Noir, Tragedy and Other Dreary Bummers
- Submitted by: DavidCorbett
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- Category: English: Novels
- Date Submitted: 06/17/2011 09:09 AM
- Pages: 5
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Noir, Tragedy and Other Dreary Bummers
The term “noir ” has become so universally misused—like other vague descriptives such as “Freudian,” “post-modern,” and “cute”—that it’s virtually a cipher, obscuring more than it clarifies.
Ask three different people if a certain writer is “noir,” you’ll get three different answers. (Yes. No. Go away.) Is Charles Willeford “noir?” James Elroy? Lynne Cheney?
This is sloppy, it’s wrong, but mostly it’s annoying—especially when the marketing flacks at major publishing houses slather the term on a book jacket to scare off the pious scoutmasters, breathless virgins and hysteric spinsters whom the publisher fears will fall into palsied seizures in the bookstore aisles if they mistakenly crack the cover.
I speak, sadly, from experience.
If words, like people, can be known by the company they keep, then “noir” might benefit from a higher class of friends. You never seem to see Noir without his sidekicks Gritty, Brutal, Grim or the ever-faithful Uncompromising. Throw in Brooding, Dark and Relentless, you’ve got one mean set of dwarves.
And never, never, never be so simple as to believe that calling a book “noir” will boost its sales. One might as well just slap DEPRESSING! on the cover. The only thing conceivably worse than being labeled "noir" is to be considered "political."
I speak again, sadly, from experience. But I digress.
Getting back to our original question: What exactly is this thing called noir?
To answer these and other questions, I turned to Dark City by Eddie Muller—the “Czar of Noir.” I was particularly struck by his distillation of the noir protagonist’s philosophical dilemma: He can’t choose the world he lives in, only how he intends to live in it. This leaves out, of course, the question of rent.
In a way, this formulation calls to mind Sartre’s immortal, “Each of us gets the war he deserves.” Mention of Sartre in turn evokes existentialism, everybody’s favorite easy credit. I have sometimes...
The term “noir ” has become so universally misused—like other vague descriptives such as “Freudian,” “post-modern,” and “cute”—that it’s virtually a cipher, obscuring more than it clarifies.
Ask three different people if a certain writer is “noir,” you’ll get three different answers. (Yes. No. Go away.) Is Charles Willeford “noir?” James Elroy? Lynne Cheney?
This is sloppy, it’s wrong, but mostly it’s annoying—especially when the marketing flacks at major publishing houses slather the term on a book jacket to scare off the pious scoutmasters, breathless virgins and hysteric spinsters whom the publisher fears will fall into palsied seizures in the bookstore aisles if they mistakenly crack the cover.
I speak, sadly, from experience.
If words, like people, can be known by the company they keep, then “noir” might benefit from a higher class of friends. You never seem to see Noir without his sidekicks Gritty, Brutal, Grim or the ever-faithful Uncompromising. Throw in Brooding, Dark and Relentless, you’ve got one mean set of dwarves.
And never, never, never be so simple as to believe that calling a book “noir” will boost its sales. One might as well just slap DEPRESSING! on the cover. The only thing conceivably worse than being labeled "noir" is to be considered "political."
I speak again, sadly, from experience. But I digress.
Getting back to our original question: What exactly is this thing called noir?
To answer these and other questions, I turned to Dark City by Eddie Muller—the “Czar of Noir.” I was particularly struck by his distillation of the noir protagonist’s philosophical dilemma: He can’t choose the world he lives in, only how he intends to live in it. This leaves out, of course, the question of rent.
In a way, this formulation calls to mind Sartre’s immortal, “Each of us gets the war he deserves.” Mention of Sartre in turn evokes existentialism, everybody’s favorite easy credit. I have sometimes...