Today's Stories

May 8-10, 2009

Paul Wolf
Obama's Axis of Obedience

Neve Gordon
Jailed for Caring

May 7, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
Criminalizing Criticism of Israel

Chris Floyd
A Full-Court Press for Pakistan War

Andy Worthington
Mixed Messages on Torture

Alan Farago
No Place Like Home: a Stress Test for Land Use, Not Just Banks

Ray McGovern
Deux ex Machina on Torture?

Dave Lindorff
Stain Removal: Impeaching the Torture Judge

Eric Toussaint /
Damien Millet
Why is There Rampant Famine in the 21st Century?

Ana M. Malinow, MD
Why We Need a Single-Payer Health Care System

Jeff Armstrong
Freeing Leonard Peltier: What Would Warren Harding Do?

Norman Solomon
A Green New Deal

Website of the Day
The End of Lake Mead?

May 6, 2009

Doug Peacock
The Fate of the Yellowstone Grizzly

Patrick Cockburn
Afghans to Obama: Get Out, Take Karzai With You

Richard Neville
The Torturer's Apprentice

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
To Power a Nation: Nuclear Bombs or Sunshine?

Winslow T. Wheeler
Of Pork and Baloney: Obama's Defense Budget

Deepak Tripathi
Pakistan in Crisis

Stephen Soldz
A "Natural Reaction": APA Ethics Policy-Maker Endorses Torture

Reuven Kaminer
Nice is Not Enough: Obama vs. Netanyahu and Lieberman

David Macaray
The Chrysler-UAW Deal

Kevin Zeese
Why We Were Arrested at the Senate Finance Committee Hearings

Marjorie Cohn
Stanford Antiwar Alums Call for War Crimes Investigation of Condoleezza Rice

Coalition for an Ethical Psychology
Investigate Psychologist and Health Provider Complicity in Torture

Website of the Day
Who's Behind the Financial Meltdown?

May 5, 2009

William Blum
Torture and Mr. Obama

Uri Avnery
Netanyahu's Plan

Steven Higgs
Autism and Toxic Pollution

Dean Baker
Why Economists Should Learn Arithmetic

Daniel Wolff
The Education of Rachel Carson

Sibel Edmonds
The Broken Congress

Carole King Klein
A New Chance to Save the Northern Rockies

Fidel Castro
Giving One's All

Belén Fernández
Oil and Aguardiente in the Ecuadoran Elections

Dan Bacher
Schwarzenegger's Big Lie About Fish vs. Jobs

Website of the Day
"I Married Isis on the Fifth Day of May"

May 4, 2009

James G. Abourezk
The AIPAC Spy Case

Jeff Leys
Obama's War Budget

Patrick Cockburn
Afghan Ayatollahs Press Marital Rape Law

Andy Worthington
A Start on Guantánamo, But Not Enough

Jaime Avilés
Mexico's Plague-Bringers

David Swanson
An Even Worse Bybee Memo

Paul Craig Roberts
Working with Jack Kemp

P. Sainath
Celeb Crusades and the Death of Politics

Eugenia Tsao
Canada's Obama and the Cult of the Prof

Benjamin Dangl
Protest and Rubber Bullets in Paraquay

Sami Al-Arian
Mourning William Moffitt

Website of the Day
"Soldiers Are Cutting Us Down": Kent State, May 4, 1970

May 1 - 3, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Game-Changers: Specter Jumps, Souter Quits

Gary Leupp
Dropping the AIPAC Spying Case

Peter Linebaugh
The Key to the Bastille

Jeffrey St. Clair /
Joshua Frank:
Half Life of a Toxic War: Iraq's Wrecked Environment

C. G. Estabrook
Minion of the Long War

Patrick Cockburn
Kabul's New Elite

Mike Whitney
Economy on the Ropes

Pierre Sprey /
Winslow Wheeler
What "Sweeping Overhaul" of the Pentagon?

Andy Worthington
Al-Marri's Plea Deal: Dictatorial Powers Unchallenged

Mairead Maguire
Stand Up to Israeli Apartheid: a Letter to Obama From a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate

Nadia Hijab
The Israel Boycott is Biting

Diane Farsetta
Life, Death and Water Policy

Michael Calderón-Zaks
The Déjà Vu Flu: Why Much of the Discussion About Swine Flu is Racist

Richard Rhames
When Piggies Come Home to Roost: Swine Flu and the Industrial Meat Gulags

Russell Mokhiber
Inside the Beltway Baucus

Ramzy Baroud
Clinton's Unpromising Start

Rannie Amiri
Understanding Lebanon's June Elections

Deb Reich
No Talking, Dammit!

Steven Higgs
Indiana Criminalizes Dissent: Roadblocks on the NAFTA Highway

Brian Cloughley
Malice in Blunderland

David Michael Green
The Party's Over

Farzana Versey
Sex, Swat and Susan Boyle

Jim Goodman
Think Before You Eat: Agriculture and the Environment

Carl Finamore
New Prescription for a Healthy Union Movement

Christopher Brauchli
The Sounds of Silence: the Texas Option

Susie Day
The Real Cause of Unemployment: Employees!

David Yearsley
Nuts Over Beethoven

Lorenzo Wolff
Three Minutes of Perfection

Peter Stone Brown
Dancing with Dylan

Poets' Basement Dominguez, Orloski and Springate

Website of the Weekend
May Day Europe

April 30, 2009

Ellen Cantarow
Obama and "Two States": Seamless Continuity From Bush Time

Dana L. Cloud
The McCarthyism That Horowitz Built

Paul W. Lovinger /
Jeannette Hassberg
A Nation of Laws

Binoy Kampmark
Swine at the Trough: the Business of Pandemics

Brian Downing
The Perils of Modernization in Afghanistan

Frank Snepp
Tortured by the Past

David Swanson
The Wrong Torture Question

Conn Hallinan
The Coming Asian Storm

Ron Jacobs
Not Dead Yet: an Interview with Jerry Gordon on the State of the Antiwar Movement

John Goekler
The Only Path to a Middle East Picnic?

Jasmine L. Tyler /
Anthony Papa
An End to Crack/Powder Cocaine Sentencing Disparity?

Website of the Day
Emergency Petition: Stop Coal Industry Intimidation of Activists

April 29, 2009

Joann Wypijewski
Death at Work in America

Patrick Cockburn
The Taliban's Roads to Kabul

Andy Worthington
Cheney's Twisted World

Chris Floyd
The Specter Diversion

Dave Lindorff
No More Excuses: a Specter is Haunting the Democrats

Jeremy Scahill
The Nuremberg Truth and Reconciliation Commission?

Doug Henwood
Zionist Lobby Targets Another Tenured Professor: an Interview with William Robinson

Michael Hudson
Will Iceland be Handed Over to a New Gang of Kleptocrats?

Russell Mokhiber
My Ron Pollack Problem--And Yours

Eric Toussaint
Ecuador at the Crossroads

Website of the Day
An Interview with Leslie and Andrew Cockburn on "American Casino"

April 28, 2009

Uri Avnery
A Little Red Light: On Israeli Fascism

Jeremy Scahill
Obama's Iraq: the Picture of Dorian Gray

Dean Baker
The Perfect Gift for Wall Street: a Financial Transactions Tax

Michael D. Yates
At the Factory Gate

Conn Hallinan
Georgian Plots? Saakavili's "Order No. 2"

John Stauber
Beyond MoveOn

Tom Barry
The Failed Border Security Initiative

Harvey Wasserman
Who Pays for America's Chernobyl Roulette?

Jeff Nygaard
Pirates, Profits and Propaganda

Frederico Fuentes
Why the U.S. Still Hates Cuba

Website of the Day
The Man Behind the Hood

April 27, 2009

Pam Martens
The Far Right's Plot to Capture New Hampshire

Patrick Cockburn
Torture? It Probably Killed More Americans Than 9/11

Andrew J. Bacevich Guardian of the Status Quo: Obama's Sins of Omission

Mitu Sengupta
The Bloodbath in Sri Lanka

Franklin Lamb
Hillary Does Beirut: The 165-Minute Swoop-In

Firmin DeBrabander
Crimes of Economic Madness

Dave Lindorff
Wide Open to Pandemic?

Russell Mokhiber
How Corrupt is That?

Mike Whitney
Pinter's Message to Obama

Mark Weisbrot
Overhauling the IMF

Rev. José M. Tirado
Iceland's New Dawn: How the Right Got Trounced

Website of the Day
American Casino

April 24-26, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Putting the Bush Years on Trial

Marjorie Cohn
Torture Used to Try to Link Saddam with 9/11

Andy Worthington
Who Ordered the Torture of Abu Zubaydah?

Jeremy Scahill
Are Leading Democrats Afraid of a Special Prosecutor to Investigate Torture?

Chris Floyd
Top of the Heap: the Democrats' Teachable Moment on Torture

Mike Whitney
A Housing Crash Update

Anthony DiMaggio
Obama and the Housing Crisis

Chris Kromm
Democratic Lobbyists Key to Fight Against Employee Free Choice Act

Saul Landau
Seventeen Months in "the Hole:" an Interview with the Leader of the Cuban Five

Dave Lindorff
Free John Walker Lindh

Greg Moses
The Debt Looters

Joshua Frank
Calling for a Coal Moratorium: an Interview with Ted Nace

Fred Gardner
Collective Farming and the Lynch Case

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Homework, Testing and Stealth Apartheid in Education

David Michael Green
Of Tea Parties and Teleprompters

Ramzy Baroud
Middle East Spies: a New Front in Gaza's Conflict

Rannie Amiri
Mubarak's Expanding Enemies List

Laura Carlsen
Mr. President, Calderon is Not Mexico

Richard Morse
The Haitian People Need a Lobbyist

Nikolas Kozloff
Protecting the Bald Eagle: a Task Now Falling to ... Hugo Chavez?

Kent Peterson
The Fight to Save Mexico's Mangroves

Robert Bryce
The Ethanol Scammers Rent a General

Niranjan Ramakrishnan The Financial Experts

Ron Jacobs
Torture is More Than Just "Harsh Tactics"

Richard Rhames
Roman Legends, Book Burning and History's Hunt

Stephen Martin
Wherefore Art Thou American Dream?

David Yearsley
Rodgers, Hammerstein, Michener and Nostalgia's Clammy Embrace

Poets' Basement
Khalil and Mankh

Website of the Weekend
Doug and Andrea Peacock on Grizzlies and Edward Abbey

April 23, 2009

Eamonn Fingleton
How the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times Buried the Madoff Scandal for at Least Four Years

Ray McGovern
Obama Plays Hamlet on Torture

Michael Ratner
The Torture Commission Trap

Alan Farago
The Quicksand Economy

Rob Larson
Business Gets Carded

Nadia Hijab
The Real Heroes of Durban

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Deconstructing the Taliban

Dave Lindorff
Are Members of Congress Being Blackmailed?

Helen Redmond
Selling Out Single-Payer: the "Public Option" Con

Adam Federman
The Battle Over New York's Marcellus Shale

Website of the Day
An Interactive Map of Vanishing Employment Across the Country

April 22, 2009

Chris Floyd
The Fatal Thread: Torture, War and the Imperial Project

Joanne Mariner
Torture Evidence and Terror Blacklists

Vijay Prashad
Obama's Afghan Plan: Fracturing the Antiwar Movement

Gareth Porter
U.S. Lacks Capacity to Win Over Afghans

Dean Baker
The Tyranny of Bad Economics

Peter Morici
Housing Sales and Fixing the Economy

Winslow T. Wheeler
Eliminating Bad Pentagon Habits

Barucha Calamity Peller
The Battle to Take Back the New School

Harvey Wasserman
Chernobyl Could Happen Here

Aisha Brown /
Dedrick Muhammad
White Privilege in the Americas

Teo Ballvé
Obama's Feel Good Meeting with Colombia's Uribe

Website of the Day
Ahmedinejad's Durban Speech: What He Actually Said

April 21, 2009

Randy Rowland
Lindy Blake's Great Escape

Dave Lindorff
Jay Bybee's Conspiracy to Torture

Fidel Castro
The Secret Summit

George McGovern
Pull Out of Iraq This Year

Greg Moses
The Unemployment Channel

Benjamin Dangl
Argentina Remembers

Sonia Nettnin
Saving Lives in Gaza

Frank Barat
The Death of Bassem: a Shooting at the Wall in Bil'n

Binoy Kampmark
Legal Purgatory and John Demjanjuk

John V. Walsh
Code Red for Single Payer

David Macaray
SAG Should be Praised, Not Assailed

Website of the Day
Bonus Man: For Executive Assholes Everywhere

April 20, 2009

Mike Whitney
Housing Bust Comes Roaring Back, Worse Than Ever

Andrea Peacock
Histrionics and Legalisms in Missoula

Henry A. Giroux
Ten Years After Columbine: the Tragedy of Youth Deepens

Liaquat Ali Khan
Drone Attacks on Pakistan's Indigenous Tribes

Fred Gardner
Obama's DoJ Backs Prosecution of Medical Marijuana Providers

Stephen Soldz
Obama, Blair, Panetta and the Torture Memos: Praising Moral Cowards, Ignoring Real Heroes

Nadia Hijab
Obama's Multi-Polar Middle East

Dave Lindorff
The Meeting in Trinidad

P. Sainath
India's Press Nixes "R" Word

Nelson P Valdés
A Modest (Transition) Proposal to Obama

Mark Engler
American Empire Foreclosed?

Belén Fernández
The FARC Can't Dance

Website of the Day
Dear Mr. Buffett...

Weekend Edition
May 8-10, 2009

Ashes and Diamonds

A Vampire Visits a Welfare State

By BEN SONNENBERG

I’ve watched my fair share of vampire films, ranging from the silent classic (Murnau’s Nosferatu and Dryer’s Vampyr) to the commercial (Tod Browning’s Dracula, with Bela Lugosi saying, “I don’t drink – wine”), from the comic (Mel Brooks’s Dracula: Dead and Loving It) to the camp (Andy Warhol Presents Dracula directed by Paul Morrisey), from the scary (David Slade’s 30 Days of Night) to the anodyne (Catherine Hardwicke’s Twilight). These, as well as others too numerous to mention, all have one thing in common: a compelling figure of mystery who casts a spell on his victims.

Let the Right One In by the Swedish director Tomas Alfredson, lately released on DVD by Magnolia Home Entertainment, is a most unusual vampire picture. It looks more beautiful than almost any other recent movie and it has a first-class score (Johan Söderqvist is the composer). Among its other distinctions is that its vampire, Eli (Lina Leandersson), while certainly weird-looking in 1980s Sweden, is anything but a spellbinder. We first glimpse her as she’s moving into an apartment with an older man, perhaps her father. They’ll be right next door to Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant), a lovely, frail 12-year old with a fringe of long blond hair who lives there  with his mother (Karin Bergquist).

Oskar’s a lonely, sensitive boy, smarter than his classmates who of course bully him. The worst of these bullies is Conny (Patrik Rydmark). He likes pushing Oskar against the wall, calling him piggy and making him go oink, something he does every day. Oskar’s obsessed with paying him back. When Oskar first meets Eli, it’s in the courtyard of the housing development where they are now next-door neighbors. He’s angrily stabbing a hunting knife into a tree as if it was Conny saying to it, “Fuck off!... Are you scared? So, scream. Squeal!” He’s somewhat embarrassed by Eli’s sudden appearance at the top of a jungle gym. They begin by feeling each other, cautiously, out as teenagers will. “What’re you doing here?” “Nothing. What’re you doing?” “Nothing.” They’re both more or less the same age, although as Eli tells Oskar she’s been 12 for a long time, which is our first explicit hint (unless you guessed it from the title) that this is a vampire movie. Before going back home, she lets Oskar know that she can’t be his friend. “Are you so sure that I want to be your friend?” he yells after her, his face telling us there’s nothing he wants more. So begins this strange romance between a friendless, unhappy boy and his mysterious new neighbor in a soulless Stockholm suburb.

Alfredson and his cinematographer, Hoyte van Hoytema, give this early scene a spectral quality, the light magically coming off the enveloping snow. Their canny way with the uncanny shows again in a scene where Eli’s companion or protector, or slave, Håkan (Per Ragnar), murders a passer-by and strings him up to drain his blood. Shot in a lovely grove of birch trees, this gruesome scene again uses snow to create a winter pastoral, even as Håkan slashes his victim’s carotid artery. Just as the blood starts its copious flow into a plastic bottle, his efforts are interrupted by a magnificent white poodle. Its owners call, “Ricky!... Ricky!... Stupid dog,” as the frustrated Håkan gathers up his equipment, forgetting the bottle, and goes home to Eli. His remorse is painful to watch as Eli exclaims, “Do I have to do everything myself?”  She then goes about her business with a gory efficiency.

Her romance with Oskar resumes in the very next scene when they’re both in the courtyard again. He tells her of his troubles at school and, embracing him, she encourages him to fight back. When they hit you, she says, hit back harder. And she says she can be there to help him, “I can do that,” she tells him. Odd words from a vampire. But then so was her compassionate embrace. The next time at school Oskar stays behind after class is dismissed to teach himself Morse code, the better to communicate with Eli. (His first message to her will be “Sweet dreams.”) What were you doing, Connie demands and when Oskar won’t tell him, in a vivid scene reminiscent of Truffaut’s 400 Blows,Oskar’s so brutally switched with a hazel rod that his pain is almost too much for one of Connie’s gang to bear. He actually weeps as he beats him.

With each of Oskar’s troubles, Eli’s bond with him grows stronger. So do their embraces. One night, moreover, naked, she crawls into bed with him. Her body is cold. She asks Oskar if it would bother him if it turned out she wasn’t a girl. Probably not, he answers. He already knows Eli isn’t a girl. In a scene that would have delighted Buñuel, he’s glimpsed between Eli’s legs. Just as in the novel by John Ajvide Lindqvuist (who also wrote the screenplay), Eli was castrated when he was 12. Director and writer remind us that no compact in life may be stronger than the furtive, platonic friendship between two 12-year old boys. The film grows curiouser and curiouser. Eli’s gone in the morning of course, leaving behind a note that reads, “If I linger, I die. To live I must flee,” beneath which she’s drawn a heart containing the words, “Your Eli.”

And the climax is still a ways off.      

Meanwhile, Håkan seeks to redeem himself. In the gym, he strings up one of Oskar’s schoolmates, but before he can cut his throat, the boy screams out, his cries are heard and Håkan, finally realizing he’s too old for job of this kind, pours prussic acid over his face. This time there’s no poodle to mitigate the horror of the scene. Håkan’s taken to hospital where, in a comic scene typical of Alfredson, Eli climbs the wall to his room and, with a kind of mercy presumably peculiar to vampires, puts him puts of his misery by draining the blood from his body.

Connie, together with his gang and his older brother, premeditate revenge on Oskar by luring him to the swimming pool. Here they nearly drown him. Just as he’s about to die, in a surreally beautiful scene, body parts start floating in the water behind him. Eli’s hand pulls Oskar up and he sees the dismembered bodies of Connie, his brother and his gang – all but the boy who wept while beating him. It’s a sight of such spectacular sanguinity, I swear I could hear Montgomery Burns of The Simpsons whispering, “Excellent!” in my ear.

Newly resolute, Oskar packs up his belongings and leaves home. The screen blacks out for a three-bar musical measure of time, after which we’re given the beautiful coda to this film. We find Oskar in a private room on an old-fashioned Swedish railway car, heading who knows where. Next to him is a box containing Eli. She thumbs and he answers in Morse code, “Puss,” which means “kiss” in Swedish.

As I said at the start, Let the Right One In is a most beautiful and unusual film. I recommend it with no reservations whatever.  

Details:
Released on March 10, 2009
1 Disc SRP: $26.98
Sweden; 2008; in Swedish with English and Spanish subtitles; 114 minutes; Color; 2.35:1
Format: Dolby, Dubbed, DVD-Video, NTSC, Widescreen
Region 1; Rating  

Ben Sonnenberg is the author of Lost Property: Memoirs & Confessions of a Bad Boy, and the founder/editor of the original Grand Street. He can be reached at harapos@panix.com. 

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