At 10:36 PM 16/05/2004 -0400, you wrote:
>I haven't read many (hardly any) westerns, but going
by the movies, evil
>in westerns is embodied in the civilization that is
encroaching upon the
>open spaces of the frontier (geography), bringing
with it all of
>civilization's corruption. Hardboiled and noir are
(often) set within
>that corruption that has become inescapable after the
open spaces had
>been paved over.
Yes, I agree. "Function of geography" was too vague.
May I suggest that you and Jim have ended your "rules"
discussion a touch too comfortably? Seems to me a lot of
rules, perhaps all of them, tend to serve one group of people
at the expense of others, or will work in one situation but
not so well in another set of circumstances. Sometimes this
is deliberate, other times less so, but quite often when
following the rules is inconvenient for the powerful, they
ignore them, even though it is the powerful that so often get
to proclaim the rules.
But I don't think there's much point in us comparing our own
moral philosophies, and I apologize if that's what I've been
doing. My point is simply that noir deals with moral issues.
It may be argued that that is true of all crime writing, but
I'm inclined to think that some crime writing does not, and
that this is one of the characteristics that distinguishes
noir from other crime writing. Maybe it is just what
distinguishes the crime writing that interests me from that
which does not.
It is what I most enjoyed about Cock Fighter, for instance.
Willeford devised an entire system of rules and morals based
upon pitting one bird brain against another. Metaphorically
very noir indeed.
Best Kerry
Best Kerry
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