At 04:32 PM 11/07/2002 -0500, you wrote:
>in the admittedly small amount of noir that i've
read,
No need for apology here- the breadth of this list humbles us
all (well, me mostly.)
>socialistic/communistic themes pop up every so
often.
>its a natural. a very common plot in noir involves
a
>crime committed by a poor person in a desperate hope
to
>escape a life of miserable poverty, such as
cain's
>_postman always rings twice_,
Yes, I can see the possibilities for economic metaphor in
Postman, but I think the won't take us too far toward
understanding the characters. I took the novel to be more
social commentary; the drifter as outsider not finding a
place in a somewhat surreal, disfunctional society. And I saw
his crimes as driven more by lust than economic
necessity.
>or anderson's _thieves
>like us_.
See, you've humbled me again.
> the plight of the working class in a
capi-
>talistic economy is a recurrent theme in marx's
_the
>communist manifesto_. superficially, there appears
to
>be a correlation. and you will indeed often read
noir
>dialogue where the poor guy complains about the
unfair-
>ness of it all.
>
>but here's the irony. marx's suggestion is that
the
>worker's standard of living could be raised by
sharing
>the wealth. but i don't see any noir characters
that
>would go for this slightly elevated standard.
they
>want a considerably larger slice of the pie, and
pre-
>ferably without the idea of actual "labor"
entering
>the picture at all. bowie, in _thieves_, at
first
>entertains the idea of becoming a simple farmer
with
>his share of a bank robbery, but with a couple
more
>robberies and all the easy money, he forgoes the
idea
>of actually working for a living.
Not too ironic. You could take that short-cut as metaphor for
the failure of many socialist governments. My response to
your original e-mail was not a defense of socialism. But a
system based upon the unrestricted rights of capital has it's
own failures, and the unrelenting pursuit of capital is as
prone to evil as any activity organized and carried out by
humans. There's still ample opportunity to write and
appreciate noir since the end of history.
Kerry
------------------------------------------------------
Literary events Calendar (South Ont.) http://www.lit-electric.com
The evil men do lives after them http://www.murderoutthere.com
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