Clendon said:
> So let say for instance you were doing a production
of Hamlet set in gangland Chicago. (Gabriel Byrne for Hamlet
if you ask me.) Instead of the royal family of Denmark you
have a powerful mafia family. Instead of brother killing
brother, partner kills a partner, and marries the widow.
Instead of Hamlet's uncle ruling, his godfather.
> Now i don't think you can make it Hard Boiled
without also leaving out a lot or changing around. To be or
not to be is not HB.
> Would it not be noir though? Hamlet is fairly well
screwed. His father whom he loved is murdered and the man who
did it is in Hamlet's seat, and sleeping with his
mother.
> Hamlet's choices and his tendancy to keep putting
off, doom him in the end. If he had killed off the murderer
early, then he could have taken the throne and that would
have been that. By waiting and acting all funny, he inspired
two atempts on his life, the second of which succeeded. Not
to mention contributing to the suicide of Ophelia, a woman he
loved, by killing her father.
> I think clearly I don't get it. I happily await
enlightenment.
I agree that Hamlet is noir or noirish, and would add, isn't
Oedipus pretty damn screwed in Oedipus Rex? I really liked
the distinction Charles Ardai drew recently in speaking with
him privately after his fine B'con panel on noir. He said
that the Greeks felt their universe was determined by the
gods, and when a Greek tragedy suggests that the gods were
acting completely arbitrarily or unjustly, as in Oedipus Rex,
it created a noir universe. The same should apply to
Shakespeare, as in King Lear and Hamlet, and even going back
to Biblical literature, like the story of Job which suggest
an unjust God and a noirish universe. In this analysis, then,
noir is a subset of tragedy.
Best, Bruce
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