It was not my intention to begin a political discussion nor
to simply slam the good old USA. To modify my earlier
statement on the wide discrepancy in income in this country,
I believe I can safely say that it is wider here than in any
industrialized nation.
So what does this have to do with noir? Perhaps nothing. But
I think something. Here people expect to advance, to achieve
what they see on television. For many this is an
impossibility. Thus a tension develops between expectation
and reality that could be deeper here than elsewhere. So many
noir and hardboiled stories are driven by this dynamic. The
dreamer collides with reality and self-destructs.
I was impressed by a story in the NY Times a couple of days
ago. A young black man gives up drug pushing to be a stand-up
father for his new child. Laura Bush finds him inspiring and
invites him to a conference. He spends his last $25 on a
white shirt and tie, then loses two day's income as a pizza
delivery man. Now that's noir!
I lived for a while in Mexico and am well aware of the huge
income discrepancies there. Yet its detective fiction
reflects this reality in a different way than our realistic
fiction. Maybe because the chasm of class is too deep to look
at with realism. I am thinking of Paco Ignacio Taibo II. It
is recognized as unbridgeable. Here so many people are under
the illusion that it can be bridged and enough do accomplish
this so that those who fail can have tragic
experiences.
Certainly classic noir film told the story of disappointments
with the American dream in the aftermath of W.W.II. There
were Europeans that were part of that telling. But the films
were set here and largely made here.
I am sure every country has darkness. It is a human
condition. And so writers in those countries may wish to
penetrate that darkness. As they do so, they will do so in
ways reflecting their country's culture and peoples.
Noir and the hardboiled are essentially American products,
American exports. The cozy, on the other hand, is essentially
a British product, for us an import. Of course, there is Ian
Rankin and Ken Bruen and Henning Wankell. But they have
imported the form from us just as countless American cozy
writers have imported that form from England.
Why?
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