Sean T. Collins has written about comics and popular culture professionally since 2001 and on this very blog since 2003. He has written for Maxim, The Comics Journal, Stuff, Wizard, A&F Quarterly, Comic Book Resources, Giant, ToyFare, The Onion, The Comics Reporter and more. His comics have been published by Top Shelf, Partyka, and Family Style. He blogs here and at Robot 6.
(Provided that I deem them suitably fabulous, your name and message will be considered eligible for publication unless you specify otherwise.) Review Copies Welcome
* Yesterday, striking horror writers staged an "exorcism" outside Warner Bros. in attempt to drive the demons out of the studios. Good luck with that. I found this report interesting in that it's at the SciFi Channel's website, and SciFi is of course one of the networks affected by the strike.
* In the comments below, Matt Wiegle directed my attention to another tale of a hidden temporary autonomous zone, this one a little apartment built in a mall in Providence, Rhode Island. I'm sure there's a word for little secure private architectural spaces constructed in non-secure public areas, be they outside (treehouses, the jungle boat ride at Disney World) or inside (these secret apartments), but both fascinate me to no end.
* The other day I watched Rian Johnson's Brick, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt. It's a good movie, but what struck me the most is how Gordon-Levitt's performance gives lie to the notion that Josh Hartnett was doing anything but being a lousy actor in The Black Dahlia. Clearly it's possible to be a taciturn cipher pining after an idea of a person while surrounded by people more interesting than oneself and still convey recognizable human emotions, including the gulf of pain that would result from living like that.
* The other other day I watched Darkon, a documentary on live-action role playing directed by Andrew Neel and Luke Meyers. I think it's just about everything a documentary of this sort should be: fascinating, entertaining, sympathetic without shying away from the dysfunctional aspects of the lives of the participants, funny without being condescending. Even where it took the predicted route of casting "good guys" and "bad guys," the fact that these "roles" within the documentary framework reflected the adopted roles of the LARPers involved simultaneously undercut and provoked thought on the usual documentary sleight-of-hand. Finally, it just made you feel real good if any significant part of your life is dedicated to your own imagination. Check it out.
You're right about BRICK, of course, but is there anyone out there who really thinks Josh Hartnett is anything other than a lousy actor? Let alone in a league with Joseph Gordon-Levitt?
Good point about Harnett and JLG. Who would have guess from 3rd Rock that he'd be the only(?) actor of his generation to really nail the "noir" hero (in both Brick and The Lookout).
Jim--yeah, actually, at least as far as "The Black Dahlia" is concerned: The really excellent critic Matt Zoller Seitz has said as much, though I was too lazy to search through his blog to find where he said it (at least in part because he wrote about that movie a LOT and I didn't feel like wading through it all).
Jon--I haven't watched enough original noir to really comment on this authoritatively, but would you say being a noir hero entails being a patsy on some fundamental level? That's a tough row to hoe for an actor: the demands of a mystery plot necessitate that you're in every scene, holding your own with an endless succession of heavies and femme fatales, so if you're too much of a boring loser you just get drowned out.
Brick was kind of amazing. I didn't care for The Lookout as much, but JGL and the main bad guy (who I think is in Watchmen? Ozymandias?) were good. And the other bad guy who said maybe 5 words the whole movie? Looked a lot like Peter Stormare but wasn't? Creepy as fuck.
Sean - Yeah - being a patsy and also being passive. It's not that "passive" is something that's hard for actors to do, but it's hard for them to do without also being unreadable and/or boring. In Brick and The Lookout, JLG is a bit of a blank, but he's able to give off the illusion that there's all this deep stuff going on under the surface that these characters are unwilling or unable to express.
Jon: That's exactly right. Here's what interests me, then: Why is noir a man's-man genre if the male leads are suckers and pushovers? It's funny when the Dude is completely passive, just getting buffeted from one manipulator to the next, because he's a ridiculous stoner. But if it's William Holden or Fred MacMurray or Humphrey Bogart, why didn't that bother people more? (I've seen noir involving those guys and don't remember them being blanks, by the way, which is another flaw in the Hartnett argument.)
I don't think the noir protagonist has to be a blank or a pushover, or passive. Ultimately I think the only requirement is that he (she? any examples of this?) be fatally flawed in some respect, and that these flaws are exploited, successfully or unsuccessfully, by others with ill intentions. So the "patsy" definition works, but Patsy does not equal Passive. Is Robert Mitchum passive in OUT OF THE PAST? Tom Neal in DETOUR? Tyrone Power in NIGHTMARE ALLEY? Dana Andrews in LAURA? Orson Welles in THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI? Edmond O'Brien in D.O.A.? None of the above are passive, but all are flawed and exploited by others, and end up the patsy in some way or another.
JGL is anything but passive in BRICK, he's driven and passionate and intense. He keeps his emotions mostly bottled up, but he definitely drives the action. Others try to use him as a patsy, but succeed only in part, and however tragic the ending, he is his own man. THE LOOKOUT is a different story, and is arguably as much a character study of someone piecing his life back together after a devastating injury as it is a noir or crime thriller. JGL's passivity there is at least partly a function of his injury, and how it has left him rootless and disconnected from the world that he knew pre-injury. This disconnect and corresponding loneliness is his key, fatal flaw which is exploited by others (including the excellent Matthew Goode) for their own ends. But he ultimately is driven to act to try to save his friend (Jeff Daniels). Some of the supporting characters are more colorful, sure, but the protagonist isn't a total cipher or a boring, passive nothing. And to the extent he's overly restrained, that's the injury talking, the character study aspect of the story coming to the fore. When the "plot" kicks in, it's a different story, I think.
I haven't seen the Black Dahlia, so I'm unqualified to comment on it, but Hartnett has sucked in everything else I've seen him in.
Oh, and THE LOOKOUT also features Goode's WATCHMEN co-star Carla Gugino for about 5 minutes, so it has that going for it, which is nice.
Sean - I didn't mean to suggest that noir leads had to be blanks, just that that was JGL's (and not JLG - duh, I need to proofread my comments) particular method. I do think that, at least for the James Cain-style noir, the leading men tend to be passive or reactive. But even in The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade is less a man of action and more a guy that everyone is trying to use.
(Jim D. - Those guys all seem more acted upon than active. But I see what you're saying: reactive may be a better word for what I'm trying to get at).
I think noir isn't so much a "man's man" genre like the Western or what I call the Man's Adventure Story (No Country for Old Men, First Blood, Gunga Din, etc.) as it is a genre about men's men's nightmares, even if, some of the time, as in The Maltese Falcon, the hero wakes up before getting in too deep.
In that context, I think folks would have accepted something like Double Indemnity as a kind of conservative, cautionary tale: noir is what happens when you stray from the safety of law-abiding society or allow some element from outside of law-abiding society into your life. And because I just can't write about genre without taxonomizing, I'd split these stories up into (a) ones where the hero "crosses the line" because of a weakness (giving into their appetites) - Double Indemnity, Blood Simple, The Killing - and (b) ones where the hero "crosses the line" out of some kind of duty or set of values that is not necessarily in line with that of conventional society (The Maltese Falcon - Spade's sense of duty to his partner, The Long Goodbye - Marlowe's fundamental decency and belief in fair play, Brick - Brendan's feelings for Emily). In the case of type (b), these values provide the hero with the "way out" of the nightmare.
(Some of the major moves of neo-noir are to (1) suggest that the line between the criminal world and the "straight" world is an illusion (Chinatown) and (2), for type (b)s, call into question whether or not the hero's value system really will be an effective buffer against the nightmare (Brick)).
Jon - right on. I agree with everything you've said. Very astute! These days "noir" is a term carelessly applied to anything remotely gritty or crime-oriented, but the way you've characterized the key elements of the genre - that is, things necessary for it to really be noir, as opposed to just, say crime drama or action - is something I agree with completely.
No, you don't need to see The Black Dahlia. I promise.
And yes, she did. But I know from Phoebe Gloeckner that they've been working on it for YEARS, way back when I first interviewed Phoebe in fact. So it's not really bandwagon jumping. It's actually journalistic--here's the skinny:
I like him fine when he's playing contemporary, normal guys (as in Hollywood Homicide, The Faculty, Black Hawk Down or The Virgin Suicides): he's believable, relaxed, and does what he has to do. But I don't think he's great: I'm not going to go out of my way to see one of his movies (if he had starred in Fracture, for example, I would have passed).
I don't think he does "style" very well at all, though (a fault he shares with many other American actors of his generation), and he's also kind of boring as a camera subject, which is why his casting in Dahlia and Sin City doesn't make much sense to me.
I don't (completely) blame him for what he does (or rather doesn't do) in Dahlia: De Palma seems mostly uninterested in the characters or the actors.
Even though I thought The Black Dahlia was a lousy movie, I wasn't sorry I watched it. The design is gorgeous, there are two well-staged set pieces, and Mia Kirshner's performance is a knock-out - it's kind of like Naomi Watts's performance from Mulholland Drive in miniature.
Thanks for articulating something I've attempted to describe numerous times, with varying degrees of failure. I would add that I've always viewed the former as Noir and the latter as Hard-Boiled. Therefore I wouldn't consider Brick to be Noir.
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Comments (20)
You're right about BRICK, of course, but is there anyone out there who really thinks Josh Hartnett is anything other than a lousy actor? Let alone in a league with Joseph Gordon-Levitt?
Posted by jim d. | November 28, 2007 11:54 AM
Good point about Harnett and JLG. Who would have guess from 3rd Rock that he'd be the only(?) actor of his generation to really nail the "noir" hero (in both Brick and The Lookout).
Posted by Jon Hastings | November 28, 2007 11:55 AM
Jim--yeah, actually, at least as far as "The Black Dahlia" is concerned: The really excellent critic Matt Zoller Seitz has said as much, though I was too lazy to search through his blog to find where he said it (at least in part because he wrote about that movie a LOT and I didn't feel like wading through it all).
Jon--I haven't watched enough original noir to really comment on this authoritatively, but would you say being a noir hero entails being a patsy on some fundamental level? That's a tough row to hoe for an actor: the demands of a mystery plot necessitate that you're in every scene, holding your own with an endless succession of heavies and femme fatales, so if you're too much of a boring loser you just get drowned out.
Posted by Sean | November 28, 2007 12:13 PM
Brick was kind of amazing. I didn't care for The Lookout as much, but JGL and the main bad guy (who I think is in Watchmen? Ozymandias?) were good. And the other bad guy who said maybe 5 words the whole movie? Looked a lot like Peter Stormare but wasn't? Creepy as fuck.
Posted by Jim Treacher | November 28, 2007 12:36 PM
Adding to Netflix queue...
Posted by Sean | November 28, 2007 12:44 PM
P.S. BLADDAAAAOW
Posted by Jim Treacher | November 28, 2007 12:47 PM
Sean - Yeah - being a patsy and also being passive. It's not that "passive" is something that's hard for actors to do, but it's hard for them to do without also being unreadable and/or boring. In Brick and The Lookout, JLG is a bit of a blank, but he's able to give off the illusion that there's all this deep stuff going on under the surface that these characters are unwilling or unable to express.
Posted by Jon Hastings | November 28, 2007 4:28 PM
Jim: Yeah, that's about the size of it.
Jon: That's exactly right. Here's what interests me, then: Why is noir a man's-man genre if the male leads are suckers and pushovers? It's funny when the Dude is completely passive, just getting buffeted from one manipulator to the next, because he's a ridiculous stoner. But if it's William Holden or Fred MacMurray or Humphrey Bogart, why didn't that bother people more? (I've seen noir involving those guys and don't remember them being blanks, by the way, which is another flaw in the Hartnett argument.)
Posted by Sean | November 28, 2007 6:14 PM
If you like the secret living, this is absolutely going to flip your shit:
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/heritage/story/0,,2217212,00.html
Posted by Ken Lowery | November 28, 2007 11:40 PM
Linked it a couple posts ago, man. Thanks!
Posted by sean | November 29, 2007 8:51 AM
I don't think the noir protagonist has to be a blank or a pushover, or passive. Ultimately I think the only requirement is that he (she? any examples of this?) be fatally flawed in some respect, and that these flaws are exploited, successfully or unsuccessfully, by others with ill intentions. So the "patsy" definition works, but Patsy does not equal Passive. Is Robert Mitchum passive in OUT OF THE PAST? Tom Neal in DETOUR? Tyrone Power in NIGHTMARE ALLEY? Dana Andrews in LAURA? Orson Welles in THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI? Edmond O'Brien in D.O.A.? None of the above are passive, but all are flawed and exploited by others, and end up the patsy in some way or another.
JGL is anything but passive in BRICK, he's driven and passionate and intense. He keeps his emotions mostly bottled up, but he definitely drives the action. Others try to use him as a patsy, but succeed only in part, and however tragic the ending, he is his own man. THE LOOKOUT is a different story, and is arguably as much a character study of someone piecing his life back together after a devastating injury as it is a noir or crime thriller. JGL's passivity there is at least partly a function of his injury, and how it has left him rootless and disconnected from the world that he knew pre-injury. This disconnect and corresponding loneliness is his key, fatal flaw which is exploited by others (including the excellent Matthew Goode) for their own ends. But he ultimately is driven to act to try to save his friend (Jeff Daniels). Some of the supporting characters are more colorful, sure, but the protagonist isn't a total cipher or a boring, passive nothing. And to the extent he's overly restrained, that's the injury talking, the character study aspect of the story coming to the fore. When the "plot" kicks in, it's a different story, I think.
I haven't seen the Black Dahlia, so I'm unqualified to comment on it, but Hartnett has sucked in everything else I've seen him in.
Oh, and THE LOOKOUT also features Goode's WATCHMEN co-star Carla Gugino for about 5 minutes, so it has that going for it, which is nice.
Posted by jim d. | November 29, 2007 11:43 AM
Sean - I didn't mean to suggest that noir leads had to be blanks, just that that was JGL's (and not JLG - duh, I need to proofread my comments) particular method. I do think that, at least for the James Cain-style noir, the leading men tend to be passive or reactive. But even in The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade is less a man of action and more a guy that everyone is trying to use.
(Jim D. - Those guys all seem more acted upon than active. But I see what you're saying: reactive may be a better word for what I'm trying to get at).
I think noir isn't so much a "man's man" genre like the Western or what I call the Man's Adventure Story (No Country for Old Men, First Blood, Gunga Din, etc.) as it is a genre about men's men's nightmares, even if, some of the time, as in The Maltese Falcon, the hero wakes up before getting in too deep.
In that context, I think folks would have accepted something like Double Indemnity as a kind of conservative, cautionary tale: noir is what happens when you stray from the safety of law-abiding society or allow some element from outside of law-abiding society into your life. And because I just can't write about genre without taxonomizing, I'd split these stories up into (a) ones where the hero "crosses the line" because of a weakness (giving into their appetites) - Double Indemnity, Blood Simple, The Killing - and (b) ones where the hero "crosses the line" out of some kind of duty or set of values that is not necessarily in line with that of conventional society (The Maltese Falcon - Spade's sense of duty to his partner, The Long Goodbye - Marlowe's fundamental decency and belief in fair play, Brick - Brendan's feelings for Emily). In the case of type (b), these values provide the hero with the "way out" of the nightmare.
(Some of the major moves of neo-noir are to (1) suggest that the line between the criminal world and the "straight" world is an illusion (Chinatown) and (2), for type (b)s, call into question whether or not the hero's value system really will be an effective buffer against the nightmare (Brick)).
Posted by Jon Hastings | November 29, 2007 2:21 PM
Jon - right on. I agree with everything you've said. Very astute! These days "noir" is a term carelessly applied to anything remotely gritty or crime-oriented, but the way you've characterized the key elements of the genre - that is, things necessary for it to really be noir, as opposed to just, say crime drama or action - is something I agree with completely.
Posted by Jim D. | November 29, 2007 3:05 PM
Well, that took all of two seconds. Here's Matt Zoller Seitz on The Black Dahlia:
http://mattzollerseitz.blogspot.com/2006/09/all-is-loss-brian-depalmas-black.html
And here's his blogmate Keith Uhlich:
http://www.reverseshot.com/article/shot_black_dahlia
Both have good things to say about Hartnett.
And even better, here's none other than James Fucking Ellroy singing his praises to the heavens!
http://mattzollerseitz.blogspot.com/2006/01/f-gorgeous_15.html
Posted by Sean | November 29, 2007 3:51 PM
OK, so maybe I need to see it. I'm skeptical, but I've been surprised before, I guess...
Speaking of The Black Dahlia, didn't Mia Kirshner just write (or co-write) a graphic novel? I guess it's the "it" thing to do now...
Posted by jim d. | November 29, 2007 4:25 PM
No, you don't need to see The Black Dahlia. I promise.
And yes, she did. But I know from Phoebe Gloeckner that they've been working on it for YEARS, way back when I first interviewed Phoebe in fact. So it's not really bandwagon jumping. It's actually journalistic--here's the skinny:
http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6500578.html
Posted by Sean | November 29, 2007 5:05 PM
Re: Harnett -
I like him fine when he's playing contemporary, normal guys (as in Hollywood Homicide, The Faculty, Black Hawk Down or The Virgin Suicides): he's believable, relaxed, and does what he has to do. But I don't think he's great: I'm not going to go out of my way to see one of his movies (if he had starred in Fracture, for example, I would have passed).
I don't think he does "style" very well at all, though (a fault he shares with many other American actors of his generation), and he's also kind of boring as a camera subject, which is why his casting in Dahlia and Sin City doesn't make much sense to me.
I don't (completely) blame him for what he does (or rather doesn't do) in Dahlia: De Palma seems mostly uninterested in the characters or the actors.
Even though I thought The Black Dahlia was a lousy movie, I wasn't sorry I watched it. The design is gorgeous, there are two well-staged set pieces, and Mia Kirshner's performance is a knock-out - it's kind of like Naomi Watts's performance from Mulholland Drive in miniature.
Posted by Jon Hastings | November 29, 2007 5:17 PM
Sean - re: Mia Kirshner:
Collaborations with Phoebe Glockner and Joe Sacco? I am officially shutting up now.
Posted by jim d. | November 29, 2007 6:23 PM
Well, now I feel foolish. Sorry for the redundant linkage...
Posted by Ken Lowery | November 29, 2007 9:33 PM
Re: Jon Hasting's Noir split.
Thanks for articulating something I've attempted to describe numerous times, with varying degrees of failure. I would add that I've always viewed the former as Noir and the latter as Hard-Boiled. Therefore I wouldn't consider Brick to be Noir.
Posted by Steven | December 2, 2007 1:22 AM