Miker wrote:
"So one of your criteria for noir is a depressing or unhappy
ending? That's not an unusual demand on noir. Certainly most
noir does have an unhappy ending. I'd say that more than 90%
of the strict noir I've read has the main protagonist either
dead or cruelly defeated in the end. But Jim has stated that
a "happy" ending does not rule out noir, and I'm with him on
this. The Dead Calm movie had a fairly happy ending, and I
would still call it noir."
I'm sorry, but the Dead Calm movie did not have such a happy
ending. The Billy Zane character got knocked off and all
that, but had he not succeeded in messing up these people's
lives? I didn't get a feeling of the triumph of good. I got
the feeling that if you think you've got a good life, someone
like this guy can come along and fuck it up. Have you read
Jason Starr's Nothing Personal? [SPOILER] The baddie gets
nailed in the end and the nasty plot gets foiled, etc, but
all of the supposedly saved characters are only saved in a
physical sense. Sure, a noir protagonist can survive, but
he's still lost. Take Pick Up by Willeford, while we're at
it. [SPOILER] The hero is free to walk the streets again at
the end, against all odds. But during the course of the novel
it has been demonstrated that those streets are not worth
walking. That's noir of the darkest grade.
I would never dream of calling Hammett and Chandler noir. THE
MALTESE FALCON and THE BIG SLEEP are positive, life-affirming
romps. Noir must seep into heads of characters and expose
their fragilities. Chandler and Hammett's heros are
impermeable. They are white knights, not lost souls.
--- Charlie Williams
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