the naked gaze 肉眼

Obama's Shot at the Wall

On the final day of President Obama’s trip to Beijing last week, he made the obligatory trek up at the Great Wall, where he signed the official guest book, commented on the Wall’s historical significance, and posed for what White House aides celebrated as a perfect “shot.”

 

A photo-op is, by definition, a carefully framed appearance intended for public dissemination. We might ask, however, what lies at—or just beyond—the margins of these public images of Obama’s trip to the Wall?

 

The White House shot captures Obama walking along the Badaling section of the Wall just outside Beijing. The thousands of tourists who would ordinarily be swarming this section of the structure had, of course, been cleared out prior to his visit, though a reminder of their absent presence can be seen in the large “One World One Dream” sign in the landscape beside the structure.  

 

The “One World” sign ironically echoes the refrain of the 1985 famine relief song “We Are the World,” with which the People’s Liberation Army had hilariously serenaded Obama at a dinner banquet the preceding evening. The phrase is actually the official motto of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and more generally reflects China’s on-going attempts “to march into the world” (as one of China’s aspirational slogans from the 1980s puts it) and establish its presence on the global stage.

 

Beneath the sunny optimism of this call for “One World One Dream,” however, are the political controversies involving the nation’s official “One China” policy. Officially, the “One China” motto refers to the PRC’s claims of sovereignty over what it perceives as the renegade province of Taiwan (aka, the Republic of China, or ROC), but also implicitly speaks to the government’s attempts to deal with secessionist threats from its northwestern “autonomous regions.”

 

China’s preparation for the Olympics have, therefore, provoked concern that the transparent subtext of its Olympic motto was actually “One World, One Dream, …. One China.” Conversely, in the summer of 2007 several foreign protesters rappelled down the nearby Mutianyu section of the Wall just East of Badaling and unfurled a 450 square foot banner that directly inverted the apparent logic of Beijing’s own Olympic motto: “One World, One Dream, Free Tibet 2008.”

 

Obama departed on his recent Asia tour just days after the twentieth anniversary celebrations of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Conan O’Brien alluded to the parallels between the Berlin and Beijing Walls when he quipped that while Obama deemed the Great Wall to be “quote magical,” two years earlier “former President Bush stood at the exact same spot and said, ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’”

Our Embrace of Vampires

From the Twilight series to works like True Blood and The Vampire Diaries, we find ourselves surrounded by a new generation of vampires who in many respects are more or less just like us. Except that they are vampires.

In Our Vampires, Ourselves, Nina Auerbach observes that, “every age embraces the vampire it needs.” What, then, are our age’s current needs, and how does the latest vampire craze help satisfy them?

Actually, the apparent normalcy of these contemporary vampires isn’t new. In John Polidori’s seminal 1819 short story “The Vampyre” (a work, incidentally, that originated from an informal ghost story competition that also yielded Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein), for instance, the vampiric protagonist is initially described as a nobleman whose “peculiarities caused him to be invited to every house; all wished to see him.” Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 homoerotic novella Carmilla presents the eponymous vampire as a beautiful “young lady” with a taste for female companionship, while twenty-five years later Bram Stoker introduced Dracula as a gracious host and a charming conversationalist (albeit one who smelled disconcertingly of rotting flesh).

Underlying the seductive charisma of these nineteenth century vampires, however, is the shadow of disease. After the human protagonist of Polidori’s story first encounters a victim of a “vampyre,” he immediately falls into “a most violent fever, and was often delirious.” When Le Fanu’s young lady vampire is not delicately seducing the female narrator, she is ravaging the countryside and leaving in her wake a plague of deaths the townspeople attribute to a “mysterious disease” they call “oupire.” Dracula himself, meanwhile, is described in Stoker’s novel as someone “who can flourish in the midst of diseases that kill off whole peoples.”

These associations of vampirism with infectious disease have continued to haunt the genre up to the present day, and reach their apotheosis in recent films such as Danny Boyle’s vampire/zombie thriller 28 Days Later (2002) and the latest (2007) cinematic adaptation of Richard Matheson’s classic 1954 vampire novel, I am Legend. Both works feature a scientifically-created virus that goes rogue, transforming its victims into crazed, bloodthirsty creatures hell-bent on annihilating humanity as we know it. These viruses are perniciously infectious, capable of being transmitted, vampire-like, by a bite, or even, as in 28 Days Later, by as little as “a single drop of blood.”