The Criterion Channel has been putting on a special Noir-vember selection: film noir classics circa the 1930s to the 1960s.

 

During one of them last night, I was thinking about how many males seem to want to return to those times. When women had no power, when women could be slapped around, when women were either good homely wives in aprons or dumb sexy moll dolls in furs, when if a woman did acquire power it was by being even more evil than the gangsters and the cops.

 

Bit of contrast to what Jeanne Moreau –that “barbed wire fence on fire”– was pulling off in France. She calls ALL the shots in her films. (Sorry! Side track. We are not in France.)

 

What I completely missed before this last election (should I start listening to Joe Rogan or right wing ‘news’ channels to keep up?) was how many dissatisfied, disgruntled, and disturbed men there are in the USA. Men who are not yet psychologically or intellectually capable of keeping up with where the human race is obviously headed; men who still respond to a power hungry ‘bad boy’ rule breaker better than to anyone else; men who’ll do whatever a powerful gangster tells them to do, even when it is clearly not in their own best interest.

 

Like I said, Noir-vember, 2024.