Michael Blowhard writes:

Dear Blowhards --

I'm not sure why, but for the past few days I've been thinking about the European Union and Turkey. So I'm going to indulge myself by writing a few words about what's been rattling around my noggin on the topic.

• Are you up-to-date? European elites seem determined to admit Turkey into the European Union. This is a controversial policy for many reasons, among them the fact that huge numbers of everyday Europeans don't want any such thing to happen. Why not? Well, Turkey is full of poor people ... Most of whom are Muslims ... Europe already has encountered a lot of problems with their Islamic populations ... And, if Turkey is admitted to the EU, Turkey's population will be able to move and work wherever they want to. No need for a passport or visa. Turkey's population is 70 million and growing; if admitted, it would be the EU's second-biggest population. Any guesses about whether many millions of these people would want to make their way to other Euro countries? Any guesses about how many other Muslims would do their best to make it to Turkey in order to thence make their way into Europe?

  So why on earth would any sensible person even consider admitting Turkey into the EU? As far as I can tell, the reasoning is that Turkish membership in the EU will somehow civilize Turkey, that this willl be a good thing, and that the good-thing-ishness will ripple through the rest of the midEast in a beneficial way. It'll be good for Europe-Middleeastern relations. Here, for example, is a BBC account of how Germany's foreign minister is rationalizing his support, despite considerable popular German resistance. Our own Thomas Friedman, ever eager to tell Europe how to behave, writes:

  If we want to help moderates win the war of ideas within the Islamic world, we must help strengthen Turkey as a model of democracy, modernism, moderation and Islam all working together. Nothing would do that more than having Turkey be made a member of the European Union.

  Now, I may be nothing but a rube and an aging kid, but this reasoning sounds ... Well, stupid. I don't know how else to put it. Maybe fancy and brilliant in theory, but idiotic in basic human terms. Let me offer a rube comparison. Let's say that you and your family live in a house. (That's the EU.) And let's say there's a bunch of families a few blocks away who really don't like you. (That's the Islamic middle east.) What to do? Hey, how about inviting your next-door neighbors (that's Turkey) to have free run of your house!

  As is often said, there are some ideas so dumb that only sophisticated people can cling to them.

  First: why do anything at all about those nasty people a few blocks over? (Except trade with them and defend yourself against them.) How much luck have you had recently changing anyone? Isn't it basic human experience that trying to change someone nearly always backfire?

  Second: if you're absolutely/positively detemrined to do something about these nasties, can't you come up with something more sensible than this crazy scheme? Could it be more roundabout? In simple human terms, how is letting your next-door neighbors have the run of your house going to accomplish anything other than losing control of your own situation? Call me silly, but no next-block-over nasty is going to look at this situation and think, Wow, I think I'll reform myself! This next-block-over nasty is far more likely to think, Hey, I want me some of those easy pickings! And then come rob you blind. All the while thinking you're an even bigger fool than they originally figured.

  I notice that The Economist has come out in favor of admitting Turkey. I also notice that Steve, Randall, and the GNXP posse are considerably more skeptical, if not amazed and horrified.

  God bless the Turks, of course: no reason not to wish 'em well and deal with 'em positively and honorably. God bless everybody, for that matter. But, like I said, what kind of real-world sense does it make to give everybody free run of your house?

• Jane Kramer has a long piece in the current New Yorker that's of some relevance. It's about the headscarves-in-schools controversy in France; France has passed a law aimed at preventing Muslim girls from wearing the veil while in French schools. Kramer is, as always sardonic, amusing, and insightful about the French. She also does a great job of explaining why the head-scarf issue became such a big deal.

  Before I pass along a few facts and passages from her piece, I'm going to beat myself on the breast a few times. One, because Kramer's piece confirms something that I've been saying in my various "watch out for this immigration thing" postings: that the immigration question has nothing to do with traditional left-right points of view. In America, business interests (the right) and multiculturalist fools (the left) are pro-high-rates; nearly everyone else, left or right, is more cautious. In France, Kramer writes, the headscarf ruling led to demontrations by veiled women, to demonstrations by unveiled women, to endless telvision debates, to rap wars on the Muslim hip-hop circuit, and to windy discussions in all the important papers: "Liberation, on the left, and Le Figaro, on the right, were for the law; Le Monde, always contrarian, was against it." Welcome to the 21st century.

  The piece itslef isn't online, so I'll pass along a few passages from it:

  Muslims today are part of the biggest labor migration in Europe since the great migrations of the Roman Empire; some analysts at the European Union say that in Fifteen years they could account for twent percent of its population ...

  [Back in the '80s, Kramer observed the mob-like ways extremist Muslim groups in France were recruiting members.] The Islamist network was fairly simple then. Saudis funded the Brotherhood through its leadership in Egypt; the Brotherhood, in turn, trained Algerian and Moroccan preachers and sent them off to conquer the diaspora in towns like Dreux. Those preachers were self-styled vigilantes. They stalked the North African schoolboys, demanding recruits for their after-school Koran classes -- threatening and often beating the ones who refused, but always offering free textbooks to the ones who came and "protection" to their parents. Within a few months, those boys were the vigilantes, exhorting their classmates to embrace the kind of Islam they had always mocked as something that, In France, only illiterate peasants from Anatolia preacticed ...

  [Kramer portrays the bind the head-scarf wars put the French Left into this way:] The left, whatever its old claims to being the guarantor of a secular state, was adrift in a sea of unforeseen (and almost comically unsettling) new imperatives having to do with multiculturalism and diversity and political correctness, unable to decide the relative merits of freedom of religious expression and freedom from religious expression.

  It's satisfying, if grimly so, to read Kramer on the role modernist architecture played in the creation of this state of things. She's discussing the neighborhoods ["cites"] where many of the immigrants settled:

  The cites themselves were a failed fantasy of a new life, a misbegotten experiment in social planning that began with Le Corbusier's famous Unite d'Habitation, in Marseilles, and spread through France and into the rest of northern Europe. Nothing that should have happened in the cites happened. Big businesses did not arrive; bourgeois families did not build housing estates next door; the projects themselves deteriorated, victim to construction boondoggles. The children of immigrants who had moved in, expecting a new life, became the prisoners of that life.

  FWIW, a Parisian friend tells me that the French have essentially drawn a line between the heavily immigrant suburbs around the city and the Parisian downtown. These giant ring roads encircle Paris, making it physically hard to cross over the boundary, and transporation between downtown and the suburbs ends rather early. Paris: the bunker.

  The New Yorker hasn't put Kramer's essay online, but they have posted a long q&a with her. In it, Kramer says this:

  In France, as in the rest of Europe, you have immigrants, but not in the American sense. Rather, these are post-colonial populations. These European countries have ended up, through the chaos of liberation, with huge populations coming back to the colonial authority, and they have both identified with and tried to separate themselves from the colonial power. These populations—and in this case we’re talking about Muslim populations—arrive with a huge longing and a sense of identity, and also a huge despair at the accidents of history that have uprooted them. You have ambivalence in the arrival, which is tremendously different than coming to America.

  How does that affect the process of assimilation?

  Well, the French reaction, generally, has been to employ a rhetoric of assimilation without providing any reality of it. Some estimate that a tenth of the country is Muslim. Most of them are grandchildren of the original Muslim population to come to France, most of whom were workers, and these younger Muslims have grown up in isolation in these huge housing projects that were built with a false sense of community. This is, of course, exactly against what the French say their policy is. Still, these Muslims identified closely with what Europe was promising them. It’s the European dream, if not the American.

  What happened to that European dream?

  Once you got to a third generation, the dislocation and despair became permanent. The economy froze. The jobs disappeared. These kids realized that they weren’t going to get what they were promised. At the beginning of the first Gulf War, I was living in France, and what struck me then was how very calm the French Muslim population was. They were worried about backlash, about extremism, and they identified themselves very strongly with France. But in the wake of Afghanistan and Iraq you’re dealing with a much different population. Kids were disaffected and very vulnerable. Islamic preachers and recruiters came out to promise these kids what France had promised their parents and grandparents. All the things that had failed were being repromised in terms of an international Islam. So what you saw was a huge surge in the kids who were rededicating themselves to Islam, coming covered to school, and demanding to enter classrooms.

  Another part of the case that gets made for admitting Turkey to the EU is that its population is large, dynamic, and growing, while Europe's is aging; some people seem to feel that Europe needs the boost that Turkey's demographics would give it. Hard not to notice that the population's makaeup would change drastically. Whose interests are these elites looking out for?

  I do in fact have an idea why the Turkey-and-the-EU issue has been gnawing at my mind. It's because I recently watched two French movies back to back that dealt with the "What's become of Europe" question. They come from very different places, but present remarkably similar pictures. (FWIW, long ago I blogged a bit about what France once meant to Americans.)

  Gaspar Noe's "Irreversible," which I blogged about at some length here, is a film filmbuffs won't want to miss. FWIW, Noe strikes me as one of those filmmakers -- like David Fincher and Wong Kar-Wai -- who is a harbinger of the future of movie art. These are super-talented guys making dreamy electronic-media stuff that has little if anything to do with the traditional language of movies.

  The film is amazing too because of how outrageous and upsetting it is. I say this appreciatively, by the way; I like a film that stirs a little something extra up. Noe's work reminds me a bit of Celine's "Journey to the End of the Night," of Michel Houllebecq's novels, and of some of the early satirical Kubrick too. He's an entertaining madman/crank -- an outraged moralist and provocateur, satirical, angry, and (for all his coldness) tragic at the same time.

  Plot spoilers ahead, though it's stretching it to say that "Irreversible" has much of a plot. Vulgarisms ahead too: "Irreversible" is nothing if not Unrated, and impossible to discuss in terms of its content and themes without a hard R.

  In brief, the film presents a picture of contempo Europe, and it ain't pretty. The film's first scenes take place in a seedy gay sex club. The film backtracks through hooker-infested neighborhoods; it visits a party where stylish Frenchies carry on (drugs, dancing) blissfully; it follows the divine Monica Bellucci as she's raped and beaten. It backtracks from this gruesome event to an earlier time when Monica and her boyfriend were playful, in love, and perhaps even innocent.

  This arc is itself a parable about Europe today. To spell it out: the film moves from sybaritic and sterile self-pleasure (represented by the gay sex club, pointedly called "Le Rectum"); wades its way through neighborhoods populated by scavenger-like immigrants; pauses over a wonderful scene of playful heterosexuality; and ends with an image of a very fertile-seeming Monica. From anal play, to anal rape, to hetero play, to a vision of lost fertility and lost possibilities.

  Noe is telling us that Europe has traded its future for the sake of self-pleasure in the Now. Interesting to learn note that Noe is an immigrant himself. It's as though he's looking at France and saying, "Why are you throwing all this magnificence away?" The film is clearly offering up Bellucci as the flower of Euro civilization; in the course of the movie, we watch this flower be destroyed.

  In a word, Noe is saying that Europe is committing suicide. It's caught up in a frenzy of sterile self-gratification; it's letting itself be overrun by people who mean it no good; and, dammit, it was once great and things could have been different. To be hyperexplicit: the film backs out of the anus, explores the vagina, finds hope there, and watches it die. (I'm surprised more gays didn't notice and protest the symbolic use Noe makes of gays in the movie; they're clearly meant to represent sterile self-centeredness and self-gratification. Hey, don't shoot me, I'm just the messenger.)

  Things could have been different, Noe wants us to understand. The film's final shot is a whriling one of the impossibly lush and elegant Bellucci in a park -- in the sunlight, reclining on green grass, surrounded by romping children. Noe is saying to Eurupe: you've made a deal with the devil, and by god you're paying for it now.

  Bertrand Blier, in his 1993 film "Un, Deux, Trois, Soleil" (the title is taken from a children's game) addresses the "what's becoming of Europe" question even more directly. Noe's film could be taken simply as the story of a terrible thing that happens to one couple; you could ignore its metaphorical side. Blier's film is explicitly about larger cultural questions. It's set in a small French city on the Mediterranean; its main character, played by the ultra-delicious gamine Anouk Grinberg, is a poor girl from a crazily dysfunctional family who's trying to grow up and make a life in the crazy patchwork that is the new Europe. T

  I love Blier's movies; I'm as happy even when watching the unsuccessful ones as I am watching any movies at all. I'm simply off in Blier-land, a place I'm delighted to be. If anyone's interested in giving his movies a try, let me suggest starting with "Going Places," "Get Out Your Handkerchiefs," and "Beau-Pere." They're deadpan-droll yet erotic, chilly yet voluptuous, contemplative yet hilarious, "aesthetic" yet earthy.

  They're also about as amoral and intuitive as feature films can be. Without any fuss, let alone cyber-whoopdedo, Blier's films locate you in eroticized psychic dreamscapes. (The stories are like walks through these dreamscapes.) In most of his movies, this dreamscape belongs to the French male. And in nearly all his films, Blier is as straightfaced, deadpan, and full of urbane curiosity about the marvels and kinks of the unconscious mind as Bunuel was only in his later movies. Watching Blier's movies, I find myself feeling like I do during those moments when you're drifting off to sleep -- or maybe not: when your thoughts mingle with the TV that's on, and let go of reality .. and then you stir back to awakeness ... and then drift off again. Yet watching a Blier, I'm wide-awake at the same time.

  There's no one as fast as Blier is at establishing what's dramatically at stake in a scene. Perhaps that's because he has to be; the situations he sets up are so unusual that he's got to zero you in instantly on their emotional core, otherwise you'd be lost.

  Although I spent the first 20 minutes of "Un, Deux, Trois Soleil" wondering if Blier would be able to pull this movie together, I wound up loving it. It has his dream-like deadpan, and his ability to launch -- with no warning and no visible seams -- into fantasy. But at first it seemed ... a little forced, a little hectic. Grinberg plays her character from roughly the age of 8 to the age of 30 without changing makeup and without special effects. Marcello Mastroianni, plays her drunken layabout of a father; he's so out of it that he can never find his way home through the abstract concrete wilderness that is their housing project. Two actors follow him around, carrying a giant number in their arms that symbolizes the number on the door of the apartment door he can never find. The story is chopped up, twisted, and then re-run. A dead child comes back to life when a voluptuous black woman -- a goddess-like Mama figure -- nurses him at her naked breast.

  In fact, "Un, Deux, Trois, Soleil" is one of the most audacious movies I've ever seen. And by the end of of it I was quite moved. What clicked for me was that -- where Blier is usually presenting the dreamscape of an individual -- in this film he's giving us the dreamlife of an entire culture. This is Europe's dreamscape -- half nightmare, half reverie, half fantasy. And despite the film's initial choppiness, it develops its own weird kind of poise.

  As for the picture of Europe Blier presents ... Well, it's very similar to the picture Noe presents in "Irreversible." For Blier, the immigrants are everything they're made out to be: they're trash, they're gangsters, they're scary; they're beautiful, they're inspiring, they're the future. Nobody shifts gears as quickly (or as clearly) as Blier can. In one scene, Grinberg wants to lose her virginity and winds up almost being gang-raped. But the scary, dusky men who hassle her are given respect as people finding their own way too. The decrepit Mastroianni character represents what's become of Old Europe, as well he might be given his place in European film history. And we quickly understand that his character has abdicated; he's given up. Decay, change, the future -- all of it and more -- is simply washing over him now. He can't find it in himself to offer any resistance whatsoever. He simply can't stand up for himself any longer.

  Blier's film, like Noe's, ends with a vision of what might have been and what once was, in this case a ravishing image of the pure Mediterranean, a place of classic repose. What's become of it? What have we done to it?

  Gaspar Noe attacks his subject with the new language of the electronic media; Bertrand Blier takes it on with the language of the traditional cinema, though he plays with it plenty. It's wise to be wary of artists and their politics, of course; artists are anything but trustworthy thinkers. Come to think of it, I have no idea what political p-o-v Noe and Blier subscribe to. My guess would be that Noe will wind up a rightie, and that Blier is firmly leftish in a Paris film-establishment way. How interesting then that both films present such similar pictures of Europe, a culture in the process of abandoning itself.

Hey, when do you think American filmmakers will start taking worried note of what's happening with our own borders and our own culture?

"Irreversible" can be bought (for a very good price) here and Netflixed here; "Un, Deux, Trois, Soleil" is buyable here and Netflixable here.

Best,

Michael