(no subject)
Mar. 22nd, 2015 12:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionHers was another gravity. To see her was to fall. To touch her to land.
The eggcrating of the ocean's surface had at last collapsed, leaving styrofoam pulleys, then swellings and concavities so broad you had to skip your eyes across them to not find them flat.
She felt the phone buzzing in her pocket for almost a minute before realizing hers had been in her hand the whole time.
The stained glass painted the floor before them like a hopscotch ladder. He kept his feet off the lines. There were seven colors to cross. Red for Wednesday. He stopped on blue Tuesday and squinted to see what would happen. Not pausing, she ignored the lines, stepped partway into a parallel week then out of time altogether. He registered the blackness part for each leg then meet itself behind it. A dead asleep shark inhaling pale cyclones of fish. The ring of her heels hadn't changed. But the heels weren't in danger.
Had it really all come from a math error? The blood had reached the rug. Its edge fibers prickled, whether tugged at from below or sucking liquid upward. There seemed so much more blood than rug that one pictured the whole thing unmooring and silently swirling downstairs.
I fired then but it hardly mattered. The him that I needed to shoot was shut safe out of view behind twenty-four hours of past.
Only afterwards did she realize there'd been three sets of shoes by the door.
Their mouth sounds ran over then away from one another. Soon they'd be at it like blood-blinded prizefighters. I struck no match against my table's underside and lit a nonexistent cigarette with it. This might be a while.
He fell like the weight of the rain was what did it. Then his eyes met mine and have never remembered to stop.
If it was drugs it wouldn't clink and smell like metal, she pointed out. He reminded her few could know better than her there are all sorts of drugs.
What noir could ever pass the Bechdel test?
The eggcrating of the ocean's surface had at last collapsed, leaving styrofoam pulleys, then swellings and concavities so broad you had to skip your eyes across them to not find them flat.
She felt the phone buzzing in her pocket for almost a minute before realizing hers had been in her hand the whole time.
The stained glass painted the floor before them like a hopscotch ladder. He kept his feet off the lines. There were seven colors to cross. Red for Wednesday. He stopped on blue Tuesday and squinted to see what would happen. Not pausing, she ignored the lines, stepped partway into a parallel week then out of time altogether. He registered the blackness part for each leg then meet itself behind it. A dead asleep shark inhaling pale cyclones of fish. The ring of her heels hadn't changed. But the heels weren't in danger.
Had it really all come from a math error? The blood had reached the rug. Its edge fibers prickled, whether tugged at from below or sucking liquid upward. There seemed so much more blood than rug that one pictured the whole thing unmooring and silently swirling downstairs.
I fired then but it hardly mattered. The him that I needed to shoot was shut safe out of view behind twenty-four hours of past.
Only afterwards did she realize there'd been three sets of shoes by the door.
Their mouth sounds ran over then away from one another. Soon they'd be at it like blood-blinded prizefighters. I struck no match against my table's underside and lit a nonexistent cigarette with it. This might be a while.
He fell like the weight of the rain was what did it. Then his eyes met mine and have never remembered to stop.
If it was drugs it wouldn't clink and smell like metal, she pointed out. He reminded her few could know better than her there are all sorts of drugs.
What noir could ever pass the Bechdel test?
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no subject
Date: 2015-03-22 03:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-03-22 05:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-03-23 12:36 am (UTC)Noir that could pass the Bechdel test: Sarah Schulman's lesbian New York bohemia novels.
no subject
Date: 2015-03-23 01:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-03-23 09:29 am (UTC)relatedly, i like the statement wiki cites to nina power that it remains to be determined how often real life passes the bechdel test.
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Date: 2015-03-23 02:27 pm (UTC)But noir's own sort of unreality is what was interesting me, and how attempts to remove it haven't really worked. Mulholland Drive passes the test on a technicality, but also kind of doesn't, since the subtext of all the Rita and Betty scenes is that they're falling in some kind of love. The feminine is isolated in noir, and the other doings tend to be about attempts to capture or free it, and there's ambivalence about both operations. What's glorious about it can't seem to be removed from what's ridiculous and retrograde, which is part of why parodies of it have crowded out actual instances. And yet it persists inside that parody, like certain other genres do, presumably because we still respond seriously to some aspect of it.
no subject
Date: 2015-03-24 03:55 am (UTC)Also: On the second date with my new girlfriend Max, who is as androgynous as her name, we stopped by a video store to pick something up for the evening. The pierced woman clerk asked us what we liked and we came up blank, but somehow conversation turned to the Bechdel test. When I was the one who explained it to Max (reminded her, rather), the clerk immediately took us to Pride on the New Arrivals shelf. (Reader, we never watched it.)