[lbo-talk] Hard boiled philosophy

andie nachgeborenen andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com
Sun May 14 12:32:17 PDT 2006



> I think if we can talk about the novels of Hammet or
> Chandler or the movies
> made from Cain's stories we would have much more fun
> and learn much more.
> Why don't we write a book of philosophy? Let me
> suggest a title - "Law,
> Death, Capitalism and the Hard-Boiled Novel." I
> would like to throw Jim
> Thompson and Charles Willeford into the mix. Yes, I
> do think of these
> writers as contributing something "intelligent" to
> the rest of us.

There's a market for this, Borders is filled with books on The Matrix and Philosophy or The Sopranos and Philosophy, etc. I'd put Williford and Thompson into the mix, sure, there are others, e.g., Horace McCoy, Cornell Woolrich, today, James Lee Burke, James Crumley, James Ellroy. For example. Why just the movies of Cain's stories? Double Indemnity and Postman are wonderful books. And if we are putting in movies (and why not), you shouldn't leave out, e.g., The Maltese Falcon, the Big Sleep, Murder My Sweet, The Big Heat, Kiss Me Deadly, Pick Up On South Street, more recently LA Confidential. Noir is as much cinematic as anything else.

I noticed an interested spell-check created typo in my last post, that Hammett was a GI worth listening to. Of course I meant a guy, but he was, in fact, also a GI in WWII. And a Communist. Chandler thought the Commies were a joke and mostly hated the rich as phonies, but his depiction of capitalist society, leaving out accounts of actual production, is one that Marx would largely applaud. Burke's a liberal and Ellroy's a moderately rabid right winger, so the hard boiled writers cover the spectrum.

Someone to talk about this is Alan Wald, prof of English at Michigan, author of The New York Intellectuals, who last I talked with him some years back was working on a book on how ex or underground Commies dealt with Truman-McCarthyism and the blacklist by, in part, producing noir as well as, among other things, Gilligan's' Island.

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