[lit-ideas] Re: Movie Night
- From: "Andreas Ramos" <andreas@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 20 Aug 2005 16:31:13 -0700
This is a sentence too far. No it didn't and American Beauty wasn't noir in
such a "similar" way. (The Maltese Falcon was at least one noir before, and
Citizen Kane, Chinatown and The Godfather are surely more noirish than
American Beauty which is more bourgeois disenchantment a la Desperate
Housewives, Six Feet Under, Nip Tuck, etc. than noir. Hell, Miami Vice is
more noir even if in garish 80's garb).
Sunset Blvd and American Beauty have the same general structure: the narrator is already
dead when the movie starts. it recaps the last few months of their lives. Narrator ends up
dead. The story is moral decadence.
The Godfather certainly isn't noir. It's just a standard Hollywood bang-bang
movie.
William Holden's character in Sunset Blvd. is a complex person: confused, adrift, unable to
manage his life, unable to make decisions. He's repulsed by the actress, yet won't leave.
I would guess that Sunset Blvd. isn't about an actress and a younger man; it's really about
an actor and a younger man. Billy Wilder's movies are usually about crossdressing or
homosexuality. Many of the main Hollywood actors of the 20s (and practically all of the
major ones) were homosexual: Valentino, Randolp Scott, and so on. Hollywood of the 50s must
have been littered with these old gay men clutching their younger men, wallowing in
self-centeredness and self-obsession, refusing to face reality.
Tennessee William's Streetcar Named Desire is the same sort of story. Read it as a gay story
and it makes more sense. Blanche Du Bois and the delivery boys.
Michael Jackson, perhaps the most bizarre insect ever in this psychotic zoo, is our modern
example. Extremely weathly and totally insane.
Chinatown has none of this inverted perversion. Just another bang-bang movie. Blue Velvet,
somewhat, but that was mostly a movie for the masses. Maltese Falcon has a substory of
homosexuality (Joel Cairo as the catamite) but the main story is a detective movie.
yrs,
andreas
www.andreas.com
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