At 02:13 PM 29/06/2007, you wrote:
>I dunno.
>
>After reading a spate of recent books by some of the
more highly
>touted practitioners of the "new noir," I've noticed
something.
>
>Not in all of them, mind you, but in enough of them
to be disturbed
>by what seems to be a trend. I hope not. Maybe I just
hit a bad
>string of books (and no, i don't want to name them).
But...
>
>Many of these books have increasingly little to do
with the classic
>noir films and novels their authors all claim to
adore so much (but
>may have never actually read).
But you're comparing the classics of the past with average,
though highly touted, noir of today. "Touting" is not
synonymous with considered critical evaluation, though if
there's any skill that has well developed and improved upon
in the past century, it is touting.
>If the original noirs were usually about normal -- or
at least
>identifiable characters -- being drawn into the
darkness, that's long
>gone. So many of the recent noirs I've read are
populated by amoral
>sociopaths who are already plenty dark.
The genre has always been about violence. What you're saying
is that the authors of the classics managed to humanize their
violent characters more than the average authors of what
you're reading today. I suspect many of the less-skilled,
past writers of noir shared this failing and we don't
recollect them so quickly now.
And why should the authors of today write about the same
things, in the same way, as the authors of the past? Chandler
and Hammett and the rest wrote the best Chandler and Hammet
and Cain, etc. If the genre is alive, it will continue to be
explored in different directions and in different ways.
BTW, I don't think Thompson's sheriff in Pop.1280 is much of
a sweetie when we first meet him. I do think James Sallis'
Griffin is a marvelously complex character.
>In the original noirs, the main characters were
usually just more-or-
>less regular joes: migrant workers, insurance
salesmen, professors,
>news hawks, coffee shop waitresses. B-girls, cut-rate
private eyes,
>mildly bent cops, low-level crooks. The sort of
people you'd meet in
>a bar or on the street. Or getting off a hay wagon.
Just regular
>schmucks, with more-or-less normal levels of
intelligence. And their
>fall is presented as tragedy, with one bad decision,
one moment of
>weakness, one fatal flaw serving as the catalyst that
ignites a world
>of hurt.
In the context of a lot of the literature that preceded noir,
and a good deal of it that has followed as well, B-girls,
cut-rate private eyes, bent cops, low-level crooks, insurance
salesmen and migrant workers would all have been thought of
as already fallen, by their very nature, and would have been
dismissed as unworthy of being written about. Pulp was
popular fiction at the time, and categorically dismissed by
most serious students of the literary classics. Pulp has been
a democratizing influence, don't you think?
>Nowadays, though, the characters are more often big
shot celebrities
>or serial killers or globetrotting hit men or
cannibal dope fiends or
>the like, over-the-top sociopathic cartoons who seem
to exist mostly
>in books. And these guys are usually criminally
clueless. These books
>aren't presented as morality plays, but as
clusterfucks of stupidity
>and venality. These characters come pre-doomed and
pre-damned; these
>dumbfucks make one obviously bad choice after another
-- the sort of
>stupid choices that owe more to plot machinations
than anything.
I know there's a good chunk of this list that would disagree
with me, but I'm not sure the noir classics are morality
plays either (in the sense of knowing and representing firm
moral choices) so much as observations of a collapse of
institutionalized morality. Some, like Mike Hammer have a
strong, individualistic, if controversial sense of the way
out of this morass. Others are more or less floundering
before the temptations of the world. In his long list of
reasons for not throwing in with O'Shaughnessy, the best Sam
Spade comes up with is that he couldn't trust her and it
would be bad for business. At no point does he suggest it is
because the bible, the pope, or even his local imam told him
to behave.
>What happens to them isn't some slow, inevitable
tragic fall from
>grace into the darkness of the abyss, but more a
turned-to-eleven
>amplification of atrocities and bad luck, betrayals
and
>misunderstandings and coincidences that, again, only
exist in
>fiction. Certainly, things are more graphic and
there's far more
>obscene language, violence and sex than in the old
noirs, which is to
>be expected, I guess. But so much of it just seems so
strained and
>self-conscious; like a bunch of little boys trying to
out-do each
>other. These neo-noirs aren't presented as tragedy at
all, but as
>comedy of the cruelest sort, the "grown-up"
equivalent of slipping a
>frog down a girl's back.
If authors write about the banality of evil, they are
criticized for ignoring its effects. If they graphically
depict the obscenity of evil, they are only trying to
shock.
Fact is though, violence, betrayal and the rest do not
immediately
(if at all) have tragic consequences in western society, and
probably never did. Half a century of unprecedented violence
(during which noir fiction began) resulted, directly, in a
half century of unprecedented prosperity, kept going by the
constant threat of violence (the cold war, and the war on
terrorism.) Millions employed in the manufacture and
consumption of munitions and the machinery of war, and
millions more in their spin-offs. Government (democratic and
otherwise) and justice systems have institutionalized and
amplified violence, not done away with it. It's almost as if
you could say we are a violent species, arriving on the scene
with a predilection for violence. Why should modern noir not
depict this?
>And what's with all the torture and mutilation going
on? Is Cheyney
>secretly moonlighting as an acquisition
editor?
>
>Chainsaws! Woodchippers! Cruxifiction! You fed a
guy's testicles into
>a Waring blender? Fine, I'll do that, too, but I'll
toss in some
>Coors Light and then make my guy drink it!
>
>And then gerbil him to death.
What man can imagine gets done. Crucifixion is hardly new. It
was, not that long ago in human history, a form of
institutionalized violence, practiced with decorum and piety.
Maybe we should be shocked by it.
>I may be imagining this, but it seems to me that
there's also a
>growing contempt among the authors for their own
characters, a kind
>of mean-spiritedness that's creeping in -- a
condescending sort of
>self-righteous authorial stance being adapted that
says "Yeah,
>they're all scumbags, so I make them go through all
kinds of shit.
>Cool, huh?"
No more self-righteous, and a good deal less hypocritical
than the stance of readers who, made uncomfortable by graphic
depictions of mindless violence, would like to imagine it
does not exist in fact.
>The old noir characters, whatever their flaws, had
souls of some
>sort. Hell, the books themselves had soul, and you
got the sense that
>the authors -- and readers -- cared about these
characters on at
>least some level. The characters who inhabit this
cynical new breed
>of noir too often are unlikable two-dimensional
cardboard cutouts who
>exist only to be put through their paces by an author
with one hand
>down his (or her) pants for the edification of his
like-minded buddies.
>
>All the meanness and carnage of these soulless
wallows comes off more
>like pornography than noir, at least to
me.
Sex and violence- go together like love and marriage. It
isn't our neo-noir authors who discovered that sex and power
(violence is the quick and easy route to power, and usually
backs up other methods) are prime motivators in human
behavior. Sure, there's shelter and food, but if they
wouldn't amount to much if we didn't need someone to fuck and
someplace to do it. Of course it's pornographic. It is about
people, what, how and why we do what we do. Alternatively, we
could write about the angels.
>Makes me wonder who's getting off on it.
Most in the world, so far as I can tell. I don't know of any
way out of the cycle of sex and violence. Best I can tell is
that just about every species (worms may be one exception)
competes violently for what they need to carry on, including
sex, though admittedly only one gets to read about it. As one
of the latter, I find it helps to laugh about it all now and
again.
Best, Kerry
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