Some time, somewhere along the line, I developed something of a dark side. I don't dress in black, or sulk, or find oblivion in substances, but I find that I gravitate toward "the dark side" of art. Not the grotesque per se, not dirty or even violent necessarily, but something that is thematically shadier than say my mother's tastes.
Growing up, my brother and I used to joke that if Angela Lansbury ever came to town, we’d leave. That is if her sleuth character, Jessica Fletcher ever crashed a party we were at, we would run away. Death follows that sweet little lady everywhere. Nobody is safe around her. There’s got to come a time when what friends and family she’s got left just discreetly banish her from their midst out of sheer self-preservation. And yet, for all the death chronicled in that series, I don't think anybody would call it dark.
Because it's not supposed to be. It adheres to what I’d call the classic mystery form, where a crime is committed and then experts draw upon their intellect and instincts (and sometimes incredibly expensive and sophisticated specialized tools) to explain it to the world. Everything was fine and then, for some reason, a murder occurs throwing order into chaos until it can be explained and the disruptive party identified and removed.
There’s an assumption that the normal way of things is a functional society where murder or crime in general are abnormalities, symptomatic of nothing beyond the actions themselves and our heroes locate and isolate the sickness and remove it so that society can return to normal. They're brain teasers essentially and there's nothing wrong with that.
The crime story is philosophically different. It tends to divide society into two camps – criminals and squares. Squares are comfortable with the status quo and have no impulse to juke it, while criminals or outlaws are treated as romantics, idealists or hedonists (demi-gods really) operating on a higher level of morality than the squares for whom laws were written.
The stories tend to be told from the point of view of the outlaw. Whatever the justification for their actions, (and if none is offered, then all the more so), we are along for the ride, to experience a freedom from the laws of morality as we experience freedom from the laws of gravity when we read Superman.
And then there is what I’m lamely going to refer to as noir. It’s a French word. It means "black". It can’t be reduced any further, and it has much less to do with style, (like film noir does), than theme. Here friends, is where I spend most of my time. Here the assumption is that everything is broken, that order is an illusion and peace a cruel mirage. Here the law is not a simple majority held view of how you should behave, but a straight jacket placed upon you to protect the world from your basic nature.
Those who shrug it off are doomed to destroy themselves and anything they love with their freedom.
It’s a collision course of appetite and fulfillment, where all is sacrificed in pursuit of a goal and upon attainment the object of desire consumes you. We know how each story ends as it begins. The how and the why don’t vary too much. It is the flip side to a mystery.
Where the mystery is a bed time story, putting us in a position of control and placing upon ourselves a righteousness and cool headed logic to aspire to, and a crime story is an opportunity to vicariously blow off some steam, the noir is a cautionary tale. In them we recognize our alternate selves and send them to their fate so that we might be spared. In them we assume our place at the bottom, subject to whim, all manor of lust, greed or pettiness and we move in the familiar steps of our own ceremonial death dance to a tune we pray we are not seduced by again.
I'm really not terribly interested in defining genre and establishing its rules, boundaries and themes, but I do like reading about it sometimes. I do enjoy reading a skillful dissection, but onlyafter, I've enjoyed the subject. I loved the book Dark City by Eddie Muller, (the Czar of Noir) and Barry Gifford's Out of the Past and (the out of print) The Devil Thumbs a Ride. Not out of print, but rare is Megan Abbott's Street Was Mine. And if you can spare a hundred bucks to buy your own copy, surely you could spare another for me.
