… the full film, on YouTube, of DeLillo/Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis. UD, a DeLillo fanatic, found Cosmopolis so disappointing she could barely finish it. And then this novel, of all DeLillo’s novels, gets filmed…

She avoided the film, especially when bad reviews started coming in. But of course she has been curious about it. And here is an easy way for her to see it.

So she’s been watching it today, between lawn mowing, pumpkin gathering, and car washing.

The curious thing is, she’s also been watching, over and over, the trailer for Gravity; and these two films together have her thinking about their rather strange similarities. Both films feature the cuttingest-edge postmodern American technology along with the new sorts of people this technology spawns. Both films put these new sorts of Americans in conditions of absolute surreal silence.

Outside of this silence, in its background, revolves a very real world. The background in Gravity is Earth, and as I watch the trailer my homing eye is always moving away from the astronaut and instead following Sri Lanka and Florida and Chad… The revolving stage of beloved bluegreen Earth …

Manhattan’s the background in Cosmopolis, and the anarchic city churns and churns behind the deeply tinted, armored, windows of Eric Packer’s stretch limo.

The films share, that is, this perennial dual focus, this inside/outside, silence/noise, technologically mediated environment/natural (or semi-natural/semi-cultural) environment. Both really allow one to think about mediation, about the odd estranged relationship many contemporary Americans are able to have with actuality. DeLillo’s best-known novel – White Noise – is all about this, from its title onward… our white-noisy electronically mediated daily experience…

Yet Cosmopolis is the work of a moralist; indeed, for me, its weakness is precisely its moral hectoring about the psychopathology of great wealth, and in particular the way great wealth immunizes itself from the pain of humanity. I love the theme – but in most of his novels DeLillo approaches the theme subtly, satirically. Here there’s a grim sermonizing that forces the film’s actors simply into one anti-capitalist screed after another.

Gravity’s trailer (good name for a film in itself) suggests that this film uses the dual focus bit in a much more human and (I hate the word, but it fits) poignant way, conveying our new yearning for a life of embeddedness and proximities and raggedy no-tech imperfections in the wake of all that shiny mediation.

It’s like what Stephen Dedalus says in Portrait when he realizes he’s an artist:

He smiled to think that it was this disorder, the misrule and confusion of his father’s house, and the stagnation of vegetable life, which was to win the day in his soul.