Today I read the
next fifty pages of Hard-Boiled
Wonderland. In this section, the Calcutec and the Professor’s granddaughter
finally succeed in finding the Professor, who has retreated to his refuge in
order to avoid being kidnapped by either the Semiotecs or by the System, his
former employers. The Professor explains to the Calcutec in great detail
exactly what he’s done to the Calcutec’s brain, and why. We receive
confirmation not only that the Town is located in the Calcutec’s head, but also
that ‘the end of the world’ refers not to an apocalypse in the conventional
sense, but rather to the imminent shutdown of the Calcutec’s core
consciousness, a process that the Professor seems powerless to stop. This
information changes the reader’s views not only of the Hard-Boiled Wonderland,
but also of the town named the End of the World, which now takes on an even
more frankly fabulistic character. My favorite aspect of the novel so far is
the relative equanimity with which the Calcutec greets the news of his approaching
lack of consciousness. I also love the way in which the apocalyptic overtones
of this part of the narrative turn out to be both personal and mental rather
than planetary; perhaps this is the way, after all, that any one of us would
experience true apocalypse!
I also read the next
fifty pages of Paula Rabinowitz’s Black
& White & Noir: America’s Pulp Modernism. This section of
the book is titled ‘White: Work and Memory’ and in it Rabinowitz turns her
attention from African American culture to the noir-ish elements of white
culture during the 1930s and 1940s. In a chapter on ‘Rural Pulp and Documentary
Modernism,’ for example, Rabinowitz looks at the ways in which the impulses
that shaped the documentary photography of the period can also be found in pop
culture, including film noir. Even though this photography typically showed the
heartland rather than the cities one associates with noir, Rabinowitz argues
that one prepared the way for the other: “Documentary rhetoric in the 1930s
reworked the form into a vehicle for creating a national popular culture,
securing the city, or letting it languish, as grist for pulp fiction, a space
apart from the location of political truth, until Hollywood returned to the
city in the postwar years with film noir.” This argument is typical of the way
Rabinowitz uses the reader’s assumed familiarity with the conventions of film
noir to make arguments about less familiar materials.
I also watched the final episode of The Fall. The series left itself with a lot of work to do in this
final episode and it definitely felt rushed at points. In some respects,
however, this feeling of urgency worked well with the content of the episode.
For example, as Spector feels the walls starting to close in, he has to work
fast and efficiently to both destroy any evidence connecting him to the crimes
and to set up an escape route. That he neither cracks under the pressure nor
confesses but rather walks away not only leaves open the possibility of a
second season but also reflects his systematic and intelligent approach to
things—precisely the qualities that make him a good killer. With this nuanced
depiction of Spector’s personality in mind, I was disappointed that the show
chose to give him the standard ‘broken home and family’ background and that it
chose to personalize the relationship between him and Gibson. To some extent,
the face-off between Gibson and Spector was inevitable, not only because they
are the show’s two protagonists, but also because Spector is the ultimate
expression of the patriarchal culture that Gibson has been struggling against
throughout the series. The problem is that the final presentation of Spector as
Gibson’s antagonist individualizes him (he becomes the Moriarty to Gibson’s
Holmes, so to speak) and in doing so makes it more difficult to see him
precisely as the expression of a system. Is this individualization an inbuilt
limitation of the genre of television crime drama?
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