At 08:27 AM 15/08/2007, you wrote:
>Dave Zeltserman wrote:
>
>I agree wholeheartedly about Fleming's Bond
books.
>
>You Only Live Twice (completely different plot
than
>movie) == noir
>
>**************
>Raymond Chandler and Fleming had something like a
long
>distance friendship going on and exchanged
mail.
>Chandler liked Casino Royale, I think the first
Bond
>book. You talk about noir and how a book was not
like
>the movie. In Casino Royale Bond is not much of
the
>stereotype hardboiled hero at all. No ass-kicking
or
>shooting. And he loses the girl at the end and
it
>haunts him.
The themes are noirish, almost non-transcendent by nature,
but can the spy genre properly be called noir? These
characters, like James, James Bond, were licensed to kill.
Where's the prerequisite crime?
Of course, they frequently killed outside the countries that
licensed them, but if a spy is outed and not killed they will
be sent home. It's sort of a game, isn't it? Treason is a
crime everywhere there is crime, I presume, and spying is all
about double agents. Does that make the genre noir or just
some of the stories?
I ask because one direction noir may have gone, and be
flourishing is into the disruption of international conflict.
Not war itself necessarily, but civil strife, refugee camps,
displaced people and places where laws are not well defined
or non-existent. If a nation's justice system collapses, do
we still have crime? Does international law count, especially
if it cannot be enforced? If this sort of stuff is noir, is
the spy genre a transitional stage?
We must fill these categories, no? Kerry
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