After reading my July 13 review of the Spider-Noir series on Prime Video, AS wrote in to say that he was surprised I even gave it a glance. His assumption, of course, was that I would consider noir “beneath” me.
Actually, over the 20 years that the Mules have been meeting, we have read several noir detective and crime/cop books. And I think all the Mules agree with me (or they don’t want to argue with me) that some of the noir writers are among the best prose stylists of the 20th century.
The genre itself accepts the fact that to be human is to be capable of anything… from incredible kindness and self-sacrifice to incredible evil. Not just men in general, but each individual man. And that, you may remember, is my primary criteria for giving a book or movie a high rating on my “vertical” scale.
For me, the big three are Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Jim Thompson. I do have a somewhat negative prejudice against most genre fiction, but I make a big exception for those three. With their mastery of plot, character, language, tone, and structure, they are every bit as good as Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Crane. (Not Nabokov. He’s the Shakespeare of the American novelists.)
I’m serious!
Try Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me. His view of humanity is even darker than Hammett’s or Chandler’s. None of his characters seem even remotely redeemable!
A few quotes from the book:
* “When life attains a crisis, man’s focus narrows.”
* “A weed is a plant out of place. Let me repeat that. A weed is a plant out of place. I find a hollyhock in my cornfield, and it’s a weed. I find it in my yard, and it’s a flower.”
* “If the Good Lord made a mistake in us people it was in making us want to live when we’ve got the least excuse for it.”
* “You’ve got no time at all, but it seems like you’ve got forever. You’ve got nothing to do, but it seems like you’ve got everything. You make coffee and smoke a few cigarettes; and the hands of the clock have gone crazy on you. They haven’t moved hardly, they’ve hardly budged out of the place you last saw them, but they’ve measured off a half? two-thirds? of your life. You’ve got forever, but that’s no time at all. You’ve got forever; and somehow you can’t do much with it. You’ve got forever; and it’s a mile wide and an inch deep and full of alligators.”
* “There are things that have to be forgotten if you want to go on living.”
Social Issues
The Conspiracy Theory That Turned Out to Be Right
This is the sort of arrogant ignorance that was displayed by so many during the days of COVID. Everything Chris Cuomo says in this old clip has been proven wrong.
What’s really disturbing is not the arrogance or the ignorance. We all suffer from that occasionally. But when you are a journalist – a reporter of news to the public – you have some obligation to investigate the truth. And when the reporting is on a worldwide event that turns out to have been caused by an incredibly irresponsible risk taken by a man and an agency whose job was to protect the public’s health, and when that man and that agency (as well as many more) were not questioned by the press, it is a major problem and quite conceivably a major crime.
Cuomo is a smart guy. Had he done even a modest amount of questioning of authority and/or critical thinking, he would not have been so dismissive.
Worth Considering
Three Quick Bites
An Interesting Analysis of Current Events by Victor Davis Hanson
In this video, historian Victor Davis Hanson explains why he says the world is becoming more pro-American than it has been in years.
Witness one of the most dramatic encounters in the African wilderness!
Has there been a story written or a movie made that exceeds this in dramatic tension? Or has a truer, more existential resolution? The script is obviously AI, and probably the narration too. But it’s much better than most AI-generated “documentary” clips out there right now. In six months, AI will have advanced to a degree that it may not be detectable.
They Looked So Innocent…
Watching new acts succeed is what is so appealing about America’s Got Talent. Sometimes excitement rises to a frenzy when there is a considerable difference between what the performer looks capable of doing and what they deliver. This is one such case: four Filipino sisters that looked so cute and vulnerable standing on stage, taking their talent contest show to the big leagues.
Worth Considering
Postscript: Living in the Future
This is true. And this is Japan.
