“country noir”
I watched Winter’s Bone last night. The film’s takeaway is that there is nothing—spoiler alert—quite like holding out the arms of your father’s watery corpse so someone else can chainsaw his hands off in order to provide you with evidence that he is actually dead, allowing you to get the police off your back and save your home from confiscation. It’s not quite Shylock’s pound of flesh, but the ice-cube-y skin of your father’s paws must feel pretty heavy when you’re 17 and living in the meth colonies of the Ozarks. It all felt kind of half-mythical.
Anyway, it occurred to me in the middle of the movie that it was “country noir,” and I felt that little twist of pleasure one gets when an accurate or apt phrase just flies in and settles on your brain. Then later when I was looking up some details about the novel upon which the film is based I discovered that the author himself coined that phrase (“country noir”) years ago and that pretty much everyone has been using it for a long time. For instance, you reading this right now, you probably used the phrase yesterday, as in, “This shadowy cabin kitchen is pretty country noir—let’s go use some methamphetamine.” Don’t think I don’t know your game.
So then I didn’t feel that twist of pleasure anymore. Which, in the weird arithmetic of satisfaction/dissatisfaction, actually felt more significant as a negative than as a positive, meaning that the pleasure of thinking of the phrase “country noir”—which was overall kind of minimal as far as pleasure goes—turned into a genuine minor bummer, and I felt pretty behind the times, or whatever it is that gets ahead of you before you even know it. The +1 became a -4, we’ll say. So fuck that “country noir.” But I liked Winter’s Bone.
