Noir

She hung up and I set out the chessboard. I filled a pipe, paraded the chessmen and inspected them for French shaves and loose buttons, and played a championship tournament game between Gortchakoff and Meninkin, seventy-two moves to a draw, a prize specimen of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object, a battle without armor, a war without blood, and as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising agency. - from Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye.

My brother-in-law suggested that I might like Mad Men, an AMC TV series about advertising executives of Madison Avenue, New York during the early 1960s. So I watched the series premiere. I liked the period style and the dramatic tension of ambitious people trying to out-create their co-workers and other advertising agencies. And I liked the debonair main character until it was revealed that he wasn't a very honorable person. Then I remembered that my brother-in-law told me Mad Men is noir genre.

Noir means black in French. But in English, it's used to refer to a black-hearted style or mood of film art. So nobody would say "I've got the noir pieces in the next round." Instead, it's more like the mood in Pearl Jam's "Black" when Eddie Vedder sings, "All the pictures have all been washed in black, tattooed everything. All the love gone bad turned my world to black. Tattooed all I see, all that I am, all I'll be."

The visual style of noir incorporates both black and white in high contrasts. One quote from Wikipedia's article on film noir uses one of my favorite SAT words: "The low-key lighting schemes of many classic film noirs are associated with stark light/dark contrasts and dramatic shadow patterning—a style known as chiaroscuro (a term adopted from Renaissance painting)." Chiaroscuro, light/dark interplay, is not unlike chess.

Film noir incorporates common themes of social desolation and existential survivalhood in a cruel, corrupt, crushing, and arbitrarily calamitous world. Not really being an authority on film noir, I'm going to resort to many more quotes. One blogger defines "Film Noir is that film genre in which a morally ambiguous and complex hero struggles against — and almost fails in — a corrupt world before he encounters a seductive and dangerous femme fatale who simultaneously challenges and saves him."

The heroes of noir are of a certain mold. Classically, they are private detectives such as Philip Marlowe of the above-quoted The Long Goodbye or Bogart's Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon. Encyclopedia Britannica Online says "The heroes of noir generally share certain qualities, such as moral ambiguity, a fatalistic outlook, and alienation from society. They also exhibit an existential acceptance of random, arbitrary occurrences as being the determining factors in life." Comic book writer Frank Miller said, "The noir hero is a knight in blood caked armor. He's dirty and he does his best to deny the fact that he's a hero the whole time."

I prefer to respect my hero for his adherence to honor. Because I have a pessimistic view and am usually a little south of balanced mood, I prefer my endings storybook happy and trite or at the very least redemptive so that they lift me up. Watching characters who are alienated from society gives me a feeling of alienation from them. However, I much prefer the flawed darkness of Batman to a perceived untouchable perfection of Superman. Show me a little human frailty and I'll relate to the character better. But the main character in Mad Men proves to be a philanderer, a liar, a flake, and an identity thief who smokes like a chimney and drinks like a fish despite the fact that he has a high-paying job, the respect of his peers, the house in the suburbs, a gorgeous wife, and beautiful kids. He has everything, but seems determined to be unhappy.

I was going to devote a post to my comeback from chess after a six month hiatus, and speak of the renewal of my desire to get lost in calculation, lost in the moment solving pretty chess problems at Chess Tempo and in my games. But I think I already described the beauty of the moment two years ago in this post. In my comeback, I had a great tournament where my chess seemed to flow. That six-rounder dovetailed into the 11-round championship qualifier which with some luck continued my good results, but even before my streak came to an end, I lost the taste of sharpening my tactics at Chess Tempo. I recovered some ganas after rediscovering my cruel side, but over Easter I discovered "How quick the sun can drop away, and now my bitter hands cradle broken glass." I'm not alone in this feeling, but Caissa has left me again.