Dead on Red
Noir. It’s a sexy word—an intoxicating word; it slinks out of your mouth, smooth and decadent, velvety as old cognac. To say the word aloud is to form a kiss. Your tongue shapes the sound, your lips gather it together, you breathe it as much as speak it. Noir.
It’s not a genre—not in film, not in fiction. It’s an attitude, a perspective, a way of seeing. It’s about temptation and the fragility of innocence. It’s about passion, forlorn passion, disorienting passion, passion doomed from the beginning but irresistible for all that. Noir is the conflict between giving up and giving in, knowing either choice will lead to loss. Noir is the awareness that everything and everybody is, or will be, tarnished. It’s also the intense unspoken yearning to believe that beneath the tarnish is a battered core of hope and faith. Noir is the certainty that hope and faith are illusions; noir is continuing to believe in them anyway.
Noir. It’s Lady Brett saying “we could have had such a damned good time together.” It’s Jake saying “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” It’s Spade saying “I won’t play the sap for you,” even though he wants to. It’s Dietrich saying “He was some kind of a man… What does it matter what you say about people?” Noir is knowing it doesn’t matter, but living your life as if it does.
Noir is very nearly a kiss, and the memory of the last pure kiss you had, years ago.
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