Burger: Limitless (2011)

Neil Burger’s third film is elegantly simply in its premise: Eddie Morra (Bradley Cooper, looking suspiciously like David Foster Wallace) is a struggling writer in New York City who stumbles across a new brand of drug that gives him access to 100% of his brain, rather than the customary 15%. Most of the film toys, stylistically, with that possibility, as Eddie not only manages to write the book he’s always dreamed he would write, but quickly becomes as knowledgeable as Google, and as perceptually prescient as Google Street View. In fact, it’s the first definitive portrait of New York, or of any city really, in the aftermath of Google Street View – not only does Burger replace cuts and shots with stitches and pivots, but most of Eddie’s epiphanies take place on the street, as the drug sucks him into the slipstream of the Google Camera Car, endowing him with a nictating eyeball that makes him a valuable commodity for the city’s attention economy. It’s only a matter of time, then, before he’s snatched up by a wealthy, corrupt investor, Carlo van Loon (Robert de Niro), who’s in desperate need of someone who can remain attentive to every piece of information they’ve ever processed, someone who can actually perceive the market, in its entirety, as it unfolds. As might be expected, it's also only a matter of time before Eddie runs out of the drug, and has to elude the very Street View he’s helped envisage, in a quite extraordinary reinvention of the 70s paranoia mode, and its search for the hush that eludes surveillance. And that devolution is the most fascinating part of the film, as Eddie finds that he can’t go back to operating on 15%, not just he’s become hooked on 100%, but because the drug has actually merged his brain into new and different combinations. In one of the film’s tensest scenes, Carlo cautions him not to become one of those guys who gets distracted by a screen in the room, but, by this point, he’s already become the screen in the room. Like an odd, oblique superhero, or a latter-day Mabuse, he’s transformed into himself, discovered that his mind was always post-human, it’s just that he wasn’t able to access that part of it before now.