Today's Stories

May 17 / 18, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The View from the Crusaders' Castle

Andy Worthington
Gitmo Trials: Betrayal, Backsliding and Boycotts

May 16, 2008

Stephen Soldz
Involuntary Drugging of Detainees

Jonathan Cook
Police Attack Al-Nakba March

Paul Craig Roberts
Lies of Aggression

Christopher Brauchli
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Pharmacy

James L. Secor
Olympic Torch China: the View from Shaoxing

Franklin Lamb
Did Hezbollah Thwart a Bush/Olmert Attack on Beirut?

Linn Washington, Jr.
The Price of Protecting Racist Cops

Dave Lindorff
What West Virginia Means

May 15, 2008

Stan Cox
Big Brother Close Up

Jeff Halper
Rethinking Israel After 60 Years

Greg Moses
Living for the Children of Palestine

John Ross
Why Mexican Justice is a Euphemism

Ron Jacobs
Go to Work, Go to Jail

Binoy Kampmark
Indian Jailbirds: the Case of Binayak Sen

Eve Spangler
We Should Not Celebrate Dispossession

Martha Rosenberg
Meat Wars with South Korea

Website of the Day
Idaho Wolf Killers

May 14, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Oil Wars

Reza Fiyouzat
Torture, a Bully's Creed

Felice Pace
California Water Politics: Of Dams and Water Buffaloes

Hamdan A. Yousuf / Dania S. Ahmed
A Generation Defined by War

Robert Weitzel
Hillary's "Final Solution" to the Persian Problem

Ralph Nader
You're Either with the American People or the Big Auto Bosses

Dave Lindorff
Hillary, McCain and the Stupid Vote

Missy Comley Beattie
White Heaven: Hillary's W. Virginia Idyll

Neve Gordon
Israel as a Site of Struggle

Dr. Susan Block
A Washington Witch Hanging

Website of the Day
Hillary's Downfall

May 13, 2008

David Rosen
Sexual Terrorism: the Sadistic Side of Bush's War on Terror

Alan Farago
Nuclear Florida: Beachfront Reactors in an Age of Rising Sea Levels?

Saul Landau
The Crisis at Home

Saree Makdisi
Forget the Two-State Solution

Paul Craig Roberts
How Empires Fall

Andy Worthington
Gitmo's Suicide Bomber

Brother Bede Vincent
The Problem with Rev. Wright--There are Too Few Like Him

Linda Mamoun
Marketing Ethnic Cleansing

David Macaray
The Myth That Won't Die

Website of the Day
Burning the Future: Coal in America

May 12, 2008

St. Clair / Frank
The Pentagon's Toxic Legacy

Ziga Vodovnik
Rebels Against Tyranny: an Interview with Howard Zinn on Anarchism

Gary Leupp
Why All of Our Efforts Won't Stop an Attack on Iran

Frankln Lamb
Choufeit's Bloody Pentacost

Suzanne Baroud
The Ambition of Hillary Clinton

Martha Rosenberg
Farmer Ernie's Chamber of Horrors

Dave Zirin
The Boss's Boycott

Carl Finamore
I Ain't Gonna Work No More

Peter Morici
Recession Watch

Richard Rhames
The Third Way to Nowhere

Website of the Day
The Untold Story of Black New Orleans

May 10 / 11, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Real Clear Numbers: 101,000 Casualties a Year

Franklin Lamb
Hezbollah Eases Up and Beirut Opens Its Shutters

Ciara Gilmartin
A Surge in Iraqi Detainees

Diane Farsetta
Inside a Nuclear Industry Soirée

Kent Paterson
Mother's Day in Ciudad Juarez

Alan Farago
The Social Engineers

Rannie Amiri
Beirut on the Brink

Patrick Irelan
Bolivia, Morales and the Red Ponchos

Robert Fantina
The Lexicon Legacy of George W. Bush

Nikolas Kozloff
El Salvador 2009: Another Feather in the Cap of Chavez?

George Ciccariello-Maher
The Yumare Massacre, 22 Years On

David Yearsley
Bacharach at 80

Ron Jacobs
Rosa Luxemburg's Shock Doctrine

John Holt
Can Yellowstone Survive?

David Michael Green
It's So Over

Ben Terrall
Dealing Sleep

Kim Nicolini
The Best Film of the Bush Era?

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Orloski, Frisella, Gladstone-Gelman

May 9, 2008

Franklin Lamb
A Wild Day in Beirut

Andy Worthington
The Afghans of Gitmo

Benjamin Dangl
Polarizing Bolivia

Mark A. Huddle
Remembering Mildred Loving, an Unsung Hero of the Civil Rights Movement

David Macaray
Hollywood Gives SAG the Brush Off

Dave Lindorff
Team Clinton: Going Down Ugly

C.G. Estabrook
The Way We Live Now

Matt Kosko
McCain, Clinton, Obama and the Wages of Lesser-Evilism

Robert Weissman
Big Business is not the Solution to Global Poverty

Michael Dickinson
Jailing the Joint

Website of the Day
The Role of Third Parties in the U.S.A.

May 8, 2008

Sharon Smith
Rockefeller Family Fables

Saul Landau
The NATO Axiom

Laura Carlsen
A Primer on Plan Mexico

Binoy Kampmark
Food Riots are Coming to the U.S.

Kenneth Couesbouc
China's Paper Feet

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Constitutional Shenanigans

Franklin Lamb
Blindsided, Hezbollah Mulls Its Response

Sen. Russ Feingold
Government in Secret

George Wuerthner
The Problems with Conservation Easements

Richard W. Behan
A Brief Exposé of a Fraudulent War

Adam Federman
Marching for Sean Bell

Website of the Day
State of the Air

May 7, 2008

Winslow T. Wheeler
Drowning in Dollars

Joanne Mariner
Torture After Dark

Col. Dan Smith
It's Lying and It's Murder: How KBR Electrocuted US Troops

Brian M. Downing
Reports From Foreign Provinces

Andy Worthington
Who are the Prisoners Released with Sami al-Haj?

John Stauber
Pentagon Propaganda Documents Go Online, But Will the Media Ever Report on Them?

Christopher Brauchli
Outsourcing Tax Collection

Nelson P. Valdés
Cinco de Mayo and Cinco de Agosto: Mexican History and Manufactured Identities

Rep. Keith Ellison
High Court Deals Blow to Voting Rights

Dan Bacher
Undam the Klamath, Mr. Buffett!

Website of the Day
Green Porno

May 6, 2008

Pam Martens
The Obama Bubble Agenda

Nikolas Kozloff
U.S. is Promoting Secession in Bolivia

Marjorie Cohn
Under U.S. Law Torture is Always Illegal

Ralph Nader
America's Pay-or-Die Health Care System

Yigal Bronner
Archaeologists for Hire

Brian Cloughley
No Laws for Bush America

Jacob Hornberger
Killing Enemies Without Trial

Walter Brasch
People Who Don't Need People

Paul Krassner
An Open Letter to Michael Moore

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Running Mates from the Imaginary Plane

Website of the Day
Some People

May 5, 2008

Pam Martens
Obama's Money Cartel

Conn Hallinan
The Syrian Affair

Corey D. B. Walker
The End of Politics

Uri Avnery
Crusader Anxiety: Israel at 60

Dave Zirin
Refocusing Olympic Protest

Corporate Crime Reporter
Wiist's Crusade Against Corporations

Robert Jensen
The Selling and Shaping of Our Souls

Daniel White
What People Want to Hear About in Austin, Texas

Benjamin Dangl
May Day Raid on General Dynamics

Website of the Day
McCain's Pastor of Hate: "Starve. I Don't Care. Starve."

May 3 / 4, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Has Rev. Wright Cost Obama the Presidency?

Nikolas Kozloff
The Shameful Failure of the Black Congressional Caucus

Diane Farsetta
What the Pentagon Pundits Were Selling on the Side

Tariq Ali
New Labour is Dead

Harry Browne
The USA's Other Island: Irish Leaders and the War on Terror

Wajahat Ali
Pakistan's New Daughter of Destiny? An Exclusive Interview with Fatima Bhutto

David Yearsley
A Challenge to Jeffrey Eugenides

Greg Moses
Salamat, Riad Hamad

William Blum
Rev. Wright, the CIA and the AIDS Thing

Robert Fantina
The Rhetoric of John McCain

Fred Gardner
The Greatest Story Never Told

Dave Lindorff
Blame It On Paraguay: The Bush Family's Bad Real Estate Deal

Seth Sandronsky
Standardizing Learning

Binoy Kampmark
Brown, Boris and the British Council Elections

Howard Lisnoff
The Lost First Amendment

Daniel Cassidy
Slanguage: Paddy Works on the Erie

Bill Moyers
Shrink-Wrapping the Theology of Rev. Wright

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
John Holt / Akbar Khan

Website of the Weekend
Ed Abbey, Patron Saint of the Walker's Rights Movement

May 2, 2008

Andrew Cockburn
Secret Bush "Finding" Widens Covert War on Iran

David Isenberg
The Return of Limited Nuclear War?

Vijay Prashad
Driven to Terror: the Case of the Lackawana Six

William Blum
Spies Without Borders

David Macaray
Shutting Down the West Coast Ports: the ILWU's May Day Strike

Rannie Amiri
Is Sadr City Becoming the Next Gaza?

William James Martin
The Carter Coup

Stephanie Westbrook
As Italy Lurches Rightward, a Ray of Hope from Vicenza

Linn Washington, Jr.
A Battle Over Murals in Parisian Ghettos

Anthony Papa
How the Byrne Fund Corrupts Cops and Destroys Lives

Website of the Day
The Serota Petition

May 1, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Fed Sinks the Dollar

Behzad Yaghmaian
Blaming the Yuan for the Deficit with China

Wajahat Ali
The Dark Knight: the Real Rise of Obama

Dedrick Muhammad
Senator Obama, Please Come to Your Senses

Cynthia McKinney
Police in America Can Kill Some People With Impunity

Corporate Crime Reporter
Farm Broadcaster Fired After Ripping Monsanto's Goon Squads

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The Speech That Might Have Been

Reza Fiyouzat
Stop Obliterating Yourself!

Leigh Saavedra
Suspending the Federal Gas Tax

Tom Semioli
Hollywood Hypocrite: an Open Letter to Michael Moore

Website of the Day
Why Won't McCain Release His Medical Records?

Subscribe Online

Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park

Inside the Fractured Landscape of Male Adolescence

By KIM NICOLINI

Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park certainly isn’t the first movie that has used a dead body or act of violence as a narrative device to depict coming of age and the violence of adolescence crossing the line to adulthood (think River’s Edge and Stand By Me). What makes this movie different and marks it with Van Sant’s signature is that it uses what seems like cinematic realism to propel us into a surreal, avant-garde state into the interior landscape of adolescent masculinity. In particular, it quietly codes the film with the trap of heterosexuality and the horror of being an adolescent boy coming of age within the heterosexual matrix. Sure the movie has a surface plot that involves a murder and some kids and some skateboards, but when you look below the surface of the film, what you discover is the abstract violence of growing up gay in heteronormative America.

Like in so many other Van Sant films, Alex, the adolescent boy in Paranoid Park, is an exceptional beauty who radiates with all the confusing mess that makes an adolescent boy an adolescent boy – the burgeoning sexuality, the confusion and innocence, and a kind of sexy slackerism. Van Sant’s loving and doting attention on Alex – the multiple close-ups on his big damp dewy adolescent eyes, slightly pouting lips, and gorgeously boyishly curved body – could be yet another example of Van Sant’s exercises in adolescent boy fetishism (not unlike what we see in the novels of Dennis Cooper). The camera’s lingering focus on Alex brings us almost uncomfortably close to Alex’s physical presence. Certainly adolescent boys truly can be beautiful, and no doubt, Van Sant’s depiction of adolescent boys borders on a kind of soft-core porn. But also, I think that Van Sant uses stories like Paranoid Park to revisit his own coming of age gay in America. Van Sant’s sexual orientation is no secret, and we cannot ignore the queer content of his films. What makes this story told through Van Sant’s eyes so brilliant and beautiful is how he takes the ordinary realistic landscape of America, namely Portland, Oregon, and is able to convert it into a kind of aesthetic subconscious state that takes us on a journey through the interiority of male adolescence.

The story of Paranoid Park hinges on Alex’s trip to a skate park that was created and is frequented by fringe skateboarders in Portland. Subsequently Alex meets an older man, takes a ride on a freight train, and accidentally kills a security guard. Alex’s guilt over the incident is eating away at him, and the movie follows the elliptical journey inside Alex’s head as he recounts the details in a letter. Just taking the primary narrative structure of the film – Alex’s trip to the skate park, the older man, and the violent death of the security guard – it is not too far of a stretch to read this as Alex being initiated into gay sexuality and the violence of entering homosexuality within the confines of heterosexual social norms (e.g. the security guard). Certainly, Van Sant had that in mind. But what makes this movie more than just another “coming to terms with our gayness” narrative is how Van Sant delivers the incredible beauty of this violent turning point.

His use of the skate park itself is a brilliant tool. Here Van Sant uses a symbol of the ordinary middle American adolescent – the skate board – and morphs it into a beautifully abstract state of consciousness. Paranoid Park is not just any park. It was created by rebel skateboarders and is populated by outsiders and fringe people. Street punks, homeless urban primitives, box car riders, anarchists, and other skaters use the skate park as an alternative space to carve out freedom within a system of rules and codes. Further, the skate park becomes a kind of interior alternative male consciousness that Alex and others visit to try to hold onto some kind of individuality and freedom within matrix of masculinity and the heterosexual norm. The sequences in the skate park are breathtakingly beautiful. The boys and men soar through the air on their boards, taking flight from the ground which nails them to social order. The camera slows down, and we watch the skaters float through the sky. They are more like angels in blue jeans than men and boys. Van Sant meshes the skate board scenes with Nino Rota’s gorgeous voice delivering music from Fellini films (namely Amarcord and Juliette of the Spirits) and infuses these scenes of men on skateboards with a an abstract feminine undercurrent. The combination of the skate boarding, the slow camera work, and the Fellini music turns this ordinary landscape into an alternative reality where we are left gasping with its beauty.

The use of music from Fellini films not only infuses the film with a feminine unconscious, but it also meshes realist American cinema with a European international abstract artiness, and ultimately creates a kind of hybrid film. Van Sant uses high art conventions to deliver an ordinary low art subject. What Van Sant does with the skate park (converting the ordinary into the extraordinary) is what he does best in this movie. Van Sant was inspired by the films of Hungarian avant-garde film maker Bela Tarr, and in his recent films Van Sant has adopted many of Tarr’s signature techniques. Namely, like Tarr, Van Sant uses the long take, tracking shock and the dissection of surface objects and mise en scène to deliver an interior state. While Tarr’s characters wander the vast barren landscape of Hungary to depict their particular brand of emotional despair and barrenness, Alex wanders the halls of his high school amidst rows of lockers, fluorescent lights and polished floors to depict an interior adolescent cosmology.

Two long takes in the film are particularly stunning – the shower scene and the sex scene with Alex’s girlfriend. In these two scenes, Van Sant delivers an entire interior landscape and depicts unfathomable occurrences through poetics and abstraction that carry so much more weight and meaning than a simple linear narrative could deliver. These two scenes contain tremendous power by focusing on a single element. In the shower scene, Alex stands in the shower after the violent incident with the security guard, and for many minutes the camera lingers on his profile as water drips off his face. The water seems so solid that it becomes almost like tentacles, an actual extension of Alex’s body. Alex’s face is abstracted by shadow and water, and we are left to watch for an extended period the water pouring off of/out of Alex. We are forced to contemplate the patterns and weight of the water, and it is like we are watching Alex’s innocence literally exit his body. The way the light reflects off the water, the water is almost like a living thing that is simultaneously leaving Alex’s body and clinging to it. In the scene in which Alex’s girlfriend initiates sex with him, Alex lies stiff and motionless on the bed while she climbs on top of him. We see Alex’s glazed eyes staring into space when his girlfriend lowers her head and her hair covers Alex’s face and the entire frame of a film. The camera holds this shot, and we are left staring at this mass of female hair under which Alex is buried. The hair descends over Alex’s head like some kind of monster and becomes a symbol of the smothering, claustrophobic forces of heterosexuality. Alex eventually emerges from the hair with his usual blank and distanced stare. Again he has lost innocence yet clings to it. And that is one of the things that Van Sant does so well in this movie. He shows us innocence that been corrupted yet completely unconscious. We the audience know what is happening to Alex, yet Alex himself is completely unaware because he is living within the “adolescent interior” of the film while we are experiencing his interior from the exterior perspective of adult audience.

One of the things that I think may be difficult for some audiences is the stilted awkward narrative. It sometimes seems clumsy. It’s non-linear and elliptical. People come in and out of the movie like looming archetypes – Detective Liu, Alex’s tattooed father, the guys at the skate park, the blond girlfriend, even the crawling mutilated security guard. But we have to remind ourselves that this is the perspective in which Alex sees the world. Van Sant is giving us a movie from the interior perspective of an adolescent boy. He uses highly evolved theories and techniques to depict an under-evolved adolescent state of mind. We are inside of Alex’s head during his violent transition from adolescent boy to man. We jump back and forth in time, revisit the traumas, project our anxieties, and reduce them to archetypes and symbols. The elliptical form of the narrative, the stilted and awkward language, and the hallucinatory perspective of events are all part of the landscape of Alex’s mind. We are experiencing realism projected into the interior surreal state. The events seem real, the set details are exceptionally real, yet the perspective on this realness is through Alex’s interior state. In a way, this abstraction of reality makes it even more real.

Ultimately, even though the movie traces Alex’s interactions with a number of characters, the film is primarily about Alex’s confrontation with himself. The movie is framed by Alex writing a letter that tells the story of the events. It turns out that he is writing the letter to his friend Macy who also happens to be a butch punk girl. Macy is ultimately Alex’s feminine side being given voice and solidity. By writing the letter to Macy, Alex is writing the letter to himself. The letter serves as his own interior monologue as he tries to reconcile his feminine/queer side within the heterosexual norm. In the end, Alex burns the letter and keeps that side of himself contained. Likewise, when we watch Alex recalling the vision of the severed body of the security guard, we also recognize the violated body as Alex’s own severed interior body and fragmented self. Certainly the scene is horrific and violent, but in Van Sant’s view, coming of age within the heterosexual matrix is violent. This is the literal severed body of a man, but ultimately it is also Alex being severed from his feminine side, from his innocence, from his sense of “security” within that innocence. In a way, this movie is a ghost story, in which Alex is haunted by his own masculinity and what will happen to him when he grows up. The movie ends with the song “Strongest Man in the World” which puts the final stamp on the movie’s point of addressing what it means to grow up male in America and to have to prove your masculinity when you are ultimately queer.

I think what is so incredible about Paranoid Park is its ability to seem so simple, yet when you scratch below the surface, it is an amazingly complex network of abstraction, symbol and art that delivers a devastatingly beautiful portrait of the violence of growing up male in America and the horror of reconciling masculinity and queerness within the heteronormative matrix. Yes, Gus Van Sant is a queer film maker. He deploys his queerness consciously within his films. What he is doing that cannot be dismissed is joining American realism, avant-garde cinema and a queer sensibility into mainstream cinema, and that alone makes his films worth seeing.

Kim Nicolini is an artist, poet and cultural critic. She lives in Tucson, Arizona with her partner, daughter, and a menagerie of beasts. She works a day job to support her art and culture habits. She is currently finishing a book-length essayistic memoir about growing up as a punk sex worker in 1970s San Francisco. She can be reached at: knicolini@gmail.com.

 

 

 

Now Available from CounterPunch Books!

Born Under a Bad Sky:
Notes from the Dark Side
of the Earth
By Jeffrey St. Clair

Buy End Times Now!

Click Here to Buy!

Click Here to Buy!

Click Here to Order!

The Occupation
by Patrick Cockburn

Humanitarian Imperialism
By Jean Bricmont