Brian Raftery spent a lot of his career writing for WIRED, and it shows. While the essay certainly captures the fact that neo-noir in the 90s found new niches (and a couple of new ways into old niches), the idea that there is a palpable parallel between noir in the 40s and neo-noir in the 90s is half-baked at best and pure poppycock at worst...
...the notion that the L.A. riots, the Oklahoma City bombing and the Gulf War (which was over in the equivalent of the blink of an eye compared to WWII, Viet Nam, and even Korea) were somehow haunting presences on the lives of Americans and /or Hollywood filmmakers is pop history at its worst.
And yet, a very bright young lady who likely doesn't know better (the Nitrate Diva) and an aging, well-dressed hipster who clearly should (need I mention a name at this point?) are eagerly joining Raftery's conga line to push this "new meme for old noir," as they look for some kind of angle to tie it all together, no matter how tenuous or simplistic the notions are. (Go back a few pages here on the board and revisit, if you choose to dare, the brief kerfuffle over Madeleine Stowe, and you'll see another queasy tie-in to this notion that there is somehow a link between the 40s and 90s.)
BTW, more evidence that certain folk still lurk here can be seen in the fact that Vince Keenan's pseudo-pitch for the Criterion neo-noir series (which we lauded a little while ago for taking us a good bit further into that ongoing cycle than what is happening this month at TCM--which only goes to the late 80s) can be translated as "well, we can't show those films, but we wrote about 'em in the e-zine."
And a certain well-dressed hipster was quick on the draw to retweet Vince's slightly whiny quasi-encomium for the more wide-ranging folks at the Criterion Channel.
At some point this weekend, we'll flip back through the marathon neo-noir process still stored in the back pages of the board to tie in the TCM and Criterion series to the incomplete and not-quite-as-granular-as-we'd-hoped-to-get it Top 300 neo-noir list that appears to be "Solomon's legacy" to us.
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