Today I read the
last fifty pages of Hard-Boiled
Wonderland. The Caluctec finishes his last day by spending it with the
Librarian, eating, making love, and then finally driving to the waterfront to
listen to Bob Dylan in his rental car as he fades out of consciousness for the
last time. In the meantime, the Dreamreader is with his Librarian, whom he has
clearly fallen in love with, and whose mind he has dedicated himself to
recovering from the skulls stored in the library. Before we can be sure whether
or not he succeeds, he leaves to meet his Shadow and escape from the Town.
Although the Shadow tries to persuade him to leave the Town by swimming into
the Southern Pool, at the last minute the Dreamreader refuses and decides to
stay in the Town, feeling responsible for its inhabitants and hoping to help
them in some way. This is definitely a novel that finishes with a whimper
rather than a bang, but perhaps that’s the point. Despite being cast in the
form of genre fictions (the mystery and fantasy fiction) this is ultimately a
novel about mind and consciousness, not adventure. The move from one level or
type of consciousness to another is not accomplished without conflict, but that
conflict is secondary to the feeling of gradual fading and continuity that
dominates these final pages.
I also read the last
fifty pages of Paula Rabinowitz’s Black
& White & Noir: America’s Pulp Modernism. I find myself having to
revise what I said in my previous post about incoherence not being a major
problem in this book. Although that is still true on the whole, the exception
is Rabinowitz’s chapter on the connections between early radical feminism and
1960s avant garde film culture in the US. Quite frankly, despite the interest
of the subject matter, this chapter does not belong in the book. Even
Rabinowitz has to admit that it is apparently disconnected from the rest of the
book’s focus on pulp modernism, but she also argues that “the same process by
which cultural form anticipates political action is at work.” Maybe so, but absent
any demonstrable connection to noir, this material reads like part of an
unrelated project. In her final chapter, “Mapping Noir,” Rabinowitz makes one
of the most expansive claims in the book when she describes Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter as establishing the
basic formula for film noir, in the sense that “a noir plot underlay the entire
history of this continent.” Although this is a claim that can be neither proved
nor disproved definitively, it is fascinatingly provocative. Place this claim
alongside Leslie Fiedler’s claim about the priority of the gothic in American
literature, or DH Lawrence’s description of the essential American soul as
‘hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer,’ or the work of Richard Slotkin and you’ve
got yourself a course or a book proposal! http://works.bepress.com/richard_slotkin/
I also watched Fritz
Lang’s classic 1953 film noir The Big
Heat. http://www.filmsite.org/bigh.html
Glenn Ford plays incorruptible homicide cop Dave Bannion whose attempts to
bring down a local crime syndicate lead to the death of his wife, a death that
adds a burning desire for revenge to his determination to see justice done. The
characters and situation are introduced quickly and effectively and the pace
never slackens for the remainder of the film. In a film distinguished by
several strong performances (including Lee Marvin as a particularly vicious
gangster) the stand out for me is Gloria Grahame as Debby, Lee Marvin’s
girlfriend, who transforms the standard type of the gangster’s moll into a real
character who, in a key scene with another female character, describes them
memorably as “sisters under the mink.” By the time Ford achieves his quest for
vengeance and justice, we have no confidence that those values mean anything. Because
of this, although the film ends with Ford returning to his job as a detective
apparently satisfied and vindicated, the viewer is still overwhelmed with a sense
of how much he has lost. Incidentally, fans of Alfred Hitchcock will enjoy
seeing a young Adam Williams, six years before his role as Valerian in North By Northwest, and the wonderful Edith
Evanson, five years after her great role as Mrs. Wilson in Rope.
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