PRIVILEGE

Cosmopolis really gives us a window into the mind of someone who privileged to the point that they have trained themselves operate unyielding from on their own terms and time. He does what he wants, gets whatever he wants and does it when he wants. The book addresses this effectively, but the movie does it even better. After playing Edward Cullen in the Twilight series, Robert Pattinson was in a position of new found success and fortune. He was living a lavish lifestyle at the time and probably felt as though he could be with any women he wanted, so he was a perfect fit for his role in Cosmopolis. I think absence of a middle class being represented in this book and the movie is because Eric Packer is representing extremes of privilege. The audience experiences privilege in the story on a enormous scale which I think will better for an audience to reflect it on their own lives. Using an ultra rich person to display privilege that we all have in varying degrees is an interesting choice. An audience would be more engaged hearing about Eric Parker as a character and his privilege than how a middle class person is privileged because we can separate ourselves from him and his lifestyle because it is not our own. The title of the film sort of reminds me of a 1920's expressionist film called Metropolis about factory workers and how they work under an evil elite society that controls the city.