A Film Canon

Cosmopolis is based very closely on Don DeLillo's novella, which describes the ruminations and reflections of a 28-year old billionaire who journeys across Manhattan, in his limousine, to get a haircut. Although the screenplay's penned by Cronenberg, it's pretty much just a series of excerpts from DeLillo's novel - and, at that level, buys into a slightly tiresome exercise in the exquisite aesthetic agony of cybercapitalists, or a capitalist realist insistence that it's only the 1% who can properly philosophise and theorise how things really are. As a result, the whole film's shot through with cybercapitalist ideology - characters, or more accurately, mouthpieces, performing a series of rote, mechanical observations on their own shallowness and ideological disingenuity. At one level, this works quite well with Pattinson's adolescent self-absorption, his heightened awareness that he's delivering lines, or that he simply knows his lines. It is tedious, though, and what turns boredom into something more like a mild narcotic, is Cronenberg's response to the aesthetic challenge at the heart of DeLillo's vision - how do you represent a city, or a world, in which money has ceased to exist? At the most basic level, Cronenberg's answer is to divest the film of anything resembling absolute movement. All movement in this universe is comparative, and so most scenes are shot through with the mild queasiness of not quite being able to identify what's moving and what's not. It's movement without movement, creating a kind of distributed, pulsating luminosity that feels like capital finally catching up with abstract expressionism, specifically with Pollock and Rothko's prophecies of what capital - and New York capital - might eventually be: "money has lost its narrative, the way painting once did". But this approach is also, simply, scientifically accurate - it's just the general principle of relativity - so there really is something universal, cosmic about the film's scope, a real sense that the 1% are a new or alien species, peculiarly sensitive to the space-time continuum, and therefore capable of fusing themselves with the fabric of the universe in a terrifyingly unimaginable and unprecedented way. That means that they also fuse themselves with the fabric of the film, with its own aphoristic insularity - and, along with A Dangerous Method, it's part of Cronenberg's wider movement towards being a director of conversation - with the result that the film feels less like a depiction of a cosmopolis than an actual cosmopolis, less an exercise in generating capital than a radical, disarming attempt to simply be capital.