Blog #8: 1st Assignment: Option 1 & 2nd Assignment

After reading both stories, there were a couple of similarities both protagonists seem to share.  Both characters have an uneasy relationship with their wife and/or girlfriend, like Jim for example in “The Kidnapper Bell “all this time he had a wife at home while he was on a date with his girlfriend that didn’t really have an interest in him up until she really needed him in helping her rescue her little sister from her kidnapper which led her to her own death. As for Nick in “City of Commerce” his gambling addiction gets the better of him and lands him in trouble with the Russians making him miss his important meeting that his wife kept nagging him about and in the end barely escapes with his life. His relationship with her wife is described as “Admissions of love came less and less frequently from her these days, not that I blamed her.” (N. Pollack 228). One thing that stuck out though in both stories is having both male protagonists ignoring their reality to satisfy their need for thrill, exploiting imperfections in their relationships, unaware of getting involved in unexpected dilemmas or situations that puts them on the brink of life and death, and end up having that event as either life-changing or a repressed memory. Such details like these, I believe can be summed up as very well description of male protagonists of neo-noir for this type of story.

I chose the story “The Girl Who Kissed Barnaby Jones” as the best example of noir because even though it was a short story, many familiar qualities from classic noir are told in this story where the femme fatale seduces the male protagonist, then tries to manipulate him into helping her getting rid of a dead body she had just killed. With Tate being uncooperative, he refuses to lend her a hand at the risk of him getting killed by her with the pistol in her hand and manages to escape and call the police, but realizes it’s too late when he sees her in her car, ready to fire. “I put my weight back onto my feet just as I catch sight of a vaguely familiar, battered red Corolla pulling into the lot and heading toward me, the face behind the wheel bearing down on mine, jaws clenched so tight they’re bulging, and all I can think is how pretty she still looks.” (S. Phillips 298). Out of the other stories in the “The Gold Coast Section”, I find “Kinship” to be the most difficult one to classify as noir, just because I think the story is only about revenge and that’s it. Not much else of noir I couldn’t really see in that story.