Opens with an epigraph from a poem by Polish poet and dramatist Zbigniew Herbert(1924-1998), just like the 2003 novel by Don DeLillo did: "a rat became the unit of currency". The poem was originally published 1983 as "Report from the Besieged City" in the collection "Raport z oblezonego Miasta i inne wiersze" ("Report from the Besieged City and Other Poems"). The novel and the film adaptation both include Herbert's poem and further develop his metaphor of 'rats' as an extended leitmotif. For example in Cronenberg's film character Eric Packer says that he read a poem where "a rat became the unit of currency". Later we see the protestors use rat-like masks, puppets and real dead rats as their main symbolic expression of anti-capitalist criticism.
Being known as an incredibly faithful adaptation, the few changes made were the money currency (from yen to yuan) or the sex scene between Didi and Eric, which in the book takes place on a flat.
Benno Levin: You try to predict movements by drawing on patterns in nature. Yes, of course, the mathematical properties of tree rings, sunflower seeds, the limbs of galactic spirals. I learned this. I loved the cross harmonies between nature and data. You taught me this. You made this form of analysis horribly and sadistically precise. But you forgot something along the way.