The Comfort of Noir @ElectricLit @nicholas_seeley

Nicholas Seeley muses on the question, "Why is noir having a renaissance?"  His answer: "Noir was powerful because it was a tiny bit true."

He goes on:

But then, it faded. Perhaps, in part, it was the cultural revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, when, for a moment, it seemed that victory over the forces of Old and Evil was possible. (I believe there were other reasons as well, which I’ll get to in a moment.) But today, noir has returned with a vengeance, and it’s easy to see why. Even as social and political revolutions have failed, the media revolution has succeeded. In an expanded world of internet and mobile technology, we are more aware than ever of the webs of power, money and influence that ensnare us, their global tendrils connecting us to people all over the planet. Yet more than ever we are powerless to influence the powers-that-be, change the system, or hold the corrupt to account. Add to that the nostalgia inspired by rapid change, and the proliferation of media and markets, and it seems clear why we look back to noir heroes and antiheroes: doomed losers, perhaps, but ones who could look the corruption in the face without flinching. There is, for me, no clearer marker of the noir moment in our popular culture than the UK TV series Sherlock, which tries (with very uneven success) to re-imagine Sherlock Holmes, the elite icon of the whodunit, the Superman of detectives, as a noir figure.

Ultimately, though, I think such literature comforts us. It tells us we are right in our evaluation of the world and its evils, and that most of us are powerless to stand up against the powerful and the corrupt. And yet--there are still heroes among us. There are still those who will go down fighting. There are still those who see some light at the end, and will tell the stories. We will survive. It's not all noir, after all.

Read the entire essay, Noir is Protest Literature: That's Why It's Having a Renaissance, here.