Today's Stories

June 12-14, 2009

Mike Whitney
Bernanke's Next Parlor Trick

June 11, 2009

Kathy Kelly /
Dan Pearson
Down and Out in Shah Mansoor: With the Swat Refugees

James Bovard
The Latest Torture Cover-Up Scam

Tristan de Bourbon
The Toy Makers of Chenghai: the Financial Crisis Seen From China

Dave Lindorff
The Wheels are Coming Off the Recovery Program

Kevin Zeese
The Case for Disbarment of the Torture Lawyers

Ralph Nader
The Craft of Sam Maloof: a Visionary Woodworker

Harvey Wasserman
The GOP's Trillion Dollar Reactor Plan Goes Radioactive

Nicole Colson
The Anti-Abortion Movement's Climate of Violence

Mark Weisbrot
Showdown Over the IMF

Dan Bacher
Big Water's Big Lie Unravels

Website of the Day
Top 10 Most Absurd TIME Covers

June 10, 2009

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Obama's Doublespeak on Iran

Jennifer Van Bergen / Douglas Valentine
The Dangerous World of Indefinite Detentions: From Vietnam to Abu Ghraib

Kathy Kelly
Visitors and Hosts in Pakistan

Paul Craig Roberts
Fear Rules

Rev. William E. Alberts
First the Torture of Truth ...

Peter Lee
Obama and North Korea: a Warm-Up in the Offing?

Carol Miller
Why We Need a Holistic, Cradle-to-the-Grave National Health Care System

Emily Ratner
Dreams of Flight in Gaza

Robert Weissman
The IMF's Accountability Moment

Dave Lindorff
The Sutra of the Crushed Volvo

Website of the Day
Starving in Gitmo

June 9, 2009

Winslow T. Wheeler
Back From the Dead: Pentagon Pork!

Mike Whitney
Is Hyper-Inflation Around the Corner?

Stan Cox
Biofuel's Drug Problem

Sibel Edmonds
The Battle Against the State Secrets Privilege

Jonathan Cook
Where the Victim is the Guilty Party

David Macaray
A Bad Time for Unions

Robert Jensen
In South Africa, Apartheid is Dead, But White Supremacy Lingers On

Nadia Hijab
The Obama Difference

Mark Weisbrot
Vulture Funds Descend on Argentina

Website of the Day
Waging Non-Violence

June 8, 2009

John Ross
Mexico: Politics as Drugs / Drugs as Politics

Paul Wright
Deconstructing Gus: How a Former Prisoner Took On and Took Down Corrections Corporation of America's Top Lawyer (and Cheney Pal)

Paul Craig Roberts
Long-Term Economic Memory Loss

Franklin C. Spinney
"Natural Growth:" Israel's Demographic Hogwash

Franklin Lamb
Lebanon's Elections: Return to the Status Quo

Uri Avnery
The Tone and the Music

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Loyalty Oaths

Eric Toussaint
/ Damien Millet
The Partisans of Capitalism Have Lost All Credibility

Jim Goodman
The Dairy Oligarchy

Norman Solomon
Words and War

Reza Fiyouzat
When Accusations Fly: the Spectacle of the Iranian Elections

Website of the Day
Latino Jobless Rate Soars

June 5 -7, 200

Alexander Cockburn
High Words, Low Truths

George Galloway
Our Convoy to Gaza

Paul Craig Roberts
Obama in Cairo

Jennifer Loewenstein
How Much Really Separates Obama and Netanyahu?

Franklin Lamb
Watching Obama's Speech in Lebanon

Mike Whitney
The Biggest Rip Off Ever?

Andy Worthington
Death at Guantánamo

Missy Comley Beattie
Peace Be Upon You?

Farzana Versey
Walk Like an Egyptian: the Oprahfication of Obama

Stanley Heller
Obama's Non-Starter

John V. Whitbeck
Nothing Comes From Nothing

Robert Weissman
GM: the Path Not Taken

Lee Sustar
The Fall of GM: Why Workers Will Pay the Price

Dave Lindorff
What a State-Run GM Could Do

William Blum
The Great, International, Truly Demonic Iran Threat

Ernest Callenbach /
Harvey Wasserman
A Green-Powered Trip Through Ecotopia

Greg Moses
By George! Austin Leads the National Recovery

Ron Jacobs
The Meaning of Yasser Arafat

David Yearsley
Art Set in Concrete:
the Desolate Urban Landscape of High Culture

Tim Stelloh
Pot Home Invasions: Bud and Blow Torches

Belén Fernández
The Joksters: Obama and Thomas Friedman

David Ker Thomson
The Academics

Karyn Strickler
Clean Coal: a Dirty Joke

Christopher Brauchli
Judicial Amnesia and the Federalist Society

Charles R. Larson
Leaving Tangier: Exile and Exploitation

Kim Nicolini
"Hunger:" Art With a Punch

Lorenzo Wolff
Good Head (Or Why the End of Hand-Crafted Music Isn't (Necessarily) the End of Music)

Poets' Basement
Jenkins, Orloski and Willson

Website of the Weekend
Tankman

June 4, 2009

Arno J. Mayer
The Future of Israel and the Decline of the American Empire

Mike Whitney
Bond Market Blowout

Gareth Porter
Report Ties Dubious Iran Nuke Documents to Israel

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
Clearing Misconceptions on Pakistan's War in Swat

Mouin Rabbani
Paradigmatic Progress?

Jordan Flaherty
Life in Gaza

Adam Turl
Is Card Check Dead?

Nikolas Kozloff
Iran's Elections: the Latin America Factor

Yifat Susskind
Obama's Double Standard

Website of the Day
Pink Floyd's Roger Waters Slams Israel

June 3, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
As the Dollar Falls Off the Cliff...

Kathy Kelly
A Weaver's Welcome to Pakistan

Alan Farago
Bailing Out the Land Speculators

Franklin Lamb
Israeli Spies and Fake IDs

Bill Hatch
Why Congressman Cardoza Stiffed Michelle Obama

Nadia Hijab
A Stifling Embrace

Dean Baker
Reporters With Pom-Poms: Cheerleading the Recovery

Binoy Kampmark
Whither GM?

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
What Happened to Air France Flight 477?

Remi Kanazi
Oslo Redux?

Behzad Yaghmaian
The End of Idealism in China?

Website of the Day
A Time Comes: the Story of the KingsNorth Six

June 2, 2009

Uri Avnery
Racists for Democracy

Robert Weissman
Bankrupt Thinking

Conn Hallinan
Shadow Wars

Gideon Spiro
Obama and Israel's Nuclear Arsenal

Roger Burbach
US-Cuba Policy: "Still Stuck in the Past"

Dylan Quigley
My Experience with Dr. Tiller

Dave Lindorff
The American Taliban Claim Another Victim

Ray McGovern
Navy Vet Honored, Foiled Israeli Attack

Belén Fernández
Israel's Newfound Concern for UNIFIL

Martha Rosenberg
Give It Up, Wyeth

Willie L. Pelote, Sr.
GOP: California's for the Rich (Poor People Should Move)

Website of the Day
You Bet Your Health

June 1, 2009

Pam Martens
Wall Street Braces for New Cops on the Beat

Yitzhak Laor
Washington's Mirror

Mark Weisbrot
More Stimulus, Not Deficit Reduction

Ramzy Baroud
Netanyahu's New Quest

Saul Landau
Dancing the Afghan Jig

Eugenia Tsao
Smug Toronto Seethes as Tamils "Go Too Far"

Afshin Rattansi
Women in Darfur: "We Saw No Evidence of Genocide"

Debra Sweet
The Murder of Dr. Tiller

Abdul Malik Mujahid
Obama's Trip Egypt and American Muslims

Bill Quigley
Haiti's Revolutionary Priest Gerard Jean-Juste: Presente!

John Wright
The Tragedy of Susan Boyle

Website of the Day
Young Neo Con Anthem

May 29-31, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Sotomayor and the Last of the WASPs

Patrick Cockburn
Iraq: The Mother of All Corruption Scandals

Vijay Prashad
Reeling Republicans

Gary Leupp
The Destabilization of Pakistan

Ray McGovern
The Impossible Rehab of Colin Powell

Rannie Amiri
Spies, Lies and Mr. Lebanon's Demise

Bill Hatch
The Mechanic's Tale: a Short Chapter in the History of Foreclosures

Chellis Glendinning, Stephanie Mills and Kirkpatrick Sale
Three Luddites Talking ... on a Computer!

Phyllis Pollack
Dosed, But Not Spiked: an Interview with Grace Slick

David Yearsley
Eros and Susan Boyle; Fakery and Simon Cowell

Jean-Christophe Servant
A River of Acid: Mined Out in Zambia

Dave Lindorff
Sotomayor's Problem Isn't That She's Too Latina

James McEnteer
Straw Dogs: the Media and Sonia Sotomayor

Missy Beattie
A Place Called Despair

James C. Faris
On Evolution: a Critique of Darwinism

David Macaray
When Workers' Rights Go Unenforced

Harvey Wasserman
The Catastrophic Economics of Nuclear Power

Adam Federman
Drilling the Marcellus Shale Through the Halliburton Loophole

David Ker Thomson
Turtle Island: Adventures in Recycling

Mark Seth Lender
Great Egrets Return

Stephen Martin
Big Trouble in Little Britain

Joseph Nevins
Sin Nombre is Only Part of the Border Story

Sophia Mihic
Star Trek and the Continuing Mission of American Imperialism

Lorenzo Wolff
Dylan Kelehan Gets What He Needs

Poets' Basement
Fleming, Shields and Greer

Website of the Weekend
Petition: Grant Parole to Leonard Peltier

May 28, 2009

Joan Roelofs
The Philanthropies and the Economic Crisis

Paul Craig Roberts
Torture and the American Conscience

Ralph Nader
Corporate Frankensteins

Mouin Rabbani
The Dangers of False Optimism in the Middle East

Joe Bageant
Plain Truths From Appalachia: a Redneck View of Obamarama

James McEnteer
America Held Hostage

Dedrick Muhammad
Obama and the Harsh Racial Reality

Richard Morse
On Speaking Out in Haiti

David Macaray
Have We Turned Into Sheep?

Harvey Wasserman
The 8 Green Steps to Solartopia

Website of the Day
Col. Peters: Just Kill the Gitmo Detainees

May 27, 2009

Joanne Mariner
Military Commissions, Round Three

Paul Craig Roberts
Doublespeak on North Korea

Walden Bello
Can China Save the World From Depression?

Dave Lindorff
Recidivism and Guantánamo

Brian M. Downing
Along the Durand Line

Carlos Villarreal
Separate But Equal Just Fine in California?

Nadia Hijab
Israel's Next Move: Armageddon Now?

Adam Federman
The PCBs of the Hudson River

Laray Polk
RadWaste and Texas' Future

Isabella Kenfield
The Fall of a Brazilian Financier

David Michael Green
Overcoming the Poverty of Ambition

Website of the Day
The Case Against Shell

May 26, 2009

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Fearful Pride: North Korea's Second Nuclear Test

Mike Whitney
The Next Leg Down: When Deflation Becomes Entrenched

Sharon Smith
Obama and Abortion Rights: What We Learned at Notre Dame

Marjorie Cohn
The Gitmo Appeasment Plan: Obama Buckles on the Constitution

Dean Baker
Waterboard the Fed

Deepankar Basu
Was the Indian Election a Debacle for the Left? If So, Why?

Fred Gardner
The Vindication of Sgt. Northcutt

Jordan Flaherty
New Orleans for Sale

Josh Ruebner
Rethinking the Costs of Peace

Brian Cloughley
The Man Who Murdered Count Foulke Bernadotte

Website of the Day
The Montana Town That Wants to Become the New Gitmo

May 25, 2009

Diane Christian
Looking at Torture

John Ross
Mexico's Shock Doctrine

Kenneth Hartman
The Trouble With Prison

Uri Avnery
Netanyahu Goes to Washington

Fred Gardner
"War on Pot" Overrides "Support Our Troops": the Punishment of Sgt. Northcutt

Cindy Sheehan
Day of the Dead

Sen. Russell Feingold
Prolonged Detention and the Rule of Law: a Letter to Barack Obama

Sibel Edmonds
Two Sides of the Same Coin: From State Secrets to War to Wiretaps

Franklin Lamb
Der Spiegel Tries Again

Dave Lindorff
Memorial Day in the Land of the Weak and Wussy

Daniel Wolff
Learning to Read in the Pacific Northwest

Website of the Day
Decoration Day

May 22-24, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
How Long Does It Take?

Michael Teitelman
Obama, Torture and John Walker Lindh

Mike Whitney
Credit Default Swaps: the Poison in the System

Ray McGovern
Cheney Breaks the Taboo: Support for Israel Feeds Terrorism

Sonia Cardenas /
Andrew Flibbert
Why We Love to Hate Pirates

Clive Hamilton
Biblical Prophesy and the Iraq War: Bush, God, Iraq and Gog

Conn Hallinan
Swine Flu Fallout

Fred Gardner
Sgt. Northcutt's Homecoming

Carlo Cristofori
The Latest AfPak War

Dean Baker
A Friendly Financial Intervention

Rannie Amiri
King Abdullah's 57-State Solution

Andy Worthington
A Message to Obama: No Military Commissions; No Preventive Detentions

David Macaray
Democrats Betray Labor: Card Check is Pronouced Dead

Nadia Hijab
What Kind of State?

Franklin Lamb
How Not to Win Votes for Team USA

Ted Newcomen
The Forgotten Casualties

David Ker Thomson
Joy (Or How Hope, the Thing With Feathers, Gets Plucked)

David Rosen
Porn Wars

Mark Weisbrot
Climate Change and Intellectual Property Rights?

Robert Fantina
Gitmo, Democrats and Business as Usual

Heather Gray
Some Positive Directions in Public Health?

Farzana Versey
The Myth of Manmohan Singh

Chris Genovali
A Paler Shade of Green

Ron Jacobs
His Terrible Swift Sword: the Legacy of John Brown

Jay Diamond
Why the Left Should Cheer Hannity and Limbaugh

Dr. Susan Block
The Binds That Bond

Ben Sonnenberg
"Ballast": An Endlessness of Almost Ending

David Yearsley
Handel's Ghost ... Again

Lorenzo Wolff
My Problem with Led Zeppelin

Poets' Basement
Corseri and Bohm

Website of the Weekend
Bob Graham's CIA Notebooks

May 21, 2009

Jeffrey St. Clair /
Joshua Frank
The Politics of Bait-and-Switch: Obama and the Environment

Paul Craig Roberts
Morphing Dick Cheney

Chris Floyd
In Defense of George W. Bush

Gerald Paoli
Inside Iraqi Kurdistan: Life and Death in the Qandil Mountains

Zach Mason
Something's Gotta Give: Obama and the Hustler

Uri Avnery
A Quarrel on the Titanic

Andy Worthington
Out of Guantánamo

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
India: Two Funerals and a Wedding

Norman Solomon
The Afghanistan Escalation

Dave Lindorff
A Corporate Crime Wave of Labor Law Violations

Website of the Day
Swine Flu: The Panic That Wasn't

May 20, 2009

Michael Hudson
The Toll Booth Economy

Gary Leupp
Courting Hekmatyar: Obama and the Warlord

Michael D. Yates
Work is Hell

Jonathan Cook
Netanyahu Adviser Steps Out of the Shadows

Peter Lee
The World Doesn't Have a Pakistan Nukes Problem ... It Has a David Albright Problem

Binoy Kampmark
The End of the Tamil Tigers?

Peter Zinn
Eulogizing Lawyers

William Loren Katz
Tortured Reasoning; Tortured Results

Gary Lapon
Why Women Need Single Payer

Trudy Bond
Torture, Shrinks and a Groundhog's Day Moment

Website of the Day
Meet the Climate Change Lobby

May 19, 2009

Kristoffer Rehder
Check Point Iraq: a Soldier's Tale

Mike Whitney
The Real Lesson of the Financial Crisis

Ray McGovern
How Colin Powell Got Duped by the CIA

Vijay Prashad
The Indian Elections: a Game Changer?

Mirjam Hadar Meerschwam
Intimidation and Interrogation in Tel Aviv

Mustafa Barghouthi
Is Obama Up to the Challenge of Dealing with Netanyahu?

Andy Worthington
Gitmo: A Prison Built on Lies

Binoy Kampmark
Britain's Speaker Crisis

John Walsh
John Kerry vs. Single-Payer

David Macaray
Alcohol as Metaphor: Zero Tolerance in the Workplace

Website of the Day
So You Think That Veggie Burger is Organic...

May 18, 2009

Dave Lindorff
The US is Using White Phosporous in Afghanistan

Abdul Malik Mujahid
Thirty Years of Tragedy in Afghanistan

Jonathan Cook
How Many Secret Prisons Does Israel Have?

Ben Rosenfeld
Police Violence: How Many Kicks to the Head Does It Take?

Patrick Cockburn
These Killings Will Only Strengthen the Taliban

Ralph Nader
They Want It All: New Tricks From the Old Energy Lobby

Stephen Soldz
Psychologist Bryce Lefever Clarifies Defense of Torture

Eugenia Tsao
On the Devaluation of Labor

Walter Brasch
Cheney's Magical Mystery Media Tour

Roberto Rodriguez
War and Torture

Charlotte Laws
Politics and American Idol

Website of the Day
Disbar the Torture Lawyers

May 15-17, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
King of the Hate Business

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Case of the Missing H-Bomb

David Rosen
Sexual Torture: What is Acknowledged and What Remains Unknown

Mike Whitney
From My Lai to Bala Baluk: Obama Picks Up Where Bush Left Off

Bruce Page
A Real History of Rupert Murdoch

Jeremy Scahill
The Black Shirts of Guantánamo

Fred Gardner
Tortured Reasoning: Judge Bybee Rules Against Brian Epis

Tom Barry
Fighting the Drug War at Homeland Security

Mats Svensson
On the Beach in Tel Aviv

Ramzy Baroud
The Drones Are Coming

Mark Engler
Science Fiction From Below

Mark Weisbrot
Stealth Move by IMF to Get $100 Billion Without Congressional Debate

Farzana Versey
Of Scapegoats and Separatists

Ron Jacobs
It's Up to You to Save Troy Davis

Hannah Wolfe
What to Tell the Children

Cal Winslow
Fresno, the New Ground Zero in the Battle Between the SEIU and NUHW

David Macaray
Labor Needs a Southern Strategy

Christopher Brauchli
Involuntary Baptism

Mark Seth Lender
The Lion Tamer's Story

Robert Fantina
Lapel Pins, Arugula and Mustard

David Ker Thomson
Last Man Walking

Stephen Martin
Lipstick Nightmare for Spin Merchant

Charles R. Larson
Double Exile

Chase Madar
"Angels & Demons" and the Extraordinary Power of Imaginary Heretics

Kim Nicolini
Vaginas From Outer Space! Boldly Sitting Through Star Trek

David Yearsley
Handel's Ghost

Lorenzo Wolff
Killer Virtues

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Jordan and Moser

Website of the Weekend
Catch F-22

May 14, 2009

Michael Hudson
Where Russia Went Wrong

Andy Worthington
The Poisoned Mosaic: Judge Condemns Guantánamo Evidence

Paul Craig Roberts
The Impotent President

Jonathan Cook
The Pope's Pilgrimage: Legitimizing Netanyahu?

Ray McGovern
See No Evil: Ugly Questions for General Myers

Lance Selfa
The Limits of Liberalism

David Green
The Deportation of Demjanjuk

Dave Lindorff
Obama Channels Cheney

Frida Berrigan
Nuclear Options

Sue Udry
The Bybee Question

Website of the Day
Our Bombs: Tracking US Air Strikes

May 13, 2009

Brian M. Downing
The Road Out of Iraq

Gareth Porter
Gen. McChrystal and Afghanistan

Robert Sandels
Obama and Latin America: No Light, All Tunnel

Ricardo Alarcón
Cuba: Measure of a Revolution

Eric Walberg
NATO in Georgia: Fun and Games

Dave Lindorff
The Sinking of GM: When Captains of Industry Don't Go Down with the Ship

Deepak Tripathi
A Culture of Abuse

William S. Lind
Back to the Balkans: Hillary and the Sleeping Dragon

Kevin Zeese
A Populist Health Care Rebellion

Franklin Lamb
Lebanon: From Perdition to Redemption?

Website of the Day
Beth McIntosh: The Wild Ride

May 12, 2009

Gary Leupp
The Bomb Iran Faction

Richard Neville
The AfPak Blues: Corpses of the Kids by the Truckload

Wajahat Ali
Obama Chooses a Reliable Dictatorship

Dean Baker
The Banker Boys Are Alright! Time to End the Bailouts

Franklin Lamb
What Palestinian Refugees Need From Lebanon's Elections

Norman Solomon
A Progressive Challenge to Jane Harman

Paul Craig Roberts
Beware the Hate Crimes Bill

Lisa M. Hamilton
Let's Grow a New Crop of Farmers

Bob Fitrakis /
Harvey Wasserman:
Why Isn't Obama Turning to Credit Unions?

David Macaray
Wading Through the Grassroots

Website of the Day
Electronic Police States

May 11, 2009

Andrea Peacock
No Justice for Libby

Michael Hudson
Gordon Brown Spills the Beans on the IMF

Patrick Cockburn
Who Killed 120 Civilians?

Ralph Nader
The Single-Payer Taboo

John Kelly
Pseudoscience and Wrongful Convictions in the War on Drugs

Saul Landau
Cuba's Biggest "Crime"

Dave Lindorff
Blaming the Dead Victims

David Michael Green
Get Obama

Anthony Papa
Gov. David Paterson Does the Right Thing

Paul Krassner
Jon Stewart and Truman, the War Criminal

Website of the Day
Generational Homelessness

Weekend Edition
June 12-14, 2009

Sam Raimi's Frightfest

Foreclosure is Hell

By KIM NICOLINI

The first time I saw the trailer for Sam Raimi’s new horror installment Drag Me To Hell, I knew I had to see this movie. From the trailer, I could surmise that a young bank loan officer forecloses on a poor old woman’s home and brings on a horrible curse in which she is hounded by demons who want to drag her to hell. Sure the old woman is a scary, creepy, milky-eyed gypsy, but does that make it okay to foreclose on her home and render her homeless? Sometimes, it seems, an Evil Curse From Hell may be necessary, especially during trying economic times like the current mortgage crisis. Seriously, can anything be more timely at the multiplex than a little exercise in Foreclosure Horror?

Did Drag Me To Hell provide in-depth commentary on the current state of American economics and the mortgage crisis? Well, it certainly does make some brilliant points encased in B-Horror camp, but mostly the movie provides a lot of hilarious moments that are primarily generated by another genre of horror that has been around long before the current economic crisis. I’m talking about White Trash Horror (e.g. The Hills Have Eyes, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and every Rob Zombie horror movie). White Trash has historically provided oodles of fodder to scare people at the movies. An evil predator from the bottom of the class basement, White Trash has haunted the screen in the guise of rapists, cannibals, and serial murderers for decades. Why is White Trash so scary? Because we live in a culture that promotes fear of economic failure and conditions the population to gauge success by material acquisition. Nothing puts a scary face on this fear more than a rotten-toothed, chainsaw wielding, filthy, beer-guzzling, homicidal maniac.

The difference between Drag Me To Hell and its White Trash Horror predecessors is that it is not about the externalization of the White Trash monster who reeks havoc on the paranoid bourgeoisie. Rather it’s about the horror of suppressing the White Trash Within and the inability to escape class. In other words, Drag Me to Hell is about the horror of trying to become the bourgeoisie rather than killing the bourgeoisie. The movie centers on protagonist Christine Brown (noted as possibly the Whitest Person Ever in cinema) who attempts to escape her class via employment and marriage. Poor Cristine goes through all the moves in her attempts to suppress her White Trash class origins and become the bourgeoisie, but at the end of the day, Cristine cannot escape her class, and she is dragged to hell for trying.  In its way, the movie actually does address the current foreclosure crisis which was provoked when massive numbers of Americans tried to pretend they were from a different class by purchasing homes that were way beyond their economic means, only to find that credit does not buy your way out of your class, so they were drug into the hell of foreclosure.

I’m getting off track. The Foreclosure Horror element is only one component of the subtext of Drag Me To Hell. Horror movies almost always serve as allegories of something or other (gender, class, psychology, sex), and in this case the horror couples two classic horror elements – class and gender – while also mixing in a good dose of psychoanalytical horror (directly connected to class and gender). Sam Raimi brilliantly plays on the classic tropes of horror, encases them in kitschy B-horror style, and integrates a whole lot of theoretical punch into a bellyful of laughter.  Drag Me To Hell doesn’t just tell the story of how a young white trash farm girl is unable to escape her class, but it also shows how her class position is inextricably connected to her gender. All the pieces are there, and because the pieces are delivered via White Trash Horror, the movie is a total laugh riot because seeing how white trash manifests itself through disgusting symbols (flies, maggots, kittens, goats) is funny.

The movie opens with Christine driving her lowly Ford to work, the car itself placing her in the lower echelons of the working class economic scale. Christine is not only driving a cheap Ford, but she’s also practicing her diction with audio tapes designed to teach her how to erase her White Trash Farm Girl accent and adopt the voice of the upper class. In other words, the movie opens with Christine trying to erase her class from her voice. When Christine arrives at work, Raimi’s framing and camera perfectly embody the bland, life-sucking tedium of bank administrative life. From wastebaskets to water coolers to name plates and pencil holders, every set detail echoes with the depressing reality of the bank worker’s life. As if working in this environment isn’t bad enough, Christine is then confronted with a slew of overt chauvinistic encounters which firmly place her in the role of subservient lowly female. She is treated as an inferior by her power grubbing male colleague Stu, and she is told by her boss Mr. Jacks that she isn’t tough enough to get promoted to a higher level at the bank (e.g. because she is female). To top it off, when she meets her boyfriend Clay for lunch, Christine overhears a phone call with his mother during which Clay’s mother berates Christine for being a “farm girl” and insists he dump her for a “country club” girl. Poor Christine. She gets it for being trash and for being female, and those audio tapes don’t seem to be working!

At this point, we understand that Christine is a White Trash Bank Working Girl who is confronted with her lowly status at every turn. The conversation with Clay’s mother, when class and gender meet in Cristine’s face, is the icing on the cake and the turning point in the movie. It comes as no surprise that hearing her class ridiculed so blatantly provokes the horror to rise out of Christine and take over the rest of the film. Indeed, it is immediately after the phone call that Mrs. Ganush, the old gypsy woman who curses Christine, appears and that Christine decides to take her class destiny into her own hands and get tough (e.g. become a ruthless capitalist and foreclose on Mrs. Ganush’s home). Horrific in her natural state, Mrs. Ganush wears her lower class like a horror show. Her milky eye, filthy dentures, yellow phlegm, cracked and dirty fingernails,  and candy-stealing grubby fingers are like the literal embodiment of Christine’s suppressed poor white trash background. Indeed, Mrs. Ganush can be read as an apparition of Christine’s class anxiety.  Christine decides to get tough on Mrs. Ganush to prove to herself and others that she is not a Mrs. Ganush. At this point, Mrs. Ganush literally turns into a demon and unleashes a curse on Christine. Mrs. Ganush rips a button off Christine’s coat and dooms her to hell. Why a button? Because the coat that is ultimately cursed is the coat of Christine’s class, and it is buttoned tight onto her being as we will eventually see. I like to refer to this curse as the You-Are-So-Fucked-Curse because it is the curse which is impossible to escape (since it is programmed into Christine’s very genealogy).

The scenes with Mrs. Ganush are played out with disgustingly gross bodily humor as Mrs. Ganush spews all kinds of vile bodily fluids onto Christine and literally attaches herself to Christine’s body. We are so busy laughing at the disgusting humor that it’s hard to see how brilliant the whole You-Are-So-Fucked-Curse trajectory is. The foreclosure narrative flows seamlessly from the current mortgage crisis to classic psychoanalytical horror in which the unconscious materializes as some kind of monster that terrorizes the protagonist (usually female) in the film. In this case, foreclosure also directly refers to Jacques Lacan’s term cited here from the profound anals of Wikipedia:

Foreclosure is to be distinguished from other operations such as repression, negation, and projection. Foreclosure differs from repression in that the foreclosed element is not buried in the unconscious but expelled from the unconscious. Repression is the operation which constitutes neurosis, whereas foreclosure is the operation which constitutes psychosis.

Indeed, Mrs. Ganush is the manifestation of Christine’s class paranoia, and she is expelled from Christine’s unconscious and unleashes Christine’s psychosis into the material world.  The horrors that ensue are a riot a minute as Christine’s White Trash Psychosis gets more and more out of control. Try as she might to deny her class and climb the social ladder, Christine remains doomed. Once trash, always trash, or at least that’s what Christine’s psychosis seems to be telling her. Mrs. Ganush unleashes the demon Lamia onto poor Christine, and it’s no surprise that Lamia first appears at Christine’s door right after a childhood photo of her as the Fat Girl Pork Queen falls out of a cook book. Christine stares in horror as her class is exposed in the photo of her white pudgy body posing with a pig on the farm. Christine drops the photo to the floor, and at that very moment, Lamia makes his first appearance in her house. It should be noted that Lamia bears the feet of a farm animal (e.g. the ghost of Christine’s farm girl past). Later that evening, the demon appears as flies invading Christine’s body. In a truly hilarious gross-out scene, a fly crawls in and out of Christine’s nose and finally wedges its way between her lips and disappears inside her mouth. We all know that flies are attracted to garbage (a.k.a. trash). The disappearing fly uproariously appears later in a dinner party scene at Clay’s parents’ house when Christine chokes at the dinner table and spits a fly across the table . While she can pretend to be accepted into the upper class life of Clay’s family, her psychosis and class anxiety provoke her to practically vomit her trash class all over the dinner table.

More animals than flies appear with Christine’s psychosis. For example, there is the terrible Kitten Sacrifice scene, in which Christine murders her kitten as a blood sacrifice to the demon Lamia to try to save her ass. So much for the façade of Ms. Civilized City Girl. Once Christine’s White Trash Class Paranoia is foreclosed, the psychosis builds to the point where she non-chalantly kills her kitten like some kind of farm hog and buries it in the backyard. Sounds awfully scary, doesn’t it? Well, it’s not scary. It’s funny because watching this prim pristine girl covered with blood and flies and maggots and killing a kitty with a kitchen knife is funny. And the humor and animals don’t stop with the kitten. When Christine arranges to have the demon exorcised, the exorcism takes place in the form of a white goat. The goat itself is pretty darn funny, as in its white hairy goat face is literally hilarious. But when you read the goat as the literalization of Christine’s White Trash Farm Girl unconscious, the yucks are even more hilarious. The White Goat is Christine’s White Trash Background that she wants to kill. Christine is the White Goat, and the White Goat is Christine.  Needless to say, try as she might, the goat refuses to be killed, and the exorcism fails. Christine cannot escape her class, and the goat lives! The goat always lives!

Speaking of spewing things, I must mention another over-the-top scene of gross-out spewage. When Christine returns to the bank after her first encounter with Mrs. Ganush and Lamia, she gets a nose bleed which starts with a couple of drops of blood on her desk and soon turns into a geyser of blood spewing out of her nose and spraying all over the bank. The two chauvinist men – Stu and Mr. Jacks -- look on in horror. How can this woman be bleeding all over the bank? Eww. We’ve all seen Carrie. We know what blood spewing from a female orifice means in horror movies. The horror of the female body! Yes, not only is Christine mucking up the place with her white trash farm girl dirt, but she also dares to leak her femaleness all over the bank. Talk about a horror show. Christine can’t seem to contain anything these days. And talk about funny, how can we not laugh when Mr. Jacks gets splattered with Christine’s blood and then asks in horror, “None of it got me in my mouth did it?” God forbid you get female sexuality in your mouth!

Christine’s battle with the demon goes on and on with lots of gross-out humor. It culminates in a battle in Mrs. Ganush’s grave in which Christine becomes a combination of a mud wrestler and a wet t-shirt contestant. She wrestles with Mrs. Ganush’s corpse trying to pawn off the coat button and pass on the curse. After lots of nipple exposing muddy t-shirt shots, Christine thinks her mud wrestling stint with the gypsy cadaver worked and that she has rid herself of the curse. She rewards herself by shedding the white trash coat of her past and buying a new classy blue coat as a symbol of finally transcending her class. She meets Clay at the train station wearing her new coat and her new class, ready to embrace the life of the upper social echelons. Isn’t that nice? Well, no it’s not. Just as Christine opens her arms to embrace her new social position, she gets sucked into hell, back to where she belongs with Mrs. Ganush and Lamia the farm animal demon. Sorry Christine. No go. You can’t escape your class by buying a new coat. Apparently, the You-Are-So-Fucked-Curse lasts forever. You’re born with it and get sucked into hell with it.

This brings us back to the Foreclosure Horror as a mirror of the current mortgage crisis. Just as Christine can’t buy her way out of her class with a new coat, millions of Americans learned the hard way that you can’t buy your way out of your class with credit. Maybe if Sam Raimi made this movie eight years ago, so many people wouldn’t have lost their pretty blue coats (homes) and would have realized it’s okay to wear the coat you can afford rather than buying the expensive coat only to lose it inside the gaping hungry mouth of Foreclosure Hell.

After the movie, most of the audience was bellowing about how awful it was, even though they laughed all the way through it. Sure it’s awful, but it’s self-consciously awful. Sam Raimi plays on the tradition of B horror and tropes on classic horror narratives and theories at every turn. Full of belly laughs and gross-outs, Drag Me To Hell is an incredibly tight film that packs a whole lot of punches. I think that one of the most brilliant things about this movie is how smart it is while being delivered in a seemingly stupid package. The acting is awful. The script is hilarious and unbelievable. The monsters are ludicrous. And the movie seems to be poking fun at itself all along the way. But because it’s so darn simplistic on the surface, every single moment counts as allegory and symbol. From flies to mud to cheap Fords to bloody noses, every single thing in this movie is loaded, and that’s why it’s fun to watch. Still, for all the poor white trash farm girls of the world who want to transcend their class, I can’t say that Drag Me To Hell offers a hell of a lot of hope, just a hell of a lot of hell. But it’s funny hell!

Kim Nicolini is an artist, poet and cultural critic. She lives in Tucson, Arizona with her 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 being a teenage runaway in 1970s San Francisco. She can be reached at: knicolini@gmail.com.

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