Yet Another "New" Noir? By Jeremiah Healy

YET ANOTHER “NEW” NOIR?

by

Jeremiah Healy

   Okay, I’m guessing that most of us can agree that a trio of relatively recent movies qualify as noir, in the sense of (to quote our own Lou Boxer) bringing “to life the sins, moral failings, and dark existential truths of the human condition.” 

   The three films I’m thinking of are THE ROAD TO PERDITION (with Tom Hanks and Paul Newman), SIN CITY (with Bruce Willis and Jessica Alba), and 300 (with a lot of Spartans and even more Persians). Now, quickly, what do these feature-releases also have in common?

   They were all adapted from graphic novels.

   I must say that the first time I ever heard of graphic novels was in 1989, when I attended Semana Negra (Spanish for the “Black Week,” celebrating everything from WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE to MIKE HAMMER) in northern Spain. I was amazed to see crime stories in what we’d call comic- book format, but with virtually no censorship evident in text or drawings. I was assured by my Spanish, French, and Italian colleagues that graphic novels were very popular in their countries, especially among working-class people who had little time to read on the job but enjoyed well-crafted, exciting tales, with lurid drawings of creepy smugglers and corrupt police

officers, prostitutes and sexual perverts. My over-riding impression from skimming a few graphic novels?: “Life sucks, and then everybody dies.”

   Which is, I think, why traditional-length (say, 350 printed pages) noir novels don’t usually sell very well in the United States. We are a country of immigrants, decedents of folks brave, strong, and clever enough to risk what they had in the old country toward the hope of living better in the new one. Optimism is a key characteristic in that attitude, and in turn most of us don’t want to wade through many hours of reading only to find a bleak ending as the bittersweet payback for our perseverance. Most of the American noir novels I know of were relatively short, more on the order of 120 pages, and I think that means that we are willing to spend two hours reading (or watching on a screen) a story that descends into gloom and doom.

   And that brings us back, I think, to the future of noir. The November 19, 2007, issue of PUBLISHERS WEEKLY decried in article and editorial the National Endowment for the Arts report that both teenagers and college graduates are reading less accompanied by eroding comprehension skills. Yet, within a month, the December 10th issue of the same publication noted that sales of “manga” (Japanese-style graphic novels) in the United States rose about 10% to $220 million dollars during the year.

   Put simply, the time our young adults don’t spend surfing the Internet or crawling the Web may be lavished on graphic novels: lots of pictures, minimal dialogue, dark and dirty deeds. Probably not great news for maintaining this nation’s place in the world, but maybe the rise of yet another form of noir?

copyright 2007 by Jeremiah Healy

www.jeremiahhealy.com