Robo Cheetah.

I want one.

Horror Movies That Don't Suck: Near Dark

After an annoying bout with insomnia last night I came across Harry Knowles weekly DVD Picks and Peeks article. Among the selections this week is a new edition of Kathryn Bigelow's 1987 vampire classic, Near Dark, which has some very... um... special box art.

Like Harry, I find this rather hilarious, but I also find it a tad annoying. Near Dark is not Twilight, and while I'm with him on enjoying the prospect of a bunch of cushy Twilighters stumbling across this movie and getting a taste of what a vampire action romance can really be (that is, good), I can't stand how cheapening this box art is, and how discouraging it is to anyone who hates Twilight. This movie is the anti-Twilight. From a glance though, I actually thought it was a straight-to-video remake.

Near Dark is the other 80s vampire movie. People will often cite The Lost Boys as the best vampire movie of the 80s. The Lost Boys of course being the story of a single mom and her kids who move in to their uncle's house (ignoring potential Toys in the Attic joke), the oldest falls for a girl who is caught up in a biker gang who turn out to be vampires, becomes a vampire, doesn't want to kill people, and then has a crazy showdown at the end. Near Dark is about a rancher boy who falls for a girl who is caught up in a biker gang of vampires, becomes a vampire himself, REALLY doesn't want to kill people, and has a big showdown at the end. It is, the other vampire movie of the 80s. (If you haven't gathered by now, I'm not a fan of The Hunger.) However, where The Lost Boys is rather campy, Near Dark is a hard R, seriously badass film with a quarter of the cast of Aliens (Lance Henricksen, Bill Paxton and Jenette Goldstein) making up the vampire gang. It's an outlaw film, with an epic shoot out and one of the most violent bar-fights in film history. Its a hybrid of action and horror that puts the Underworld and Blade films to shame, with the closest film I can think of to compare it to being the original The Hitcher (which I plan to write about more in the future). But to sum it up, it's a Kathryn (Blue Steel, Point Break, Strange Days and recently The Hurt Locker) Bigelow film. What more really needs to be said?

This movie isn't about glistening skin as the golden-eyed hunk (...of hairspray) gazes at the virginal young teen girl, its about a woman letting a guy feed off her blood so he'll survive because, unlike her, he lacks the killer instinct. That's basically the romance here. They do not exactly sparkle when the sun comes up. Oh, and the golden eyes and white skin on that cover... total BS. Not in the movie. It's that blatant an attempt to make this look like Twilight, and frankly, I don't think Twilight has a scene where someone's throat gets ripped open by way of Bill Paxton's boot spurs. Gore isn't everything, and far from all Near Dark has to offer; it's one of if not the best vampire movie of the 80s. The cover art designer(s) should show a little more respect. Sheesh.

Horror Movies That Don't Suck: Rogue

During the torture horror wave Dimension EXTREME and Lion's Gate had a tendency to buy out a lot of horror movies and utterly shaft them on the distribution. Greg McLean's 2007 follow up to Wolf Creek, the giant killer croc film Rogue, was one such film. As I recall, it went straight to video in the US, and as the used copy sitting on my desk can account, it was given the most misleadingly terrible cover art they could possibly have given it, but more on that in a moment.

The giant killer corc/gator sub-genre is roughly a step above the giant killer snake sub-genre and a step or two below the werewolf picture. Few people wouldn't be hard pressed to come up with more than two titles worth your time of day. There is Cujo director Lewis Teague's 1980 classic, Alligator, and then their is Steve Miner's 1999 return to comedy horror, Lake Placid. For all the Robert Forster glory of Teague's gator-in-the-sewer flick, it hasn't aged well at all. Miner's can almost be considered the American Werewolf in London of giant croc films, and should probably be considered the best, except that unlike Werewolf in London, it never tries to mix real scares along with its humor; it's just a fun crazy film. Beyond these two though, it's mostly just terrible Sci-fi Channel schlock. The same year as Rogue brought us another larger budgeted attempt to make a scary croc film with Primeval, which I think did get a go in the theaters. It's a film that, while not totally terrible, doesn't really satisfy. Partially because the characters have a human element to face along with their croc, something that worked in Anaconda, and even makes sense considering the premise of Primeval (thousands of bodies dumped in the Burundi marshes by a warlord lead to a croc overfeeding and developing a taste for human flesh, which then attacks reporters investigating the mass graves... or something like that) the action element is ultimately a little distracting. Not a terrible film, but one that doesn't induce any kind of real desire to return to it again.

And then there is Rogue.

I. Really. Like. Rogue.

It doesn't water itself down with a subplot about military warlords, it doesn't avoid taking itself seriously with absurd comical moments (though there are laughs to be found now and then). It's just a straight up film about a tour boat taking a wrong turn in the Northern Territory of Australia to investigate a distress flare, getting attack by a 7 meter rogue saltwater crocodile and the survivors fending for themselves on a small patch of land as the tide comes in. It's a simple good old fashion monster movie, but a surprisingly well made one. Surprising not in the sense of McLean's competence (say what you will about Wolf Creek, but it was shot well, the teens were some of the most believable characters of any torture horror film of the period, and it was pretty damn scary) but rather in how he approaches the film. Contrary to what one might expect from the premise, there are no long agonizing scenes of half devoured people bleeding all over the sand, screaming to their loved ones as their guts spill out. In fact, their is really little gore in this film at all. Some deaths actually happen off camera and the gore of what is shown feels more practical than gratuitous. People forget that despite Ebert's rant about its utter cruelty, Wolf Creek was actually quite tame in literal gore compared to the Hostel or Saw films. For all its very gruesome scenes, what made the film the hardest to watch of nearly all the films from the wave was that it made characters you cared for, and pulled no punches with them. It succeeded in giving the (original) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre experience to a modern horror going audience. This time out, McLean isn't even going for that. He is simply making a good monster film--a love letter to Jaws even, and while it is unquestionably inferior to that classic, it has something that that film never even showed an interest in having: a stiff shot of reality. Rogue crocodiles are a phenomenon that is real, and as crazy as it is to imagine, McLean's restraint on the gore is also carried over into his monster's size. There was supposedly a crocodile reported in the Northern Territory as big as 7.5 meters. As huge as his beasties is, they do get bigger than it.

(NOTE: spoiler heavy paragraph)

When the film does drift into the realm of disbelief suspending fantasy, it is largely on a symbolic level. The formulaic male weakling from the city (Michael Vartan) does ultimately go toe to toe with the croc, in a cave, to save the female lead (Radha Mitchell), the dragon slayer feel of it is strangely aesthetically pleasing. There isn't really a sense of feminist guilt to be had. The scene is practically saturated in psychoanalytical imagery (something I always welcome in horror films when smartly executed) but Mitchell plays the tour boat captain as a strong woman whose moment of distress doesn't seem to bare any judgment on her femininity. That the two leads do not for all their chemistry become a couple at the end further aids the film in escaping the knight saves the princess formula, leaving instead a pure exploration of male impudence. The protagonist enters an unmodernized world where and combats primal nature, but the heroics that he rises to are not the heroics of a man saving a woman, but of a human being saving another human being. The phallic and yonic symbolism persists not as a literal stand in for sexual organs and their respected sexes, but as the narrativized geography of the psyche.

(End spoilers.)

Like Wolf Creek, McLean, with late cinematographer Will Gibson, use the scenery to great effect within the film. Horror cinema has been in an unfortunate rut when it comes to mise-en-scene with many films simply revising the same basic approach of eclectic decay. It worked in Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Silence of the Lambs, and was perhaps utilized best in Se7en, where the obsessiveness of John Doe's (Kevin Spacey) apartment was used to contrast the pristine library that serves as pursuing Detective Summerset's (Morgan Freeman) own lair. Horror movies like the new TCM, and Saw and more recently (and most mind bogglingly) the remake of Friday the 13th (oh god, don't get me started on that one) today adopt the aesthetic without offering any intellectual content. McLean doesn't do this so much. With Rogue he continues to use Australia in much the same way that Peter Jackson uses New Zealand, to take us to another world. Much of the Northern Territory, including where a great deal of the film is shot, is tribally owned and normally off limits. It is a real corner of the world where dinosaurs are alive, and the photography revels in all the Heart of Darkness, modernist colonial anxiety of the jungle, the dark water that you can't see the bottom of. This is Jaws territory.

The casting is also quite nice for your basic monster movie. It's a delight see Radha Mitchell, not needing to try and hide her Aussie accent. Most of the rest of the cast is a little stock, from snarky guy turned hero, to nervous breakdown girl, to the all time favorite: arrogant asshole that doesn't stick to the plan and almost (or does) get everyone killed in a moment of utter stupidity guy. (Oh, why does he always have to come along for the ride?) Still, they are largely good stock, interesting enough to watch stock. They each get a moment or two to make them likable on some level. The real surprise though is John Jaratt, the guy who played the serial killer Mick Taylor (or as I like to call him Crocodile Dundee-McF*@k-You-Up-My-God-He's-Evil). His unrecognizable performance as the pudgy widow who is sometimes a jerk and at other times quite likable officially makes me interested in the actor. He really steals the show, offering almost uncharacteristically tender moments to the a genre known for cartoonish dog chompings off camera (not that this film would stoop to such lowbrow humor... really...).

Rogue isn't perfect of course. The line between good old fashion horror and formulaic horror is a tough one to walk. The CGI is... CGI, but the painstaking work taken to capture how crocodiles really behave pays off, creating a monster with a lot of personality that moves realistically enough to overlook its other budgetary limitations. The obligatory moment where someone does something stupid, for all its suspense, is frustrating to watch unfold. And while it can be cop-out to say this, it simply isn't JAWS. Still, people that see that horrible box cover, with its bloody mouth implying hundreds of gallons of blood and guts (there are body parts and parts of bodies... but it's seriously not that bad), and the BS "UNRATED" edition label, are more likely than not going to give it a complete pass in the rental, and that is a shame. This isn't torture horror. This isn't Sci-fi Channel schlock. It's a genuinely decent monster movie that tries to be great, with beautiful cinematography--the last work of an artist who died tragically too soon--and many entertaining moments of acting, horror, and action (I unapologetically love the final showdown). McLean can do more than Wolf Creek, and this film shows that. From the range of his first two major film, horror fans should be greatly anticipating whatever he does next. I know I am.

I.e., it doesn't suck.

After Thought About Micheal Jackson's Death

You know who I feel really bad for? Macaulay Culkin. I'm dead serious. Child actors have a way of getting skewed up pretty badly, but if there is one kid I think deserved a few heavy narcotics in his system, it was the kid from the Black or White music video.

I was largely persuaded by the "Take Two" or "Rebuttal" video to Martin Bashir's special, Living with Michael Jackson, that it is very possible that Jackson is not a pedophile. Crazy? Oh god yes. Still, that special was fairly convincing that a sound byte free Jackson was much more rational than I'd have ever wagered. Nonetheless, let's say he did molest those children. Let's go so far as to take even the joke seriously and say he molested Culkin as well. If that were true, how utterly horrible for him, not only to be a victim, but to be surrounded in media making fun of the fact that he was raped.

Think about it, what are the two things Culkin is most known for? Home Alone first and foremost, obviously, but how many people can honestly say #2 for them is The Pagemaster, Richie Rich, or even The Good Son? The reality is that for most people he is the butt (pardon the tasteless pun) of a rape joke, that few of us can saw we aren't guilty of laughing at or even making a variation of at one point or another. He's that kid Jackson slept with. No, not the one with cancer! The one from Home Alone!

Keep in mind that when the first allegations of Jackson molesting a child were made, Culkin was 13. Yeah, of I'd get into narcotics too.

Even though he's not really a rape victim in the least likelihood, I can't help but imagine how much it would get to me after awhile. Culkin: the raped kid. And just as he's starting to inch his way back into acting... Jackson dies, and despite how much that rebuttal video showed how distorted the media image of Jackson really was (guilty or not), the media can resist dredging up the molestation charges again.

If Jackson was innocent, then as sad as it is, at least he doesn't have to deal with the blitz anymore. Culkin on the other hand, is a big target for some pot shots, and god that's got to suck.

So, I saw Flowers in the Attic... THE MOVIE

"EAT THE COOKIE!!!"

That is all.

So... Rees is sponsored by Sprint?

I've sat on this one for about a day now since I followed the NBC29 link in Waldo's recent post to the campaign website of Brad Rees. At heart, when I discovered Rees' website and this sort of manifesto, I wasn't interested in coming down on it for party reasons. To put it bluntly, I don't think he has a chance; the need to defend Perriello against him is the last thing on my mind. He's just a long shot trying to get his ideas out there, so whatever.

Still, even the above attempt to depoliticize fails, as it implies allegiance to Perriello (Disclosure: his father was my doctor from infancy till only a few years ago, and technically right up till his retirement). More importantly, in stating my doubt for his chance so bluntly, I can be accused of swaying voters. For one reason or another, people tend to not vote for or give their time/money to support lost causes.

Perhaps there is an utter futility to trying to claim politics do not matter here, in the sense that I, as a Democrat (or a crazy independent wolf in Democratic Party clothing), am criticizing the website of a Republican candidate. Nonetheless I insist that my interest is more broad than that. It is the content of his piece that interests me, and while I'd like to think that I'd be just as hard on a Democratic candidate, I'm not really interested in who did what first or how many worse things Republicans think Democrats have done. I'm interested in criticizing the content of Rees' multi-media post "Welcome To A New Kind of Campaign From A New Kind Of Candidate" because I think it is... well... special.

The tiresome 'I hate lawyers' rhetoric and the not very new approach of 'I'm a working Joe like you' (even if he is one) are of little interest to me other than the basic problems of representation that crop up because of them. The aspect that makes this a multi-media post--a video entitled "What if Firefighters Ran the World?"--however, I find fascinating.

Where do I begin?

The video is a neat little piece of blue collar catharsis. A sort of Regan era down with the eggheads mentality permeates it as the firefighters breeze through problem after political problem, unanimously agreeing to fix each--speaking in unison even. Sure, it's funny, but while it seems to praise firefighters, doesn't it also mock them right alongside the bureaucrats they replace? Did the tensions of the last three presidential campaigns not leave us with some degree of heightened awareness of just how complex politics can be? Don't we find the utter naivete of the video repulsive? The representation assumes that the firefighters must purely tackle problems as opposed to issues (problem + solution = done, as opposed to situations where either/or the problem or the solution cannot be unanimously accepted, where there are causes and consequences). Of course, I'm saying the obvious, but nonetheless is this a wise representation of the blue collar worker for a self-proclaimed working Joe politician to evoke right off the bat? Yes, yes, lawyers are teh bad... but they have a fluent knowledge of laws and argumentative/problematic variables, things one should want in a politician. A representation like this makes me question that a candidate opposing them would as well.

Another creepy issue I have with the video is the arguable discrepancy between the title and the content. It says it is about firefighters running the world but it very clearly shows them running America. While we can suppose that a similar scene is occurring in other locations around the world, the logistics of it are difficult to actually imagine. Instead what we have is America (the flag is just barely visible in the top of the frame, and of course there's not exactly much evidence that this is occurring in, say, Russia) as the world. Maybe also not a wise image to associate with running for office.

Then there is the simple intertextuality of firefighters in politics. Over eight years after September 11, I'd like to think that we can dissociate firefighters in general with the heroics of those at the World Trade Center, but when they are placed in such a blatant political context, it's still nigh impossible. Both parties have evoked 9/11 numerous times throughout the decade for political reasons, but Republicans in particular have come under fire for it as a rally cry for Iraq. Bush fell back on it in tight spots so often it was almost like a special kind of TS. So as indirect as it is, again it strikes me as a bad move for a politician to take who is claiming a "New Kind of Campaign." But it gets worse. I've been dancing around one of the most striking things about this video being used in a political campaign:

It's an ad for a cellphone from Sprint.

That's right. It shows firefighters, talking on cellphones, running congress (and the world from congress?), and it's a phone advertisement. So if the issue of exploiting the heroics of firefighters bothers you, here we have them being doubly exploited first by an cellphone company of all things and then by a political candidate. Then there is just the pure issue of having an ad woven into your major introduction to your website and campaign. Is Rees sponsored by Sprint? Did he get permission to use their ad? Are cellphones a big part of his platform? Are firefighters?

There is something appealing about the underdog DIY mentality of utilizing external media to get around the annoying reality that it does take a lot of money to run a campaign, but ultimately is it really a good idea? Most politicians try to avoid addressing their relationships to large corporations helping fund their campaigns. Rees proclaims to be "The guy with no money to speak of" but uses a Sprint Cellphone commercial as a welcome mat.

Regardless of political views, to anyone interested in pursuing politics, I think Rees offers an example for the textbooks of how NOT to run an underdog campaign website.

Sacha, Can't You See Michael Jackson is Burning?: Too-Soon-Ness and Icon Exploitation

I'm not particularly interested in writing about Michael Jackson's death. My parents called me in a short game of phone hopscotch to let me know about it after my dad heard the news on the radio. My reaction was indifferent, I liked a lot of his material and am old enough to remember when he was still huge, but besides a recent look back at his material after seeing The Nostalgia Critic's episode on Moonwalker, I just don't think of him often enough anymore to really feel anything. I was honestly more upset about Farrah Fawcett dying.

That said, I find myself somewhat fascinated by the media reaction. I suspect that this is less a particular fascination as it is the first incident of this kind I've been aware of post-college (particularly post-media studies courses) and in a moment of semi-leisure where I could actually critically take it in.

There are two incidents that fascinate me. The first is rather typical of a pop-icon's death or really any iconic figure's death. I am of course talking about the immediate need to exploit that death. It becomes the fixation of the media, prioritizing it over almost any piece of news that might actually be relevant to the lives of readers and viewers. As in life, the person continues in death to be a free-for-all commodity to be traded and sold. This relationship between person and image is embedded in their very title as icon, a term which loses the person in the "pictorial representation" of the person when their "form suggests its meaning" and becomes something in itself. Calling someone an icon thus creates a separation of the figure--of their form--from the literal intimate person, who becomes a source of tension and instability (e.g. Jackon's image of being a great humanitarian who loves children being all but utterly obliterated by accusations of child molestation later in life) essentially till their death. At which point, the process of shaping their total life into the particularly lucrative product of narrative becomes virtually stable (the imposed form of narrative onto the total life is completed by a formal and definitive end of the story).

In the case of Michael Jackson we can see the perversion in icon commodity value not through the under reported events of relevant news (well... we could... but who reads anything beyond the front page anyway? ;) ), but through the comparative valuing of another iconic figure's death on the same day: Farrah Fawcett. I think Larry King made this about as apparent as it could be made with his tasteless comment on CNN Live while plugging his show for that evening. Originally planned to focus on Fawcett, he said, "this puts that story into the past" (skip to the 1:50 mark if you can't stand Larry King and just want to get to the point). What is so striking about it is the admission that Michael's death does not mean that Fawcett's focus will have to be dimmed down to accommodate two icons dying, but that it means Fawcett is officially a less valuable commodity. She is yesterday's news. The stock has officially plummeted for Fawcett icon sales in light of the sudden rise of Michael's.

At the same time that the media floods the market with products of the disembodied body, the icon husk of Michael Jackson, there is another phenomenon of restraint which can be witnessed. In the case of Jackson, we can see an example of too-soon-ness in the choice to omit a scene in Sacha Baron Cohen's new Movie Bruno where he gets a-hold of La Toya Jackson's Blackberry and tries to get Michael's number. Ain't it Cool News reporter "Beaks" provides an account of the scene:

Earlier this week, I saw BRUNO (Cohen's follow-up to BORAT directed by Larry Charles), and thought nothing of a scene in which the flamboyant Austrian talk show host interviewed La Toya Jackson while sitting on, um, Mexican furniture. As with most of the bits in BRUNO, it was in spectacularly bad taste. But while Cohen was definitely taking advantage of Ms. Jackson's shocking naiveté, it actually turned out to be one of the least cruel vignettes in the entire movie. And what is cruel about it really has nothing to do with La Toya. In fact, the highlight of the scene - where Bruno commandeers Jackson's Blackberry and attempts to relay her ultra-famous brother's phone number to his assistant (in German) - actually elicits a kinda cute response from the giggly La Toya.

Unless he is grossly downplaying the scene, it appears that it has little to do with Micheal at all beyond the phone number, in which case the too-soon-ness of the scene would appear to lie not in its making fun of a figure whose recent death places them in high sympathy which as a result would hurt the Bruno's sales, but the more subtle case of simply addressing Micheal after the fact.

How do we reconcile these two acts? How is it acceptable to flood media with icon commodity and yet in poor taste to address the deceased?

A consistency does occur upon closer examination. The commoditizing media produce essentially two kinds of products: "Jackson is dead" and "Remember Jackson" (this second one of course branches into multiple subcategories from nostalgia to narration to reexamination of past narrative, among others quite possibly). What is apparently so inappropriate despite the chronology of the film to Jackson's death, is the illusion that Jackson is not dead in the present. Bruno is something new, and will be seen as something new, but it is a world of the past which exists unaware that it is a product comprised of the past. This tends to happen with any contemporary fiction (acknowledging of course the problems with calling Bruno fiction in the conventional sense) that is not date specific, a sort of space-time split where the fictionalized present is either an alternate universe or simply in the close future. As such, Bruno becomes out of joint with the current, like the long unseen friend who upon bumping into you in town asks about some mutual acquaintance unaware that they're deceased.

What is likely to become (if it hasn't yet) the classic example of this phenomenon is the digital removal of the twin towers from Sam Raimi's Spider-man. While the media was generally called on for its exploitation of the incident, it was essentially accepted that images of the towers being hit and collapsing could be shown over and over (and over) again, but the idea of showing the towers in some of the last films that captured them before the attacks as if they still existed was somehow too upsetting. It recalls to me the Freudian story of the father who dreams of his son burning so that he will not wake to the horror of him actually being dead and burning as it was reinterpreted by Lacan and introduced to me through Zizek:

Why do we dream? Freud’s answer is deceptively simple: the ultimate function of the dream is to enable the dreamer to stay asleep. This is usually interpreted as bearing on the kinds of dream we have when some external disturbance – noise, for example – threatens to wake us. In such a situation, the sleeper immediately begins to imagine a situation which incorporates this external stimulus and thereby is able to continue sleeping for a while longer; when the external stimulus becomes too strong, he finally wakes up. Are things really so straightforward? In another famous example from The Interpretation of Dreams, an exhausted father, whose young son has just died, falls asleep and dreams that the child is standing by his bed in flames, whispering the horrifying reproach: ‘Father, can’t you see I’m burning?’ Soon afterwards, the father wakes to discover that a fallen candle has set fire to his dead son’s shroud. He had smelled the smoke while asleep, and incorporated the image of his burning son into his dream to prolong his sleep. Had the father woken up because the external stimulus became too strong to be contained within the dream-scenario? Or was it the obverse, that the father constructed the dream in order to prolong his sleep, but what he encountered in the dream was much more unbearable even than external reality, so that he woke up to escape into that reality.

To understand this theory that the dream of the boy is more terrifying than the actual death of the boy, we must note from the set up that the boy is already dead. The horror of the dream is the confrontation with the desire for the son, The World Trade Center, and now Michael Jackson (the element of the absurd in this statement does not escape me) to live. It is traumatic in that our desire cannot be fulfilled. Our dreams show us what we want but can never ever truly have. With are own anxieties of death, is the unbearable reality not the fear of non-existence but rather the horror that we don't want to cease existing but will anyway? That our underlying nature is in an inherent conflict with the real, which as a result reveals a fundamental riff in our sense, or rather our illusion, of control?

The films show us things that are no more and act as if they still are, and like the long unseen friend, we tell the screen that they aren't, but we wish they were. Of course, I doubt Sacha or Raimi were really thinking about this when either made their call, but does it not explain this inconsistency? How exploitation is met with cynical but nonetheless complacent disgust while the phenomenon of films like Bruno and Spider-man evoke a need for self-censorship? The exploitative supplements our desire for what can't be through the persistence of the disembodied body, the commoditized icon. As Elton John put it, "your candle burned out long ago/ your legend never will."

God Bless France: A Secularist Feminist Critique of Sarkozy's Objection to Burqas

NOTE: I should in fairness stress that my following of this incident has been limited. I looked at a few other stories online which seemed to be summeries of the Google article, so the analysis is based almost completely on this one account. If you feel the article does not represent the incident or Sarkozy well enough, please feel free to leave alternative accounts in the discussion below with links. I'm headed out of town and had to scramble to finish this before it became too dated. I expect that even with the proof reading I'll want to edit this thing to death when I see it again with fresh eyes two days from now.


There are a few things about French President Sarkozy's reasoning against the wearing of burqas in his country that I find curious. Living in Virginia, where it is illegal for an adult regardless of sex to wear a mask or other substantial face covering in public, I find it surprising that the most pragmatic argument against allowing the wearing of a burqa--that it conceals the wearers identity in public--is apparently not an issue with regard to safety for Sarkozy. Where I cannot walk down the street wearing a full Richard Nixon mask over my head without a police officer being concerned that I'm going to commit a crime (yes, like rob a bank), Sarkozy seems more concerned about someone completely covered from head to toe posing a threat to secularism and feminism.

As a secularist and a feminist (yes men can be feminist too) Sarkozy's angle bothers me.

First of all, there is the simple inconsistency of his secular argument as it's presented by Google News. He seems to want to have it both ways, saying that the Islamic burka (or burqa) is not welcome in secular France but at the same time saying, "The burka is not a sign of religion, it is a sign of subservience." How can it be both not a sign of religion and undermine secularism? While shifting the focus to feminism this quote in effect manages to secularize the burqa which poses even more trouble for his agenda when we look at how it supposedly undermines feminism.

Since Sarkozy has relieved us of our burdensome preconceptions about ignorant Islamic barbarism, let us indulge a bit more and lay down the baggage of western (arguably still white) middle-class/bourgeois feminism. That is to say, let us attempt to look at the Burqa as a completely secularized object devoid of as much preconceived bureaucracy of dynamics as possible. What we are left with is an object that virtually conceals all aspects of appearance, forcing wearers to define their selves in a non-superficial manner. When we are freed from the the notion of the non-consensual wearing of the burqa, the male order forcing women to cover up so that their sexuality does not undermine some patriarchal chauvinist order, we see the woman (or wearer of any sex) is just as freed from the objective gaze. Instead of the physical prejudices which influence our opinions of people (what is beautiful, ugly, sexy, etc.), relationships with and between burqa wearers would seem to develop on the basis of personality, one's intelligence, beliefs, tastes and so on. In this light, is the burqa not potentially the physical preexistence of the condition of early internet socializing?

With image and video an ever increasing aspect of internet society now, it is easy to forget that in the early days there were no or very limited avatars and profile pictures. In your home you were you with all your physical characteristics, but on the internet you were essentially a name, a being of text to be judged by the content of your text. This relationship hasn't utterly vanished. For example, I've never bothered to put a photo of myself up on this blog, so for the visiting reader I am essentially these words. You can't see if I am buttoned down and neatly dressed or unshaven and covered in grass clippings, fat or trim, if I look like an Old Navy model or your cousin who plays Halo 3 all the time, to give but a few of the many possibilities. Without an external relationship, I'm freed of virtually all visual coding by you the reader.

A personal example of this absence of visual codes as a positive is found in the many late nights in college talking with a Muslim friend of mine. Though she did not wear a burqa, she did adhere to many formalities in public which coded her very much as Muslim, which, all things September 11th aside, left a sense of treading eggshells for a ferocious secularist fighting the Marshall-Newman amendment like myself. Yet, this baggage was quickly obliterated within the disembodied space of the internet where she would initiate wonderful conversations with me about, among other things--and of all things--Nietzsche. (This occurred often at three in the morning while we both wrote papers due the next day). While I never disregarded her customs, this idea of Muslim other simply broke down, and I found myself able to talk to her more or less as I would anyone else.

The Burqa seems to function mostly in the same way. Inside one's home, it is not worn (among family); it is something put on to enter the public sphere which makes interaction something outside visual coding. This however is not as effective as the internet for it still retains the cultural dimension of the specific garment, which admittedly can become exceptionally coded, especially in contemporary times. While it prevents me from seeing not only if I am sexually attracted to wearer's physique, it also prevents me from making preconceptions about them based on fashion sense... except that they are Muslim. That detail of course is one betrayed by Sarcozy in claiming the garment to be "not a sign of religion." Secularized, it is a garment that, like the text-based internet, actually encourages intellectuality and personality as the definers of identity and relationship.

Isn't that what most feminist want? To be identified as people and not just sexual objects?

I am not unaware of the enormous problem with what I've argued so far. Sarcozy, or any sensible feminist who wants to strangle me write now, is arguing that women are forced to wear these so men don't have deal with their urges. Feminism is as much a psychological movement as a political one, and in most circles it is the gaze itself that is the issue, not what is being gazed at. My point is simply that the object, the burqa, separated from the context of who decides for who, is not a fundamentally bad thing. It is not genital mutilation or some other extreme form of misogyny at its core, but rather something which one could even conceivably choose to wear as a means of separating their identity from their body. This could even be an act of feminist resistance to the sexual objectification of one's self.

Let us consider how identity is addressed by Sarkozy. Instead of framing it as a necessity that others see one's identity for their benefit (ridding all criminals and law abiding citizens alike of the luxury of visual anonymity), Sarkozy focuses on the woman's need to show her self for the benefit of being seen. "We cannot accept to have in our country women who are prisoners behind netting, cut off from all social life, deprived of identity." Identity here becomes something bestowed by society, projected upon the woman's exposed skin. Identity is thus superficial. I think I just heard Camus roll over in his grave.

What this 'need to be seen' really means is that to have an identity others must see you, and (because of the extreme coverage of the burqa) you can't wear too much clothing while being seen. That strikes me as the opposite of feminism, and even smacks of the same subversive motivations as heterosexual men insisting that women should have the same equal rights to walk around topless. If Sarkozy is seriously concerned about feminism in his country he should (like Obama, who he makes a point of differing with) stress the woman's choice to wear or not wear a burqa and oppose anyone depriving them of the right to choose for their selves. He should even insist that men have the right to wear them as well, destroying the gender connotation.

I swear, as he argues it, even the use of "submissive" becomes suspect. Don't people have the right to wear submissively coded clothes? I get that he's probably as hard on nuns for the way they dress, but can we expect him to crack down on corset wearing emo-types as well? Should we be bracing for a full-scale shut down of fetish clubs and a mass deportation of gimps from France in the coming months?

Jokes aside, Sarkozy's argument has a perverse undercurrent to his reasons against the burqa that should not be overlooked by our cultural imperialistic progressive urge to cleans everyone of barbarity. I haven't even gotten to what, as a secularist, I find to be perhaps the biggest problem with his statement that, "The burka is not a sign of religion, it is a sign of subservience." More than the inconsistency of the statement we should be asking who is he to say that it isn't a sign of religion? What he is doing is as a president--one of the highest positions of political authority--is imposing a theocratic position on his people. How the hell can he call himself a secularist and do that? Imposing a theocratic view from a political position as an argument for potential legislation is about the greatest undermining of secularism anyone could conceivably commit.

The purpose of a secularist government should be the insistence of pragmatism and utilitarianism as the means for determining laws. Drawing from the premise of theologian Roger Williams that marrying church and state corrupts the church, secularism can be as much a pro-religion institution as opposed, understanding the necessity of the state not to favor one religion or particular interpretation of a religion over others in a multi-faith populace. As I pointed out at the beginning, there is a perfectly good pragmatic reason to object burqas for reasons of safety, but Sarcozy is not quoted addressing it, choosing instead to tell citizens what does and does not represent their faith and that they cannot represent their faith. While the movement to forbid politicians from wearing signs or otherwise outwardly designating themselves as members of a particular faith is not beyond the scope of how secularism can be practiced by a government, the implementing of such restrictions on civilians elevates atheism in the very same problematic way as elevating a given religion. Politicians bare a responsibility to everyone that they represent, which in a secularist state requires some personal sacrifice to ensure one serves equally, but to impose the same on civilians as citizens is pure religious oppression. Sarkozy seems more interested in an atheist state than a secular government for France, which anyone truly serious about secularism should oppose.

So yeah, damn you Sarkozy for making me defend burqas!