Philosophy is the art of putting our thoughts in order. But doing that requires us to scatter the pieces sometimes, just to see how we again arrive at order from the disorder.
“… scatter the pieces…” Yeah! I do that. All. Day. Long. I don’t do so well with the “arrive at order” part, but who cares. Neatness is overrated.
The quote is from a review of the book, The Philosophy of Film Noir edited by Mark Conard. The review is by Les Reid in the Sept/Oct 2008 issue of Philosophy Now. Here’s a bit more from it; this is what immediately preceded the above in the article:
Hume argued quite convincingly that morality ultimately rests on our emotions of sympathy and compassion. Those feelings provide the ‘ought’ – the basic moral values – from which all our complex moral reasonings are derived. But Hume assumed our sympathies would follow a conventional path and cherish our common humanity. The challenge of film noir is to deny that assumption and depict a world where our sympathies take a different path that leads us down darker alleyways. Perhaps that is part of its attraction. We enter a world where our moral bearings are lost, and we allow ourselves to side with amoral people living in a world quite like our own, but with all its ugly, unjust defects emphasised. We cannot tell how well we shall cope, confronting murky situations with our moral complacency switched off, but that uncertainty grips our conscience and our attention and carries us into the story.
-Julie
Interesting review (I like film noir a lot). But this doesn’t quite wash as a theory:
Those directors may well have driven the visual feel, but the plots and scenarios largely sprang from the fiction of home-grown American authors such as Rayond Chandler, James M Cain and Dashiell Hammett.
Comment by Ray Girvan — October 30, 2008 @ 11:32 pm
I totally agree. You couldn’t do the European kind of visual feel without the plot. In addition, the phrase “distorted view” is so loaded, I can’t see how it could be defended. It’s subjective from whichever side you argue.
I really like film noir, but I’ve never paid much attention to who made them, so I’m sure you know far more than I do about background influences. My main comment/complaint about this kind of movie is that the “good” guys are often incredibly stupid, boring, indecisive, and whiny — or nauseatingly nice. Too obvious, especially when the bad guy is super-smart, innovative, and having a hell of a good time.
Comment by unrealnature — October 31, 2008 @ 7:23 am