This will be a lovely livish blog of my personal nightmare. My class in the "Just Barely Accredited Master's Program" wants its final paper today as opposed to the traditional Sunday night. This is a thing I discovered while idly clicking through the bulletin board of the class and dismissing all my classmates as intellectual inferiors and hacks of the worst kind.
Which may well be true, but I bet most of them knew when the final paper is due and were prepared for it. I suppose there are different
levels of hackery and I have found mine. So, to make the whole stupid thing interesting I'm going to blog it as I go... This begins with preparations.I had breakfast on the way to my desk - you see that lovely photo up there on the left.
I also brought my books (I'm a big thinker) including my notes.
And, of course a brain can't work without some fuel, so I brought a couple of fuel pods... And the smart scientist never burns fuel without realizing their will be byproducts. And since the room my desk is in (I am at work not home) has no access to any
porcelain conveniences I have brought my own fuel-discharge system or, as others might call it, a cup.Now off to the writing of something.
Siiiiiiiiigh...
1:08 I have a Thesis!
So, hopping, skipping and jumping over things, I have this thesis:
Jim Thompson’s “The Killer Inside” me represents a final interiorization of the historical progress of the hard-boiled noir’s detective from the masculine heroics of Sam Spade to the over the top testosterone laced hysteria of Mike Hammer (and leading later to the ineffective J.J. Gittes). In Thompson’s lead character, Lou Ford we see a detective hero who sits not only at the violent end of this continuum, but also has swallowed whole the schizophrenia inherent in the detectives’ role in a society that is increasingly fractured and evil
1:32 -- I have over 600 words and no more coffee
Time to move to the beer I suppose. Cranking my notes into the thing I now have over 600 words, if not a real direction on the thing. It looks like this:
Jim Thompson’s “The Killer Inside” me represents a final interiorization of the historical progress of the hard-boiled noir’s detective from the masculine heroics of Sam Spade to the over the top testosterone laced hysteria of Mike Hammer (and leading later to the ineffective J.J. Gittes). In Thompson’s lead character, Lou Ford we see a detective hero who sits not only at the violent end of this continuum, but also has swallowed whole the schizophrenia inherent in the detectives’ role in a society that is increasingly fractured and evil.
While arguments as to all the specific details of what constitutes film noir may never be settled, there is some general agreement on its outlines. Paul Schrader sums noir up as “lighting, darker characters more corrupt and the tone more helpless.” (Schrader 53) While this is intended to be descriptive of film noir, it is equally useful in assessing literature for its usefulness as a source for film noir, and this is the general description which I will use as I both assess the extent to which Lou Ford is the culmination of detective noir and a suitable subject for it. I will largely discard what Schrader calls the ”stylististics” of noir because they are largely cinematogrpahical artifices added by director, cinematographers and German immigrants(!). To the extent that I do mention them I will be pointing out areas in which the novel would lend itself easily to a noir treatment on film.
My first task is to demonstrate that “The Killer Inside Me” is in fact a noir piece. Durgnant exhaustively (in both senses of the word) takes Schrader’s general approach and slices noir into eleven sub genres. Of these sub-genres, “The Killer Inside Me” neatly fits nine: Social Criticism; Gangsterism; Hero on the run; Private eyes and adventures; Middle class murder; Portraits and doubles; Sexual pathology; Psychopathia, and; Guiginol. The only two sub-genres which do not apply to “The Killer Inside Me” are the ‘hostages to fortune’ and ‘blacks and red’ sub-genres which are primarily political in nature and thus inapplicable.
Lou Ford is the first person narrator of “The Killer Inside Me” and being so he assumes the perogatives given to the narrator in a film noir. He is our point of view and he is the judge (and in this case the jury) of all actions in the novel. Ford initially seems like a reliable narrator, though it is often clear that he is not completely accurate in his assessments, his narration sees straight ahead enough. Some facts are established quickly. Lou has “the sickness,” an appetite for rough, even murderous sex, and this sickness caused him to molest a three year old girl when he was only fourteen himself.
The essential absurdism of the entire world (In the Ford worldview) is revealed in an anecdote at the end of the book which is recounted by lawyer and possible hallucination Bill Bob Walker. Walker tells the story of an abortionist whom he had once defended. In the course of his abortions the doctor had introduced peritonitis to his patients, thus ensuring they would die in agony. Walker explains that the doctor had a younger brother
Who was “unfinished,” a premature born monstrosity as the result of an attempted late-pregnancy abortion. He saw that terrible half-child die in agony for years. He never recovered from the experience, and neither did the women he aborted … Insane? Well, the only legal definition we have for insanity is the condition which necessitates the confinement of a person. So, since he hadn’t been confined when he killed those women, I recon he was sane.” (Thompson 182)
This passage is key in several ways. First
1:52 - First use of the styrofoam porcelain
and up to 800 words..
2:25 - 1,500 words reached.. first beer opened.
It has been flowing pretty well.. a bit of interlaced plagiraism here and there. ;-) and some substantial quoting and we may have a paper developing. Interestingly, it is veering towards a psychological analysis. Even though Ford regularly argues that fate and society are the hands that guide, they seem to guide through psychological events. This would be a nice paper to expand for my Capstone....
The words are like this now ---
“A weed is a plant out of place” (Thompson 183)
Jim Thompson’s “The Killer Inside” me represents a final interiorization and almost inversion of the historical progress of the hard-boiled noir’s detective from the masculine heroics of Sam Spade to the over the top testosterone laced hysteria of Mike Hammer (and leading later to the ineffective J.J. Gittes). In Thompson’s lead character, Lou Ford we see a detective hero who sits not only at the violent end of this continuum, but also has swallowed whole the schizophrenia inherent in the detectives’ role in a society that is increasingly fractured and evil. This society, largely through psychological pressure, insinuates itself into Ford and ruins him and all who come into contact with him. In return, Ford despises society in general and while he appears a solid citizen on the outside (with one or two more perceptive citizens seeing through him, perhaps more than he recognizes) he is in fact completely rotten on the inside. In fact, as Ford tells it, everyone is rotten on the inside, merely playing the game in any way they can.
While arguments as to all the specific details of what constitutes film noir may never be settled, there is some general agreement on its outlines. Paul Schrader sums noir up as “lighting, darker characters more corrupt and the tone more helpless.” (Schrader 53) While this is intended to be descriptive of film noir, it is equally useful in assessing literature for its usefulness as a source for film noir, and this is the general description which I will use as I both assess the extent to which Lou Ford is the culmination of detective noir and a suitable subject for it. I will largely discard what Schrader calls the ”stylististics” of noir because they are largely cinematogrpahical artifices added by director, cinematographers and German immigrants(!). To the extent that I do mention them I will be pointing out areas in which the novel would lend itself easily to a noir treatment on film.
My first task is to demonstrate that “The Killer Inside Me” is in fact a noir piece. Durgnant exhaustively (in both senses of the word) takes Schrader’s general approach and slices noir into eleven sub genres. Of these sub-genres, “The Killer Inside Me” neatly fits nine: Social Criticism; Gangsterism; Hero on the run; Private eyes and adventures; Middle class murder; Portraits and doubles; Sexual pathology; Psychopathia, and; Guiginol. The only two sub-genres which do not apply to “The Killer Inside Me” are the ‘hostages to fortune’ and ‘blacks and red’ sub-genres which are primarily political in nature and thus inapplicable.
Lou Ford is the first person narrator of “The Killer Inside Me” and being so he assumes the perogatives given to the narrator in a film noir. He is our point of view and he is the judge (and in this case the jury) of all actions in the novel. Ford initially seems like a reliable narrator, though it is often clear that he is not completely accurate in his assessments, his narration sees straight ahead enough. Some facts are established quickly. Lou has “the sickness,” an appetite for rough, even murderous sex, and this sickness caused him to molest a three year old girl when he was only fourteen himself. Lou’s MD father persuades his other son (adopted) to take the blame for this crime, sterilizes Lou, persuades Lou to stay in his small Texas town, and gets him a job as a sheriff. Lou is trapped in a small and stupid town on which he gets revenge by playing the crashing bore, burying people under the weight of his large stock of idiotic platitudes and common sayings. After an emblematic epsisode. Lou reflects that he had been “draggin ‘em in by the feet, but I couldn’t hold ‘em (his platitudes) back. Striking at people that way is almost as good as the other, the real way.” (Thompson 9) This is a clever inversion of the traditional “wise-cracking” noir detective whose verbal ability is noted for invective and insult (Even the neo-noir and ineffective J.J. Gittes has this skill, at one point explaining his damaged nose as the result of an annoying detectives’ wife crossing her legs too quickly
This limited-strike approach helps Lou keep himself under wraps until the arrival of a protsitute causes the wraps come off in murderous fashion.
Lou is, as the traditional noir detective is, in opposition to society.
The essential absurdism of the entire world (In the Ford worldview) is revealed in an anecdote at the end of the book which is recounted by lawyer and possible hallucination Bill Bob Walker. Walker tells the story of an abortionist whom he had once defended. In the course of his abortions the doctor had introduced peritonitis to his patients, thus ensuring they would die in agony. Walker explains that the doctor had a younger brother
Who was “unfinished,” a premature born monstrosity as the result of an attempted late-pregnancy abortion. He saw that terrible half-child die in agony for years. He never recovered from the experience, and neither did the women he aborted … Insane? Well, the only legal definition we have for insanity is the condition which necessitates the confinement of a person. So, since he hadn’t been confined when he killed those women, I recon he was sane.” (Thompson 182)
This passage is key in several ways. First it suggests an experiental (and certainly psychological) pathway to character. This is key because it provides a point of access for society, and Ford’s hatred of it, to literally “get inside” him. Lou’s MD father, a rich, intellectual, and successful man
This experience is given by the hands of a much larger force, however, than a mere abortionist or MD father. Prior to murdering his young friend Johnnie, Lou philosophizes, “how can a man ever really know anything? We’re living in a funny world kid a peculiar civilization. The police are playing crooks in it, and the crooks are doing police duty. The politicians are preachers, and the preachers are politicians. The tax collectors collect for themselves. The Bad People want us to have more dough, and the Good people are fighting to keep it from us”. (Thompson 93) This is precisely the world in which the noir detective lives, the difference in Ford is that this world also lives within him and guides his actions. Ford later summarizes, “that’s all any of us ever are; what we have to be.” (Thompson 143) The social determinism is thick here and Ford argues that it chooses us, not we it. Just after perhaps his “worst” murder, the killing of his fiancée, Ford frames a bum and says, “he hadn’t done it at all. But he could have done it.” Essentially, any of us could find ourselves in the position Ford was in. We may propose, but fate and society dispose.
The final section of “The Killer Inside” me is a harrowing trip through Lou’s disintegrating mind. The narration becomes uncertain and almost literally psychotic. Lou’s presentation of Billy Boy Walker is extremely unlikely. This high-powered and successful lawyer speaks in florid exaggerations, ‘Have you torn out his tongue? Have you roasted his poor broken body over slow fires? … Are you too weak to cry out? Be brave, my poor fellow.” His physical description is equally unlikely and comes off as a stock noir description of a bad guy, “He was short and fat and pot-bellied; and a couple of buttons were off his shirt and his belly button was showing. He was wearing a baggy old black suit and red suspenders; and he had a big floppy black hat sitting kind of crooked on his head.” This is a description that might have come out of the many short and odd characters in “Kiss Me Deadly.”
This suspect description comes short on the heels of the hallucinatory passages which have immediately preceded it, which are full of aural and visual hallucinations of the past These passages are insane montages, something like a German Expressionism of the interior. As a filmic matter one could easily envision these passages shot in the manner that “Sudden Fear” presented Myra’s ‘pre-visioning’ of her murder-scheme – with chiaroscuro inflected layers of film.
Ford finishes his narrative with a final shot a society and how it treats people. Ford hopes that “our kind” will get “another chance in the Next Place. Our kind. Us people .. all of us that started the game with a crooked cue, that wanted so much and go so loittle, that meant so good and did so bad.” (Thompson 188) Thompson even goes on to list his own murder victims as among this group of people. By doing this Ford explicitly puts himself in their group. He does not see himself as a murderer, rather he sees himself as a victim. Although he has done quite a great deal of plotting and killing, Ford sees himself as nothing more than a tool of forces much greater than himself.
3:21 - Interupted and up to 2,000 words.. first beer almost gone.
Of course that's a 24 ounce beer, so this isn't an admission that should be held against my hairy-chested manliness. ;-) The writing continues to go well and I wish I had that extra day I thought I had. This might be a bit rough. There is a whole class-related psycho-sexual thing in here that won't fit in my paper. All the sexual women in this book (Helene and Joyce for sure, perhaps not Amy?) are using their sexuality to break class boundaries... and they get punished. In some ways this is quite traditional...
I got a call from O - he was out drinking with us last night and regaled us with stories of strip bars and his nearly mythical endowment. He got so drunk he wasn't sure he had saved these stories til after the boss left. He had. We swapped work-related animadversions, and then I got back to the paper. Which now looks like this:
“A weed is a plant out of place” (Thompson 183)4:08 - 2500 words (da minimum)
Jim Thompson’s “The Killer Inside” me represents a final interiorization and almost inversion of the historical progress of the hard-boiled noir’s detective from the masculine heroics of Sam Spade to the over the top testosterone laced hysteria of Mike Hammer (and leading later to the ineffective J.J. Gittes). In Thompson’s lead character, Lou Ford we see a detective hero who sits not only at the violent end of this continuum, but also has swallowed whole the schizophrenia inherent in the detectives’ role in a society that is increasingly fractured and evil. This society, largely through psychological pressure, insinuates itself into Ford and ruins him and all who come into contact with him. In return, Ford despises society in general and while he appears a solid citizen on the outside (with one or two more perceptive citizens seeing through him, perhaps more than he recognizes) he is in fact completely rotten on the inside. In fact, as Ford tells it, everyone is rotten on the inside, merely playing the game in any way they can.
While arguments as to all the specific details of what constitutes film noir may never be settled, there is some general agreement on its outlines. Paul Schrader sums noir up as “lighting, darker characters more corrupt and the tone more helpless.” (Schrader 53) While this is intended to be descriptive of film noir, it is equally useful in assessing literature for its usefulness as a source for film noir, and this is the general description which I will use as I both assess the extent to which Lou Ford is the culmination of detective noir and a suitable subject for it. I will largely discard what Schrader calls the ”stylististics” of noir because they are largely cinematographical artifices added by director, cinematographers and German immigrants(!). To the extent that I do mention them I will be pointing out areas in which the novel would lend itself easily to a noir treatment on film.
My first task is to demonstrate that “The Killer Inside Me” is in fact a noir piece. Durgnant exhaustively (in both senses of the word) takes Schrader’s general approach and slices noir into eleven sub genres. Of these sub-genres, “The Killer Inside Me” neatly fits nine: Social Criticism; Gangsterism; Hero on the run; Private eyes and adventures; Middle class murder; Portraits and doubles; Sexual pathology; Psychopathia, and; Guiginol. The only two sub-genres which do not apply to “The Killer Inside Me” are the ‘hostages to fortune’ and ‘blacks and red’ sub-genres which are primarily political in nature and thus inapplicable.
Lou Ford is the first person narrator of “The Killer Inside Me” and being so he assumes the perogatives given to the narrator in a film noir. He is our point of view and he is the judge (and in this case the jury) of all actions in the novel. Ford initially seems like a reliable narrator, though it is often clear that he is not completely accurate in his assessments, his narration sees straight ahead enough. Some facts are established quickly. Lou has “the sickness,” an appetite for rough, even murderous sex, and this sickness caused him to molest a three year old girl when he was only fourteen himself. Lou’s MD father persuades his other son (adopted) to take the blame for this crime, sterilizes Lou, persuades Lou to stay in his small Texas town, and gets him a job as a sheriff. Lou is trapped in a small and stupid town on which he gets revenge by playing the crashing bore, burying people under the weight of his large stock of idiotic platitudes and common sayings. After an emblematic epsisode. Lou reflects that he had been “draggin ‘em in by the feet, but I couldn’t hold ‘em (his platitudes) back. Striking at people that way is almost as good as the other, the real way.” (Thompson 9) This is a clever inversion of the traditional “wise-cracking” noir detective whose verbal ability is noted for invective and insult (Even the neo-noir and ineffective J.J. Gittes has this skill, at one point explaining his damaged nose as the result of an annoying detectives’ wife crossing her legs too quickly)
This limited-strike approach helps Lou keep himself under wraps until the arrival of a prostitute causes the wraps come off in murderous fashion. And once the wraps are off they are well off and Lou takes the traditional noirish mistrust of women to an entirely new level. Phillip Marlowe may have alternately loved and hated Vivian Sternwood and eventually left here (depending on whether you read or watch the work); Sam Spade may have abandoned Iva Archer and turned Brigid O'Shaughnessy in to the police; but Ford goes nuclear.
Lou Ford’s entire sexual career is also one of violence and it is entirely devoted to damaging and then killing any female who is unlucky enough to be sexually attractive to him. This is perhaps the most troubling aspect of the novel, all the rest of the violence notwithstanding. Ford’s stance on women is created early when he shares a sado-masochistic relationship with the housekeeper his father is also sleeping with and beating. This is a truly bizarre relationship which the housekeeper initiates and likes. Helene likes to be beaten, “Oh, I’m tired, You just hit me …. you’ll like it, darling. All the big boys do it.” (Thompson 84). When Ford comes upon the picture which reminds him of all this, we hear a description that includes a very noirish set of crisscrosses and unusual fraiming, “she was looking through a crotch, all right, But it was her own. She was on her knees, pering between them, And those crisscross blurs on her thighs weren’t the result of age. They were scars.” (Thompson 83)
Lou is, as the traditional noir detective is, in opposition to society.
One interesting difference between Lou Ford and other noir detectives is location. Most noir detectives are located near bright lights or big cities while Ford, who is in many ways the most modern man of the noir detectives, lives in a town that might charitably be called a hick-town. Ford, in fact, has never even left the county he was born in – he is the ultimate local in a town of locals. Everyone is involved with everyone else (in the entire town, not just the plot) and there really are no secrets. People often believe they have secrets but they really don’t. Ford thinks he has fooled the entire town, but it is clear he has not. Joseph Rothman is on to him from the start, noting that Ford has, “a good act but it’s easy to overdo.” (Thompson 23). Even the “big” secret of the plot, that Joyce Lakeland is not dead, is obvious: Ford knows it, as Bob all but admits it to him, but Ford willfully refuses to see it.
The hick nature of Ford’s surroundings are in contrast to Ford himself. He is, in many ways, cosmopolitan (again, he internalizes the larger issues of noir – the big world is inside of him, not around him). Ford reads five languages and says, “I could understand ‘em all. I’d just picked ‘em up with Dad’s help, just like I’d picked up some higher mathematics and physical chemistry and half a dozen other subjects.” (Thompson 25)
The essential absurdism of the entire world (In the Ford worldview) is revealed in an anecdote at the end of the book which is recounted by lawyer and possible hallucination Bill Bob Walker. Walker tells the story of an abortionist whom he had once defended. In the course of his abortions the doctor had introduced peritonitis to his patients, thus ensuring they would die in agony. Walker explains that the doctor had a younger brother
Who was “unfinished,” a premature born monstrosity as the result of an attempted late-pregnancy abortion. He saw that terrible half-child die in agony for years. He never recovered from the experience, and neither did the women he aborted … Insane? Well, the only legal definition we have for insanity is the condition which necessitates the confinement of a person. So, since he hadn’t been confined when he killed those women, I recon he was sane.” (Thompson 182)
This passage is key in several ways. First it suggests an experiental (and certainly psychological) pathway to character. This is key because it provides a point of access for society, and Ford’s hatred of it, to literally “get inside” him. Lou’s MD father, a rich, intellectual, and successful man
This experience is given by the hands of a much larger force, however, than a mere abortionist or MD father. Prior to murdering his young friend Johnnie, Lou philosophizes, “how can a man ever really know anything? We’re living in a funny world kid a peculiar civilization. The police are playing crooks in it, and the crooks are doing police duty. The politicians are preachers, and the preachers are politicians. The tax collectors collect for themselves. The Bad People want us to have more dough, and the Good people are fighting to keep it from us”. (Thompson 93) This is precisely the world in which the noir detective lives, the difference in Ford is that this world also lives within him and guides his actions. Ford later summarizes, “that’s all any of us ever are; what we have to be.” (Thompson 143) The social determinism is thick here and Ford argues that it chooses us, not we it. Just after perhaps his “worst” murder, the killing of his fiancée, Ford frames a bum and says, “he hadn’t done it at all. But he could have done it.” Essentially, any of us could find ourselves in the position Ford was in. We may propose, but fate and society dispose.
The final section of “The Killer Inside” me is a harrowing trip through Lou’s disintegrating mind. The narration becomes uncertain and almost literally psychotic. Lou’s presentation of Billy Boy Walker is extremely unlikely. This high-powered and successful lawyer speaks in florid exaggerations, ‘Have you torn out his tongue? Have you roasted his poor broken body over slow fires? … Are you too weak to cry out? Be brave, my poor fellow.” His physical description is equally unlikely and comes off as a stock noir description of a bad guy, “He was short and fat and pot-bellied; and a couple of buttons were off his shirt and his belly button was showing. He was wearing a baggy old black suit and red suspenders; and he had a big floppy black hat sitting kind of crooked on his head.” This is a description that might have come out of the many short and odd characters in “Kiss Me Deadly.”
This suspect description comes short on the heels of the hallucinatory passages which have immediately preceded it, which are full of aural and visual hallucinations of the past These passages are insane montages, something like a German Expressionism of the interior. As a filmic matter one could easily envision these passages shot in the manner that “Sudden Fear” presented Myra’s ‘pre-visioning’ of her murder-scheme – with chiaroscuro inflected layers of film.
Ford finishes his narrative with a final shot a society and how it treats people. Ford hopes that “our kind” will get “another chance in the Next Place. Our kind. Us people .. all of us that started the game with a crooked cue, that wanted so much and go so loittle, that meant so good and did so bad.” (Thompson 188) Thompson even goes on to list his own murder victims as among this group of people. By doing this Ford explicitly puts himself in their group. He does not see himself as a murderer, rather he sees himself as a victim. Although he has done quite a great deal of plotting and killing, Ford sees himself as nothing more than a tool of forces much greater than himself.
WORKS CITED
Gehring, Wes. D. American Dark Comedy: Beyond Satire. Greenwood Press. Westport CT 1996
So now it's time to do some formatting and print it out for a first cut for sense and sensibility. Haven't even opened that second beer yet. What a loser I am. ;-) Took a short break to answer some stuff on the discussion board.. don't want to lose that .05% of the grade remaining over there.
So.. as it continues to develop...
“A weed is a plant out of place” (Thompson 183)
Jim Thompson’s “The Killer Inside” me represents a final interiorization and almost inversion of the historical progress of the hard-boiled noir’s detective from the masculine heroics of Sam Spade to the over the top testosterone laced hysteria of Mike Hammer (and leading later to the ineffective J.J. Gittes). In Thompson’s lead character, Lou Ford we see a detective hero who sits not only at the violent end of this continuum, but also has swallowed whole the schizophrenia inherent in the detectives’ role in a society that is increasingly fractured and evil. This society, largely through psychological pressure, insinuates itself into Ford and ruins him and all who come into contact with him. In return, Ford despises society in general and while he appears a solid citizen on the outside (with one or two more perceptive citizens seeing through him, perhaps more than he recognizes) he is in fact completely rotten on the inside. In fact, as Ford tells it, everyone is rotten on the inside, merely playing the game in any way they can.
While arguments as to all the specific details of what constitutes film noir may never be settled, there is some general agreement on its outlines. Paul Schrader sums noir up as “lighting, darker characters more corrupt and the tone more helpless.” (Schrader 53) While this is intended to be descriptive of film noir, it is equally useful in assessing literature for its usefulness as a source for film noir, and this is the general description which I will use as I both assess the extent to which Lou Ford is the culmination of detective noir and a suitable subject for it. I will largely discard what Schrader calls the ”stylististics” of noir because they are largely cinematographical artifices added by director, cinematographers and German immigrants(!). To the extent that I do mention them I will be pointing out areas in which the novel would lend itself easily to a noir treatment on film.
My first task is to demonstrate that “The Killer Inside Me” is in fact a noir piece. Durgnant exhaustively (in both senses of the word) takes Schrader’s general approach and slices noir into eleven sub genres. Of these sub-genres, “The Killer Inside Me” neatly fits nine: Social Criticism; Gangsterism; Hero on the run; Private eyes and adventures; Middle class murder; Portraits and doubles; Sexual pathology; Psychopathia, and; Guiginol. The only two sub-genres which do not apply to “The Killer Inside Me” are the ‘hostages to fortune’ and ‘blacks and red’ sub-genres which are primarily political in nature and thus inapplicable.
Lou Ford is the first person narrator of “The Killer Inside Me” and being so he assumes the perogatives given to the narrator in a film noir. He is our point of view and he is the judge (and in this case the jury) of all actions in the novel. Ford initially seems like a reliable narrator, though it is often clear that he is not completely accurate in his assessments, his narration sees straight ahead enough. Some facts are established quickly. Lou has “the sickness,” an appetite for rough, even murderous sex, and this sickness caused him to molest a three year old girl when he was only fourteen himself. Lou’s MD father persuades his other son (adopted) to take the blame for this crime, sterilizes Lou, persuades Lou to stay in his small Texas town, and gets him a job as a sheriff. Lou is trapped in a small and stupid town on which he gets revenge by playing the crashing bore, burying people under the weight of his large stock of idiotic platitudes and common sayings. After an emblematic epsisode. Lou reflects that he had been “draggin ‘em in by the feet, but I couldn’t hold ‘em (his platitudes) back. Striking at people that way is almost as good as the other, the real way.” (Thompson 9) This is a clever inversion of the traditional “wise-cracking” noir detective whose verbal ability is noted for invective and insult (Even the neo-noir and ineffective J.J. Gittes has this skill, at one point explaining his damaged nose as the result of an annoying detectives’ wife crossing her legs too quickly)
This limited-strike approach helps Lou keep himself under wraps until the arrival of a prostitute causes the wraps come off in murderous fashion. And once the wraps are off they are well off and Lou takes the traditional noirish mistrust of women to an entirely new level. Phillip Marlowe may have alternately loved and hated Vivian Sternwood and eventually left here (depending on whether you read or watch the work); Sam Spade may have abandoned Iva Archer and turned Brigid O'Shaughnessy in to the police; but Ford goes nuclear.
Lou Ford’s entire sexual career is also one of violence and it is entirely devoted to damaging and then killing any female who is unlucky enough to be sexually attractive to him. This is perhaps the most troubling aspect of the novel, all the rest of the violence notwithstanding. Ford’s stance on women is created early when he shares a sado-masochistic relationship with the housekeeper his father is also sleeping with and beating. This is a truly bizarre relationship which the housekeeper initiates and likes. Helene likes to be beaten, “Oh, I’m tired, You just hit me …. you’ll like it, darling. All the big boys do it.” (Thompson 84). When Ford comes upon the picture which reminds him of all this, we hear a description that includes a very noirish set of crisscrosses and unusual fraiming, “she was looking through a crotch, all right, But it was her own. She was on her knees, pering between them, And those crisscross blurs on her thighs weren’t the result of age. They were scars.” (Thompson 83)
Lou is, as the traditional noir detective is, in opposition to society and as other noir detectives, is not shy to say it, at least to himself.. In “The Killer Inside Me” this can manifest itself in unusual ways. Ford is downright protective of the downtrodden, priding himself on never having hurt any prisoners. In fact, he sees himself on the same side as the stoned Mexican that he semi tussles with, “Maybe I figured subconsciously that the prisoners and I were on the same side.” (Thompson 33). This admission has at least two roles. First, it quite traditionally places Ford among other, particularly later, noir detectives like Mike Hammer – Ford recognizes that he is a criminal. But it has a second meaning that is more important – Ford is not only explicitly to a criminal, but also to a prisoner. Ford understands that society has him just as barred in as a stoned worker.
One interesting difference between Lou Ford and other noir detectives is location. Most noir detectives are located near bright lights or big cities while Ford, who is in many ways the most modern man of the noir detectives, lives in a town that might charitably be called a hick-town. Ford, in fact, has never even left the county he was born in – he is the ultimate local in a town of locals. Everyone is involved with everyone else (in the entire town, not just the plot) and there really are no secrets. People often believe they have secrets but they really don’t. Ford thinks he has fooled the entire town, but it is clear he has not. Joseph Rothman is on to him from the start, noting that Ford has, “a good act but it’s easy to overdo.” (Thompson 23). Even the “big” secret of the plot, that Joyce Lakeland is not dead, is obvious: Ford knows it, as Bob all but admits it to him, but Ford willfully refuses to see it.
The hick nature of Ford’s surroundings are in contrast to Ford himself. He is, in many ways, cosmopolitan (again, he internalizes the larger issues of noir – the big world is inside of him, not around him). Ford reads five languages and says, “I could understand ‘em all. I’d just picked ‘em up with Dad’s help, just like I’d picked up some higher mathematics and physical chemistry and half a dozen other subjects.” (Thompson 25)
The essential absurdism of the entire world (In the Ford worldview) is revealed in an anecdote at the end of the book which is recounted by lawyer and possible hallucination Bill Bob Walker. Walker tells the story of an abortionist whom he had once defended. In the course of his abortions the doctor had introduced peritonitis to his patients, thus ensuring they would die in agony. Walker explains that the doctor had a younger brother
Who was “unfinished,” a premature born monstrosity as the result of an attempted late-pregnancy abortion. He saw that terrible half-child die in agony for years. He never recovered from the experience, and neither did the women he aborted … Insane? Well, the only legal definition we have for insanity is the condition which necessitates the confinement of a person. So, since he hadn’t been confined when he killed those women, I recon he was sane.” (Thompson 182)
This passage is key in several ways. First it suggests an experiental (and certainly psychological) pathway to character. For Ford, however, the specific experiences, as sexual as they are, are presented in terms of social and economic expectation. This is key because it provides a point of access for society, and Ford’s hatred of it, to literally “get inside” him. Lou’s MD father, a rich, intellectual, and successful man has scarred Lou and it is interesting to note that this scarring, the emphasis Ford Sr. puts on it has to do with social standing This is expressed in an exchange between Helene and Ford Senior.
“But a child! My child. My only son. If anything should happen –“
“”Uh-huh. That’s what bothers you, isn’t it? Not him, but you. How it would reflect on you.”
“Get out! A woman with no more sensibilities than-“
“I’m white trash, that’s the term isn’t it? Riffraff. I ain’t got that ‘ol quality.”
Ford has an opportunity to deny the social issue after Helene brings it up, instead he acquiesces to her argument by beginning the comparison of her substandard “sensibilities” (a very refined word, there).
This experience, squeezed and formed by the subsequent control Ford Sr. exerts over his son, handed down by a much larger force, however, than a mere abortionist or MD father. Lou clearly sees this as nothing more than traditional grinding of the big socioeconomic clock or of fate. People are essentially and inexplicably bad, and nothing can be done to alter that reality. Prior to murdering his young friend Johnnie, Lou philosophizes, “how can a man ever really know anything? We’re living in a funny world kid a peculiar civilization. The police are playing crooks in it, and the crooks are doing police duty. The politicians are preachers, and the preachers are politicians. The tax collectors collect for themselves. The Bad People want us to have more dough, and the Good people are fighting to keep it from us”. (Thompson 93) This is precisely the world in which the noir detective lives, the difference in Ford is that this world also lives within him and guides his actions. Ford later summarizes, “that’s all any of us ever are; what we have to be.” (Thompson 143) The social determinism is thick here and Ford argues that it chooses us, not we it. Just after perhaps his “worst” murder, the killing of his fiancée, Ford frames a bum and says, “he hadn’t done it at all. But he could have done it.” Essentially, any of us could find ourselves in the position Ford was in. We may propose, but fate and society dispose.
The final section of “The Killer Inside” me is a harrowing trip through Lou’s disintegrating mind. The narration becomes uncertain and almost literally psychotic. Lou’s presentation of Billy Boy Walker is extremely unlikely. This high-powered and successful lawyer speaks in florid exaggerations, ‘Have you torn out his tongue? Have you roasted his poor broken body over slow fires? … Are you too weak to cry out? Be brave, my poor fellow.” His physical description is equally unlikely and comes off as a stock noir description of a bad guy, “He was short and fat and pot-bellied; and a couple of buttons were off his shirt and his belly button was showing. He was wearing a baggy old black suit and red suspenders; and he had a big floppy black hat sitting kind of crooked on his head.” This is a description that might have come out of the many short and odd characters in “Kiss Me Deadly.”
This suspect description comes short on the heels of the hallucinatory passages which have immediately preceded it, which are full of aural and visual hallucinations of the past These passages are insane montages, something like a German Expressionism of the interior. As a filmic matter one could easily envision these passages shot in the manner that “Sudden Fear” presented Myra’s ‘pre-visioning’ of her murder-scheme – with chiaroscuro inflected layers of film.
Ford finishes his narrative with a final shot a society and how it treats people. Ford hopes that “our kind” will get “another chance in the Next Place. Our kind. Us people .. all of us that started the game with a crooked cue, that wanted so much and go so little, that meant so good and did so bad.” (Thompson 188) Thompson even goes on to list his own murder victims as among this group of people. By doing this Ford explicitly puts himself in their group. This is a complete inversion of the typical noir detective whose outside status includes a complete lack of identification with the ‘other.’ Although Ford can kill without compunction and displays a general lack of concern for others that borders on the sociopathic, his lack of feeling does not alter his intellectual understanding that we are all in similar positions with respect to the larger world. This “large-mindedness” allows the reader a small entry to sympathy for Ford. Ford sees us all as doomed, perhaps even without control over what we do, even when we do have control. And he sees this as entirely in line with how the universe does and should work, “and you know that everything has been done right. You know, because you planned this moment before eternity way back yonder someplace.” (Thompson 185)
He does not see himself as a murderer, rather he sees himself as a victim. Although he has done quite a great deal of plotting and killing, Ford sees himself as nothing more than a tool of forces much greater than himself.
WORKS CITED
Gehring, Wes. D. American Dark Comedy: Beyond Satire. Greenwood Press. Westport CT 1996
7:55 After the Bar and the Sushi...
Printed the thing out.. looked at it in print and saw some changes. Oddly, it is above 3000 words by word count, but barely ten pages. I think I need to start using bigger words. A beer at the bar, some sushi at home.. about an hour of work and here is what will go off (it would have been far better with another day, but that's what I get for being a moron. ;-)
Name Redacted
Dr. Professor Redacted
English 666 - the Gates of Hell
21 October 2006
A Weed Is A Plant Out Of Place
Lou Ford, Jim Thompson’s ‘hero’ in “The Killer Inside Me” represents a final interiorization and to some extent an inversion of the historical progress of the hard-boiled noir’s detective from the masculine heroics of Sam Spade to the over the top testosterone laced hysteria of Mike Hammer. Ford also represents, in his inability to fight what society (I use the word in a political and economic sense as well as the traditional one) dictates, a step towards the ineffective J.J. Gittes in Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown.” In Thompson’s lead character we see a detective hero who sits not only at the violent end of this continuum, but also has swallowed whole the schizophrenia inherent in the detectives’ role in a society that is increasingly fractured and evil. This society, largely through psychological pressure, insinuates itself into Ford and ruins him and all who come into contact with him. In return, Ford despises society in general and while he appears a solid citizen on the outside (with one or two more perceptive citizens seeing through him, perhaps more than he recognizes) he is in fact completely rotten on the inside. In fact, as Ford tells it, everyone is rotten on the inside, merely playing the game in any way they can. By being rotten apart from and because of society Ford also manages to fuse the two disparate ends of the noir hero scale: He is single, perhaps elite man but also, as we shall see, sees himself as substantially an everyman.
While arguments as to all the specific details of what constitutes film noir may never be settled, there is some general agreement on its outlines. Paul Schrader sums noir up as “lighting, darker characters more corrupt and the tone more helpless.” (Schrader 53) While this is intended to be descriptive of film noir, it is equally useful in assessing novels for their usefulness as a source for film noir and their general “noirishness”, and this is the general description which I will use as I both assess the extent to which Lou Ford is the culmination of detective noir and a suitable subject for it. I will largely discard what Schrader calls the ”stylististics” of noir because they are largely cinematographical artifices added by director, cinematographers and German immigrants(!). This is the kind of description that is rarely found in novels, most often in the pictures on their covers. To the extent that I do stylistics them I will be pointing out areas in which the novel would lend itself easily to a noir treatment on film.
My first task is to demonstrate that “The Killer Inside Me” is in fact a noir piece. Durgnant exhaustively (in both senses of the word) takes Schrader’s general approach and slices noir into eleven sub genres. Of these sub-genres, “The Killer Inside Me” neatly fits nine: Social Criticism; Gangsterism; Hero on the run; Private eyes and adventures; Middle class murder; Portraits and doubles; Sexual pathology; Psychopathia, and; Guiginol. The only two sub-genres which do not apply to “The Killer Inside Me” are the ‘hostages to fortune’ and ‘blacks and red’ sub-genres which are primarily political in nature and thus inapplicable.
Lou Ford is the first person narrator of “The Killer Inside Me” and being so he assumes the perogatives given to the narrator in a film noir. He is our point of view and he is the judge (and in this case the jury) of all actions in the novel. Ford initially seems like a reliable narrator, though it is often clear that he is not completely accurate in his assessments, his narration sees straight ahead enough. Some facts are established quickly. Lou has “the sickness,” an appetite for rough, even murderous sex, and this sickness caused him to molest a three year old girl when he was only fourteen himself. Lou’s MD father persuades his other son (adopted) to take the blame for this crime, sterilizes Lou, persuades Lou to stay in his small Texas town, and gets him a job as a sheriff. Lou is trapped in a small and stupid town on which he gets revenge by playing the crashing bore, burying people under the weight of his large stock of idiotic platitudes and common sayings. After an emblematic epsisode. Lou reflects that he had been “draggin ‘em in by the feet, but I couldn’t hold ‘em (his platitudes) back. Striking at people that way is almost as good as the other, the real way.” (Thompson 9) This is a clever inversion of the traditional “wise-cracking” noir detective whose verbal ability is noted for clever language, invective and insult. Sam Spade’s “the cheaper the punk, the gaudier the patter” is a line of stunning sophistication compared to what Ford routinely passes off to the public. Even the neo-noir and ineffective J.J. Gittes has the skill of extemporaneous language, at one point explaining to an annoying detective that Gittes has damaged nose as the result of the same detectives’ wife crossing her legs too quickly. This sort of repartee might occur in Ford’s head, but it would never pass his lips. Even his interior dialogue is unclever and elemental. As he prepares to murder Elmer Conway his inner voice is pedestrian and violent, “I wanted to leap on him and tear him to pieces.” (Thompson 43) This is slightly reminiscent of Hammer, but even Hammer could get off the occasional good line as he did when he tells the rather odd Friday, “Let's see how good you are at spelling. Can you spell the word "no"?
On the rare occasion that Ford does say something that seems clever, he immediately regrets it. After murdering Elmer Conway (in a convoluted revenge for Conway Sr. having killed Ford’s adopted brother) Ford spars with Conway who says he won’t let tender feelings alter his approach. Ford responds, “It’d be pretty hard to start in at your time of life.” (Thompson 61) This is pretty weak as a witticism, but Ford is immediately concerned that he has let something slip. There is a sort of confluence here, actually, Ford isn’t much a clever talker, and when he is he has broken what he takes as cover. He is more reminiscent of J.J. Gittes somewhat thick “associates” than he is of other noir detectives.
This limited-strike verbal approach helps Lou keep himself under wraps until the arrival of a prostitute causes the wraps come off in murderous fashion. And once the wraps are off they are well off and Lou takes the traditional noirish mistrust of women to an entirely new level. Phillip Marlowe may have alternately loved and hated Vivian Sternwood and eventually left here (depending on whether you read or watch the work); Sam Spade may have abandoned Iva Archer and turned Brigid O'Shaughnessy in to the police; but Ford goes nuclear.
Lou Ford’s entire sexual career is one of violence and it is entirely devoted to damaging and then killing any female who is unlucky enough to be sexually attractive to him. This is perhaps the most troubling aspect of the novel, all the rest of the violence notwithstanding. Ford’s stance on women is created early when he shares a sado-masochistic relationship with the housekeeper his father is also sleeping with and beating. This is a truly bizarre relationship which the housekeeper. Helene, initiates. Helene likes to be beaten, “Oh, I’m tired, You just hit me …. you’ll like it, darling. All the big boys do it.” (Thompson 84). When Ford comes upon the picture which reminds him of all this, we hear a description that includes a very noirish set of crisscrosses and unusual framing, “she was looking through a crotch, all right, But it was her own. She was on her knees, peering between them, And those crisscross blurs on her thighs weren’t the result of age. They were scars.” (Thompson 83)
Ford’s attitude towards women is “the sickness” and any woman he desires must surely die. This relates directly to his formative experience, scars and all, with Helene:
Since she was the first woman he had ever known, Ford says, "she was woman to me; and all womankind bore her face." He felt that he could strike back at any of them, any woman, especially "the ones it would be safest to strike at," and it would be the same thing as striking back at the housekeeper. "And so I did that, I started striking out," he says, and letting others take the blame (Whissen 120)
This is a complete reversal of the ‘normal’ noir detective who distrusts women so deeply that he largely refuses to become entangled in them. While Ford may share this distrust, he is unable to control himself in its face. When Ford meets the prostitute Joyce he is completely unable to control himself and beats her until his, “arm ached like hell and her rear end was one big bruise. (Thompson 14). Later, of course, he “kills” her to avoid the sickness and later kills his fiancée. This is the logical evolution of the noir detective’s distrust of women, but it is also an inversion of their self-control in the face of it.
Lou is, as the traditional noir detective, in opposition to society and as other noir detectives, is not shy to say it, at least to himself.. In “The Killer Inside Me” this can manifest itself in unusual ways. Ford is downright protective of the downtrodden, priding himself on never having hurt any prisoners. In fact, he sees himself on the same side as the stoned Mexican that he semi tussles with, “Maybe I figured subconsciously that the prisoners and I were on the same side.” (Thompson 33). This admission has at least two roles. First, it quite traditionally places Ford among other, particularly later, noir detectives like Mike Hammer – Ford recognizes that he is a criminal. But it has a second meaning that is more important – Ford is not only explicitly to a criminal, but also to a prisoner. Ford understands that society has him just as barred in as a stoned worker. I will return to this notion when I discuss the absurdism that inflects all of Ford’s thinking about society.
One interesting difference between Lou Ford and other noir detectives is location. Most noir detectives are located near bright lights or big cities while Ford, who is in many ways the most modern man of the noir detectives, lives in a town that might charitably be called a hick-town. Ford, in fact, has never even left the county he was born in – he is the ultimate local in a town of locals. In fact Ford’s location is “the valley of the shadow of death just outside the door of your home or local church” (Schwarz 149) and everyone is there. Everyone is involved with everyone else (in the entire town, not just the plot) and there really are no secrets. People often believe they have secrets but they really don’t. Ford thinks he has fooled the entire town, but it is clear he has not. Joseph Rothman is on to him from the start, noting that Ford has, “a good act but it’s easy to overdo.” (Thompson 23). Even the “big” secret of the plot, that Joyce Lakeland is not dead, is obvious: Ford knows it, as Bob all but admits it to him, but Ford willfully refuses to see it.
The hick nature of Ford’s surroundings are in contrast to Ford himself. He is, in some ways, cosmopolitan (again, he internalizes the larger issues of noir – the big world is inside of him, not around him). Ford reads five languages and says, “I could understand ‘em all. I’d just picked ‘em up with Dad’s help, just like I’d picked up some higher mathematics and physical chemistry and half a dozen other subjects.” (Thompson 25) Ford is repeatedly presented as a big thinker and his schemes, while ultimately failures, are certainly clever enough and thought through. This is also a contrast to the normal noir detective who, while clever, is a reactive planner (part of this is that the “normal” noir detective is not a serial murderer)
The essential absurdism of the entire world (to Ford) is revealed in an anecdote at the end of the book which is recounted by lawyer and possible hallucination Bill Bob Walker. Walker tells the story of an abortionist whom he had once defended. In the course of his abortions the doctor had introduced peritonitis to his patients, thus ensuring they would die in agony. Walker explains that the doctor had a younger brother
Who was “unfinished,” a premature born monstrosity as the result of an attempted late-pregnancy abortion. He saw that terrible half-child die in agony for years. He never recovered from the experience, and neither did the women he aborted … Insane? Well, the only legal definition we have for insanity is the condition which necessitates the confinement of a person. So, since he hadn’t been confined when he killed those women, I recon he was sane.” (Thompson 182)
This passage is key in several ways. First it suggests an experiental (and certainly psychological) pathway to character. For Ford, however, the specific experiences, as sexual as they are, are presented in terms of social and economic expectation. This is key because it provides a point of access for society, and Ford’s hatred of it, to literally “get inside” him. Lou’s MD father, a rich, intellectual, and successful man has scarred Lou and it is interesting to note that this scarring, the emphasis Ford Sr. puts on it has to do with social standing This is expressed in an exchange between Helene and Ford Senior.
“But a child! My child. My only son. If anything should happen –“
”Uh-huh. That’s what bothers you, isn’t it? Not him, but you. How it would reflect on you.”
“Get out! A woman with no more sensibilities than-“
“I’m white trash, that’s the term isn’t it? Riffraff. I ain’t got that ‘ol quality.”
Ford has an opportunity to deny the social issue after Helene brings it up, instead he acquiesces to her argument by beginning the comparison of her substandard “sensibilities” (a very refined word, there).
This experience, squeezed and formed by the subsequent control Ford Sr. exerts over his son is handed down by a much larger force than a mere abortionist or MD father. Lou clearly sees the specific traumatic events of his life as nothing more than traditional grinding of the big socioeconomic clock or of fate. People are essentially and inexplicably bad, and nothing can be done to alter that reality. If it is his father or Helene who is the proximate evil, it has little to do with them personally.
Prior to murdering his young friend Johnnie, Lou philosophizes, “how can a man ever really know anything? We’re living in a funny world kid a peculiar civilization. The police are playing crooks in it, and the crooks are doing police duty. The politicians are preachers, and the preachers are politicians. The tax collectors collect for themselves. The Bad People want us to have more dough, and the Good people are fighting to keep it from us”. (Thompson 93) This is precisely the world in which the noir detective lives, the difference in Ford is that this world also lives within him and guides his actions. Ford later summarizes, “that’s all any of us ever are; what we have to be.” (Thompson 143) The social determinism is thick here and Ford argues that it chooses us, not we it. Just after perhaps his “worst” murder, the killing of his fiancée, Ford frames a bum and says, “he hadn’t done it at all. But he could have done it.” Essentially, any of us could find ourselves in the position Ford was in. We may propose, but fate and society dispose.
The final section of “The Killer Inside” me is a harrowing trip through Lou’s disintegrating mind. The narration becomes uncertain and almost literally psychotic. Lou’s presentation of Billy Boy Walker is extremely unlikely. This high-powered and successful lawyer speaks in florid exaggerations, ‘Have you torn out his tongue? Have you roasted his poor broken body over slow fires? … Are you too weak to cry out? Be brave, my poor fellow.” His physical description is equally unlikely and comes off as a stock noir description of a bad guy or unimportant character, “He was short and fat and pot-bellied; and a couple of buttons were off his shirt and his belly button was showing. He was wearing a baggy old black suit and red suspenders; and he had a big floppy black hat sitting kind of crooked on his head.” This is a description that might have come out of the many short and odd characters in “Kiss Me Deadly,” particularly the small and shabby coroner who Hammer tortures with the unlikely instrument of a desk drawer.
This suspect description comes short on the heels of the hallucinatory passages which have immediately preceded it, which are full of aural and visual hallucinations of the Ford’s personal history. These passages are insane montages, something like a German Expressionism of the interior. As a filmic matter one could easily envision these passages shot in the manner that “Sudden Fear” presented Myra’s ‘pre-visioning’ of her murder-scheme – with chiaroscuro inflected layers of film.
Ford concludes his narrative with a final judgment on society and how it treats people. Ford hopes that “our kind” will get “another chance in the Next Place. Our kind. Us people .. all of us that started the game with a crooked cue, that wanted so much and go so little, that meant so good and did so bad.” (Thompson 188) Thompson even goes on to list his own murder victims as among this group of people. By doing this Ford explicitly puts himself in their group, similar to the way he placed himself among the company of jail-prisoners at the open of the book. This is a complete inversion of the typical noir detective whose outside status includes a complete lack of identification with the ‘other.’ Mike Hammer may call himself rotten inside and a killer (“Kiss Me Deadly”), but he would never associate himself with what he would consider the dregs of society. Although Ford can kill without compunction and displays a general lack of concern for others that some times borders on the sociopathic, his lack of feeling does not alter his intellectual understanding that we are all in similar positions with respect to the larger world. This “large-mindedness” allows the reader a small entry to sympathy for Ford. Ford sees us all as doomed, perhaps even without control over what we do, even when we do have control. And he sees this as entirely in line with how the universe does and should work, “and you know that everything has been done right. You know, because you planned this moment before eternity way back yonder someplace.” (Thompson 185)
He does not see himself as a murderer, rather he sees himself as a victim. Although he has done quite a great deal of plotting and killing, Ford sees himself as nothing more than a tool of forces much greater than himself. And this is perhaps Ford’s greatest inversion of the traditional detective in film noir. For unlike some other characters in noir, the femme fatale and the doomed hero come to mind, the noir detective is, in all cases, in charge of himself. This represents his separation from society, his allure to women, and the basis of his competence. Even when competence is in question, as it is in the case of J.J. Gittes, who gets results the exact opposite of what he aims for, the detective is his own man struggling against bigger powers. Ford recasts this relationship in that he even while he seemingly struggles against bigger powers he explicitly admits to himself that he not only can he not be successful, but more subversive to the genre, he will end up doing the work of his enemy.
At the time Thompson wrote, this notion was almost farcical, and it is not surprise that Thompson wrote his characters as psychopaths. It was likely the only way that these characters could be accepted. It is interesting to note that by the time J.J. Gittes was running around Los Angeles and losing every major battle he fought, he could be portrayed as successful and clever, but still a failure.
In the end, this is part of what makes Ford interesting. Not only has he swallowed noir whole and lives it completely, but he is squarely in the middle of the evolution that eventually kills the importance of the noirish detective. Well, that and the fact we don’t film in Black and White much anymore.
WORKS CITED
Durgnat, Raymond. Paint it Black: The Family Tree of Film Noir. Silver and Alain. 37-52.
Gehring, Wes. D. American Dark Comedy: Beyond Satire. Greenwood Press. Westport CT 1996.
Schrader, Paul. Notes on Film Noir. Silver and Alain 53-64.
Schwartz, Richard B. Nice and Noir: Contemporary American Crime Fiction. University of Missouri Press. Columbia, MO 2002.
Silver, Alain and James Ursini, eds. Film Noir Reader. . Amadeus Press/Limelight Editions. Pompton Plains. New Jersey. 1996.
Thompson, Jim. The Killer Inside Me. Quill. New York. 1952.
Whissen, Reed. Classic Cult Fiction: A Companion to Popular Cult Literature. Greenwood Press. New York. 1993.
1 comment:
Dude, I didn't see the words "Moral compass" anywhere. I thought that was some sort of requirement for any paper.
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