ABSTRACT
After the millennium, Americans felt secure in their leadership of the New World Order; but then the towers fell, ushering in the twenty-first century as an age of terror. Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003) probes the source of this catastrophe in the transnational forces of global capitalism and resistant terrorism. The novel chronicles a single day in April 2000 when the financial market suddenly loses its momentum and wobbles towards collapse. As billionaire currency speculator Eric Packer embarks on a crosstown odyssey in Manhattan, he is confronted by anarchists at the NASDAQ Center, the funeral cortege of a murdered rapper, the president’s motorcade, and finally a lone assassin who resembles an amalgam of Lee Harvey Oswald and John Hinckley, Jr. The film adaptation of Cosmopolis (2012) by David Cronenberg evokes the claustrophobic compression and fatalistic inevitability of Packer’s journey. In a related short fiction by DeLillo, “Baader-Meinhof” (2002), strangers view Gerhard Richter’s cycle of fifteen canvases, October 18, 1977 (1988), of German Red Army Faction terrorists. Resistance to state corporatism and the origins of modern terror bring novelist, filmmaker, and artist to a vision of an apocalypse yet to come.
