David Cronenberg trickled out over the weekend as the latest filmmaker attached to direct a Don DeLillo adaptation, setting his sights on the great novelist's slender 2003 volume Cosmopolis. It's not the worst selection he could have made from DeLillo's rich, dynamic tapestries of American striving, fear, sex, politics and satire -- which, taken as a whole over his 40-year career, read like a kind of parallel cultural history of our nation. And from which, to this day, no one has successfully adapted a film.
Still, set in one day in the life (and in the limo) of a 28-year-old billionaire crossing Manhattan to get his hair cut, Cosmopolis has always felt to me like a poor man's Ulysses, some half-hearted, self-aware, post-postmodern wink at the undergrad lit student in all of us. I'm not sure what Cronenberg sees in Eric Packer's fantastic crosstown voyage, but I know what I see when I think of the great director -- and his own vivid, unforgiving eye -- interpreting DeLillo, legend-on-legend:
· White Noise (1985): DeLillo won the National Book Award for the story of Jack Gladney, a death-obsessed professor of Hitler Studies forced to flee the mysterious "Airborne Toxic Event" that envelops his town. Later, his wife cheats on him to acquire the pharmaceutical that will cure her own fear of mortality. The second act's intimate, absurd visual potential alone anticipates Cronenberg's mid-'90s style (itself informed by William Burroughs and J.G. Ballard); the third act has all the sex and violence and televisions he'd need to effect his signature on DeLillo's brilliant material. And he could even work with Viggo Mortensen and Maria Bello again, assuming they all felt comfortable lightening up a bit with the subject matter. Everyone wins, especially readers, who've been hearing about a movie adaptation of this for years. (Barry Sonnenfeld dropped his own attempt about two years ago.)
· Underworld (1997): Probably DeLillo's best book, and almost certainly his most cinematically challenging. Nevertheless, the epic story of waste-management executive Nick Shay and his links to nearly 50 years of American cultural history -- from Bobby Thomson's 1951 Shot Heard 'Round the World to sprawling desert art installations -- is no more unfilmable than Naked Lunch. Instead of Mugwumps, we get J. Edgar Hoover... that kind of thing. Bonus: Last I heard, Scott Rudin owns the rights to this, and he and Cronenberg go back almost 25 years to The Fly, which Rudin recommended him for. Someone owes somebody. Or something. Just make it happen.
· Libra (1988): DeLillo's imagined biography/origin story of Lee Harvey Oswald both confronts and embraces JFK assassination-conspiracy culture. Moreover, it's got to be at least as thrilling a political intrigue as The Matarese Circle, the Robert Ludlum novel he was planning to adapt Tom Cruise and Denzel Washington. Given to the right young actor, this is an awards-season powder keg.
· The Names (1982): Another long shot, but an underrated thriller nevertheless that invokes language cults, terrorism, American imperialism and nasty murders in Greece. It's what the The Da Vinci Code might be like if Dan Brown didn't write with his feet.