PLATFORM-Michel Houellebecq

Recomendación del Sur
Playa Blanca

Album from the Frech label Tricatel- "Presence Humaine"
"Platform was written before Sept. 11, before the murder of tourists in Bali, before the attack last October on the Moscow theater, before the kidnapping of Western tourists in Algeria. Because it includes an attack on Western sex tourists by Islamic terrorists, "Platform" has been called prophetic. That is to deny the power and clarity of Houellebecq's vision, to indulge in what Berman has identified as the Eurocentrism that, following the fall of Communism, led the West to conclude that all those exotic, funny countries posed no threat to us. It's ironic that a writer who has been accused of racism has written a novel in which, though his narrator proclaims he has no knowledge of the modern world, the fates of the West and East are inextricably linked. If there's anything prophetic in "Platform," it's the section that must have seemed satirical to Houellebecq when he wrote it: editorials in French newspapers condemning the attack but saying that the Westerners had it coming. "Faced," one of Houellebecq's fictional editorialists writes, "with the hundreds of thousands of women who have been sullied, humiliated, and reduced to slavery throughout the world -- it is regrettable to have to say this -- what do the deaths of a few of the well-heeled matter?" You can hear echoes of that in Noam Chomsky's lie that as many people were killed in the American bombing raid in Sudan as in the Sept. 11 attacks, or in Michael Moore's contention that this is what happens when Americans want their Nikes."
By Charles Taylor-Salon
Elementarteilchen-Elementary particles(trailer)

Also see:
Moritz Bleibtreu in:
"DAS EXPERIMENT"
"IN JULY"
Martina Gedeck in:
"The Lives of Others"
Franka Potente & Moritz Bleibtreu in:
"Run Lola Run"