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).

Great piece on rise New Right, postmodernism, Lot 49

Nicely historicizes Lot 49, rightly figures New Right as postmodern phenomenon by reading traces of Southern California rise NR in Pynchon's novel:

http://journals.ohiolink.edu.ezproxy.libraries.wright.edu:2048/ejc/pdf.cgi/Shoop_Casey.pdf?issn=15489949&issue=v53i0001&article=51_tppatrotnric

Zero history, antibranding, effective masculinity

Reading Gibson's Zero History, the third in his "Blue Ant" trilogy, which have as their topics international intrigue, but of the postgovernment marketing variety.The landscape here is effectively meaningless in that no governments will be overthrown, no peoples oppressed or unoppressed, no secret technologies will be revealed or hidden. Instead, nearly all of the novel's energies concern branding and trademarks: the wild schemes put in place here, making use of private drones, camera-fooling t-shirts, and "darknets" ("Deep. Very deep.") all have at their root a struggle between warring designers, though one of those designers happens to also be a military supplier/glorified gunrunner.

The plot concerns two quests initiated by Hubertus Bigend: first, the identification of the "Gabriel Hounds" designer (who turns out to be Cayce Pollard) and second, finding a design for military uniforms, what Bigend describes as "the only stable market in this economy," and which the book positions as intricately linked with conventional fashion, the idea being that midcentury men's fashion was heavily influenced, and continues to be influenced, by American military styles, but that now such styles have become part of a feedback loop, whereby fashion also influences the military.

I'm most fascinated by the cultural thread Gibson applies to "mall ninjas," whom Bigend describes as:

Young men who dress to feel they'll be mistaken for having special capability. A species of cosplay, really. Endemic. Lots of boys are playing soldier now. The men who run the world aren't, and neither are the boys most effectively bent on running it next. Or the ones who're actually having to be soldiers, of course. But many of the rest have gone gear-queer, to one extent or another. [...] It's an obsession with the idea not just of the right stuff, but of the special stuff. The costume and semiotics of achingly elite police and military units. Intense desire to possess same, of course, and in turn to be associated with that world. With its competence, its cocksure exclusivity" (213).

Bigend's comments bind tightly to the object-fetishization coursing through Gibson's recent work, which serves for his characters as the full locus of agency: these are characters whose actions are subsumed beneath their clothing, who are, in some fundamental way, their Hounds denim jacket or Buzz Rickson MA-1 indistinguishable from their effectiveness in the world. Part of Gibson's point seems to be that consumer goods, in the Network Society, substitute for identity, or serve as some overdetermined site of meaning, connection to larger systems (the military, in this case), and occupation: all the truths of the old order.

My interest here lies with thee men, who adopt some sense of not just who they are, but of how the world works (the men with cocksure efficiency, and their capacity to be such). It's fascinating that this occurs, too, in the context of the book's crisscrossing logics of secret brands, antibrands. Gibson repeatedly reminds us that brands matter intensely to their possessors. The intense layers of desire figured through otaku haunt everything here. This works well with the Birchall/Fenster point about conspiratorial cultures and the market, how a political orientation can be consumed like everything else. And doubtless there's more here, too, because we're all the way back to the mad subcultures of The Crying of Lot 49, the collector of Nazi parapheniala. All these things give their owners a sense of presence in the world, a rootedness in history.

Not sure whether Gibson is critiquing or reinforcing consumer cultures, or doing something else altogether. Certainly, collecting is different, in some sense, than consuming. But the question of Cayce, revealed as the Hounds designer, is tangled. On the one hand, she serves as a counter to the increasingly disposable, temporary, flighty manifestations of consumer culture: antibranding, and the historical quality fetish that Cayce embodies, certainly resists the complicated marketing logics of instafashion. On the other hand, the anti-label, should be quality idea has long been a staple of the upper class, and works with the cosmopolitan elite class that Cayce/Hollis occupies.

Redeployment house

At the end of "Critically Queer," her account of the often unsubversive possibilities of drag as a result of their being framed within the limiting citationality of gender norms, Butler asks whether the drag documentary Paris is Burning might have a role to play in redeploying or reforming gender norms. In doing so, Butler veers (as is her habit) from the film's central topic--drag shows--and instead focuses on the alternate forms of domesticity depicted in the film "it is in the reformulation of  kinship, in particular, the redefining of the 'house' and its forms of collectivity, mothering, mopping, reading, and becoming of legendary, that the appropriation and redeployment of the categories of dominant culture enable the formation of kinship relations that function quite supportively as oppositional discourse" (622). In so doing, she imagines that the house might genuinely rework gender and sexual norms by acknowledging its "[implication] in the very relations of power it seeks to rival" while remaining "[irreducible] to those dominant forms" (623). I'm intrigued by the way Butler here imagines a refigured domesticity as a site of resistance, but also by the implication that domesticity operates itself by citing norms. This has implications, for the refigured domesticity of the small room and its alternates, as depicted by Lee in Native Speaker; the small room in the father's house is, in some sense, queered, and as such denatures the authorized small room of power.

Thackeray amongst men

Amongst men:

"Thackeray's bachelors created or resinscribed as a personality type one possible path of response to teh strangulation of homosexual panic, their basic strategy is easy enough to trace: a preference of atomized male individualism to the nuclear family (and a corresponding demonization of women, especially mothers); a garrulous and visible refusal of anything that could be interpreted as genital sexuality, toward objects male or female; a corresponding emphasis on the other senses; and a well-defended social facility that freights with a good deal of magnetism its proneness to parody and to unpredictable sadism" (Sedgwick 525).

An open sky of one's own

Rereading Woolf's A Room of One's Own for my theory seminar. First, it's a delightful essay: Woolf neatly mirrors abstract argument and embodied journey, walking her readers through the British Museum, where her quixotic distance from male influence takes shape in her caricatured doodle of Professor Von X and her catty disdain for the researcher next to her, even as she recognizes their unwarranted superiority over her and other women. But the lively part, for my purposes, lies with her discussion of money, and how it frees her to see an open sky instead of a statue. Male knowledge, here and elsewhere, is figured as ordered, organized by looming statues that warp and bend the space around them, creating their own aura of authority. It's facile, perhaps, but that's just what conspiracy theory makes visible: the urgent desire to be meaningful, to represent one's knowledge as essential firmament, when it is, in truth, as arbitrary as the strained logic of conspiracy. Woolf sets the statue in contrast to the unstriated open sky, a space without division or hierarchy. For all her urging about private room, this essay revels in open spaces, spaces where movement is unimpeded.

Boxwood grove as small room

In my chapter on Don DeLillo and Chang Rae Lee, I emphasize the small room as a site of masculine reinforcement, a site where gender hierarchies are ordered against the perceived disorder of postmodernity. I've written here, in the context of Roth's American Pastoral how the small room can be imbued with feminine energy as well; in Roth's work, Merry's terrorist cell becomes not, as it is for Oswald, a locus of masculine affirmation, but of a threatening, semiotic femininity, a femininity that utterly refuses patriarchy, within the designified realm of the counterculture's excesses.

Toni Morrison's Beloved contains yet another type of small room, one that indeed reinforces identity, but does so in the context of both the natural and the feminine. Lonely and isolated, pummeled by the "hurt of the world," Morrison's Denver takes refuges in a boxwood grove that functions as a room:

First a playroom (where the silence was softer), then a refuge (from her brothers' fright), soon the place became the point. In that bower, closed off from the hurt of the hurt world, Denver's imagination produced its own hunger and its own food, which she badly needed because loneliness wore her out. Wore her out. Veiled and protected by the live green walls, she felt ripe and clear, and salvation was as easy as a wish (35).

Morrison emphasizes the way the grove becomes a kind of Bachelardian anchor for Denver, keeping her identity intact in the face of the multiple forces that would destroy it, which would include the violent legacy of enslavement (which takes shape as her mother murdering her sister), as well as the rejection heaped on Denver and family by the community. So the grove, like the small room, serves to reinforce Denver against the storms raging around her. And yet, this room bears no connection to wider networks of power; Denver does not identify with imaginary women or men elsewhere.

Still, though, Morrison positions the grove as part of a wider state of dysfunction at work in post-murder, pre-reconciliation 124. In this sense, the grove serves both as a figure for isolation and an artificial differentiation from the enveloping domestic energies of the house. Moreover, Denver frames her subjectivity in terms of mystical forces, which offer something of the same kind of false-transcendence/connection proffered by conspiracy theory:

None of them knew the downright pleasure of enchantment, of not suspecting but knowing the things behind things. Her brothers had known, but it scared them. Grandma Baby knew, but it saddened her. None could appreciate the safety of ghost company. Even Sethe didn't love it. She just took it for granted--like a sudden change in the weather (45).

As it does for Oswald and others, "knowing the things behind things" offers a compensatory affirmation for Denver's character. Denver fills the void left by the loss of community and mother by both fleeing to small room and figuring herself as occupying a separate social realm from the rest of the community. Of course, Morrison is working in a much different tradition than DeLillo, Lee, or Roth, and yet I wonder what she's pointing toward with grove and ghost. What response to terror and paralysis is figured here? Might Morrison be pointing to a tendency toward mysticism and/or isolation in an African American context? This does beg the question of whether such rooms are too common to serve as tropes. And yet, they're each invested with a very particular energy which concerns individual and self.