this piece is poetry of the dark side, noir poetry

it’s fucking great, Tony

Your line below is every noir sap ever put on celluloid.

“Pull down your hat, turn up your coat collar, no-one knows you behind a week’s growth of beard. The concrete is jarring, every sorry bone in your body aches, your stomach growls, and your head spins. I need a shot.”

I had no specific movie in mind. I had a kernel of a thought when I started writing the piece, a guy walking down a noir city street, and it just developed as a stream-of-consciousness thing. As you point out there are many scenes like this in noir, but few if any give us access to the thoughts of the protagonist.

Seriously though, while the femme-fatale is dominant in noir, there are noir anti-heroines. Interestingly though, in film noir the inner thoughts of male protagonists are rarely expressed, while women are more often given an expressive outlet. I am reminded of this line deftly delivered by Barbara Stanwyck in Fritz Lang’s Clash By Night:

“And we’re tough, we’re hard? And if someone suffers because of us, that’s just too bad? That’s the way life is? Huh. How many times have I told myself that. Nothing counted but me. My disappointments, my unhappiness… I thought I was being honest. I thought I wasn’t lying, but I was. I said to the world, this is what I am, take me or leave me, so that it was always on my terms that they had to accept me. But it was a trick. Can’t you see Earl? It was a trick to avoid the responsibility of belonging to someone else.”

Thanks, for sharing!
DeeDee ;)