on 6/4/2025, 8:55 am
The newest edition of the NC e-zine, which appeared yesterday (roughly three months later than the official quarterly schedule would seem to prescribe...) might explain why he had uncharacteristically scant praise for Imogen Smith's showcase series. It is a wide-ranging but ultimately rather wan collection of essays, foregrounded by introductory comments from Eddie and Imogen that are much fiercer in tone than almost everything that follows. (Eddie has belatedly taken up the gauntlet in response to "Trump 2.0" that we had urged on him back in 2017, only to be told by him at that time that we were as deranged as the "Dear Leader." We do applaud Eddie's recent actions, however, and regret only his delay in getting there.)
It appears that the sources for new essays have atrophied as well, because Eddie himself jumped into the breach this time with not one, but two essays--the first a BIG HEAT-centric look at the underrated William P. McGivern, which could have been definitive if Eddie had decided to devote more space to McGivern's other worthy works that are dispensed with in the article via single paragraphs. (Not that anyone could suggest this as a realistic editing procedure--then, as now, there was no room for suggestions such as the one above that could be offered.)
Eddie's second essay is another of his advocacy exercises for a forgotten neo-noir : he's written several of these in the past, most notably for MIRACLE MILE (notable mostly for the tenuousness of his argument). With DESTROYER, Eddie is on much firmer ground, though his claim that the film is a masterpiece is overstated. (He elides several plot inconsistencies in order to bestow greatness on an over-ingenious screenplay, and the "look of recognition" that he hopes to find in Nicole Kidman's eyes regarding her actions ultimately being a suicide mission is going to prove permanently elusive because it just isn't there--we are only clued into the level of injury suffered by Kidman's character at the very end, which is another script "cheat" that must be counted against it.) It's a fine film, and Eddie is right to laud it, but perhaps he goes too far because there are certain types of films that "go too far" and are triggers for his own psyche.
With editor-in-chief Smith absent from the issue save for her waspish introductory remarks, Eddie's prose tone overwhelms almost everything else in the issue. Given that the cover of the e-zine showcases the recently departed David Lynch, one would figure that Zach Vasquez's article about him would lead things off, but it's simply not sufficiently up to snuff to do so. Vasquez gamely collects noir references and affixes them wherever he can to the procession of Lynch films he catalogues, but he runs out of fuel midway through his survey and limps to an indistinct conclusion.
Drew Smith has a much more intriguing premise in his attempt to tie two recent "changed identity" neo-noirs, THE SUBSTANCE and A DIFFERENT MAN, to the existential, paranoiac abyss explored in John Frankenheimer's SECONDS. The article begins with great promise but gets bogged down as it slogs through the details of the two 2024 films, ultimately not just burying the lede but letting it escape without being stated: the horror in the shock of existential recognition about the sinister nature of "masks" as related to personality that is still so powerful in SECONDS is blunted and inverted in the new films, a chilling admission that concerns for "loss of humanity" can be postponed or elided if we own our delusions. Smith flies high in negotiating some tricky verbal gymnastics, but he doesn't stick the landing.
From there, any ambition in the balance of the issue's material is mostly non-existent. Perhaps constrained by the "noir or not" format, the usually reliable Rachel Walther provides a one-note look at BEYOND THE FOREST, sidestepping a chance to vindicate the film on her own terms. Carsten Andresen papers over the many weaknesses in the well-meaning but ultimately over-hysterical (and overly long) recent Iranian film THE SEED OF THE SACRED FIG: we don't mean to discount the terrible ongoing conditions for women in Iran and elsewhere, but advocacy is overwhelming analysis here, a weakness in this essay similar to several others in the issue that actually do "inject" politics in too forceful a manner.
By contrast, the remaining features are exceptionally bland--Stefan Styrsky has a good idea with his survey of writers as characters in film noir, but the piece meanders and the characters grouped together don't really connect with each other. Nick Rossi is forced to pad his biographical essay on Joseph Calleia and it becomes tedious enough that some readers might not stick around for the payoff (his great work in TOUCH OF EVIL). The former editor would have solved this problem by commissioning a kaleidoscopic look at Welles' baroque masterwork from multiple writers and included an 800-1000 word essay on Calleia's performance that also contained a truncated bio (something akin to what you can find at Calleia's IMDB page). The book v. film essay succumbs to the always inherent danger of this department that Eddie stubbornly wants in the issue--superfluousness. (Doubly so here, since Eddie's essay on THE BIG HEAT is primarily the same format.)
Even designer Michael Kronenberg seems a little distracted here--he's usually more seamless in his layout.
It looks like this one was a real struggle to get into print; we now wait to see whether the next issue will appear at the standard interval. Possibly it's just due to the malaise so many are dealing with in the wake of the Trumpian "flooded zone," which is clearly a significant energy drain. We await further developments...
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