Doug wrote:
"So if the PI's run is really up, I don't think it has
anything to do with him/her not being "realistic" anymore.
Never mind what "real" PIs do: at heart the fictional PI is
an incarnation of the traditional American hero --
individualistic to the point of isolation, deeply moralistic,
violent, stoic, a Romantic, etc. That figure will probably
stick around as long as there's an America."
I agree, but I'm having trouble thinking of what profession
is the current embodiment of that figure. Perhaps a lawyer?
Or maybe it's someone who manages to be a loner within and
institutional setting?
"My guess is that we're living through an unsettled age and a
PI needs to be in a settled time, since his/her whole raison
d etre is to confront the corruption that undergirds the
seeming stability."
I once wrote a paper that looked at when new PI writers came
on the scene. It seemed that there were upsurges after each
major war the US was involved in. So I'm not sure it's so
much stability that feeds the PI so much as society's
attempting to return to a stability that the
(often returning vet) PI reminds us was never quite as pure
as is being claimed. Or, as Bruce Cockburn put it, The
trouble with normal is it always gets worse.
"Actually, as I type this, it strikes me that this is an age
for horror
(and we do see a lot of horror efforts in pop culture
nowadays) and, strangely, the Western."
I see horror, but why western? I would think that the western
loner had so much in common with the PI that their cycles
would be roughly the same.
"If somebody could reconceive the Western to speak to these
times, they'd probably make a killing."
Does Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada count? Or the new
Australian western scripted by Nick Cave -- what is the
title? -- I'm really looking forward to that.
Mark
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