Patt Thomas: Book: Closer look at the Cosmopolis Teaser Trailer

If you’ve been with us for a bit, you’re aware of our book discussions. We couldn’t let this teaser trailer go by without linking up the scenes with book, could we?

This will be a three-parter that we post over the weekend. Let’s get right to it and crack open this bad boy with Eric’s (Robert Pattinson) narration to Kendra (Patricia Mckenzie).

"I'm looking for more. Aim & fire. Come on do it. Click the switch."

The first image for the teaser is a striking one. Kendra wearing only the body armor:

She had coral brown skin and well-defined cheekbones. There was a beeswax sheen to her lips. She liked to be looked at and made the act of undressing seem proudly public, an unveiling across national borders with an element of slightly showy defiance.

She wore her ZyloFlex body armor while they had sex. This was his idea. She told him the ballistic fiber was the lightest and softest available, and the strongest as well, and also stab-resistant.

Her name was Kendra Hays and she was easy in his presence. They mock-boxed for about a second and a half. He licked her body here and there, leaving fizzes of spittle behind.

Eric & Kendra’s scene is an intense one (all the scenes are!) and the teaser let us know Cronenberg went there (duh.).

...a woman of straps and belts.

The voice over with Eric is found at the end of his scene with Kendra:

She poured a few drops of vodka on his genitals. It stung, it burned. She laughed when she did it and he wanted her to do it again. She poured a trickle more and bent over to lap it off, to tongue-scrub him in vodka, and then knelt astride him. She had a glass in each hand and tried to keep her balance while they bounced and laughed.

He finished off her scotch and ate peanuts by the fistful while she showered. He watched her shower and thought she was a woman of straps and belts. At some level she would never be naked.

Then he stood by the bed to watch her dress. She took her time, the body armor fastened across her torso, the pants about to be fastened, shoes next, and was fitting the waistband holster onto her hip when she saw him standing in his shorts.

He said, “Stun me. I mean it. Draw the gun and shoot. I want you to do it, Kendra. Show me what it feels like. I’m looking for more. Show me something I don’t know. Stun me to my DNA. Come on, do it. Click the switch. Aim and fire. I want all the volts the weapon holds. Do it. Shoot it. Now.”

"Show me something I don't know."

BANG! This teaser is off to a roaring start.

More book-to-teaser details after the cut! *SPOILERS*

The next shot launches us all the way to the end of the story.

The hand went hot.

We see Benno (Paul Giamatti) watching this display. What was Eric thinking moments before? The dialogue starts with Eric:

“Bullets flying through the walls and floor. So useless and stupid,” he said. “Even your weapon is a fantasy. What is it called?”

The subject looked hurt and betrayed.

“What’s the attachment that abuts the trigger guard? What is it called? What does it do?”

“All right. I don’t have the manhood to know these names. Men know these names. You have the experience of manhood. I can’t think that far ahead. It’s all I can do to be a person.”

“Violence needs a burden, a purpose.” He pressed the muzzle of his gun, Eric did, against the palm of his left hand. He tried to think clearly. He thought of his chief of security flat on the asphalt, a second yet left in his life. He thought of others down the years, hazy and nameless. He felt an enormous remorseful awareness. It moved through him, called guilt, and strange how soft the trigger felt against his finger.

“What are you doing?”

“I don’t know. Maybe nothing,” he said. He looked at Benno and squeezed the trigger. He realized the gun had one round left just about the time it fired, the briefest instant before, way too late to matter. The shot blew a hole in the middle of his hand.

The scenes with Benno are going to be amazing and we got a few more glimpses throughout the teaser.

He walked over to the table and picked up the weapon. Then he sat on the sofa, hunched forward, half lost in the towel shroud.

The rave is next. Eric is with another one of his bodyguards, Danko.

There was something infectious in the air.

It wasn’t the music and lights alone that drew you in, the spectacle of massed dance in a theater stripped of seats and paint and history. Eric thought it might be the drug as well, the novo, spreading its effect from those who took it to those who did not. You caught what they had. First you were apart and watching and then you were in, and with, and of the crowd, and then you were the crowd, densely assembled and dancing as one.

They were weightless down there. He thought the drug was probably dissociative, separating mind from body. They were a blank crowd, outside worry and pain, drawn to the glassy repetition. All the menace of electronica was in repetition itself. This was their music, loud, bland, bloodless and controlled, and he was beginning to like it.

But he felt old, watching them dance. An era had come and gone without him. They melted into each other so they wouldn’t shrivel up as individuals. The noise was nearly unbearable, taking root in his hair and teeth. He was seeing and hearing too much. But this was his only defense against the spreading mental state. Never having touched or tasted the drug, not even having seen it, he felt a little less himself, a little more the others, down there, raving.

I love how vividly the teaser connects me to what I read. The book has truly come alive. The shot after the rave is with Jane (Emily Hampshire) but later in the teaser, we see Eric’s regular doctor, Nevius, is replaced by Ingram.

Torval had the man's arm yanked up behind him now. He pressed the man into the side of
the automobile. Eric leaned toward the window and lowered it. Eric looked at the man. He wanted Torval to shoot him or put the weapon at least to his head. He said, "Who the fuck are you?"
"Dr. Ingram."

Dr. Ingram slaps on those latex gloves and while Eric and Jane have a memorable conversation (“I want to bottle-fuck you slowly with my sunglasses on.“), Dr. Ingram got down to business:

He heard a slidy rustle of latex. Then the Ingram finger entered.

Ingram examined the prostate for signs. He palpated, the finger slyly prodding the surface
of the gland through the rectal wall. There was pain, probably just muscles tensing in the anal canal. But it hurt. It was pain. It traveled the circuitry of nerve cells. From his stooped position, Eric looked directly into Jane's face. He liked doing this, which surprised him.

When Nevius did the finger, it was in and out in seconds. Ingram was probing for some murky fact. Jane was the fact. She had the bottle in her crotch, knees flopped outward now, and watched him. Her mouth was open, showing large gapped teeth. Something passed between them, deeply, a sympathy beyond the standard meanings that also encompassed these meanings, pity, affinity, tenderness, the whole physiology of neural maneuver, of heartbeat and secretion, some vast sexus of arousal drawing him toward her, complicatedly, with Ingram’s finger up his ass.

I enjoyed the Eric/Jane dynamic and can’t wait to see it play out. The scene is charged and the only person touching anyone is Ingram. The other dynamic I loved?

Didi Fancher.

This was the first scene I noticed that was different from the book (as mentioned here) but I’m not complaining at all. These two are on fire. Eric and Didi (Juliette Binoche) have a conversation about a Rothko…among other things….