Cosmopolis,
the latest film from Canadian auteur David Cronenberg, may seem like an unusual
film when one delves into it head-on, but it is in fact a continuation of one
of the director’s favoured subject matter. Like Vittorio de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, it could be said that
this film has a very basic story: man wants haircut. However, whereas de Sica’s
film was a view into the realities and horrors felt by Italians living on the
losing side of a post-war world, Cronenberg is more interested in the realities
and horrors of a world so unified with technology that the separation of the
two becomes a near impossibility and the attempt to do so becomes a crime.
In
order to fully grasp this particular film, one must go backwards in
Cronenberg’s filmography, back to 1983’s Videodrome,
where Cronenberg began his cinematic obsession with technology which could
replace humans. In Videodrome, Max
Renn, played by James Woods, becomes obsessed with a program whose signal is
discovered by his co-worker. It turns out that this signal is a tumour-causing,
hallucination-inducing virus which causes difficulty in telling the difference
between reality and this hallucinatory sub-reality. While this virus causes
difficulty in this particular arena, it is still readily combatable, leading to
its seeming defeat with the cries of “death to Videodrome (long live the New
Flesh)”. This virus may pervade the social reality and make it difficult to
differentiate between the real and the sub-real, but it is a weak substitute
for the real world, at least compared to what comes later. After all, the virus
travels by videotape and while the television signals can pervade the human
mind, the plastic of the tape is weak. This weakness was remedied over a decade
later in Cronenberg’s 1999 film eXistenZ,
which brings the real and the sub-real even closer by introducing virtual
reality. While the Videodrome was plastic, the gaming system tranCendenZ, which
contains the game eXistenZ, is a fleshy, receptive, seemingly-living creature.
Videodrome’s death would lead to a new life for flesh and here it was. While
Videodrome was hallucinatory, tranCendenZ or eXistenZ or wherever our heroes
happen to be goes way past that. Even when the characters, who are unfortunate
enough to be trapped in this sub-reality, realize that their reality is not
real, it is impossible to escape. Even Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh),
the woman “responsible” for the creation of eXistenZ, has trouble escaping the
virtual reality game as her real reality has become as artificial as the game.
Of course, it is revealed that what Geller believed to be her reality was
actually at least two layers of reality below the actual reality (that is to
say, the “real world” was a sub-reality of tranCendenZ, which was hinted to be
a sub-reality itself). This virtual reality world was a clear precursor to
where Cronenberg would go more than a decade later.
If
you are still left wondering what the last paragraph and its summaries have to
do with anything, here it is. Cosmopolis
is a continuation of Cronenberg’s obsession with the sub-reality and its
further and further advance into the real world. While Videodrome was a weak,
plastic substitute, eXistenZ and its various higher levels became stronger and
more flesh-based. Now, almost thirty years since the release of Videodrome, sub-reality is no longer
separate from humanity. Not only has sub-reality pervaded the flesh, it has
pervaded our flesh and become a part of us. This is not mere science-fiction.
This is our new society. Rather than the videotape or the virtual world, this
is a substitute for the internet and the social media that is a by-product of
it. The internet has allowed everyone to create several online identities,
distinct from one’s own flesh and blood identity. While a human walks around,
he or she continues to build a character in a variety of online world,
including, but not limited to, facebook, twitter, reddit, etc., where one can
exaggerate or plainly lie about various qualities attributed to one’s self.
This, however, results in a loss of reality of the self. Instead of videotapes
or multi-layered virtual worlds, society is being destroyed by the members of
society themselves. In the world portrayed in Cosmopolis, people are so sheltered from their surroundings that
they no longer have personalities. They simply sit in their metal coffins and
“live”, protected from anything that could harm their fragile sensibilities.
Simply put, the real world has become a sub-reality and vice versa. Nothing is
real anymore. This becomes clear throughout the film in so many instances. Life
takes place within a limousine. People converse in clichéd, pre-written
dialogue, which masks its own shallowness by using large, self-important words.
Everyone in the world is a success, because the unsuccessful are simply tinted
out of view. Even sex has become artificial, as a husband and wife must sit
down and discuss plans to have sex in the distant future, an idea which seems
to almost disgust the wife, who has better things to do. The husband must
instead seek out no-genitals-shown sex with prostitutes with fake breasts and
fake orgasms. Even the way that the film is presented to the viewer, with
distorted close-ups and shots of television screens and windows which cannot be
differentiated from each other, presents its subjects as cartoon characters,
mere avatars for ideas that seem to be presented in the void of this “perfect”
union of reality and sub-reality. What makes this sub-reality more dangerous
than the sub-realities in the two earlier films is the fact that this
sub-reality has invaded the human flesh and has stopped any differentiation
between the two. While a dualism existed in the two earlier films, there is no
dualism here, merely humans, their penetrated flesh.
While
the film clearly attacks its subjects for going into this mindless, emotionless
sub-reality without a struggle, a large amount of the scorn is saved for one particular
group: the protestor. In this world, the most pitiable creature is the
protestor, because the protestor does not realize that he/she is part of the
sub-reality itself. The protestors believe that they are going against the
sub-real world, by opposing the tenets of the society around them: essentially
capitalism and all of its results, mainly corporations and ridiculous amounts
of money. However, the protestors themselves are part of the sub-reality, going
along with the predestined reality, where they believe that they are making a
difference, while simply doing what they are supposed to do. There are three
forms of protest in this film. The first comes when the group of “anarchists”
attack Eric Packer’s limousine, throwing rats and defacing the outside of the
car. As Vija Kinsky (Samantha Morton) mentions, the motto of the modern anarchist
(“the destructive act is a creative urge”) can very easily apply to capitalism
itself, which must destroy to create. These “anarchists”, with their
rat-flinging ways, are doing nothing. They are attacking a limousine simply
because it is a limousine (it is mentioned that they are not aware that Packer
is in the car). Even if they knew that Packer was in the car, along with his
theory advisor (Kinsky), they would only be attacking a cog in the machine, the
figure-head, but a cog nonetheless. He is simply the image fed to the masses of
what capitalism means. Packer is simply a spoiled child with only a fragment of
knowledge about the bigger picture, because he is, after all, trapped in this
sub-reality with the rest of us. He is also on his way out, because this new
society deals in two things: rats and age. Age plays an important role in the
bigger picture. Two characters in the film state their ages as 41: one has
become a prostitute, the other has gone insane and both were once powerful. 22
is a golden age, where one can have power, but must start to think about
retirement. Packer, at the age of 28, is already aware of his imminent
downfall. The horror of this does not come from the science-fiction world of Logan’s Run, but rather from the fact
that our new sub-reality does in fact deal in age. No one is successful, unless
he or she accumulates billions before the age of 30.
The
second form of protest is just as inane as the first, but more self-aware. Romanian
“terrorist” (or whatever his designation would be) Andre Petrescu has a new
form of protest. He attacks famous people (this is the essential designation,
as his previous attacks included Michael Jordan, a man with no power in the
grander scheme of things) by throwing pies in their faces and then stands
around to get beaten up and photographed. This is the modern protestor. In the
1960s, people would get shot at protests and yet they would place themselves in
front of the guns, for a cause. Today’s protestor has no underlying cause,
other than to show himself or herself to a mass audience and creator a
martyr-like legend of the self. In this sub-reality, the protest has already
become about the singular rather than the collective. Each protestor is now an
individual, hoping to get beaten and turned into a symbol. Their weapons range
from pies to stones to words, but they still do not realize that they are still
stuck in the sub-reality.
The
third method of protest is the only effective one and yet it is one that is not
often attempted and even less accepted. Only two people in the film attempt
this method, because it is a difficult method. The first step is to realize
that you are in fact in a sub-reality. In Videodrome,
this could be accomplished by differentiating between hallucination and reality
and in eXistenZ, it was about
differentiating between the virtual world and the real world. Here, it is a
more complex differentiation between various levels of reality. Packer only
realizes where he is because of the death of Brother Fez, which brings him
feelings that were previously mysterious to him. It was not just the death that
brought him back, but the method of death. In the sub-reality, “natural causes”
are not natural. In the sub-reality people can only die of shootings and
televised facial stabbings. Just like the news of our world, natural causes do
not exist. Packer can only come back to reality, break through his metal coffin
and see the world through natural means. The only other person who can protest
the sub-reality by leaving it is Benno Levin, a mysterious character in his own
sense. He is visible in the sub-real world and he has not gone into hiding. He
can be seen in the background in at least one sequence and he is seen by Packer,
showing that there must be some kind of unexplainable connection between them.
Benno, as he prefers to be called, used to work for Packer until he realized
the absurdity of the day-to-day world around him and decided to become Benno
and leave the sub-real world. It is also suggested that Benno could only leave
the sub-real world, because he has gone crazy. In other words, insanity is a
prerequisite to living freely in the real world (if such a thing can be found
anymore). Benno has become a prophet-like individual who realizes the pretences
of the world around him and has grown to hate all of them, again making the
mistake of the first two protestors, thinking that taking out the figure-head
will solve the world’s problems. Packer himself has only recently discovered
these pretences and it is implied that he has begun an ill-fated mission to get
himself out of this world before it is too late. Of course, this is a world
that cannot allow people to leave, stopping them by labelling them, threatening
them or inadvertently killing them, no matter how hard they try or how much
they learn. After all, Packer is most likely killed by Benno soon after his
revelation. This man who, all in one day, has killed his protection and
experienced real pain, perhaps for the first time, by shooting himself through
the hand, has tears in his eyes before his death. Packer, the Packer who we see
in the limo at the very beginning of the film, is not the type to shed tears.
The biggest irony of the film is that Cronenberg does not allow the audience to
relate to Packer and, in doing so, does not allow the audience to feel for him
during his last minutes, despite the fact that the people in the audience are
Packer, other people trapped in a sub-real world and trying their hardest to
get out.
There
is also an argument to be made for an association between Packer and Benno.
They are one and the same, and yet entirely distinct from each other. The
mystery really comes down to one question: is Benno free? Has he really managed
to escape sub-reality? On one hand, he is no longer concerned with finding
meanings for the smallest irregularities in the world (his asymmetrical
prostate, for example) and he has no problem killing those that he considers
sub-real. However, at the same time, he seems far too obsessed with the
sub-reality to be considered free of it. His attempt to kill Packer could be
seen as a happy occurrence, as Benno killing off the last bit of sub-reality within
himself, but it could also, just as easily, be Benno trying to keep anyone else
from reaching his reality, because it is far from perfect. Since leaving the
sub-reality, Benno has become more obsessive and anxious. So, is this a
scenario like eXistenZ, where the
escaped sub-reality is simply a place for a bigger sub-reality? Once reality
and sub-reality collide, how long will it take to dig oneself out?
In
the end, this film continues the cycle started by the two previous films of an
impromptu trilogy, the already oft-mentioned Videodrome and eXistenZ.
However, this film is the logical conclusion of this trilogy. Whereas in the
previous two films, the hero(es) fought valiantly and (to varying degrees)
defeated the virus that threatened them, in the most recent incarnation of the
story, it becomes an impossible task to defeat the sub-reality and anyone who
tries becomes a casualty, whether physically or mentally slain. Even David
Cronenberg has given up on trying to break through the shell of sub-reality and
declared any such attempts to be a losing struggle. We are firmly trapped
within this sub-reality and the worst part of all is that we don’t even realize
it!
