suicidal tendencies in the heart of homo technologicus.”
Such mangling and self-obliterating tendencies are the lifeblood of Cronenberg’s late period, inaugurated with 2005’s A History of Violence and continued via heavily tattooed Russian mobsters (Eastern Promises, 2007), the invention of psychology (A Dangerous Method, 2011), the exploitative corruptions of the entertainment complex (Maps to the Stars, 2014), and the future-world surgeries of underground augmenters (Crimes of the Future, 2022). As these films herald what Sara Eddleman calls, in Queen’s Journal of Visual & Material Culture, “the postmodern turn in Cronenberg’s cinema: possibility in bodies,” a reflection on the predecessors of literary modernism and naturalism can prove fruitful as well, especially for a novelist whose works have been deemed, by Paul Giaimo in his book Appreciating Don DeLillo, “neither modern nor postmodern.”
Carving out contemporary context for Cosmopolis, Ben Jeffery discloses in his 2014 piece “Foes of God” for lit mag The Point, “To the capitalist’s eyes, New York exists in a state of perpetual decay. No sooner does his gaze rest on some piece of technology – handheld phones, guns, cash registers, even the dazzling skyscrapers of the city’s post-industrial economy – than it seems to rot into obsolescence. Indeed, you can see epochs melting into one another in the structure of the story itself, which layers futuristic fantasies and pop-culture clichés over the bones of an ancient warning about idolatry and greed.” Consider this conception of decay applied to the last century or so in art and literature.
As far back as Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) we find a precursor for Cosmopolis near the beginning of Section 7/“Aeolus,” within a novel very much concerned with a slow march through a city paralleling a funeral rite, and though the cosmopolis there is Hibernian, the funerary cortege is unspooled thusly: “This morning the remains of the late Mr. Patrick Dignam. Machines. Smash a man to atoms if they got him caught. Rule the world today. His machineries are pegging away too. Like those, got out of hand: fermenting. Working away, tearing away. And that old grey rat tearing to get in.”
The imagery of rot and rat is hard not to see bellwethered through Cosmopolis, which opens with an epigraph by Zbigniew Herbert, “a rat became the unit of currency,” a phrase that also appears, capitalized, on a screen in Packer’s limo. Cronenberg’s adaptation features a regular deployment of murine imagery while presenting a luxury automobile as the ultimate maze rat, its own downfall pre-engineered, gnawing its way around at a creeping pace in that famously rodent-infested conglomeration of five boroughs.
DeLillo, at the press conference for Cosmopolis, seated beside Cronenberg on the dais, speaks of how claustrophobic he felt while writing the novel and states:
When I saw the film, it was all new, despite the fact that much of the dialogue should have been familiar to me. The book is here, the film is there, they’re two very different lifeforms. I wasn’t looking at images from my novel, I was looking at actors speaking lines. And it was compelling. I was struck by the fact, although in a way not surprised, that David did not move action out of the limousine into other, broader, environments for the “cinematic” sake of varying scenes. In fact, he brought at least one scene out of another environment into the limousine. Only Cronenberg could do this. And I ought to add, though nobody asked, the titles, that begin the film and end the film, are absolutely beautiful.
Don says that they’re the primary reason he wants to rewatch the film, which garners a series of chuckles from the room, before correctly identifying said titles as works by Rothko and Pollock, the pinnacles of American abstract expressionism, and the locus of the shift from modernist to postmodernist visual art.
For American naturalist texts to pair with Joyce’s evocation of rats, machines, and the death march in Ulysses, there are Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer (both 1925), or look farther back to Frank Norris’s pivotal fin de siècle novel The Octopus (1901), in which the engine of capitalism (the railroad) always has the supernal right of way. The limousine as DeLillo and Cronenberg’s updated modality of intrepid naturalism and obscene-but-extinguishable wealth would please Norris tremendously. Predestined and fated. Inexorable. Determinism codified. Cosmopolis incarnates an octopoid entity, a nameless, opaque, individuality-obscuring vessel, a beast slouching toward death, not birth, toward cultural and literal bankruptcy, toward Bernie Madoff and Martin Shkreli and Sam Bankman-Fried, toward both Elizabeth Holmes’s Theranos and Marvel’s Thanatos. And maybe eventually even chugging toward Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, and European Unions (or non-unions), and NFTs and BRICS and cryptocurrencies and other cyber-capitalistic fates yet to be determined.
Works Cited
Cosmopolis. Directed by David Cronenberg. Entertainment One DVD, 2012.
Cronenberg, David. “Metaphor Man: Interview with Rob Blackwelder.” SPLICEDwire, 14 Apr 1999. https://splicedwire.com/features/cronenberg.html
DeLillo, Don. Americana. Penguin, 1989.
DeLillo, Don. Cosmopolis. Scribner, 2003.
DeLillo, Don. White Noise. Penguin, 1986.
Duvall, John N. (John Noel), ed. The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
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Unless otherwise noted, all images are screenshots from the film.
