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I'm the shadow you chase, I'm the sting when you breathe
Yesterday was unexpectedly rough. It began with a sash falling out of one of our living room windows so unprovoked and badly that we were eventually obliged to fasten a small board across it in order to keep it from repeating the trick and shattering this time, after which I reinjured my back dealing with an overspill of rat-chewed garbage in our driveway, a sentence no part of which I had any interest in ever typing. For assorted reasons I am lead-weight exhausted and had a nosebleed in the night, which just seems like overkill.
By way of consolation, the mail brought the copy I had finally ordered of Imogen Sara Smith's In Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond the City (2011), which I had been curious about since the last administration. I opened it to an early chapter and got sharp, close, back-to-back readings of Act of Violence (1948) and The Reckless Moment (1949), which delighted me. Smith reads noir as a genre more pessimistically by definition than I do, but she keys her definition to philosophy more than tropes and ties it unambiguously to shadow sides, of modernity, of morality, of the American dream. I am working on the recurring motif of not feeling as though all of my interests are useless just because somebody else picked up on the same details first. That said, I was so glad to see this statement at the head of the chapter on domestic noir:
Film noir did not always take the man's point of view, though the assumption that it did—along with a common prejudice against melodrama and women's movies—often leads films with female protagonists to be treated as less than fully noir. Movies with women at the center complicate the standard noir duality of good girl vs. bad girl, avaricious temptress vs. apron-wearing wife happily keeping her husband's supper warm. Films about men with dangerous jobs typically show them returning to loving, supportive and contented wives, but films that focus on domestic settings show women as vulnerable, locked in lifeless or life-endangering relationships and warped by the narrowness of their experiences.
—enhanced by this footnote to her discussion of Gun Crazy (1950):
The Production Code supported the motif of the femme fatale, since it allowed sinful impulses to be contained within the singular figure of a "bad woman" whose death would restore order and virtue. In other words, put the blame on Mame. Noir films, however, frequently undermine this misogynistic scapegoating by making it clear that the men who are led astray by temptresses were just waiting for a chance to go astray anyway; the women awaken a suppressed tendency toward antisocial rebellion and crime, the desire to "get away with something."
Come on, if actual critics with sufficient clout to record features for Criterion are saying this sort of thing and have been for a dozen years or more, why am I still running into this Manichean nonsense about femmes fatales at all? I hit it just the other night in a recent review from a high-profile outlet and didn't make it through the lede without vocally blowing a fuse. Just think how much more annoyed Smith must be every time she has to spell the facts out in small words. In any case, I am enjoying a sort of cherry-picking approach to the book where I am reading her thoughts on films I have seen, occasionally regretful at the absence of non-urban noirs that did not make the cut. (That's not shade-throwing: Strange Bargain (1949), for example, is so on the nose with its domestic-economic desperation, I would love to know what she makes of it.) The hang-ups I have about reading critically in fields I really care about are too old to have the inconsistent force that they do and so far this book is a pleasant way to chip at them.
By way of consolation, the mail brought the copy I had finally ordered of Imogen Sara Smith's In Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond the City (2011), which I had been curious about since the last administration. I opened it to an early chapter and got sharp, close, back-to-back readings of Act of Violence (1948) and The Reckless Moment (1949), which delighted me. Smith reads noir as a genre more pessimistically by definition than I do, but she keys her definition to philosophy more than tropes and ties it unambiguously to shadow sides, of modernity, of morality, of the American dream. I am working on the recurring motif of not feeling as though all of my interests are useless just because somebody else picked up on the same details first. That said, I was so glad to see this statement at the head of the chapter on domestic noir:
Film noir did not always take the man's point of view, though the assumption that it did—along with a common prejudice against melodrama and women's movies—often leads films with female protagonists to be treated as less than fully noir. Movies with women at the center complicate the standard noir duality of good girl vs. bad girl, avaricious temptress vs. apron-wearing wife happily keeping her husband's supper warm. Films about men with dangerous jobs typically show them returning to loving, supportive and contented wives, but films that focus on domestic settings show women as vulnerable, locked in lifeless or life-endangering relationships and warped by the narrowness of their experiences.
—enhanced by this footnote to her discussion of Gun Crazy (1950):
The Production Code supported the motif of the femme fatale, since it allowed sinful impulses to be contained within the singular figure of a "bad woman" whose death would restore order and virtue. In other words, put the blame on Mame. Noir films, however, frequently undermine this misogynistic scapegoating by making it clear that the men who are led astray by temptresses were just waiting for a chance to go astray anyway; the women awaken a suppressed tendency toward antisocial rebellion and crime, the desire to "get away with something."
Come on, if actual critics with sufficient clout to record features for Criterion are saying this sort of thing and have been for a dozen years or more, why am I still running into this Manichean nonsense about femmes fatales at all? I hit it just the other night in a recent review from a high-profile outlet and didn't make it through the lede without vocally blowing a fuse. Just think how much more annoyed Smith must be every time she has to spell the facts out in small words. In any case, I am enjoying a sort of cherry-picking approach to the book where I am reading her thoughts on films I have seen, occasionally regretful at the absence of non-urban noirs that did not make the cut. (That's not shade-throwing: Strange Bargain (1949), for example, is so on the nose with its domestic-economic desperation, I would love to know what she makes of it.) The hang-ups I have about reading critically in fields I really care about are too old to have the inconsistent force that they do and so far this book is a pleasant way to chip at them.
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Thank you!