The Half-Baked Cultural Detective
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The Contemporary Status of Noir in America - Postmodern or Retro?
In the past ten to fifteen years, there has been a resurgence of the noir
tradition or vocabulary in films. Dating back to the success of Blade Runner (1982)
and The Terminator (1984), a retro-noir or neo-noir period has blossomed in
America, spawning such recently successful films as Die Hard (1986), Lethal
Weapon (1987), Under Siege (1990), Pulp Fiction (1994), Get Shorty (1995), and
Dark City (1997). These films may be considered postmodern in the sense that
they flamboyantly deconstruct or parody the traditional film noir. Neo-noir movies
typically contain a morally ambivalent, borderline criminal protagonist, who is
actually a pale representation of the modern or postmodern noir hero. The neonoir “hero” is not a cultural detective, nor do the movies attempt any serious cultural
detection. Unlike Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, neo-noir has little or no
encroaching sense of postmodern noir that equally threatens the protagonist and
American society. Rather, the deeper noir threat is contained and becomes somewhat
playful, parodic, and ultimately superficial. While earlier noir has always been
entertaining on some level, it has a deeper purpose to shockingly tear away
superficial layering, revealing a horrific core of psychological and sociological
degeneracy.
Postmodern works introduce the added dimensions of hyper-reality and
self-reflexivity, where the distinction between the external social world is blurred
with the internal psychological world. In order to understand postmodern culture
and the pervasive spread of noir into hyper-reality, postmodern works should further
explore hyper-reality. Postmodem noir is more fitted to a surreal visual landscape
such as Las Vegas, or those significant dreamscapes portrayed in Michael
Rappaport’s Local Color (1979), Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), David
Lynch’s Eraserhead (\911) and Blue Velvet (\9^1). The hyper-reality of these films
allows the viewer to feel the dark isolation and perversions of its characters amidst
the eerie beauty of its hyper-real panorama. In a surreal postmodern landscape,
they question sociological and psychological “reality,” instead of merely entertaining
the viewer as neo-noir films tend to do.
In fiction, postmodern noir has developed past the writings of the new or
postmodern journalists and is crystallized in what is currently known as “cyber
punk” fiction. The “cyber-punk” literary genre can and perhaps should be interpreted
in the vocabulary of noir. Its protagonists employ the tough acerbic language of
the noir hero in their technological interface and subsequent isolation from the
empirical world. Furthennore, its protagonists may be the new fictional postmodem
noir heroes who are attempting a technological derangement of themselves out of
being human in the tradition of Raoul Duke in Fear in Loathing in Las Vegas, but
with technology, not drugs^
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was published in the early 1970’s, soon