Friday, August 31, 2018

On Dangerous Ground: Film Noir Poetry- Gun Crazy (1950), The Hitch-Hiker (1953).



“Ontology! I’m just
  telling you a story
  about this projector, that’s all.”


                     Edward Dorn, Gunslinger, Book II























Gun Crazy (Joseph Lewis, 1950)

Another case of Godard getting 
it right. Perhaps all you really do 
need is a girl and gun. Plus thirty 
days and a black-listed ghost, star-
crossed by mutual obsession. Soak 
and stir in delirious metaphor: trick-
shooter, gun stealer, carnival contest 
winner, to prove whose is bigger, if 
not best. Sleazily slipping on silk 
stockings, threatening to walk if her 
boyfriend isn't with the programme, 
ready to swim in her hapless pit of 
anxiety. Together seeking redemption 
in one-shot heist, from, not in, 
the back. Why show the teenage 
robbery- with ghost-laden precision- 
when you can depict trembling smirks, 
gazing into the past, while making 
plans to finagle the future. Adrenalin 
pumping gaggles of personas: tight 
sweater, cowboy gear, beret, like 
shapes of things to come, breathless, 
amidst soiled pruriencequote “Your 
cock has never been...female dog 
in heat." Perhaps that's just stating
an obvious ellipsis.  Better, if possible
to scam the studio, Das Capital in 
their pockets and Fuck you, League 
of Decency on their backs.  
















The Hitch-Hiker (Ida Lupino, 1953)

Fear of the other, past and
present. From picket-fence 
and fishing trips to inflagrante 
hitch-hikers with psychotic 
tendencies. Is that tough love, 
or, if pushed, simply physical 
deformity- the hitcher's drooping 
eye which, like Pinkerton's, 
never closes. Breaking in this 
new smog of paranoia, dragging 
those hostages all the way to 
Baja, tortured by a survival-of-
the-fittest spiel and the irksome 
inadequacies of everyday life. 
Like sharecropping desolation 
row. If you don't believe me, 
check the map: Lone Pine, not 
far from the source of L.A.'s 
water. Manzanar, where other
others were interned. Ida,
geographically sussed, riffing 
on the dangers of an outstretched
thumb and proverbial obsession:
a stranger asking for help could
be a killer, a commie, or, worse,
a commie killer. But when have
non-drivers not been suspect?
Like paying in cash, thumbing 
is a state of mind lacking in 
negotiable currency. And Ida, 
air-brushed, herself a hostage, 
stuck in another kind of desert, 
released for a price only after the 
world had all but passed her by.


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