Murakami/Rabinowitz/TheBigHeat

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.