Blog Entry #7

Option Two:

Both The Method by Janet Fitch and Morocco Junction 90210 by Patt Morrison, in my opinion, encompasses elements of neo-noir.  In classic noir, a male protagonist normally narrates the stories and we view the story through his point of view.  Neo-noir, as we learned last week, contains elements of noir and gives it a twist to express the anxieties of a modern condition.  In both of the stories, the role of the protagonist is reversed, as it is now recounted through a female’s perspective.

            In The Method, we are introduced to a female protagonist named Holly, who is working as a waitress in an Italian restaurant hoping to make it “big” in the film industry.  There, she meets Richard, who in a way plays a role as the “male” femme fatale.  As the story continues, both characters begin a relationship and Richard takes advantage of this and convinces Holly into participating in deceiving a former well-known famous actress named Mariah, misleading her from within.  The scheme turns from a simple dog snatch and return into an ultimate plot for murder.  As the story goes on, Holly discovers that Richard has been manipulating her into committing his crime to even the score with Mariah, in which he formerly had a relationship with.  Holly, on the other hand, realizes Richard’s true nature through Mariah and, in the end, turns on Richard and murders him.  The Method embodies features that define neo-noir.  We have the protagonist, though this time is a female, who narrates the story and is seemingly manipulated by a male femme fatale into committing a crime.  However, Richard can in a way be seen as the “male” femme fatale, but as we learned about neo-noir last week, the neo-noir femme fatale is now viewed through her own point of view and isn’t always punished.  Holly’s character falls within neo-noir’s femme fatale, as the story is told in her point of view and in the end, she gets away with murder.  She, in a way, seemed to be manipulated by Richard, but it was her who used him to get closer to Mariah to gain some sort of status.  “Not bad, for in a mansion in Los Feliz.  Wouldn’t that look good on my portfolio” (111).

            In Morocco Junction 90210, we are presented with another female protagonist named Minerva.  She plays the detective character, a distinctive character to noir.  The story is also told through her point of view as she tries to disentangle the recent crimes of burglaries that are occurring in the city of Beverly Hills.  As the story goes on, she is committed to solving the death of her close family friend, Eloise Davis, who at first is thought to have been murdered due to the recent home robberies.  Minerva, through all her investigation comes to the conclusion that it was not murder that succumbed her friend’s life, but of suicide.  Minerva unravels the motive of Eloise’s suicide as it was generated from the effects of the death of her son that she had left for adoption.  Minerva portrays the prototypical detective in noir, as described in Raymond Borde and Entienne Chaumeton’s Toward a Definition of Film Noir, “The private detective is fulfilling the requirements of his own code and of the genre as well.”  Though she is female, she is still regarded as the story’s detective and protagonist.  She fulfills her own code by protecting her friend’s persona and by withholding the truth of her suicide.