Chapter ONE

 

DARKEST NOIR AND A TRIUMPH OF LOVE: PAUL AUSTER’S NEW YORK TRILOGY

 

By the end of The Locked Room, Guy the smut merchant (a "smart guy," like Mickey Spillane), has enacted the case for petrified "silence" as the only way to deal with a fateful primordiality. The narrative energy, inspired by Guy the dancer, Fred Astaire, would tend, like Bezzerides, toward disgust for such calculation and its deadened emanations. Kiss Me Deadly, accessorized though it is by the tang of Heraclitean fireworks, posits a very strong case for the suicidal stature of lovingly heeding the demands of “fate.” As such it would direct the investigation into eschewal of resentment toward those under the gun of that very large extenuating factor. But in the last analysis, as a cherishing of the full proportions of that film, one’s investigation would have to bring to bear upon such an unsatisfactory inflection (almost exactly that of Tocqueville) the sustained frisson suffusing every frame of this gem, shot in three weeks, for a paltry $400,000.

 

(excerpt)