I dunno.
After reading a spate of recent books by some of the more
highly touted practitioners of the "new noir," I've noticed
something.
Not in all of them, mind you, but in enough of them to be
disturbed by what seems to be a trend. I hope not. Maybe I
just hit a bad string of books (and no, i don't want to name
them). But...
Many of these books have increasingly little to do with the
classic noir films and novels their authors all claim to
adore so much (but may have never actually read).
If the original noirs were usually about normal -- or at
least identifiable characters -- being drawn into the
darkness, that's long gone. So many of the recent noirs I've
read are populated by amoral sociopaths who are already
plenty dark.
In the original noirs, the main characters were usually just
more-or- less regular joes: migrant workers, insurance
salesmen, professors, news hawks, coffee shop waitresses.
B-girls, cut-rate private eyes, mildly bent cops, low-level
crooks. The sort of people you'd meet in a bar or on the
street. Or getting off a hay wagon. Just regular schmucks,
with more-or-less normal levels of intelligence. And their
fall is presented as tragedy, with one bad decision, one
moment of weakness, one fatal flaw serving as the catalyst
that ignites a world of hurt.
Nowadays, though, the characters are more often big shot
celebrities or serial killers or globetrotting hit men or
cannibal dope fiends or the like, over-the-top sociopathic
cartoons who seem to exist mostly in books. And these guys
are usually criminally clueless. These books aren't presented
as morality plays, but as clusterfucks of stupidity and
venality. These characters come pre-doomed and pre-damned;
these dumbfucks make one obviously bad choice after another
-- the sort of stupid choices that owe more to plot
machinations than anything.
What happens to them isn't some slow, inevitable tragic fall
from grace into the darkness of the abyss, but more a
turned-to-eleven amplification of atrocities and bad luck,
betrayals and misunderstandings and coincidences that, again,
only exist in fiction. Certainly, things are more graphic and
there's far more obscene language, violence and sex than in
the old noirs, which is to be expected, I guess. But so much
of it just seems so strained and self-conscious; like a bunch
of little boys trying to out-do each other. These neo-noirs
aren't presented as tragedy at all, but as comedy of the
cruelest sort, the "grown-up" equivalent of slipping a frog
down a girl's back.
And what's with all the torture and mutilation going on? Is
Cheyney secretly moonlighting as an acquisition editor?
Chainsaws! Woodchippers! Cruxifiction! You fed a guy's
testicles into a Waring blender? Fine, I'll do that, too, but
I'll toss in some Coors Light and then make my guy drink
it!
And then gerbil him to death.
I may be imagining this, but it seems to me that there's also
a growing contempt among the authors for their own
characters, a kind of mean-spiritedness that's creeping in --
a condescending sort of self-righteous authorial stance being
adapted that says "Yeah, they're all scumbags, so I make them
go through all kinds of shit. Cool, huh?"
The old noir characters, whatever their flaws, had souls of
some sort. Hell, the books themselves had soul, and you got
the sense that the authors -- and readers -- cared about
these characters on at least some level. The characters who
inhabit this cynical new breed of noir too often are
unlikable two-dimensional cardboard cutouts who exist only to
be put through their paces by an author with one hand down
his (or her) pants for the edification of his like-minded
buddies.
All the meanness and carnage of these soulless wallows comes
off more like pornography than noir, at least to me.
Makes me wonder who's getting off on it.
Kevin Burton Smith June 2007 Issue New fiction from Rogers,
Abbott, Bracken, Bradley, Ergang and Spiegelman http://www.thrillingdetective.com
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