Today's Stories

November 28-30, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
In Time of Trouble

Mike Whitney
The Obama "Dream Team": Rubin Clones and Other Fakers

Tom Kerr
Preserving Filthy Lucre (Or Becoming My Dad)

Deepak Tripathi
Uproar in Police-State Britain

Sonja Karkar
Gaza's Death Throes

Ramzy Baroud
Salvation in a News Broadcast

Stan Cox
The Most Disappointing Gift

November 27, 2008

Tariq Ali
The Assault on Mumbai

Steve Hendricks
Thanksgiving We Can Believe In: Justice in Indian Country

Ralph Nader
Open Up Those Corporate Tax Returns

John Walsh
The Root Cause of the Crisis of 2008

Dave Lindorff
The Department of Homeland Lunacy

Christopher Brauchli
Thanks A Lot, Mr. Meese: How Alberto Gonzales Learned to Get You to Pay for His Legal Bills

Matthew Koehler
Giving Thanks for Burned Forests

Website of the Day
John Trudell: "Crazy Horse We Hear What You Say"

November 26, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Obama Letdown

Alan Farago
Bailouts and the New Math

Stanley Heller
Don't Bail Them Out, Take Them Over

Kevin Zeese
The Real Cost of the Bailout

Steve Conn
Now It Can Be Told (Except in North Carolina)

Ray McGovern
Kafka and Uighurs at Guantánamo

Ron Jacobs
King George is Gone: Now It's Time to Organize

Eric Walberg
Obama's Odious Entourage

Martha Rosenberg
Pay No Attention to That Turkey Being Slaughtered (Or How Sarah Palin Created a Whole New Generation of Vegetarians)

Matt Siegfried
Back to the Future With Barack

Website of the Day
"Every Time I've Compromised, I've Lost"

November 25, 2008

James Abourezk
Of Arrogance, Bailouts and the Big Three

Ralph Nader
Don't Suppress Carter

Patrick Irelan
PBS Reports for Big Oil on Venezuela

John Ross
Obama in Bedlam

Fred Gardner
Dr. Goodwin and the Infinite Con

Dan LaBotz
The Auto Crisis: a Big Caravan to Washington?

Tom Barry
Napolitano and Immigration Policy

Norman Solomon
The Ideology of No Ideology

Richard Morse
Memo From Haiti: Where the Culture of Corruption Meets the Corruption of Culture

Chris Strohm
The Missing Rules of Engagement in Cyberwar

Website of the Day
Green vs. Green?

November 24, 2008

Mike Whitney
You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet

Pam Martens
The Rise and Fall of Citigroup

Laray Polk
Bush's Library: the Kurds, Oil and Missing Records

David Ker Thomson
American Friends: With Friends Like These, Who Needs Canadians?

Uri Avnery
Likud Rising

Joe Mowrey
Deprivation and Desperation in Gaza

Ramzi Kysia
An Administration in Search of a Progressive: the Team Obama Should Have Picked

Kevin Zeese
The Causes of the Auto Crisis

Dave Lindorff
Rescuing the Blob: Idiots and Bailouts

David Macaray
Seven Reasons You Should Join a Union

Howard Lisnoff
Inaugurations Past and Present

Website of the Day
I Hate the Beatles

November 21 / 23, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The Honeymoon is Looking a Bit Wan

Michael Hudson
Paulson's Cascade of Lies

Mike Whitney
Time to Move to Plan B ... If There is One

Barbara Rose Johnston /
Holly M. Barker
Cautionary Tales From a Nuclear War Zone

Serge Halimi
The Gloom of Empire: Downhill All the Way

Alan Farago
The Suburbs March On

Ralph Nader
Changing With Retreads: the Third Clinton Administration

Saul Landau
When Old Axioms Don't Apply

Robert Bryce
From LBJ to Obama: the End of Texas Dominance

Shannon May
Ecological Crisis and Eco-Villages in China

Binoy Kampmark
The End of the Yugo

Jack Ely
The Fate of the West's Wild Horses

Ramzy Baroud
The Rights of Women in War Zones

Missy Beattie
Why Vote, Anyway?

Larry Portis
Women Soldiers Serving in (and Barely Surviving) the Israeli Army

James McEnteer
Colombia's Laboratory of Failure

Christopher Brauchli
A Tale of Two Whales

David Yearsley
Real Swords, Fire and Don Giovanni

Adam Engel
Power Down

Ron Jacobs
The Continuing Saga of the White Album

Lorenzo Wolff
Honky Tonk Heroes: When Country Got Real

Poets' Basement
Raza Ali Hasan

Website of the Weekend
Lips and Fingers

November 20, 2008

P. Sainath
The Jurassic Auto and Idea Park

Brian McKenna
How Dow Chemical Defies Homeland Security and Risks Another 9/11

Paul Craig Roberts
What Uncle Sam Has to Say to His Creditors

Andy Worthington
How Guanántamo Can be Closed

Peter Lee
India Doubles Down in Afghanistan ... Maybe

Dr. Eyad al-Serraj
At the Erez Crossing

Sen. Russ Feingold
The Bush Pardons

Lance Selfa
Who Made the New Deal?

Ray McGovern
Keeping Gates

Benjamin G. Davis
Ending Torture; Prosecuting the Torturers

Tracy McLellan
Obama's Crony Democracy: the Return of Tom Daschle

Website of the Day
Finally, a Victory for Palestinians

November 19, 2008

M. Shahid Alam
Obama and the Politics of Race and Religion in America

Mario A. Murillo
Holder, Chiquita and Colombian Death Squads

Martine Boulard
Escaping the Dollar's Shadow

Robin D. G. Kelley
Will Obama be the First "Freedom" Democrat?

Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi
Obama and the Iron Cage

Jonathan Cook
Who Will Stop the Settlers?

Steve Conn
Spare Change or No Change at All

George Wuerthner
The NYT and the Beetles of Mass Destruction

Michael Winship
This Just in From Middle Earth

Stephen Martin
The Other Side of the Pleasure-Dome

Website of the Day
An Important Holiday Message From Kristen Johnston

November 18, 2008

Chellis Glendinning
Cheering for Morgan Stanley

George C. Wilson
Perils of Pakistan: Will It Prove to be Obama's Cambodia?

Franklin Lamb
Who Will Evict Israel from Lebanon: Hezbollah or the UN?

Bill and Kathleen Christison
The Irresponsibility of Appointing Hillary Clinton Secretary of State

Roger Burbach
Orchestrating a Civic Coup in Bolivia: How Bush Tried to Bring Down Morales

John Ross
Drilling vs. Direct Democracy in Mexico

Wajahat Ali
Is Obama the Muslim World's Superman?

Damien Millet /
Eric Toussaint
What Really Happened in Washington? The G20 and the Inconsistent Script

Marc Gardner
When Mooning is a Sex Crime

Eric Walberg
Courting the Bear: a New Era for Russian/Western Relations?

Wendy Williams
The Bottled Water Con

Website of the Day
Where's Zappa When We Need Him?

November 17, 2008

Michael Hudson
Bankers Shake Down Congress and the G-20

Paul Craig Roberts
When It's a Clear Day and You Can't See GM

Mike Whitney
Busted in Washington

Steve Conn
Where is Nader Country 2008? Mapping the Nader Votes

Andy Worthington
Closing Guantánamo: Advice for Obama

Jonathan Cook
The Real Goal of Israel's Blockade of Gaza: "They Are All Hamas"

Rannie Amiri
Dual Loyalties Will Doom Obama

David Macaray
Bailing Out the Automakers

David Michael Green
Twelve Victories

Charles Modiano
Sports Illustrated and Sexism: Tokenism or a New Day?

Website of the Day
The South Sea Bubble

November 14 / 16, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Heading for the First Hundred Days

Jeffrey St. Clair
How Bill Clinton Doomed the Spotted Owl: a Cautionary Tale for Greens in the Age of Obama

Mike Whitney
Paulson the Bungler

Sasan Fayazmanesh
RIP: the Experts, 1929-2008

Moshe Adler
Keynes: China's Greatest Export?

Anthony DiMaggio
Transcending Race?

Jean Bricmont
Cats, Dogs and Creationism

Sheldon Rampton
The Eisenstadt Hoax: a Real Life Example of a "Fake Fake"

Douglas Valentine
Let the Trials Begin!

Joseph Nevins /
Timothy Dunn
Barricading the Border

Tom Barry
Rahm Emanuel's Political Pragmatism on Immigration

Ron Jacobs
Che Guevara Meets Trashman: the Genius of Spain Rodriguez

Larry Portis
The State of the Israeli State

Mary Lynn Cramer Obama's Brain Trust: Seems Like Old Times

Sherry Wolf
The Myth of the Black/Gay Divide

Peter Cervantes-Gautschi
Secretary of Greed: How Larry Summers Championed Wall Street by Impoverishing the Mexican People

Jacob Hornberger
The Conservative Malaise: Hey, Brother, Can You Spare Some Habeas Corpus?

Lance Selfa
The Center-Right Nation Con

Benjamin Dangl
Vermont Against General Dynamics

Seth Sandronsky
Lifelines in Hard Times

Russell Mokhiber
Time to Give the Friends of Big Coal the Boot

Allan Stellar
Nuke a Gay Whale for the Navy

Kelly Overton
Get Thee to a Shelter: the Obamas and the Million-Mutt March

Martha Rosenberg
Why Mink are Cheering the Economic Crisis

Richard Rhames
Palling Around with Ray the Plumber

David Yearsley
How I Played Hooky from "High School Musical 3"

Lorenzo Wolff
Zach is Back: Songs of Hurt, Rage and Resistance

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Ford and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
The Eyes Have It

November 13, 2008

Pam Martens
The Two Trillion DollarBlack Hole

Vijay Prashad
Guilt by Participation: Sonal Shah's Membership Has Expired

Patrick Cockburn
Who is Paying for the Iraqi National Intelligence Service?

Jonathan Cook
The Withering Palestinian Economy

Ralph Nader
Obama and the Rogue Regime

Bill Quigley
McCain Owes America an Apology

Lee Sustar
Bailing Out the Big Three

Omar Barghouti
Boycotting Israeli Settlement Products

Steve Conn
More Alaska Fun

Howard Lisnoff
The Last Bastion of Hate

Jeff Cohen
What Indy Media Heroes Can Teach Us

Website of the Day
Who are the Obamagelicals?

November 12, 2008

Johanna Berrigan
Scattered Families: the Iraq Refugee Crisis

Steve Conn
The Big Mystery Election in Alaska

Patrick Bond
Against Volcker

Bokar Ture /
Dedrick Muhammad
Remembering a Black Radical in a Barack Obama America

Alan Farago
The Hispanic Vote in South Florida: Not Dyed Blue Yet

Dave Lindorff
Rescuing Joe Lieberman

Karl Grossman
Break Up Big Oil: Tyranny in the Tank

David Macaray
An Obama Litmus Test: Will Labor Have a Seat at the Table?

George Wuerthner
Act Now to Save America's Public Forests

Susie Day
Heavy Weather

Website of the Day
Does the Planet Have a Future? an Interview with Derrick Jensen

Weekend Edition
November 28-30, 2008

Olivier Assayas' demonlover

Women as Products and Cannibalistic Achievers

By KIM NICOLINI

Olivier Assayas’s demonlover (2002) is, in short (and I know this is going to sound awfully heavy-handed), an absolutely bleak and scathing critique of the pornographic body that is the global capital machine, a machine that continues to be patriarchal driven. Stunningly and eerily filmed, incorporating anime and internet pornography at its core, Assayas shows us a vicious opportunistic business world in which women’s chance for survival and success are only achieved by cannibalizing each other.

The film opens in a high-tech, high-powered business space filled with men shouting in phones and at each other in a sea of computers blinking with numbers and stats. This is a man’s world that we see in the opening shot of the movie. Then the movie shifts gears, and the rest of the film is about how women operate in the man’s world of global capital. We see women trying to take control over capital and more importantly the commodification of their bodies. Diane De Monx (Connie Nielsen) is at the center of the film, and her trajectory is both appalling, heart breaking, and utterly damning. An excellent counterpart to Tilda Swinton’s character Karen Crowder in Michael Clayton (2007), Diane is a ruthless, cold cyborg of a woman who will do anything to try to claw her way to the top of the business world. She steals trading secrets, drugs another female employee, and murders a competitor. When I say cyborg, I’m not too off the mark as the business that is being bartered in the film is pornographic anime and ultimately female torture, a business where women’s bodies are turned into artificial machines produced for mass consumption. The movie is spliced with graphic sexual anime pornography of women being fucked by machines and monsters. Certainly women are being fucked by machines and monsters – the machine of global capitalism and the monsters that are the men who drive the machine. The anime sex business content is the literal manifestation of the commodification of the female body and an allegoric representation of the pornographic matrix of global capital. In order to try to survive in this world and not just be pornographic profits, women become abominations cannibalizing each other to stay afoot. Interestingly, all the women in the movie are complicit in the sex torture business and find it alluring. When Karen (the woman Diane drugs at the beginning of the movie) finds Diane browsing the sex torture website, they both agree that they find it fascinating. What is not said is that by watching the women tortured on the internet, these women are somehow watching themselves and/or viscerally controlling their own bodies through others. Elise, on the other hand, actually orchestrates the torture of women (including Diane), the literalization of women cannibalizing each other to succeed.

When I say global capital, I am not speaking lightly. While Diane, the French woman is at the center of the film, there is also an American woman (fantastically played by Gina Gershon) and a slew of Japanese women, not to mention a quietly menacing Chloe Sevigny as the cut-throat Elise. The matrix of global capital is represented in this network of women and the men they work for. The mistake these women make, particularly Diane, is to think that they can control the system when ultimately the system still has control over them. When Diane is outed for her crimes, she is taken to the giant mansion of the old school patriarch who runs the business. He sits in his garden with his tribe of daughters and his wife while Diane is taken somewhere into the bowels of the house (e.g. the bowels of old school patriarchy). She emerges gutted. We don’t know exactly what happened to Diane, but we do know that she has been put back in her place as submissive and compliant female. Likewise, when she goes on a date with her co-worker Hervé, he ends up pretty much “date raping” her body, and she blows his brains out. Well she may off Hervé, but she certainly isn’t going to off the whole system of men in control of her body and of capital. In a horrifyingly bleak ending, Diane is captured and sold on the internet via a porn torture website, her body reduced to literal commodity to be abused and sold. It is not Diane’s body encased in black latex and chained to a metal bed frame that is the horrific sight in this scene. In fact, we’ve been expecting that to happen all along, and in a way that is where she has been all along in a metaphorical sense. The real horror is the young boy mindlessly using his parents’ credit card to pay for the torture of a woman, a taste for torture that he has developed via media itself. In the final bleak shot, the boy turns off the computer leaving Diane strapped to the bed waiting for his next command while he works on his math problems, a small gesture that indicates his enormous control over and disregard of the female body.

It’s interesting how the film uses the pornographic elements to mimic the perpetual tease of capital-driven commodity culture. Like capitalism itself, it functions like a coitus-interruptus, setting us up for some kind of delicious orgasmic satisfaction but always falling short of climax, provoking us to want more just like the capital machine perpetuates a state of dissatisfaction where the consumer always wants more and never fully gets/his her rocks off. Diane starts watching the porno in the hotel room, and we get all geared up for some enticing voyeuristic sex stuff, but then she gets interrupted before. It seems like she and Herve are going to have some massively hot kinky sex, but then when they finally "consummate" their relationship, he just basically rapes her in a missionary position penetration scene completely lacking in any erotic appeal. Likewise, when she logs into hellfire.com, we anticipate partaking in the taboo of porn torture, but then Karen interrupts her before we can really get a reaction from Diane. The only real sex scenes are the bizarre ones in the anime sequences. The film functions in a way like the false advertisement of consumer culture. It leads us to believe that the film will be loaded with kinky sex scenes, but then it withholds our pleasure. The sex appeal is in what is implied and promised but not in what's actually delivered. And this is how commodity fetishism functions. What is promised is rarely actually delivered, so we are conditioned to desire more, newer, better products. 

All of this is delivered via Assayas’s gorgeous cinematics. The interior spaces – hotels and corporations – are eerily sterile. They echo with a menacing emptiness. These buildings and spaces contain humans yet seem to be completely devoid of humanity. They buzz and hum with electricity that keeps the machine going and has replaced the human body. The integration of anime footage furthers this kind of isolation from actual flesh and blood. That these cartoon characters are seemingly the most alive beings in the film is unsettling. Much of that effect is achieved from the frenetic color-saturated anime scenes in juxtaposition to Assayas’ subdued and static view of the interior spaces the characters occupy. The film is also punctuated with a number of gorgeous night shots smeared with light and abstraction as Diane drives around Paris and reels out of control while she tries to maintain control in a system governed by men. All of this is scored by an original soundtrack composed and performed by Sonic Youth for the movie. The Sonic Youth score provides a kind of undersound of beautiful noise, a quietly saturating dissonance and an electric hum and buzz that carries us through the film.

All this may sound densely theoretical or absurdly over-read, but the content of the film definitely supports my argument. One could read the movie as a negative portrayal of women in business, but we need to look beyond that and see who is lurking behind the scenes. While the women are cutting each other’s throats as they try to claw their way to the top, in the end it is the men behind the scenes who are pulling the strings. demonlover is a powerful critique of patriarchy and capital encased in the body of present day global capital. Yes, in my opinion, it is profoundly leftist and feminist filmmaking, but it brings Old School Critiques of patriarchy and capitalism firmly into the 21st century. demonlover is brilliant, beautiful, and unsettling.

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 being a teenage runaway in 1970s San Francisco. Her work has appeared in Bad Subjects, Punk Planet, Bullhorn and Berkeley Review. She can be reached at: knicolini@gmail.com.

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