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For reference, the thread in the comics is here.
A workable (but wikied) explanation of Film Noir. It's a quick and dirty option, as I've lended my film studies textbooks to a friend.
Wiki refers to the quote by Raymond Borde and Etinne Chaumeton with regard to defining the genre: "We'd be oversimplifying things in calling film noir oneiric, strange, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel..."
Interested me, because those are all words that can used to describe the average Lynch film. Lynch also tends to favour certain plot structures and character types -- the femme fatale definitely recurs, along with the good girl, for example. In Lost Highway, I'd argue that the two become emmeshed in Renee/Alice's misremembered personalities.
The hallmarks of Lynch's narratives are dream-like ambience (which often infringes on causality and story structure, certainly, more than one might expect from traditional noir) and the darkly sexual underpinnings of seemingly "normal" spaces (The mafia-ridden sex worms breeding underneath the soil in a small town, as in Blue Velvet). He employs a lot of mystery elements as well.
In terms of breaking the genre and reworking with it - well, the dream is usually strong enough to deform reality (Lost Highway, for example) and I've always felt that while a lot of the first half of Mulholland Drive explodes with saturated colour and Naomi Watts's "good girl" happy vibe, the brightness is used to make a new kind of noir, bright noir, where even colour has menace (Watts's character, walking through her aunt's bright orange apartment, is unsettled - there's something about the paint on the walls that meshes with the creepy music so well).
That's not very well written and off the top of my head, having not seen the movies in a while, how do you feel about that, sleaze? Want to talk about why you don't feel Lynch is a noirist? I'm not sure I'd call him neo-noir so much as pomo-noir or the like. I like Decadent's phrase in the Comics thread about Lynch's working being dark and glossy and consequently neo-noir. |
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