I've just started a book entitled Staying Up Much Too Late:
Edward Hopper's Nighthawks and the Dark Side of the American
Psyche, which purports to be about how the painting
Nighthawks is emblematic of the post-war sense of alienation
in the U.S. that manifested itself in film noir, hardboiled
crime fiction and the photos of Weegee. The author's point is
that, though the U.S. returned to a certain normalacy after
the war, there was a dark underbelly of despair and
alienation that is still with us toward.
Not an earth-shattering premise by any means, but he does
make some interesting points. He points out that the U.S.
lost it's optimism and dreams. The optism of "manifest
destiny" and the idea of building a utopia on a new continent
had been completely obliterated by the end of the depression
and the second world war.
A quote:
There's the small town of Jim Thompson's pulp novel, The
Killer Inside Me, where deputy sheriff Lou Ford spouts a
string of cliché¤ platitudes--"If we didn't have rain, we
wouldn't have rainbows."--but gets his kicks from torture and
killing, by, say, extinguishing a cigar in a beggar's
palm.
Jeff
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