CBS News: Robert Pattinson kicked off his Tuesday ringing the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange…accompanied by David Cronenberg, the director of his new film Cosmopolis. (Emphasis added.)
All eyes are upon him — blinking, widening, twitching. He approaches the raised podium and awaits the designated moment. There is a hush.
Beneath him, the vast hall is crammed with bodies. Steaming, sweating bodies. Down in the muck, the rounded, ill-defined forms jostle for space. Torsos collide, limbs entwine, orifices gush with the secretions of effort and stress. The throng is a single living thing, its exhalations dominating the hall’s atmosphere, humidifying it, reconstituting it.
He attempts to breathe, but can only gasp and choke. The horde gathered here is merely a colony of a much larger organism. Each figure below represents thousands of other creatures, out there beyond the hall. That teeming multitude is the great swarming mass that all here must serve. The outsiders’ domination is total, unquestioned. Welcomed. Meanwhile, the imprisoned crowd feeds upon itself. It consumes its own waste, and grows. Yet it remains forever in chains.
He has been brought here to set the world in motion. His function is to connect this hall with the outside, by sparking to life a great assembly of machines. Machines of gleaming metal, rivets and bolts, pins and sockets. Machines linked in a vast network encircling the globe many times over. Millions of nodes; billions of wires. There is nowhere outside the network. Its tentacles penetrate all.
The final seconds tick down. The pressure is excruciating. His nerves scream. His skeleton cracks. Fissures appear in his skin, his joints, his extremities.
The moment is almost here. He tries to extend one limb, but it seizes and contracts. With a spastic jerk, the useless member flops dead at his side. Another limb remains frozen, unresponsive; it is now useless meat, marked for excision.
As the ultimate moment approaches, he makes one final effort. He stretches one more appendage toward the focal point, the central node, the seething omphalos of the apparatus that enfolds and sustains the entire world.
He makes contact.
Bells ring. Horns buzz. The creatures below add their own cacophony — horrible sounds issuing from their thousands of mouths, their millions of phalanges.
His work is finished. He expires upon the podium. His mangled carcass is brushed aside without ceremony.
The market has opened for yet another day. Now, finally, the consumption may begin.
Photo credit: BBC World Service via Flickr; used under Creative Commons license.
