A Geek History of Time - Episode 213 - Film Noire with Beowulf Rochlen Part I

Episode Date: May 26, 2023

I'm not here to poke holes and suspended this belief. Anyway, they see some weird shit. They decide to make a baby. Now, Muckin' Merchant. Who gives a fuck? Oh, Muckin' which is a trickle, you know, baby. You know what it's called. Well, you know, I really like it here. It's kind of nice and it's not as cold as Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or Muckin' or M So yeah sure I think we're gonna settle. If I'm a peasant boy who grabs sword out of a stone,

yeah I'm able to open people up. You will yeah. Anytime I hit them with it right? Yeah. So my cleave landing will make me a cavalier. Good day, Spree. If sysclothed it was empty headed, plubian trash, it being trash is really good.

Really good group. Because cannibalism and murder, pull back just a little bit, build walls to keep out the rat heads. And it's a little bit of a round of two. A thorough intent doesn't exist. Some people stand up quite a bit, some people stay seeing a lot of us.

Let me just... This is a history of art. Where we connect Nurgere to the real world, I'm Ed Blayman, the world history and English teacher here in northern California. And just yesterday, my wife and I were awakened at one o'clock in the morning by a sound no parent ever wants to hear, and that was the sound of our son vomiting violently from the other end of the house. And he's fine now, where 36 hours or so removed from it and he's okay now but something we had for dinner last night did did not agree with him like at all and so we were

awakened at one o'clock in the morning by that and then it took until, I don't know, two or three to fall asleep. But the really complicating factor for me in all of this aside from just being worried about my kid was, of course, I'm a teacher, which means in order for me to take a sick day, I have to be able to which means in order for me to take a sick day, I have to be able to call in to get a sub and then I have to provide plans for what the substitute is going to be having my kids do while I'm out. And it was both a bit of a scramble and at the end, I felt pretty confident in my role in my profession because I was actually able to knock out yeah, I came away from it feeling feeling pretty good about my position, I suppose. I've made it. I am in fact no kidding a full-time public school teacher, because, you know, I could get that done like, okay, you know, shit hit the fan and the blades kept spinning. So there we go. So yeah, like I said, he's fine now. He is however still using his tummy hurting as an excuse for literally

everything under the sun. Like anything he didn't want to do today. He was telling me, well, my tummy hurts. Like, okay, no, that's not a reason why you can't pick up your toys. Like, no, clearly, it doesn't, it doesn't hurt that bad because you're playing with your hot wheels. So, no, sorry. But yeah, so that's, that's my tale of self discovery for the week. How about you? Well, I'm Damien Harmony. I'm a Latin and US history teacher at the high school level level up here in Northern California.

So you will. A lever. Cronk. You will. So you you now have a vomit wing and a non vomit wing at your house. I think either I've stymied him or he lost his audio. I lost audio there for a second. So say that again. You have either a vomit wing and a non vomit wing at your house.

Okay. Yeah. Is there any particular place in your house where your son tends to hurt himself to the point of blood? I'm thinking about patio maybe. I'm just thinking you've got no. Not at all. Look out for black bile. Yeah. You know humor me here. Yeah. Actually, I do want to send you now pictures from a half. Well, then I want to send you now posters of Conan the barbarian fighting against various creatures and see. Because do we have a controlled case here where now

that he has vomited, is this for listeners who are just jumping in? This is the poster. When I was at your son's age, I was not feeling well. My dad brought home a bunch of Conan the Barbarian posters to like show me. And when he showed me one and he like, he's did up and all this is like, this is going to be really scary. You think you can handle it? I yeah, it's gonna be great. But the problem was my stomach coincided with that moment. And so he shows me Conan fighting the ape beast, right? And I just vomited everywhere all over the table. Blue chunks. Yeah. Yeah. And so the the standing story has always been that that's scared me so much that I puked and it's like no no

I really liked the picture, but then All of breakfast came out, you know, so But but my intestines were just not happy that day, right, you know, but so I'm gonna Maybe we can start with like princess bride and work his way up. I don't know. Okay. Well, I say just you know Go for go for the shock treatment and start with the Conan Foaster. I like it. I like it. For myself, I actually, you know how depressing it's been being a US history teacher for me this year because all the content I write is US history, which is categorously depressing. I finally found a lesson that made me happy. And it cheered me up. And it was, yeah, I did a lesson on Japanese internment. That's not the part that cheered me up.

I'm not cheered up by Japanese incarceration during World War II. I am cheered up by Gordon here. He had me in the first half, not gonna lie. Yeah. Mitsuhi Endo, Mr. Yasui and Fred Korematsu, the four people who stood up against it and brought cases to court, specifically Yasui who like turned himself in, made sure he waited an hour past curfew. And he says, I've been walking around past curfew for people who are of my descent. And they're like, well, now you have to go to jail. He's like, I understand. And I'll be appealing this. And then they like sentence them. And he's like, you should send me to an outside prison. And they're like, well, we're going to send you to internment. You don't get to do that. Like it was just so cool to see the

polite bad assery. Oh, wow. Of it. And so that prompted me, of course, to pick up a graphic novel about it, which my kids are going to have to read this summer. So It was it's really cool. It's really cool. We hear by refuse now. I don't normally make recommendations this early in the show, but it's really good. But Mitsuyu Endo is a sacramental native and she basically proved that incarceration was not okay, especially since she was proven not to be disloyal. And then they're like, yeah, but we're still getting incarcerated. And she's like, oh, yeah, because she was, because she was methodist, she was a methodist, she could speak at any like 20 years old. Yeah, yeah, yeah, she was fun. So it cheered me up. That story of polite Yeah, yeah, she was fun. So it cheered me up that story of polite resistance

and refusal to accept such a pressure. I really liked it. So that's what's up with me. I don't know if anybody heard, but we heard a third laughter in there. And that's because tonight we have a guest to try to explain stuff to me that I just can't seem to stay awake to understand.

So ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children, all ages, everything in between. And on either side, please welcome Mr. Beowulf Rockland, the host of Face Paul America. Well, thank you very much. Thank you so much for I couldn't help but but but laugh at the background. And I just, you know, I was, you know, things, things make me chuckle. And I, I, they need to come out sometimes. Oh, absolutely. As, as, as, as son has proven, I love the story of that poster, you know, I mean, I'm sure you're not the only one that Arnold Schwarzenegger has made, you know, vomit over the course of the years. Right. Well, it was the, what's the guy's name?

Boy, yeah, that's probably. Oh, Boris of the Leo. There you go. Him. That guy. It was his art of the Conan stuff. But yeah, yeah. So yeah, well, I've had a similar response to Boris Vlaio's art a number of times. I'm just not a fan.

That's just entirely fair. I would say it's literally a matter of taste, but we know what I tasted that day. So. So. Are you like orange juice? Yeah. Oh, you had rice. Did you?

Okay. Yes. It just makes me very grateful that both of my kids are in their 20s now. And I, you know, I'm roughly around the same age as you guys. I started very early and I'm just, you know, I'm glad we're past the barfings day. And you know, that's, you know, I remember that era well. I feel for you, Ed. And it's not fun. But it is at the same time, like very reassuring to know that you can get things done in the background. Like, you know, you know, that like thrown into a situation, you can make things function. And that's a certain marker of adulthood and professionality.

And I found at a certain point, like working in radio and podcasting, which is my background, that I could be thrown into a call. And all of a sudden, I could be talking about stuff and saying stuff and thinking to myself at the back of my head. Wow, hey, I'm talking about things and people are kind of nodding their heads and believing what I'm saying and that's pretty cool. And this seems reasonably decent and professional and wow, hey, I'm just saying stuff awesome. That's great.

And you know, that's when I started. That's like me in a classroom at least three days a week. Yeah, there you go. I mean, you guys are dealing with this all the time. Sure. But for me, it was a big deal. Wow. I mean, yeah.

Nice. I can say things on calls. I can talk to people. I can conduct interviews. Hey, we're speaking. We're communicating and we're human beings. Have you ever prepared one direction and then they offer you a thing going completely? You're like, hey, I'm here to talk about ice cream cones and why we don't see sugar ice

cream cones as much. And they're like, so about turkey and the curds. I mean, like not that dramatically, but sometimes, yeah, I mean, it's you just get to talking and you find a different direction. And as long as there's something within your Ken that you can grasp on to, we just have flow in that direction. And it's fun. And I think that's a dangerous thing, especially for white guys like us, because we just start talking and we start explaining things. And we have to be a little careful and check ourselves and say, how long have I been talking

about this? Oh, okay. I think I should stop though. Other people might want to talk too. Yeah. Okay. And then shut the jaw. And there, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. That is a good reason for people to have podcasts. And it's a good reason to keep keep track of, you know, your your own talk time on on others. So, but when you're a guest as you are tonight, you are the star of the show. So Geek History of Time is very pleased to have you come on and talk to us about a genre of film that I have here to for Not been able to hang with except for the multi-s Falcon. I'm talking film Right, yeah, so right. Yes, please. Yes, first off like you have semi credentials on on this in that you've been on several cruises with old people

on on this in that you've been on several cruises with old people. I suppose you could sort of say that in a way. So I went to UC Santa Cruz. I have a piece of paper that actually has, you know, burned up in a fire since that says I have a degree in in film and video. And that basically means that I wrote a bunch of essays about movies in college. And so, and at one point, I did take a class in film noir. And over the course of the years, I've interviewed a few interesting folks, including people at Turner Classic movies, interesting folks, including people at Turner Classic movies, Ben Mankiewicz. Actually, these are of noir. One of their hosts over there was fun talking to him, talked to Jane Palette and went at one point on the Turner Classic movie cruise, And Debbie Reynolds, I interviewed her, Mickey Rooney. And yeah, no, it was, so yeah, I'm into classic films, but I will say also that having gone

on the classic movie cruise, and this was about 10 years ago now, when, and Alex, I could you know, Alex Trebek was there. He was conducting classic movie Treviah Knight night and he's a classic, he was a classic movie fan. Sure. And you, you realize what your shortcomings are when you get into the level of detail of trivia that some of these folks know. You think among your set of friends, you know about classic movies, you know who the actors and directors are and when such and such a film was made. I mean nothing Compared to these people compared to them. These are top level folks. So Wow, I do have a little bit of a background. Sure. I remember listening to your interview with Debbie Reynolds

And I rather enjoyed it. It was just it was very sweet and it was very respectful of her time and the time that she's been on the surface and the time she had on the cruise. And I still liked that you like you respected her enough to have done your homework so to speak like you you had a fair amount of working knowledge with the things that she said like she would say things and you would not be out of your depth it was really it, it was cool. It was fun to hear. Cool. And I do have to say that that my wife, Lisa, I mean, she assisted me in conducting that interview. And I thought it brought a dimension to it, especially when she discussed her motherhood and raising carry Fisher that I probably could not have brought to it. And I think that brought out things, you know, in her experience where she talked about,

you know, how difficult it was raising kids, how difficult it was being a kid coming to Hollywood from Texas having, you know, her dad sleep out on park benches, like when they were really struggling before she had made it, that there were some real, real amazing moments there during our conversation and that would feel very privileged to have had it. That's pretty neat. So, but I don't think Debbie Reynolds

was that much film noir. So, she was not, no, no, no, no. When we're talking about film noir, we're talking about Robert Mitchum and Humphrey Bogart and Dana Andrews and Bert Landcaster and Liz Biscott and Lauren Bekall. And we're talking about like the from mostly, and you know, there, there patches here and there about different things, but the late 40s through to the through to the late 1950s. This is primarily at least one we're not talking about neon war a post or

genre and it and it comes about I think I really only retrospectively, you know, once you reach the 1970s, is it referred to as film noir. But these are basically, so. Yeah, good. Sorry, but when we're talking about, when we're talking about the time period of the genre, would you say that the, I mean, film noir is largely kind of built that the, I mean, film noir is largely kind of built around the works of Chandler

and those guys. And now if I'm remembering right, Chandler and those guys were writing like in the early 40s or were they later than I'm thinking? So if you're talking about like like Chandler's first novel was actually in 1939, he wrote that's when he wrote the big slip. And and during the 1930s, he's such an interesting guy in and of himself because he had been an oil company executive in the 1920s who lost his job as a combination of a result of one is alcoholism and two, the bad economy, and he tried his hand like at the age of, you know, around 40 at writing short crime stories and in pulp magazines and actually became incredibly successful at it.

DeShiel Hammett was really his prime, was writing in the 1920s. And that's, and if I'm remembering correctly, I think it was about 1925 or 1926, that the multi-s Falcon with Sam Spade came out. So that's the sort of range of time. And a lot of these movies, you know, I mean, there's an impetus and there's a strong connection between those hard boiled detectives and that era and certainly there are a lot of hard boiled detective adaptations that are film war like the multi-s Falcon like the big sleep like murder my suite. The big screen wasn't that the one from 1981 with Jeff Goldblum. No, it was 83 and Glenn Close and I think they did a remake. I think they did a remake. I think that that was in it. Yeah, but but but but but but there's version of the big sleep was was what I think 1946. I'm thinking of the big chill. Never mind. The big, okay.

All right. You see completely over my head. The multi-zoned is that the one where all the kids are in detention together in Chirmer, Illinois? Is that? No? Right. 12 angry men.

That's the one with the three women. Right? Right. Yeah. And now you understand why sometimes I hate my podcast partner as much as I do. Oh, no, that just might. And now, and now you understand why sometimes I hate my podcast partner as much as I do. Oh, no, no, it just, it just goes over me. But, but, but that was, and that got, in a way, the genre going, but I think it more fully came into its own, like, after World War II. But

there were, I mean, there, there are a lot of commonalities. And I think that the hard boiled detective genre is a big inspiration and there's a lot of overlap with film war. And in a way, it's sort of like the literary side of it. And that extends also to a certain extent, and Mickey Splane, who I don't like so much because he's just more raw violence than I care for, but kiss me deadly. Uh, 9.55 is certainly considered a classic film noir, one of the few that kind of gets

into the nuclear issues of the day. So I was going to ask like, because you're saying that it's adapting in many ways, the hard-boiled detective stuff, which comes around 20s and forward, when you've got prohibition, when you've got the roaring 20s into a terrible depression, a great depression even. The best. The very best.

Best of all depression. Yes. Yes, it was the biggest, the biggest, the most amazing depression. Yeah. So, you know, when I was a kid, there was, so I lived in a community that was next to a retirement community that most people had done very well for themselves their whole lives, is Walnut Creek area, right? Ross Moore's where all these oldsters live.

And the assignment that the history teachers used to assign was go and interview someone who lived through the Great Depression. Oh, you can learn about how bad it was for people and stuff. Well, the problem was everybody who like went to Ross Moor, no, they all did fine. They were part of that tooth or it never lost their job. So that assignment was pretty much bricked after a few years.

So I never had to do it, but I had to take the part a few few miles further. Yeah, West and where the line turns orange and maybe you've got some people. But there you go. But okay, so you've got this great depression, not to be confused with, of course, the great panic, which of all the panics. But you have this hard-wild detective, which is extra legal. They have some licensure and things like that, but they exist in a space that is not what the cops do, but they're doing things that the cops do. And you get the feel there's no good, there's no bad,

there's just all this gray, and then they get to the movies, but the movies start coming out after the war. And it just feels to me like there's in the very few movies that I've seen, it's that way through. Um, the, the, the paranoia aspect of post-World War II America of like oh shit, they also have the bomb. All that kind of stuff seems to have, you know, like so it's really interesting that it's book ending the war, but it doesn't exist during the war. Yeah, and it starts to develop and there are pieces here and there. I mean, the multisfilcome for example, that's 1940, which is, you know, before the war, double indemnity, if I'm remembering correctly with Fred McMurray and Barbara Stanlock, that's I think that's 1944. And I've heard that refer to as a film, gray, you know, a,

you know, still a film, black film, gray film, which is like sort of leading towards the development of this genre. But definitely, in a recurring theme, in a lot of classic film noir is the returning veteran. And in corporation back into the society, like one of my favorite ones is out of the past, which in which Robert in which Robert Mitchum plays a returning veteran, who is, you know, starting, I mean, he gets involved in all this stuff, but that's the context for it. Also, Crossfire, literally, which is one of my absolute favorite film, The Wars,

because it has a strong, you know, a liberal social message to it also takes place among veterans who have literally just gotten back from the war. One of them kills a civilian and it's kind of like told in this flashback as many film film movies are. But and what active violence with Van Heffland is, you know, involves something that happened in a POW camp and Benjans being taken for, you know, about that, you know, back in the United States once both, both the pro protagonist and the antagonist get back. So it is a constant theme of like re-incorporation into the society, dealing with the psychic pain of World War II, figuring out what the role of the returning veteran is, dealing with that that sometimes unspoken trauma, but sometimes like, you know, very, you know, very clear trauma. Right. And in finding out what your place is with regard to how you're going to make

money, how are you going to fit into society? What is your relationship with with women when you get back? And that that certainly highlights, you know, something that has been brought up and I is a very legitimately problematic thing about film war. I mean, you have the you have the femme fatal and often women are are not treated, you know, well, they're they're dealt with as spectra being dangerous leading you down the primrose path and right and so forth. So it's interesting because what you just brought up there just again, I just you know, I think of echoes forward One of the plots you described sounded almost like a version of Rambo first blood.

He's back, he's trying to reintegrate, he's not fitting in, and then I'm also thinking deer hunter as well. Like, he's back, and it's just, I mean, again, both of these were shortly after another war, so it kind of makes a lot of sense that I'm track, but just those weren't noir pieces, or were they? Yeah. Yeah, it's weird because you're right about both of those except these characters, you know, try to, you know, they put on suits and ties and they engage in nefarious behavior and all of that angst plays out with it, you know, typically, you know, urban, you know, crime sort of setting. I find I want to jump in on the note you mentioned about, you know, typically, you know, urban, you know, crime sort of setting.

I find I want to jump in on the note you mentioned about, you know, the wearing suits and ties. Do you do you think that's simply reflective of, well, you know, this is this is what an adult male and in society in the late 40s. This is just how everybody dressed. Or is there some level of symbolism involved in specifically like the way the hero in hero and kind of air quotes the protagonist in in film noir because I know, you know, the image that sticks in my head is, you know, the tie is kind of undone, the collar is, the collar is loose and, you know, and, and is there a conscious level of symbolism in that or... You know, it's interesting to me because I mean, I certainly always associated with, It's interesting to me because I certainly always associated with that kind of dress, particularly early 1950s, late 1940s style of dress, where you have a suit, not only a suit,

but a wide lapeled suit as opposed to the smaller lapeled suit that you got. And the shorter tie, which as you say, is often a skew, or for women, the silk stockings, maybe still a fox fur, something like that. I guess I see symbolism more in the disruption of that, like when the tie does go a skew, or the hat gets knocked off or something like that. I'm not saying that that's necessarily, I think that was conscious. But in terms of what they were wearing, it's often kind of similar to what they were wearing in the scruple comedies in the 1930s or something like that. It's just, it's just sent in a very different context. And in a way, that is sort of what they do to these like static genres of film. Like at least after 1934 when the when the Hayes office kicked in, right? When censorship was

really more buckled down, you did not see things in which like moral transgressions were not punished. You didn't see like a focus on these negative, morally questionable things, because the Hayes Office was sort of a reaction to things that were coming out of the 21 in terms of female sexuality to the gangsters that you allude to and the violence in which they engaged and they weren't almost punished for it. And for a long time, you know, at least for 10 years, mostly that was, that was a next, you know, that fight. It was more sad, more studio power. And then as you reach the other side of World War II, it becomes more questionable. And that is a big mainstay of film war, you know, getting gritty going down the wrong path, sometimes getting punished for it, sometimes not completely,

but it's a focus on characters who do bad things. And that had not existed for a while, and that it's definitely a mainstay of Filmmore. Do you think that that ability to transgress post-war wasn't, I'm not saying this is the only factor, but wasn't enabled in some way by the sneakiness of screwball comedy. I mean, screwball comedy comes in right after the haze code and it's like, oh, we can't have sex. Fine, we're going to have sex verbally. And it's going to be all about your frustration and you're never getting off like. And so just that dancing up to the line, I'm not touching you kind of aspect of it. And then that just getting completely obliterated by violence. And those two things kind of dovetailing into, you know, you've got, we can do the violence now. And we've moved the bar enough from

Hayes through clever talk and things like that that now we can do, you know, focus on bad people doing bad things who they might not get punished ultimately, but there's almost always a scene where he takes a crack to the jaw or his hair is slightly a Kimbo instead of he takes a crack to the jaw or his hair is slightly a Kimbo instead of neatly shellac back. And it occurs to me also, like you said, the connection made the suits that they wear. I was thinking of it happened one night, you know, that very big, you know, David Burns style suit, where, where what if it's that, like that purposeful use of it? I mean, you're talking about using the same style

that was 10 years earlier. Right. Or if you're talking about like Carrie Grant who in bringing in baby, he'll become completely disrobed and has to put a, as to put a woman's negligent on or something like that. They are constantly playing with stuff like that. And not only are they're constantly playing with stuff like that. And and not only are they

they continuing to deal with those sexual issues in a way that's sublimated through this language and just kind of kind of bubbles towards the surface. I mean, you can look at and this is this is a part that they put in later once they had filmed the movie, The Big Sleep, between Humphrey Boegard and Warren Bekall, like there's a whole scene where they meet together in a restaurant and they're talking about like horse racing and who's in the saddle and there's all sorts of sexual innuendo going back and forth. And that that's also in double indemnity between Fred Murray and Barbara Stanwick, all sorts of stuff, which by the way, the screenplay on that was written by Raymond Chandler, based on an original book by James M. Kane.

And that kind of purple prose and that sexually charged verbiage definitely continues and become, and as a, as a mainstay. But then on top of that, you have dealing with the violence of World War II. You don't see that as much as in the 1930s, but, but there's, there's violence. There's, there's people brooding and thinking about, you know, they're in all the new skills. We've seen so much news real violence that now we can take it. And in many ways, the violence, I think, We've seen so much news real violence that now we can take it. And in many ways, the violence, I think, sub not sublimates, but subsumes the sex talk.

Right. So now the ornate has to get that. But to the point where like, you know, hundreds of thousands of American men had gone overseas and killed people. Yes. And they had seen people's like, you know, I mean, a generation was exposed to that. So, like, like, you look at these movies afterwards and, you know, yeah, there was a lot of drinking smoking, but it just goes, it goes up exponentially.

And people are gruding and they're like, and they're screwed up and they're drinking and they're smoking. And they are dealing with a lot of stuff. And it's not always mentioned literally, but that is the background to all of this stuff. And it's, you know, I guess the reason why I engage with that and I'm going to try to win you over, Danine. I'm going to try to like point out a few things that you can because I don't even necessarily think that the multi-sfolk is the best example of it. I think it's an early example of what it started to become on a certain kind of structure. But what you see there, the phrase that the phrase

that we frequently use is it's the trope codifier. It's the one that that lays down, you know, this is this is how we're going to structure this going forward. Right. So whether it's whether it's the most important or the best is kind of immaterial, it's it's the one that everybody points to is, okay, this is where this is where we see this. You know, the West thing how to the originals Edison. In some way, in some ways, it is, but like like so many post-war films like

employ much more of the Chiaroscuro and Loki lighting that a lot of European directors like Jacques, Jacques Turner of who did out of the past Fritz Lang, Robert Sionemack. it's much more dramatic like as you progress into the 1940s. And I like the multi-s Falcon, but it doesn't have quite all the element. I mean, it has the femme fatale in Mary Astor's shirt. But it's almost the way it's filmed. It has the homophobia. No, it definitely has the homophobia. It has all of these things. And to my mind, you can't separate it from all that cultural baggage that was a part of its time. And they're

all cartoonish to a certain degree. They're those big rough heroes and like, sultry women and everything like that. And yeah, like they're all sorts of like caricatures and like, you know, I mean, that's that's part of it. You're not going to be looking for. You're not going to be looking at modern points of view in these, but right. If you understand what the context is, you could you, it's just just fascinating to me how these movies deal with one coming out of this incredibly violent watershed. How do we deal with this? How do we deal with like re structuring society? How do we deal with like the the economy in and and and all of these things like are just to me in a way in addition to like being these incredibly cool just to me in a way, in addition to being these incredibly cool visuals, just kind of a big psychic blast of coolness and weirdness at the same time.

That's how I would encapsulate it. Okay, so in the post-war period, I want to get your take on an idea that occurs to me. There is, you know, all the GI's return home from the war and while they've been gone, their sisters, their girlfriends, their wives have been working in the factories to fuel the war machine. And now they're coming back and all of those women are getting sent home so that these men now have a job to come home to.

Do you think the, as you say kind of cartoonish, gender interaction, gender roles that we see portrayed in these films might have in some way been fueled by a level of insecurity based on the knowledge that while they'd been gone, their places had been held by these, these same women. Yeah, no doubt. And I have no doubt that that is the psychic center of the femme fatale. You come back from the war, you have a woman who who have had jobs outside the home, who have some money, who have confidence, who are who are more confident in their own,

expressing their own sexuality. And I think you have a whole generation of men, or at least a subset of a generation of men, whom that frightens the bejesus out of. And I think a lot of the people who are writing this stuff are either consciously or subconsciously reacting to that. And that's that's that to me is a big part of where the femme fatale comes from. Now my take on that in terms of, you know, what do we get out of that? Is that just a bad thing? To me, I look at that, okay, like, you know, women are,

okay, they admittedly, usually they are put in the context of something that's dangerous, that's going to take you down the wrong path. Nevertheless, this, historically, for me, is a manifestation for the first time outside of, say, you know, social dilatants, you know, from 1930s, a screwball comedies like Carol Lombard or Catherine Hepburn. Right. Like here is here, from the middle or lower class who actually have power and who are confident and these stories do not always put them in a good light. But you can see that this is something significantly different that is being

presented that has not been presented in a big way before. And that, to me, is significant. Yeah, I think, you know, again, screwball comedy is where I keep coming from on this, partly because that's what I wrote my bachelor's thesis on. But I think that there's something to be said as the agents of chaos that the women were in screw-all comedies deliberately so and they were agents of chaos within a closed system of logic. I can remember she turns off the lights. Why?

Because I don't want the electricity. No, no, she unscrews the light bulbs. Why? Well, because that way the electricity doesn't leak into the light bulb. It makes perfect sense and she draws you into it, right? You know, Catherine Hepburn making you into it, right? You know, Catherine Hepburn making you sing to a leopard, you know, shit like that. Like it all just makes sense, even though it shouldn't. And you're kind of brought along. And it disrupts

this, the whole point of screwball is frustration, you know, frustrating the man, right? Now that is zany. It's fun. It's, it silly. It's kooky. It's still not challenging the man's dominant place. It's it's disrupting his place, but he still will land in a commanding spot, whereas after the war, men come home. And I mean, one of the one of the things about a film noir is that you always have the femme fatale But you always also have the loyal angel like you know, you've got the blonde who's hair is straight And she's always his secretary You have a working woman featured

So you've got a working class woman featured as the ideal or certainly a far more ideal than the femme fatale. And so you still have that safety, and then you've got, and the femme fatale is not an agent of chaos here, she is a menace. And I think the upper class twit, as Ed likes to put it, the dilatant, she's a disruptor, but then you have a woman that you need to protect and you have a woman.

You essentially have the woman that you want to come home to and then the woman that you've come home to. You've got that being represented very often in stark black and white contrast in the film noir and there's menace to her now. She's almost always deadly in some way, shape, or form. Yeah. And in, in, in, in that dynamic, that's, I mean, that, that dynamic, the, the yin yang of that completely borrow a cultural term, but the, the dichotomy involved in that. I mean, that dates back to Madonna or as a concept. That's been a trope since before the written word.

The two merits. But the context of it, I think you're right. Yeah. And I think though that you're onto something with the context having shifted on it for sure. Yeah. You know, but I think it's my take on it is it's an evolution of that. Yeah, no, I would say that there are a lot of movies from the film noir era that contain

that sort of secondary character that you're talking about. Certainly, like there's the, I forget who plays here, but in out of the past, Robert Mitchum is like explaining the story of what happened with him and Greer Garcin to this woman who's kind of like the pure chaste ideal in active violence, a young Janet Lee is then Halfland's wife and actually Mary Astor kind of plays a prostitute that he gets involved with as he's being chaste by fellow veteran Robert Ryan. But I would say, and then the secretary,

Effie Priehn that you allude to in the multi-falken, certainly there too. A lot of the time though, it's, there isn't that secondary character. And sometimes it's just a femme fatale. I don't want to let film noir is like off the hook. I mean, they are problematic. And, and, and, and there's not always even the dichotomy. Sometimes, sometimes, sometimes the male character is, is just bad like that. Right. Like, like, in, in your almer's,

you know, a detour like for seemingly no reason. Like she's just angry at this guy and she and she's like got him over a barrel and and she just like completely like screws, screws up his life. Right. So it's there. You're right. And I see a pattern of it, but a lot of the time it's even more roughly massagernistic than that. Okay. Fair. Oh, wow. So it also occurs to me that 1947 is when we see Levittown being built.

Yes, and there is this very, there's this very polished, very idealized idea of what everybody ought to want, which is the house in the suburbs with the 2.5 kids. And like you say, the loyal wife that you go home to, and literally white-picket fences was actually one of the standard upgrades on an 11th adult house. Or you can re-treat to the fantasy of the dark world of crime on the other side of the tracks. Yeah, so okay, yeah, that was kind of where I was going with that.

Do you think to some extent this genre is an escape from the cultural straight jacket that some of these men might have felt was being put around them. Yeah, I do. And I know like my grandfather was one of the, I think he worked as a PR agent for, and he was to this day, if you go to the lake,

the lakewood, California Museum, he's one of the founding pillars of the community of Lakewood. He staged a photograph that was on the cover of Time or Look, I forget which in which they're all these like moving trucks in on a single street. You had Lakewood on the West Coast, you had Levittown on East Coast, you had other places like it around the country. And yeah, psychically, that kind of like forms this like, as you say, a straight jacket because coming home from the war, you had this structure. Now, what's going to replace that? Well, is it consumerism? Is it materialism? Is it the suburbs? And can you live culturally only with that?

It's very limiting. So yeah, this can definitely be taken as a reaction to that. And certainly not everyone fit into that and they were still trying to find their place. It was a turbulent time. It was a turbulent time and people were trying to figure stuff out and I absolutely believe that it was a cultural reaction to that. You know, also since we're playing with the date 1947, obviously, you have the Marshall plan, so you've got a desire to restabilize the world You've got America turning Japan into essentially another goal

Um on on some levels. I mean McCartor certainly saw himself as Caesar having been sent to goal Yeah And then you also have in 48 you have um, I hope forget I is 801 it's the executive order that desegregates the army. Are the army? Okay, that's 48. So, you know, these films are also overwhelmingly white.

They are. Yeah, I can think of very few, like, characters of the color at all. Like, impact 1947, like has sort of secondary character at anime one. That's the only one I can think of off the top of my head. And so there you go. Like you have like this, this, also this psychic frustration of I'm going to use the phrase that they would have used. Cantaman, and really what it is is Cantowightman.

That's the answer to me in this world, you know the way in this world. And these are made for white audiences and so on and so forth. Again, I come back to the clothing. I'm fascinating at the fact that they're fascinated at the fact that I think that choice of clothing might, I don't know if it was purposeful, but it was certainly influential. If they're picking the same clothes that are out of style now, that you went through rationing about, you had literal riots where, where service members were attacking young kids for wearing the same clothing, just to a slightly more cartoonish level because they were zoot-koot, zoots-koots. But you have the same clothing as you had in the 30s. It's almost like you have the same ideology

and the same expectations free and post war. It's represented in the fact that he's wearing a suit that's usually wrinkled. He's wearing a suit that is kind of out of touch with the times or at least the last grasping reach back to a simpler time. It's a hard-killing, if you will. And I don't know there's something really interesting about that when you take a look at the

fact that now Japanese people are being reintegrated into society and white people don't have a choice despite all the native sons of California groups that got started. Black people are being integrated into society to a greater degree, you know, again without white people getting to have a choice in it, and yet you also have the Leviton, which is, oh, okay, well, we're just going to go over here and you know, white flight it up it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I just, I, I You know how I am about this stuff. So Truman signed executive order 99 99 81 on 26 July 1948 What you mentioned

801 you might have been thinking of order 802 which was June of 41 which banned discriminatory Descriminatory employment practices by federal agencies. Well, there's the eight in the one in the same cloth. Yeah. Yeah. So thank you. Sorry. And 47 is when you get out of the past and crossfire. I mean, this is like when and crossfire interestingly is one of the few that kind of does like deal like even if indirectly with with those issues like it starts out like the very first scene of the movie like some like someone's beating someone else up you don't see what their face is because like there's a there's a lamp that's the only light in the room it's been knocked over you don't see their faces you like one guy's getting pummeled. The body is still, the guy straight

and satai walks out of the room. And you find out that it, you know, as the movie progresses, it's a Jewish guy that's been killed by a returning war veteran who's motivated by anti-Semitism. And this is one of the few issues, the few films that like touches on that, but almost in no other place that I am aware of, do those come out. I mean, it's almost completely from perspective of, you know, the white guy, and what is my place, What is my power going to be? And I really do do think to that you're right that, yeah, rationing has been like taken away. The lapels are getting wider. There's, you know, kind of a more over the top feel to

the suits now and the the dores. And that and that's emphasized. There's a little bit more ambient wealth, but it's weird and kind of out of place. And the sort of like German expressionist cast it's put on all of this makes it a thought and it left. Um, I'll come back. Joseph. Let me ask. Let me ask you this. Um, you, you talk of these movies as you've seen them. I've not. Uh, could you take me through one of them?

Uh, one that's either iconic or very demonstrative of some of these concepts that you're talking about, like, talk me through the plot of it, not, not just the synopsis, but like, or not just like the, the elevator pitch, but like, talk me through the plot of it, not just this synopsis, but like, or not just like the elevator pitch, but like, you know, take me through Luke Skywalker's day, you know, that kind of, that kind of thing. Okay. Tell me about Star Wars. Give me the 10 minute version. Gotcha.

Okay. So that'll help a lot of our audience members who are like, what the hell is film noir? Right. Okay. So let's, let's deal with one of my favorites, which is out of the past. Okay. So the main character played by Robert Mention, he's found at the beginning of the movie and running a garage somewhere in this small little town in the valley in California. And guy comes up to him and this is like a figure from his past.

He's the assistant for for a gangster who's played by a young Kirk Douglas actually, who's been looking to find Robert Mitchum for a long, long time. And he realizes he's going to have to go see him. When you see Robert Mitchem, okay, he has an assistant who's at his garage who's a who's a death mute, he goes, he realized, wow, okay, I'm going to have to go and see this guy. And I've in the meantime, I've developed a new life. He has a girlfriend played by this kind of young pure woman.

And much of the story is told as he's driving to see Kirk Douglas, the gangster. He's telling all of this in flashback as it happens. Okay. So the flashback is, okay, here's, I mean, I have to go see this guy, I may not be coming back, I don't know what's going to happen, but I want you to know that I have this dark past, and I want to tell you about it, and I want to come clean because you're important to me. And so as he's driving, he says, okay, I used to be a detective, and my partner and I went to see this guy who was who was a gangster and his girlfriend a shot him. So that's Kirk Douglas and and Greer Garcin. I'm sorry I don't I don't think that's

the correct name of the actress but she shoots him and he wants to track her down. And he wants his money back. He doesn't want to revenge, exact it on her at least, supposedly. And he sends the two of them to, like he wants to bring her back, get his money back. And so Robert Mitchum manages to track her back, you know, get us get us money back. And so, um, Robert Mitchum manages to track her down, but also like loses his partner as a part of the process that two of them meet together

in Mexico. They, they hit it off. They like, they fall in love. And so like he keeps sending messages back to Kirk Douglas and his TOTE is saying, Oh, I haven't been able to find her. I haven't been able to find her blah blah blah. Meanwhile, they're having you know, fun in Mexico. So he finally Kirk Douglas shows up unexpectedly and says, Well, how's the hunt going here? And he said, oh, I haven't been able to find her. You know, and then he manages to get out of there and and and leave with her without for Douglas finding out. They go together back to California. And but meanwhile, his partner, his detective partner has tracked

the two of them, them down because he's still working for Kirk Douglas. So they get into a confrontation, they get into a fist fight in this very famous scene that's like kind of low key lit where Robert Mitchum's hair is flying all over the place, but he's still got his trench coat on and they're punching each other and their shadows are cast on the wall. And then suddenly a shot rings out. And the femme fatale is kind of pressed against the wall with her gun. She shoots his partner detective. And then while he's checking out to confirm that he's dead,

she runs off, gets into the car, drives off, never sees her again. And then it dissolves back into he's telling the story to his present girlfriend. So they connect again. He's gotten together with the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the And he gets into this whole thing. Kirk Douglas tries to frame him for a crime. And meanwhile, the femme fatale is double dealing with her and everything. And finally, they manage to off him. They both go off together. And as they're driving away, they run into a police block blocking the road. A police checkpoint, she shoots Robert Mitchum and then the police

shoot her and they're both dead and gone. And the original girlfriend back in the small town with the, with the, where he ran the garage, like she ends up with a, with a local cop who is investigating him. So in that case, like justice is done, but he was led down the primrose path by the femme fatal. So I would, I would strongly recommend that the visuals are incredible. Robert Mitchum is just like at his at his smoothest and most, you know, he's smoothest and cockyest. And the the language is great. The acting is great. It's very well done. I would highly recommend that. Sounds like the cinematography is off the hook too.

Like it is. It really is. A lot of shadow work. A lot of, um, you know, anytime I see, uh, stuff where it's shot where the shadows are doing the action, it, it, you know, obviously takes me back to Plato's cave, you know, and so it's like, they're watching our darker selves. There's so much to play with with that, you know, and our darker cell are always a grotesque version of us, because they're elongated, because their actions are projections and not and in some ways reflections, but their projections of what we wish we could do and

things like that. So in the scene with his detective partner and fighting where the in the cabin, where the shadows are casted on the wall, I can totally see that. Like there's some just amazing scenes. Is there a lot of work from low camera angles too? Because I'm picturing this in my head and everything is camera close to floor level. Yeah. And that's seen it is. And there, there are a couple like, especially in dark rooms where they're meeting them, nothing like not all the time. Like, for example, like when they're in Mexico, it's supposed to be a kind of Halcyon thing. And it's almost like, you know, it's it's like that, that's sort of like the romantic phase of it. But when

they get into the dark scenes, when he's being framed and when there's that central fight, yeah, that's definitely. When the world's closing in on him, it sounds like opens up for the Mexican stuff. Yeah, exactly. It's all based on the frame of mind of the protagonist. That's interesting to me because, and you said that was what, you're 47? I'm pretty sure. Yeah, okay So they've lost so I mean you're I mean they're playing with framing. They're playing with perspective

They're playing with focus playing with shadows. Um, they're they're also going to Mexico Yeah, you know the Bracero program is I think it's been renewed by that point because there was a point after the war Where Mexico is like, oh you you've got to stop being shitty to our people. And like they banned Texas. It's almost like green day in Sacramento. Like we don't play Texas, you know, and they banned Texas for the longest time. So you had this weird scab labor thing going on. Um, but I think by 4748, they renewed the Procero program with more stuff put in there. So you see Mexico is being a larger part of the news cycle if such a thing existed at the time. Right. A larger a larger contribution to the zeitgeist on some levels and and also

You know, it's just interesting because I always think of noir being so urbanized and yet this is interesting because I always think of noir being so urbanized. And yet this is almost pastoral from what you're just showing. You know, in a way, not primarily because of Mexico. And let me just let me just say that it does not put Mexico or Mexican people in a good like the one character that you can that's memorable at all is the kind of like guy who's trying to sell you a watch and like guy go around and it's a total like stereotype like it's just like. And you're doing it. Exactly. It's it's it's played it's it's played for a laugh line. It is it is not it is not good. And you can look at you can look at something like, gosh, what is it? What is the one that Orson Wells did?

1950 in that touch of evil. Oh, no. That is particularly bad because Charlton Heston is basically playing in brown face with Janet Lee as his wife. And there are some very good parts in that film. It just like, you know, I mean, it all kind of the problem. There's all sorts of baggage with that. But yeah, in out of the past, actually,

a lot of the action takes place in this, you know, in either like Tahoe, in a small town. I think it's supposed to be like bridge port near the seeras. And the kind of culminating scene, which I keep describing, is in a cabinet in the woods. And yeah, there are scenes where they're in San Francisco and he's trying to, he's being framed in the latter part of the film and he's going around and it's haxian stuff, but it's not purely set in urban. So in that way, it is a little bit atypical, but it has all those other key elements of turning what in terms of lighting and fantasy tell and all the things that we've discussed.

No, I just I always like to look at the influences at the time kind of thing. And again, it is interesting that Mexico plays a part as a set piece in it. You know, it's interesting to me that they're also talking about Tahoe because we see this, like you said, with Godfather Part 2, right, they move their operations to Tahoe and that's set in the 50s. So like this period of time, there is a move toward these little hamlet places, you know, away from the city, away from the corrupting influence of the city and stuff like that. And yet you can't get away from the noirness, the noirate of it. So it's okay, cool. So that's... Yeah, go ahead. Well, when you're talking about the the urban versus rural, I don't remember the title of the movie. It's totally not a not a noir, but it's a

it's a I want to say it's a comedy, but there was there was a film that I think is around the same time period that the central conceit is there's this little town someplace in the Midwest that is this secret magic button for anybody who wants to take a poll because the population break down of this little town is this magical microcosm of the rest of the country and this city slicker of the rest of the country and this city slicker goes to this town because one of his war buddies is from there. And he winds up totally screwing everything up because he starts pole. It gets out that this is the secret of how his poles are also accurate. And so everybody shows up and everything gets completely wonky. But one of the conversations in that film

is like his army buddy from the war talking to him about, you know, it's funny, I remember you talking about, you know, in our unit, you were the only one of us who was from the big city. And there was at this time, this is very shortly, either before or after, the majority of Americans weren't living in small towns anymore. The majority of Americans were now living in urban centers. And the depiction of the herb in in noir, it strikes me, could have been a reflection

of like the the conflicted feelings that that were there in the zitgeist about that development. Am I stretching here? You know, I'm not sure, but you're talking about magic town with Jane Wyman and Jimmy Stewart. I hadn't remembered the name of it, but I was frantically looking it up in the background and googling different terms. That's the one. We got our Reagan connection. All right, here we go. The show we have stayed within contract. So, but there are a few things that we have to do in our contract for this show.

One, I have to have a pun. Two, every six episode, I have to do some sort of a literative paragraph that actually fits to what we're doing. Don't worry, we're still three episodes out from that. Three, I have to mention pro wrestling and four, Ronald Reagan has to come up. There we go.

And oh, five, it has to say, no, no, at least once. So. Just a single degree of separation. Exactly, you're all set. Yeah. Yeah. But, okay, so magic town. Okay, that's.

1947, by the way. Yeah. And in the 47, and 48, I I, I wonder if I shouldn't hold this for the next episode if there's going to need to be one. But I'm going to go ahead and throw it in here now. And perhaps that'll spin us off. TV is just coming into the four. Like it's, I mean, by the time we get to 55 or so, you're starting to see TV as a fairly regular, almost tropey thing. Like, you know, people are still gathering at each other's houses to watch the TV on the giant console with the tiny screen, but

it is a thing. Like, you know, 4748, you start to see, here's the wrestling. You start to see professional wrestling showing up on low fatality. Don't forget Uncle Milky. That's right. And also you know, you can cold gate hour and all kinds of, you know, soap hours and shit like that. Is there an interplay that's happening? Lucky strike sponsoring everything. Chesterfields speaking of Ronald Reagan. Drake sponsoring everything. Chesterfields speaking of Ronald Reagan.

Is there a interplay that's happening here? A reactive aspect here. TV goes whole hog into family stuff. Pretty pretty early, not right away, but pretty early on. Is that a rubber band effect to what's going on with noir? Or is noir more of a like we look back and like oh my god, this is so big a deal, but back then it was just kind of and also that was playing. You know what I mean? Yeah, I don't know. I mean there's definitely a contrast because it's so much of early television, you know, a lot of it for the first decade is so relatively like stayed and conventional compared to the movies that we're going on at the time.

And I don't really think that artistically they were necessarily thinking, oh, we've got to like fight back against television and be more artsy or anything like that. I think primarily what these were, I mean, there's an economic frame to this as well within the industry. You're talking about crime dramas, which are relatively easy to make and enticing in terms of plot. They're relatively inexpensive to make. They don't have a lot of special effects. They don't always necessarily have enormous stars or anything like that. Or they focus on these.

Yeah, exactly. Big, they don't have big casts. I mean, I mean, they don't have huge sets and a lot of those things are concealed by the sort of like loculating and gira-escura that we've been talking about. So I don't know. I kind of think that they're just kind of going

along separate, you know, tracks at that point. Okay. I think my impression is that eventually the film war is kind of like overtaken by other phenomena in the film industry and the increased popularity of television is certainly one of the things that like causes it to die down a little bit and maybe it explore other things. You know, I mean, there's also like in the late 50s and early 1960s, the epic, which is designed to compete with like the small screen, which it can only offer so much and designed to make use of the theater and the color

and the widescreen and everything like that. So they're tending away from the sort of thing that mine television anyway. So yeah, I mean, I guess I don't see that so much, but I think it took a while for television, by and large, to get more nuanced and more interesting. I think, once you get into stuff that, like the Twilight Zone and the early plays of Patty Triewski

and stuff like that, you get some interesting writing. But at the beginning, a lot of it is almost just like, you know, a film to radio show or something like that. Not too much different than that. Yeah, you're right. Like a lot of variety, a lot of situational comedies that could have been audio only, you know, things like that. Yeah. What about, so I'm just also thinking, as we wind

down this episode, what about, because we talked, Ed talked about insecurity, and we talked about the psychic trauma and things like that. And in the 1950s, we see a resurgence of, and some of its atomic based, right? You know, a fear of a nuclear world kind of thing. But we see a resurgence of monster horror films. We see a resurgence of horror films in general, but they're all very specifically like, you know, them. And I mean, I think Ed, correct me if I'm wrong, is that when the Gujiro movies started in Japan as well, right? Now that's not responding to noir, but like,

explicitly, yeah, like everybody is really scared of monsters, you know, and you start to get into and then you get to the psychological thriller that kind of pops out of that. But is, is horror like taking up some of the air that noir is is trying to do for us in terms of answering to those insecurities and those traumas? Yeah, I think it's kind of responding to it. It's transitioning into a new set of fears. And you do see stuff again like like Kiss Me Deadly, which deals with, you know, nuclear material and the my camera character, you know, trying to take nuclear material and it all blowing up

in this in this beach house at the end of the movie, but that's 1955 and that's like relatively late. I feel like as you transition into the late 50s, sci-fi and other similar things, whether you're talking about Godzilla, there's a new and emerging set of fears that kind of transcends the boundaries of the genre of film noir that really can't be dealt with within its confines. And you certainly see less of them.

I think it's equally got to do with like economic forces in play and just like an interest in other things. And maybe that has to do with maybe that has to do with Sputnik that is launched in addition to everything that's going on with the with the the Cold War in addition to, you know, the arms race and so forth. arms race and so forth. But you have new and emerging locuses of public interest that filter their way into the culture that really there isn't room for that in film more, at least not within that particular genre. And again, I don't think they were thinking of it in the genre. It's like within within crime, it's sort of like it's it's kind of too narrow for that. Sure. Yeah. And I guess now that I know that you've said that. And I think about it a little bit more, you know, horror films are there's an existential fear. Whereas noir

seems to be almost a, there's a depression. Yeah. There is a post traumatic response, not a fear response. Yeah, no, that's a good point. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like just a bird eye Gordon producer of many flaky films from that passed away just recently at the age of 100. And also the frozen food magnet, right?

Was it? Yeah, probably so. Yeah, or someone in the family. I don't know. But, but, but, but all the all these weird, I mean, you know, like this science fiction stuff, I mean, like the original like monster movies of the universal era, I mean, I think that was responding to a fear of the economic trauma that was going on it on at that time globally. And I think that like when you look at the science fiction stuff of the late of the late 50s in the early 1960s, you're looking at a response to the possibilities of nuclear warfare and 1960s, you're looking at a response to the possibilities of nuclear warfare and the Cold War. And, yeah, there's this wonderful period of time, and it comes back because, especially in the 1970s, there's a resurgence of interest in it.

Once you reach a different era, but in terms of dealing with that kind of issue, I mean, maybe there are some examples out there that folks could prove they're wrong with, but I just don't see room within that for that kind of delving. Like science fiction is ideal for it, because it involves all these new technologies and things that we're desperately trying to wrap our our heads around were That can encapsulates these things that have been around for a long time

But all these the order is changing and we're trying to grapple with it internally and and and this is more of a response to external forces and this is more of a response to external forces. Okay, yeah, I can see that. I believe. Sure. Yes. Nice. Nice. Cool.

Well, I think this is actually a good breaking point because I have lots of questions about the resurgence of it. So I think in our next episode we can talk about that. So I guess, yeah, we've gotten into quite a bit here. I'm liking it. As I always ask after an episode is over, Ed, what have you gleaned? I think it's remarkable what a time capsule, the genre kind of is. The intensity, like the number of times in our discussion this time around how the years, the specific years of like 4748 kept coming back around. I think it's eye opening to me, the extent to which this was the crystallization, I think, of a whole lot of psychic stuff

of a whole lot of psychic stuff going on in this very specific moment in time. And I had never taken the time to think about the context of it in that kind of depth. And I think it's really illuminating ironically enough. Yeah. thank you. Yeah, I really, again, the 1948, 1947 connection is palpable. I mean, it's, it's, as Ed often will say, it's the pattern on the wallpaper that you never noticed until now, and you can't unsee it. You know, and it's absolutely, and for it to have such a short run as a genre,

and you know, we have to keep in mind, we imposed structures upon the past all the time. We talk in terms of decades, bullshit, things don't happen in terms of decades. We talk in terms of like, well, this genre started with this and ended with this. You know, I did it with with, uh, a screwball comedy and we're doing it here with noir. And that's a very useful model to look at.

But the reality is, is that nobody sets out in the beginning to make, I'm going to make a noir piece. And nobody at the end goes, this will be the end of noir pieces. Somewhere in the middle, somebody's's like I figured out the formula. But everyone else is kind of like you know trying to make art. Or trying to make a buck really. Yeah. Yeah. This is a popular genre of film. Hey, exactly. Run that up the cycle. Yeah, absolutely. And I think those are the formulaic folk and good for them. You know, there's nothing wrong with Thomas King Kate. I just don't want it in my house. What?

There's plenty wrong with Thomas King Kate, but he knows what he knows what he takes your point. What? He gets he does as a matter of fact. But, you know, I do think that it's the same genre. It's not actually Thomas Conquate who did Trump writing on a dinosaur, right? Or correct. No, it's not. No, it's not. Conquate died of heat.

He could have a fact. OK. But he is known as a painter of light. So that's two things that I've talked about that have to do with light in the Phil Noir episode. But more to the point that it's such a short lived live drama genre, you know, essentially we're talking what 47 to 55 if we are going to put an overlay on it, right?

50 58, you know, I definitely got by six. Yeah. You know, same thing as we saw with with screw ball comedy 34 to 43 like and and 43 is pushing it Like if you consider hell's a pop and to be one as variety magazine did Then okay fine, but variety magazine recognize it as one simply to declare the death of of screw ball so And and they weren't wrong either. You know, it had died. And for reasons that I think episode like 24 will show you. But, you know, it's interesting that these are very short

liven genres. And I wonder if most genres aren't roughly half a generation old in terms of like when they really came in and were really forceful their first wave, I wonder and I haven't done any looking, I'm just wondering aloud and I see both of you putting, you know, your lips away to think about it. But it's it's it's fascinating because we talk about satire only lasts half a decade before it becomes a goal. Um, which is depressing. Um, so I wonder if I have, you know, unless there's a, unless there's a, an author who really pushes hard and keeps innovating, can we think of any genres that last in our movies that lasted more than a decade?

I think the Western's some enduring quality. I mean, like, I mean, like there were West, they've been going since the 20s and, and, and, and, and we know, and again, it evolved. Yeah. It's definitely a very narrow period in time, which is funny. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. But okay.

Yeah. Okay. So yeah. Yeah. The slapstick. And I mean, if you look outside, if you look outside the United States, sure.

Right. Saying single could Jedi movies, um, uh, have, have lasted since the 60s in Japan. Okay. But that's basically their, their version, that's their version of the Western. So yeah. Yeah. But again, like in all these, in genres, like end up showing up in different ways

because again, you have neo-noir and, and it, and it, yeah, it pops up in up in different ways because again, you have neon war and it pops up in different forms. And then you have the spaghetti western, which is a lot different than most of the John Wayne era. So traditional. Yeah. So, you know, yeah, it's the beast that wouldn't die. Well, and just like, you know, we found that Steve Martin really liked making screw wall comedies in the 90s. That was his thing. That and through the 2000s, he and Stuart Tifa made like three or four of them. So and to this day, there are really good variations on the screw wall comedy, like, like, you know, I mean, two, two weeks notice, there was that there was that one with Sandra Bullock and, and Daniel Radcliffe and, and yeah I mean like like yeah

yeah yeah it's like that comes up all the time. Sure and I assume there's New War type shit that comes up too like I mean this got started this this particular podcast came around as a result of Ed trying to convince me that Blade Runner is a movie worth a damn. So, yeah. Wait, because it fucking is. You know, I will tell you, I went back and said I hadn't seen Blade Runner for a long time, but then I saw Blade Runner, for the 49 in the theater. I was captivated with that and then I had to go back and see that.

And maybe it's just because of how I was exposed to it, but I was just, I was thoroughly impressed in, especially the visual sense about, you know, and you can definitely see the noir resonant and says in, in both films, but I love 2049. And I think that's, I think that's worthwhile too. If you haven't seen it. I've not, but I historically 2049 and I think that's I think that's worth wild too. Yeah, if you haven't seen it. I've not, but I historically have fallen asleep trying to I've tried five times to watch Blade Runner and I've fallen asleep within 20

minutes each time. Now some of that might be I was you have to yeah, you got to come over. We got it. We got it. At some point at some point, I got to come over and when you start falling asleep, I just get it. and hit you with it with a fireplace. I fall asleep to some of my favorite things. Sure. But I'm a fall in the fall of Andrea Tarkovsky. Oh, yeah.

I like long boring takes like Andrea Tarkovsky, like, you know, just slow. You must have loved very learning movies. I love those. Which one? Barry Lyndon. I did like Barry Lyndon. Oh, my God. Yeah. I know.

I'm a free and Kubrick. I have very smart friends who like Barry Lyndon a lot. So I know the problem is me, but good Lord. No, no, I mean, it is no, that's not entirely true. It's a boring slow film. And it's sometimes, and you know, not everybody can process that. And I can't process it all the time. But I just, but there's something about the level of art in which you're willing to just be incredibly patient and incredibly deliberate, which is just like, it's very calming to me. It's almost not like about what you would typically consider to be the art of the film.

It's just like, you're going through an art gallery or something like that. It's just a background setting and it's like white noise and I just, I love it for that way. It's very meditative that is kind of what that sounds like to me. Okay. Precisely. Cool. Precisely.

All right. Well, what would, let's see, how are we going to do this? Beowulf, why don't you hit us first with what you would recommend people to read? You got any reading recommendations or see since the film is literature. Yeah, I got to recommend a couple of films. As I have mentioned before, out of the past, I think is a sublime example of the genre. I would also recommend, although it is a little less typical,

also starring Robert Mitchem, Crossfire, which is kind of a combination between a film noir and a social message film. And I would say to active violence with Van Hefflen, Robert Ryan, Janet Lee, Mary Astor, a really good cast, one that especially illuminates the sort of psychic echoes of World War II that we're talking about, particularly well, active violence. So those would be my three recommendations. I love it. And how about you? What would you like to recommend? Well, on a complete tangent from what

we've talked about today, in a continuing effort to prepare everybody for when I start talking about Cyberpunk S.A. John R.O. I very strongly recommend Snow Crash by Neil Stevenson, written in 1992. And it is, I think, a wonderful example of the evolution of the genre away from Gibson and away from Walter John Williams into a new direction with a slightly less self-serious kind of tone. Famously, the main character of the novel is named hero protagonist. That feels hero H.I. Go on. Go ahead. I was going to say that feels very Yes, literally, it is little tricky one. Yeah, he did go, spelled H-I-R-O, protagonist.

He is the son of a, or son or grandson of an African American GI who married to Japanese woman after the war. Anyway, but it's an amazing, an amazing book and a great example of the genre. So I'm going to highly, highly recommend if you haven't read it, go out, read it. If you have read it, go out and reread it. And so that's my recommendation. Love it. Well, since you asked Ed, I'm going to recommend. Yeah, I'm sorry. Sorry. I faded there. I apologize. My bad.

What do you got? I'm going to assume it was audio. I'm going to recommend actually Preston Sturgis by Preston Sturgis. Gosh, it's been a long time since I read that. I read it when I was studying a screwball comedy. But he writes his own. It's adapted and edited by Sandy Sturgis, who I can't remember if that's his wife or his daughter. It kind of doesn't matter. But he essentially is kind of just, it's his memoir about his times as a Hollywood director, a very successful Hollywood director in specifically a scruple comedy,

but he also dipped into other things because nobody just did one thing back then. I also just finished watching five came back. It's on the streaming services, I believe it's on Netflix. It is a documentary where they interviewed a bunch of modern directors, and I'm talking like the stars of modern directing, Spielberg's in there. And it's talking about Frank Caprice boys, and all the guys that went over during the war,

it was a really good, or five episode documentary. There's a lot of a lot of good stuff in there. So yeah, so that's that's what I'm gonna. All right, very cool. Yeah. So let's go around the horn. We'll go ed than me then we'll finish with bail wolf. Ed, where do you want to be found this week or no? I do not. I remain shadow in the warp. But we collectively, of course, can be found at woeboeboeboeboeboeboe.geekhistorytime.com. Online, we can be found on Twitter as long as that doesn't evaporate in a ball of purple flame at Yic history time. They're on on the Twitter machine.

And then you have obviously found us if you're listening to this our podcast is available on Stitcher and the Apple Podcast app. Please wherever you've found us, take a moment to subscribe, take another moment after that to give us the five star review that you know found us. Take a moment to subscribe. Take another moment after that to give us the five-star review that you know we deserve. If only, because we're fortunate enough to have smart people like

Baywolf come join us. But that's that's reason enough right there. And so yeah, how about you, Damien? Well, let's see. On social media, I'm pretty much static, so I'll just tell you if you're in the Sacramento area and you wanna come and see a pun tournament, you just missed the April 7th one where we had an actual professional wrestler competing on our show, which was awesome. By the time this releases, that will have happened

and it will have been awesome. By the time this releases, that will have happened and it will have been awesome. But also our May 5th show is coming up at Luna's. I don't think we're doing anything for the holiday because it's not really a holiday that people celebrate outside of Pueblo or all of the United States gets drunk. But May 5th is is going to be a show at Luna's eight o'clock, bring your Vax card, bring $20, $10 for the ticket, another 10 for merch and nachos. And if for some reason this pops up after that, then go to the June 2nd show, which should be a lot of fun. It'll be kind of the first one of the summer. So same play, same time. So yeah, that's capital punishment, capital with an O.

So, uh, Bay Wolf, nice. Thank you. Where do you want to be found? If you want to be found at all, plug your stuff. Well, you can find me on Twitter at Bay Wolf Rockland. That's B-E-O-W-U-L-F-R-O-C-H FacePolmAmerica.com where you can connect, listen to all past episodes and have a great time doing it. I like it. Cool. Well, thank you, Bill Wolf-Rachlan for joining us. Thank you so much for having me on. It was fun.

I like, I like blathering about non-political stuff too. Nice. Well, it's, we sometimes we blather whether or not we're political. Yeah, I You ask incisive questions. I just go off Well, for a good blood and rhetoric school. What's that? I said we're the love blood and rhetoric school It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a how it's fake? Yeah, is this fake? Yeah, you knew the hamlet was gonna win at the end. You knew it's pre, it's all fake.

Well, Oregon history of time, I'm Deemian Harmony. And I'm Ed Blalock and until next time, keep rolling 20s. Please.