Jess wrote:
"Any fiction based on them wouldn't be hardboiled; simply
committing a crime does not make on hardboiled. It'd be
something between tragedy and farce. Maybe there are
prostitutes and junkies out there whose lives fit neatly into
the noir or hardboiled categories. I haven't met them,
though, and based on the ones I've known, I'd have a hard
time believing that they were either noir or hardboiled, as I
define them."
Leaving aside the hardboied vs. noir debate (although I do
have opinions about what separates them, I often tend to lump
them as general terms), I'm not talking real people here, I'm
talking literary, factual or fictional, creations. For
instance, I'm pretty fascinated by some pretty reprehensible
characters in books, but I wouldn't want to meet them. This
was actually brought home to me by two movies: Basketball
Diaries and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Both were books I
really liked, but I found it very hard to watch the very same
behavior in the movie. Seeing it was just foul, if not
disgusting, whereas the narration style of each book gave me
enough abstract distance to see the humor in the same
situations. At least in Leaving Las Vegas, for all of its
romanticism of self-destruction, they weren't presented as
positive role models.
So I'm talking about a stylized depcition of out of control
lives, where they still hang on to just enough dignity and
self-worth to hope, something the real-life counterparts have
usually lost.
Marianne wrote:
"There's nothing romantic, nothing sexy, nothing very
gripping about people helplessly out of control."
This is assuming that we are looking for romanticism or sexy
when we read this stuff (and often we are, you don't get much
more romantic than Chandler, for instance). However, I often
do find the fictional depiction of people careening out of
control (but not quite all the way there, which is, I guess,
where the romanticism comes back in) quite gripping -- for
instance, pretty much all of David Goodis, Terrill Lankford's
Shooters, Kent Harrington's Dark Ride, Vicki Hendricks' Miami
Purity, etc.
Mark
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