One day in the head of the modern capitalist. With billionaire Eric Packer on this day will happen only two things – he will be wrong in the forecasts of the yuan and the doctor will say that his prostate asymmetric. This will be more than enough for his world on the wheels of a white limousine to slide straight into chaos.
The limousine is a conditional place of action, which metaphorically reflects what is happening in the mind of the main character. Somewhere he really goes to the doctor, watches the news and has dinner with his wife. We see pure reflection and the flow of consciousness caused by these and other events. As Leopold Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses crosses not Dublin, but the whole world in one day, Packer crosses an impossible number of semantic, social and psychological layers in a day. Eric is almost always in the picture. The film is a rare for postmodern creations unity of time and action. Because, apart from the subjective view of a young billionaire, nothing is offered to the viewer. But that's more than enough. In the limousine, of course, there is order, computers work, graphics run, numbers are considered, and in the circumference on the monitor some “solaris” fluctuates.
Women appear in the limousine as if at the behest of thought. And it's not "as if," it is. It is worth remembering the wife as she finds herself in a nearby taxi and bookstore "on the way." In traffic, he manages to go to the theater with her, have dinner and lunch. She doesn't show up in the limo. The hero is always forced to meet her on her territory, opposed to his space of graphs and analysis. If men knock on the window of a limousine, and pass a security check, women often find themselves in Packer's world quickly - without underwear and riding on the main character. As soon as he saw an attractive guard out the window, after a few shots, they had sex in a motel where Packer wanted to do it with his wife. And this is not the wonderful world of billionaires, where opportunities and desires are realized instantly, this is the device of the average man’s head, who can think about money, sex, and why he hasn’t done this with someone else during a prostate examination.
Protection. Eric says the main thing is isolation. The interior of the limousine is not penetrated by outside noises, and the attacks of anarchists look like a safe television picture without sound. The inner world is structured and protected. The young techie, who also holds a tablet with charts, talks to Packer about protecting the most important thing - his system, his internal computer from hacking, the very machine with which he "predicts" exchange rates and life events, organizes, reduces the world to a formula, making order out of chaos. The security service, which constantly talks about the measures proposed by the “complex”, a kind of “Super-Ego”, which should protect against all uncomfortable and disturbing “symmetry” and order of events. The first frame already indicates this confrontation, where Packer wants to go to the barbershop, symbolizing his childhood, and the guy from the security service tries to dissuade him. That's why Eric will shoot him next to the basketball court, otherwise he won't get into the barbershop. That the self-defense system is vulnerable is said first when Eric asks where the limousine was when it was checked.
"Where do the limousines sleep?" is the code phrase. Night is the territory of the subconscious mind, the time of dreams, the uncontrolled journey of our self, where even the last control freak and rationalist can control nothing. Such lynch-like phrases and moments in this very lynch film are enough. During dinner with his wife, Packer notices that she is wearing a cashmere sweater and a beaded skirt, although we see that she is wearing a black dress. This emphasizes the discrepancy between the subjective and objective realities of the hero. “Taxi drivers come from horror and despair” – as if accidentally abandoned sets the contrast between limousines, symbols of the cult of rationality and purity, and taxis, driving in a completely different direction. Therefore, his wife Eric meets for the first time in a taxi, and in the hairdresser he will be able to get not with the security service, but only with a crippled taxi driver at the wheel.
Way. Cosmopolis can be roughly translated from Greek as “the city of order”. And we do see a world ordered according to the rules of a single man, the demiurge and the soothsayer. At first he is in a perfectly ironed suit, in dark glasses, a symmetrically hanging tie. As he moves from the controlled realms of his inner world to his subconscious, Eric will take off his glasses and tie, remember and unbutton his shirt. A snow-white limousine, a symbol of success on Wall Street, will be transformed by the efforts of anarchists into the walls of some ghetto, inscribed with graffiti. At this time, a black fat uncle will appear in his salon, as if straight out of this ghetto, to talk about the death of a Sufi rapper and the fact that Eric's limousine looks like a dead body - something that has lost self-control, lost its "face", and in the world of capitalism it is always a scandal. Packer will finally lose his decent “face” after the “haircut” in the hairdresser – childhood, and he and his limousine will turn from symbols of order into symbols of chaos. And in the end, from the cosmopolis, he will get to schizopolis - a place where "limos sleep" and pass the watch taxi drivers. There he will communicate with some of his projection, which also miscalculated the exchange rate, knows every expression of his face and where the office is. On the way to the abandoned house, he will smile. His wife warned him that freedom was a terrible thing to be allowed to do anything and go anywhere. The house is a mess and ruin, also full of computers, monitors and calculators, but they all do not work, will not protect and will not save. Projection will press charges, hint that there are other people besides you, and pass judgment. It's dangerous to think of yourself as a god when you can't even control your own prostate. And whoever shoots, the screen goes out. “When the time comes, he will not die. The whole world will die (c)
Different things are synonymous in our minds. For example, taxi drivers with a crippled eye and attacks on politicians. Here it is interesting to watch how the Chinese prodigy shuffles from place to place, and how it rhymes with convulsive throws around the salon of the heroine Binoche after sex. Both episodes combine the main character's thoughts about age. In general, the relationship of the characters in the cabin is symbolic and always thoughtful. Parker never gets behind the wheel. He can't control movement even while he has the illusion of control. He is hindered by the president, anarchists and funerals. He sits in the back seat, and only at the end is he next to the taxi driver, but he never drives. “Cosmopolis” is also a kind of universal “world”, our world, where in the back seat we roll into tartars and see out the window a sign with the arrow “one way”. Because, according to Cronenberg, as Eric Packer, we have only one way left.
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