Word: noire
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...teenage angst bullshit has a body count!" And so, Veronica Sawyer, god-daughter of teenage troubles, instigated the rebirth of the noir movement. People in Black (PIBs), Veronica and J.D. do battle with the forces of popularity and color coordination amidst the perils of keggers, footballers, and homophobic cow-tippers. And the winner is: black and blue angst and no "dark horse" date to the prom...
...only much later that I learned to call these novels noir, or to think about them as part of an American tradition of mystery writing and film. At the time they dominated my inner life...
Eventually, of course, I outgrew this kind of pretending. But as someone who has been involved with noir for a while, I am surprised by the sudden resurgence of interest in noir film and fiction. The heyday of noir was in the late '40s and early '50s. Between then and the middle of the '90s, the genre was nearly ignored...
...last three to four years, noir has become culturally rehabilitated. The recent success of L.A. Confidential is one example: the re-release of Purple Noon (based on Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley, with hunky French actor Alain Delon) is another. In the world of books, James Ellroy's novels are selling well. Ross MacDonald's works have been reissued in a Vintage edition, and the Harvard Bookstore featured a compilation of crime novels of the '40s and '50s only a month or two ago. I am compelled to ask: why now? Why are people suddenly interested in noir...
Money, in its various forms, is one of the main subjects of noir: how people get it, use it, keep it, lose it, steal it, and above all kill for it. The world of noir is populated by gangsters, heiresses and thieves. The detective's work is usually motivated more by the promise of hard cash than anything else, though there are exceptions (notably Ellroy's haunted policemen in The Big Nowhere and The Black Dahlia). Now, as in the '40s when noir was at its peak, the economy is booming in an uprecedented way. Perhaps the consequences of money...