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The Cosmopolis Effect

Cosmopolis
Cosmopolis

I had high hopes for Don DeLillo’s novel and David Cronenberg’s film adaptation Cosmopolis. On 30th October 2012, I wrote Australian publisher/editor Ashley Crawford the following reflection:

 

I finally finished DeLillo’s Cosmopolis last night. It has three problems: background research; the characters; and the final narrative arc (a weakness in Point Omega, too). I’ve not yet seen Cronenberg’s film.

DeLillo had a potentially interesting story idea. Eric Packer’s rise-and-fall was very much like how Victor Niederhoffer ‘blew up‘. Packer like Niederhoffer is interested in how abstract systems can be used to chart financial markets using technical analysis. Apart from Niederhoffer the real life equivalent to this was probably Richard D. Wyckoff who had a model based on Pythagorean geometry. But DeLillo’s trader — like the defence intellectual in Point Omega — is a media stereotype. Real traders do use the Yen “carry trade” a lot and currency speculation is very popular in Japan — the Japanese magazines are more sophisticated than their US or Australian counterparts. But sophisticated traders wouldn’t necessarily make the money or risk management errors that Packer makes in the book that destroys his personal fortune (what about diversification, hedging market risks, and testing assumptions?).

This makes the characters a little unbelievable — they are there as style and to personify the moral points that DeLillo wants to make (which resonate more after the 2008 global financial crisis). They don’t really develop emotionally despite what happens in the plot. The characters around Eric Packer are like little portraits or set pieces that are incidental.

The final third of the book is a series of fairly disconnected scenes. The finale with the nemesis ex-employee had potential but seems half-realised.

Looking forward to reading White Noise, Mao II, Libra and Underworld.

 

This morning I read that Brazil’s Eike Batista has lost $US34.5 billion; and hedge fund manager Bill Ackman lost $US2 billion on his Herbalife and JC Penney trades. There’s also the FBI’s takedown of the alleged Dread Pirate Roberts and Silk Road black market. The DeLillo’s Cosmopolis still reads as a postmodernist idea of millionaire currency speculation rather than how good traders actually deal with market volatility. But maybe the Cosmopolis Effect — the fallout of self-destructive hubris, cognitive biases and decision heuristics — has crossed from DeLillo’s fiction into the financial elite. Risk on?

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17th August 2012: Cosmopolis

Cosmopolis (2012)

 

The New Yorker and Slate have reviews out of David Cronenberg‘s new film Cosmopolis based on Don DeLillo‘s novel:

 

An erudite but vacant young man, Eric lives mainly within the pulsing circuits of electronic information. We can feel DeLillo’s loathing for the dematerialized world of financial manipulation; he makes Eric a kind of science-fiction metaphor of a human being, and Cronenberg cast the right man for a living cyborg. Pattinson has large eyes, heavy eyebrows, a soft voice. He’s sombre and quiet, a minimalist actor, but he has just enough tension to keep us interested in this intelligent creep. For Eric, the past doesn’t exist, the present is simply money zipping around the globe, the future is his to inhabit. Inside his car, he lives at a still point, but the market economy creates hysterical activity all around him. Though DeLillo wrote the novel a few years after the tech collapse of 2000, it now seems prescient about the much greater collapse of 2008. “We’re speculating in a void,” as one of the twerps says, but that remark no longer sounds extravagant—not after billions of dollars bet on derivatives and “synthetic credit products” have disappeared into the air. And the book’s anti-capitalist theatrics in the streets seem a very accurate anticipation of the Occupy Wall Street movement. DeLillo even understood the ambivalence of the protest: did these people hate capitalism or were they afraid that they had been left behind by it?

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The Debt

Assaf Bernstein’s The Debt (2007) portrays the breakdown of accountability during a fictional operation by Israel’s Mossad agency to capture a Nazi war criminal.

The film opens with the Mossad team of Rachel Brenner (Gila Almagor, Neta Garty), Zvi and Ehud arriving home triumphantly in April 1965: a scene reminiscent of Beatles mania.  Flashforward 30 years later and Rachel explains to Israeli intelligence trainees what it was like to kill the Nazi war criminal Maximilian Rainer (Edgar Selge) in a safehouse shootout: ‘I didn’t think of anything, I just closed my eyes, thought of my mother and what she had been through.’  The trainees joke about the Surgeon of Burkenau as a symbol of evil.

At a launch party for her memoir My Mission we hear an account of Rachel’s bravery and see her signing books like a celebrity.  As the party ends Zvi arrives with a newspaper story that will shatter the bubble: an old man in a nursing home 40 minutes outside of the Ukrainian industrial city Kiev now claims to be Rainer.  Rachel, Zvi and Ehud all know the truth that has been hidden for 30 years: Rainer escaped from the safehouse and they created the cover-story to hide the truth about the Surgeon of Burkenau’s fate that would have shocked Israel. 

The team is being reactived before Mossad and the Israeli public find out the truth.  Ehud is already in Kiev whilst Zvi cannot go due to wounds from an Israeli embassy bombing 10 years earlier.  Zvi convinces Rachel to go to Kiev armed with poison to confirm Rainer’s identity and to kill him.  She is unsure about the newspaper photograph.  ‘People change a lot in 30 years’, Zvi tells her.  ‘We were different then, weren’t we?’, Rachel wonders.

The Debt‘s narrative cuts back and forth between the 1964 Berlin operation and Rachel’s 1994 visit to Kiev.  Bernstein thus creates a cause-effect relationship between the team’s initial decisions and their consequences.

Mossad tracks Rainer to Berlin in 1964 after a 15-year search.  The night before the team’s operation begins Rachel examines photographs of Rainer’s atrocities in Auschwitz-Birkenau.  Rainer now works as a gynecologist so Rachel poses as Mrs. Roget and gets several appointments for an infertility examination.  These scenes have a starkness similar to David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers (1988) as Rainer attempts to discover Rachel’s true identity.  Eventually the team resorts to an extraction operation: Rachel injects Rainer with a serum whilst Zvi and Ehud arrive with a fake ambulance.

Holed up in a safehouse with Rainer imprisoned the team begins to fall apart.  The cover operation to use an embassy party is delayed several times.  The team starts infighting over their motives: Rachel has unrequited love for Zvi, Ehud’s tough personal masks his fears and Zvi is hauned by the deaths of his entire family at Auschwitz.

Rainer emotionally manipulates Rachel and Ehud when they break Zvi’s rule not to speak to their prisoner.  He offers several rationalisations: his work was done for ‘scientific progress’, ‘hundreds of deaths’ were necessary to save millions, and that ‘we could do anything we wanted with the Jews’.  Rachel taunts Rainer that he will endure a public trial similar to Adolf Eichmann
in Jerusalem in 1961.  Rainer explains to Rachel and Ehud that only four guards were needed to send entire families to their deaths: Jewish ‘egoists’ meant that individuals only thought for themselves.  ‘Jews only knew how to die, they didn’t know how to kill,’ Rainer concludes.  The exchanges are a misdirection ploy: with Ehud and Zvi now out of the room Rainer attacks the sleeping Rachel with a razor that she has dropped and escapes.  ‘It took 15 years to find him, we aren’t going to find him in 10 minutes,’ Ehud and Zvi argue.  The truth that happened in Berlin is not the truth that Israel must know.

30 years later Zvi, Ehud and Rachel are each haunted by their lie.  When Rachel arrives in Kiev she meets Ehud who is now an arms dealer to both sides in Sierra Leone: ‘rebel against them’ he explains over a double malt whiskey.  Ehud and Rachel are unable to get into the Kiev nursing home which is a high security facility for former Soviet military.  The next morning Rachel discovers that Ehud has committed suicide because he is a coward.  Zvi asks her to return but Rachel wants to finish what should have been done in Berlin.

After several cat-and-mouse attempts Rachel disguises herself as a nurse to infiltrate the nursing home.  She sees the old man on a balcony.  A Berliner Zeitung reporter also wants to interview the old man and phones his editor in advance to claim a double-spread cover story.  In these scenes Rachel seems cautious to conduct a field operation, unsure of the old man’s true identity and out-of-place in a life after espionage.  Both she and the reporter discover the truth: the old man has Alzheimers and started the story a month ago to the concern of his son.  The reporter leaves in disgust.

Only then does Rachel discover the deeper truth underneath the surface truth and by accident:  she follows the old man’s grandson and his remote controlled car to discover an elderly Rainer playing cards in the dining room.  ‘I should never have confessed to him,’ he tells Rachel, ‘I should have taken this secret to my grave.’  Rachel and Rainer’s bathroom knife fight leave both fatall wounded, and Rachel dies on a train platform, remembering the team’s triumphant return to Israel, the black and white news footage now in colour.

The Debt explores the ethical challenges of intelligence fieldwork, coming face to face with ontological evil, and the cost of living with a lie.  However two other dimensions are only hinted at.  The team’s lie is necessary to maintain Mossad’s invincibility and as a counter-myth against the Nazi postwar survival myths of Adolf Hitler, Martin Bormann and the Odessa in South America.  More cryptic is Rainer’s explanation to Rachel about World War II’s intergenerational trauma: ‘The war changed a lot of people.’