At 07:32 AM 10/11/2005 -0500, you wrote:
>Noir switches perspective, and we become the Screwed.
With a dash of Crime
>thrown in. The readers are still slumming, but
there's a mirror.
>
>Anybody buy into this?
At least until someone comes up and smacks me for it.
I think a bottom-up point of view is characteristic of noir
(working or lower class,) especially in earlier work. Easy to
see that the disenfranchised are doomed. But I don't think it
essential that a story adopt a working or lower class point
of view to be noir. In essence, noir says everyone is
screwed. At least that's the definition I've been
touting.
I do think though, to some extent, it is the denial of class
that has sucked a lot of energy from the genre in more recent
times, adopting noir atmospherics in order to talk about good
and evil and make noir more acceptable to
middle-classes.
Kerry
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 10 Nov 2005 EST