Murakami/Rabinowitz/Hobbit

Today I read the next fifty pages of Hard-Boiled Wonderland. As I said in my last post, there are a number of connecting points between the two parts of the novel, but they also diverge significantly. ‘Hard-Boiled Wonderland,’ as befits a narrative clearly influenced heavily by the crime fiction of Raymond Chandler, is much more action-driven than ‘The End of the World.’ In this section, the plot surrounding the Calcutec and the skull given to him by the scientist thickens considerably when some independent operators break into the Calcutec’s apartment and attempt to intimidate him. It also appears that the scientist has gone missing, although the scientist’s exact loyalties and aims are becoming increasingly obscure. The pace of ‘The End of the World,’ meanwhile, is much more sedate. At the urging of his shadow, from whom he was surgically separated upon his entry into the town, the Dreamreader attempts to make an exact map of the town. This proves to be much more difficult than he anticipates, partly because of the difficult terrain, and partly because of a pervasive air of threatening unreality that the Dreamreader feels as he moves about the town. His map-making clearly proceeds not only out of sense of obligation to his shadow but also out of the Dreamreader’s own desire to understand his new environment (and perhaps to find a way to escape from it). It also serves, of course, to give the reader a much more vivid sense of the setting of this part of the novel.

I also read the first fifty pages of Paula Rabinowitz’s 2002 book Black & White & Noir: America’s Pulp Modernism. http://www.cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-11481-3/. I remember the first time I read Michael Denning’s The Cultural Front being overwhelmed by the range of the work and the huge amount of research that must have gone into it. http://www.versobooks.com/books/523-523-the-cultural-front Although Rabinowitz’s book is more modest in scope, it reminds me of Denning in that it also has tremendous range in its examination of noir. It’s worth mentioning that this range could be a potential problem. On the whole, I have an issue with the way in which the definitional scope of the term noir keeps being expanded in an opportunistic and frequently unthinking manner, leading to a situation where the term becomes progressively depoliticized as it’s made over into a lifestyle term. Although Rabinowitz is expanding the term noir far beyond its conventional association with film noir, she is repoliticizing rather than depoliticizing the term by exploring what she calls the noir sensibility, which she defines as a form of social and political expression that seeks to uncover and come to terms with the pervasive and persistent role of violence in American history and culture (in terms of both slavery and class conflict). This is a very ambitious project and right off the bat two things stand out about her approach: 1. She spends relatively little time discussing film noir. 2. The book is hugely eclectic in terms of its subject matter. The reason for the lack of attention to film noir is simple: as Rabinowitz says, there’s been a huge amount of excellent critical work on that subject and she wants to do something different. As for the book’s eclecticism, Rabinowitz defends herself well from the charge of possible incoherence: “precisely because the book ranges among seemingly disparate fields of inquiry, it demonstrates the wild totality possible through interdisciplinary work.” This kind of argument could easily be self-serving but the delicious phrase “wild totality” describes exactly what Rabinowitz seems to have achieved in this book.

I also watched The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. Just as with Catching Fire, I watched this movie with my 13-year-old daughter, who loves Tolkien even more than she loves Catching Fire (thank goodness). She didn’t have any problems with the various changes that Peter Jackson made to the source material in this film and for the most part, I didn’t either (if you really care about that kind of thing, by the way, this article is a veritable nerd’s delight: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/The-Tolkien-Nerds-Guide-to-The-Hobbit-The-Desolation-of-Smaug--236566281.html). With that said, I did find the she-elf/dwarf romance narrative pretty ridiculous, and certainly the most egregious example of new elements being introduced with seemingly no other purpose than to stretch the running time enough to allow for a trilogy of films (though I suppose one could argue that it was done to generate a different audience for the film?). Desolation is much better than the first film in the series (no singing dwarves and more action scenes both represent a huge improvement) but ultimately this is a film with a lot of visual style and very little substance. It’s a shame that Guillermo del Toro didn’t stick with this project. I would love to have seen what he would have done with it. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/guillermo-del-toros-hobbit-what-401909