Brick 2 or Is Noir the New Black?

Brick was on again and it got me thinking (see my Brick post for previous comments). It used to be the Western trope was the common way to interpret narratives but could it be that these times are more appropriately noir? The western hero is rarely conflicted and usually certain of his skill. He has a quest, usually a rather straightforward quest, a route to the heart of evil, and then he overcomes it. He might suffer but he triumphs. Actions speak much larger than words; in fact, in Westerns the voluble ones are usually suspect. And though he might die in battle, he rarely actually takes the fall for anyone. He will not be misrepresented.

The noir hero is often someone who is just recovering from a great loss or failure. He is unsure of himself and unsure of what to do next. So he does something but more just to see what happens, stirs the waters to see what monsters lurk beneath. And he talks and talks. Noir heros like to talk more than fight. There is violence but is often offscreen and if not it seems almost incidental. The quest is for knowledge rather than revenge or justice, and the latter two are rarely accomplished. All too often the noir hero takes on disgrace to save another, or dies a futile death where the power structures remain intact. His triumph is only that of glimpsing a little knowledge of the foot before it crushes him.

Bruce Willis in Sin City plays this role where he has to die disgraced to save a girl with the knowledge that he was unable to change anything else.

Brick has the same system in place where characters talk and talk and try to discern what is happening in the murk, and if possible to survive it all. I was struck on this second viewing about the speed of the dialogue. Snappy and fast verging on screwball comedy speed and insinuating fast quick brains negotiating the dangerous seas of slower large implacable predators.

The film’s setting is perfect. A generic high school shot like a prison. And aren’t high schools prisons and often hell as well. No other time in life is so locked in. You can leave a job or drop out of university but high school is an unendurable stretch of power cliques, alpha manoevering and more distinct from the “real world” than most environments. Many noir characters operate within a cage either real or metaphorical and high school too makes quite the cage.

Brick captures both the poetry of noir and the limitations of high school. Our dark figure runs his games but at one point asks if our protagonist has read Tolkien, and specifically the Hobbit because he builds such amazing worlds. The guy is a puppetmaster but he’s also an almost laughable character riding around in the back of a van with a table lamp inside, cape wearing and strutting with a bird head cane, and having sandwiches with his mom.

But back to noir as the new genre black. In this world if power being held in fewer and fewer hands, of the greater secrecy around vested interests, of the decreasing power of the individual and the fragmentation of world views, noir works better than the Western does.

Any thoughts…not too much behind this…quickly threw this off without really cleaning it up. But do see Brick. And for the most over the top noir Kiss Me Deadly.