Contrary to general opinion, Noir films do not just show the grimmer parts of American life.
Their particular effectiveness is to give you both the official version and then show you the unofficial reality.
It was a bit like public school and high school in my day : we got plenty of sunny uplift from our unaltered textbooks, '40s and '50s NFB films and present day CBC radio school broadcasts.
But just outside the classroom, TV's noir and sci fi horror movies , combined with tv newscasts, told us all was not really that rosy in the human animal kingdom.
Of course, learning in school and on television about good old Uncle Joe Stalin's Katyn Forest mass graves, Auschwitz, DDT, Thalidomide and Nuclear Fallout had already prepared us to trust film noir far more than any government official ....
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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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