At 03:28 AM 18/02/2005 -0800, you wrote:
>No, we didn't agree. The Doherty definition of
tough
>and colloquial stood hard and fast until Jack
Bludis
>nailed his infamous "hardboiled = tough" thesis to
the
>rara-avis door, introducing the heresy that you
no
>longer have to be colloquial to ascend to
hardboiled
>heaven.
Much as I admire Jack's brevity and thought, I still believe
Marlowe moved in a different world than many of his clients.
That was his purpose as knight errant, to save the damsels
from the dragons of their base nature and the low caste
criminals who would exploit them. And so we get the
colloquialisms. Moose Malloy, anybody?
>Personally, I agree with both you, Kerry, and
Mario,
>on the class issue. I think that hardboiled
is
>predominantly class-based, but if the rich guy
can
>pass through the eye of a needle, he can be
hardboiled
>too.
What I've said above doesn't make Chandler's work noir,
however. Or at least it doesn't qualify as looking at the
world from the bottom up, and I think that is a necessary
characteristic of noir. This is where you can have the
atmospherics, but not the essence. If noir means screwed, as
Jack so eloquently puts it, then it's hard to see the winners
in capitalist society as screwed. Of course, nobody wins
forever, but some seem to manage it until they die.
Anyway, what I started to say was that this is one area where
hard boiled and noir brush up against one another. Colloquial
and working-class are not the same things, though, as Mario
pointed out, one is often used to reveal the other. And a
working-class background does not rule out an interest in the
arts, for that matter.
Educate me some more, Kerry
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