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.
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timeasmymeasure
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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.