I always assumed that the phrase "existential hero" was an
apt description of noir protagonists. But I recently read a
piece about Sartre who, it turns out, felt that existentilism
was often a philosphy of joy and liberation.
I think a lot of this present discussion about noir makes it
sound as if noir is the only possible (or legitimate) way to
look at the world. A piece in the London Sunday Times a few
months ago made the point that too much contemporary crime
writing makes a "fetish" out of grimness for its own sake. I
agree. It's like the old John Candy-Eugene Levy SCT hillbilly
movie critics who judged all films by how many explosions
were in them. "Blowed it up real good!" if you recall.
Darkness for its own sake strikes me as a form of arrested
adolescance. Life is too complicated and too ambiguous to be
reduced to "darkness."
Ed Gorman
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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