COSMOPOLIS - a short review

If a city may be thought of as a body because it moves to some internal beat, then the city, its people and its waste is the viscera strewn outside a pristine interior space in which much of the activity and dialogue occurs in Cronenberg's latest film Cosmopolis (2012). That main space, simultaneously a virtuality, a coffin, or exoskeleton that protects the Billionaire Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson) is a luxury twenty two foot stretched limousine in which he slowly rides as it makes its way across Manhattan. I call this interior space of the limousine virtual because it all but cuts off Packer from the outside world of fragmented reality seen through his car window all the while being totally absorbed in a world of computer screens, virtual cash, information data and the fulfillment of his own personal fantasies that include a desire to engage in philosophical speculation, have illicit sex and purchase the unobtainable Rothko Chapel. The Chapel, which houses fourteen canvasses by the Russian born abstract artist Mark Rothco is considered an intimate sanctuary for private meditation and is akin to Packer's private and inviolate space of the limousine protected from the protestors outside it who rally against the invasion of rats and the demise of humanity through capitalism. A previous David Cronenberg’s film Crash, not only engages with the notion of what J.G. Ballard called 'the spectres of sinister technologies’;and the 'death of affect',but also with a desire to achieve an intense or ecstatic state of embodiment. The bodies of the individuals have been anaesthetized and desensitized to horror through the bombardment of information and images by the media, resulting in a closing down of emotional responses to sex and death. Paradoxically, Crash reveals that it is through images of horror that life itself is heightened. This is also true in Cosmopolis for Packer, who owns almost everything, appears detached from ordinary life, his wife and his sexual escapades and so when his business begins to fail in the hours that we are witnessing him, he begins a journey that is about reconnecting to flesh and opening himself up to horror; for it is only in this way that he can experience something that money can't buy. His downfall (if you like) is heralded in the scene in which the Occupy-like demonstrators defile his limo with graffiti. This is a philosophical tale that references some of Cronenberg's earlier films. Packer's 'asymmetrical prostate' (is discovered when his doctor performs an examination on him in his limousine) allows us to recall the fact that Cronenberg’s films the human body is almost always mutant. However, Packer's mutant state is not that his prostate is asymmetrical, but that he is obsessed with death - 'we die everyday' he says to one of the visitors to his car.I found Cosmopolis to be engaging, philosophical, thought provoking, stylish and elegant - Cronenberg refined. However, it may only appeal to those willing to listen carefully to the dialogue.