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.