Never Hard Boiled Enough

Broken Eggs and Reading Group Invite

Catherine,

This election is critical to the future of our nation. Nazis are the door. Can you chip in $1 to keep the district Blue?

Does it take $1 to prevent Nazis from taking over?

Catherine,

We are short of our fundraising goal of $500,000. PA is on a knife’s edge. Can we count on you to make sure the Nazi stays out of the White House? No amount is too small.

Readers,

It’s amazing what a dollar can do these days!

During our last discussion group, some one said of the hardboiled protagonist of film noir and neo noir, that s/he can never be cynical enough about the actual state of corruption and dishonesty in a world that is as dangerous as it is seductive. We will be continuing the discussion during our next meeting, which will take place after the election, on November 16 at 8:30 am, Zoom invite below the paywall. We will be talking about Bladerunner, the Ridley Scott 1981 hybrid of science fiction and film noir that created a new visual vocabulary for the fin de siecle post-apocalyptic world. It sounds romantic and it is, because future Los Angeles is, in Ridley Scott’s vision a fairly walkable city, if you don’t have hovercraft police car and downtown is not filled with toothless people bent over from fentanyl highs.

In Asian extreme noir, John Woo’s 1992 film Hard Boiled is terribly sentimental and terribly violent. Noir, neonoir is the tragic genre of late capitalism. It offers a terrible catharsis for subjects trapped in dreams of escape and escapism.

For the protagonist, and for us as spectators to the political catastrophe unfoldin gfor us, is a problem with trying not to have feelings, and then having too many feelings. The upcoming election is a catastrophe that is unfolding before our eyes no matter what the outcome. It makes us all feel as powerless as the trapped hero/heroine of the best noirs, who think they know it all, but are drawn into unpeeling layer after layer of violence underneath a veneer of civilized, liberal society. There is no release when secrets are unlocked.

I try to be indifferent about the state of U.S. politics, especially the state of American liberalism, I can’t help but feel drawn into a cycle of rage and disappointment. The conservatives have no familial hold on me. I’m mad at liberals. I’m still making lists of what they could do differently and better by giving up on identity politics and advocating for things people need and want, attacking speculation and financialization of public goods and services, breaking up hedge funds for one, who likes Apollo Group or Blackstone? It would be so great if the allegedly progressive party could take a consistent stand on economic populism that wasn’t just about tariffs and tax cuts. But Dems are going for celebrity endorsements and tightly scripted talking points: they’re acting like ChatGPT generated politicians.

Please come to the discussion groupseven if you haven’t been to one before. We have read together and talked about The Authoritarian Personality, the Culture Industry, Moses and Monotheism, Robert Warshow, Paul Schrader.

On November 16, we may get to Bladerunner. We may not. I wanted to talk about Philip K. Dick, the prophet of deindustrialization, the mourner of craft knowledge, the seer of drug addiction and suburbia the author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the man who wrote about the double world and its degradation. But we may just have to talk about November 5.