Occupy Cosmopolis
David Cronenberg never achieved his early aspiration of becoming an
“obscure novelist that was too difficult or too dark to be very
popular”. As a director and occasional screenwriter, though, he has
never been afraid of dividing audiences. “You should be provocative [if
you’re an artist],” he once told me. “If you make a movie that everybody
loves, you’re in big trouble.”
He was presumably over the moon,
therefore, when his glacial adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 2003 novel
Cosmopolis split opinion at this year’s 65th Cannes Film Festival. While
some critics simply scratched their heads in puzzlement at the opaque
tale of twentysomething billionaire Eric Packer’s death trip across New
York in a white stretch limo, others praised the film’s cool style
(reminiscent of Crash), intelligence, and nuanced central performance by
Twilight’s Robert Pattinson.
A long way from the body horror
films such as Shivers – in which a parasite spreads sexual anarchy
throughout a high-rise building – or Rabid – in which porn star Marilyn
Chambers spreads disease from a phallic growth in her armpit – which
defined Cronenberg’s fledgling career, Cosmopolis is the director’s view
that “dialogue is the essence of cinema” writ large.
This is not a
new idea, he says. “Everybody would talk about the gore or the
creatures or the science fiction, but if you look at those early movies
the dialogue is pretty interesting, I think, still,” he says, when we
meet in London a week after Cosmopolis’s Cannes debut. “It’s not the
normal low-budget horror dialogue that’s very banal and ordinary. It’s
unusual, and the characters are unusual, and I think very funny as well.
So I say I have always been concerned to write good dialogue, and to
have interesting dialogue.”
Cosmopolis,
like his previous film A Dangerous Method (adapted from Christopher
Hampton’s play The Talking Cure), is such a tsunami of words and ideas,
however, that it even took DeLillo, who loves the film, two viewings to
absorb everything.
Cronenberg is unapologetic about making viewers
work, and dismisses much of modern Hollywood’s output as a “very
superficial version of what cinema can be”. “It’s like eating candy,” he
says. “You consume it, and then it’s gone and you forget it. I like to
put a lot into my movies so that it’s not an instant consumer item.
“Now
I’m completely aware that offends some people, because they’re used to
the consumer version of cinema, and I say, ‘Well, too bad. Then maybe my
cinema’s not for you.’”
What Twihards will make of the latest
Robert Pattinson vehicle, and in particular a scene in which Packer
undergoes a weirdly sexualised prostate examination, is anyone’s guess.
The 26-year-old is surprisingly well cast though, despite personally
having doubts about whether he was good enough, playing a role which
effectively reverses the journey of many Cronenberg protagonists.
Where
a character in the Canadian’s films will often mutate into something
else, as in The Fly or Videodrome, Packer is already a kind of alien
when Cosmopolis begins. Disconnected from society, and even from his own
humanity, by his immense wealth, he gradually transforms back into a
recognisable human being, filled with dread and doubt, the closer he
gets to fulfilling his own elaborately self-engineered suicide. What had
begun as a trip to get a haircut – symbolising “a journey into his
past, into his childhood, and perhaps an innocent time,” says Cronenberg
– turns into an existential odyssey.
Packer is representative of a
type well known to Edouard Carmingnac, a French investment banker and
hedge fund manager who put money into the film because he loved the
novel’s “absolute accuracy”, says Cronenberg: “He knows many people just
like him. Money isn’t real to them any more, or it’s almost a game, or
they deal in billions of dollars but never actually touch real money;
it’s all in their heads and they don’t even have time to connect with
real people in a real way. So for him this is not a fantasy; this is a
documentary.”
If the film felt like a fantasy to Cronenberg when
he took it on, it started to feel increasingly less so as real world
events alarmingly mirrored their story.
“We were directing scenes
of anti-capitalist riots in Times Square [on a soundstage in his native
Toronto], and then we’d go home and read about the Occupy Wall Steet
movement.” On another occasion, Paul Giamatti, who appears as Packer’s
executioner/saviour, Benno, texted him just after they’d filmed a scene
featuring Mathieu Almaric as a cream pie-throwing anarchist, saying
Rupert Murdoch had been attacked with a pie. “We said, ‘This is bizarre.
Everything we’re shooting is happening.’ Of course, we never really
thought of it per se as a documentary, but it was really interesting to
see.”
Cosmopolis inevitably taps into widespread anxieties about
capitalism and the yawning gap between haves and have nots. However,
looking at what Occupy Wall Street actually stands for (anti-fraud,
anti-corruption, anti-greed) made Cronenberg realise that nobody in the
film is actually anti-capitalist.
“Occupy Wall Street is
pro-capitalist, they just want to be part of it,” he says. “They’re
saying capitalism has excluded us and we’ll be happy if we are part of
the 1 per cent.” Similarly in the film, Benno hates the younger, more
successful Packer because he feels too left out, too old, too left
behind. “So in terms of these characters it’s not really an
anti-capitalist screed of any kind, it’s an analysis of capitalism.”
And
a certain kind of rapacious capitalism at that. In Canada, says
Cronenberg, where things are more conservative, the banks have evaded
the financial disaster afflicting America because regulation has
prevented them from running amok. When banking was deregulated across
the border, no-one was amazed by the consequences. “If you just say to
Americans, ‘Go crazy’, they will go crazy of course. And they have a
history of that. So we’re not surprised.”
Canadian capitalism is
less extreme, says Cronenberg. Unlike the Packers of this world, “we
just think it’s natural that you want some safety net for certain
members of society that can’t hack it, and that’s human. Sure some
people try to scam the system, and so what? That’s also human and you
try to balance that, too.” He laughs. “In America they think we’re
pinko, they think we’re socialist or worse, we’re almost communist. And
in the heartland of America, Canada is quite threatening in that way.”
Some
Americans also used to find Cronenberg threatening because of his
films. Even Martin Scorsese, who’d already directed the violent gangster
movie Goodfellas at the time, once admitted to Cronenberg that he
was scared of meeting him because he thought he would be “some crazy
person”.
It is risky judging an artist by their work, of course.
That said, it is hard not to wonder what goes on inside the mind of a
man whose films include exploding heads (Scanners), identical twin
gynaecologists obsessed with a woman with a “trifurcated cervix” (Dead
Ringers), wounds that offer new orifices for sex (Crash), and a
sexualised prostate examination (Cosmopolis). The latter make me wonder
if Cronenberg believes that anything can be eroticised.
“I think
so,” he says unhesitatingly. “Certainly Freud suggests that when he
talked about what he called polymorphous perversity: the idea that to
the child who is almost pre-sexual in a sense, everything is sexual;
eating, shitting, sensuality, touching, drooling, there’s an eroticism
to all of that. So I think the answer is yes, under the right
circumstances.” He smiles. “And in the right delicate hands, of course.”
It
isn’t any wonder that over the years Cronenberg has shocked, sickened
and provoked, attracting labels such as the King of Venereal Horror and
the Baron of Blood. Subversion and transgression, and a sometimes queasy
fascination with human physiology, still colour his work. But its
maturity and complexity is now such that no-one could seriously mistake
Cronenberg for being “just some kind of schlocky horror film-maker”.
The
French love him so much that in 1997 he was made an Officer in the
prestigious Order of Arts and Letters, while in Canada (and this could
perhaps only happen in Canada) he is regarded as a national treasure.
“I’ve
had to endure that,” he says wryly. “But you take strength from it,
especially given that I have always been rigorous in being true to my
own visions of things, and am not just being loved for the sake of being
loved.”
If he ever “lost the edge”, he says it would be time to
seriously consider retirement. “I’m not interested in becoming an
establishment kind of old fart. That would be the end of your career,
and at that point you would hope that you would have the grace to stop.”
While he’s still making films as provocative as Cosmopolis, that day,
even at 69, looks some way off yet.
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