Montalbán/Golem/MyraHindley

Today I finished Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s The Buenos Aires Quintet. Not surprisingly, a mixture of resolution and continuing loose ends characterizes the end of the novel. Muriel is reunited with her parents, but Montalbán spends very little time depicting the reunion or giving us a sense of whether these characters have a future as a family. The Captain is defeated but not killed; instead, he goes into exile in Paraguay and could easily come back in the future. So what has changed? As the minister Güelmes puts it, the country has returned to democratic normality, but all that means is that “corruption and state violence are in the hands of civilians, not the military.” Continuity, then, rather than change. Güelmes again: “Sometimes the state needs to remember it has a monopoly on violence.” Against this background, Carvalho returns to Spain, not defeated precisely, but surely irrelevant. Even though Don Vito will continue to run ‘Partners In Crime,’ their private detective agency, in Carvalho’s absence, Montalbán makes it clear that the detective is little more than charming anomaly in a world where state violence of one kind or another is the only game in town. File under coincidence: yesterday’s New York Times includes the obituary of Juan Gelman, an Argentine poet who not only resisted the military dictatorship, but whose life circumstances uncannily mirror some of the circumstances depicted in Montalbán’s book. Food for thought.

I also read the next fifty pages of The Golem Redux: From Prague to Post-Holocaust Fiction. In this section of the book, Baer discusses a wide range of materials, including the films Der Golem (Paul Wegener, 1920) and Le Golem (Julien Duvivier, 1936), two stories called “The Golem,” by Isaac Bashevis Singer (1982) and Elie Wiesel (1983) and Barbara Sherwood’s 2002 novel The Book Of Splendor. Baer’s emphasis throughout is on the various intertextual adaptations these texts make to the Golem legend, and the purpose of such changes, but there are weaknesses in her discussion. Some are minor (such as a tendency to spend far too long on plot summary) and others are more serious, such as her rather simplistic preference for ‘faithful’ adaptations. This preference leads her to ultimately dismiss Wegener and Duvivier’s films as anti-semitic (or, as she puts it, “intertextuality gone awry”) while saying virtually nothing about their considerable technical achievements. Because she approves of Singer, Wiesel, and Sherwood, Baer’s account of these sources is more interesting, but still hews much too closely to the fundamentally uninteresting question of whether these sources are ‘accurate’ treatments of the Golem.

I’m doing the research for a piece on the Moors Murders at the moment and so I’m subjecting myself to a slew of ‘true crime documentaries’ on the case, even though they’re practically unwatchable. A typical example of the genre is Martina Cole's documentary about Myra Hindley, which is part of her series on female murderers ‘imaginatively’ titled ‘Lady Killers.’ Ironically, Cole begins the documentary by quoting from Compulsion,  Meyer Levin’s famous fictionalization of the Leopold and Loeb case, specifically the passage where Levin defends himself from the charge of sensationalism and explains the rationale for going back once again to such a notorious case. One can see why Cole would find this passage appealing but whereas one could conceivably find Levin innocent of the charge of sensationalism, Cole would be guilty as charged. Although this documentary of Hindley professes, like every other example of the genre, to want to get to the bottom of the mystery of its subject, what it in fact does is simply rehash the same old facts about a case that everyone already knows by heart. The cultural work of these repetitions interests me, but so do the other standard features of studies of Hindley on display here: the claim that she was worse than Brady; the claim that she personifies pure evil; and above all, the endless reiteration of the fact that she remains the most reviled woman in Britain (even after her death in 2002) with no serious consideration of why this is so and absolutely no self-awareness that this film and others like it merely contribute to the ritual reestablishment of that revulsion. It should not be possible to make a film about Hindley that is boring and predictable and perhaps only in this respect should Cole be congratulated: she has achieved the seemingly impossible.

Montalbán/Golem/DerGolem

Today I read the next fifty pages of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s The Buenos Aires Quintet. This is the section of the novel where I began to feel that Montalbán is overstaying his welcome. The subplots continue to proliferate (here it is mostly a storyline involving the boxer Boom Boom Peretti, who is being blackmailed by Loaiza, a former friend of his. Peretti hires Carvalho to find out exactly what Loiaza wants) and they mostly seem to serve as a way to bring together the main players in the drama in ever closer proximity. The boxing match that Alma, Carvalho, Muriel, and the Captain all attend reminded me irresistibly of the boxing match in Hammett’s Red Harvest, but it main purpose is to give Carvalho a clue that the Captain and Muriel may be related to each other. In other words, Carvalho is inching ever closer to a solution of what seems to have become the novel’s main mystery (what happened to Alma and Raúl’s daughter, or more precisely, will they find out what happened to their daughter?) but the progress is at a snail’s pace. This may be Montalbán’s way of emphasizing that his detective can do very little in this kind of environment other than wait for the pieces to fall into place and recognize the resulting pattern when they do, but it does not make for an exciting read.

I also read the first fifty pages of Elizabeth R. Baer’s 2012 book The Golem Redux: From Prague to Post-Holocaust Fiction. Building on previous surveys of the golem’s presence in literature and culture, Baer aims to analyze why this figure remains so prevalent in post-Holocaust and contemporary literature and culture. With Adorno’s famous prohibition against the writing of poetry after Auschwitz in mind, Baer argues that “the golem serves in several ways to provoke readers to consider the viability of imaginative works about the Shoah” (emphasis in original). Contra Adorno, Baer argues that the golem’s presence constitutes a defense of the continued relevance of the imagination and imaginative literature in the post-Holocaust period. Baer’s other main contribution in this book is her emphasis on the importance of intertextuality (in the Kristevan sense) in understanding the character and importance of the golem legend. “No wonder he has been adopted, adapted, appropriated, and riffed upon in so many post-Holocaust fictions: intertextuality is an approach to writing devoted to instability, multiplicity, and correction.” This first section of the book, after providing this framework, establishes the (literary) origins of the golem legend before going to examine its twentieth-century incarnations, including Gustav Meyrink’s novel Der Golem (1915) Paul Wegener’s 1920 film Der Golem: Wie er in die Welt kam.

Inspired by Baer’s book, I also watched Paul Wegener’s 1920 film Der Golem: Wie er in die Welt kam (The Golem: How He Came Into the World)  . Wegener was so fascinated by the figure of the Golem that he made three films featuring him; this is the only one to have survived. It tells the story of how Rabbi Loew saves the Jewish community of 16^th century Prague by bringing the Golem to life and using him to change the Holy Roman Emperor’s mind about expelling the Jews from the city. Baer discusses the issue of whether or not the film is anti-semitic at length in her book. My own view is that it reflects the default anti-semitism of its time but that this fact alone does not define the film. In other words, the film is also an important example of the sympathetic dramatization of Jewish mythology and a key example of the German Expressionist school of filmmaking. The sets and cinematography are both absolutely extraordinary and Wegener, who plays the Golem, is wonderfully effective at showing the evolution of the Golem’s personality in the short time that he is alive. David Bordwell hits the nail on the head when he says “But putting aside Der Golem’s minor weaknesses, it has marvelous moments that summon up what cinematic Expressionism could be.” Bordwell’s essay can be found here and the film itself here.

Montalbán/Cockburn/DirtyWars

Today I read the next fifty pages of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s The Buenos Aires Quintet. In any crime novel set in Argentina (especially a playfully metaphysical one) one would expect some reference to Jorge Luis Borges. But when it comes, Montalbán gives it a surprising form: a serial conman pretends to be Borges’ son, in the process incensing the members of The Aleph Club, a society of Borges disciples composed of members of the Argentine elite. When members of the Club beat Carvalho’s colleague, Don Vito, Carvalho burns down the club in retaliation, leading to his arrest along with that of Alma and Don Vito, with Alma’s arrest leading to a protest by her students, including Muriel, the Captain’s daughter who is in fact Alma and Raúl’s long-missing daughter. The point here is not just how Montalbán uses Borges to construct a particularly complex part of this book’s increasingly tangled storyline but also the fact that he is not particularly interested in paying tribute to or honoring Borges. After all, even though he later came to regret it, Borges did support the dictatorship during the Dirty War and in that sense the fact that Montalbán makes his most passionate supporters members of the oligarchy makes a depressing kind of sense.

I also finished Alexander Cockburn’s A Colossal Wreck: A Road Trip Through Political Scandal, Corruption, and American Culture. In my posts on this book, I was often conscious about not speaking ill of the dead, and now I’ve finished Cockburn’s final book, I don’t want to go to the opposite extreme and overpraise him. Fortunately, Cockburn solves this problem for me in the way that he so frequently combines observations with which I agree and others with which I disagree in practically everything he writes! I suppose what I appreciate most about him is his refusal to specialize; that is, his freedom to hold forth about everything that piques his interest and to ignore what bores him. I can’t resist saying that even when he was still alive he was part of a dying breed, a fact brought home not only by the frequent memorials to deceased friends in this book but also by its often elegiac tone in other parts of the book—the American left, from Cockburn’s point of view, was more or less dead, while capitalism, in all of its bloody hypocrisy and corruption, was as vigorous as ever. I suppose it’s some kind of testament to Cockburn that the book didn’t feel as pessimistic as I make it sound.

I also watched Dirty Wars, Rick Rowley’s 2013 documentary featuring Jeremy Scahill, upon whose book the film is based. Like The Act of Killing, Dirty Wars has been nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary, but the two films are very different. Dirty Wars is less formally experimental, focuses on the victims rather than the perpetrators, and whereas Killing’s Oppenheimer remains off-camera (though frequently referred to), Scahill is very much the on-camera focus of Dirty Wars. In fact, I would say this last point is a weakness in the film. Following Scahill’s efforts to get to the bottom of exactly how the US is conducting its covert wars gives the film a clear narrative structure (although, as Cahill points out, it is a film without an ending, just as America is fighting a ‘war against terror’ without end) but there are moments when the film because as much, if not more, about Scahill and his feelings than it is about the victims. Centering the film upon a white, Western, male subject might have been thought necessary to engage a Western audience (and perhaps it is) but in my view it doesn’t add to the film’s impact—quite the opposite, in fact. With this said, sometimes the film does make calculations about what it needs to do that are depressingly accurate. When it shows film and photographs of the child victims of an American cruise missile strike in Yemen, for example, the film could be accused of being sensationalistic and manipulative, but I read this decision as a reflection of an inconvenient truth, which is that most Americans don’t care about foreign casualties of American aggression, unless they are children (and sometimes not even then). The film gets in our face at this moment, in other words, because it feels it has to in order to make its point. Whatever the weaknesses of the film, however, Dirty Wars does have the singular virtue of allowing for no ambiguity about the following points: 1. The murder of civilians is now standard operating procedure for how the American government conducts its ‘war on terror.’ 2. The Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) is operating as a paramilitary wing of the American state. It is able to kill with impunity because it has zero accountability except to the President of the United States, who orders the assassinations JSOC carries out. 3. For this reason, Obama, like many other US presidents before him, is a war criminal, and should be arrested and tried as such.
 

Montalbán/Cockburn/TheField

Today I read the next fifty pages of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s The Buenos Aires Quintet. Although the search for Raúl continues to feature in the novel, it is by no means Montalbán’s exclusive focus because he is interested in constructing a much larger canvas of Argentine life in which absurdity and cruelty are combined in equal measure. Take, for example, the characters of Robinson and Man Friday, who are a former member of the oligarchy and his chauffeur who have converted themselves into caricatures of Defoe’s characters while preaching universal equality. Although Montalbán plays their antics up to highlight their comedy on one level, the fact that Robinson is blackmailing his former allies among the rich and powerful leads to his speedy and brutal execution. It’s almost as if Montalbán encourages one to laugh only to have the laugh die in one’s throat. Another interesting aspect of the novel is Carvalho’s decision to form a private detective agency in the style of a Marlowesque 1940s gumshoe. Although this decision is initially prompted by necessity (Carvalho needs funds) and with a strong sense of its absurdity, the agency actually seems to work and to be successful. This suggests, perhaps, that several different temporalities coexist in contemporary Argentina, so that modern police work, the old-fashioned private eye, and the machinery of state violence can all coexist in the same space.

I also read the next fifty pages of Alexander Cockburn’s A Colossal Wreck: A Road Trip Through Political Scandal, Corruption, and American Culture. In the context of discussing the arc of Christopher Hitchens’ career and whether he should be described as a contrarian, Cockburn makes the following interesting observation: “if the word [contrarian] is to have any muscle, it surely must imply the expression of dangerous opinions.” I had not previously thought of ‘contrarian’ as a complimentary term in this sense, but Cockburn both convinces me that it is and persuades me that, like Hitchens, he is not truly a contrarian. In other words, Cockburn objects to what we might expect him to object to (Obama, the treatment of Bradley Manning, etc.) and approves of what we might expect him to approve of (the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, etc.) but at those moments when he seems to hold contrarian views (global warming is hogwash, the right to bear arms should be protected) those ideas are merely vaguely naughty from a leftist perspective rather than dangerous. It’s ironic that he criticizes Hitchens for always wanting to be an insider as I think Cockburn had the same yearning to belong. Granted, this need expressed itself in very different ways in Hitchens and Cockburn but they do share an intriguing similarity from this perspective, namely, their decision to become American citizens late in life.

I also watched The Field, a documentary about rap and violence in Chicago. I didn’t know much about the music scene in Chicago until watching this film, and it helped me not only get a better understanding of ‘drill music’ but also to understand the lived reality of the headlines about ‘Chiraq’ being the murder capital of the US. In many ways, there is a lot of continuity between this iteration of gangsta rap and the version that came out of LA in the later 1980s and early 1990s, but what complicates the situation in Chicago even further (as explained at the beginning of the film) is that the destruction of public housing in the city in the early 2000s distributed gang members across the poor areas of the south and east sides of the city in such a way that members of rival gangs could be living right next to each other. Talk about a recipe for disaster! The one thing I would have liked to hear a lot more about is the contribution of female rappers to the Chicago hip-hop scene. Even so, this is still a must-see for anyone interested in rap music, black American pop culture, and why violence remains such an ingrained part of urban American life.

Montalbán/Cockburn/IanBrady

Today I read the next fifty pages of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s The Buenos Aires Quintet. In this section of the novel, we begin to get a better sense of what exactly Raúl is searching for, although this issue remains somewhat ambiguous. On the one hand, he is looking for his missing daughter, taken from he and his wife Berta when she was a baby. Raúl has not yet found out that his daughter has been adopted and raised by the villainous Captain. On the other hand, Raúl is looking for himself. The years he spent in exile in Spain seem to be an empty time for him. He has never stopped thinking of himself as Argentine, but given how much Argentina has changed during his exile, he is no longer sure what being Argentine means. In these ways, Raúl’s search, and in particular, the responses of various characters to Raúl’s return, give Montalbán a way to explore the meanings of history, the connections between private and state violence, the malleability of identity, and a host of other subjects, all through the prism of the crime novel, a genre supposedly committed to the restoration of order. Early in the novel, however, Carvalho has already pointed out that private detectives do not restore order; instead, they merely uncover disorder. It’s reasonable to expect that Montalbán will do the same.

I also read the next fifty pages of Alexander Cockburn’s A Colossal Wreck: A Road Trip Through Political Scandal, Corruption, and American Culture. In commenting on Obama’s receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize, Cockburn points out that former Presidential recipients of the prize (Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Jimmy Carter) were also inappropriately undeserving of the honor in their various ways. The lesson Cockburn takes from this is amusing: “People marvel at the idiocy of these Nobel awards, but there’s method in the madness, since in the end they train people to accept without demur or protest absurdity as part and parcel of the human condition.” Unfortunately, absurdity also characterizes many of Cockburn’s observations in this section of the book. How else to describe his approval of Bob Barr’s political platform in his assessment of the failings of the 2008 presidential candidates? Or his singling out of the Supreme Court’s 2008 defense of the Second Amendment (with the majority opinion written by Antonin Scalia) as a bright patch “in the gloom in Bush time”? Or his admiration of his neighbor’s gun collection and his readiness to defend himself at a moment’s notice? The strong streak of libertarianism that runs through Cockburn’s work all too often makes A Colossal Wreck an unfortunately apposite title for this book. But at least there is a shout-out for Buffalo. “Si monumentum requiris, go to downtown Buffalo and weep.”

I also watched Ian Brady: Endgames of a Psychopath, a 2012 documentary by Paddy Wivell on the British serial killer Ian Brady. This documentary was the focus of controversy in Britain when it was originally aired because it was claimed that one of its interviewees was in possession of a letter from Brady that revealed the location of his last unfound victim. Despite the patina of novelty that this controversy lent the film, however, on the whole it resembles closely both most other ‘exposés’ of the Moors Murders case in particular and the genre of the true crime documentary as a whole. First, Endgames asks nothing but rhetorical questions. Although it claims to want to determine whether or not Brady is a manipulative psychopath, it has already decided the answer to that question and every other question it asks before the film was even made. Second, in the questions it asks, the answers it gives, the people it interviews, and in every other respect, there is nothing new about Endgames. It recycles the same facts, pictures, and outrage as every other film on the subject. Third, precisely to disguise its lack of novelty, Endgames, like every other film on the subject, must claim to be novel and different in order to pretend to social utility and disguise both its lack of originality and its moribund and morbid fascination with the case. Fourth and finally, although the aim of Endgames is apparently to deflate Brady’s grandiosity and to challenge his control of the narrative of his life, this film inevitably bolsters both by both reiterating and updating the components of the Brady legend. This is not a dilemma with any easy resolution.

Montalbán/Cockburn/TheActofKilling

Today I read the next fifty pages of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s The Buenos Aires Quintet. In this section of the novel, Carvalho succeeds in his mission when he locates his missing cousin Raúl, but his success is only temporary, as Raúl soon escapes and disappears again. This momentary resolution and partial success reflects the book’s account of the consistency between the old and new Argentina; in other words, not much has changed with the overthrow of the military dictatorship and the election of the ‘reformer’ Carlos Menem. As one character puts it “Apparently all the secret shit of power never disappears.” The personification of this ‘secret shit’ is the mysterious figure of the Captain, responsible for many deaths during the Dirty War and still pulling the strings in the ‘new’ Argentina, much to the frustration of both Carvalho and the Argentine police. One of the most striking aspects of Carvalho’s character is also highlighted in this section of the book—his habit of burning books. Why does he do it? Partly, he says, because books “taught me nothing about to live” and partly because Culture is “nothing more than a mask for fear and ignorance. For death.” It remains to be seen whether Montalbán is in earnest when he makes this claim.

I also read the next fifty pages of Alexander Cockburn’s A Colossal Wreck: A Road Trip Through Political Scandal, Corruption, and American Culture. As this section of the book covers the period leading up to the 2008 US presidential election, the number of negative assessments of both Obama and HRC increase dramatically. In this context, Cockburn’s repetition of a claim he’s made before, namely, that Gerald Ford is America’s greatest President, really stands out. This iteration of the claim is prompted by Ford’s passing on December 26^th, 2006, and Cockburn justifies his claim by saying “Transferring the Hippocratic injunction from the medical to the political realm, he did the least possible realm.” Cockburn’s speculations about what might have happened had Ford been re-elected in 1976 are not persuasive, but his view of Ford is certainly a bracing alternative to the Saturday Night Live  version of Ford as an utter incompetent. Much more difficult to fathom is Cockburn’s response to the Virginia Tech massacre in April 2007. The problem is not so much Cockburn’s focus on the criminally incompetent response of the University to that day’s events, but rather his brusque dismissal of the need for gun control: “There have been the usual howls from the anti-gun lobby, but it’s all hot air. America is not about to dump the Second Amendment giving people the right to bear arms.” Even worse, Cockburn goes on to argue that a better response would be to arm “appropriately screened’ teachers and students. Only a simpleton would believe this would improve the situation instead of leading to more deaths.

I also watched The Act of Killing, the 2012 documentary directed by Joshua Oppenheimer that has just been nominated for an Academy Award. It tells the story of what happened in Indonesia in 1965 when Suharto took power and killed over a million Communists, primarily by means of death squads led by gangsters such as the two men Oppenheimer focuses on most, Anwar Congo and Adi Zulkadry. Oppenheimer’s film has met with near-universal acclaim and that fact alone makes me suspicious of it. But it’s important to understand what its real weaknesses are, rather than its apparent ones. For example, it’s been said that the film lacks historical context and only presents one side of what happened. Both of these claims are true (for example, the film says nothing about the US role in the killings, discussed in detail here) but they are also beside the point because The Act of Killing is not a documentary in the conventional sense of the word. Oppenheimer has called it a “documentary of the imagination,” which is a useful way of making sense of how the film blends fictional and non-fictional elements. Specifically, when Oppenheimer encourages the killers to recreate some of their killings, they take to the idea with great gusto, filming scenes in the style of several of their favorite genres, including a gangster movie, a war movie, and even a musical. These recreations, cross-cut as they are with standard first-person interviews with the killers, give the film a bizarre, almost hallucinatory quality and make The Act of Killing truly distinctive. At its best, it powerfully demonstrates the influence of these movie genres on the self-definition of these individuals when they were committing the murders in the 1960s. And in doing so, it shows us that documentary can never draw upon a well of undiluted ‘reality’ for its representations. Rather, it is always necessarily trafficking in a combination of the fictional and non-fictional. Accentuating this combination, however, is a technique that is fraught with danger. Does the recasting of acts of torture and murder into B-movie scenes aestheticize and trivialize the violence? Does blurring the line between fiction and reality make it more difficult to make accurate truth claims about what happened and who is responsible? As the movie progressed, I found myself becoming more and more troubled by the way in which this film represents the killers and by my inability to distinguish reliably between truth and fiction. Both of these issues come to a head in the film’s final scenes involving Anwar Congo. Apparently, as Congo participates in more and more recreations, the ghosts of the past come back to haunt him, especially once he plays the part of a victim. As Congo’s humanity seemingly begins to reassert itself (even on a visceral, physical level, as the concluding scene of him retching suggests) we are offered the spectacle of redemption, not only of Congo, but also of our faith in humanity, so sorely tested by the rest of the film. But why should we believe what we are seeing? What confidence do we have that this is not another fictional scene? Personally, I was unconvinced by this attempt to install Congo in the place of victim. It felt wrong not only on a moral level but also on an aesthetic level: it was too neat to be convincing. But even if one is not convinced, one can understand why Oppenheimer makes this decision. Congo’s apparent redemption offers Oppenheimer a much more promising conclusion than Adi Zulkadry’s complete lack of remorse, guilt, and nightmares. It seems that The Act of Killing simply does not know what to do with Zulkadry’s acceptance of what he has done and instead opts for a sentimentalism that, intentionally or not, exposes some of the problems with this film.

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.