#redrow

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piercepenniless:

Shit, this is astonishing. Redrow, a luxury apartment builder, have made this creepy, completely dystopic, half-American Psycho advert for the new London they’re currently metastasizing all over the city. Its protagonist lives in a world of almost continual night, with the hungry eyes and dead affect of an Ayn Rand wet dream: his world is constituted of chrome, glass, a palette of white-to-taupe, a spatter-pattern rug and one book, a single book, on graphic design. ‘Luxury’ is so often a code for this – double-glazed, polished steel, hermetically sealed in the back of a cab. Our man does not have conversations, but stares out at the city from the fifteenth floor (he does a lot of staring). The concept of conversation is alien to him, though he is shown having a screaming argument; as you see from his inventoried shelves, he has a passion for objects and this is how he treats women, as well.

Flat-toned, void affect, social cancer in a suit: a model for London living. Here’s a curious honesty about it all: houses in the suburbs are marketed still for the smiling happy family, all oak tables and smiling coffee mornings (in zone 4, the dog never even barks, let alone bites). In the central zones, having been cleared of many of their inconveniences (families, communities, *life*), now deadboxes are marketed to the single (wannabe singular) sub-Thatcherite dweeb who manages his violence only on a balance sheet, who wants to take life, pin it, and crush it behind plate glass. Let us burn it down.

This is amazing. There needs to be a word for the kind of text that deconstructs itself, that contains its own negation so nakedly on the surface.

“They say nothing comes easy - but if it was easy, it wouldn’t feel so good. [Now I have to tell myself it feels good. It feels good. I am a valid human being]

*Cutaway to a shot of the cut-glass tumbler of whiskey he drinks each morning before work*

"To look over the city that could have swallowed you whole [ / that swallowed your soul], and say, ‘I did this’, [I allowed myself to be swallowed by dreams of achievement & accumulation that were in no way individual, however much I doth protest] and stand with the world at your feet [still so distant from me.]”

The comments on Vimeo are great:

• Does this remind anyone else of American Psycho?
• 100% No
• COSMOPOLIS PSYCHO.

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