In a noir world you can't rely on justice -- since the
judicial system is corrupt -- so a strong protagonist will
mete it out himself. In which case it's called revenge. A
constant theme throughout history and likely to remain so,
I'd have thought.
Al
----- Original Message -----
From: Joy Matkowski
To:
rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, July 11, 2006 10:54 PM
Subject: Re: RARA-AVIS: Re: Spillane and misogyny
and revenge
You've shed some light, Kerry, on that box of
thirty 1950s Westerns I bought
for a dollar a couple of weeks ago. When I looked
at the cover blurbs,
nearly all seemed to have a revenge motif, a
"they didn't know who they were
messing with when they cheated [our protagonist]"
sort of plot line. I guess
I was expecting boks more along the lines of the
Lone Ranger, but not one of
them looked worth reading.
Is whatever is today's equivalent of this "men's
fiction" still based on
this revenge theme? Or was it peculiar to that
era? In either case, why? Now
there's a topic for a doctoral
dissertation.
Plus nearly all the cover art on those cowboy
books featured gaunt men.
I'm figuring that was prior to all those Charles
Atlas ads.
Joy
http://badattitudes.com/MT/archives/003979.html
Kerry J. Schooley explained:
> I'm not going to knock Spillane. I think his appeal
lies largely in his
> strength at creating revenge fantasies. The desire
for revenge is a very
> durable human emotion, and Spillane gets at it
directly, without a lot of
> self-justifying debate. You might say the book that
precedes the blow-away
> final act is all self-justification, but if that's
the case it's a
> one-sided debate. Real debate would just get in the
way of the emotion,
> which Spillane loads like the gun he fires in the
final scene. Like Jim
> said, Spillane knows how to manipulate readers'
emotions. The writing is
> to
> the purpose and I suspect The Mick's stories will
be read long after the
> political context of his yarns have
faded.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
RARA-AVIS home page: http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rara-avis-l/
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email
to:
rara-avis-l-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 11 Jul 2006 EDT