Noir, The Blog

Out of the Past: Neo-noir as a More Complex Genre Than its Predecessor When I first cracked the spine of Devil in a Blue Dress , on the car ride home through beautiful, harvest season Indiana, already exasperated by my siblings bickering and my mother’s endless stories, I was expecting yet another cookie-cutter hard-boiled novel. I anticipated a witty, cynical private eye, enlisted to solve a crime, somehow mixed up with a beautiful yet dangerous woman, and all this overshadowed by a sense of impending doom. However, from the very first sentence I knew this would not be like previous noirs. Told from the perspective of an African American man, this is the first and most obvious difference between this and other noir novels. Despite this difference, at first glance Devil in a Blue Dress may simply appear to be an offshoot of the popular noir genre, with just this slight variation to set it apart. It has the typical femme fatale character, a number of seedy establishments, and a man ...

          I remember my first my first day of school junior year. Third period was starting, and I remember walking into my first psychology class and feeling so excited to learn about a subject that grasped my interests. Every day in the class I learned something new that I continue to reference to this day. Nothing we learned disinterested me, but I definitely have my favorites. One of those being the chapter on personality disorders. There are ten different personality disorders, and I found every single one fascinating. While we learned about them during class, I started to quietly observe my friends to see if I could diagnose any of them with a personality disorder. While I have stopped diagnosing my friends, sometimes when I watch movies with characters that seem to have sort of mental disorder I will jot down some of their personality characteristics and try to psychologically diagnose them. After watching Taxi Driver for class, I t...

Jonah Jerabek Professor Sinowitz Noir Film and Fiction 11/21/17 Existentialist Vince              Boom. A small Vietnamese building is replaced by a roaring ball of fire. Corpses litter the ground, each with a conical straw halo. “Well done, hawks, well done,” Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore gazes down upon his handiwork. Nausea burrows deeply into my stomach before sliding up my spinal cord, twisting my thoughts and blurring my mind. I never could endure “Apocalypse Now”. Sliding my headphones in, I hurdle onto my twin bed, forcing wrinkles into the cobalt comforter. JD McPherson’s “A Gentle Awakening” sooths my twisted stomach and mind. “The people on the city streets, The farmers on the plains, All walking in the lucid dream, While the sky is set aflame” The comforter remains rumpled.             I am an eighteen-year-old man. I should love “Apocalypse Now”. Ther...