Montalbán/Cockburn/HanselandGretel

Today I read the first fifty pages of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s 1997 novel The Buenos Aires Quintet. Montalbán (1939-2003) was a prolific Catalan writer in several genres but is probably best known for his many novels featuring private detective Pepe Carvalho. Most of those novels are set in Montalbán’s birthplace, Barcelona, but for the Buenos Aires Quintet, as the title implies, Montalbán takes his protagonist out of Barcelona and sends him to Buenos Aires to track down Raúl, his cousin, who recently returned to Argentina after many years living in Spain, to which he fled to escape the political repression of the military dictatorship. This summary makes clear the jokingly metaphysical dimension of Montalbán’s premise—a missing person mystery set in a country dominated by the memory of the disappeared, the tens of thousands of victims of military repression killed in Argentina during the so-called 'Dirty War' in the late 1970s and early 1980s. If one expects this novel to be a conventionally grave and respectful tribute to the memory of the disappeared, however, Montalbán soon disabuses his reader of that expectation, with the Mothers of the Disappeared being described by one character as “mad” and “just symbolic folklore.” This is not to say that politics is only treated as a joke in this novel but the humor is never far away. When Carvalho is asked what kind of leftie he is, for example, he replies “Marxist-Leninist, gourmet-faction.”

I also read the next fifty pages of Alexander Cockburn’s A Colossal Wreck: A Road Trip Through Political Scandal, Corruption, and American Culture. The focus of this book up to this point has been so relentlessly on the vagaries and sheer weirdness of American culture that the amount of time devoted in this section of the book to Cockburn’s 2005 trip to India seems disorienting. The connecting thread, of course, is neoliberalism and in particular the enormous amount of damage it has caused to the lives of ordinary people. In the case of India, Cockburn focuses on the suicides of poor farmers, whose livelihoods have been devastated by neoliberal agricultural policies. Cockburn relies heavily on the work of his friend P. Sainath (author of the excellent Everybody Loves a Good Drought) for information on this issue, but the work of Vandana Shiva is also absolutely crucial, not only for understanding the causes of the suicides, but also for building effective resistance to those causes. Back in the US, Cockburn remarks with his usual prescience on then-US Senator Barack Obama in 2006: “Obama is one of those politicians journalists like to decorate with words like ‘adroit’ and ‘politically adept’ because you can actually see him trimming to the wind, the way you see a conjuror of indifferent skill shove the rabbit back up his sleeve. Above all he is concerned with the task of reassuring the masters of the Democratic Party, and beyond that, the politico-corporate establishment, that he is safe.” Obama's strategy clearly worked depressingly well.

On the heels of Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, today I watched an infinitely more complex and creative adaptation of the fairy tale. Yim Pil-sung’s 2007 Hansel and Gretel  has been classified as a horror film but I think it’s more accurate to describe it as a fantasy in the manner of Neil Jordan’s adaptation of Angela Carter’s work in The Company of Wolves or Guillermo del Toro in Pan's Labyrinth. It tells the story of Eun-soo, a young man who after crashing his car on a lonely road is led to a house in the middle of deep woods by a young girl named Young-hee. Once in the house, he meets Young-hee’s older brother, Man-bok, and her younger sister, Jung-soon. Despite repeated attempts to leave the house over the next few days, Eun-soo is unable to find his way out of the woods and ultimately realizes that he is trapped in the house and that the children are somehow keeping him there. Despite the fact that the children occupy the position of the witch in this film, with Eun-soo as the child, the children are in fact not entirely evil (at least, not in the conventional horror film sense of the word, and Eun-soo (along with the other adults in the film) is not entirely innocent. In fact, the most thought-provoking aspect of this adaptation is the way it blends the roles of aggressor and victim so that the ostensible source of the film’s threat, namely, seemingly demonic children, in fact turns out to be deserving of the audience’s sympathy due to the trauma they’ve experienced. But the true power of this remarkable film comes not just from extraordinary performances from the child actors but also the rich and inventive visual style of the film. Both the use of color and the set design are stunningly creative and together they make this film a truly memorable experience.