Fright Night

Casper the Friendly Ghost was moping. He had excellent reason to mope, because he was depressed. And there’s nothing more depressing in the world than a depressed, moping ghost, even if it’s a friendly ghost. And he wasn’t.

He was depressed because he was sick of the little town where he’d spent what he’d increasingly become convinced had been the best years of his unlife. He was sick of the people he’d spent his time being “friendly” to, who never seemed to reciprocate his friendliness. And he was depressed, most of all, because he was alone.

He hadn’t even had a girlfriend, had Casper. He’d had hopes, certainly, and once made a move on Wendy the Witch, but she’d merely swatted him away with her broom and laughed. He was, she’d said, too bald and too fat.

That had been years ago, and Casper hadn’t seen Wendy since then.

Then he decided to abandon being friendly and start scaring people.

That didn’t go quite as planned.

“Boo!” Casper would shout, in someone’s ear.

“Buzz off,” this person would snap, and even swat at Casper. You’d think they had no respect for ghosthood at all. ”Don’t bother me.” He couldn’t even scare anybody any longer.

So Casper decided to make an end to it all. And, having made that decision, he found that he had a problem.

Just how do you kill yourself if you’re a ghost?

Casper tried. Oh, he tried. He attempted to hang himself, and oozed right through the noose and fell to the floor. Since he wasn’t anticipating falling to the floor, he gave himself a nasty bruise on the buttocks. And since he was a ghost, and didn’t have the normal bodily repair mechanisms, the bruise wouldn’t even go away. And that depressed him even more.

Then he had decided to shoot himself. Since he didn’t have a gun, he sneaked into the home of the town’s greatest gun nut and stole the man’s treasured Magnum, turning it on himself. The bullet went right through him and shot dead the gun nut, who was sitting in front of the TV watching Rambo for the thirty-seventh time. Casper didn’t wait around to see what would happen. Not that he was afraid of being brought to justice, but because he was scared of loud noises.

Then he thought of drowning himself, but he remembered that he didn’t breathe. As for stabbing, that wouldn’t work either, for the same reason the bullet wouldn’t. Besides, he was scared of pain.

Poison? That cheered him up for a minute, until he remembered that he didn’t eat.

All this disappointment made him even more depressed. He moped so much that he looked like a squeezed out rag. And that depressed him even further.

It was at this low point that he had the Idea. It was the kind of Idea one gets only once in a hundred years of non-living, and if he were in his comic strip he’d have had a light bulb glowing above his head.

“Why don’t I jump off a high building and put an end to myself?” he thought. “There’s no need for a knife or a gun. I don’t even have to breathe or eat. All I have to do is fall."

But there was a problem with that too: there was no building higher than two stories in Spooksville, where Casper lived.

“I’ll have to go to the big city,” Casper said to himself (he’d developed a nasty habit of talking to himself over the years, another reason why he didn’t have a girlfriend). “They say the buildings touch the sky there, and that kind of fall will do the trick for sure.”

So, tying up his possessions in a swag bag on a stick (hey, he’d worked to gather that stuff, all right? Why should he dump it for some undeserving idiot to walk off with?) Casper slung it over his shoulder, dressed in his favourite shroud, and trudged off into the night.

Because Casper had no idea where the big city might be, it was several days before he wandered, quite by accident, to a highway where he managed to hitch a ride on the back of a lorry that took him far enough that he saw the lights of the skyscrapers shining in the distance. Those were fairly miserable days for the poor ghost, not least when the truck driver mistook him for a used rag and wiped off some engine grease on him. He was too broken in spirit even to say Boo.

So, finally, Casper came to the Big City (named, not unnaturally, Big City), and began looking for a nice building to jump off from.

He was spoiled for choice. And there was another problem.

In Spooksville there never had been a problem with choice. You took what you got and did with it what you could. Here there were so many tall buildings that Casper wandered all night, mouth agape, looking up until he got a crick in the neck.

“Blast!” he said, rubbing vigorously.”I didn’t know that could happen!”

Just then a woman walked up to him. She was a decidedly pretty woman, Casper thought, in her high heels, fishnet stockings, hot pants, bare midriff with the pierced navel, and the halter top which was one size too tight. “Hey sonny,” she said. “You want to have a good time?”

“Thanks awfully,” Casper replied politely, though if he’d had a heart its rate would have increased sharply. “I just want to kill myself, that’s all.”

“You don’t say.” The woman peered at Casper suspiciously. “You in fancy dress or something? If I wasn’t doped to the gills, I’d swear there was something weird about you, mister.”

“No,” Casper said, still politely, though if he’d had genitals, the blood flow to them would have increased dramatically – if he’d had blood, that is. “I’m not in fancy dress. Could you please tell me a good building to jump off from, ma’am?”

The woman snorted. “I’m not selling that kind of information, honey. Why don’t you just take a dive off that one there?”

Casper glanced up at the building she’d indicated. It reared skyward, its walls huge panels of glass and metal, so that it looked like aquaria stacked on top of each other. He almost expected to see fishes goggling at him through the glass.

“Thank you, ma’am,” he said. “That will do admirably.” But she’d already stalked off, muttering under her breath – something about having kooks enough in her life without one more.

With an inner sigh of regret (not a real sigh because he couldn’t breathe) at her departure, Casper walked over to the building. What he saw in the glass brought him up short and sent him scuttling backwards.

“Cor lumme!” Casper gasped, his refinement forgotten. “A ghost!” He was terrified of ghosts as well, as long as it wasn’t himself.

“It’s your own reflection, idiot,” an ant said, but it spoke in antlish, and Casper didn’t understand it. However, he did pluck up the courage to approach another part of the wall. There was no reflection here, the street lights having been broken and not replaced, and Casper took a short-cut through the nearest sheet of glass. This served as an admirable entrance, but the stick and the swag bag got stuck on the glass and fell outside on the pavement.

“Bother!” Casper swore. “Now I’ll have to go out and bring them in.”

In irritation, because the contretemps had thrown his entire suicide schedule out of gear, he stomped off to the main door of the building, only to find it locked and bolted, and watched over by a security guard sitting on a chair tilted against the wall and leafing through a magazine. Casper lingered long enough to get a look at the magazine, which depicted women even prettier than the helpful lady who’d talked to him outside, only with fewer clothes. Some of them didn’t have any clothes at all, not even the fishnet stockings and high-heeled shoes. The guard was too engrossed in looking at these beautiful women to notice Casper. Maybe he thought they’d help him. But he was sitting right in front of the door, and there wasn’t a hope in hell that Casper could open it without him noticing.

Sadly, Casper decided to abandon his swag bag (it had already been purloined by a street urchin, but Casper wasn’t aware of that) and tried to find a way up. It was more difficult than he’d thought, because off the bat there were no stairs that he could see and he wasn’t familiar with the concept of an elevator. Not that it would have done him much good if he had been, because the power to the elevators had been turned off for the night. Not that Casper knew what electricity was, either.

In the end he settled for going outside and climbing up the building, hand over hand. This worked fairly well for a little while, until he made the mistake of looking back over his shoulder, and screamed.

Casper had just discovered that he was afraid of heights, as well.

Quickly, he squeezed back through the glass, and fell through into an office. The floor was thickly carpeted, and he wasn’t hurt, though he did get dirty. The cleaning staff had been less than thorough.

He’d just picked himself up and dusted himself off when he realised he wasn’t alone...

The figure which sat behind the desk in the office crossed its red-stockinged legs on the desk and tossed its long blonde hair over its shoulder. “What took you so long, Casper?” it asked.

Casper had been struck so dumb with fear that he literally couldn’t speak. Now he swallowed drily and approached the desk cautiously. “You know me?”

“Of course I know you, Casper, you idiot.” The figure lit a cigarette, the glow of the tip illuminating the brim of the conical hat she wore. “I thought even an incompetent like you would’ve been able to figure that out by now.”

“Wendy?” Casper gasped, and began coughing as the cigarette smoke caught at his nonexistent lungs. “Is that you, Wendy?”

“Who else?” Wendy took her legs off the desk and leaned over it, exposing her cleavage. “Who did you think I was, dimbrain?”

“One of the helpful women,” Casper said. “Like the one down in the street, or those in the magazine. But you’re wearing too many clothes for that.”

Wendy snorted and blew a smoke ring. “I was watching you crawling up this building like a maggot, you maggot. And I thought, why shouldn’t I wait for him up here? What are you doing here in Big City anyway? I’d thought you’d stay buried back in Spooksville. I got out of that place as soon as I could.”

“I came here to kill myself,” Casper confessed. “Nobody takes me seriously. I’m a total failure.”

“Well, of course you’d be,” Wendy scoffed. “Who has time for a friendly ghost? Now if you want to be taken seriously, you need a makeover. You need,” she said, peering at him critically, “a makeover anyway.”

“What kind of makeover?” Casper asked. “And what do I do afterwards?”

“Let me think.” Wendy sucked on her cigarette. “What do you think of Big City?”

“Well,” Casper began uncomfortably, “I...”

“Let me guess. You find it all soulless, don’t you? This building, for instance?”

“Well, I...”

“That’s decided then.” Wendy stubbed out her cigarette on the desk, leaving a burn mark on the wood. “This place needs spirit. We’ll give it a spirit!”

“I don’t understand...” Casper began.

“You don’t need to. Leave it to Wendy. Now, what about your makeover? For one thing, that dead-kid look’s out. It’s so 1950s, you know? Time to grow up.” She extended her wand across the desk and pronounced something unpronounceable. “There...you...are. Wow!”

“What?”

“I surpassed myself. Here, look.” Snapping her wand, she created a mirror out of thin air.

Casper gawped. Staring back at him from the mirror was someone so awesome that he was speechless. “I look frightening,” he said when he found speech.

“Of course you do.” Wendy laughed throatily. “I can just see those stockbrokers and investment bankers coming in tomorrow, eager to suck up all the money around...and there you are. Standing in front of their computers. Grinning.” She shook her head. "Man, I should have done this a long time ago."

And, ladies and gentlemen, there you have the story behind the Great Stock Market Crash which happened the Tuesday after next, and will go down in history as the day when The Bloodsucking Leeches threw themselves out on windows as though they’d just seen a ghost.

Meanwhile, Casper and Wendy are shacked up together, and she takes him for rides on her broomstick.

Are they happy? Well...Wendy’s expecting her first litter next July.

And Casper? He’s dropped an r.

As Casper the Fiendly Ghost, he’s having the time of his unlife.

Don't look. He's right behind you.

Copyright B Purkayastha 2011

King Jong Ill...?

I was reading a story on the Home Page Of The Dead website about a zombie outbreak in North Korea. Struck me that the author took all the propaganda he could find, much of it provably outdated/false, and shoehorned it into a single package.I mailed him about it, didn't get a response.

It strikes me that there's some kind of innate resistance in the Western world to believing anything but the worst about North Korea. Certainly I don't believe the place is a paradise, but when people refuse to even attempt to acknowledge that things might be a bit different from the standard propaganda presented in the usual accounts (and bolstered by defector stories - defectors, as anyone with sense can tell you, have a vested interest in telling you what you want to hear) I wonder why.

After all, we know all about the WMD fables in Iraq, etc, and it strikes me that the credibility of unimpeachable Western media sources isn't all that high. At the same time, we know that while inveighing against the evil flattopped madman in Pyongyang, the West has no problem cozying up to that great and liberal nation, Saudi Arabia, which conducts public beheadings and where women can't drive or even go out in public without written permission.

Is it perhaps because of the presence of a North Korean nuclear arsenal, which, however small and unreliable, insulates it against the threat of being "liberated"? After all, Iraq and Libya gave up their WMD programmes (not that Libya had much of one), and look what happened to them. North Korea hangs on to its rickety missiles and its handful of atom bombs, which may or may not work - and nobody thinks seriously of invading it. All they do is demand that the country give up its only means of self-defence. Coincidence? I think not.

Insult him as you will (and the author of the story I alluded to has him eaten alive by cannibal women), it seems to me that the lunatic flattop might not be such a lunatic flattop after all. 

Or maybe he's a zombie too.

Rendition: Review

 

Back during my schooldays, we had a teacher (a monk of the Christian Brothers of Edmund Rice, not the most liberal organisation in history) called Brother Beddoe. This person would only occasionally teach our class, but was chiefly memorable for the fact that he would spend a good half of it inveighing against the (then) Soviet Union. Apparently, the people of the USSR had “no rights at all” and, among other things without number, were tortured routinely in secret prisons to extract confessions from them.

I rather wonder what Brother Beddoe is doing today. I hope he’s alive and well, and that he keeps up with current affairs. I also hope he’s grown a sense of irony since I last saw him over twenty-five years ago.

If he’s still around, I’d strongly recommend Brother Beddoe do a few things. Like, watch a certain movie.

Y’know, I don’t like Hollywood much. I could say that it’s at least, overall, better than Bollywood, but that would be condemning with faint praise indeed. I much prefer European or Iranian cinema. But there are times, rare and precious, when Hollywood doesn’t drop the ball.

You’ve heard the word rendition, I suppose? The full form of the term is extraordinary rendition, and referred to the practice, started by that great liberal Kill Blinton (who destroyed more than one country in order to save its people), of outsourcing torture. Suspected “terrorists” were sent via planes (which landed and refuelled in other great and liberal European nations) to Arab countries where they were tortured professionally to squeeze out confessions. Whether those confessions were useful or even real didn’t matter – the programme needed confessions, and, of course, got them. And the practice soon stopped being "extraordinary" and became quite routine during Bush's Global War Of Terror.

This is one such story.

Anwar el-Ibrahimi is an Egyptian chemical engineer, who lives in Chicago with his heavily pregnant wife, Isabella, his son and mother. He’s lived in the US since the age of fourteen, has a green card, and travels abroad once in a while on conferences.

Meanwhile, somewhere in an unnamed generic North African country, a suicide bomber blows himself up in a public square. Among the nineteen people killed is a newly arrived CIA agent, a US citizen. The bombing is claimed by a local Islamic fundamentalist terrorist group, El Hazam, and another CIA agent (Jake Gyllenhaal as “Douglas Freeman”) is ordered to lead the local investigation.

Anwar el-Ibrahimi has just landed after a trip to South Africa when he’s arrested, at Chicago airport before arriving at customs, and hustled into a CIA secret prison, while all records of his having flown at all are quietly deleted from the passenger list. His crime? Someone who may be a terrorist has, apparently, called his cell-phone number on several occasions. Of course, it may not be his phone (as when the phone was in his possession; as a character says, “these people” sell or give away their SIM cards, and one SIM card can often pass through the possession of many people in succession), and he denies knowing the man, but the CIA wants a confession. Someone must confess something, even if the act of extorting a confession by torture creates a hundred or a thousand enemies where there were none.

At the express order of CIA official Corinne Whitman (a superb performance by Meryl Streep – I love this woman’s portrayal of utterly vile people) el-Ibrahimi is shipped off to the same unnamed North African nation, where he’s stuffed into a tiny cell, stripped naked, waterboarded, and subjected to electric shocks to get him to tell all he knows about the terrorists he’s never heard of. Freeman is a mute spectator at these torture sessions, which are supervised by local secret police chief Abasi Fawal, who had been the target of the suicide bombing in the public square.

Fawal, meanwhile, isn’t a typical movie-monster. He’s a family man with a wife and two daughters, the elder of whom, Fatima, elopes with a young fellow-student called Khalid. Khalid is not someone whom the police chief is likely to approve of as a prospective son-in-law; still less, if he knew that the young man is a secret member of a radical Islamic fundamentalist group, and also someone whose brother Fawal himself had tortured to death in the prison.

On the other side of the planet, Anwar’s wife Isabella frantically tries to discover his whereabouts, finally asking for help from an old friend, senatorial aide Alan Smith. Although Anwar was erased from the passenger list at Chicago, proof exists that he had boarded the flight at Cape Town in South Africa, and his credit card statement proves that he had purchased items from the onboard duty-free shop. Smith approaches his senator, an alleged liberal, but is warned off both by the senator himself and Corinne Whitman, since defending an alleged “terrorist” is career suicide.

There are these separate stories moving side-by-side through the narrative, then: Anwar and his torturers; Fawal’s daughter Fatima and her boyfriend; and Isabella, frantically seeking information about her husband. The common element in them is one, the figure of Anwar, even though he isn’t even aware of the existence of most of the other protagonists.

In the way it juggles different narratives, this film can be compared to Babel. However, I’d call it infinitely superior to that film, where the only “common” element – if one could call it that – between the parallel stories was a rifle, and those who’ve seen that movie will probably agree that the Japan scenes were thrown in as an excuse for some of the most bafflingly gratuitous nudity ever filmed. Rendition is superior to Babel by just about any parameter one can think of, including the fact that it, too, has a time sequence shift which becomes clear only at the end. In Babel, that shift only serves to confuse the issue further; in Rendition, it serves to tie up loose ends and makes for a twist that I won’t reveal here.

There are various things that one takes away from Rendition, or should if one’s watched the film with any attention:

There’s the parallel between the thinking processes of the jihadist preacher who exhorts his congregation to give their lives for Islam, and not to fear the enemy’s bullets because all they can do is “set (their) soul free”, and the secret police chief who describes the act of torturing prisoners to extract confessions as his “sacred duty.” There’s the idiocy of torturing confessions which are completely false, because, as Shakespeare said five hundred years ago,

I fear you speak upon the rack

Where men enforced do speak anything.

There’s the pervasive fear in Washington of going against the official stance on national security, where the Constitution can be dumped along with one’s personal convictions just to avoid being called a “lover of Osama bin Laden.” And there’s the unnamed North African nation, where legitimate protestors are baton-whipped, arrested and tortured by police, so there’s no way out but violence if one wants change. Stupidity, cowardice and expediency, mixed into the most lethal cocktail one can think of.

Rendition wears its liberal credentials on its sleeve and would have pissed off a lot of people of the right-wing persuasion, because of the uncomfortable questions it asks. That these questions are “uncomfortable” are themselves testimony of their validity; they can’t be easily answered. Are 999 fake confessions, 999 tortured innocents, justified if by chance the 1000^th just might be useful in preventing a terror attack which might, in the words of Corinne Whitman, have killed “7000 people” in London? And who is to say that it was useful, the people who have a vested interest in keeping the torture programme in existence? Who shall guard the guardians?

The best acting comes from Omar Metwally as Anwar el-Ibrahimi; not because of what he says or does, but how he depicts the character’s steady physical and mental deterioration throughout the film, turning from a cool and composed professional in the first scenes to a drivelling wreck towards the end. As his wife, Isabella, Reese Witherspoon is competent and thankfully doesn’t go the wrist-wringing route. Zineb Oukatch is good as Fatima Fawal, and as I said, Meryl Streep is superb in the few scenes she has. The cinematography is good and the North African settings look authentic.

I’m giving this film four and a half stars out of a possible five. I’m deducting half a star entirely because of the denouement of one of the narrative plots in the last fifteen minutes, which depends on a CIA agent suddenly developing a conscience and deciding to do the “right” thing even at the cost of his career – an intensely unlikely happening however you look at it. It’s as though the filmmakers suddenly realised that after one hour and forty five minutes of treating all Americans except Isabella el-Ibrahimi as villains, they needed to show that at least one of the others was someone with a conscience and the spine to do as it dictated.

In the final analysis, though, that’s quibbling. The film’s excellent.

Like Roger Ebert, who gave it four stars out of four, I strongly recommend it.