RARA-AVIS: Re: Welcome to Vicki Hendricks, guest of honour

From: Dave Zeltserman ( davezelt@comcast.net)
Date: 08 Apr 2005

>
> That's fine as a starting point, but it must be remembered that
> individual noirs can inflect this schema in a thousand different
> ways. In Edgar Ulmer's film DETOUR, for example, the protagonist is
> constantly moaning about his bad luck, about how an impersonal fate
> has reached out and put the finger on him for no good reason at all.
> He sees himself as an everyday guy whose world has suddenly spun out
> of control. Yet the film makes it absolutely clear that this man is
a
> hypocrite who invokes the concept of 'fate' as a means of denying
> what is blatantly obvious to anyone who looks closely at the film -
> that he personally responsible for everything which happens to him.
>

I agree that most noir protagonists create their own doom by either crossing some line (murder, bank robbery, infidelity, etc.) or just being psychologically broken, but how did the protagonist in Detour create his own doom, other than being a hapless victim of bad luck?

-Dave Z.

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