Neo Noir Now

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Noir is a genre of crime film or fiction characterized by cynicism, fatalism, and moral ambiguity. Use of the definition, interestingly, is on the rise. Bleak, sleazy settings. Hard-boiled. Violent. Suggestive of danger. Sexy. Mysterious.

Also, French for black.

CNN is noir. MSNBC. Twitter. Facebook. Network television commercials. Newspaper headlines. Two out of three billboards. We live in a noir now. Why? How the fuck did that happen? The product with the most advertising revenue behind it, the one that receives top billing across the board, the one that comes up a thousand times a day in a thousand different places, is fear. Fear is the name of the game.

Fear is also the word missing from the classical definitions of noir, and yet it figures hugely in every single noir film and novel. Strange, right? But the two go together in a way that’s so obvious that the writers of definitions failed to point it out. As ingredients go, it simple enough to understand why. Let’s take two products and compare them to get a handle on it.

Hair gel– Purified water, PVP, Propolene glycol, Carbomer 940, Triethanolamine, Polysorbate 20, Fragrance, etcetera.

Budweiser– Water, Barley Malt, Rice, Yeast, Hops.

Two very different products, the same main ingredient. The water component is immediately dismissed in an evaluation because its in everything. Its all the other ingredients that determine how the water presents itself.

Noir is bigger now than ever before. The definition is broadening, to include base ingredients. As it does, it’s picked up a new prefix of sorts. Neo. New. Neo Noir. Great big broad spectrum deep as a hole in space black, with all the juicy elements associated with it. Now the dead end, the character who never learns, the jaded mess of a hero, he or she is a little different too. It isn’t enough to paint that picture and be done with it anymore. Now, we want to understand those characters. Why? Because we can sympathize with them like never before. They aren’t so far away from us now. They’re our neighbors. Our friends. Us. You.

In the case of my characters, the have another commonality I like to the think does well in neo noir and daily life in general. I call it The Motivation Of The Two Edged Knife.

In the two edged knife, a character, like Deadbomb Bingo Ray for instance, will solve a vile, wicked, semi-insane problem, but the solution itself will be useful to achieve a further, obscure objective. Without ruining DBR with spoilers, the reversal of the primary burn in the novel (the vile, wicked, semi-insane problem in question) conducted by erstwhile shit heel hedge fund manager Tim Cantwell nets many positives for Ray, but in keeping with noir tradition, these positives would not be viewed as joyous cupcakes by the common man or woman. ‘Positive’ for Ray is different. In keeping with the noirish values of our time, they’re a little dark by the conventional standards of even a decade ago.

Knottspeed, the main anti-hero in Knottspeed, A Love Story, employs the two edged knife to great effect. For him, it is an act of contagion. He actually loans the other characters his knife, and it permanently alters their mentation. None of them are the same after he passes through their lives, and the changes don’t fit the cookie cutter definition of good, either.

In Grand Estuary Grand, the central character Baby Moon Gow also employs the two edged knife, but the idea has been evolving for me a writer. Gow does it in a natural way, as the impulse is ingrained in the root of his character and not a learned behavior. Every action adds momentum to his hidden agenda. Every solution has inside it the solution for an entirely different problem, often one that has yet to materialize.

Why is noir making a comeback? One so strong that the definition itself is changing?

“Newton’s three laws of motion are less a product of novel experiments than of the attempt to reinterpret well-known observations in terms of motions and interactions of primary neutral corpuscles”

― Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Same deal. Neo noir is literally right in front of us in the same way.

Are we looking to noir for something? Fear is the water ingredient of our culture. How do the characters in neo noir react? What is their water ingredient? They are fearless. So maybe we are looking for something. Dark times call for dark new models of behavior. Here we are. Neo Noir Now.