When it comes to crime novels, I'm usually for Cain over Hammett, though I love them both. Cain's greasy diners and disreputable insurance agents are the rough company I prefer to unease me into bed at night, but Hammett's novels have style, and it's style that carries Brick every step of the way. Johnson's movie is a clever and faithful adaptation of the genre; detailing its loving throw backs to noir would require all but a cut and past of the script into this text box. Every convention translates to the high school setting, so seamlessly it feels like quickly shot afterthought to 10 Things I Hate About You. The use of classic crime and horror genres to renew our metaphors of adolescence is becoming a convention itself (noir is a perfect visual fit for the teen and twenty-something love of vintage fashion that's held strong since the 90s), but somehow Brick is not Rob Thomas and it's not Joss Whedon. The thing about Brick is they play it straight, from "She knows where I eat lunch" to "don't come kicking in my homeroom door once trouble starts." Veronica and Buffy have their share of sorrow, but so deftly gauzed up in humor that even something so unrelenting as season 6 of Buffy is, at its heart, a musical. Brick doesn't break for a dance number; it's already dizzying Astaire and Rogers with its dialogue, and there's no time to recognize your audience's laughter when the joke relies entirely on a consistent game face. It's a difficult balance, jesting a genre such that every joke venerates its source material, and here the commitment pays off. Noir is funniest at its most tragic, if it's ever funny at all. Conversely, every beat of Brick is pure comedy, played so straight it feels like an honest tragedy. The tragedy, of course, is never really present. Just as we do in noir, we indulge the characters their melodrama because it flatters the stylized aspects of their personas we find pleasing: the underdog's uncanny ability to manipulate circumstance, the fatale's bewitching affectation of innocence, the victim's helpless slide into a sorrowful, yet necessary demise. Character is the most advanced stage of style, and it must be thorough to be successful. In that way, it's just like high school. [photo: you can't see it very well here, but I'm totally knitting her scarf]
2 comments:
Brick!
We have to talk - I started reading The Postman Always Rings Twice, and I'm so far (only twenty pages in) sort of underwhelmed. What if I'm a Hammet person and not a Cain person? Can we still be friends?
We can. It'll be okay. But I think you need to wait it out. The beauty of Cain is the sense that you're underwhelmed until you realize suddenly how subtly brilliant it is. Watch the text closely--there are some great moments early on when it becomes sort of clear that the narrator is completely unaware of what is happening around him (a good example is the scene in which he believes he's hustling someone at pool and is then hustled himself), these passages completely re-contextualize the ending.
If you aren't convinced when you finish it then we'll just be one of those tedious comedy teams, an odd couple that constantly bickers about noir. Our 50 year long feud will bring us to be warring neighbors with exasperated children who can never figure out what the source of the conflict was. I'll whisper "postman" on my deathbed. Your last word will be "falcon." These will be inscribed on our tombstones.
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