Teri said:
> So, how about you? Ever given any thought to why
you're on THIS list and
> not another?
I've always been attracted to the outré®®..be it books or
movies or art or music or whathaveyou. At the same time, I've
always been fascinated by the
"junk" and detritus that our culture leaves laying around.
Hence, I'll take William S. Burroughs and Thomas Pynchon over
Henry James or Ernest Hemingway, Peter Greenaway or Luis
Bunuel over Vincent Minelli or Stephen Spielberg, Patti Smith
or Lou Reed over Frank Sinatra or Irving Berlin, Joan Miro or
Jackson Pollock over Rembrandt or Reubens, and so on.
When it comes to noir fiction ( and it's inevitable, I think,
when talking noir that hard-boiled creeps in...not to start
one of those endless arguments over what's noir, what's
hard-boiled...if there is a difference), I admire the
transgressive nature of it. It's aggressive, gets into your
face, grabs you by the back of your neck and and thrashes you
around until you're all mangled by it. It appeals to the
trouble-maker in me that wants to see the bad guy (or gal)
get away with it...to test the limits of what's proper, go
beyond the boundaries of what's permissible, knowing that
there's no going back.
Noir intends to shock (most of the time anyway). Like Neil
Smith mentioned, it takes the ordinary into the extraordinary
and takes extreme positions. It speaks to the dark side in us
that ordinarily would never do some of the shit that noir
protagonists do, and vicariously lets us peep into that dark
world that we barely remember when we wake up from those
godawful dreams we have some times.
It's amazing for me to read guys like James M. Cain, for
example, pulling the stunts in his work that he did when the
provincial/puritanical/white-bread point of view still had de
facto control over the media. Or to read Jim Thompson coming
up with these awful scenarios that he'd whip up in a couple
of weeks, often terribly crafted, but still knock your socks
off with the horrible outcomes.
Noir is stuff that scares you. The way people f**k each other
over, the way primal impulses are laid bare, the way
consequences aren't that important except for the thrill of
the moment....it's a reminder how naughty we can really be.
If we're just given a chance.
Tribe
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