Today's Stories

December 12 / 14, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Hail to Chicago, Beacon of American Values

Michael Hudson /
Jeffrey Sommers
The End of the Washington Consensus

Frank Barat
An Israeli in Gaza: an Interview with Jeff Halper

John Ross
Writing a Thesis in Blood

Binoy Kampmark
Humanitarian Imperialism: Obama and the Genocide Task Force

David Macaray
Killing the Auto Bailout: a Dagger to the Heart of Organized Labor

Ralph Nader
Antidotes to Plunder: a Holiday Reading List

Eamonn Fingleton
Whatever Happened to Iris Chang?

Lawrence Velvel
Why Blagojevich Might Be Acquitted

Behzad Yaghmaian
The Housing Crisis: a Timebomb China Can't Defuse

Tom Barry
Incentives to Detain: How Immigrants Drive Prison Profits

Howard Lisnoff
Why I Went to Jail

Laura Carlsen
Mexico's Immigration Problem

Raj Patel
The WTO and Other Fairy Tales

Ron Jacobs
The Manufacturing of History

David Yearsley
They Also Serve Who Only Pull or Tread

Lorenzo Wolff
So You Want Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star...

Susie Day
Proposition 1984: the Problem with Heterosexuals

Worthy Group of the Weekend
Energy Justice

December 11, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
Total Defeat for U.S. in Iraq

P. Sainath
After Mumbai

Vicken Cheterian
The Zarqawi Generation

Ray McGovern
Will Obama Buy Torture-Lite?

Dedrick Muhammad
Post-Racial Racism at the Post: the Undying Obsession with Black Family Values

Lee Sustar
Victory at Republic

Peter Morici
The Big Drag

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
Must They Hate Us So?

George Wuerthner
Another Subsidy to Big Timber?

Christopher Brauchli
Mr. Berg's Strange Obsession

Worthy Group of the Day
Animal Balance

December 10, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Whose Interests Will Shape Obama's Change?

Mary Lynn Cramer
The Multi-Trillion Dollar Question

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Nuclear Weapons Obsolescence

Joshua Frank
Breaking the Stranglehold on Middle East News Coverage

Jack Ely
Stop Sobbing About Free Music Downloads: a Message to the Music Industry from the Lead Singer of the Kingsmen

Steve Conn
An Obama Public Works Program?

Lee Sustar
Republic Workers Target Bank of America

Glen Ford
The Die is Cast

Stephen Lendman
The Persecution of Syed Fahad Hashmi

Nadia Hijab
The Face of America

Dave Lindorff
We All Need a Union

Website of the Day
This One's For You, Senator Dodd

December 9, 2008

Mike Whitney
Card Check

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Us vs. Them

Ghada Karmi
The UN Resolution That Time Forgot

Dave Lindorff
A Car Dealer Explains Why the Bailout is a Raw Deal

Steve Breyman
Notes on a Green Economy: Managing Stuff in the 21st Century

Lee Sustar /
Nicole Colson
Raising the Stakes at Republic

Rev. William E. Alberts
God of Our Fathers

Martha Rosenberg
Bill Richardson: Secretary of Bloodsports

Sam Husseini
How Holbrooke Lied His Way Into a War

David Macaray
The UAW in Peril

Website of the Day
This Toxic Life

December 8, 2008

Steve Early
Is Obama Backing Off a Crucial Pledge to Labor?

Michael Hudson
Obama's Favoritism: Wall Street, Not the Auto Industry

Patrick Cockburn
Talking to a Lashkar Militant

Diane Farsetta
An Officer and a Conflicted Man: McCaffery, the Pentagon and Fleishman-Hillard

Paul Craig Roberts
Chapters in Imperial Hypocrisy

Daniel Gross
The Chicago Sit-Down Strike

Saul Landau
To Bail or Not to Bail?

Harvey Wasserman
Why John Bryson is Unfit for Energy Secretary

Mike Ferner
The New Generation of "Non-Lethal" Weapons

Norman Solomon
The Silent Winter of Escalation

David Michael Green
The Other Foot

Website of the Day
The Remains of Detroit

December 5 / 7, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Honeymoans From the Left

Brian Cloughley
Shambles in Afghanistan

Paul Craig Roberts
Muslim Revolution: How Washington Arrogance Helped Drive the Mumbai Attacks

Liaquat Ali Khan
Mumbai and the Kashmir Tinderbox

Farzana Versey
Mumbai's Charge of the Lightweight Brigade

Peter Lee
Pakistan Nears the Breaking Point

Peter Morici
Slouching Toward a Depression?

Ralph Nader /
Toby Heaps
Junk Cap-and-Trade

Yinon Cohen /
Neve Gordon
Obama Could End the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Will He Meet the Challenge?

Wajahat Ali
Perverse Justice: the Holy Land Foundation Convictions

Johnny Barber
Aswad's Story: Illegal Detention and the Declaration of Human Rights

Alan Farago
Fallout from the Pass-Through Economy

Jeremy Scahill
Obama Doesn't Plan to End Occupation of Iraq

Mike Whitney
Powergrab in Ottawa

Ranjit Hoskote
Jahiliyya Versus Jihad

Carl Finamore
Thank God I'm an Atheist! (Or Boy is Bill O'Reilly in for a Big Surprise)

Marjorie Cohn
Obama and Women's Rights

Norm Kent
Tommy Chong, the Unanticipated Warrior

Missy Beattie
What Lies Ahead

Binoy Kampmark
Committing Suicide On-Line: the Briggs Case

David Macaray
The Best and the Brightest Redux: Too Many Brains, Not Enough Humility

Nancy Stohlman
Relational Activism

Ron Jacobs
Irreverent Politics Then and Now

David Yearsley
Thematics From the Golden Past

Lorenzo Wolff
Troubled Songs of Home and War

Poets' Basement
Orloski: The Door Opener

Website of the Weekend
In Prison My Whole Life

December 4, 2008

Ece Temelkuran
Inside the Ergenekon Case

Ralph Nader
Turning Crisis into Opportunity: Who Will Seize the Moment?

Harry Browne
The Bush-Obama National Security Strategy

Eamonn Fingleton
The American Car Industry: a Riposte to the Knockers

Conn Hallinan
The Syria Attack

Mike Whitney
Fiasco in Somalia: Another CIA Cock-Up

Stewart J. Lawrence
Obama and Latinos: Richardson, Alone, is Not Enough

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
Message to Obama: Stop Killing Afghanis

Karyn Strickler
Show Us the Green, Before We Show You the Money

Jennifer Matsui
Obama-Cola: the Great National Temperance Beverage

Website of the Day
"He Ain't Got Laid in a Month of Sundays..."

December 3, 2008

Andrew Cockburn
What's Wrong with the U.S. Military

Sheldon Rampton
Mormon Homophobia: Up Close and Personal

Robert Weissman
Nationalize GM

Yifat Susskind
From Mumbai to Washington

William Blum
The Obama Bummer: Vote First, Ask Questions Later

Alan Singer
The Ghost of the Defunct Economist

David Macaray
Trampled Under Foot at Wal-Mart

Martha Rosenberg
Born With a Statin Deficiency? Line Forms to the Left!

Mats Svensson
The Crimes Have No Period of Limitations

Website of the Day
Why Bill Richardson's Nomination Should be Opposed

December 2, 2008

Jeremy Scahill
Obama's Kettle of Hawks

Paul Craig Roberts
The New Arms Race

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
The Mumbai Terror Attacks: Is Pakistan to Blame?

Sarah Anderson /
John Cavanagh
Skewed Priorities: How the Bailout Dwarfs Spending on Other Global Crises

William Blum
The Mythology of the War on Terrorism

John Ross
Mexico's Drug War Goes Down in Flames

Dave Lindorff
A Tale of Two Terror Attacks

Nicola Nasser
A Peace Process That Makes Peace Impossible

Steve Conn
Operation Redskin Removal

Robert Bryce
Coal Hard Facts

Website of the Day
Country, Funk, Soul

December 1, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
From Baghdad to Mumbai, by Way of Pakistan

Damien Millet /
Eric Toussaint
Obama's Economic Team: Records of Failure

Vijay Prashad
The Fires in South Asia

Deepak Tripathi
Obama's Foreign Crises

Joshua Frank
Madam Secretary Clinton and the Middle East

P. Sainath
The Unlikely Martyrdom of Free Market Jihad

Alan Farago
The Right's War on Regulators

Binoy Kampmark
Sydney's Ball and Chain

Chris Genovali
Silent Fall

David Michael Green
Hope You Die Before You Get Old

Stephen Martin
The Chinese are Coming, the Chinese are Coming!

Website of the Day
Robert Rubin: Coward, Liar or Both?

November 28-30, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
In Time of Trouble

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

Ted Honderich
What is the Meaning of Obama's Election?

Tom Kerr
Preserving Filthy Lucre (Or Becoming My Dad)

Mike Ely
The Conquest of New England

David Yearsley
Hymns of the Conquest

Deepak Tripathi
Uproar in Police-State Britain

Sonja Karkar
Gaza's Death Throes

Ramzy Baroud
Salvation in a News Broadcast

Robert Weitzel
Israel's Settlement on Capitol Hill

Robert Roth
Can We Create a Movement for Change?

Carlos Fierro
Obama and the End of Racism?

David Macaray
How to Kill a Union

David Rosen
A New Sexual Agenda

James Cockcroft
Indigenous People Rising

Stan Cox
The Most Disappointing Gift

Steve Conn
Talking Turkey About College Basketball

Stephen Martin
The Electromagnetic Pulse and Economic Warfare

Richard Rhames
Busty Bimbettes, Bombs and Brand Obama

Kim Nicolini
Women as Products and Cannibalistic Achievers

Lorenzo Wolff
A Battle Cry for the Confused and Vulnerable

Poets' Basement
Woods, Harrison and Corseri

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
December 12 / 14, 2008

Let the Right One In

Finally, a Vampire Movie You Can Sink Your Teeth Into

By KIM NICOLINI

Let The Right One In, otherwise known as “the Swedish vampire movie,” is a gorgeous, dark, tender, and intelligent film that not only delivers a classic vampire romance narrative but also serves as a subtle critique of the pressures of heteronormativity on adolescent sexual development. Being a vampire story, the movie is in essence a horror movie, and it certainly is not without its ghastly moments. But like the best of horror movies, Let The Right One In uses the horror of the body to explore issues of sexuality and social conformity.

The film uses the vampire narrative to tell a coming of age story and a romance between two adolescent children – a boy, Oskar and a girl, Eli. Eli just happens to be a vampire, and Oskar a feminized boy who is terrorized by the heteronormative dominating bullies of his school. These kinds of tales are no strangers to cinema. Let The Right One In isn’t the first film to use violence and the horror of the female body to depict a coming of age narrative . Think of two classic Stephen King inspired movies -- Stand By Me, in which a group of adolescent boys’ pilgrimage to see the dead girl’s body serves as their rite of passage and Carrie in which the beginning of menstruation triggers a cavalcade of horror and violence. And there is always The Exorcist for the classic Puberty Brings Horror narrative. Let The Right One In is definitely coming from this tradition of the inherent violence of adolescence and sexual coming of age, but in so doing it doesn’t terrify as much as reveal an innocent tenderness that is threatened by the real monsters outside – the social dominance of heteronormative masculinity. Like the best of horror movies, the monster in this movie is not the problem.  The real monster isn’t the vampire, but unreasonable social pressure to conform to the “norm” and submit to male dominance and the narrowly defined terms of what is sexually acceptable. Anything outside the status quo (an effeminate quiet boy or a vampire girl) becomes a “monster” and suffers a kind of social castration. Some of the best horror films show the monster (think Frankenstein) suffering social castration at the hands of the violent masses.  What makes this movie so exceptional is that it is incredibly gorgeously filmed and is more art than horror, and it doesn’t wear its message on its sleeve but weaves it beautifully into the subtext of the film.

The cinematography is gorgeous in its beautiful bleak minimalist realism. From the moment the film opened with a quietly abstract shot of snow falling against the night sky, I was hypnotized by its dark and blurry beauty. It is perpetually night, dusk or dawn. Everything is washed out with a layer of cold haze. The dim atmosphere combined with the film’s focus on bleak winter landscapes, nondescript architecture and the banal things that occupy interior spaces reminds me of the look of recent Romanian films such as Death of Mr. Lazarescu and Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days. Of course, Romania is the home of the original vampire – Dracul, or Vlad the Impaler, and in fact I cited one of the female leads in Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days as being vampiristic and her name, Dragut, as a derivation of Dracul. Perhaps it is a coincidence that the Swedish vampire movie bears the look and feel of recent Romanian cinema, but given Romania’s vampire history, I like to think it’s more than a coincidence. It is this exquisite use of the ordinary non-descript landscape of a working class town and the details of the space (a torn poster hanging from a kitchen wall, an empty room with blanket thrown on the floor, the ugly institutionalized space of a boy’s locker room) that makes the story so much more tender for all its gore. The fact that the vampire girl Eli lives in massive Eastern Bloc style apartment building and that her apartment is as rundown and ugly as any non-descript housing space makes her character so much more vulnerable and believable. She is not just a girl vampire, but she is an adolescent girl coming to age in the confines of this socially and economically limited environment.  She is a lower class child struggling for a source of food, which happens to be blood. And she bears none of the aristocratic trappings of some vampire narratives. Eli doesn’t sleep in a coffin or any kind of romantically gothic space. She sleeps in the bathtub covered with cheap blankets. She has too much connection to real people with real struggles to be taken simply as a monster. So even when she leaps on unsuspecting victims, attaches herself to their necks, and sucks their blood, she very quickly retreats back to her vulnerable girl self. She is committing heinous violent crimes out of the necessity of life, not because she particularly enjoys it.
Given that the movie is a coming of age movie, it is no surprise that the tale includes a lot of blood in relation to the girl character Eli. But this isn’t just another Menstruating Girl as Horror movie. In fact, it uses the classic tropes of girl body horror – adolescence and blood – to move beyond gender. Eli is inextricably linked to the boy character, and they reflect off of each other into a gender neutral zone, and their complex relationship to each other is what fuels the movie. What this movie does that most coming of age films fail to do is represent both sides – the male and female. Coming of age stories tend to be one-sided – the female (Carrie) or the male (Standy By Me). Let the Right One In beautifully integrates the male and the female, and by doing so deconstructs the social confines of gender and sexuality. The film first focuses on Oskar who in the opening shot is not only feminized but also uncomfortably sexualized as we see him lying in bed in his underwear. Seen through a blurry focus that presents him like some kind of dream, Oskar’s nearly naked beauty makes the audience hesitate for a moment in its blatant sexuality. Of course, we are not supposed to recognize a 12 year old boy as sexual, but the truth of the matter is that twelve is the threshold into sexual life, and that is the threshold that this movie occupies. The film then reveals the trials and tribulations of Oskar, who turns out not only to be feminized in his looks but also in the social place he occupies as a victimized boy who is terrorized by the random violence of heterosexual boys in his small town. The adult town itself is represented by a series of men who drink in the pub and socialize, the grown up versions of the boys who terrorize Oskar. In one scene, the bully boys attack Oskar after school and slash him with a whip, giving Oskar a bleeding vaginal gash on his face, further feminizing his character. Also, Oskar lives alone with his mother and therefore occupies the feminine space in his home life. When Oskar does go visit his father, there is an odd homosexual undercurrent in his father’s character (a character that lives outside the claustrophobic confines of the town), and the homosexual subtext is brought further to the surface when one of Oskar’s father’s male friends shows up and there is an odd tension between them and Oskar.

As Oskar struggles with his sexual coming of age and his social castration at the hands of the aggressive hetero male community in which he lives, it makes complete sense that the Female Other would appear in his building. He first encounters the mysterious Eli while he is stabbing aggressively at a tree with his knife. He is engaging in a kind of substitute fucking with his artificial phallus (the knife) to replace the penis he has lost by being bullied by the bad boys. Eli becomes the physical manifestation of Oskar’s sexual otherness, his female mirror image. When we learn of Eli’s proclivity for drinking blood (her mouth frequently smeared with red dripping warm fresh blood or at least crusted with scabby traces of her bloody tendency), the first interpretation is menstruation, the bodily manifestation of sexual maturity. Whereas Oskar is the sexually confused boy, Eli is menstruating girl, the gateway to sexual awakening. Of course, being a sexually maturing young girl, social pressures say that she must be controlled, so it is no surprise that Eli’s father tries to control her “appetite” by acquiring the blood for her to drink and to keep her primal tendencies in check. But of course, the young girl cannot be controlled by the father, so even though he attempts to slaughter adolescent boys (those who prey on young girls' sexuality) so he can feed Eli their blood, he botches every single job. His ineffectual impotence reigns over his desire to control the female sexuality under his roof. The botch job “murder” scenes are portrayed with such ludicrous humor (a poodle licking the fresh blood from the snow, a young boy screaming and swinging from rafters in the locker room), that we not only laugh at the father’s impotence but we realize, through humor, how ludicrous his attempt to control female sexuality is. He tries to control Eli’s “thirst,” but in the end she still jumps on unsuspecting victims and sucks the blood right out of their necks. And in fact, after her father’s final failed attempt to control her desires by unsuccessfully killing a boy in the gym (hetero male central), he sacrifices himself to Eli, and she kills her father because the father must be killed for the female sexuality to have freedom.

There is more to the father’s character than just the “father” figure. In a way, the father can be read as the “sickness” of socially controlled sexuality. He represents a society that preys on adolescence and sexual development by trying to control it. He is a kind of generic sexual predator who resorts to violence as a sexual outlet, and he is a stand-in for the hideous underside of hetero-male domination. There is an odd tension between him and Eli that hints at an unhealthy sexual connection. It seems that he wants to possess her sexually by controlling her blood and therefore her sexuality. But his obsessive desire to control her means that ultimately she has the control over him because he’ll do anything to keep her in his reign. His final attempt to maintain control, he avails his own life blood to her. As she descends on his neck and penetrates his flesh, we can read the as a taboo sex scene involving incest and pedophilia. In addition, during the first murder scene when the father gasses the teen boy, hangs him from the tree and slits his throat, the father appears more as sexual predator, the classic repressed homosexual serial killer using violence as a sexual outlet narrative. Of course, the father preys on teen boys because they are the sexual threat to Eli and they are also what he ultimately desires. All of his attempts to control (kill boys and get their blood, keep Eli in his power) fail because sexuality cannot be controlled. In essence, the father is the sickness and corruption of social heteronormative conformity.

Most movies would leave the story with Eli and assume that this tale of female blood thirst and its relation to the father good enough. But Let The Right One In brings the story of the girl back to the realm of the masculine by using it to show that social confines that restrict male sexual identity as much as they do female. When Oskar and Eli develop a close friendship, and Oskar begins to “fall in love” with Eli, she keeps reminding him that she resides in a place that is not “normal,” and that is outside of socially acceptable norms. “What if I wasn’t a girl?” she asks Oskar in one scene. “Why should that matter?” Oskar responds. In another scene, Eli climbs naked into Oskar’s bed. Oskar asks if she will be his girlfriend, and she says, “But I’m not a girl.” In a later scene, Oskar peeks in on Eli as she’s changing her clothes, and we get a quick glimpse of her mutilated genital area. She is stitched up and sealed shut with no indication of any remaining genitals. No vagina, no penis, Eli possesses a stitched up botch-job where her sexual organs should be. Indeed, Eli is truly the mutated sexual Other. She is the melding of male and female reduced to a gender-neutral creature. Eli may not be a girl, but she is the feminine, and her role in Oskar’s life is to free him from the stranglehold of masculine domination (the bullies at school) and to let him embrace his “otherness.” In the final scene of the movie, when Eli rescues Oskar from a brutal scene in which one of the boys nearly drowns Oskar in the pool, we see the dismembered parts of masculine dominance (their literal legs and arms) floating in the pool of water (the feminine). This is a movie where The Other wins, and Oskar and Eli leave to embrace a life of otherness outside of the strangulating pressures of dominant heterosexual aggression and conformity.

The tenderness of Eli and Oskar’s story comes from both characters’ ability to embrace each others’ flaws or otherness. Oskar doesn’t hesitate for a second to put his arms around Eli, even though her face and eyes are dripping blood. Her blood doesn’t matter to him. Likewise, Eli loves Oskar’s vulnerability, the fact that he is not “one of those other boys.” But as tender as the story is, it is not without its horrors and its humors. As Eli pounces on victims and sucks their blood or as frozen bodies are pulled from the ice, as Eli’s father slices the throat of a young man and drains his blood into a plastic jug, certainly we are given an ample dose of horror. But each one of these scenes is also laced with humor, and the movie is not without its share of classic Horror Camp moments, such as when one woman victim who is turning into a vampire is suddenly attacked by dozens of cats. Her screaming body covered with ferocious felines is hilarious and reminds us of some of the funnier Beasts Versus Human horror narratives. Also, when the same woman commits suicide by sunshine and her body burns in a hospital bed, we leave the sincerity of the love story for a moment of flaming excess. And also, for all their tender love for each other, we have to remember that Eli and Oskar also stroke violence. Eli really does kill people and drink their blood. Oskar quietly fetishizes murder. He keeps scrapbooks of newspaper clippings from heinous violent crimes, and he carries and fondles his knife with the desire to someday really use it. As tender as the love story is, coming of age as seen in this movie is a an act of violence, but if you meet the right people in the right places (sissy boys and vampire girls) tenderness and love can be found within the frame of violence.

Dripping blood, flaming bodies, and ferocicous felines aside, the real star of the movie is the atmosphere. The dark barren frigid claustrophobia of the small town is delivered through gorgeous photography and intersected with an eerily atmospheric soundtrack.

For all its horror, mystery, violence, and romance, the movie is art above all else. And cinematically beautiful horror films are hard to come by. The movie functions exquisitely as a fresh vampire tale, but also, like most good monster films do, it serves as a critique of socially imposed sexual repression. Perhaps, we should all embrace our inner-vampire and enjoy the taste of the interior body instead of running from it.  The film is quite a piece of work. An American remake is already planned, but of course it will lack all the beauty and subtext of the original, so go see the Swedish version while you still can.

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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