Blog Entry #7

Out of the four short stories included in part four of “Los Angeles Noir”, Scott Phillips’ “The Girl Who Kissed Barnaby Jones” is the best example of noir. The ambiguous character is introduced right away on the first page of the story. The way he talks about his female co-worker makes us believe instantly that he’s going to do something stupid for her. “I have a great big boner with Cherie’s name on it, and if she asked me to shovel shit I’d ask her how fast she needed it shoveled” (287).  That’s also when we figure that she is the femme fatal in the story. It is evident that he’s a sucker for her. When she calls him over from where she is staying, he doesn't even insist on knowing what she wants from him. As he drives to the address she has provided, the roads are lonely. Making the story more nerve-racking is the presence of the cop car on the same road as him, “the only moving vehicle in sight an LAPD cruise that crosses in front of me just before my right turn onto Via de la Paz” (288). The house is dark and he starts to feel uneasy about why she would be in this nice house. The room where she takes him to is erotic “with framed gold record and what looks like dark red velvet” (291). She knows he’s into her and she uses that to her advantage.  Though he does not end up helping her get rid of the almost dead body, the story still continues to be the most familiar to any noir story. With use of the femme fatal, the weak protagonist, the darkness, the murder, and the setting, it is certain that this is a work of noir.

The least associated with noir would be Diana Wagman’s “What You See”. This story is gruesomely corrupted for many reasons but especially with the use of the human head being in the case that’s being delivered, “A head, a human head, launched out of that suitcase like a sixty-yard pass into the air” (347). Corruption is written all over this story but there aren’t many characteristics of noir found besides that. The qualities are definitely nightmarish and cruel but other than that there’s nothing.  As a protagonist of noir he should be fighting between good and bad but he’s just a sad guy who has just lost his mother and is looking for a friend, “Then she died and I stayed in my room and she went to heaven” (331). This friend who he ends up calling his “girl” is no femme fatal. She doesn't drag him into doing anything; it’s more like he drags her into her death. 

Blog Entry #6

The neo-noir genre is all about finding one’s self. The protagonist or detective in the story is always in the hunt to find the truth about him and searching for things he has trouble understanding. But, because of many factors surrounding the protagonist, their journey only becomes difficult and confusing. Beside physical factors there can be psychological factors affecting the protagonist’s hunt.   According to Abrams, one of them is amnesia caused by a shocking event in their lives. There are three types of amnesia that the protagonist may be dealing with that he states in his article: “Retrograde amnesia, in which the detective cannot remember past events, or anterograde amnesia, in which he cannot form new memories, or lacunar amnesia, which involves the loss of memory about a particular event” (pg.10)  One of these is taken place in most neo-noir protagonist’s lives. In total contrast to the protagonist being introduced in neo-noir, the one in film-noir is much more slick and seems to have all the answers at the top of his head while having a corrupted side to him. In past neo-noir the protagonist struggles with spiritual beliefs, either with finding any evidence that god exists or with finding the way to the hell like in the movie The Ninth Gate (Roman Polanski, 1999). Abrams explains how the protagonist, Dean Corso (Johnny Depp), is on an investigation he got hired to do on some books supposedly written by Satin years ago. During his investigation, he gets caught up into the stories after finding out those books make one book and figures the devil has really chosen him to find the gate into hell. Abrams states the following: “For Corso has been “converted,” and he is now searching for his own demonic salvation—his own otherworldly dark power” (pg.11). Future neo-noir is all about future technology and advanced science. The protagonist must find himself with high technology in the way making things harder. One of the films used as an example in Abrams article for future neo-noir is Minority Report (Steven Spielberg, 2002). In this film the protagonist, John Anderton (Tom Cruise), “must go on the run, effectively “running from himself ”—indeed, from a system he helped create”(pg.14). The protagonist-being chief of a new form of law to prevent future attacks being seen in the present by drugged geniuses called Pre-crime- discovers that he will soon commit a crime. Off course, the present is between the past and the future, making present neo-noir the best one of all; not being too sci-fi but the protagonist still having issues with himself. Fight Club (David Fincher,1999) is great example for present neo-noir. The protagonist hates his usual life until he meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a reckless young man who is revealed at the end to be his own self. Tyler Durden reflects the bad side of him he always wanted to be and after finding out of the truth he wants to get rid of him, but how if it’s himself.  Abrams states: “But, with seemingly no options left, he goes for broke and shoots himself through the mouth, killing Tyler and somehow saving himself” (pg.18). The film examples by Abrams in his article Space, Time, and Subjectivity in Neo-Noir Cinema were useful for a reader to better understand the genre of neo-noir.