Noir

Reporting live from this noir-tinged week.

Dateline: Monday.

Today the President of the United States said he might annex Greenland because Norway didn't give him a Nobel Peace Prize, among some other referenced reasons the US might want to own Greenland.

Last night we watched a Swedish film from 1950 called Girl with Hyacinths. It was very noir and bounced quickly from the opening suicide to tour through post-War Swedish cultural and social disintegration. While the final "cause" of the suicide is presented sublimated queer desire, the film walks us through a world where everything has been dirtied by proximity to Nazism. Maybe the cause of the death was "overwhelming disappointment with the state of the world.

Dateline: Wednesday.

Today the President of the United States said that we might annex Greenland but not by force. He said that we might take it now because we once gave it away.

Last night we watched a Hungarian film from 1939 called Two Girls on the Street. It was incredible and also very dark. The theme was definitely male predation and the ways that women bend themselves into incredibly tight corners to find a modicum of safety in this terrible world. The young protagonist is assaulted, rescued, and then marries her assailant. This is all presented as a happy ending because the alternative is that she's assaulted and left alone to suffer the shame and violence without the coverture provided by a man of status. There is a very frank depiction of an abortion that highlights how medical care for women in Hungary in the 1930s might have been more humane than medical care for women in America in the 2020s.