Today I read the
next fifty pages of Hard-Boiled
Wonderland. If there are fifty pages that could have been cut from the
book, these are those pages. In Hard-Boiled Wonderland, we’re treated to an
unnecessarily detailed description of the Calcutec’s and the Professor’s
granddaughter’s efforts to find the Professor. They are following what they
hope is the Professor’s trail underground through what amounts to a kind of
obstacle course. This account of their struggles could have been much shorter.
In the End of the World, the Dreamreader continues to have difficulties in
knowing his own mind (both literally and figuratively), especially now that
winter has arrived in the Town. Even though his Shadow is suffering more
physically, he seems to maintain a stronger sense of than the Dreamreader, and
one senses that if they’re ever going to succeed in escaping from the Town, it
will be thanks to the Shadow.
I also read the next
fifty pages of Paula Rabinowitz’s Black
& White & Noir: America’s Pulp Modernism. At one point,
Rabinowitz notes that the “formula for noir—guilt, knowledge, desire, deceit,
vengeance, a past weighing heavily on the present, and a lone man, an outsider…provides
a frame for understanding African-American experience.” With this in mind, it
makes perfect sense that Rabinowitz spends a large part of this book discussing
black American culture. In a chapter that addresses film noir more directly
than any other part of the book, Rabinowitz develops an interesting angle on
the genre by studying the figure of the black maid in movies like Out of the Past and Imitation of Life in order to discuss why there can be no black
femmes fatales in film noir. And in a chapter that argues most directly for
influences of one kind or another, Rabinowitz writes a very useful chapter on
Richard Wright’s neglected novel The
Outsider, connecting it with Wright’s better-known work in terms of his
persistent fascination with black crime and the complex relation between actual
crimes and their fictional recreation in Wright’s work. My only complaint with
this latter chapter is that Rabinowitz misses a golden opportunity to discusses
Chester Himes’ noir-influenced social realism of the 1940s. She mentions If He Hollers Let Him Go only in passing
and completely ignores Lonely Crusade,
a novel with multiple connections to Wright’s oeuvre, especially in terms of
its representation of the American Communist Party.
I also watched the next episode of The Fall. The police corruption aspect of the plot is by far the
weakest aspect of the show. Once it’s been set in motion, the show doesn’t seem
to know what to do with it and I can’t help but feel that it’s there primarily
to take some of the focus off the plot involving Spector and Gibson, in the
sense of giving viewers a break. If the show does indeed come back for a second
season, it will be interesting to see how it handles this corruption plot. In
the meantime, Spector’s character is being developed in interesting ways. If
the first couple of episodes were at pains to emphasize how well he balances
his rigidly compartmentalized life, so that there is apparently no crossover
between his life as a family man and his life as a killer, we now see him start
to unravel, not just in the sense of bungling his latest attack, but also in
the sense that his compulsions are starting to destroy the edifice of normality
that he has worked so hard to create. The show is also very adroit in its
timing of certain scenes. When Spector angrily defends himself to his work
colleagues and claims that he has saved a woman from domestic violence, we are
struck not only by the crack in his carefully controlled façade, so that the
rage shows through momentarily in a non-homicidal context, but also by the lack
of irony in his claim to have done the right thing. In other words, while his
savior complex is inappropriate, he has in fact done the right thing (albeit
for the wrong reasons) and this is just one way that the show grants its killer
shades of grey.
No comments:
Post a Comment