Cosmopolis/DeLillo/Filmic Violence

First take on Cronenberg's Cosmopolis. Heard a lot about this film at the DeLillo conference back in April.
A lot of the commentary predictably and compellingly focused on the film/novel's invocation of global technocapitalism and its discontents, focusing with particular urgency on the protest scene at the film/novel's center, as well as the protagonist's self-destructive drive to self-immolate through a radically risky bet on the Japanese yen (the third most traded currency in the foreign exchange market, per wikipedia). Many of the film's reviews, such as this excellent one in Salon, emphasize the same themes. While I see these themes undeniably active in the film, and also well in keeping with the themes circulating around post-08 capitalism, I also think the film version does a good deal to emphasize the novel's violence, beginning with the grisly public assassination of an IMF official live on television. The blood gushing out of that official's eye prefigures the abrupt gunshot that Pattinson's Packer uses to kill his bodyguard and ultimately the tense, violent exchange between Packer and Benito Levin.

What difference, then, does putting Cosmopolis to film make? Many of Cronenberg's reviewers spend a lot of time talking about how faithful he is to DeLillo's text: he makes few significant changes, aside from rerouting some dialog from Packer's head into conversation. For the most part, the film is meticulously adherent to the novel, radically unlike Cronenberg's take on Naked Lunch. But in transfer to film, of course, the narrative changes, and I would argue that one of the most startling areas of change lies with the novel's violence.

Because this is the first filmed version of a DeLillo novel, it foregrounds the long association in DeLillo's work between violence and film, most centrally with the Zapruder film in Libra, Underworld, and the American Blood essay (as well as with the Frank Volterra character in The Names and David Bell in Americana). DeLillo has written and spoken about the influence of assassination and Zapruder film on his work, and in the following I want to call attention to the way this original piece of filmic violence emerges in Cosmopolis's own filmic violence. The physical representation of this violence, juxtaposed with the self-conscious conversation that Levin and Packer have at the end, serves to disrupt the uneasy association between abstraction and violence, the continual, difficult question that DeLillo explores: how and why does violence become a useful way to overcome the anxieties of postmodernity, to assert a meaningful identity in the context of forces that would erase such identity? But when the violence appears onscreen, particularly in a Cronenberg movie, it can no longer serve as an abstraction: the film enters into the very media world that DeLillo has long critiqued, by virtue of the very visual imagery deployed by Cronenberg. I raise these issues not to criticize Cronenberg's use of violence, since his oeuvre has repeatedly queried the filmic deployment of violence, and often seems in self-conscious dialog with filmmakers who use violence more instrumentally. Rather, I assert that DeLillo's violence become something different onscreen, and that experiencing its physicality alters, at least in part, DeLillo's long fascination with the irruption of violence through the medium of film. Cosmopolis self-consciously engages the troubling confusion of filmic violence with transcendence (an argument the book itself seemingly takes up as well). Moreover, the filmed version of Cosmopolis represents, in some ways, a return to the scene of violence that DeLillo claims created him as a writer: the Kennedy assassination and its famous filming.

Cosmopolis has multiple parallels with the Zapruder film: Both films focus on a limousine. The limo's slow crawl across the city mimics the way the Zapruder film is often seen, in slow motion.The film contains within itself a filmed assassination, of the IMF officialPacker expects his own assassination, to the point that when Torval points out a "threat level," Packer presumes it applies to him, not to the real U.S. president visiting New York.  The film's climatic moment concerns an encounter between a deranged loner and a powerful man. Even Packer's destination, to get a "haircut," recalls Kennedy's decapitation, given the long history of linguistic jokes about haircuts and decapitations. In a larger sense, the scenes of Packer intact in his limo as an anti-capitalist riot occurs outside invites questions of Kennedy's opposite vulnerability, and the rigid barriers between power and people that are a legacy of the assassination. . Even the "faux assassination," involving a pie-thrower, echoes the roughing up of Adlai Stevenson in the months before the Kennedy assassination.

Of course, describing the up-to-the-minute Cosmopolis in terms of the half-century-old Kennedy assassination seems a bit anachronistic; the former has its protagonist complaining about the "old-fashioned" terms "skyscraper" "ATM machine" and "office," while reveling in the hyperfast exchanges of capital on dozens of tiny screens, while the latter, while framed justifiably as the "first postmodern event" (Jameson), is nevertheless recorded on Kodachrome II 8 mm safety film and takes place not in a start of the art "Prousted" stretch limousine, but in a 1961 Lincoln Continental, admittedly upgraded to serve as a "presidential limousine." The Zapruder film seems to have reached a kind of apotheosis in Oliver Stone's JFK, though continuing to circulate through both art and conspiracy theory cultures.

But there's no doubt at all that the Zapruder film is central to DeLillo's work. DeLillo not only uses the film throughout Libra, he also talks about it extensively in one interview and features it prominently in Underworld. If Cosmopolis overtly concerns global capital and its discontenteds, it is, like Libra, intricately concerned with the assassination of powerful men; threats to Packer keep recurring, and if DeLillo firmly establishes the assassination as a form of meaning-making in Libra, this idea also courses through the latter text.

The Zapruder film is more or less synonymous with filmic violence: Zapruder himself claims to have had a nightmare in which he saw a billboard in Times Square reading "See the President's head explode." In reading Cosmopolis as a kind of extended meditation on the Zapruder film, multiple vectors around the film emerge: its focus on mediation, privilege, and distance; the intersection between the what Slavoj Zizek calls "structural violence" of capitalism itself and the more immediate, subjective violence of assassination. As Mark Osteen has demonstrated, the idea of the rat as currency comes from Zbigniew Herbert, who frames it as "expos[ing] the vanity of wealth and asserting against it the fact of mortality." The Zapruder film was almost immediately commodified, sold to Time/Life, before becoming the most expensive piece of film ever sold. Violence and commodification are intricately bound up in Cosmopolis, then.

DeLillo has never been a bloody writer; he is no Cormac McCarthy or Burroughs. Even when DeLillo describes overt violence, as he does in Cosmopolis, his work seldom functions as visceral; the famously detached language, his focus on sociological and philosophical abstraction, the very themes of his work (The Names isn't about murder, nor is Libra about an assassination) divert readers' eyes from any actual violence. The same cannot be said for Cronenberg, of course, most of whose opus has concerned violence in one way or another, and who has worked the theme with particular intensity in a pair of films from the mid-aughts, A History of Violence and Eastern Promises. Whereas another filmmaker, then, might choose to cut away from either the stabbing death of the IMF official or the gunshot to Torval, Cronenberg gives these scenes a visual intensity that sharply contrasts the film's otherwise deadness (much has been made of the intersection between Cosmopolis and Pattinson's more famous role).

Within the register of DeLillo's work, violence serves a role that is not quite redemptive, but nevertheless is set in opposition to the banality of mass culture. In her wide-ranging meditation on the depiction of cruelty, Maggie Nelson observe a distinction between "benumbing banality" and "unthinkable, rupturing calamity," with the representation of the latter serving as a kind of truth (42). Throughout her work, Nelson seeks to complicate such easy oppositions, and certainly DeLillo does not draw such easy oppositions. Nevertheless, the showdown between Jack Gladney and Mr. Gray in White Noise features some sense of Gladney cutting through the "white noise" of consumer culture to something real, and Nick Shay's nostalgic memories of the Bronx, set in opposition to the overriding "waste" of present-day Underworld, are also connected with an act of violence. One could continue: Libra seems to privilege the "man on the slab" over the false representations of Oswald. It is no surprise, then, that in Cosmopolis, the immediate, or real, has similar associations with violence: Packer, hungry all day for sex and food, identifies his immediate scene with the barbershop of his youth, a barbershop in which Packer is handed a gun by the barber (and, one might add, shaved with the same kind of razor that kills several characters in Eastern Promises).