Abbott/Cockburn/Targets

There are a number of ways in which writers have reworked the conventions of noir. One of the most common follows this rule: where men were, there let women be. And so Sara Paretsky, for example, invents the character of V.I. Warshawski, a female private eye who shares many characteristics with classic male avatars of the same type, such as Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade. It’s worth noting that, as popular and revolutionary as Paretsky’s feminist reappropriation of noir tropes has been, it’s also on occasion been criticized for being simply imitative of the masters; in other words, the gender of the protagonist changes, but everything else remains the same. That same charge could not be leveled at Megan Abbott’s work in Die a Little because she has a very different approach to reworking noir conventions. On the one hand, she gives her reader a recognizably Chandlerian Los Angeles; landscapes, clothing, cars, buildings, and a host of other period details are all recreated with loving attention, but largely from the point of view of a female protagonist (and here’s the rub) who is not a private eye and whose association with both the law and crime is only incidental (at least initially). The novel tells the story of Lora King, a schoolteacher whose brother, Bill, is a junior investigator in the local DA’s office. When Bill marries Alice Steele, a mysterious woman with an equally mysterious past, Lora becomes progressively more obsessed with finding out who Alice is and was. The ostensible reason for Lora’s interest in Alice is her concern for her brother Bill, but as the novel goes on, it becomes more and more clear that Lora is drawn to the dark side of life she encounters as she investigates Alice. It’s the allure of crime that is Abbott’s real subject.

I also read the next fifty pages of Alexander Cockburn’s A Colossal Wreck: A Road Trip Through Political Scandal, Corruption, and American Culture. With Cockburn you have to take the rough with the smooth. As someone with opinions about everything, there’s no way that you’re going to agree with all of them (although he never underwent the catastrophic deconversion of a Christopher Hitchens). But sometimes he’s right on target, as when he understands immediately what’s at stake in the American reaction to 9/11. This is Cockburn writing on September 12, 2001: “The lust for retaliation traditionally outstrips precision in identifying the actual assailant. The targets abroad will be all the usual suspects: rogue states (most of which, like the Taliban or Saddam Hussein, started off as creatures of US intelligence). The target at home will be the Bill of Rights.” I’m sure that nothing that happened in the months and years after he wrote these words surprised Cockburn at all. In my previous post, I wrote of Cockburn’s tendency to romanticize “ordinary Americans” due to his fondness for Americana, but perhaps that was ungenerous of me. It might be more accurate to say, with his remarks on 9/11 in mind, that Cockburn is determined that his readers not confuse Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld with Americans as a whole. From April 2002: “People who drive or lecture their way through the American interior usually notice the same thing, which is that you can have rational conversations with people about the Middle East, about George W. Bush, and other topics certain to arouse unreasoning passion among sophisticates on either coast.” Yes, this is still romanticism, perhaps, but it is at least romanticism with a purpose and a target.

I can’t seem to avoid the word ‘target’ today and perhaps that’s because I also watched Targets (1968), Peter Bogdanovich’s first film, which he also wrote and produced. The film has a complicated production history involving both Roger Corman and Boris Karloff (this was Karloff’s final film) that is discussed in more detail here. Although Bogdanovich’s use of Karloff was accidental in the sense that Corman stipulated it, it works beautifully for a number of reasons. One half of the film follows Karloff’s character, Byron Orlock, an aging horror movie icon who wants to retire because he’s convinced he’s nothing more than an antiquated relic. The other half of the film follows Bobby Thompson, an utterly normal young man (based on the Texas sniper Charles Whitman) who one day decides to go on a shooting spree, beginning by killing his wife, mother, and a grocery delivery boy, then moving on to picking off drivers on a freeway, before ending up shooting moviegoers at a drive-in movie that is not only playing one of Byron Orlock’s films, but also anticipating a personal appearance by the man himself. The climax of the film sees the elderly Orlock disarming and subduing Thompson and it’s a tribute to Bogdanovich that this seemingly unlikely conclusion feels both compelling and utterly appropriate. The horror movie monster of the past, embodied by Karloff, takes his final bow and is supplanted by a new monster for the contemporary age, a monster with no visible evidence of monstrosity, unless you count excessive normality as monstrous. Quite apart from anatomizing the ordinariness of those who kill in a way unlike the vast majority of other films that purport to address this subject, Targets remains one of the best studies of American gun culture I’ve ever seen. Bogdanovich comments on the disturbing and depressing fact that Targets is as relevant today as it’s ever been in this interview.