How do you wake up from a non-dream?

And last night I dreamed of a wrecked, bruised, storm-skied city, tangled in post-apocalyptic piles of rubble and scavenging reconstruction, that was also in some capacity the afterlife or the otherworld. I guess it's time to rewatch Cocteau's Orphée (1950), but jeez.

1. Courtesy of a friend who is not on Dreamwidth: Lizabeth Scott photographed by Allan Grant in 1947. That would have been the year of Desert Fury, a Technicolor noir I still need to see. It co-stars Mary Astor and is legendarily queer.

2. Courtesy of spatch: the annotated Rude Food. Not safe for work. Possibly not safe if you ever want to eat some of these foodstuffs again.

2.5. Chaser, also courtesy of Rob: that one time a columnist talked trash about Marilyn Monroe and she responded by rocking a potato sack.

3. I realize I may be falling into the same nostalgia-measuring trap described in this cogent article about Gamergate, gatekeeping, and Ernest Cline's Ready Player One (2011), but is there any reason that Cline's Armada (2015), which according to this article "takes the premise that the video game industry is actually a secret government strategy meant to train civilians to fight against an alien invasion—so when the aliens come, gamers are the human race's best hope of survival," is not considered merely a ripoff of The Last Starfighter (1984)? Without even Robert Preston?

4. I know David Niven was a real person, and I know Milt Wolff was a real person, but please understand why I say that this photo of Milt Wolff looks like a David Niven character.

5. I went back to check on that overfishing-awareness project that photographs actors and fish and found Imelda Staunton and a blonde ray and suddenly all I could hear was a line from the first production of Gypsy I ever saw:



"What will I do when big hats go out of style?"

Guess I'm not a swimmer—I'm the type of girl you can drag down

I'm very sorry, Paste magazine, but your article on "The 100 Best Film Noirs of All Time" is exactly the sort of thing that frustrates me about film noir criticism. It's smart and nuanced—

See, noir didn't play by any rules, not really. We think of noirs as urban stories, but that's not always the case—for every L.A. and N.Y.C.-set saga, there's a small, heartland tragedy. We think of a never-ending, rain-soaked night—sunlight replaced with neon and nocturnal reflections, the optical trickery of mirrors and shadows—but in contrast, the days of noir scorched its characters. We admire its heavily stylized approach—exaggerated camera angles, tension-crafting mise-en-scène, flashbacks, deep focus and trademark shadows—but also its neo-realist and documentary-like experiments. We talk about noir plotting and tropes, but in fact it drew liberally from the gangster pics of the Depression/Prohibition era, crime procedurals, heist movies, horror films (again, the German Expressionist influence), romantic melodrama, Gothic thrillers, tawdry B-movies, and that other quintessentially American breed, the Western. Though its blueprints were everywhere, noir forged its own language, its own playbook, its own universe . . . Noir is a state of mind, of subconscious, a fever dream, an existential crisis.

—in exactly the same measure as it's teeth-grindingly obtuse, falling right back on the same stereotypes it was taking such pains to complicate a minute before:

You couldn't say the same for the ladies, what with that Madonna-whore complex running rampant through noir's icky Freudian gender dynamics. Unless they were a good, subservient girl, women were brazen, sexual bitches, more often than not smarter, and more powerful, than the guys—at least at the outset. Extrapolated to the off-screen world, the logic was, solve the crime, solve the problem. Put the femme fatale in her place, show the girl—the world—who's boss. Take it all back. The nightmare was made wish-fulfillment. It's not overreaching to read all of this from the 300 or so titles generally considered the classic noir canon. Remember: The folks at the Hollywood Production Code couldn't handle it either, mandating changes in service of propriety, i.e., social conformity. (Had Will Hays, Joseph Breen, and their censoring kind not been around, noir would've been an even more nihilistic realm.)

It is damn too overreaching! Look, please, I know I can't be the only person in eight decades who has seen women in noir with agency. I have printed evidence that viewers who are not me have noticed that some noirs just flat-out star women. (I have seen noirs where if there were women I didn't notice. We can argue about what that means for representation, but at the least it means they were not functioning Jordan Peterson-style as symbols of chaos to be overcome.) I have even encountered the suggestion that they come in more flavors than bitch/reward. For God's sake, just yesterday, here's Imogen Sara Smith on three noir roles by Ida Lupino, including a beautiful description of the character Lupino wrote herself in Private Hell 36 (1954), and she doesn't once claim that Lupino atypically transcends the inescapable misogyny of noir, nor does she try to twist the plots around to prove that Lupino is really either a compliant sweetheart or Satan. But I keep running into the other view, presented as casually and unthinkingly as something everyone already knows and agrees on, and at this point I feel toward it as I feel toward Russian troll farm misinformation. Paste briefly escapes its blinkers with Mildred Pierce (1945), but crashes them right back on to categorize Barbara Stanwyck in Clash by Night (1952)—a world-wounded woman returned in midlife to her fishing hometown of Monterey, trying to reinvent herself with a stable marriage while falling into the self-destructive orbit of a caustic misogynist with whom she has blow-the-bloody-doors-off sexual chemistry—as a femme fatale. I feel like a stuck record. Just stop. Anyway, if your list of hundred best film noirs (and neo-noirs) includes Obsession (1949) but not The Reckless Moment (1949), I have nothing to say to you.