Noir actually doesn't really talk - much less frankly : the Breen Office put full stop to that idea.
But its small scale and relatively personal dramas among downmarket nobodies are free to cast a highly suggestive and subversive mood - and they do - in (Sam) spades.
Their mood clearly suggests that corruption, double-crossing and deception extends through all aspects of human life - not just in the lower ranks where dis-honour among working class thieves has long been taken for granted by the upper crust.
That the big double cross actually extends upwards to (or is that 'extends downwards from' ?) the sunny, sacred, servants of the people top of national society.
And beyond. Far beyond.
With Nazi Germany's abrupt 'Pact with' and then 'Attack upon' communist Russia being perhaps the ultimate double cross - particularly to the left wing writers, directors and movie critics who responded by creating Film Noir in the years immediately following Germany's sneak attack upon its new ally.
When, in turn , mainstream Hollywood's newest best buds, Russia and America, also suddenly fell out with heated criminations, it only further fuelled Film Noir's downbeat deconstruction of the overly sunny "official version" of reality ...
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
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