"The Logical Extension of Business is Murder": Cosmopolis

"If you have a strange sensation while watching Cosmopolis, a dreadful remove, it's because you are experiencing the end of the world as theory." --Daniel Kasman

"I think David [Cronenberg] liked the takes when I had literally no idea what I was doing.” --Robert Pattinson

"Eric’s in-dwelling in the super-rarefied world of abstract finance gives him the illusion that the material realm is irrelevant, archaic." --Cornel Bonca

"Eric Packer’s world, the world of digitization and cyber-capital, transcends linguistic representation. DeLillo facilitates this point through Packer’s running commentary on language. `The cool universe of digitality has absorbed the world of metaphor and metonymy' (Baudrillard 188). Language, according to the protagonist, is currently incapable and utterly inappropriate for expressing the current situation, which is marked by simulation, hyper-reality, and ever-increasing speeds of change." --Stuart Noble


"The visual style of the movie comes from the dialogue. It wouldn’t exist if the dialogue wasn’t there or there was less of it, or if the dialogue was more, in quotes, realistic, or whatever those critics are thinking. There was one critic who said `The dialogue is making me think kill me, kill me now, I can’t take any more of this,' and I thought, `Yes, I’d be happy to kill you now, no problem.'”

"[Edouard Carmignac] felt that it [Cosmopolis] was absolutely accurate, that he works with people who are exactly like Eric Packer in terms of their abstraction. They live in this weird bubble where they are disconnected even from the way that normal people buy things and sell things, let alone from basic social interactions with normal human beings." --David Cronenberg

"I write as I can in the rhythm of interminable weeks
monday: empty storehouses a rat became the unit of currency
tuesday: the mayor murdered by unknown assailants
thursday: after a stormy meeting a majority of voices rejected the motion of the spice merchants for unconditional surrender
friday: the beginning of the plague saturday: our invincible defender
N.N. committed suicide sunday: no more water we drove back
an attack at the eastern gate called the Gate of the Alliance

all of this is monotonous I know it can't move anyone"
--from Zbigniew Herbert's "Report from a Besieged City" ("a rat became the unit of currency" is the novel's and the movie's epigraph)


"Where do these limos go at night?" --Eric Packer

"Where do the ducks go in the winter?" --Holden Caulfield in J. D Salinger The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

“Computer power eliminates doubt. All doubt rises from past experience. But the past is disappearing. We used to know the past but not the future. This is changing. . . . Time is a corporate asset now. It belongs to the free market system."--Vija Kinski (Samantha Morton)

"Life is too contemporary." --Didi Fancher (Juliette Binoche)

"The subjects of the talks, as well as the mise-en-scène in general, principally dances around the severe abstraction late capitalism has introduced into life—or, at least, into the life of a very rich man, where numbers and screens, his head of security's warnings about threats to his life, and, ultimately, the unrest that percolates through New York as the film goes on, all remains at a distant, intangible remove. The world is reduced to virtual communication and personal relationships to theory, each talk . . . an intellectual negotiation for the purpose of cerebral play." --Daniel Kasman

"My prostate is asymmetrical."
"What does that mean?"
"I don't know." --Eric Packer talking with his wife Elise (Sarah Gadon)

"A specter is haunting the world, the specter of capitalism." --a red LED ticker display

"The logical extension of business is murder." --Eric Packer


"People will not die. Isn't this the creed of the new culture? People will be absorbed in streams of information."


Popular Posts